Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. This week, I have a repeat guest because he’s so fabulous, Jeb Blount. We talked with Jeb probably a year ago now on his book Fanatical Prospecting which I do recommend that everyone have in their shelf. I have my version because it’s available at airports, on bookstores, online. Now, he’s come out with a fabulous book called Sales EQ: The New Psychology of Selling. Welcome Jeb to the podcast. Jeb: Thank you for having me back. I love to be on your podcast. I can’t believe it’s been a year but I was just thinking it has been a year, that’s too long. Marylou: I know you need to write more books, get out there. I just downloaded my copy of Sales EQ and I love where you’re going with this. Tell the audience, what happened? I think this is one of those books everyone that’s going to be a resource book, that you’re going to go to again and again and again. You’re probably going to have it earmarked. You’re probably going to have it underlined if you’re an old-timer like me, highlighted. What caused you to get this book out? Jeb: We are in a world that is being overwhelmed with technology. It’s what everybody talks about, the digital world. Technology is great, it is awesome. It has done so many things for us. It made life easier. It gives us the ability to connect with anyone really anywhere, anytime, on any device. It’s just striking how it changed our lives. In the middle of all of that, the world is changed to good that buyers are more afraid than they’ve even been before to make a change, the great recession didn’t help that any. At the same time, we have an entire generation of salespeople who are coming into the sales force who have basically lived their life with people in an abstract. In other words, they’ve communicated via text, or via Snapchat, or via Facebook for those that are in their early 20s. No one taught them how to interact with other human beings. At the same time, these buyers who are afraid because of all of the disruptive change that are hitting them, they’ve gotten a little bit raw with salespeople who just waste their time, who come in and impeach, and talk about themselves. The pre-show, we were talking about sending emails where the first line of the email is about the seller. They’re sick of it and they’re exasperated with it. A number of books have come out that have been trying to address this, insight Selling, Challenger Sale, which is a really big book. What I noticed was a lot of my clients who were adapting things like Challenger Sale were failing at it miserably because the system in the process looks really, really good but they were able to actualize at the human level. In a sales relationship, I call it an artificial relationship, it’s not the type of relationship we have anywhere else in your life. Its two strangers basically who come together to accomplish something, neither of them trusting each other, extremely emotional because no one wants to fail, or lose, or be taken, and everybody is looking to get the outcome that’s in their best interest. Very few relationships you have are like that. It puts both buyer and seller in these extreme emotional vice and the advice is go challenge them, go talk at them, we send them stupid emails that don’t engage them emotionally, and we’re just a hole. Just spending time with my clients, I noticed that there was a hole. This is a follow up to Fanatical Prospecting with the rest of the story which is for sellers, how do you manage your own disruptive emotions so that you have the ability to influence the emotions of other people? For the sellers working with buyers, how do you help the buyer connect with you emotionally so that as they’re walking to the buying journey with you, whether it’s from the very beginning when you’re reaching out to them and asking them for time, all the way through of your account executive going all the way to the close, how are you doing it in a way so that the buyer, the stakeholder, whoever you’re working with has this amazing emotional experience and they become connected to you and they’re buying you and not the product or the service? In today’s world, in most cases when you have competitors offering their equal, they’re all about the same and you become the differentiator that eventually gets the deal closed. That’s a long answer to a short question but I hope that makes sense. Marylou: It does. I think there are a couple points that I want to make sure hit home with my folks. The first is the work that I’ve done teaches how to get to that first conversation but as Jeb said, what he’s done in this book is to teach you how to overcome your fear when you actually have someone on the other end say, “Hello.” And what do you do on that point of view? I don’t teach that and I get you up to that point but Jeb actually walks you through how to not only have this conversations so that you get both of you to the desired outcome of whatever that call is, but how to put that fear, anxiety, whatever it is that’s inside of your being, how to control and maintain that so that you can have a compelling conversation with your buyer. Let’s talk a little bit about that. What kinds of fears are you seeing? What are the main obstacles that we put in our own way in order to effectively have that first conversation? Jeb: One of the biggest problems itself people have, crazy at it sounds, is they are hyper-empathic. This is especially true for outreach professionals, people who are picking up the phone and reaching out to strangers essentially, and asking them for their time. By the way, I think it’s important to understand that asking someone for their time is the hardest ask in sales. It’s one of the reasons when I’m working with account executives, I look at them dead in the eye and say, “If you can’t pick up the phone and ask for time, I can never trust you to ask for money.” Therefore you have a responsibility to be in the churches with your SDRs, supplementing the work that they’re doing with prospecting, you have to be there. For SDRs and BDRs, when you are picking up the phone, calling strangers, and asking for time, know that you are doing the most difficult job in the sales world. If we think about it, one of the big issues that say an SDR has when they’re asking for time whether picking the phone and calling is when you’re hyper-empathic. That means that say for example on the scale of 1 to 10 for empathy, which by the way is the midscale of 21st century. Empathy, if you have a great little of empathy in sales, you can step into your buyer’s shoes and understand them. But if you’re too empathetic, what happens is you start projecting onto the potential prospect. You feel like asking for time it’s too pushy, or when you get a brush off, getting past that brush off and asking for the meeting anyway, you’re being too pushy and you begin to think about that, you begin to worry about that and then that kicks off what they call fight or flight, which is an autonomic response that you have for feeling of threat. That creates a neurochemical reaction in your body that makes your heartbeat and your muscle tense up and you can’t think very well. This is what happens when you get an objection or you get rejected, that kicks on but you can make that happen through worry. That’s one of the big issues. The other problem that you have and this is another issue for SDRs and BDRs. On the other side of things, which is on the scale towards narcissistic or being extremely self-centered. People who are extremely self-centered at times can make really, really good SDRs because you’re calling up, you’re reaching in, you’re asking for time, and you move on to the next one. The moment that you have to do with deeper level of qualification, the moment that you have to engage in another human being, if you were not able to just wrap that self-centered desire and be more empathetic, you won’t make a real human connection, you won’t be authentic, and you won’t be able to deep dive and gather the information that you need. By the way, when you’re thinking about levelling up in your organization and getting promoted into a higher level sales job, if you’re unable to disconnect from your inwards focus, your self-centered focus and be more empathetic, it’ll be very difficult for you to make that move. As weird as it sounds because when we think about empathy we think about empathy being a good thing, it’s a double-edged sword for salespeople. Marylou: Wow. Yeah, I think one of the things I’m sure is resonating with the folks listening right now is we get to that first conversation, we may have some jitters but we get time. Then the next meeting is set where we’re supposed to do maybe an are we a fit call, which is a top level qualification in some organizations. Some organization actually dives into an hour long call with one stakeholder and then followed by two hour call or so with multiple stakeholders. I think that first conversation is the one where people see that lag, or the ability to continue that sale stall. From what I’m hearing what you’re saying is that there is a process, since I’m a process expert, there is a process that they can learn of how to not only determine where they are but also determine where your buyer is along that empathy scale, is that correct? Jeb: That’s correct. Let’s talk about fight or flight. This is one of the biggest issues that face all humans. We have a natural process inside of our brains for keeping us alive. Our brain responds to threats. There’s all a part of your brain called the amygdala. It’s the hub for all your sensory information. When it senses that you are being threatened, it sends off these signals that release adrenaline into your bloodstream and cause a whole lot of crazy things to happen to get you ready to either run away or defend yourself. The problem for us as human beings is that it responds to two types of threats. One of those threats is physical threat. If you are being physically threatened, it rightly so gets you ready to run away or to defend yourself. Because human beings are packed animals, we feel threat to our social standing. When you think you’re going to get rejected or you think you’re in a situation where the person might say no to you, a great example of that for moving a deal forward into the pipeline, for asking for the next step, is we ask to the next step the person might say no. A lot of our early conversations end up going nowhere because the prospects will actually, “Why don’t you give me a call next week.” The salesperson says, “Sure, that’ll be fine. I’ll call you next week.” And then you never get them back on the telephone again. The reason is that you failed to get in a way at the disruptive emotion of being afraid of being threatened, of running away from that, and just asking for the next meeting. Because if you asked for the next meeting and they say no to you, it tells you a lot about how qualified they are to keep moving forward, it tells you about their engagement. What top salespeople, I call them ultra-high performers, do is they’re constantly testing that with asking for the next step. To do that, you have to get pass this emotional rush called fight or flight that happens without your consent, you have to get pass that. You have to teach yourself to despite how you feel, “I don’t want to be too pushy.” Or “I don’t want to put this person in a situation when they tell me no.” Or “I don’t want them to be uncomfortable.” You have to push pass that and ask respectfully and politely but assertively for the next step, for the next commitment, for a micro commitment along the way. Until you understand that, we walk you through that process in the book so you understand how that works, you never going to get pass that. I think the big thing if you’re new about emotions is this, is the book doesn’t teach you how to basically stop your emotions because you can’t. All the emotions that you feel happen without your consent. People have no control over that. What it teaches you is in the context of a sales relationship, which is different than anything else that you have in your life. How to put in systems, you’re a systems and process person, and process this to check those disruptive emotions so you become aware what’s happening and you’re able to get control of yourself. In other words, you’re able to rise above your emotion. The emotions can be happening but cautiously and rationally rise above them versus being tossed around by them. Marylou: That’s a perfect example of stopping right now and correlating that to when we’re working on the email engine and when we’re working on these level of awareness, we’re trying to figure out where in the thought process a buyer is. I’ve taught my folks to be able to articulate where that is and also to track where that is. What Jeb is saying is the same thing needs to happen with your patterning, with the way that you handle certain situations, and awareness is the first step of becoming more of a master at it. Knowing that you are who you are, you’re going to feel what you feel, but getting that awareness around why you feel the way you do and at what point you feel the way you do will allow you to overcome that, is that correct Jeb? Jeb: Yes, absolutely. That’s the universal law of awareness of sales. That says that you can’t be successful in sales and delusional at the same time. Marylou: Yes. Jeb: So you have to be aware. I think it’s probably fair to say this because we’re humans. In a lot of cases we can’t even see our reaction, we don’t even feel it. It’s just happening to us. Dr. Kahneman, one of the people that I quote in the book, who wrote Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow, so that humans are unique and that we’re blind to the obvious. Lots of the obvious that’s happening or we’re feeling fear, we’re holding back, and we know that we should ask for what we want but we don’t. We feel this fear but we’re blind to the obvious and then we’re blind to our blindness, and he’s exactly right. What all ultra-high performing salespeople do is they create mechanisms to help them be able to see. For example, qualifying is one of those mechanisms. If I understand what an ideal qualified prospect look like and I can look at the empirical data that tells me that this prospect is qualified. Over time, I can look at the emotional data that says that the stakeholder is qualified. For example, if I ask them a question and they give me a long answer, tells me they’re engaged. If I asked a question, they give me a one word answer, I got some work to do because they’re not engaged, there’s an emotional wall up. If I’m not sensitive to that, if I’m not paying attention to that, if I’m not listening to that emotionally, then I’ve got a problem. But if you teach yourself to listen deeply to those emotions, then even though that particular persona, that style of only giving you a little bit of information and typically you’re going to find that in people who are analyzers, they’re accountants and CFOs, those type of people. Instead of shutting down and then you starting to talk over them, you recognize, “I’m going to need to go a little slower here because I can’t move forward until this person begins giving me long answers me, or until this person means forward, or until this person changes their tone of voice so that they sound like this is something that’s important to them. I need to change the way I’m doing things.” The same check and balance, if I have a deal