It may be possible to use manipulative sales techniques to sell people things that they don’t really want or need. But do you really want to do that, and is it really a good strategy in the long run? Today’s guest talks about the importance of centering the customer’s needs, even if that means passing up an immediate sale, and how that strategy can pay off in the long run.
Andrew Priestly is a business coach, chairman of the Children’s Trust, a publisher, and an author. In today’s episode, he talks about his background in teaching and then real estate sales, his psychology training, and how all of that got him to where he is today. Listen to the episode to hear what Andrew say about sales tactics, the impact of the internet, the importance of personal relationships, and his new book that features contributions from experts in the sales field.
Episode Highlights:
- Andrew’s background in real estate sales
- How Andrew started researching sales tactics and where they came from
- How the internet has affected the sales world
- The impact of Facebook
- The importance of personal conversations in selling
- Andrew’s book
- How Andrew went about getting contributors for his book
- The feedback Andrew is getting from his book’s readers
- The psychology of sales
- Why Andrew believes in the using sales tactics responsibly
- Why building relationships matters in sales
Resources:
Sales Genius 1: 20 top sales professionals share their sales secrets
Full Transcript:
Marylou: Hey, everybody. It’s Marylou Tyler. This week’s guest is a gentleman who we connected over the internet, over LinkedIn, and he’s pretty awesome. His name is Andrew Priestley. He is a world-class coach but he’s also got a lot of other stuff going on. He’s the chairman of the Children’s Trust. He’s an author. He’s a publisher. The list goes on. Andrew, welcome to the podcast today.
Andrew: Hey, what can’t I do? It’s pretty amazing, isn’t it?
Marylou: It is.
Andrew: With an introduction like that, I’m thinking, “What can’t I do? I want to try anything.”
Marylou: The fact that you’ve done a lot of stuff speaks to–it’s amazing. It’s what this profession allows us to do. Being in sales, being part of that whole environment, allows us to morph into very different things. You started out–correct me if I’m wrong–in the real estate vertical and became top notch there, but tell us about that story. What happened?
Andrew: It was funny because it depends on how far you want to go back. Originally, I trained as a school teacher. Can you believe that?
Marylou: I believe it.
Andrew: Yeah, I trained as a school teacher and my majors were in reading psychology. At the time, I joined a brand-new university and I got interested in creating a newspaper for the university. My skills in reading psychology helped incredibly there and, after about 10 years of teaching, I took a long service leave and stupidly resigned to start my own publication. That was probably the dumbest thing that I had ever done in my life because I could not believe how hard it was because I had the technical skills but I just didn’t know how to sell.
I was going out there and I was talking to the entertainment industry, the hospitality industry. You can’t imagine. I’m going into nightclubs at 2:00 AM in the morning to try and sell on full-page newspaper advertising, which was just, after six months, I was just absolutely burned out. I left that and it was actually a question of my values. Mary Lou, have you ever had experiences with people that they do something and go, “This doesn’t align up with any of my values,” because I had a young family and I think, “What am I doing hanging out in night clubs with a young family?” It’s crazy, crazy stuff.
I actually took a bold decision. I shot down that newspaper. I was actually in competition with Rupert Murdoch at one point and, for the record, Rupert won just so you know. He was a very interesting man to me. He was incredibly interesting to me but he said, “You’re not going to win.” I just loved his confidence, and he was correct because I was punching way above my weight, incredibly so, and we had a staff of 12 and he had a staff of 153 and we’re trying to do the same job as 153 people.
Anyway, I took the bold step to shut down the paper, which I did before it killed me. I was really burning out and, on the back of that, a friend of mine was selling prestige real estate and he said, “Hey, why don’t you come to prestige real estate?” Part of the training for that was you had to go and do, firstly, an agent and auctioneer course and then, after that, what you had to do was you had to do a sales course. We were being taught–do you know Tommy Hopkins?
Marylou: Of course, yeah.
