The Salesman.com Podcast

In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Andy Whyte explains what salespeople commonly get wrong about sales qualification. Andy is the founder of MEDDICC.com and the author of “MEDDICC’ the book. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Andy Whyte Author of MEDDICC Resources: Andy on LinkedIn The MEDDPICC Masterclass MEDDIC Academy on YouTube Book: MEDDICC: The ultimate guide to staying one step ahead in the complex sale Transcript Will Barron: Hi, my name is Will, and welcome to today's episode of the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode we're looking at what salespeople get wrong about sales qualification. Our guest is Andy Whyte. Andy is the founder of medic.com and author of MEDDICC the book. Andy has been on the show before. He's a legend. I'm excited to speak with you. Andy, welcome back to the show.   Andy Whyte: I thank you so so much. Well, it's great to be back on the show once again. I had so much great feedback from people who were your audience from last time. So it was a joy to be invited back on. Thank you very much.   What is Sales Qualification? · [00:36]    Will Barron: You are more than welcome. I'm glad to hear that feedback. So let's not mess around. Give us, if you can, a definition, a one line of what sales qualification is. The audience should know this, but just in case they don't and then we're going to get into what people are getting wrong in this space.   “For me, qualification is about identifying with your prospect, with your prospective customer whether there is enough value that you can provide to them, whether they have enough pain or goals they're striving to achieve that your solution can help them to achieve. If the value in that is large enough for it to be worth your while and their while, that is for me what qualification is all about.” – Andy Whyte · [00:57]    Andy Whyte: It's a big question because I think as you kind of hinted there, people get this wrong a lot and I think there's a few reasons for that, which we can definitely get into. But for me what qualification is, is about identifying with your prospect, with your prospective customer whether there is enough value that you can provide to them, whether they have enough pain or goals they're striving to achieve that your solution can help them to achieve.   Andy Whyte: If the value in that is large enough for it to be worth your while and there while because we're asking them to invest their time, their energy, their expertise, just as much as we're asking ourselves to invest with them, is there enough value in that to make it worth my while and the customer's world? That is for me what qualification is all about.   “Sales, when done correctly, should be in exchange of value between a salesperson and a buyer.” – Will Barron · [01:44]    Will Barron: Do you blow people's minds when you frame it up that, Andy, of sales went done correctly should be in exchange of value between a salesperson and a buyer, right? It should be an adult conversation. And if we're in a position where we've got to suck up to potential customers as salespeople we ever sell in a crappy product, we've approached the conversation the wrong way from the outset or they're just not qualified. Do you find the people go like a light bulb clicks on when you frame it up that we're exchanging value and solving a pain as opposed to just talking to features and benefits?   Andy Whyte: Yeah. I do. But I think it's one of those things that seems very obvious when you say it, but when people are actually in the moment it's less visible to them for them to see it. And if you think about what you just described there as a sort of the negative approach that we have in our industry, where we frequently have where we are almost apologetic for being salespeople, when we approach sales with that mindset of thank you very much for your time, it's a great pleasure to meet you, I'll be very, very brief or get into it, all that kind of mindset, but that reverberates with the customer and then they therefore perceive you that way.   “When you engage with a customer almost apologetically, they straight away subconsciously or consciously sort of lower their perception of the value that you are going to bring to the table. Because the opposite of that is if you go into a conversation and you stand firm, you stand tall because you know your solution has tremendous value to offer, then you are going to make the customer feel like, wow, this person is really here to talk value.” – Andy Whyte · [03:02]    Andy Whyte: So even if they were like, great, I'm really excited to meet Will today. I've heard great things about his company. My friend actually has worked with Will before. You may not know this. And so when you engage with the customer that way almost apologetic, they straight away sort of in subconsciously or consciously sort of lower their perception of the value that you are going to bring to the table because the opposite to that is if you go into a conversation and you stand firm, you stand tall because you know your solution has tremendous value to offer.   Andy Whyte: You shouldn't be working for the company you're working for if you don't genuinely believe that. And so you go into the conversation with a mindset of, I have tremendous value to offer this customer. I think, I mean, I've still got to qualify this, but based on my product market fit in the sector based on the references I have, based on the great feedback I have from my customers, now I have genuine values off this customer. So I'm going to engage based on that confidence.   