Interview with David Moulton

I got together with David Moulton, who has taught sales and marketing for the last two decades at Douglas College in B.C., after a long career in sales. What followed was a fascinating discussion on what makes a successful sales person. A self-described “social democrat”, we also talk about the legacy of our mutual friend, Barbara Turnbull.

Watch: https://youtu.be/8bWaT_0RivE

Unedited Transcript.

Jim Allan: David Moulton has made the long trip to visit me today. How are you doing, David?

David Moulton: Just fine. Good to see you, Jim.

Jim Allan:  I can't remember the last time I've seen you.

David Moulton: It's been a long time.

Jim Allan: At least 20 years. At least 20 years. So, some website says this. David has been a faculty member at Douglas College. You teach sales and marketing. Since 2004 and has also instructed at Kwantlen Polytechnical University and the University of the Fraser Valley. David has written several case studies that focused on sales management issues. So, how are you doing?

David Moulton: Good.

Jim Allan: It's been a long time. I always like to tell people how we're connected.

David Moulton: Right.

Jim Allan: And we were talking about this, of course, before we start rolling. I have to say, save it. Save it for the show. And it's through Moorelands Camp. Now, I worked there on and off for a long time. We weren't there at the same time. But, you were always around. You were always around. How did you get involved? You worked there in the 70s, right?

David Moulton: I only worked there the one summer. It was in 1977. And I didn't have a summer job. And there was an Ad. I was actually collecting unemployment. And, you know, they had a bulletin board back in those days. And they had this assistant director position at Moorland's camp. So, I applied and I met Doug Varey. And he hired me. And so, I worked the whole summer. So, at the beginning, I guess it must have been part of May and end of June, I worked downtown by the diocese office, by, you know, the St. James Cathedral. There was an office in the basement.

Jim Allan: The Anglican Church.

David Moulton: And then you go up to camp, you know, July early, whatever it was, late June or July. And then you have the four two-week periods, right? And then the break at the end of July, when you come down for three or four or five days, and then go back up and finish up just before Labor Day.

Jim Allan: Now, your parents were involved.

David Moulton: No. They were not in the church.

Jim Allan: But weren't they donors for a long time? I used to see their name on lists. Are they donors because of you?

David Moulton: It would have been that. Because they were good Catholics. I mean, we're not. So, you know, Moorelands was an Anglican. So, at least they were.

Jim Allan: So, they felt guilty about donating to an Anglican church.

David Moulton: But it was a great experience. Probably the best summer job I ever had. Right. I mean, if you remember, you could look out onto the water.

Jim Allan: Why didn't you go back?

David Moulton: Doug Varey sat me down in September, October, and said, I just don't think you fit in.

Jim Allan: What happened?

David Moulton: Well, I was... Well, I don't know. You'd have to ask him, but he's gone now. So, I think, largely, it was that I was very participated. I participated a lot in all of the events. And somehow, that didn't... You know, as an assistant director, you were supposed to be a little more serious and a little more aloof. And that was not my style.

Jim Allan: Well, I do remember you as being kind of the life of the party type.

David Moulton: Thank you.

Jim Allan: That's probably how we know each other. I probably met you at a party.

David Moulton: Well, you knew Barb Turnbull. We spent time... It was not the canoe... What was it called?

Jim Allan: What happened was... Well, we talked about this before we started rolling. But Barb went to Moorelands camp. She was a counselor. It's almost hard to believe, but it's almost 40 years since she was... You know, it's hard to even talk about it. Attack. She was shot and paralyzed.

David Moulton: From the neck down.

Jim Allan: Yeah, so she became a quadriplegic. And she actually did amazing things in her life.

David Moulton: Absolutely.

Jim Allan: She went to journalism school at the University of Arizona for four years and worked at the Toronto Star for decades. So the portage-a-thon happened a couple of months after. And it was just...

David Moulton: It was late fall of 83, if I remember.

Jim Allan: The camp counselors at the time. It was more symbolic. They weren't raising a lot of money because they didn't have a lot of money. But they actually portaged up to Sunnybrook Hospital, where she was recuperating. You helped me. You drove me around. I had some sort of camera. I made a little video of it. But you drove me ahead of the... So I didn't have to walk in the portage. That was my main motivation. I didn't have to walk or carry a canoe. So we skipped ahead.

David Moulton: What I remember was you ran out of power at one point and we knocked on somebody's door. I think they gave us muffins, too. So I stayed in touch with Barb over the years. When she came out to Vancouver on a couple of occasions, she'd always let me know. My wife and our girls got to know her. I would always visit her. She had the condo on Church Street.

Jim Allan: Yeah, down at St. Lawrence Market area. Market Square.

