Sales Isn’t Sleazy – If You’re Doing It Right | Lisa McLeod

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What Thought Leaders Miss When They Skip the Pain of the Problem

Top-performing salespeople don’t just close deals—they lead with purpose and focus on making a meaningful impact on their customers. This episode explores how organizations can build a sales culture rooted in purpose, resulting in greater employee satisfaction, customer trust, and long-term profitability. We also unpack how thought leaders can better connect their insights to the real, lived problems their clients face—because selling ideas is about service, not self-promotion

What if the secret to extraordinary sales success wasn’t pressure—but purpose?

Lisa McLeod believes the best salespeople aren’t chasing quotas. They’re chasing impact. Lisa is a bestselling author of “Selling with Noble Purpose”, keynote speaker, and creator of the Noble Purpose business philosophy. Her work has reached over 2 million people on LinkedIn Learning and been featured in Harvard Business Review. In this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, we dive deep into the heart of what drives real, sustainable sales success—and how organizations can embrace the purpose to outperform the market by 350%.

We talk about the surprising results of Lisa’s research into top-performing sales teams. Spoiler alert: the best sellers aren’t ruthless closers—they’re purpose-driven professionals who genuinely care about making a difference. Lisa shares how she fused two sides of her life—sales and soul—to build a thriving thought leadership business that helps global brands like Hilton and ThyssenKrupp transform their culture from the inside out.

Lisa also opens up about the business side of thought leadership. She discusses the challenges of scaling ideas across massive organizations and why turning insight into action requires more than just great content—it requires packaging, structure, and a path for others to teach it.

If you’re a thought leader wrestling with how to turn your big ideas into business results—or if you’re trying to bring more meaning into your work—this conversation is for you.

Three Key Takeaways

Purpose-driven sales outperform — Salespeople who focus on improving customers’ lives consistently outperform their peers, proving that noble purpose is a strategic advantage, not just a feel-good concept.

Sales has an image problem — The profession is too often defined by its worst examples, but true sales success comes from empathy, trust, and a desire to serve—especially in B2B environments.

Thought leaders must sell their ideas — To create impact, you must connect your insights to the client’s pain points and speak their language; selling isn’t about being pushy, it’s about being relevant and solving real problems.

If today’s conversation on purpose-driven sales sparked something for you, you won’t want to miss our episode with Mike Latch and Gregg Murphy, Scaling Sales, Not Sacrificing Quality – The AI-Driven Secret to Billion-Dollar Growth. While Lisa McLeod explores the human side of sales—leading with empathy and purpose—Mike and Gregg dive into how organizations can scale that impact without losing what makes it effective. Together, these episodes paint a powerful picture of what modern sales success looks like: purpose at the core, with systems that support it at scale. Listen next and discover how to align purpose with process to drive real, lasting growth.

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Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage and you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Lisa Earl McLeod. She is a bestselling author, she’s a consultant, she’s keynote speaker, she is an executive coach and she’s recognized as the creator of the noble purpose business philosophy. So I love the creator of philosophy because most philosophers are no longer with us. She’s spoken in over 50 countries and her LinkedIn learning work has been utilized by over 2 million people. She’s been published in HBR and I’m lucky enough to spend some time with her today. Welcome Lisa, how are you?

Lisa McLeod Thanks, now that you’ve put me right up there with Play-Doh, I feel like I have to say something.

Peter Winick Well, I mean, that was my first choice. You were the backup Plato’s people called in sick. So, uh, we, you know, we’ll do it what we can with that. So let me ask this, how, uh. Uh, how did this

Lisa McLeod What happened? How’d you get here? So to give you the truncated version, it’s really in the last 10 years that the two lanes of my life have come together, the two driving force lanes of my life. And the one most immediately obvious driving force lane of my life was career driven. I started out in sales, worked my way up to a VP of sales. So it’s very much someone who had a business mind, who. believed in commerce, who focused on numbers, created a really assertive team. But the other lane of my life was much more philosophical and soulful and spiritual. And my belief that we’re put on this planet to make a difference with our lives. And so for a long time, I felt like those two lanes were competing with each other for time and.