Andy Whyte: And here's the really good bit is if that customer doesn't see that, then I want to also give the impression of, well, if you are not prepared to end to into, as you said very eloquently, a value exchange with me then I've got 10 other customers queuing up to talk to me because my solution is that good. That is all in a mindset for me. And I think that's very, very important, but it's also very infectious.   Andy Whyte: If you go into conversations that way then you are going to make the customer feel like, wow, this person is really here to talk value. They're really here to talk business. I believe that they must have some value to offer me. And so it's sort of almost like a fork in the road and you can go down to one way of being apologetic being very, very confident.   Will Barron: I think the clichéd way to frame this up is perhaps you go into the conversation as a consultant and it's a consultative sound. We've all heard this, but it doesn't really mean anything. And I've found this that's not necessarily the most practical way to look at it. Something that I teach over at some municipal academy and something that I do literally on calls every single day is I will start the conversation, do a bit of small talk, 10, 20 seconds then I'll use this line.   Will Barron: Hey, this is how this call usually goes, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then explain how these calls usually go. And you typically get most people go, great. And then they fall into the conversation and the questions that you want to ask. Sometimes people go, oh, I don't care. I just want to ask about this or just tell me your pricing, or I'm ready to go in which case I'll go, oh, great. Well, the way that these calls usually go is that we go blah, blah, blah and go through it again.   Will Barron: And I find that's a real practical way of implementing this, I guess, strategic consultative approach to sales calls specifically. It's more difficult to do that over an email. It's very easy to do that in person. But I like to frame it up that you want to be the doctor. And we'll go through this with qualification in a second. You sit there, you're not judgmental, you're asking intelligent questions, you're hopefully making the prospect think a layer deeper than what they have done in the past as you do question them, and they're hopefully getting value from the conversation because you're perhaps uncovering what their real needs are.   The Consultative Selling Approach · [05:58]   Will Barron: You're uncovering they think they want this solution, but you know with your insights that there's a better solution in the market for them. It may be with your company. It may be with another company, but when you go into a conversation using that line, hey, this is the way these calls usually go and then you dive into outlining what the call goes like and then you frame it up in your own mind that you're a doctor, you're here to understand the patient and then prescribe them a solution, I find that that really gets that consultative approach really practically nailed on people's heads.   Andy Whyte: Yeah. I love the way you said that and I'll probably be stealing your line there a little bit actually. Well, I like it a lot. Don't you think it's funny or don't you find that I think everybody understands what you said there about the consultative approach? I think we buy into that. I think in our industry we understand the value, for want of a better word, of the consultative approach. But we also I think where we get it wrong in our industry is we disassociate being the consultative approach from selling.   Andy Whyte: And what I mean by that and the best way I can articulate this is if you think of a typical LinkedIn salesperson's title these days, if they're not calling themselves an account executive or whatever their actual job role on their job description is, they tend to sort of come up with titles that try to give the illusion that they're a consultant rather than a salesperson. And they're not doing that from the basis of I'm here to be a consultative approach, or maybe they are a little bit, but they're trying to disassociate themselves from sales.   Andy Whyte: And I always think that's funny because I always laugh because I think, well, what's going to happen? You're going to get into what is in my industry of technology sales an average sort of anything like a three to a six month average sales cycle. You're going to get sort of five, six months in and sort just sneaky slide an order form across the desk and the customer picks up and goes, what? You're a salesperson. I thought you were here to give me some free consulting. Well, you got me, so I better sign sort of thing.   Andy Whyte: It's staffed. Whereas the best salespeople, I'm sure if people reflect for a second the best salesperson they've ever worked with. And then if you stop thinking about yourself because salespeople we always think we are the best salespeople ever. So then maybe the second best salesperson you've ever worked with what you'll find with that person it's a lot of behaviours in my opinion and when I talk to people about this, which are things they're the first person to say they're a salesperson.   Andy Whyte: They're the first person to kind of qualify out if they don't think the opportunity is there for them. And so there's a real correlation in my experience about the very best salespeople who are the ones that orientate closest to being salespeople and approaching their job as a salesperson.   Will Barron: I think it's simple than that, Andy. I think this is just a big gap between used car salespeople that we don't want to be associated with and obviously there's some great used car salespeople what's the stereotype but we're going to lean into the stereotype because it makes us feel good in this scenario and then there's actual salespeople. So me who sells medical devices could not go to a surgeon and use weird used car salesperson close ended closing questions and things like that because they're just say get out the operating room, never come back and that's it.   