David Moulton: The one conversation, I don't know how it came up, she basically said, we have to do more as a society. We have to do more for the disabled. And she fully recognized that she was very lucky in terms of her disability. One, she got shot working at Becker's. So she got covered by WCB. A lot of people have injuries and don't have any social safety net to rely on. The other thing she was lucky about was because she became good friends with Dini Petty. And any time WCB got bureaucratic and wouldn't do what they were supposed to do in terms of supporting her. And she would go to Dini and Dini would raise a ruckus.

Jim Allan: She had her own talk show for a long time.

David Moulton: Exactly. And then WCB would back off and do whatever was required. Same thing with the star. She was very fortunate. The star hired her. I remember she was saying that they reconfigured a whole washroom area just for her because of her particular kind of disability. So she saw herself as being very lucky. People supported her. She had her foundation. All of those things. But she said the numbers are terrible. That disabled people, the unemployment is well over 50%.

Jim Allan: Unemployment of disabled people.

David Moulton: Is very high. And so I wanted to have the opportunity just to say if only for awareness for those people who are watching that one of the things we need to do as a society, forget things like the minimum or guaranteed annual income is one thing, but actually consciously thinking about how can we integrate disabled people into the workplace. So I just wanted to if nothing in memory because Barb was a wonderful person. I really I remember when we got to the end of that partage-a-thon she came out with the halo on her head. Remember? I don't know if you remember. And she smiled. Beaming is the right word. She just had such a positive I don't know how any of the rest of us would have handled that situation. But I remember somebody I think it was Neil Young who was an MP and New Democrat MP he called us tabs. We're temporarily able-bodied. So tabs tend to forget that there are a whole lot of group of people who have a disability of one sort or another. I suppose I have a disability in the sense of my glasses. But it's not a disability that hasn't hindered my career. But if I ever was without my glasses I'm almost blind as a bat.

Jim Allan: So you're a capitalist who cares. That's what I'm getting out of this conversation. Speaking of capitalism here I just jogged them. Didn't you run once or twice as an NDP candidate?

David Moulton: I ran twice federally. 79 and 80. I ran in Brampton. I got run over by Bill Davis in 1981.

Jim Allan: So literally?

David Moulton: Well, electorally certainly.

Jim Allan: Can you be a capitalist and also be a card-carrying member of the NDP?

David Moulton: Being a social democrat doesn't mean that you don't. I mean I think you have to be prepared to understand there are some contradictions obviously. I made very good money and I guess as a capitalist how can you be a new democrat? Well, it was easy. I did my job and I got remunerated for it. But it doesn't mean I don't believe that there should be a good social safety net. So for example, one of the things I think that we have not done a good job of in this country is guaranteed annual income. It's been around for like 50 years at least. There was that trial they did in Manitoba, I think it was Winnipeg back in the 70s. It actually is a workable concept.

Jim Allan: It just lifts up everyone I guess. We got a bit of that when there was that pandemic with CERB, right? Suddenly a lot of people got checks but guess what? They spent the checks. It stimulated the economy and a lot of people are bitter about it in hindsight but that's literally what that, it's giving people money to buy something, stuff, food, whatever it is.

David Moulton: Yeah, I mean there are really good arguments to be made for that kind of program. I don't know if you saw recently but the PharmaCare program, they've actually did a study that showed that you would actually save money by providing people with drugs for free. They're in pharmaceuticals for free because it would drop the number of hospital visits and the number of calls. All of the various things where you would save money by doing something else and as a salesperson, when I was at Pitney Bowes, that was one of the key things I would talk about was if you take this piece of equipment, this is your productivity, this is what you're going to save and so it actually is a decent investment.

Jim Allan: Well that's what I think, I mean I think of you, I think salesman, I know you teach sales and marketing, marketing is like a fancy term but I think of you, you worked at, when I knew you, it's the McLean Hunter, like they had a lot of magazines and print stuff now bought by Rogers. And you worked a lot of other places too, right?

David Moulton: So yeah, my sales career started actually by accident, like most sales careers, I was at this symposium earlier this last week, Canadian Sales Educator Symposium and I asked the question in the room, how many of you woke up when you were 10 years old and said I want to be a salesperson? Nobody puts their hand up. So most people end up in sales by accident and that was my story. I was looking for a job because I had decided to drop out of my doctoral program at York because I didn't see any future being an academic. So that would have been 1978.

Jim Allan: So you're trying to tell me you're smart, is that what you're trying to do by dropping that little bit of information, you're smart.

David Moulton: Smart can be used in a number of ways.

Jim Allan: Well you're smart enough to drop out of a doctoral program, which is a smart two decisions there, go in and getting out of it.