that is qualified on paper but I can’t get the key stakeholders to agree to the next meeting, I can beat my chest all I want to, I can throw all the information I want to, I can do all the pitching that I want to, but that deal is going to stall in my pipeline. I’m not going to be able to move it forward with a hope or a witch. The reason most of that happen like deal stalling, not paying attention to qualifying, and working on low probability deals, almost all of that, almost 100% of it is caused by disruptive emotions, not the system. It’s your delusion, it’s your inability to understand that your fear, your insecurity, your desperation, and your attachment, all of those things are coming into play and they’re keeping you from getting what you want. What top salespeople have very, very well, is they learn to control their emotions. Another way of looking at this is in any sales conversation, the person in that conversation who has the most control of their emotions has the highest probability of getting the outcome that they desire. Marylou: Wow. That speaks volumes right there for sure. In chapter five, I think you talked about the four levels of sales intelligence. Does this apply to an SDR role, or is it an AE role, or is it anyone in sales in any sales capacity? Jeb: It’s anyone in any sales capacity. There’s innate intelligence such your IQ, that’s how smart you are. That’s unmovable, that’s talent, it’s baked into your DNA. Every single person is as smart as they’re going to be. We’ll do an extrapolation and we’ll think about your audience. If you’re listening to this podcast, you probably have an above average IQ, because people who have above average IQs most of the time are working on ways to improve themselves. In sales today, I think that’s important. It’s really, really hard. With the complexity that we face in the environment that we’re in today, with the rap and disruptive change to have a low IQ and be successful but IQ is not nearly enough. You also have acquired knowledge. That’s what you get from going on to your website and reading things, reading our books and paying attention to everything that surrounds you. It only works right if you were able to learn diversity, if you’re able to read books, if you’re able to grow. That’s acquired knowledge. What acquired knowledge does is it makes your IQ relevant. It makes it useful for you in different capacity. There’s no difference in a tough athlete who goes and gets a good coach that turns them into a lead athlete. From there we have technological intelligence. Today, our ability to interact with and work with machine learning and with artificial intelligence and with technology, and integrate it into our lives in a way that gives us more time for the things that are most important in our lives and that’s human beings. If you’re in sales today, this is a requirement. There is a wave of technology rolling over the sales world and if you don’t wake up and if you don’t learn how to adapt to a technology and bring it in your life, you are going to be left behind. The days of, “I didn’t know how to use that because nobody taught me,” or “I’m not really good with computers,” or “I’m not really good with technology,” if those words escape your lips, go look in the mirror and have a good talk with yourself because you will be unemployed. You have to learn how to interact with technology and you have to be able to use technology by the way to help you acquire more knowledge. Finally there’s emotional intelligence and that’s EQ. We have IQ, AQ, TQ and EQ. Emotional intelligence is your ability to perceive, control, and own your own emotions while at the same time responding appropriately to the emotions of other people so that you can influence their behaviour. To me, for me, this is called sales-specific emotional intelligence. For us, this is everything. This is the fuel of ultra-high performers. This is what pulls all those together because there are people who have high IQ, who know a lot of stuff, and are great with computers that can’t get along with a wall. There are people who have high IQ and they maybe deficient in some of those other areas and it fills that in. As a salesperson, you have to focus on raising your AQ, raising your TQ, and raising your EQ. You can’t do anything about your IQ. What I’ll tell you is that we call them high Q people, that’s a stupid thing to call them but I can’t think of anything else but we call them high Q people. High Q people will own the world. Another way of looking at this, this is a really harsh thing to say but in the future, there are going to be two types of salespeople. They’re going to be salespeople who tell robots what to do and they’re going to be salespeople who are called what to do by robots. Trust me, you want to be in the first group. Marylou: Indeed, indeed. As I was reading through the book, another area that I know my crowd get stuck on is the concept of qualification. There are always arguments. Even my business partner disagrees with me because I used the word disqualification as opposed to qualification. He hates that. I’m more about trying to get rid of the junk out of the pipeline but I know there’s probably a more elegant way to look at this. I think one of the chapters in your book really focused on this concept or the topic of qualification and how to do it right. Would you mind sharing that with the audience? Jeb: I think you are right by the way. If we look at ultra-high performing sales reps and these are the people that are in the top 1% to 5% of their peer group. One of the things that ultra-high performers have the ability to do is walk away from deals. They’ll invest months and months and months in deal and they’ll get up one day and leave it, because they live in something called win probability, which I know is something that is near and dear to your heart. With single deal and they say, “What is my probability of either moving this to the next step and then ultimately to win it?” You can only move a deal forward one micro commitment and one next step at a time. Their qualifying process begins with a mindset of, “I spend my time on the highest probability deals.” Here’s the thing for salespeople and this is what you have to understand, your success will always be limited by how you chose to spend your time. I’ll say it one more time, your success as a salesperson will always be limited by how you chose to spend your time. If you chose to spend your time on low probability deals, you are going to fail. If you spend your time on high probability deals, you’re going to succeed. The higher probability the deal, the more money you’re going to make, the more deals you’re going to put in the pipeline, the more your pipeline is going to be robust and it’s going to be moving and it’s going to have a high velocity from start to finish. The problem for us is that when we try to assess win probability, the human cognitive bias called [00:29:24] comes into play. What that means is that as human being spend more and more effort, whether it’s time, whether it’s treasure, putting money into it, or whether it’s putting emotion at something, we become more attached to something and we become delusional about the probability that it will happen again. There are a number of biases. One of the biases called attribution bias that makes it very hard for human beings to assign probability factors to a particular event because we are bias by the other events that happen around this. There are some salespeople who have something called the confidence bias. They think they have the ability to close something that no one could close, it would be impossible to close. The greatest salesperson in the world could never close it. Og Mandino couldn’t close it so nobody could close. You have all of these human biases, all these emotions around what win probability looks like. The only way to manage that is through a system of qualification that allows you to understand the qualification touch points of a prospect or the data points about prospect, so that you have the ability to look at it objectively. There are some pit parts of all these that are non-objective. I mean, is the stakeholder engaged or not as that objective. However, if the stakeholder refuses to go to the next step or refuses to live up to their commitment, or refuses to match my effort, or doesn’t match my efforts, that’s empirical evidence that the emotional engagement isn’t there. I build a process, it’s a non-brain process that allows you over time to better qualify your prospect. Any qualification method that you chose, you use BANT, MEDDIC, WOLFE, PACT, any of the qualification acronyms that used others fit into these process to allow you to be aware of whether or not your deal is qualified. In the chapters, something you have to read more about, we talked about murder boarding which is the process of using that non-brain process inside the sales process to become even more aware of where you are in a deal and does it matter. I’ll tell you and I wrote this in the book, this is true for Fanatical Prospecting as well and the other six books that I wrote, there’s nothing that I can teach in a book that will help you if you’re working with a qualified prospect that’s not qualified. You can be the greatest human being in the world. You have the highest EQ, you can be smart beyond your years, you can be the greatest close, greatest phone callers, greatest appointment setter that ever lived, if you’re dealing with a prospect that is not qualified, you’ll fail. I go back to what you said, disqualifying, one of the things that ultra-high performers are constantly doing is they’re looking at their pipeline deals and they’re making decisions about whether to take them out, not whether to keep them in. It’s a different way of looking at things. Marylou: It is. Thank you for saying that because it’s my mindset, it has always been my mindset, and it’s not I don’t love all my prospects, is that I know there are certain ones that are going to be more profitable early on and it’s all about for me is high revenue, high likelihood of closing. And then now as I get older, it’s do I love my clients, is one of my qualifiers too. Not so much when I was younger but definitely now as I’m getting older. There’s a love component to all of these for me that definitely has a play. Jeb: I’ve got this square I’d like to play and I used this four square matrix for fit. I’ve look at, are you easy to work with and highly profitable. That’s where I want to spend my time. I was on the phone with a big client of ours who is growing bigger and bigger, and there’s a big opportunity for us inside this big client. I’m on the phone with the person who is an influencer. We’re supposed to be having to talk on your show and I’m saying, “Listen, here’s the deal. This is beyond business for me. I love you guys. The only reason I want to keep working on this is because I’m really having fun time working with you and I had such a good time working with you that I almost should pay you for the opportunity.” Those were the clients that I want. I want to work with people that I like but let’s taught and talk about a 25 year old. I had someone give me this advice early on my career and it’s the greatest thing about sales, is you don’t have to work with people that you don’t like because as a sales professional, if you can prospect and you can manage a pipeline and you can qualify properly, you can fill in the gap. There’s a prospect out there that’s hard to work with, they don’t treat you well, they don’t value you, they don’t value your team, they don’t value the conversations, they’re not engaged, they make everything hard, you don’t have to do that, you don’t spend time with them, you can go get three more that’ll be so happy that you’re working with them and helping them. Actually, that’s the hard end. I’ve away from a lot of clients and a lot of opportunities where I just looked at it and said, “Life’s too short to deal with this jerk.” Marylou: Right. I wish my clients are like that but sometimes we are given records to work especially in the more high volume shops. We don’t get to choose sometimes who we’re going to be working on and so that component of freedom that I would think, that we experience as entrepreneurs, solos, or people who are allowed to build our own pipelines is not there for people. So the next best step is to really focus on and I’m so glad you agree with me on the disqualification because of the fact that we have technology, we have process, we have the ability to build a good enough pipeline so that we don’t experience those peaks and valleys and we have more of an even kill approach. I have a question for you, Jeb because it’s interesting. I talked with one of your colleagues, who we all love, and he uses the word discipline. I have a problem with discipline because I think discipline is for folks that are like I think of marines, or I think of people who are just everyday, “Boom, we’re gonna get this done. We’re going to get this done.” What I like to teach my folks is that yes we need discipline but I want you to work towards habit. Because I think habit is more of getting up in the morning, brushing your teeth. It’s getting up in the morning, doing your prospecting. What do you feel? What would you call this process that we’re trying to get people to do in the prospecting world? Is it habit? Is it discipline? Or is this something else? What is your term for it? Jeb: That’s a great question. I wouldn’t say I’m the most discipline person or I get a lot done. I want to step back in that last conversation that we had. I want to clarify because I want to make sure people aren’t hearing me the wrong way. No salesperson has the choice of who they work on because you have a database, you have a choice of who you work with. There’s a difference there. Because once you get them into your pipeline, right then at that point, you begin making decisions, “Is this a prospect that I want to continue on this journey with?” To me, that is discipline, the discipline to be able to say in the pipeline, based on everything that I see here, me spending another minute of my time on this deal isn’t going to be worth it because if I take this time and I invested in this deal, I’m going to make twice as much money, I’m going to have a better outcome and I’m going to close it quicker. To me, that’s discipline, that discipline is it’s the emotional discipline to overcome your natural tendency to hold onto something that’s not going to close versus being able to make good decisions in that emotions too for you. That’s where I see discipline. When we talked about prospecting, for example, one of the things that you’ll notice in the very best prospectors is their consistence. We keep calling it habit but they’re unbelievably consistent. A great example of how I’ll see a salespeople like one day they’re doing this and one day they’re doing that, and the results were changing all over the place. They’re up and they’re down, they’re up and they’re down. You challenge them on that. You say, “You don’t have a plan. You don’t come in everyday and you have a system that you run.” And they’ll go, “Well, you know dude, I don’t really like being held down. I keep things loose and do whatever I want to do because you just never know what’s going to happen.” Most people are typically average to mediocre salespeople. They don’t have a plan, or a system, or a process. Then you have the people that crush it. I