Andrew: Yeah, Tom Hopkins. The book, I think from memory, was the Art of Selling or the Dark Art–it wasn’t called the Dark Art of Selling, wasn’t it? It was the Art of Selling. We were getting trained in Tommy Hopkins-style training, and that was all the rage in Australia at the time. I went and did this amazing course. I topped the course. I topped my alumni. I came out almost like straight A’s right across the whole lot there, and I got out into the field and none of it worked. Absolutely zero worked and I was really, really confused.
In fact, more than confused, I was devastated because I’ve got a young family and I’m thinking, “If this is going to work, what am I going to do?” It’s actually more serious than–it was just about me. It was, “Shoot, I’m not selling anything.” All this stuff was supposed to work so I remember trying to do puppy dog closes on a $2 million-property, wondering why the people fought and backed away slowly. It just wasn’t good. Stop me if I’m talking too much because I love talking about sales.
In this particular situation, I remember one day that the turning point for me was this lady came into the real estate office and I wasn’t on the top of the of the router that day so I was just watching what was happening. I saw, outside the window, this lady talking to the guy who was the head of the router and said, “Take me and show me your property,” and they disappeared. Five minutes later, she came back and she was scowling and growling at this guy. I couldn’t hear what they were saying. He came in and he said an expletive and walked off.
About 15 minutes later, I went down to get a coffee and she was sitting there with her husband and I said, “Hey, just out of interest, you went out with my colleague but you came back. You seem pretty upset. What was going on?” She said, “Well, I told him that my husband has just had hip replacement surgery.” Back then, it was quite a serious operation. She said, “I don’t want a two-story house and I don’t want a sloping block. Guess what the first house he took us to was.” It’s a two-story house, sloping block. I said, “Take this back. We’re done.”
I said to her–we don’t have any bungalows. We don’t have any single-story dwellings on a flat block. It’s waterfront land. It all leads down to the canals. It’s waterfront wet blocks. I said, “Even if your husband had a boat, he wouldn’t be able to take the boat over the sandbar with a hip replacement because it’s too bumpy, but I know someone about 20 miles down the road who you could buy property from and I’ll look after you.” “Do you want a commission?” “No, don’t worry about that,” and so this lady went away.
A couple of days later, another lady came into the office and she said, “I want to buy here because our kids want to go school and it’s a nice neighborhood.” I said, “Look, if you live over here, you’ve got to drive four miles up to the junction, two miles along there and four miles back to the school. You can see the school so why don’t you teach your kids to ride a bike and then they can get to school really quickly?” I said, “You’d be better off living over there.” My sales manager absolutely went nuts.
The context was–you remember Glengarry Glen Ross, Boiler Room, those movies, that’s what our sales room was like. They used to have these rah-rah sessions and, “We will sell. We will sell,” and you had to stand up on the desk with a power hat on and a sword. “I am the best. I am the best. People will buy from me,” that sort of stuff. We were going nuts just chanting. I thought, “Man,” I was losing the will to live listening to this stuff. Anyway, the thing was, though, that it just didn’t resonate at all. Any of stuff resonated.
What happened was I started this little quest to discover where did these ideas come from, where did these sales tools come from. The sequel to the lady story was about, four months later, a man walked in and he said, “Is Andrew here?” Somebody said yes over there and the guy said–he didn’t look friendly. He said, “You met my mother three months ago.” I said, “Oh my god, who’s this? What have I done now? How bad is this going to get?” He said, “You didn’t sell her a property on this estate.” I said, “Which by the way, my dad’s got the hip replacement.” “Oh, yeah. I remember. How’d it work out?” “Really, really well, and my mom said, if you want an honest salesperson, go and see Andrew.”
Marylou: Awesome.
Andrew: I sold three properties at that point to this guy because he was the head of an airline and he wanted to get a precinct for his CEOs and sees where it is and he bought three properties. That game me a lot of pause for really thinking it through. What just happened there? What just happened? I started to get referrals. The lady who bought with a school, she sent some friends over–her parents, for example–that they would love to live here. They don’t have school kids. “This guy, you can trust.” “He didn’t try and sell me anything. He was more concerned about–” it was really good because I know parents who live over on the island and they say it’s absolutely–you think the mom drops her child off to that school. She’s got four miles to the junction, two miles across, four miles down. What does that add up to,10 miles?