David Moulton: So the Globe Mail ran an ad for two people to sell classified advertising and I was one of the two selected. So I learned how to sell on the telephone selling classified advertising, which really doesn't exist anymore. So I did that for a year, hated it because you're in this little cubicle. It's telemarketing, you're in this little cubicle. But I learned how to sell on the phone and then there was an ad in the Globe and Mail for a rep at Pitney Bowes. So I went and applied there and got the job at Pitney Bowes. So I learned how to sell in person and I really enjoyed it.

Jim Allan: Right. That's why I want to talk to you because you're a real live sales guy. So you're not offended that I call you a salesman. It's not death of a salesman, it's life of a salesman.

David Moulton: But in fairness, it took me probably 18 months to realize that it was a profession. I kept looking for something else and didn't really take sales too seriously. Anyways, at some point I made the transition where I went, this is not...

Jim Allan: At some point the money starts rolling in.

David Moulton: Well the money is good and the hours were great. You could be your own person. The thing is you could, if you made your numbers, you could do whatever you wanted. So I would sneak off to a movie or I remember playing bowling in the mid afternoon because you had major quota. There was no urgency to... So there was a lot of flexibility. And then from within Pitney Bowes, I got promoted to head office to do sales training and sales management training at the training centre which was in Don Mills. And I did that up until the crunch of the 1982 recession which a lot of people don't remember. And the organization...

Jim Allan:  I was in school then.

David Moulton: Well the organization didn't do a particularly good job of handling the recession including me. They put me back in the field and I went... So this is it. I'm back in the field. So I said, okay, I did. I went back and did just fine and now I said no, I want to move on. So that's when I moved to Maclean Hunter. And I worked for Marketing Magazine for a period of time and then I moved on to Macleans.

Jim Allan: But you also worked at Scotiabank and CIBC. You worked for banks.

David Moulton: That was the transition.

Jim Allan: So you moved out west later. Okay.

David Moulton: So what happened was when I was at Macleans they had a contest in 1985 that if you made your numbers, you got to go to Expo 86 in Vancouver. So I remember Mary and I were newly married. We got married in May of 85 and through the last part of 85 I'd come home and she'd say, what did you sell today? Because she really wanted to go back to Vancouver. I had never been. So I made my numbers. So in 86 we went off to Vancouver. Turned it into basically a honeymoon because we were there for three weeks. And I said, you know, if I ever get an opportunity I want to move to Vancouver. So a good friend of mine from college which interestingly enough, we never really agreed on very much when we were in college. Helen Sinclair was a senior person in the planning at Scotiabank. And she said, you know, we're trying to reorient the retail network of the bank. And we want somebody with a sales and customer service orientation as part of this task force. So I was the outsider. I came in there was a series of people who had different expertise as HR operations, whatever. They were part of the group. And so I was there for about two years. And Helen went on to become the first woman president of the Canadian Bankers Association. So I lost my political protection and was dismissed. And then I got an opportunity through a friend at CIBC to apply for a district manager's position. And they said, would you like to go to Vancouver? And I said, yes. And so that's how I end up in Vancouver. So our older daughter was just turning three and our younger one was Alexander was born there in Vancouver. So it was great because we didn't have the challenge of moving your kids in the middle of their teen years or whatever. So I went there. And again, the same thing happened. I lasted about two years. And the fellow who hired me got promoted to run CIBC mortgage and the guy who replaced him. He and I certainly did not get along because I got, I got canned there too.

Jim Allan: So I mean, you know, you're again, you're a sales sales guy. And so I thought I'd pick your brain a bit just about selling in general. So I mean, Pitney Bowes, Globe Mail, there's media, you've sold media, you've sold different things. Bank, banking services. When you're does it matter? Does it matter what you're selling? Do you need to believe in what you're selling?

David Moulton: First of all, yeah.

Jim Allan:  I mean, I I'll tell you why, because there's guys out here that are like CFO type guys that I know here. And I don't think they care about what they they're selling. They could be widgets. They're just capitalists. They just, they're just capitalists. But it helps you believe you need to believe in what you're selling.

David Moulton: Yeah, I mean, well, this is me, you know, from a personal point of view. Absolutely. If you don't believe in what you're selling, it's very, very difficult. I mean, maybe if you're a psychopath, you can get away with it. But I think most people in a sales position have to believe in what it is they're promoting. Some are easier than others, obviously, but and tangible versus intangible. So like a Pitney Bowes, you're selling equipment. So you could actually demonstrate the equipment, put it in the office, let the people see how it worked. Advertising was different and in some ways a little more difficult because you're selling, you know, it's not, how do people respond to the ad? Well, you, it's, you know, there is some research, but it's not as tangible as watching, you know, letters fly, you know, flow through a machine to increase productivity, that sort of thing. So but I would say that you know, there's three things, there's a wonderful book by Daniel Pink called Drive, and he talks about three things. It's about motivation. And what he he talks about three things. You have to have mastery. So knowing what you're talking about, knowing what you're doing. And that, you know, and I think he throws in the 10,000 hour rule that what's his name?