Will Barron: You've just lost a multimillion pound account. Even with, I don't typically sell the one on one training that we do salesman.org anymore, but I do most of the kind of 10 to 100 seat enterprise and large business deals and training that we do. Even with those individuals, a lot of them listen to the podcast. They tune into our concept. They're a fan of me in the training. They're already halfway there to get the deal done. It's just some of the kind of steps of MEDDICC and MEDDPICC of the logistics and things that we need to get sorted to make the deal happen and to qualify them on the call.   Will Barron: Even those people, I can't use all this weird old school sales on them because they're just going to hang up the phone and be like, that dude was two-faced. He said one thing on the podcast and then tried to do another thing with me.   Will Barron: I think it's as simple as Andy, you've got actual sales, which is what we're talking about here, which is understanding your marketplace, getting in front of the right people, doing a qualifying discovery call, understanding where the buy is, where they want to be, maybe stretching that out a little bit and adding a layer of emotion and really emphasising the pain and helping them understand that the pain they're in, getting them through the blockers, wherever that be the status quo, the risk of change, things like that, and getting them from one side to the other.   Stepping Into The Acceptable Sales Landscape · [10:33]    Will Barron: That's what sales is. But that word sales is on the gulf of the kind of sales landscape is someone selling used cars or someone selling TVs in PC world. And I think the same word as you to describe two totally different industries and hopefully our audience right now are in the kind of the far side, the large deal size enterprise, medium size company, that side of things. So is that fair to say?   Andy Whyte: Yeah. I think that's very fair to say. As a former double glazing salesman I have to defend my peers in that industry and say that some of the best lessons I ever learned in sales that I still use today will learn double glazing selling, honestly. And people are probably wondering what those things are. If I expand on what those things, what they are, it's very similar to how when I look at some of the most successful salespeople I've ever hired have been, they've been former recruiters.   Andy Whyte: And I think there's a lot to be said for the craft of sales, but there's also a lot to be said for the graft of sales. And I think that those types of industries where they really make you learn very early on that there's a lot of art to sales, but there's also a lot of the numbers game involved as well. And so I have a certain fondness for people operating at the sort of the less respected end of sales.   Andy Whyte: And as someone that really struggled to get into B2B sales from that world I would implore anyone that meets somebody who's in that world and you're thinking about hiring them and you're looking at all their characteristics and you're thinking this seems like a really high potential person, but I'm a bit put off because they don't have that experience of B2B. I know we're digressing here, but I'll say take a chance on that person.   Will Barron: Well, I think that's easily solved of, Andy, if you got a call with me in a job interview, you're obviously not an idiot. You're obviously not, again, the stereotype that was leaning into there. And so if you've got the traits of someone who's willing to put in the work, who understands the numbers, who isn't fearful of rejection, you've done the hard bit. That's all the mental game.   “Anyone can read a book, anyone can memorise some stuff, but if you're not the person who can implement it, then it's all for waste.” – Will Barron · [13:13]    Will Barron: That's becoming the person who can implement all of the modern tactics and what we're going to talk about in a second, Medic, all the modern tactics and frameworks and procedures of a successful B2B salesperson. The hardest bit is becoming the person who can do the job. Anyone can read a book, anyone can memorise some stuff, but if you're not the person who can implement it, then it's all for waste.   Andy Whyte: Yes. I agree with that spot on   The Things Salespeople Get Wrong About Qualification · [13:22]    Will Barron: Okay. Let's bring things back to the premise of the show because we've digressed and that's great. We can digress some more in a second, but what do salespeople get wrong about sales qualification? It's the one or two things, Andy, that people you see just getting wrong over and over and time and time again.   Andy Whyte: Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot recently because I think it comes down to this. If I said the right way of qualifying is to identify if there's value for the customer and for ourselves that is there that it's worth exploring, another way of putting it. I think the way that people get qualification wrong is they approach the opportunity based on the perspective of, is there an opportunity here for me? Is there a deal here for me? And if you think about kind of traditional qualification framework, something like BANT, for example, which I'm not going to criticise BANT, it has a place.   Andy Whyte: I wouldn't say you could have it broadly as your qualification framework, but if you think about how that works, you approach a customer and you say, hey, do you have budget? Do you have authority? Do you need what I'm selling and do you know the timing in which you're going to buy it? And if you think about that and if you think back a decade ago, two decades ago, there wasn't that much on offer to customers, particularly in my space of technology sales.   