mean everyday they crush it, their pipeline is always full. What you notice about them is it they have a habitual use or work habitual system. They’re consistent. They come in and every morning they have the same cup of coffee at exactly the same time. They open up their computer, they turn everything off, they get rid of all the noise, they sit down, they do their outbound phone blog, then they stop, then they enter into their database, then they work on their email blog, then they do this, then they move into this. They’ve just got a consistent process and habit for managing every single day. When I think about prospecting and filling the pipeline, to me that’s the foundation. If you don’t have a foundational system for doing it, you’re just going to stale. In Fanatical Prospecting I make this claim all the time because I think there’s a difference between prospecting and sales, is that prospecting is full contact. There are not a lot of new ones here. I mean I’m interrupting someone’s day and I’m asking them to give me their time, hard as asking sales. When we add your predictable system into it, I’m calling the right people everyday with the right message, who are also strangers asking for their time. There were no new ones in that. Our favorite friend, we’re just talking about said to me last night on a telephone call, we’re doing this conference. “We need to change everything else up there. I’m in prejudice.” I’m like, “What’s there to change up? This is freaking prospecting.” I mean, “There’s like 10 steps. Do those things over and over and over again, I promise you’ll be successful.” That’s what maddening about it. To me, discipline is impulse control, it is emotional intelligence, it’s self-control. It is giving up what you want now for what you want most. That’s what I mean by discipline. The discipline of the yes, or no, or having a lifestyle that is so structured, that you don’t have any fun, I think that’s what you and I probably think of and a lot salespeople think of, I can’t say that I’m that type of a discipline person because I’m not but I’m extremely disciplined with the emotional decisions that I have to make when it comes to prospecting my pipeline, extremely disciplined. Marylou: Yeah. I think what I really would love my folks to get to the point of is analogous to naps. Taking a nap everyday is probably a good thing, especially someone getting it up in years like I am, it’s like 20 minute nap is a good thing. It’s something that I really do everyday but I know it’s good for me. Prospecting is a same way. You have to build up to knowing in your heart that it’s good for you to do, it’s going to be the driver for growth in your pipeline. I’m not saying that if you’re doing all roles, if you’re prospecting, selling, servicing accounts, you can’t possibly prospect everyday. I don’t prospect everyday but I do have on my wall a board that says Tuesdays and Fridays, I am prospecting and I do it in blocks. My blocks are short, I put 33.33 on my phone and then hit start as a countdown and I prospect during 33 minutes and 33 seconds of time. When I’m done, I’m done. But I’m only doing that single test and that has made me very successful with the pipeline that I can’t possible work the opportunities because I’m just me. That’s where I want you guys to get. What Jeb offers is the ability to once you get somebody on the phone, you can create a compelling reason for them to want to move forward with you and lean into that phone thinking, “Wow, these people really know, this person really knows what’s bothering me, what my challenges are. I want to continue the conversation with that person.” To do that, you really need to dive deep into who you are, how you think, what your fears are, and also that of your buyer, where they’re at in their top process. I think the Sales EQ book just is mind boggling. There’s so much information in there and how to go about doing that. Jeb: Awesome. I like that. Marylou: The question is, we’ve got the book, we’re kind of process people, what do you have for us? How do we take this book and use it as a resource to actually start putting these practices in place and start to internalize them into our DNA so that we are going to be awesome on the phone or awesome in our emails as we go forward? How do we continue our education? Jeb: This is what’s most beautiful about and a little bit disheartening about emotional intelligence. We define it as a sales-specific emotional intelligence because the emotional intelligence trace that you need in the context of a sales conversation are a little bit different than what you need as a leader, or a parent, or a teacher, or even a fireman, because of the nature of the commercial relationship that you’re in. The thing about emotional intelligence is that is a lifelong endeavour. Everyday of my life, I have to work at managing, building, and growing my emotional intelligence. Good news, emotional intelligence is something that you can absolutely grow, you can become better at, and you can improve but it is ongoing always on. The first step is get the book, Sales EQ. I promise you’ll like it. If you don’t, call me up, I’ll give you refund, you’ll love it. Understand what emotional intelligence is, so read about disruptive emotions. Understand the four foundational components of Sales EQ. Once you understand that, really the rest of the book, every single chapter on the book almost stands alone. I don’t know if you noticed that. You could open the book and take any chapter in the book and read it, and it will almost be independent of everything else. But you have to start with the foundation of managing your own disruptive emotions. If I’m you, if I said go do something right now, I would say you’ll do two things. I would say, “Take out a piece of paper and put it on the desk long ways and draw three columns. Write trivial, important, and impactful.” For a week, take a look out how you spend your time. Are you spending your time on trivial things– things that don’t matter in the whole scheme of things; things that are important–there’s a bunch of those things like taking care of customers, responding to the bulk of emails and turning in a report; and what’s impactful–impactful is having conversations with customers, adding something to your pipeline, moving things to your pipeline. Take a look at how you’re spending your time. That will tell you a lot about your impulse control, your habits, and your emotional discipline. And then, sit back and start paying attention to how you feel. When you are on the phone with the customer, before you call a prospect up, before your work day ends, at the end of your work day, when you get rejected, when you get an objection, when you’re getting certain kinds of rejection, when you’re running the certain buyer and prospect your personas. Marylou and I, I’d love the way these things fit together. You talked about prospecting for phone, personas and then Sales EQ, you can shift into Buyer Personas. Our stakeholder persona is different people you’re going to deal with and they’re going to shift along that process of making decisions. Those people, how do you deal about them? Think about your interactions. Who do you do the best with? Who do you do worst with? And start building your awareness. And then go buy the book and read the main chapters on Sales EQ or emotional intelligence. From there, whatever role you’re in and wherever you fit in the sales continuum, you can pull multiple chapters out of the book that will help you wherever you are. Marylou: Yeah, definitely. I noticed when I was going through it that there were certain areas of immediate interest to me, it all flowed very nicely but you’re right, you need to start with at least understanding where you are from a pattern perspective and your cognitive biases. There’s some great chapters on that to really get a baseline as to where you are as a person regardless of the salesperson or not even though this book is obviously written for sales professionals. From there you can just drill down in the areas that are of interest. The other thing I’d love about this book is that Jeb has processes these and he’s schematics. He’s got all the things that I love, the visual representation of how to start tackling these things. End result is you’re going to generate predictable revenue. Jeb: I love it. I love it. If we get right to it, awareness is the mother of change. The only way you can change is to start learning who you are and how you interact with the world. Marylou: Right. I noticed in the book too you mentioned about the cutting your own floor. There’s a lot of data then and a lot of text that you didn’t put in the book. For people like me who love you, how do we get more information on this book and your other works? Jeb: Beautiful. There’s couple of great things about this book. Just like we did with Fanatical Prospecting, there is a back of the house membership site that is attached to the book. We’re adding more and more and more data everyday to the Sales EQ website. Just like Fanatical Prospecting, we’ll continue to do that over the next year. In Fanatical, were into almost year two and we continue to add new videos everyday. With Sales EQ, we’re adding tools and videos, and I’ve got a couple of things in the book that aren’t even up yet and we’re still adding in because the book is so new. When you buy the book, there’s a secret code inside the book that gives you access to that. The book cost $20 and you get a one year membership that’s worth $2,400 and is deep, deep content inside that membership. Only people who have the book or who choose to pay for the membership, although you’d be crazy to spend $2,400 in a membership and you can pay and spend $20 and buy the book, but you get access to that. It’s very similar to the site of people who bought Fanatical Prospecting. What I would encourage you to do is you can go to anywhere in the country, you can go to your local Barnes & Noble Store and they have Sales EQ in stock there. Buy Fanatical Prospecting and Sales EQ then do a double dip there or you can go anywhere online that books are sold including Amazon or Books-A-Million and you can buy the book there. If you want to get it right now just walk out your door and it should be heading if you’re a traveller, it’ll hit airport early in May or late April. Marylou: Okay. Because I’ve seen Fanatical Prospecting at the many airports that I visit regularly so we’ll be looking for that. Other than that, digging in and finding that secret code, what’s your website? How do people get a hold of you outside of the book? Jeb: Sure. A couple of websites, salesgravy.com is my main website and we have lots of resources there for salespeople. Many of those resources come from the experts like Marylou so if you come in, you’ll find just tons and tons of stuff there. At the same time you can go to my website, jebblount.com. That’s my own personal blog. All the content there, for the most part, I created and put up. You’re going to learn a little bit more about me as well. Also, you can go and grab my podcast on iTunes or on Stitcher Radio, you just type in Sales Gravy or type in my name, Jeb Blount. You can catch me on Twitter @salesgravy, Instagram @salesgravy, Facebook @salesgravy, and just type my name into LinkedIn, you’ll be able to find me there. Marylou: Okay, great. Of course, Jeb has a lot of instructional online classes. Again, what we’re working on here, Predictable Prospecting, is creating the assembling line, creating the engine, creating the velocity. Once we get to that first conversation and you’re actually talking and you’re working on moving that sale forward, that’s where Jeb comes into play because it’s all about sales skills, it’s all about the process of sales and being able to have these conversations with the right people but also moving them forward or out of the pipeline. Where I stop, he takes off, and he gets you that trajectory towards your retirement and a happy life with less stress. Jeb: There you go. That’s exactly right. Marylou: Thank you, Jeb so much for your time. As usual, I enjoyed the conversation and thank you for spending time with the audience today. Jeb: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Marylou: Hi everyone, its Marylou Tyler. I have a guest this week that you’re going to really want to listen to. His name is Nigel Green. He is a lifelong student of sales and buying psychology and all of the things that we love for top of funnel. I’ve asked him to be on the show today because he has an amazing story. Even though he says he is a lifelong student, he’s also a founder of his own sales consultancy by the name of Evergreen. The real cool thing too about Nigel is that he walks the walk. He actually took a company from 2012 to 2015 that he worked at, in 36 months moved that company from $94 million all the way to $350 million. He knows his stuff, he is definitely a person that we’ll want to listen to today and has expertise on the entire funnel. Without further ado, Nigel, welcome to the show, it’s so nice to have you. Nigel: Marylou, thanks for having me. It’s always a pleasure to be with you. Anytime you hear your own story, you listen to the growth that we had from 2012 to 2015 and I’d be remiss not to point out to you that a lot of that growth happened in 2014 and 2015 when we decided to get really serious about the top of our funnel and put into practice Predictable Revenue, sales development, market response techniques and tactics. I’m very grateful for the work that you have done and you really paved the way for a lot of us who want to grow quickly to get that done. Thank you for that. Marylou: You said something, Nigel, that really resonates with me. You said the phrase, “Get serious.” What was the trigger behind you deciding, “Okay, now is the time to really get this thing done.” What happened? Nigel: You may have had something like this where you have been with a hiring manager, maybe someone you work with and they might characterize a sales rep or a sales manager, this person has all the characteristic of a good salesperson. They talk well or they are really good with customers. I don’t know if that’s true, I don’t know that all sales is sales. What I’ve learned is that it’s more science than it is art. I think that people that make the decision and the companies that decide that they’re going to get serious about sales, they leave their gut outside of the boardroom and they allow the data to be something that they listen to. We’re going to hopefully get into conversation today about listening. I want to say that listening is probably the most overlooked aspect of a sales team in a sales organization. You got to be able to listen to your customers, listen to your people. When you get serious, you start listening to the data. Stop ignoring what it says. The truth is always on the data. That’s what we found with Predictable Revenue and Predictable Prospecting, you said, “Numbers very rarely lie to you.” Marylou: That’s so true. Can you frame your story with this growth in the context of listening so that our listeners can come away not only with the framework that you’ve created for listening but also be able to relate it to your story in growing this company? Nigel: My dad used to tell me, “Son, you got two years and one mouth.” It took me probably 16 or 17 and him beating me over the head with that to really understand it. And then, Jim Collins comes along with his book Good to Great. He had an entire