Jim Allan: Malcolm Gladwell talked about.

David Moulton: And I think there's some truth to that. There is some truth to that. You know, some people are natural, but most of us have to work at it to get where we are. He talks about autonomy. So the idea of being able to do your own thing, be your own boss, and not be micromanaged. And the last thing, I always forget whether it's purpose or passion, it doesn't really matter, but this is the same thing to your earlier question about believing in what you do. If you believe in what it is you're talking about, or you're trying to promote, and it can apply to ideas as well as to products and services, then it's really important that you have that sense of commitment. I think, and one of the things I think you're seeing with the new generation, as I'm hearing from people talking about the new generation, is that they're much more interested in that than maybe our generation was. Right, believing in what they're doing.

Jim Allan: Having an ethical or

David Moulton: Yeah, and I'm making a difference in the world. Like a positive difference.

Jim Allan: Just do no harm kind of thing.

David Moulton: Well, exactly. Yeah, I can get that.

Jim Allan: So why did you decide to teach?

David Moulton: Well, if you recall, I mean, go back to my two years as a doctoral student, I actually taught. One year I taught American history as a teaching assistant, and then I taught Canadian history, actually with Irving Abella was the prof. So I did have the teaching, some teaching experience, and liked it. The reason I left the doctoral program is by the time I got to the doctoral stage, all the jobs were filled.

Jim Allan: What were you studying?

David Moulton: Canadian history. Maybe be a history professor. But the chances were slim to none. So I just made a decision. And then when I was at Pitney Bowes, I ended up in the classroom teaching sales and sales management to as a corporate entity. And then when I did my own consulting, I did a lot of training of various organizations. So I've been in front of people. It wasn't a big move to go from that to the classroom. So, you know, 40 years later after getting my masters, it paid off. The masters was really not a particularly useful degree in sales. But it turned out that

Jim Allan: So you got a masters in what?

David Moulton: In history. In history. And so that allowed me to teach at the college level. And I'd taken the UBC has a program called Sales and Marketing Management. And I convinced my spouse to allow me to take three years away from the family every Monday night and several nights doing my homework to get that. So to do that I graduated in 99, which gave me the credentials around marketing and sales from an academic point of view.

Jim Allan: But you know what? You're stumbling on something here. It is a smart thing to do if you have the time to do it to get a masters, even part time, because I did not. But a lot of my contemporaries, like when later in their careers things dry up, you can teach, maybe. I can't. But it would have been smart of me, but I was maybe too busy or whatever. And there's other stuff going on.

David Moulton: I have students who ask me, is it worthwhile doing my education? And I say to them, Education in general. Getting a degree, is that going to help me? All I say to them is, I don't know where the future is going, but all I can tell you in terms of my experience, having a degree, or degrees in my case, gave me much more flexibility and much more potential in terms of my career. I was never restricted because of any educational qualifications.

Jim Allan: Well, you're right into liberal arts, that argument, but it does open doors for you.

David Moulton: Well, but the thing too is it, and I think it helped me in terms of my sales career, is the critical thinking. I am a real fan of the liberal arts. I did not go to business school. I am teaching in a business school. What I find interesting for me is that maybe it's my liberal arts background, but I do not rely on a single textbook. I find some of my colleagues will use a single textbook, and I'm going, no, no, no. There's no truth in one book. So I always, even my introductory courses, I have more than one book that the students need to read. And in my sales management, I probably have four or five texts.

Jim Allan: So you teach more than one class then, one subject?

David Moulton: You know, my repertoire, as it were, I teach introductory marketing. We have an introductory sales course called personal selling. I've taught business marketing, international marketing, sales management, and an upper level sales course called professional selling. So that's probably my extent. I've stayed away from market research. I was never very good at algebra or statistics. So, you know, I'll let somebody else handle that.

Jim Allan: So I had an aspiring stand-up comedian sitting in your chair, and he had his lifelong dream was to be a stand-up comedian. He actually went to community college, I can't remember which one, to be, there's a course in stand-up comedy, and so I asked him, can you teach funny? And then, you know, can you, but my question for you is, can you teach someone to be a salesperson? Or are you born with those qualities?

David Moulton: Well, one of the myths I think of sales is that you'll hear a lot of people say they have to have the gift of the gap. You've got to be able to chat people up and blah, blah, blah, you know, that sort of thing. And my experience is the really good salespeople aren't big talkers. They ask good questions. They do their research and make sure that when they're in front of the customer, they ask them really good questions, and then they listen. And then, you know, they confirm it back and make sure that they've heard whatever correctly. So can you, yeah, I think you don't have, there are people who have some natural talent for sales, but there are a lot of techniques that you can convey and they can learn.