Peter Winick Actually, the outcome of someone sort of dealing with that conflict is pick one, yet you kind of pick both.

Lisa McLeod Yeah, and it wasn’t just so much that I picked both, but I had a fundamental belief that these things should be, that we’re not in conflict. And a study I did about 10 years ago of top sales performers revealed that the people who sell the most actually have a strong sense of what we now call a noble purpose. They truly wanna make a difference in the lives of their customers. And so, what I saw at the time… was I saw those two mindsets, this I’m here to make a difference, I wanna change the world, I wanna make the world a better place, was relegated to the social workers, ministers, teachers, you know, low pay jobs. And it was assumed that sales organizations, which is what I primarily worked with, were these ruthless, money grubbing, you know. Closing at all costs killers. And actually that is not true. the research tells us a very different story. And I often say sales is one of the few places that we’ve allowed to be defined by the people who do it badly.

Peter Winick Yeah, so stay there a minute because it’s so interesting to me that if you’ve got a kid in college and you’re paying whatever, ridiculous. Oh yeah. They just send you.

Lisa McLeod I’ve done two rounds of that.

Peter Winick Yeah, I might. So you’re paying your 70, 80 grand a year and you get the sweatshirt and all that sort of stuff. And they tell you they’re going into something like sports marketing, communication, social work. You say, oh, lovely, dear, that’s great, right? But if they tell your sales, you’re like, oh my God, where did I go wrong as a parent? But I look at it the opposite and say, like listen, if there’s one thing everyone needs to know how to do, whether you’re an internal corporate person or a salesperson is to sell, whether it’s. your ideas, your beliefs, your product, the services, what I, which encompasses communication and empathy. There’s so many things that a real person, a real salesperson that’s good does it. And I never heard it framed the way you just did that it’s a profession where the worst get to define it for all of us, right? Cause there are bad, everything’s, but we don’t define the worst doctors by the, you know, the kill rate or whatever.

Lisa McLeod We all know there’s bad doctors, we know there are bad teachers, like every professional has that. But what’s interesting is what people perceive of as sales failures. This pushy, grabby, aggressive, don’t listen, don’t care about you. There are salespeople that fit that mode. But the research tells us they’re not successful, not over the long haul, and they’re especially not successful in B2B.

Peter Winick Right, so is it that they stand out more in our minds because those experiences are so horrific? Yes. Because a classic B2B salesperson, they’re consultative, they’re collaborative, they know you’re not making a unilateral decision, there’s a piece of this to it. And maybe it’s just not as sexy or so out there that you say, I just had a really great sales call from my friend at Oracle, isn’t he lovely?

Lisa McLeod What is interesting, because I was talking to a friend of mine who’s in education. And she works for a large school system, a really big school system. And she makes the decisions on a lot of their paper and materials. So that’s a small part of her job, but she’s the one. She does all their graphic design, so she has to decide. And we were talking about this and she said, oh, got some of these salespeople that call me. They’re just awful. I hate these salespeople. And I said, well, how do you decide then if they’re all so bad? And she goes, oh, I never do business with any of those salespeople. I have a few trusted colleagues that I work with. And I was like, well they’re salespeople, they’re just actually good at it. Because, I mean, it’s just like, if you think about a doctor, a doctor’s gotta diagnose you, they’ve gotta fill out the insurance form, they’ve got to complete it if they want to get money. And we don’t ever think. that it’s irrelevant that a doctor infuse that with compassion and care and love. We expect that. Sure. And the insurance does not pay them extra for that, okay?

Peter Winick Yeah, but you also don’t have a mentality that says, oh, my appendix hurt. I’m gonna wait until the end of the month to go to the appendix guy because they’re gonna give it away like the myth is in the car business. We’re like, I’ll hold off on that pain for two weeks because they are cutting deals on appendicitis.