Marylou: That’s a lot.
Andrew: She’s doing 20 miles twice a day in a car. That gave me a lot of thought. Then, I started to think, “Where did these ideas come from? Where did the puppy dog clothes come from? Where did the hand grenade start–which we don’t talk about now?” Do you get the idea? I started to read and, at that point, I left real estate. I went back to university. I did my industrial organizational psychology degree and I got interested in doing factor analysis. I got interested in serious research. I actually picked up on–I loved the reading psychology part but I really wanted to go into abnormal psychology and look at that.
I started doing loads and loads of reading. Eventually, I ended up reading right back to about the 1840s and 1860s when they first started publishing–people started writing stuff about selling and sales. It’s fascinating. It was really fascinating, what I found. I’ve read about 256 factors that are involved with selling, which chumped down to about 10 things, which pretty much closely follow a high-value multi-step sale now. Are you ready to sell? Have you got the knowledge? Do you have a prospect? Can you build rapport? Can you qualify? Can you present? Can you close? Can you handle objections? Can you do the customer service? Can you do the admin? All that sort of stuff.
Marylou: Now, let me ask you a question about that. Has the internet changed any of that? Has the internet allowed us to bypass these behavioral cues because of the ability to know more about our prospects or is it, in your opinion, behavior is behavior, doesn’t matter how many tools you throw at it; There’s still a process that people go through to buy something or to feel comfortable to buy from you?
Andrew: I’ve got a feeling this is a loaded question. You’re actually the expert on it. I’ve been reading your book and you know this question backwards. What’s the answer?
Marylou: The answer is what? I want to hear what you have to say.
Andrew: It’s a funny thing. The context that I’d probably provide when we talk about internet–and it links back to what I was saying before. The context here for me was, if I was to sum up selling from about the 1840s right through the 20th Century–and, in fact, I’d say that people worldwide–the world changed in 2004. Something happened in 2004 that just changed everything. Big cycles go in about a 20-year span so, in 2004–we’re only just coming out of that really big, big dream that happened in 2004. Do you know what it was?
Marylou: No. What?
Andrew: It was Facebook.
Marylou: Okay.
Andrew: See, and Facebook–part of that, the year before that was WordPress came out and Zuckerberg got the idea, “Oh, shoot. I could actually–I don’t have to try too hard. I can use something like WordPress,” and then, a year later, YouTube came out, 2005. To get into Facebook, you had to be in his alumni or you had to know somebody. It just wasn’t open to anyone and he created this, if you like, sense of–the little black book was back and who do I know? It was about relationships and not a lot I can trust and those sorts of things.
If I can sum up selling from about 1840s right up to about 2004, the word, I’d say, is transacting. A lot of times, we say, “Look, buy something from me and I’ll be your friend, but I want to sell you something.” A lot of the tools that we were learning were how to get people to close and transact, but it was all down to transacting. From 2004 onwards, I think what we did was we skipped a beat, in my opinion, in my experience. Can I validate this? I’m not sure, but my gut tells me and my heart tells me that even back when I was selling real estate, it’s about the relational thing.
Even if you make contact with them, people still want to make a connection with you, still want to know a little bit about you. We know that some people won’t buy unless they buy the salesperson. Other people have different motives of buying. I think the internet certainly leverages that and gives a smarter intel, if you like, but I actually think, too, if you talk about a big-ticket high-value sale, I still think it comes back to that very relational, get-to-know-me, get-to-understand-my-needs, qualify-me-properly, don’t-try-and-flog-me-something-because-you-can-or-you-have-to. I don’t know if that answers it, but that’s the sort of feeling.
Marylou: Yeah, there’s this notion that behavior has changed because we hide behind electronics, but I submit to you that, as you just said, it eventually will come down to what I call belly-to-belly conversation, meaning across a table from someone, they getting to know you, you getting to know them, you getting a good feel for how they roll, so to speak, and they getting a good feel of how you’re going to transact their business with them and whether you are trustworthy.