Jim Allan: Well, do you have to be an extrovert? I mean, when I look at you, when I think of Dave Moulton a lot of these qualities, you're arguably born with them. So you're extroverted, charismatic, charming, funny, et cetera, et cetera. All the things I'm not. You can't teach that. But, I mean, were your parents extroverts? Where do you get all that from?

David Moulton: Well, what's interesting is my dad was a credit manager. Right. So I was telling you.

Jim Allan: So he was hilarious, in other words.

David Moulton: Well, two things. One is that I'm the oldest of nine and four of us end up in sales. Nobody ended up in credit. Oldest of nine.

Jim Allan: So yes, you mentioned before you were Catholic.

David Moulton: Yeah. Well, I'm a recovering Catholic.

Jim Allan: Certain things are lining up here.

David Moulton: So my dad was a credit manager. So, you know, which is often seen as the opposite of sales because oftentimes credit managers will tell sales people they can't make the deal because they haven't cleared credit. But no, my parents were both I think rather than introvert or extrovert, they were just active in the community. They were, you know, volunteers and that sort of thing. And that's part of it as well.

Jim Allan: So, you know, it's So if you had students I mean, you've had a lot of students in there almost 20 years. If they're just like painfully introvert, would you counsel them to maybe have you done that to find something else or?

David Moulton: Well, again, it depends on the student. Because there's a book by again, Daniel Pink has written two very good books. One is Drive, which I just described and the other one that I use actually in my introductory sales course is called To Sell As Human. And what he has found through his study and I think he had seven thousand respondents. It's actually a fairly detailed study, but he called them ambiverts. That is, you had an element of invert and an element of extrovert. So if you're too extroverted or too introverted, you're not going to be a successful salesperson. So you need to be and it's true for a lot of things.

Jim Allan: You can just be too much.

David Moulton: Yeah. Well, it's so in sales, there's this contradiction or between ego drive on the one hand, right? And empathy on the other. And so what I tell students is it's you want to be somewhere in the middle with both of them because if you're too empathetic, you're never going to ask for the order. If you're too ego driven, you're going to beat up and run over your customer. So if you have you're in the range in the middle in terms of both empathy. So I have enough empathy to understand where you're coming from, but I've got enough ego drive that if I really believe in what I'm promoting, I'm going to ask you for the order.

Jim Allan: Okay. So every once in a while I write something down that resonates with me. And it's kind of like what you're talking about asking for the sale. No one told me that for years and years. I didn't study sales. But then I hear somebody say that, remember to ask for the sale and it makes a lot of sense. Makes a lot of sense.

David Moulton: But the thing is that a lot of people get hung up on the close and what a lot of the research I call it the reverse triangle. That is in the old days, if you look at a triangle at the top starting the sales process and then down to the bottom and the wide end of the triangle, that was the close. So you'd see advertising heavy closer, big closer, strong closer. Well, what they discovered, Wilson Learning really came through with this, is that it's actually the reverse that the triangle starts at the top. If you develop a relationship with somebody, but more importantly, qualify the opportunity properly. Ask the right questions and know that there's actually a situation here that you can help the client. By the time you get down to the close, I think Wilson Learning was around 3%. So asking for the order was actually a fairly easy thing to do if you had done all the other steps in advance. So I tell students that if you follow the process reasonably well, you have every right to ask for the order and take it from there.

Jim Allan: So a podcaster I listen to define sales as and there's all these pithy definitions out there. So sales is trying to convince someone else that they need something that they might not realize they need, whether they need it or not. Can you follow that?

David Moulton: Well, I still think at the end of the day, both parties have to feel that they got value from the transaction.

Jim Allan: A win-win. Just to feel good.

David Moulton: So that's why as a salesperson, it's really important that you articulate value. So if there's been a revolution in sales, it's been that the advantage I had, going back to my Pitney Bowes days, is I was the keeper of product knowledge. So you called me and said, I think I may need a mailing machine, or I may need a copier, or I may need a photo, or I would go in and take a look at all your papers and say, I think maybe we could do something here. And then I would ask questions and qualify. But I knew all the product information. The internet comes along and the paradigm completely changes because now people show up, and I've had salespeople tell me that they show up and a customer calls them, and they show up and they've got all their information, their company's information, plus all their competitors' information on the desktop or on the table. And the problem is they're confused. They don't know one from the other. They don't know what the differentiations are. And so what do they do? The default is always to price. Why is your solution $300 or $3,000 or whatever it might be, more expensive than company B here?