Lisa McLeod happened at the end of the month. And so what’s happened is sales has been defined by a lot of onesie twosie sales reps that are selling you something one time they’re selling to a consumer and you got the worst of them because you were the walk-in or you got the worse double cause they cold calling you. And so, what we know is that actually organizations that have the true north to improve life for customers and sellers who have that same true north outperform the market by over 350%.

Peter Winick So I want to flip the perspective on that. So performing by 350%, I would also suggest that the person doing the selling in the latter description is more satisfied, is more gratified. I mean, I can’t imagine the sleazy used car, stereotypical poor salesman gets up every day and really enjoys that maybe that’s.

Lisa McLeod Let’s go.

Peter Winick Yeah

Lisa McLeod Well, that was the thing, when I talked about these two lanes of my life, what I saw was I saw I had a lot of clients who were big piece of sales. So as a consultant, I had clients who are big piece sales, chief officer, CEO. And I saw them becoming increasingly frustrated that they were being commoditized by their customers and that they we’re not differentiated. But then the other thing I saw, which is where I found the answer. was I saw salespeople who felt the same, that they felt like, I’m just some transactional hustler here, I’m only as good as my number, I make my number one year, the clock starts ticking again. And so everybody was wrapped up in this thing, in the corollary, so you have unhappy sales executives, unhappy salespeople, but then the corollary is, you also have unhappy customers, because they don’t feel like there’s anybody that they can trust. And so the whole thing becomes this hustle transactional culture that no one is happy with. And it also winds up not being that profitable because you sort of have a race to the bottom. Yeah. And so what I stumbled upon quite frankly, by accident in this study of a sales team, really brought together, she asked me about my journey. So in that moment, and I guess now it was closer to about 15 years ago because the first book I wrote out was about 12 years ago. That moment When I saw in front of me this thing that I have in my heart, that I want to make a difference in my work, that I wanna help people in a way beyond the money is actually not unique to me at all. It was present in the top performing salespeople and they articulated it very clearly. And when I saw that, it was off to the races because that’s when I realized This economy that we create may make a great movie, but it’s not how people really live.

Peter Winick So I love that. They’re sort of shattering the stereotypes there.

Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a five-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcasts

Peter Winick I want to segue a bit into, because you talk about your sort of journey as a fall leader, talk about the sort of the evolution of your business, right? So you’ve written, what is it? I’m trying to read your shelf as I’m talking to you.

Lisa McLeod I’ve written five books.

Peter Winick Five books. Okay. So I can’t do two things at once anymore. So five, yeah, five books. So one way to describe you would be an author, but I would also argue that the percentage of your annual revenue that comes directly from the sale of those books probably wouldn’t warrant that. So what we all know how that works. What’s your business and how does, how’s it evolved and who’s paying you to do what? Let me ask it that way then.

Lisa McLeod So you ascertain correctly. So most of the work that we do is in a B2B space, and I have a business partner who’s also authored a book, Elizabeth Lattardo, she’s leading yourself. I think you had her on. But most of our work is in B2B space and it is for sales driven organizations. So it’s usually we’re doing both consulting, coaching, and training. We’re doing a lot of that. A lot of times I’ll coach the chief revenue officer, we’ll do a consulting project. and we’ll have some training around it. And it’s around helping an organization get clear on how they make a difference to customers. And there’s a lot of talk about value prop and the value prop language was well intended, but I believe it led organizations to these very generic definitions of their value prop. that lacked the emotion to stir a passion in anybody. So when we work with an organization, we make, they may already be clear. We just work with Hilton and they had a clear purpose to fill the earth, light and warmth of hospitality. Conrad Hilton said it a hundred years ago. And our job as consultants and trainers is to take that all the way through the organization so that every person in the organization is clear on their role in that. So you have this. I often say our job is to take the emotional, seemingly gauzy feeling and put it into somebody so they know what to do differently on Monday morning.