chapter on question to statement ratio and how level five leaders are very conscious about two questions for every statement that they make. Then I started thinking about if I’m building a sales team and part of scaling a sales organization is having predictable training and onboarding. It became apparent to me that language is so important, so much in fact that we spend almost all of our training time when we onboard a new sales rep and develop that sales rep on language that they use out of their mouth. What they speak, how they position, how they frame, but we don’t spend hardly any time on the language that we consume. I think that is the most important part of what we do in sales. All day, thousands of times a day, there are sales calls. We ask things of others, potential clients and we’re all attuned to language and signals that language pervades to us, whether it be willingness, commitment, reluctance. I don’t think we practice language listening. I think we practice what is perfective listening. If we talk a little bit today about listening, particularly in a one on one setting, I think that might be something that people listening to this podcast can take away today, practice, and immediately implement in their business. Marylou: That sounds great. You’ve obviously come up with a framework for listening. You want to share that with us? Nigel: Good listening is fundamental to sales but the good question is what is it? I want to start with what it’s not. Good listening is not being quiet and letting the customer talk. I think that’s where most people start. “I’m going to listen, I’m going to be really focused in this meeting and I’m not going to talk.” Yes, creating space for the customers to talk is essential, but being quiet isn’t listening. What typically happening is while our customer is speaking, is we are thinking about what we want to say next. We’re all guilty of it from time to time, that’s not listening. That’s thinking or planning. When I’m talking about listening Marylou, I’m really talking about active listening. Once you learn active listening, you have an invaluable gift. Not only gift to those with whom you come in contact, but also your customer will feel more appreciated and you will eventually have more sales. That’s really what we’re in this business to do, to create more sales, add more value. When we’re actively listening to a customer, completely attentively, then we are listening not only to the words but also the feelings being conveyed. We’re listening to the feelings that the customer is trying to express to us. We’re listening to the whole conversation at that point, not just part of it. What we know to be true is that people buy things based on how the solution of the product makes them feel. If we’re not listening for those non-verbal things or their body language and the feelings that are being conveyed, we’re not listening. Stephen Covey wrote 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’m sure you read that book. You are one of the most effective people I know. Marylou: Yes, I’ve read it. Nigel: He talks about the five levels of listening. He says the most surficial level is really just ignoring. We’ve all been in meetings, we’re guilty about it,  we’ve seen someone that just ignored us. Then, there’s pretending or maybe we’re just doing the nod but we’re checking and looking at our phone and nodding at someone. Selective listening, we hear what we want to hear. There’s attentive listening and there’s empathetic listening. We want to get to the place of empathetic listening because what that really does is it opens an opportunity for the customer to stay on track, to continue considering and exploring what might be an uncomfortable reality of the business. As we have conversations with these customers, we inevitably are going to reach a point in the conversation where we want to contribute. Sometimes we feel the need maybe to affirm their feelings or maybe to interject and challenge their opinions. How we respond is going to be important and also an indicator of whether or not we’re listening or whether we’re not listening. What I’ve done is created some training around eight times to know that you’re not listening and I think it might be cool if we ran through those and give your opinion on some of these eight signs that a rep or a manager is not listening on the sales call. Marylou: Let’s do that. One thing I want to clarify for the audience, you mentioned the term body language which sort of implies you have a belly to belly, face to face thing that is going on. Is body language a term you can use when you are working on the phone? Nigel: Absolutely. Body language, I can hear you breathing, Marylou. That is a non-verbal auditory response to how you feel. That could be a sigh, pauses, fidgeting. If you are on the phone with someone, you can feel that they’re fidgeting, you are deserving their body language on the other hand. Body language is true and important because even though every inside sales position we’ve been in, they talk about before you get on the phone, smile. We’ve all been on the other end of a phone call where we just know that person is not smiling or that person is having a bad day. I think we can intuit body language through the phone. Marylou: Cool. I just wanted to clarify that for the audience so that when you go through this eight signs, it doesn’t matter modality wise whether you’re belly to belly in the same office or you’re on the phone or you get to see them through a video chat type of thing or even probably chat. There are certain ways people type that you can get a gist of what they’re feeling, how they’re behaving, etc. Just open your mind, audience, to the fact that this is just not face to face related. It’s all methods of communication via all modalities. Nigel: Correct. You want to start with the first one? Marylou: Let’s do it. Nigel: This is one of my favorites, it’s telling. Telling when we give an order and we try to direct the customer’s next response or we issue up a command. Here’s how this one goes. The client says,”I just don’t know if we need new chairs.” You’re actually telling if your response is anything like this. “You’ve got to sit in our new line of chairs, they’re so much more comfortable.” We didn’t hear them say that they may not be needing new chairs, we actually just jumped right into telling them that they have to sit in new chairs. That’s a response that would be from a rep that is telling and actually not listening. All of these are indications again that you are not listening. The second one is scaring. Scaring happens when we warn, caution or threaten a customer. Your customer might say, “We’re really pleased with our current provider.” Then a rep, you might say something like this. “Did you see a recent article about the lawsuit? I think they’re going to be in big trouble.” That’s kind of using negative or some type of scaring tactic to get them to really think about our offering. But it’s just another sign of not listening. Consulting. This is kind of one that I think a lot of people have a hard time embracing the fact that they may not actually be listening because they see themselves as a consultative sales person. There actually is a role in that. You have to use it appropriately. Consulting is giving advice, making suggestions, or providing solutions before the customer has asked for your opinion. The client might say to you, “One of our newest robots broke down yesterday during surgery.” And then the rep would respond, “Why do you call the manufacturer and ask for it to be replaced?” They didn’t ask for you to tell them what to do, they asserted that one of their newest robots broke down yesterday. A more appropriate response might have been, “Oh, that must have been inconvenient, can you tell me about it?” It’s a subtle difference but it’s asking for more, it’s keeping the conversation going, it’s letting them continue the drive. The fourth is tricking. We trick when we persuade with logic, provide figures out of context or just make up success stories. I see this happen all too often. We state facts and figures that haven’t been scientifically validated. Where this comes out is a client might say, “I’d love to see some white papers on the product.” The rep will respond, “We’re working on some material but I can’t tell you.” 97% of customers see it as an improvement. I laugh at that because we see it all the time, everybody loves this. When customers are asking, let’s not trick. Let’s actually give them statistically validated data on that. Another one we see, Marylou, is combatting, disagreeing, judging or criticizing the customer’s decision; that’s all just being combative. I like to tell people, “Just don’t argue with the decision maker.” That will go everything against some of these challenger sales models. Marylou: The gist of the delivery is to get the clients thinking outside the box. But, there’s a circuitous path to get there and there is the direct path. I think the challenger books really talk about the direct path. “No, you’re wrong.” I was listening to a podcast the other day where they were discussing the challenger customer. He even said the words, “You’re wrong,” to the client. I could never do that. That’s not in my DNA to do that. Nigel: “I don’t know if this service is actually saving us money.” The rep might respond, “Of course it is, look at last month’s report that we sent you.” That’s being combative even though you’re trying to help them make a more informed decision. A more appropriate response to that would be, when they say, “I don’t know if the service is actually saving us money.” You affirm them by saying, “You aren’t sure the service is living up to your expectations, is that right?” That is more appropriate. What it does is let them know that I heard what you said. I heard you say that you’re unsure about it and I’m not going to pick a fight with you. Ultimately, you have to be right for this to work, let’s just go with it. There are just a few more stroking. When we approve or praise a customer, we’re just stroking their ego. We shouldn’t do this. That again may seem against the grain but especially when we agree and we actually don’t. A lot of times, we just want to get to business so we’re saying yes, we don’t mean that and it damages our credibility later down the road. And then there’s counselling, reassuring, consoling and sympathizing. It doesn’t help the customer buy. It’s not helpful at all. A client might say, “It hasn’t been a very good year for our division, sales are down 30% compared to last year.” A more appropriate response to that might be, “Division sales are down, do you want to talk about it?” What most reps would say is, “Well, don’t worry, most of my customers are experiencing decrease sales too. You’ll be fine next quarter.” That’s not helpful and we’re not listening to them when we say that. They’re giving us an opportunity to engage at a different level and we’re just counseling them. The last one is distracting. I see this from a lot of new reps. I’d be interested to hear your feedback on it. Humoring, changing the subject, leading statements are always to get the customer off track. One way we do that is, client says, “I noticed our spend went up 58% this month. What was that about?” “Yeah, but did you see where your overall spend went down 3%, isn’t that what’s important?” Just a distraction. A better response to that might be, “Correct. It was up this month. Would you like to look at it a little bit deeper?” Marylou: Yup. Nigel: Those are really some of the eight things that we want to teach. I think if reps will focus on what are the customers are saying and try to eliminate and really manage our own behavior in these meetings and eliminate these eight signs that we’re not listening, I think ultimately you’ll sell more. I’ve seen it play out with reps that focus on what they hear and not what they say. Marylou: It’s interesting because I heard you help us, and thank you for that. Giving us what not to do but also suggesting what to do. A lot of times, we’re faced with learning mode. Don’t do these emails, it’s notorious. This is a bad email. Okay well, give me the contrast. Give me the good email from the bad email so that I can learn. I do appreciate you mapping for us what not to do with a suggestion of how to overcome that and what to do to make the conversation better and with more empathy. Nigel: There are three more things that I want to share, this is what you should do. The number one thing you should do is you should give your customer affirmation even when it’s bad news. When they say something, when they assert, one way to let people know that you’re really listening is to affirm them. Even if it’s just as simple as, “I hear you. I appreciate you.” The number two thing is a reflective statement. This makes a guess about what the customer is meeting. It tries to say it in a different way. Articulate it with your own words to show that you’re trying to deepen the understanding by clarifying whether or not our guess is accurate. This also allows the customer to hear again the feelings they are expressing. If we use different words, it also forces the customer to ponder. They have to continue to sit with the pain that’s in their business. Good reflective statements keep the customer talking, exploring and considering. The third thing is summary. I don’t think we’ve close enough of our sales-calls with good summaries. We’re very quick to distribute the action items, who’s going to do what and who’s appropriate for that. We’re not summarizing, “Here’s what the essence of what you felt and how I’m responding to the feelings you shared with me.” I think if we do those three things, we will come off as more real and more genuine speakers, guides and providers for our customers. Marylou: Getting back to the amazing growth that you shared at the top of this podcast. From a process standpoint, how were you able to get those skills to a point where it became second nature for the team to not do the eight and instead do the three things that would allow us to have more meaningful conversation with our clients, which probably reduce the lag in the pipeline because you were able to take their hand and guide them gently pulling them through from a cold conversation to a qualified op. Did you come up with a training schedule or role playing schedule? How did this actually come from assembly to activation and then optimization of listening? Nigel: Very good question. Every training program you can think of, part of the graduation or at least part of the completion process includes the rep having to stand up in front of a room and give a pitch. We just flip that upside down. We observe through film, we observe and then have them watch it. We spend more time on listening than we do on talking during sales training. There’s a five day week. Instead of spending all five days on learning the competitive landscape, talking about pitches and product positioning and going over sales and marketing material, we’re just going to roleplay actual meetings. This is for the sales managers. If you start incorporating this into your training, what you’ll find is you need a different type of rep to be successful in today’s marketplace. So much of industry experience and what they did before they got to your organization, that won’t matter as much. It’s can they engage at a more effective level. If you can train on listening, the ramp up time? Fast. It’s so much