Andy Whyte: You kind of just had a few different pillars, if you like. You had ERP, which actually covered probably five or six different categories that have broken out of it. You have CRM, you didn't even necessarily have marketing software. So generally what was happening when a customer approached you, they a good understanding of whether they needed what you're selling or not. Nowadays I think there's something 10,000 marketing technology companies. There's something like 1,000 new SaaS companies a week.   Andy Whyte: And so the chances of when you approach the customer them really understanding whether they need your solution and therefore whether they even have budget for it or the authority to buy it is quite unlikely. You are narrowing yourself in with that approach for people that are very, very well informed of which, of course, there are customers out there that do approach you well informed, but that's the RFP track. That's the inbound track. And we know in sales now so much revenue is driven out bound.   Andy Whyte: So much revenue is driven by ingenuity at the top of the funnel, whether it be an SDR, BDR, doing something wonderful to capture somebody's attention who's had 10 other people try to get their attention that day. Whether it's somebody boldly approaching someone an event, or whether it's a marketing team with a brilliant campaign, whatever it is, those things, those little sparks of ingenuity that we need now to get the attention of our prospects in so many cases.   “Giving medicine without diagnosis in healthcare is malpractice. But we so often do that in sales when we approach the customer who doesn't probably know much about what we do and saying, “Do you need what we do?” And their answer is either no or they're going to not fully understand your full value and you're not going to get into a really good conversation based on that.” – Andy Whyte · [16:51]   Andy Whyte: If we then take that spark of ingenuity and then say, hey, we caught your interest with something we do, it might have even been a strap line, it might have been a screenshot of a dashboard, if we then go, do you need that and have you got the budget for that? Then we're not going to get a very positive outcome, I don't think. And if we do we haven't even got to what the problem is. And I think you talked about the medical industry and that kind of classic line that we all know and love in sales, which is giving medicine without diagnosis in healthcare is malpractice.   Andy Whyte: But we so often do that in sales when we approach solution first and that's kind of what we are doing when we qualify on that basis. We're approaching the customer who doesn't probably know much about what we do and saying, do you need what we do? And their answers is either no or they're going to not fully understand your full value and you're not going to get into a really good conversation based on that.   The Primary Role the Salesman of the Future Will Play · [17:17]    Will Barron: Is this a lack of understanding our buyers' journeys in that if we are replying to RFPs, well, we've probably already lost a deal because a salesperson has probably helped the buyer create the RFP and that buyer is going to be informed. They've done their own research. We all know these statistics that the salespeople are getting involved further and further back in the buying journey.   Will Barron: Maybe bounce more appropriate in that kind of environment as you kind of outline, going back to Medic, is this more appropriate when we are proactively trying to spark and help the buyer understand the pain point that they may have so we're not reliant on them having gone through tonnes of content, tonnes of conversations with other salespeople before they get to us? We're not necessarily engineering the pain, but highlighting the pain, which is the role of a consultant, which ties us back to the beginning of the conversation. Is that where we should be going with this so that we can then educate the buyer through their buying journey?   Will Barron: We have our own content, we have our own conversations, we have our own insights. So then obviously the far side of this, the far more likely to sanity of course than our competitor. Is that the future of all of this, of lead generation to a buyer? Hey, well, if you discover this problem yourself, you're going to do all this research, you're going to come out of it maybe with a solution one side, but give me five minutes now. I'll see if you've got the problem, I'll see if we can help and I'll guide you through the process towards the end of the sale and in a consultative role instead. Is that what the future of this looks like?   Andy Whyte: Yeah. I think it comes back to a number of things that we know are really, really important. And we all buy into things like the challenge yourself, for example, of kind of thought leadership and it is said a lot that customers are much, much more informed these days than they were because of analysts, because of reviews sites, because of peer reviews, because of better websites, better mediums like YouTube for finding things out. And I think that's all fair, but I do think it does miss out on the big, big, big opportunity that is there, that elite salespeople I see regularly grab hold of.   Andy Whyte: This is the kind of thing that those elite salespeople will hate me for saying. It's one of those things that's dead obvious though. So I think that people probably should use it more, but it's the idea of influencing the customer towards your strengths of your solution. And in a MEDDPICC context, this full into the decision criteria and typically people when they think of the decision criteria, they think about it in a manner of approaching the customer and understanding what the criteria is in which they're going to base their decision.   