No amount of technology can help us with that; it has to be our humanness and our authenticity that gets us there. All these tools do is get us to the point where we can selectively choose, especially from an outreach perspective, who we want to have these conversations with, what’s a good use of our time and whether they’ve engaged enough with us so that the conversation makes sense right now in this moment to have that conversation with them.
Andrew: Totally. I think more so because we are shifting our perspective to more relational things where LinkedIn is very much–I doubt if you would have had me on this podcast had we not chatted.
Marylou: Correct. I didn’t know you existed until I saw you on LinkedIn.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s true, and we reached out and we had a great chatter. We had a good chat and a good connection, particularly in sales and professionalism, things like that, but, in the same thing, everyone who’s a piece in the book sales genius, which we just put out there, every single one of those authors, I spoke to. If I didn’t feel right, I didn’t want them in the book. Do you know what I mean? Because, I think, I also, too–with selling, I take the obligation to my readers as a publisher really seriously. I don’t want to put a sales book out there where people go, “Oh, yeah, it’s just like everything else.” I want people to look at it and go, “That was really good. I can trust these authors.”
Marylou: Let’s transition now to the book. Before, when we first met each other, this was a gleam in the eye or it was something you were thinking about doing and, boom, it became actionable, which I love about you that you have an idea, you put it into action. That is our motto as an outreach business development, is take something and put it into action. You’ve done that so tell us about this book. Tell us what happened.
Andrew: Firstly, Mary Lou, I did an expression of interest on it first. I started talking to people about it so it wasn’t just I wake up one morning with an idea and, “Let’s do a book.” I had the idea for a long time about–again, selling for me is an honorable profession and it should be done with the utmost responsibility. I learned that through prestige real estate. I didn’t want to ever sell a house to somebody because I could, because I wanted to go back a year later or two years later and they say, “Andrew, that was a great house. You really did a good job for us.” That was what I thought about deeply. I wanted to go back to people, look them in the eye and they say, “I’m so glad you sold us this property or that you were our agent.”
I was talking to people. “Do you think this is an idea?” There’s a lot of sales books out there. I think if you Google search or if you do an Amazon search, there’s hundreds and thousands of sales books out there so how is this one going to be different? I started talking to people and saying, “What’s your take on selling? Just tell me how are you different from whatever’s out there,” and then that’s what turned into–I kind of think, “God, that’s genius, what they’re thinking,” so Sales Genius was the name of the book on Amazon.
I put out a call to action on Facebook and I said, “Look, I’m thinking of writing a book because I’m a publisher. If you’ve got a take on selling and you’re interested in writing a short article, about 1,500 words–I didn’t want it too long–something you could read over a coffee, would you like to participate?” I was deluged and then it was a matter of going and talking to those people. Subsequently, we ended up with 20. I think they’re just brilliant. We’ve got some amazing people in our first book, people who–it does what it says on the team. They’re peak performance. I think you’re the #1. You did the foreword for the book, didn’t you? How did I call you into doing the foreword, even?
Marylou: Simply by asking, Andrew.
Andrew: That’s exactly what it was. There was no calling. There was no spin. There were no inducements.
Marylou: No, just a simple request, no reason why, no compelling reason.
Andrew: Why did you say yes?
Marylou: Why? Because I felt that it was a great project to get like-minded individuals all from different walks of the sales pipeline itself to give a comprehensive, short yet sweet overview and actionable book. It was just great to get everyone’s opinions, and those who read the book can pick from the ones they like that resonate and apply. That’s the biggest thing about this book, is it puts you in the position of action.
Andrew: Yeah. I know I think you’ve said something really, really important here, that there’s a good cross-section of 20 people, some of them going, “No, that’s not me,” but some–and I know this because I’m getting feedback where people say, “I love that article.” I read the articles and, yeah, it was okay but, for some people, they’re going to go–that’s kind of the game-changer for them, but it doesn’t happen unless you actually take action on it. You’re right, 100%. If you don’t actually do anything with it, what was the point?
Marylou: Exactly. The book is on Amazon, yeah?