more fast than if you put a rep out there, they run around telling, distracting, scaring customers. What I’ve seen, you talk about the top of the funnel, we started having a greater acceptance rate of qualified leads to the account executive who were a properly trained on listening. So much of the reason before that we were rejecting leads is we just weren’t listening to the customer, we wanted to put them in a box. When we started listening better, we noticed that there was a far greater increase to the number of qualified leads that got pointed over from our development team to the account executives. Marylou: And the acceptance rate remained high. Nigel: Remained very high. Marylou: That’s an important metric for us. One of the first places I look in a pipeline that’s cranky is to see, especially if we separated the roles that you were mentioning, there are people doing business development. Once the lead is qualified, it’s handed to a quota carrying rep to take it the rest of the way. In your situation, there’s a hand off, passing the baton as we used to call it in Predictable Revenue and that point is one of the metrics that I really look at when I go in and start analyzing the health of the pipeline. I’m happy to hear that, not only that you get more people to go from an SQL to as ASL status, qualified lead to accepted, but the quality of those leads remained high, which is great. Nigel: Here’s the other thing that affects the bottom of the funnel, Marylou, and that is retention. There’s this old adage, it’s so much easier to sell something new to a customer you already have than it is to go get a new customer. A lot of companies are experiencing churn where they got to bring on 31 clients because they’re going to lose 29 in the month. Listening unlocks an ability to keep customers happy, upsell them, cross sell them to ancillary products or services that they may not already be buying, charge more money for the same thing. What we also found is that’s a real key to growth. It’s not always about how do you get all these new customers, it’s how do you keep the ones you have happy, engaged and willing to write you a check. Listening unlocks a lots of them for you. Marylou: Indeed. Nigel, it’s been great having you on the show. I very much appreciate you coming on. One of the questions I’m sure that’s bubbling up to the top in the audience is, “This sounds like something I want to get my arms around. I heard him strategically tell me the pros and cons. Now I want to implement some type of tactical.” How do we get to that next step? How do we get ahold of you? What resources do you recommend that we look at? Nigel: I’m really easy to find. You can go to nigelgreen.me or you can send me an email. I check all of my messages. It’s just nigel@nigelgreen.me and I’m open to having a conversation and talking more about the value of listening. Some great resources that are out there on listening, there’s a book called Ask, it’s by Ryan Levesque. There’s another book, it’s a clinical book. It’s called Motivational Interviewing and it’s a clinical technique that are used by clinicians to engage a patient that may be unwilling to change. A lot of what you learned about listening, you can take from commissions. They do a great job of helping convince people with their own motivation to do the right thing. Those are a couple of resources that I would check out for sure. Marylou: I just want to say one more thing about Nigel’s background is primarily healthcare. What’s really interesting, I use this forever, is that in my teaching on the skill side, we talk about diagnosing the problem as a doctor would be coming in and trying to figure out where are you hurt. Part of the questioning process is to really dig deep, we call it the root analysis, we called it the five whys, whatever it’s called. It’s an analogy to us going into the doctor’s office and really not knowing what’s wrong with us and trying to drill down to the root of the problem. I would look to the healthcare industry for a lot of the questioning and listening techniques because of the fact that it’s dealing a lot with human behavior for sure. Nigel: We often make a dangerous assumption that we have to compete to win business and if they don’t do business with us, our competitor is going to get the business. Why studying health care is so important is because doctors don’t lose patients to another doctor. Doctors lose patients who choose to take no action, to do nothing. I think that when you start studying what doctors do and how they engage patients to change, you’ll learn that you might actually be losing more business to customers who do nothing than choose to do business with your competitor. Marylou: Exactly. This whole status quo. We used to call it in house. They just would want to keep it in house. They didn’t want to do anything about it. There wasn’t enough of a motivation or any sense of urgency to get them to realize, “Wow. This is something that’s really going to transform me, my company, my department. Active listening gets us to that place a lot faster so that we can reduce that lag in the pipeline going from initial conversation to close. Nigel: Absolutely. Marylou: Thank you so much, Nigel, for your time. I very much appreciate it as I said and I will put all those notes out there for you guys to take this power of one and just take one of those three listening techniques that Nigel recommended and start mastering it. That’s what we do here. Power of one. Thanks everyone and have a great week!

Marylou: Hey everybody, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have a special show for you. You know how we’re always working on sales process, sales enablement trying to get all of those records coming in to the top of the pipeline. Organized, categorized. Today’s special episode is with Dr. Diane Hamilton, she’s a speaker, author, she has been an instructor at multiple schools, thousands of classes, she’s a nationally syndicated radio show host, and she is going to talk to us today about the human side of selling. The reason why I asked her on the show is because we do all this work to get to the point where we have our first dialogue with our prospects, have our first meeting, have our first conversation, and we bungle it. Not always but we do it enough and we work so hard to get to that point that I really want you to listen to Dr. Dianne today about the types of things that she specializes in like emotional intelligence, like communications, and help us set aside the actual process pieces for today and really focus on the human side of selling. Welcome Dr. Dianne, it’s so great to have you on the show. Diane: Thank you, I’m excited to be here. Marylou: Tell us, you’re a specialist in emotional intelligence and communications, how does that align with the sales roles? My guys are all business developers, net new business. They’re really trying to start conversations with people we don’t know. We leverage technology to help us get there. How does your expertise align with, once we get there, how do we handle that first conversation? Diane: It’s interesting because I’ve spent many decades in sales and I’ve had all different types of sales jobs from very sophisticated training that got you very well prepared to the office where they hand you the Yellow Pages. It got me interested as I started teaching, I do teach some courses in marketing and sales related things and then I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the impact of emotional intelligence on sales performance. I looked at subprime sales individuals for that particular research. I was interested in the components of communication and interpersonal skills and that type of thing and how it impacted their results. There’s no surprise that you do need to have very strong interpersonal skills to do well in sales. It’s kind of interesting because I worked for a sales company where they gave us personality tests to determine our personality type before we even got the job. Then, they made us post our personality results on our cubicle so that we all knew how to interrelate to one another because if you were a blue, you were a certain personality, a red, green, and yellow. In sales, we all wear reds and greens. Every once in awhile a yellow would get in, it was almost like the movie Pushing Tin where the people are betting as they’re watching to see if the guy is going to be able to get from his car back up to work because he’s so stressed out because we didn’t think the yellows would make it. The reason why they didn’t do very well was because they were more analytical and they really weren’t meant for sales job as well as the more direct reds or the more extra verdant green. It’s not that they were inferior in any way, they were just mismatched for their job. I looked at a lot of the personality issues behind sales in my research because I think that there’s a lot that people need to do in terms of self-reflection to see what skills they have and where they can develop in terms of their personality. There’s a lot of research in emotional intelligence which I think it’s really important to understand that, but I also think that understanding things like Myers Briggs assessment where you learn about whether you’re an extrovert or introvert and all of that can be very useful for sales people because sometimes we tend to think that everybody thinks like we do because that’s how we think. Once you learn how other people prefer to receive information, you can adjust and present information in that way. That’s so important in the sales call because if I’m an extrovert and I’m calling an introvert, I’m doing it my way, I’m turning that person off completely. That has be something that they have to think about if that’s their first and only chance at this person, they better connect in a way that they want to be connected with. That’s what a lot of people make mistakes. Marylou: Right now, the way we work is that we’re working with a lot of contact records and we finally dwindle it down to the top 10, 20 that we want to put into our calling sequence so we can contact them. How do we know when we say hello, what kind of personality they are? Are there cues, is there a rhythm, is there a way we can tell within the first five to ten seconds what kind of personality we are dealing with? Diane: It’s a lot harder on the phone but a lot of it is how they respond when you ask a question. An introvert is going to take a lot longer to respond. They’re going to think about it, they don’t do it at the same time. The speed at which they respond will be one good clue. The quick questions they ask will be another clue is if they’re a thinker versus a feeler. If they think, that means on the Myers Briggs kind of a personality assessment, if they are thinkers they are interested in you giving them more solid base data and facts. They are less interested in making decisions based on their value. Pulling on their emotional heart strings is not going to work with that person. If they’re starting to ask you data, give them data. Don’t try to appeal to them in an emotional way. I think you can get some of these cues right off the bat from just asking a few questions because what you’re trying to do at beginning is find their pain. The mistakes a lot of salespeople make is not finding out what they need. They just start selling right off the bat, this what I have and then they send out all this information when maybe that’s not anything they even want and they’re wasting time. Marylou: We get some cues when we’re doing our email because the way that our rhythm works is that sometimes we send emails first or we blend emails and telephone trying to leave them a voice mail or whatever. We do get some cues in the email because people may respond back to us saying I really want more technical information about this, I want to understand others who have gone before you and actually come out the other side successful and transformed. We do get a little bit. Is there some pre-work we can do based on or have you discovered based on the actual role or title, because my folks are mostly business to business so we’re selling into companies that are certain role based. For example when I sell to marketing people for my work, I know that they’re more touchy feely. They’re more personal in their goals. Whereas if I’m talking to a sales ops guy, it’s more strategic. Are there cues like that that we can when we’re developing the actual profiles for the people we’re trying to call into that we can sort of at least get 80% there? Diane: I agree with you completely. I just attended the board summit for CMOs in Coronado last November. They definitely have a unique way of looking at things. Their pain right now is trying to reach people in so many different ways with so many different platforms and personalizing content. They have a real obvious emotional issue attached with what they’re trying to do. It depends on the product of what you’re selling, do you have particular product that your listeners focus on? Marylou: It’s all over the map, some are doing actual widgets and some are doing services but what we teach or what I like to instill in my folks is we have to do a profile, we call it persona profile development for sales, where we really are looking at the person in that role and we’re trying to figure out the pain like you talked about before. I’ve given them an extra three ways to look at the pain, it’s strategic, financial, and personal. We make some guestimates based on whether this particular pain point affects our prospect either strategically, meaning a business related issue, is it financial or is it personal, meaning growth or something to do with movement in the company or culture of the company. I’m curious if there are other things that we can think about as we work on these persona profiles because doing this exercise in my opinion propagates throughout our entire sales conversation. It helps us understand which case studies we should present to them like you said based on their profile. It helps us understand preempt objections they may have during the sale cycle itself. I have some steps of things that I want them to look at. You always wonder, are there other, more human elements like the Myers Briggs that you’re talking about, are there other things that we should be looking at for profiling the person that we’re trying to get that first conversation with from your research that we may be missing? Diane: I think you can use a lot that you find on social media and different websites to find out more about them. You just think of a job interview, you’re going to research everything you know about the company before you go in because you want to show an interest in them. Anything you could find about them personally without sounding creepy like you’re stalking them. You want to be genuine, anything you could find out about the company’s mission, their strategic plans. That’s what you’re focusing on is helping them achieve their goal. If you don’t know what they are, you’re wasting your time in the call. You need to know everything about this person. I had a boss that was wonderful when I was in sales about just looking around the room before we even said two words to anyone. Knew what school they went to, check out the flags, whatever it was in the room he could figure it out what their sports team because he was so perceptive and he just paid attention. You make it about them and you show an interest in them, it