Peter Winick Yeah. So there’s, and I love that because oftentimes listen, you read the value prop statement and it rarely says to aggravate and frustrate our customers. Right. It’s usually something to strive for something idealistic, positive, but how do you see it, feel it, taste it, touch it day to day in the indirect? And, uh, I remember the, um, one of the tab lines that rich Carlton used to use before the acquisition of Marriott was ladies and gentlemen serving ladies.

Lisa McLeod Ladies and gentlemen.

Peter Winick And you’re like, wow, like, they’re starting with the employees, because everyone knows Rich Caron serving a bunch of well to do folks and blah, blah, but to sort of equalize that instead of saying, oh, this is, you know, there’s a different classic from whatever that tells you something about how you show up to work that day.

Lisa McLeod And they train for it. So when my younger daughter was 18 years old, she worked as a hostess at a Ritz-Carlton restaurant. I watched her be trained for this. And I watched an 18-year-old who’d worked at a pizza place before, learn what it meant to be ladies and gentlemen and learn what meant to serve ladies and gentleman. And that’s the thing that so often happens that I saw, you know, purpose. We call it noble purpose. Purpose, mission, vision. Words only mean what we think they mean. But I was with a client recently and I can say this because I’m about to do an article about it. You’re working with the division of Tiss and Krupp and I was on stage with the president of this division who has just achieved exponential results. And he said our challenge was to take it from being a poster to something that lives and breathes inside of all of our people. and that when we show up, customers can see it. And they can see in a way that makes them want to buy from us.

Peter Winick So when you talk about your business being sort of the consulting, the training, the coaching, how, I mean, let me, let you put it this way. A lot of the clients that we work with, the struggle or the challenge, maybe even the opportunity is they’re in the sort of high ticket, low volume business. Right. There’s only so many engagements they can do a year getting in bed and being a high level coach and a high-level consultant, et cetera. But then they add onto that a low ticket, high volume business, meaning Bye. Hey. I’m going to work with the senior leadership team to set this up. But if you look at you, you mentioned Hilton, well, they have tens, if not hundreds of thousands of people in afford to bring you in and have you travel the world delivering this to the frontline folks in Denver one day in Cleveland the next, so how do you offer a derivative of your intellectual property of your thought leadership that’s accessible or democratized to more people inside of your client organizations? Have you, have you wrestled with that?

Lisa McLeod wrestled is the operative word, yeah, that is the operative work. And that, that has been one of our biggest challenges. And so one of the things that we’ve done is gotten really good at creating customized learning programs for companies and teaching them how to do a train the trainer. So again, we’ve been pretty public about our work with Hilton and they’ve talked about it where we get to the point where we’ve got the hotel manager. at the Hilton Garden Inn in Vietnam pushing play and saying, okay, we’re all gonna talk about, here’s our purpose, here’s the video. Now we talk about how do we do this? And so we do something we call meetings in a box where we do these for our clients. The challenge though, like so many people that you help is to get that low cost, high scale offering and get it to the right people. Because I’ll be honest with you, many times when we’ve tried that, we’ve gone from that B2B sale to a B2C, and then we have a lot of consumers wanting our stuff and they take a lot handholding and take a lotta work. And so to be candid, that is one of our biggest business challenges that we’re still working on. So we’ve done it successfully a couple times, but we haven’t gotten to that low labor place that we need to be.

Peter Winick Yeah. And that’s where the, I think that’s part of where the magic happens. And the, you know, the prereq today have all of it. You’ve got language. I mean, some of the prerequisites are language, models, methods, frameworks. You can’t scale charisma. You can put charisma in a box. Not that you don’t have charisma, but in the app, you know, there’s a lot of folks out there that are speakers that are great. Yeah. If the sizzle, there is no there, right? So that’s not a teachable piece, but you know even the languaging of noble purpose, it leads one to say, tell me more. What do you, what do you mean by Right. Not putting you in a customer experience bucket where there’s a bunch of generic.