Andrew: It’s on Amazon as a paperback. It’s in 12 countries. I got #1 in five categories in the UK and I think in Australia, and it got to–America’s a much bigger market but I think it got to about #4 or #5 in America, which, to me–if I could get a sales book into the Top 100, I’d be happy. If I could get it in the Top 50, I would happy. What’s the feeling? You’ve done two bestsellers. What’s it like when you look at it and you see the numbers racking up?
Marylou: It’s just wonderful. It’s a great feeling to know that people are taking notice of your body of work. The big thing for me, though, personally, is that they’re taking action on it. I would like to hear from people when they’ve applied something, some part of the book, which I’ve been hearing from a ton of people about that. That’s, to me, the most gratifying–it isn’t the number of sales but the number of people who’ve applied the information within the book and can cite specifics as to what they did and what it meant to them to actually do that.
Andrew: It may not be quantitative; it might be a thing like I had someone email me the other day who said, “The thing I got out of the reading the book was, ‘Shoot. Actually, sales is pretty good and I should be doing more of it.'” I asked him, “What has it translated?” “I’ve just been contacting people more.”
Marylou: See? That’s awesome.
Andrew: There’s a difference between, “I should contact more people,” as opposed to, “You know, I should contact more people.” Do you know my sales manager, going right back to the prestige when he was looking–because we had the old leaderboard system, who’s on top and blah, blah, blah. It was dog-eat-dog in the real estate game back then. I don’t know if it’s changed but it certainly was then. I was doing okay on the leaderboard and my salesman just said, “What are you doing because you’re not doing what we do? What are you doing?” I said, “Well, you get your credit card out and I’ll tell you exactly what I’m doing,” because it was a commission environment where everyone was poaching everybody’s ideas. I honestly thought, “I don’t even think you’re going to get it anyway. Just be genuine. Care about your client. Try that one and see how that goes.”
Marylou: Listen to their request, like with the woman who needed a single-story home for her husband. Listen to that and let them know if you can or cannot make that adjustment. Like you did, you referred her out. That speaks volumes to me.
Andrew: From a psychology point of view, I hate to say it but there’s a lot of sales techniques that actually work. You come to an ethical point where you say, “I know I can use this technique on someone but should I use this technique on someone?” To me, that lady, for me, was–I couldn’t sell her a house. I couldn’t say, “Look, somehow massage the property so that they somehow like it.” I said, “You know what? There’s no properties that you want like that here.” I was just straight, up and down, nor did I want to take a conjunct with her and take a split on the commission or anything like that. I wanted someone to look after her because I know what’s it like to do a sale. You really do earn those commissions.
Marylou: Exactly. It’s that whole karma thing, though, and the law of reciprocity at work. I think that’s what separates the really great salespeople from the not-so-great salespeople, is that they think longer term.
Andrew: Yeah, I think so and I think, at the heart of it, when I talk to people about sales and they talk about stunts, and tricks, and techniques, and how can I use this, and blah, blah, blah, at the heart of it is a desire to manipulate others, which, to me, there’s your problem right there. My approach has always been help somebody make an informed, adult decision, a grown-up decision. If they can’t do that, if the decision is, “I don’t want to buy from you,” I respect that.
Marylou: I think choosing your path, though, is the path of the high road. It’s going to serve you in the long run especially now since a lot of these tools that are available for reaching out and contacting more people are ubiquitous. They’re lower cost so it leaves more room for mass contact that’s not a value. If you put yourself on that higher road, I think you’re going to win more often than not just because you are spending the time to be more authentic.
Andrew: I think it’s a great point you make. One of my colleagues is an incredibly bright, young man who started out as a physicist. He got into AI and particularly with a focus on decision mapping and then using the data to make better decisions. However, the caveat there is we have to use this responsibly because people can be manipulated, but you can also get the wrong customers for the wrong reasons as well. People can buy from you but they end up being a nightmare for you.
I’ve sort of looked at that but it goes back to what we said at the very start. It’s still that relational thing. It still comes back to that. This is what I’ve learned through being a chair of a children’s charity: It’s real people, real lives, real situations. You’ve got to really care about the person on the receiving end and you can’t fake that. I don’t think you can.
Marylou: Not at all, no.