Andy Whyte: And so that's fine if it's an RFP and they've put a lot of thought or hired an analyst or a consultant to build the RFP for them in a good situation. Like you said earlier, often it's written by your competitor. It's fine if they've already got this really sort of well set out decision criteria to try and adapt your solution to suit that. Of course, you're still going to want to try and influence it towards your strengths as well.   “What elite salespeople do differently is they approach every single conversation with a very clear set of decision criteria that they want to influence the customer towards. So there'll be things that they know that their solution does differently or better than the alternatives on the market and they'll be trying to influence the customer to understand the value of needing those things.” – Andy Whyte · [20:32]    Andy Whyte: But what that really misses out on is the huge opportunity that exists to be seen as a thought leader, your customer and what elite salespeople do is they will approach every single conversation with a very clear set of decision criteria that they want to influence the customer towards. So there'll be things that they know that their solution does differently or better than the alternatives on the market and they'll be trying to influence the customer to understand the value of needing those things.   Andy Whyte: So it therefore becomes part of the customer's decision criteria and therefore they've differentiated their solution and they're kind of almost put it onto the requirements without even almost the customer realising that it's unique to them. That sets them up beautifully for defending and differentiating themselves further on in the sales cycle where other competitors come in and try and say they do the same thing. The customer can ask, well, do you do it like this? And hopefully if you set it up properly the customers should really understand the value and how you do it differently or better.   Andy Whyte: I'll give you an example of where this happened for me recently. I was looking to hire a particular company a vendor to do something for me. And in the very first conversation the first vendor we spoke to said, oh, from everything you've told us you really should have this thing, three letter acronym thing. And I was like, oh, I hadn't thought about that. I knew about it, but I hadn't considered it for this project. And so all of a sudden from that point on they did a great job of explaining why it was valuable to me.   Andy Whyte: I was like, yes, I absolutely need that thing. Every single vendor I met thereafter, I didn't even mention it to them that I was looking for that thing unless I really liked them and I wanted to give them the chance to show that they could do it because I felt if I go and say, hey, do you do this three letter acronym thing everyone go, oh, we do that. So I was almost holding it back and keeping it to myself. It's almost like a test for the vendor I was going to pick. And it turned out that I didn't pick the first vendor, but I would've picked them.   Andy Whyte: It was just that their model was not right, but if everything else would've been right with them they would've won that deal, hands down, no question about it even if others could do what they said as well as them because they were the ones that planted the seed. They were ones that maybe think they're really, really thinking ahead on this stuff. And I think that's a really big thing. We're trying to buy some community software right now and every company website we go on has the buyer's guide, the RFP primer, the comparison site, the 10 things you need to consider buying community software, all that sort of stuff.   Andy Whyte: And we've had to build a spreadsheet of decision criteria, things that we think we need and there's a few things on there that the companies have done well where they've kind of differentiated themselves and they've kind of put themselves strongly early on, but to your point, this is all happening before I've actually spoke to a salesperson.   Andy Whyte: Now, if I actually got onto the phone to one of these people and they really understood what we were trying to do early on and then were able to sort of influence me then I am so easy. I don't know if it's just me, whether it's a salesperson thing, but I feel like I'm very easy to sell to if you kind of understand my needs and adapt your solution to fit it.   Will Barron: I do this all of the time, Andy, and I'll just be straight about it. We just want to deal over Sandler. And what we do different over at salesmans.org and our training programme is online training programme, it's killing, it's great and it's been updated. I think it's Version 4 or 5 now that we're on and it's effective. But what I found, this is just before Christmas we started experimenting with this, is that if I just jump on at least one call with everyone who signs up, just having done now hundreds and thousands of these calls and all these podcast apps, I'm pretty good.   Will Barron: I'm not a genius or anything, just pattern recognition. I'm pretty good at spotting the 10%, 20% of things that typically make 89% of the difference. So I can say, hey, you're just sending this one crappy email. Why is that email going out? Stop doing that. And immediately everything else improved later on down the sales cycle. Whatever it is, there's multiple things. You'd be able to do this as well duping on these consulting calls. So I really emphasise when we're selling against competitors, whoever that be.   