And so salespeople have got to find more ways to add value than product knowledge won't cut it anymore. And so that's what I tell students, if you're really going to move, if you're going to be a professional salesperson these days, you really have to think about how am I going to make this person's business better? It isn't flogging product. And so the other thing is that salespeople, if you think about it, are change agents. Your client has status quo. This is how they're doing things. And you're trying to move them to something different. And what do you have? Inertia. So my biggest competition, and I've sold against a lot of different organizations, was inertia. They'd rather not do anything. They wouldn't make a decision or they would say no. So you can compete against IBM and Xerox and all these other companies. But at the end of the day, actually most of the competition is the internal inertia of an organization, trying to condense and get everybody lined up. And to see that there is value in the change that you're proposing. And then then you have to deliver on the promise. I've made a promise to you that your business is going to be better. If you accept my proposal. So the sale isn't over. Now I have to go.

Jim Allan: So you're really connecting on kind of a cerebral level, right?

David Moulton: Well, no. There's always an emotional element to sales, too. Do I like the person I'm dealing with, both as a seller and as a buyer? And I guess that's one of the, I was saying that I was at this sales Canadian sales educator symposium last week. And I did a presentation on teaching sales management in Canada. And what I was saying is that really you have to really try and understand where your client's coming from. And you know, so that's where the empathy plays a role. But on the other hand, you also have to have that, whether it's ego drive or that personal ambition to make sure that you make your numbers. And I say to students, it's like having, you have to have a short term eye and a long term eye. I've got to have my short term eye on what am I going to get done this month? And what am I going to get done in the quarter often? But I'll have the long term eye. Where am I going to be three years from now with my clients? And can I develop business over the next three years by developing relationships? So you have to have a short term and I would argue a long term perspective. Because if you only have a short term perspective, you're going to burn bridges. If you have a long term perspective, all you're going to do is make, the sales aren't going to happen because you've got to do a combination of both.

Jim Allan: Back when you were starting out, did you ever, did you do cold calling at all? I mean, do you believe in it? Does it work?

David Moulton: Well, what I argue today, yeah, it does.

Jim Allan: I mean, the better than doing nothing.

David Moulton: Oh, absolutely. No, no. But pre internet, cold calling was a way of generating business. I mean, I was quick story. I was my first month or so. They may have been my first client, but I'm in an office tower somewhere in Etobicoke, deepest, darkest Etobicoke. And there's this door and all it has is a number on it. There's no nameplate. There's no nothing. So I walk through and I introduce myself as the Pitney Bowes rep. And the woman says, oh, our machine is in the back. Well, I don't know. There's no record of a machine. So I go around to the back. And there's a competitive machine. But Pitney Bowes had such a market dominance or, you know, brand name that she assumed it was a Pitney Bowes machine in the back. They were not happy with their machine. So I said, well, listen, I can bring you a machine that will actually do the job better than this one. So that was where I put a demonstration machine in and like two weeks later I got my first sale. But I didn't know anything walking through that door. And those days are, I think, are gone now in the sense that if I went to that door, I could punch in the suite number and something I'm sure would come up on my iPhone or my iPad, right? So I would at least know. It turned out they sold and distributed contact lenses. So I would think somebody popped up. So you have the opportunity these days, I think, to have more of a warm call, you know, a little bit more because the Internet just has so much information.

Jim Allan:  I remember going to job interviews and not knowing anything about the company. And then you kind of get the message kind of a two or three interviews like that in like maybe you should research this again pre-Internet. So what? I'm supposed to go to a library and like look up. That sounds like a lot of work, but now there's no excuse. I can I can research Dave Moulton on the way before you come.

David Moulton: And this is where LinkedIn becomes remember I mentioned that Rick Lambert made a presentation at the same symposium and he talked about how students really didn't get the importance of LinkedIn. In terms of both design starting out and maintaining it and using it properly, right? And I think, you know, he made a valid argument in my mind and it's going to change my approach. And when I get back to Vancouver, I'm going to try and be a little more active on my, I was a passive user on LinkedIn, be more active. Is that he makes a valid argument that LinkedIn is now going to surpass the resume as that sort of area exploring the background of people. But what he's basically saying, if you have a mediocre, whether you have a mediocre resume or mediocre LinkedIn page, you're actually doing yourself a disservice.

Jim Allan: It's also just collecting connections. That's what the concept of this show is really is connecting with people. But I also tell that to my daughters who are just really starting out. It's just like these summer jobs that you have, you can just, like you can connect. You never know two, three years from now, ten years from now. I mean, someone just called, you know, I was telling you before, somebody I met 13 years ago haven't worked for 10 or 11 years calls me up because you kind of somewhat passively have continued to be connected with.

David Moulton: Well, I was going to say that, and I was saying this at the end of my presentation, I was fortunate for two reasons. One by family. My dad was a credit manager. So I understood the importance of credit in sales. You don't have a sale until you've got the money. So getting to know the credit function and the credit people was really helpful. The other thing is that two of my summer jobs I did procurement. So I worked for a company called Holophane and a company called Federal Pioneer, Federal Pacific, no, Federal Pioneer. And that gave me the viewpoint of what it's like to be on the buying side. So when I went into sales, I had a pretty good idea of what people are looking for on the other side. I was never one of those heavy closers like wait for deal with all the objections and close, close, close. I was much more I'm much more into the relationship and much more into the consultative type selling.