Andrew: I wanted to make a comment about your book. It’s an amazing book.
Marylou: Thank you.
Andrew: Yeah, that’s one of those books when you pick it up, you go, “Ah, god, this makes sense. Of course,” but I like the fact that you haven’t dumbed it down. You haven’t dumbed down processing and things like that. You’ve actually challenged people to really think about, “Okay, how does what I’m saying apply to what you’re doing?” and I’m going to that step. I hate it when you get a book which is, “Do this and everything would be amazing.” What you’re saying is, “Do the hard work and things will probably be amazing,” which I love about the book.
Marylou: It’s all about iterating. Being a process expert and spending my life in process, it’s about setting it up so that you’re constantly iterating and improving. That’s why it’s called Process Improvement and it just happens to be a sales process. My favorite chapter in the whole book is about the prospect personas because it’s all about the people like we’ve been talking about this whole time. It’s all about who you’re going to be sitting across the table from, either virtually or in real life, and solving real-world problems that they have but understanding what it is that motivates them, that engages them, that resonates with them so that they want to have a conversation with you. It’s not really thinking outside the box; it’s just understanding who they are, what activities they’re doing, what jobs they’re trying to accomplish, and they’re frustrated, trying to get them done.
Andrew: Hey, tell me this: Why do you do this? Why do you sell?
Marylou: I do it because I love interacting with people. I love finding out about people. That’s why I’m a real good door opener as opposed to closing the business. That requires an expertise, a relationship-type of expertise, longer term that I am not inherently possessive of. I am definitely one that loves to understand about people, who they are, what makes them tick, why this, why that, but not necessarily getting engaged and married and spending years together. That’s not necessarily my area of–
Andrew: This is sales, not therapy, is it? We didn’t just switch to therapy, did we?
Marylou: I always kid my–because I’ve been married forever. It’s like, that’s why with that and my kids are the only things that I’ve done forever. Everything else, I prefer the kind of love them and leave them approach or love them and hand them off to somebody else approach but, yeah, I really like understanding, “What is it that makes you tick? What are you struggling about? What do you love? What do you don’t like as much and how can we figure out if this is a good fit? Are we good a fit for one another? Is there something here we can work on together or not?” I’m totally okay with yes or no, go or no-go. I don’t want to be in limbo. I don’t like being in limbo, and that’s the quality of a business developer; we want outcomes.
Andrew: We don’t want the maybe zone.
Marylou: No, we don’t want the maybe land. No, we want yes or no, love us or hate us. Either or, they both work.
Andrew: That’s okay, and there’s a couple of assumptions that sit under that. A lot of people do stupid stuff because the assumption is there’s not enough business out there. I hate to say it but there’s a lot of business out there. There’s a lot of money to be made out there for the right reasons. One of the things when I was doing this research on the sales: There was a time when you had to be an end-to-end seller, where you had to have the readiness right through the admin, through all those 10 key phases I talked about, which I identified.
What’s happening here–you probably noticed this. For example, when I get into–some of my clients are in engineering, for example, and there are very strict laws that cover procurement and whatever, and they’re not allowed to do things like–a salesperson isn’t allowed to do a close or an objections handling. All they can do is qualify and present, for example. I went to a very large engineering firm recently and they were doing closing techniques. I was looking at their sales process, briefly met their sales process, which pretty much template-d under what I’ve looked at.
I said, “Why are they doing closing techniques? They’re not allowed to do closing.” The people in the room were bored but there was someone doing closing techniques from the 80s which, I thought, “No, that didn’t work back then. Why do you think they’ll work now?” but you go into some really amazing organizations. I’ve been working with a bank recently where they do that. “Let’s start a relationship.” There are people who specialize in starting relationships and then they hand it over into qualifying and making sure it’s a brilliant fit.
They don’t want your business if it’s not a brilliant fit, and they really say, “It has to be a brilliant fit. You can’t get 4 out of 5. It’s got to be 5 out of 5 criteria,” and that’s just to start a conversation. “You’re not a client for us and we’re not the provider for you,” and that’s a gutsy sort of thing to do. Then, there’s people who then handle the procurement and closing. I think that’s the other thing, too: You don’t have to necessarily put yourself under the pressure during the whole end-to-end thing, really.