Lisa McLeod there is some differentiation and that has really helped us. And I’ll tell you one of the things I was thinking about your audience and other people who are thought leaders, aspiring thought leaders. We’re all aspiring, I guess, to the Play-Doh look. But I was think about one of big challenges and it’s a lesson I’ve had to learn a time and time again is I could sit here all day and talk about selling the noble purpose. This is how great it is. This is what it does. But it’s not nearly. as interesting because I’m spouting my solution as if I dial it back and go back to what was the presenting problem? Yeah. And I think that’s one of the challenges with having even compelling thought leadership is there’s so much on the internet now. There’s so many catchphrases. There’s much out there. And so you’ve got to have the ability to speak very crisply to the presenting problem that is causing pain. then link your solution to that afterward. And the mistake.

Peter Winick The avatar who used to be what’s keeping them up at night. And all noble purpose is the answer to that. And I think you’re right. A lot of thought leaders can’t get out of their own way and they start with all their stuff. And they don’t have the understanding of the contextualization or the, what would it mean to relieve this person of this pain in their role in the growth of their organization, their career, their team satisfaction levels, that sort of thing.

Lisa McLeod Well, and the crazy thing is, they often do have that contextualization because that’s how they came up with the thought leadership in the first place.

Peter Winick Yeah, that’s true.

Lisa McLeod But they forgot it.

Peter Winick So some of this is just re revisiting an old friend, I guess, or, or.

Lisa McLeod Yeah, well, and it’s like I look back and I’m so excited to write the book and I went out talking about the book And then I realized no you’re you studied the problem. You felt the pain of the problem me you identified the solution You got to take them through that same journey. What is the problem is they’re seeing it What is The pain of The problem what is the win for solving the problem? They gotta go through that journey with you before you can describe Here’s how I would recommend the new way I found to solve the problem

Peter Winick That great point. Well, this has been fantastic as we get to the end of our time here. Any advice that you would give to the someone, whether it’s you or someone in the position you were 10, 15 years ago, earlier in your journey as a thought leader.

Lisa McLeod I would give two pieces of advice. One I’m gonna give to me, one I’d give somebody else. To me and the people like me, I know you’re excited. Go back and speak in compelling terms to the pain of the problem.

Peter Winick I love that.

Lisa McLeod That’s advice. And the second piece of advice that I would give, and I actually work with a lot of colleagues and friends who I give this advice to, is do not make the mistake of thinking that because you have to sell your ideas, it cheapens you.

Peter Winick Say more, because a lot of thought leaders don’t want to, either they can’t, they don’t know how to, they feel like, Ooh, it’s icky, whatever. If you can’t sell it, nothing, if nothing gets sold.

Lisa McLeod and let go of your idea of the Glengarry Grin-Raws. Let go of you idea of icky sales. You’re right. It’s disingenuous and it wouldn’t work. And what I often tell people is if you had a life-saving vaccine. and you were having trouble getting people to take it. Or let’s use the example of Jimmy Carter. He wanted to solve the Guinea worm problem. And he had trouble getting the people, he had the answer, just do this. But he had a trouble getting to take the advice and incorporate it into their lifestyle and get their water differently and do all these things differently. So what did he do? He went in and said, help me understand where you are. Let’s figure out the pain of the problem. Let me show you that I understand the pain the problem And then. we’ll get you to here.” And he wasn’t annoyed. Well, maybe he was privately annoyed. I don’t know. But the reason I bring that up is if you have some thought leadership around how to be a better mentor, around how be a coach, around how do be more innovative, you need to go in and the way to you sell it is to demonstrate a true understanding of their situation and then position yourself. So it’s an ordering thing. So, my advice would be… Let the idea that you have to sell it feel like it’s cheapening your ideas. Instead, care enough about your ideas that you’re willing to go to the communication dance to sell them.

Peter Winick Yeah, I love that. Thank you so much. This has been great. I appreciate your time. Thank you.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at Thought Leadership leverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.