Will Barron: And we are the kind of baby in the room versus the beasts of Sandler and challenges sale by Gartner and all these large organisations, corporate organisations. They're all great companies and I've had people from all of these organisations on the podcast in the past. So it's a pleasure to compete against them, but I always double down on this idea that you're going to get me on an hour call, depending on what type of training package you sign up for your team and I'll sit there and listen to them and give them noble share outside perspective insights on what they're doing.   Will Barron: Now, maybe consultants do this, small businesses individuals who do sales training, but no large corporate that I'm aware of does this. They'll do a group class or they'll do a mixture of one thing or another, but you're just getting some random sales trainer. You're not getting the person that you're speaking to, the person that you're consuming the content of. I said, we just won this deal against Sandler, is 100 odd seats, pretty good deal for us, nice kind of large deal size for our organisation.   Will Barron: It might be like a pile sales. It might be pile number of seats for their organisation. I have no idea, but nice little deal for us this month. On the back of they're like, well, can you do some one-on-ones because that's what salesman.org are going to do and they just refused to include it no matter what the price. So we charged way more than what they did, but I influenced the customer and rightly so in that these one-on-one sessions, quick 45 minute call has tremendous value and they bought into that idea. They're going to see the benefits of it.   Selling Success Often Comes Down to Focusing on Your Strengths and Making That Your Differentiator · [26:32]    Will Barron: And that one was a deal against a larger more established company. So this is out the realm for anyone to do. You just got to source out what your strengths are, how you can implement it. And if there's any value that you as a salesperson can add on top of this as well because there's a lot of salespeople out there have a lot of insights and ability to consult and maybe a few phone calls, maybe an onboarding call or something might be valuable for your customers.   Andy Whyte: Yeah. And I bet the beautiful thing about that was, I guess it's why you were using it as an example is the one-to-one, the one-on-one, sorry, were not necessarily something you led with. It was you had identified, hang on a minute, there's something that I have in my offering that seems to be particularly important to this customer therefore I'm going to double down on those things.   Andy Whyte: And what t I'm sure you did and what really elite salespeople do in those situations when they identify they have differentiation, is they almost, well, the best case I ever see of it is they wrap the deal up where it's almost takes entirely around that thing. It's like, we're going to do some training and, of course, you're going to get that brilliant training we've talked about and all that good stuff, but for me I'm just so glad that came to work together because it sounds to me like this is the most important thing. This should be the priority one that we should really stick into.   “Unfortunately, salespeople often just skip past that bit of discovery straight into trying to talk about their solutions and miss out on all the opportunities to attach and uncover genuine value.” – Andy Whyte · [28:01]    Andy Whyte: And that, of course, it only works if it's genuine. So we're not saying for a second that we kind of try and do anything other than find what's in our offering that is genuinely most impactful, most valuable to the customer. So often we just skip past that bit of discovery straight into trying to talk about our solutions and miss out on all the opportunity to attach and uncover genuine value.   Will Barron: Yeah. And in this particular case, and this is why I love remote selling, I love Zoom. Everyone now is just happy to use Zoom or Skype rather than pushing beyond the phone. When I was chatting with this VP of marketing who got the deal signed, got the paperwork done, I could see his eyes lit up as soon as I mentioned the one-on-one sessions. I just called him out, hey, you seem to have lit up when I mentioned that.   Will Barron: And then he goes into the issues that he is had with training in the past and people not getting on top of it and training companies promising one thing and then never see them again further down the line and they'll sign up to an online call or books or in-person training and it doesn't have an effect. And I was like, great. So I'm kind of just calculating all of that and then that's the follow up email that I send. Hey, you said all of this, we solve all those problems.   Will Barron: We solve X with Y, this is why we're a good fit to get work together. Does it make sense to get the contract signed? It's dead simple, but I guess that's almost the art of some of this. The science is you've got the MEDDICC process. You're going to ask certain questions. You're going to qualify appropriately hard and not feel uncomfortable asking some of these questions that can be not awkward. If you're speaking to someone who's actually a decision maker, most people are happy to answer MEDDICC kind of questions.   Will Barron: If you're speaking to the wrong person, an end user, they're probably thinking, oh, crap, this is probably a conversation with my boss. And so they might put the guard up a little bit, but when you qualify hard, you speak to the right person, you get the right answers, you can then facilitate the whole of the rest of the sales process as well as feel comfortable putting in your own time into this because there's a decent chance of it turning out all right.   