Marylou: Right, but they’re still–48% of my audience is still doing all roles even though the predictable revenue book written in 2011 talks about separating those roles out. Culturally, some companies still in the US want their reps to do all roles. What I hope to do is at least say, “Okay, when you have your prospecting hat on, this is the work flow. This is the habit.” It’s like, “You need more of yourself into a whole different type of person,” which is unfortunate because it’s very difficult to do for one person.
If we have the luxury to separate out the roles, yes, exactly what you’re saying. There are people who specialize in dating and getting people excited about what they have. Then, they turn them over to somebody else who qualifies and gets the teams involved, gets down to the nitty-gritty of design specification, et cetera, et cetera, and then there are people who, once they become a client, they manage them, they keep that relationship going with cross-sell, up-sell, but, yes, that’s the ideal in a lot of these more complex, whether it’s a multi-stakeholder type of environment. It’s really a way to go but a lot of people don’t do that and a lot of people won’t do that until they see some consistency on the top.
Andrew: Yeah, some of my larger clients are very much what you’ve just described there but SME clients, yeah, they do have to do the whole end-to-end thing. They’ve got to go and prospect and then go and meet and present and qualify and close and handle objections and then maintain the relationship afterwards. They’ve got to do all of that stuff, yeah. I guess the thing that–and we’ve got Jackie Jarvis, for example, who was one of the authors here. She’s talking about authenticity and is a big speaker on that.
One of your colleague’s in the book, too, Allison. It’s the same sort of thing. It’s, “How do you manage those relationships?” I’m an Aussie but I live in the UK and Brits are incredibly relational. They get very, very sensitive if they upset somebody. I want to do that. They tend to manage those relationships very well. I like that aspect of it. It’s always resonated with me. I don’t want to sell somebody something and then have them turn around two days later or two years later and say, “I’m not happy and you sold us a pup,” although that pup you’ve got, I wouldn’t mind buying that one. Look at that dog of yours.
Marylou: Larry the Dog is on our screens right now.
Andrew: There’s this Labrador. The eyes of that dog, I’m thinking, if you just walked into a meeting with that dog, it’s like, I don’t know whether the dog’s got your eyes or the other way around but it’s sort of–and the smile. You’ve both got the matching smiles. Folks, if you can see this, it’s just a classic photo of this Labrador we get. Give me the contract. Let me sign something so I can just pat that dog.
Marylou: Yes. For those of you listening, Larry is a rescue dog that we picked up and adopted. He was supposed to be a PTSD service dog but, unfortunately, he became the dog with PTSD so we ended up adopting him. He has goldfish eyes, almost. He’s got those bug eyes. He’s very cute.
Andrew: I love Labradors. They’re just lovely, aren’t they?
Marylou: Yeah. The book here is Sales Genius 1, 20 Top Sales Professionals Share Their Secrets. Andrew Priestley is the publisher. Get it on Amazon. I’ll put it in the notes so that people have an easy link to get to that. The Kindle version is very affordable and it’s got some great tips for you to start activating into your sales process and get the ground running. Andrew, thank you so much for your time today.
Andrew: You’re welcome. Thank you.
Marylou: I very much appreciated you having on.
Andrew: Yeah, and listen, thank you for your time, too. I love your book and you should do a plug for your book, too. If you haven’t picked up Mary Lou’s book, you need to rush to the internet straight away and just download it. Don’t think about anything else. Just get the credit card out and buy that book and then destroy it with a highlighter. Read it, read it, read it and read it. The good thing about our book is everybody’s contact details are in there. They want you contact them. They want you to say–if they can help you, they’ll help you. It’s not, “Yeah, I’ll try and flog you something as well,” but they’re really nice people. I take that back. They’re really good people. They just want to help and share generously. Your book is just like gold. It’s pure gold. If you take the time to read it and think about it, it’s a brilliant book, yeah. Thanks for having me as a guest. I appreciate it.
Marylou: Loved having you. Talk soon.