makes such a huge difference because you’re not there for you to sell something, you’re there to create a relationship. I’ve had jobs I was a pharmaceutical rep for 15 years where that was a long term relationship. It’s not like, buy this car, I’ll never see you again, kind of thing. You’re in there every week and every month. It’s something you have to develop, you don’t want to start off by having it be all about you. It depends on the type of sales they do. If it’s shorter term sale, you have to go a little higher pressure, if it’s a longer term relationship, you have to build that relationship because you won’t get back in another time. Marylou: I definitely think for our audience, we’re developing a relationship but some of us are just long enough to hand it off to a closer, a quarter carrying sales rep who closes the deal. Over half of my audience is prospecting, closing, and servicing accounts. There’s a big relationship builder at the same time. This first call has stymied us for so long on how to prepare properly for it, how to understand the opening of that call itself. The more we can get intel going into the conversation, the better. I think your suggestions about the research of looking in forums or group discussions with these people and these roles, just like you said when you’re at the conference, you got the jist and the vibe, it’s an emotional time for marketing because of all the different channels that they have to worry about now with the internet. What other things have you seen or do you recommend that we look for to help us be better on that first call? Diane: I think being prepared, having notes right in front of you, having a good customer relationship software is important to make sure you have everything right there because you don’t have answers to anything about them right there, that’s going to be a problem. I used to type my notes while I talked to them sometimes so I would be able to have that for the next call. I think you really have to keep really good notes. I know you don’t really want to multitask but you can do something at the same time to free up some time. I think for the first call, just starting off, trying to figure out their pain is going to be your major focus because if you start off thinking I want to sell this, you may be selling the wrong product and a lot of salespeople have multiple products and they may be going in a completely wrong direction. The first thing, if you don’t know their pain or you may assume you know their pain, I would focus on that first, I would start with what I know about them and maybe say you’re impressed by something you read about them. Start it off on a positive note. In any sales, they’re going to give you a negative response to things. If they say something negative to you, of course you can’t just jump in and say why they’re wrong. Support what they’ve said, give them some kind of yeah I understand, some other people have agreed with you, or give some support before you limit them as we learn in sales. A lot of salespeople lose people because they just limit them right off the bat. They don’t say you have a really good point and other people maybe would agree with you and give them a little bit of basics, yeah my competitor, they do have a good product, that’s why we use some of those things in our products but we’ve improved it by blah blah blah. You have to learn the process of developing the relationship and you have very little time sometimes. I never had less time when I was a pharmaceutical rep because they gave you one minute sometimes as you’re tracing them down the hall. It’s tough sometimes in certain industries. When I dialed for dollars, you have very little time. Telephone is a lot more challenging, you have to develop your presence. It depends on the industry, it’s really hard to give a blanket answer that is applicable to all sales jobs. But I have worked in real estate, I have worked in lending, I have worked in pharmaceutical sales, and different types of sales. It is all different. That’s why shows like this are so great and what you do is so great because they can pick and choose the things that are applicable to their industry and their type of sale. Marylou: Is there a process that we can put ourselves through for preparing or when we’re actually in the conversation that we hear certain things and we react a certain way? Is there some type of process in the communication aspect? Diane: In pharmaceutical sales, they had a certain sales process. I think that in terms of what you can do is create your own process based on your industry of what works. I recommend that you go to the best person in your field and find out what works for them. I always think having a good mentor is part of the process that works. I can remember one guy, he came in 11 in the morning, the rest of us are at 8, he leaves at 2 and he killed everybody in sales. What is this guy doing? I sat in and listened to his calls, he was just so conversational and just right off the bat you could tell that he was an expert. A lot of people, the new sales people have difficulty with that. They don’t feel confident. They have to learn to fake the confidence a little bit until they make it. There’s a great TEDtalk about how sometimes you have to portray a certain image until you actually become it, which is kind of in contrast to see the book about an introvert which was called Quiet. I don’t think there’s a whole lot of introverts in sales. I think that you probably would do better to listen to the first TEDtalk about how you can portray confidence to the point where people are going to listen to what you have to say a lot more openly, even if it is your first call. Marylou: Because it’s the telephone, it doesn’t matter if you’re 20, out of college talking to a CEO, it’s a mindset change of you meeting that CEO at that peer level. That’s one of the things that’s so important for us because we’re not doing face to face sales in many cases, we are on the phone. The tonality we know from research is 75% of that conversation is based on your tone. It’s not being perfect in your wording, it is about enthusiasm, smiling on the phone, having that conversation with confidence. Like you said, I think the main way to get there is role playing, listening to people who have these great conversations, mirroring what they’re doing as much as possible, adding in your own style as you start to feel more confident. Is that the best way for us to get better at this first conversation? Diane: I think so. I’ve had some mentors give me advice that may be very uncomfortable. I can remember in subprime sales I had a wonderful boss but she was tough and I wasn’t a tough type of a personality, I was more of a relationship kind of a personality. In mortgage sales, you get some of these tough guys, there’s not a lot of women at that time, that were used to just bluffing it out, it was a mad man kind of a thing on the phone, I can’t explain compared to today it was a lot different. She listened to me and she goes, “Just tell him, this is what it is and if he doesn’t like it, too bad.” She made me do this for the phone call and the guy got really mad and he was just like, “Nobody talks to me that way.” I wasn’t really mean, I just put it the way she said it. “This is how it is, if you wanna do it, let me know.” Marylou: Very direct. Diane: He kind of got mad and hung up. Later, he ended up being my best customer. He kept calling me back because he respected me after that. I think it depends on the industry how tough you can be or how you should be. I think you learn, she was obviously really good in this job, she was the leader in it, and she’s one of the best leaders I’ve ever had. She gave me good advice for that particular situation, not that I’d say that would work in every situation. That’s why I really think you got to find the proper mentor for that industry. It just depends on the industry, I think mentorship can’t be rated it’s just the like the top thing you can do. Marylou: One of the suggestions I like to make with my audience is that if you’re selling to a CMO for example, then go to your CMO in your company and roleplay with them. Do it by role. Luckily for us, we’re sometimes talking to three to five different roles before we can actually get in the door. We’re trying to navigate through the company, we’re talking to multiple personalities, trying to figure out which one of those is going to let us get our toe in the door. We do have to be a little bit of a chameleon depending on who we’re talking to. This conversation is great Dr. Diane because I really want people to understand that we are going to change our delivery based on who’s on the other end of that line. It’s not that we’re changing ourselves, it’s just in that moment we are really focused on the caller, the person we’re speaking with, and trying to get them feeling comfortable to trust us so that we can do what we need to do to get in that door. The more we practice, the better we’re going to get at it, that’s what I’m hearing from you. Diane: That’s true and I recommend practicing videotaping yourself. We did a lot of that in pharmaceutical sales, a lot of the details we did videos and then we would critique each other, not just have you look at it, have somebody else look at it and it’s tough sometimes. It’s pretty intimidating for a lot of people who do that when they’re new but it’s a very important thing because we do things that we just have no idea we’re even doing until you see it on video. Now that you have the iPhone, there’s different ways to simply recording yourself, it can’t be any easier. I think that’s a key thing to do to just kind of look at the things that you’re doing and think of it, put yourself in their shoes which is a big part of empathy, think like they’re thinking which is a big part of emotional intelligence and that’s the way we work. I really think that doing that would be a huge step in improving your sales presentation. Marylou: Tell us a little bit about the radio show, what are the topics of that show and I’ll put in the show where people can listen to you, how often is it gonna air and what’s the topic? Diane: It starts next month, I don’t have all of the information for you yet but it takes a lead. It’s about leadership and communication and just about anything that leaders deal with. A leader could be an entrepreneur, just all levels of a lot of the stuff that we talked about today, salespeople. Others can really benefit from it because we’re gonna go in a lot of different directions. I don’t really have all the information for you yet but you’ll be able to find it on my site which is drdianehamilton.com. I do have some really wonderful people that I’m gonna have on the show right off the bat, the top 30 under 30 list of people that Forbes voted the most influential of the 30 under 30 are going to become my guest. I’ve met some wonderful people from working at Forbes and I hope you’ll get a chance to listen to that. I do have a video interview with Ken Fisher that you might find interesting. If you look up Dr. Diane Hamilton and Ken Fisher who’s the billionaire behind the Guru genius, behind Fisher Investment, that’s on YouTube. There’s also something that your listeners might want to see on YouTube, I spoke at Forbes Mentor, look up Dr. Diane Hamilton Forbes Mentor Week. It’s all about the future, when I speak, I speak about just the millennials and different generational conflict issues that I think that would be very helpful. Marylou: Yeah, a lot of the roles for the business developers are the younger crowd because it’s usually the entry level sales position besides following up on leads coming in. It’s another position in sales that grooms you to become, if you want, an account executive that’s going to be more of a closing type person. This position typically is held for younger people generally, not always but they’re coming out of school, they’re not necessarily enamored with the telephone and a lot of our work is still done heavily reliant on the telephone although email is becoming a good conversational piece but to get 15 emails equals one phone call in my world. At some point, we really need to embrace the phone and maximize the way we have conversation. Diane: I’m just gonna say I have one more piece of information. I think that if you’re getting millennials and younger people listening to the show, one of my books would really tie in well to learning a lot of the stuff we talked about today. It’s Not You, It’s Your Personality, and you can get that on Amazon. In that, I give a lot of stuff on how to deal with different personality type traits and not actually having to take the case of MBTI, all the different personality tests, emotional intelligence, but the kind of things you would learn had you taken it and how to use it to interact with other people. I think that would tie in really well with the younger generation because it was a book I wrote with Toni Rothpletz who is my daughter and she helped make it focused for the younger generation because I think post boomers would do really well to learn that type of thing. Marylou: That’s great, so it’s called It’s Not You, It’s Your Personality? Is that correct? Diane: Yeah. Marylou: Okay folks, make sure you get that book to download and listen to because I think that’s another area where we’re trying to start these communications with people from a cold status. They haven’t necessarily opted into us, they may not necessarily be aware of who we are and we’re disrupting them. The more that we can really align our conversation to what is important to them but be able to switch modes really quickly based on what we’re hearing and listening is a big part of this, then we’re gonna be more successful in generating those meetings. Diane: Everything, yes I agree. Marylou: Very good. I just appreciate so much having you on the show today. I’ll put all the links that we talked about in the show notes. Once we get the radio show, I’ll add that in as well for our audience. In the future though, if they want to find to more about you, drdianehamilton.com is a good place to go? Diane: Right, drdianehamilton.com and most social media sites, Twitter, LinkedIn, it’s Dr Diane Hamilton. Marylou: Very good. Thank you so much Dr. Diane for your time, I really appreciate it. Diane: You’re welcome, I enjoyed it.