Who is the Economic Buyer and Why is it so Hard to Engage with the Economic Buyer? · [29:52]    Will Barron: So with that said, Andy, we've covered the decision criteria side of things. Are there any steps in MEDDICC that people get nervous about diving into whether it's the questions are a bit more personal, we're talking about cash now rather than just want and needs? Is there any part of the process that you find people occasionally may skip over if they're not feeling so confident that day?   Andy Whyte: Yeah. There's a couple that I think stand out here and they're very different for the reasons I think. The one that people tend to I find skip a little bit is the economic buyer. And for those that don't know, the economic buyer is the person of authority in the deal. They're generally the overall authority, they control the budget. So you could be selling to somebody who owns the budget, but above them they're the controller of the budget. So they dictate how much budget the person you're selling to gets. They're the person that could create budget, stop budget.   Andy Whyte: they have veto power. They're generally a senior person. And what I find happens a lot is that because it's hard to engage the economic buyer via nature of the fact they're a senior person, there's all these other sort of social dynamics going on in the deal which means you can't go around people or you go above people, that sort of stuff. People tend to go, it's hard. And actually there's a little bit of risk with it where I might upset the people I'm working with.   Andy Whyte: And so I'm just not going to do it. And the analogy I use here is one from customer service, which is that lovely saying of we go the extra mile, which means we do a bit more. And then there's that sort of that saying that gets built on the top of that, which is there's no traffic on the extra mile. I think engaging with the economic buyer is a bit going the extra mile. You're working a bit harder, which means that hopefully you are working harder than your competition is.   Andy Whyte: And therefore when you are on that extra mile, there's less traffic there. And so because it's hard, because it can be, I don't want to use the word dangerous because I think the only time it's ever dangerous is your deal isn't qualify properly, but because of that it means that you are likely to be the only person engaging with the economic buyer in the opportunity and the deal, which for me means you're cut above everybody else. So that's something I say there and just tips for people listening along because, again, even if you don't use MEDDPICC, it's still very important that you engage with senior people in your opportunities.   Andy Whyte: The biggest tip I can give here is the sooner the better. We've all been those people where we thought we've had a good deal and everyone around us, our supporting team has been working with us felt good about it then suddenly it's gone sideways. Something has happened. The competitors got the march on us. Some priorities have changed inside, something like that. And what tends to happen, in my experience when those deals go sideways is you have an urgent meeting goes into the calendar.   Andy Whyte: Your boss invites you and other people in and it's called a war room or something like that and everyone goes, what are we going to do? And always [inaudible 00:32:56] I will reach out to the senior person who's probably the economic buyer. And then it's too late. You are literally rolling the dice at that point where you've got nothing else left to lose. And if you've done everything else right before then, and you've engaged with them, you've kept them upstages in the project and the process and it has gone sideways then that's fair enough.   Andy Whyte: That should be a good thing to do, but it shouldn't be your first engagement with them is when things have gone wrong. So that will be my advice is to engage early and use your executive team. People worry about, oh, I don't want to upset my champion. I don't want to upset my contact coach, whoever it may be by going around them. Well, you don't have to use your… The economic buyer wants to hear from your boss more than it wants to hear from you just because of multi-level selling.   Andy Whyte: So use them and then it's not necessarily going around. It can be a very positive thing. It can be, hey, there, Mr. and Mrs. economic buyer, my name is Will. I lead the team here for salesman.org in Europe. I heard that Andy and a couple of people in our team are working with Stephanie and Steve and your team and all I keep hearing is great things about it. Sounds very, very exciting.   Andy Whyte: We're particularly excited because of how we've helped X reference company that's going to inspire the person you're talking to to know that you are legitimate and know that you are credible. And all I wanted to do was just to let you know that if this project does turn into something, then I'll be the executive sponsor for it. And I wanted to just open up this line of communication with you should you have any questions for me.   Andy Whyte: They've got a meeting next week. If it goes well, I'll let you know how it went kind of thing. And there's no ask. That's the really important thing. You're not kind of troubling them. You're not trying to get them to come to the meeting or anything like that. Just engage them. And then you've got the line of communication open then which is better than not having it open.   Will Barron: So if I'm trying to identify the economic buyer and I'm not convinced the person I'm speaking to is the decision maker, economic buyer, person with the purse strings, I will jovially be, and I almost verbatim clap as I do this on a Zoom call, I'll be like, who bank rolls this? Who's in charge? Who do we need to get on board? What are we doing? Who's got the money? And I'll just throw a bunch of stuff out like that and I'll see the other person kind of go, and the pondering. And they typically give me a pretty straightforward answer.   