Jim Allan: I'm going to have some fun with you now. Have you ever looked at rate your professor?

David Moulton: Yes.

Jim Allan: So I have two and I looked you up and sometimes it's not like the happy students that go there. It's self-selective. So apparently you make your students read the books.

David Moulton: Yeah, it's a terrible thing.

Jim Allan: And that's and they're not and they're disappointed in you for that. So you're not cool, Dave.

David Moulton: I know.

Jim Allan: And here's a quote, likes to talk likes to hear his own voice. Now that I read, it doesn't sound like you at all. So so perhaps this has no credibility.

David Moulton: Yeah, I mean no, the rate your professor is self-selective. So yeah, you get people who really love you and you get people who hate your guts.

Jim Allan: You know, you have to have a thick skin, I think, don't you? If you're in the public, in any capacity.

David Moulton: Yeah, you know, and what I would say in terms of, you know, the role of instructor, I try and do as best I can the Socratic method where you ask questions. But it's difficult sometimes to do the Socratic method if the students haven't read the book.

Jim Allan: Right.

David Moulton: And I've had more instances that I like to remember where I've discovered, you know, after asking a few questions, that nobody in the class has picked up the book.

Jim Allan: Yes.

David Moulton: So I mean, I have an agreement at the beginning of the course. I say, you know, if these are the book, I'm prepared to come and talk.

Jim Allan: Right.

David Moulton: You know, I get prepped and ready to come to have a conversation around whatever the topic might be. I expect you to do the same thing.

Jim Allan: But you know what, they're also probably at a stage of their life where they need to they're learning. They're growing up to. Right. My kids are the same. Well, you know, there's a big difference between being 18 and being 22 or 25. Right. And there is a big adjustment going from school to the real world. You're going to have to read the book when you're fully employed somewhere. Whether it be a manual or whatever.

David Moulton: I mean, one of my frustrations in a business faculty is convincing students that they have to read a newspaper. I don't care whether it's hard copy or online. But you got to know what's going on in the world.

Jim Allan: Yeah. They find out differently than we used to. Facebook is not applicable to me or whatever.

David Moulton: Do you still subscribe to a real newspaper? I still subscribe to it. I get a home delivery of the Globe and Mail. I grew up with the Globe and Mail. You worked for the Globe and Mail. I worked for the Globe and Mail. My parents had the Globe and Mail in the house.

Jim Allan: Right.

David Moulton: All the time I was, you know, growing up.

Jim Allan: So in preparation for talking to you, I mean, I used to use Google. Now I use artificial intelligence. So I just asked it how I asked artificial intelligence. I don't need to name. There's a whole bunch of them now. How to be a good salesman. And it spat out 15 things. Right. And they're all, you know, nothing you disagree with. But it's pretty. So, you know, so I'll ask you, what make, just an open-ended question, what makes a good salesperson?

David Moulton: Well, let's go back to Drive, or Drive. And so, you know, having some mastery, knowing you have some idea of what you're doing, and what's going on in the business. It's not so much the product knowledge. It's what's going on in business. You know, what have you learned and what kind of questions can you ask of your client to get a better insight and to help them better understand their business. I mean, the, I mean, when I was at PwC, there was a partner who he was great to work with because I had clients who said, he asked me questions that we didn't realize we needed to know. You know, like we needed, there were great questions, but we didn't realize the situation we're in. And he opened up a whole new, you know, vista for us to consider in terms of going forward with our business. So, so, you know, learning to ask really good quality questions and listening to them, summarizing them so that you can do something with them. You need to be the, you have, you need to have the thick skin. You need to be able to accept that you're going to get mostly no.

Jim Allan: So a lot of rejections.

David Moulton: So resilience is really, really important. So, you know, one of the things I look for when I was recruiting, one of the things you look for is people who have failed. And it's not so much, we all fail. It's how did you respond to the failure?

Jim Allan: Right. Did you quit?

David Moulton: What did you learn? What did you, you know, what did you do differently? And so what else was sales?

Jim Allan: So you would ask that in a job interview, you would say, have you ever tell me something that you failed at and see what...

David Moulton: Behavioral and interviewing.

Jim Allan: Just see what the answer is.

David Moulton: So Jim, tell me about a time...

Jim Allan: So people would lie to you and say, oh, I've never, I've never failed.

David Moulton: Well, no, but you take notes and then when you do your reference checks, you make sure that the story is actually true. Right. So it's...

Jim Allan: But it takes a big person to sit, you know, early 20s, like to say that you've failed at something takes a certain amount of confidence, right?