Marylou: Hi everyone, it’s Marylou Tyler. Today, I have a guest that you probably already listen to his podcast, it’s called Accelerate. Andy Paul is with us today. He’s the founder of Zero-Time Selling. Welcome, Andy. How are you doing? Andy: Marylou, thanks for having me. I’m doing great. Marylou: Fabulous. I am so excited to have you on the show primarily because you have interviewed how many people now on your podcast? Andy: I’ve interviewed 450. I think we just released, as we talk today, probably 380 episodes, something like that. We’re a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of what we interview. Marylou: If you’re just getting to hear Andy, he started in October 2015. Go all the way back then and put those podcast in your favorite listening device. Andy: Start at Episode 1. Don’t miss a single one. Marylou: Don’t miss a single one. Yes, exactly. We focus on top of funnel. The people who listen to me, they like process, they love technology, but I think we’re having issue or we’re still being challenged with the human component of all these. What types of things have you learned or do you focus on in your business now in order to blend this technology with the human aspect of sales? Andy: I think that what we try to focus on when I’m talking to groups, or I’m doing workshops with the companies, or coaching a CEO about a process that they’re using for their sales is, okay, you’ve invested a bunch of time, effort and money to actually bring a buyer or potential buyers to a point where you’re actually going to have a conversation with them, what do you then? What happens then? What we find is that reps, by large, are unprepared for what happens then. This first instant is so critical because researchers found that people form perceptions of you as an individual at subconscious levels or what they call it pre cognitive processing. It happens within a quarter of a second. 250 milliseconds, a time it takes you to blink an eye, somebody has formed a perception of you. On top of that, the studies and science again shows that perceptions are very sticky. It’s very difficult to change someone’s perception of you once it’s been formed. Even when they’re presented with evidence showing that their perception is wrong, it’s hard for them to change perception. Daniel Kahneman talks about this in the studies that he had done in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. It’s just the way we’re wired, our brain is wired. You think of that from a sales perspective is, we don’t spend enough time thinking about really what is that first moment. What are we doing to start engaging with the buyer, building the rapport, building the relationship, building these ideas? We talked about people buy from people they know like and trust, but what are we doing right at that first moment? I mean you really have to bring your A game from the get go. Every time you interact with the prospect but especially on that first call, it’s so essential. Marylou: We tend to warm up that chill by leveraging technology in the form of emails. Maybe, people still send direct mail. I have some clients who are still sending postcards. Does that first moment start with the first conversation no matter what modality or are you talking to first voice conversation? Andy: I think it certainly can be impacted by the non-voice communications. I’ll give an example. You get emails all the time from SDR, I’m sure, yourself. I certainly do as a business owner. I was just marvelling today about the 30 mails in sequence I’ve gotten from a company. Everybody would recognize if I gave their name. There are misspellings in it and grammatical errors. It’s like I haven’t spoken to this person. In this case, I’m not going to go because it doesn’t fit the products, it’s not something that interests me, but if I was going to make a decision about whether to speak to this person or not, that would have influenced my perception of them. I’m thinking, If I want to fund and invest money with a service or product from a company, I want to have a fairly strong sense to their strong attention to detail, they’re focus on quality, all these things that you’re giving an image of in your written communications as well. Marylou: Is this concept biased in any way based on how old you are or when you were born? Are we in the older generation? I’m putting myself in that older generation by the way, not you Andy? Andy: I was going to say. Marylou: Are we being brought up “differently” than say my kids? Are there levels of interaction that matter most based on where you are in that spectrum of when you are born? Do you think? Andy: No. I think what happens is that the errors are committed more frequently if people are less experienced. As you get more experienced, you begin to understand that this is really important. That it’s not just window dressing but it actually is important. It’s part of the maturation process throughout your career. It’s so important because a lot of our productive hour is just being done by wasting certain fields and tech fields for sure, being done by people these proportionally in their earlier part of their careers. These interactions that are creating these impressions, that potential buyer have. Another example is I received another one recently where somebody is very insistent that they’re trying to set up meeting for their regional Vice President of Sales to speak with me. They’re very insistent but their emails had multiple font types because they’ve obviously been cutting and pasting. Marylou: Oh, carnal sin. Andy: Right. Pay attention there. These things are important. Are they absolutely the size…? No, but you’re creating perception in the mind of somebody that you want to have some conversation with. Why won’t you spend another minute to make sure that you’re going to make that easier to have happen than to make it harder to have it happen. Marylou: I agree. The thing I’ve noticed with calling into different regions is that culturally, there are some differences too. For example, I live here in the Midwest right now and it’s very permission based. The email flow, the gist, the sentiment, really has to be more of a permission based type of email. What I mean by that is it there’s a politeness that exists in the Midwest that maybe on the Coast it’s a little more directive, a little bit more forced, whereas here it’s gentler. Are those kinds of things also where you’ve seen that need to be taken into consideration or is it people will give leeway to that but the actual message itself has to satisfy our innate desires and needs to have a closeness with somebody? Andy: I think the best way to make it easier in yourself is to have a standard that’s acceptable to everybody. Yes, people maybe more accepting let’s say, more casual conversation let’s say in California than perhaps in Des Moines, Iowa, where you are. On the other hand, if you’re right, something that’s acceptable to to someone in Des Moines said something in California, it could be acceptable to them in California as well. Marylou: Yeah. Andy: Rather put yourself to the hassle of saying, “I need to tweet my message because I need to understand exactly where they’re going.” Maybe one thing if it’s going from country to country or some very established norms that are different, within the US I think that create a standard that works for everybody. Be effective, have high quality, check your work, spend an extra minute. It’s just a minute. That’s the whole thing we’re talking about. We’re not talking about tons of time. Take a minute, just ask somebody else to look at it. That’s the easiest thing to do. Have somebody else just look at it before you send it. Because then a lot of us templatize anyway so there’s no excuse for that to happen. Because again, you’re putting the time, effort, and investment you’re making. You’re putting risk on something stupid. Marylou: That and right now, with the emphasis on account based selling, there’s a small universe of people with whom you can have conversation. Andy: If you’re saying enterprise accounts, yeah, for sure. Marylou: Yes. Each record is very precious. What I also like to do is actually read my emails before I send them. That helps me clarify and get more clarity around the message that I’m trying to convey before I hit that send button. Andy: I think that’s a great tip. I think for a lot of people listening, you think about the process of writing an email. It’s a lot like talking to the customer. You actually have a physical conversation is that, you have to eliminate the distractions. I think probably the reasons we get these errors is because people are trying to multitask while they write their email. They’re trying to multitask while they do everything. The science is unequivocally clear, we cannot multitask. Humans are incapable of multitasking. Multitasking is not trying to do projects at once, it’s writing an email and then taking five seconds and glancing over at your phone when the screen lights up to tell you that you got a notification about something. That’s multitasking. By taking your focus away for just even five seconds to look at that phone then go back to your email, you’re not going to be able to engage the same way. The study done by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University, where they got some study subjects over a period of time and they brought them one at a time in a room, gave them a test. Sort of unexpectedly during the test, they interrupted them with a phone call and then they went back and completed the test after the phone call. What they found is after the phone call, which lasted less than a minute, these people performed 20% less well on the test. As somebody summarized, being interrupted made them 20% dumber. When you’re talking about writing emails, it’s like talking to a customer. Take the distraction all the way. Focus on one thing at a time. Get it done. Make sure it’s right and then move on to the next one. Marylou: We have the what in terms of in the moment as you said? I have a blank slate in front of me. I have piece of paper sitting here and I want to craft, at least get my talking points down on paper. Are there building blocks that we can use in order to think through how this in the moment conversation should begin? W9hat’s the beginning, middle and end? Or is it something that over time, we develop our own rhythms too? Andy: Disregarding the fact that they have in the physical phone call? Marylou: Yeah. We’re actually getting ready now. We’ve done all our pre-work. They’re receptive to us coming in. We’re getting ready to have that first conversation. What kind of prep-work? Or is there such a thing as a building block of prep-work that based on the psychology and the science that we can put together or at least have prepared so that when we do speak we are not what I call bungling it, you say something else, you had more appositives spend on it. Andy: That you’re optimizing the experience. Marylou: Optimizing, yes. Marylou bungle in the optimization. Andy: Glass is half full always. Robert Cialdini talks about this in his latest book and David Hoffeld in his book, Science of Selling talks about it, is that we know about people buy from people they know like can trust. There’s actually a fourth element there which is another like. What scientists found to the research is that people more likely to buy from people that they think like them. Okay. We’re always focused on them liking us but it’s equally as important for them to believe that we like them. How do you begin to establish that in this relationship you build with them? That starts right at the beginning with a dreaded word for many people, small talk. As you’re planning your call, are you doing your research on this individual? Are you looking at their various social profiles to see what they might be interested in, what they’re talking about, having conversations, or posting? Are you prepared? Which is our opening question on a personal note. In some cases actually, what the science found is that it’s actually just asking very sincerely, “Hey, how are doing?” As an opening which at some cases makes people feel uncomfortable to ask but asked authentically, it’s very powerful. Again, the research has shown that this is a great way to begin a conversation with somebody. Marylou: I could hear people cringing, Andy. Andy: I know. I can hear people cringing as well but the science shows that it works. It opens them up and they start thinking, “Oh, this person likes me.” You follow it up with just something of interest to them personally. Then, you start building that bridge with them, that serve them liking you and you liking them or they are perceiving that you like them. Again, as David Hoffeld points out in his book and Cialdini, that’s important, that’s an influencer. You as an individual have to understand that in today’s world, you are the first line of differentiation between you and your competitors. It’s not your product, not your services, it’s you. This is one thing that you need to start with. If it’s an in person call, or if you’re on a video call with somebody, whatever vehicle you’re using, Zoom, smile. If you have to put it down in your prep list, smile when I see the person. That makes a difference. It makes a difference in their state of mind in terms of how they receive the information you’re going to give them. Marylou: It’s funny that’s one of my big training points on using the telephone, is to smile while you’re talking on the phone. Andy: Yes. Marylou: Because that can really be heard by the recipient. It sounds kind of funky but it really works plus you feel better. You’re happy. You’re smiling, You’re sounding excited. You’re just enamoured with them with your products, with this conversation. Andy: Your body language is evidenced by your voice. Yeah, it changes your sense of confidence. Marylou: A long way. Yup. Andy: Yeah. Put on your list on prepping, number one, smile. Number two, ask how they’re feeling. Three, what’s personal thing that you’re going to bring up. I’m assuming this is the first call. This is not like, “Hey, can I have 20 seconds of your time?” This is your first meaningful conversation with somebody. Marylou: Right. Andy: This is the detail that you have to go to. With these things, something I’ve written about and talked about a lot recently is you have to eliminate the distractions. Though I was on a workshop, giving to a company that had roughly 100 inside sales reps and I ask questions, “How many people leave their phone, their cellphone, smartphone, out on their desks when they’re making calls? Raise your hands.” 