David Moulton: Yeah, no, it's still difficult. I mean, I'm well past the 20s and it's still difficult to relate failures oftentimes. But it's part of the learning.

Jim Allan: Right.

David Moulton: Right. And well, I was joking with the editor that I was talking with earlier today. I mean, I just said, I've learned and I've sang it at the conference. I've learned far more from really bad sales managers than I ever learned from good sales managers.

Jim Allan: Because it's easy to pick out what they...

David Moulton: Well, yeah, they're just, you know, they're just they're terrible. And so you learn what you know what not to do in the future.

Jim Allan: But you just mentioned your editor and that was my next question. You were meeting your editor on your way over here, squeezed in a meeting ahead of me. You're all burnt out. So because you're writing a book. So what's this book or you're rewriting a book?

David Moulton: Well, we're at the proposal stage. So what happened was late last year. Well, let's roll it back. There was a when I first started teaching sales management in 2006, there were no Canadian textbooks for sales management. So I had to use an American text, which I wasn't very happy about.

Jim Allan: So when you say sales management, you mean you're managing like corporate, at the corporate level, managing a sales force.

So my focus is my focus is enterprise business to business sales management. So Xerox, IBM, whatever. Not retail, not business to consumer, but business to business. So in 2008, Herb McKenzie put out a book called Sales Management Canada, and it was a very good book. But it's out of date. So I went to Pearson, probably a year or two ago, and said, are you going to revise this? Because I would be interested in helping.

Jim Allan: So out of date in which way? Is it because there's no references to the internet or things like that?

David Moulton: Yeah, it moves on. Must be Pearson's And I don't know why they didn't, but they didn't want to revise it. Maybe they hadn't been a good seller. They didn't tell me.

Jim Allan: But some things I would think are eternal. Some eternal truths about sales.

David Moulton: Well, the other thing that's going on that we were talking about this morning was that the market's growing, because more and more colleges, and I'm not so sure about all the universities business schools, but I can tell you, more and more colleges are taking on sales programs and sales management programs, because go back to pink. One out of dine of us ends up in some sort of sales professional sales role. So it's probably Pink said, I think it would be the, if you put all the sales people in the United States together, it would be the fifth most populous state. So we're talking millions and millions of people in North America. So it's a growing, it's a growing discipline. Well, obviously not particularly well understood by a lot of non-sales people.

Jim Allan: When you said, obviously you pointed at me, what's that?

David Moulton: Well, just no, no, no, in sense that I'm using you as a foil, but I've had,

Jim Allan: you're right.

David Moulton: Well, no, with non-sales people, they, for example, they, I talked about this last week. A lot of non-sales people think when you, if you've got straight commission sales people, you just throw them out there and they'll take care of themselves and everything will be fine, and you don't have to manage them. My experience with straight commission sales is you have to actually spend more time with them than if you have Salary Plus or anything, or say straight commission with a draw against commission.

Jim Allan: But when you say manage, you're supporting them.

David Moulton: Making sure that they're doing. Because the key to straight commission is you got to get them up the ramp quickly, otherwise they're not making any money. And if you leave them to their own devices, a lot of them are going to fail and they're going to leave. Six months with no sales or whatever. It's probably fairly common starting out. Yeah. But that's what they think because they're on their own and they have to what we used to call eat what you kill. You don't eat until you've made a sale that they don't have to worry about them. And I think that that's completely wrong. I think that my experience has been that when you're in straight commission sales as a manager, you have to really work closely with your sales staff to make sure that they're up and running properly in like a short period of time, like less than six months. So a growing market.

Jim Allan: But that's what the book's about then?

David Moulton: Well, the book will be let's roll back. I'm at the proposal stage. So that's what we were talking about today. And so I've written a proposal outlining what the textbook would contain. And I've written a sample chapter. So what I went I'm basically at the green light. I've got to make a few changes that I was going to make on the proposal. I never got around to it because I was busy working on this presentation last week. So I'm going to do that in the next week or two. And the chapter basically is written. And so what my editor's going to do is once I've made my comments, she's going to put it into a package, send it off to get some peer reviews in the marketplace. And then she's hoping that by September, October, she'll get a decision from the company because they've got to make sure there's a business case for it. That she's hoping that I'll have a go ahead by say the beginning of October. So then that would be when the real work starts.

Jim Allan: Thanks for coming.

David Moulton: Well, listen, thank you. I really, really appreciate the opportunity. It's good to see you again.

Jim Allan: Good to see you again, too. You're a long way from home.

David Moulton: Yeah. Well, I'm heading back tomorrow. So it was good to see you. Hopefully it won't be another next number of years.

Jim Allan:  I'm sure we'll find a topic to talk about.

David Moulton: Good to see you.