100% raised their hands. I said, “Okay. All of you that raised your hand, show your hands, raise a hand if you get a notification, or your phone buzzes, or you get an alert or something that you look at the screen of your phone while you’re talking to the customer?” Again, unfortunately 100%. I talked about multitasking, you can’t do it. If you’ve invested all this time and effort, you’ve made 15 outreaches to this prospecting. Finally get them to get on the phone with them or wherever you’re meeting, and you get distracted by phones sitting on your desk, you may have just messed up completely at that point in time. For a little distraction as long as five seconds, it will take you maybe up to a minute based on research to get back to the point of the conversation where you’re fully engaged again. For the mean time, you’ve missed a minute worth of information the customer is giving you and they know it. Marylou: They do know it. Not to mention, just to get to that call is so much effort. Andy: Right. Marylou: So many people are involved to get you that first call served up. Especially if you’re a larger company. Andy: Yeah, so why would you jeopardize it by keeping your phone on your desk? Sitting down to make calls, or make a call, receive a call, take your phone, turn it off, put it away. Turn your computer screen off unless you need to preference for something with the customer. Eliminate the distractions, be present. Somebody used the term recently that I thought was really great is on virtual calls, you have to look the customer in the eye when you’re on the phone. It’s a great imagery. Marylou: I love that, yes. Andy: Look the customer in the eyes because that means you’re going to maintain that focus, that presence and mindfulness that you’re there for them. That’s just the start of it. Beyond that is you need to have your questions lined up. There’s a lot of debate about what type of questions you should ask and so on. My preferences used what I call a killer question to start the conversation. This is the question that asks the customer something about their business that they should know but don’t. Marylou: That sounds scary. Andy: This is not something sales reps have to come up with them themselves. They should be questions that are developed through experience of other sales reps, and other people within the company, and so on. What you’re doing is you’re starting the conversation by asking something that demonstrated that you guys have some insights to their business. That forces them to pause and think because one of things that’s happened, I believe based on what I’ve seen, is that as we become more scripted from the sales perspective in terms of questions we ask and so on, so do the buyers become scripted in the responses they give. If you are the third person talking to a buyer about this particular project and procurement that they’re working on, if you’re going down a fairly standard set of questions, you’re going to get fairly standard set of answers that aren’t going to provide you any really depth of insight into what their real requirements are. How you can help provide the optimum solution formed, perhaps differentiate from what your competitors are talking about. The best way to start that conversation is deliver on these questions that forces them to pause and think, takes them off of their script as well. Marylou: Yes. Back in the old days, we used to use the spin selling technique, the implication questions. Andy: Right. Marylou: What I love about those questions are you do not need, I think Neil even says this in his book, that you’re not going to get great at it the more you do it, or the more you’ve been selling, you continually need to practice it. It’s something we’re coming in day one as a rep you can’t ask these questions, and 10 years as a rep, you’re going to be a master of it because you are constantly changing. There’s a constantly changing landscape. You continually improve master work on these types of questions and they are unsettling, but they’re provocative and as you said, they perk up a bit because they were like, “No one has ever asked me that before.” Andy: Exactly. Marylou: “Wow, I didn’t really think of it that way.” Certainly, the response that you want was, “Wow, that came out left field.” Andy: Suddenly, they’re engaged. Marylou: Yes. Andy: Again, Kahneman talks about, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, about people have two forms of thought. System one, thinking. System two, system one is 75% of our days sort of habitual behavior, the way we react to things are driven by past experiences that some of the path release resistance for our brains to take that approach. If we don’t challenge that, we’re just going to get the same old answers from the prospects. Another great way to start the conversation is sort of this simple gap analysis. Where do you want to be in 12 months, or 18 months, or a time frame that’s important to them? Where are you today? And then you get that implication question like, “What’s your plan to get from here to there?” Marylou: And why haven’t you made it there? Andy: One of your follow up. Yeah, why aren’t you there yet and and so on. That’s a simple three part format that anybody can use. Doesn’t take a lot of background, and it opens a larger conversation. Naturally, they’re going to turn to you and say, “How could you help us with that?” Marylou: Right. It’s a bit of the story arch. I don’t know if you read the book Resonate by Nancy Duarte. Andy: Yeah. Marylou: Yeah. She does presentations but she utilizes the hero’s journey. It starts with a revelation of, wow, here we are, at this moment in time, but I want to get way over there and I have no idea how to get there. The guide comes in, which is you and gives them a plan. It’s either you’re going to go with me on the plan and reach where you want to go or there are consequences if you do not take this path. There’s a little bit of that sort of uncertainty and doubt, they used to call it thud fear, uncertainty, and doubt of trying to get someone really off their game but do it in a way that you’re here to hold their hand through it at the same time. That comes back to what you said about I am the guide who’s going to get you to where you want to go. I’m going to hold your hand along the way. I’m not going to push you into the abyss and have you sink or swim, that kind of thing. I think that in this day and age, I know it’s becoming more important. I think you said that the research is showing that it’s becoming even more important now that we’re so multitasking and so much technology around us that the human element is desperately trying to resurface in our conversations. Andy: Yeah. I think that the buyers, the need for them in part of the buyers hasn’t changed. I mean, sure, maybe an increasing range of products that the buyers were capable of going through the entire buyer’s journey on their own. But in the business to business phase, if you’re selling a solution, yeah, they can do more of them on their own than they were 10, 15 years ago, we all know that, that’s established but they still need you. They need you be good. I listened to this call not long ago, rep was anxious, an AE is doing discovery call and it was painful. Listen to the guy who’s pretty well trained and fairly knowledgeable but not really in the moment, not really asking a question that forces the customer to pause and think. He started getting road answers. One time he didn’t get serve a road answer, he didn’t recognize it at that point in time. The customer left the door open for him to come in up a great follow up question, which [00:26:12] for a book called the Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier, excellent book. It’s an excellent sales book, one of the great coaching books. It talks about this concept of extending your curiosity. You ask the first question but you have to extend your curiosity to the second question. He frames a terms that calls the AWE Question, which is, “That’s really interesting, and what else can you tell me about that?” Marylou: Or tell me more is what it’s like. Andy: Or tell me more. But I like this what else can you tell me about that. Marylou: I like that too. Andy: Then, if you’re alive, if you’re focused, if you’re not looking at your phone, if you’re not distracted, and somebody opens that door a bit, you’ve got another question that go kick down that door, and ask this folk Russian with the second question, it’s going to take you to a point in the conversation that they’re not reaching with other vendors. Marylou: Yeah. Andy: You made yourself the point of differentiation. Marylou: So great stuff. Andy: Yeah. I think the thing about what are the killer questions or what you call the implication questions is that do yourself a favor. I know that some people are going to be horrified by this but stop asking about pain points. My experiences have shown me and I think research are showing as well, people are investing new solutions to achieve certain goals. It’s forward thinking. A pain points is where you’re going to put a bandaid or something. You fix a pain point, that’s yesterday’s problem. This company’s moving. They want to go somewhere. Your questions really should be focusing on where do you want to be and how are you going to help you get there. That’s much a better, broader conversation to have than, “What are your pain points?” Marylou: Yeah. I think the term challenge is something that we still hold on to because challenges for us, help us mapped to the possibility. If we have the challenge and we hear the challenge in how they’re describing where they are today, then we can link that to a case study or a very simple story about a client who’s maybe mid-journey in getting to the end of goal and how they were able to remove that as an obstacle on the way towards the opportunity. Andy: Right. That’s basically what I was talking about too. But too often, because again, we’re giving people these tools and we’re not really telling them the why we behind the how. Marylou: Exactly, yeah. Andy: How is ask about their pain points, but really the why is we want to ask them what they’re trying to achieve. This maybe, as you said, an obstacle to achieving what they want. But when you talk about pain points, you make it sound like taking aspirin to resolve a headache and that’s a temporary issue as opposed to something that’s integral to what they’re trying to achieve. Marylou: With the vision. Yeah, it’s a quick fix versus… Andy: How do we really help you? You do yourself a favor when you’re dealing with the customers. Talking in more of these vision terms, “Where do you want to be? What’s the path? How do we help you get there? What are the obstacles in the way?” As opposed to saying, “What are your pain points? What’s keeping you up at night?” I heard somebody say that on a call not that long ago which I want to hung up the phone for him. They’re meaningless questions. Marylou: Yeah. Let’s just refrain that way. There’s other ways to say what’s keeping you up at night, which is what we’re talking about. I think the biggest thing that I’m seeing and I tried to get this drilled into my folks is that you are your persona. Whoever you’re talking to on the other end, you’re a colleague of theirs. That mindset is that you’re a colleague of theirs or maybe you’re higher up than they are on the phone, but you’re really trying to help guide them towards a strategy, a vision, a way to get from point A to point B. You’re not necessarily diagnosing them. You kind of know what could be wrong already with them. You’re just trying to understand where they are relative to progress along the path of where they should be. When you view it that way, it’s a very different conversation than coming from, “Where’s your AWE?” Andy: “Where’s your AWE?” Yeah. You raised a great point. Bob Terson who wrote the book Selling Fearlessly talks about one of his key things that he points out in the book which I thought was a great thing for younger people to understand their careers is that you have to talk to prospects as their peer. It doesn’t matter which level within the corporation you’re talking to, you are their peer, even if it’s a CEO. Otherwise, if you have a different perspective, it’s like you’re meeting a famous celebrity and you’re odd because of it. You’re not going to get into the types of questioning and so on that you need to get to. Having that perspective as a colleague, as a peer, very important. I wish I had learned that earlier in my career. I got that point, unknowingly. I didn’t really put words to it until reading Bob’s book. I used to marvel when I was 22 years old, starting my career selling $100,000, $200,000 computer systems to companies, and looking 15 at the time. Thinking, “Why did they ever buy from me?” Marylou: Yes. Fake it till you make it kind of thing. Andy: It wasn’t that I didn’t know what I was talking about, it’s just like I looked 15. Marylou: I know. I used to get it all the time because I would be on the phone helping people and then I would go see them and they’re like, “You’re not the same person we were speaking with.” Andy: “Is your mom going to come?” Marylou: Definitely. There’s that and the other piece of advice that really helped me is to let go of the result. Just let go of what you want and really focus on what they want. It makes so much difference in your conversations and the karma of it all. It really does come around if you practice that. Andy: I have a story about this from early in my career where I was trying to sell a computer system to a retailer, jewelry store, they have multiple locations. It was going to be a big order. We’d done everything. We had crossed the tease. The guy told us pretty much that we were going to get this business, but we aren’t getting the order. I’d call the guy pretty frequently. I was pretty young at that time. Finally at one point, he calls me up and I go and visit this guy in his office. He basically said, just to your point exactly, that he was going to give me the order but not until he thought I wanted it less. Marylou: Oh my gosh, wow. Andy: It was that point, I was all focused on me and not on him. Marylou: Exactly, yeah. Andy: Yeah. He was going give me the order and we did get it. Yeah, he deliberately held it back because it was clear as I was talking to those more about getting the order for me as supposed to getting their order to get him started, to help improve his operations. Marylou: Obviously thought you a lifelong lesson there. Andy: Oh absolutely. It was hugely embarrassing at the time but a great lesson. Marylou: Yeah. Well Andy, thank you so much for your time. Before we close out, I want you to tell us, because I’m sure people are listening to this they’re like, “Okay, this is a missing component to all of our enamoured love of technology. We need to dial it in and get these, the building blocks, the habits of having a really good meaningful conversation with our prospects. How do we get a hold of you? Andy: Email me. You can do the old fashion way, you can call me at (619) 980-4002. I always love to talk to people. Email me at andy@zerotimeselling.com. Follow me on Twitter that’s @zerotimeselling. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I’d love that. But most importantly, come listen on my podcast as well. Accelerate, six episodes per week, talking to all the great minds, like Marylou Tyler, in sales. Broad range topics we cover but great guest and great conversation just like we had here today. Marylou: Yeah, thank you. I’ll put some of these links. I think the materials, some of the books you mentioned, I’m going to ask you offline to get me a list so we can put them in the shownotes because a lot of times we are focused on the process and I’m guilty of that, being a process expert, but I’d know that I’m just trying to serve up that first conversation using process as much as we can to go through to hundreds and thousands of records but it really comes down to do you have that connection, that human connection with the person that you’re trying to guide towards their solution or what you know they need, and that you know you can solve that need because you believe in who you are, your product, and your service. That’s really what it’s about. Andy: Yeah. I think people need to keep in mind and I tackle this in my books and when I do public presentations on these. The heart of sales is this bargain you strike with the buyer. They’re going to invest some of their time in you, what are you going to give them in return? This is the heart of the fundamental human to human selling is they’re going to give you some of their time, what are you going to give them in return? They give you some of their time and you give them nothing of value in return, then you broke the bargain and you’re not going to get anymore of their time. Marylou: Exactly. Andy: This works throughout the entire sales process. You have this imperative every time they invest some of their time in you. You need to give them something where they get a return on their investment. As we deliver it, this can’t be part of a robotic process because as they move through the sales process, you got need needs at each stage of it. You need to be consciously thinking about what it is you’re going to do. Marylou: Definitely. Thanks again, Andy. I totally enjoyed this conversation. I appreciate you taking your time. Andy: Honored to be in here. Marylou: Thanks.