Will Barron: Now, I don't recommend other people necessarily do this because it takes a little bit of not that I think I'm incredibly charismatic, but I can pull it off a little bit of charisma to pull this kind of thing off. And again, a lot of people that I deal with are already familiar with me, the podcast, the content. So I've already got that little bit of trust at distance and that bit of rapport before I even get on the phone. So I'll be like, who's financing this? How has this deal been done in the past? Want to Identify the Economic Buyer? Here’s How You Do It · [35:50]    Will Barron: Deals that had been done on the past. Who do we need to get on side for this? I'll just throw that out there. Is there another way to, if someone is a bit nervous and they don't want to because it's kind of full barrel. I just did that or it can be. But people who want a more subtle approach, Andy, how would you recommend people, the audience ask essentially ask if the person they're speaking to is the economic buyer and if not, who is that person? What kind of questions would you be asking?   Andy Whyte: Yeah. I love how you said that. I think this is one of the great things about MEDDPICC as well is that it's a framework at its core. People call it methodology as well which I think is fair enough, but at its core, it's a framework. And why that's an important thing in this context is it doesn't dictate your style, how you should talk to the customer, your personality, your tone of voice, all that quite good stuff that makes you you and makes people trust you and feel that you are genuine.   Andy Whyte: So what we're saying with MEDDPICC in this case, the economic buyers, we're saying you need to engage with the person, you need to talk to this person. So what you've just done there is a wonderful, wonderful example of how you can uncover that using your style. And like you said, not everyone will have the same style as you, which is fine. And I think also you've got this wonderful thing which I didn't know existed before doing what I'm doing now, which you're selling to salespeople.   Andy Whyte: So you can almost just be like, wow, I'm going to close you now just so you know. And people are like, oh, he's doing the close. Cool. I'm going to judge you on this one kind of thing. So people are a little bit more give you an easier time of it than they would say if you're selling to an HR, director, or something.   Will Barron: You say given easier time. So these enterprise deals, these large deal size, it's usually a CRO, CMO, VP of sales. And so they're usually a bit of an asshole for the first 10 minutes until I keep going back to that question, hey, the way these calls usually go and then eventually they relent. And then at the end of the call they'd be like, oh, well, I'm just testing you. Well, see our sales team are a big fan of you, but I wanted to just see. So it goes both ways. Sometimes it's really pleasant.   Will Barron: Sometimes you have to stand up for yourself a little bit and you have to position yourself as an expert who humbly I've got expertise on these calls that some of these VP of sales no matter how long they've been selling for I've spoken to more salespeople than they have very likely. I've interviewed more people than experts in the space than what they have and so sometimes you need to lay down the low. So it can go both ways.   How to Accurately Identify the Economic Buyer · [38:01]   Andy Whyte: Spot on. Totally agree with that. Going back to the question because I appreciate I kind of digressed again, but didn't answer it. So I think if you are a person that's finding it harder or finding you don't quite know how to approach that situation of uncovering of economic buyer, you've got options. First things first is it's very unlikely you are the first person ever to sell to this company from the discipline of product that you are selling from.   Andy Whyte: So if you sell marketing technology, or if you sell different type technology, or if you're in a completely different space, there'll be peers in your industry that you know who have sold to that company and to maybe even the person you are selling to before. And for whatever reason we don't tap into this enough in sales. We just don't. And even though we will know that someone else who's maybe even a former colleague, a friend of ours has walked the path that we are trying to walk, we don't ask.   Andy Whyte: So that's one option is to say, hey, I'd call you up and say, Will, I saw on website that you guys have got a ABC as a reference on there. The customer wasn't you and goes, yes. I'm struggling. I can't quite figure out who's the economic buyer or who's the person of authority. And you would tell me or you might give me some clue. You might say, well, it was this person, but they left. Whatever happens it's definitely not Steve. Steve was where I made a mistake. I thought it was Steve. And so you get free information. That's one example that you can do.   Andy Whyte: Another thing that works very well, but again, this is very much a style thing, is I would often, and it would depend on the personality of my champion or potential champion candidate to be champion, let's say, or coach, I would often just level with them. And I would say, hey, look, a lot of people think that my job as a salesperson, what makes me a good or a bad salesperson is my ability to do great presentations or to make really cool demos and things like that.   Andy Whyte: What really makes a good or a bad person when it comes to my job is to being able to understand who all the stakeholders are and make sure that I understand who is who, who cares about what, and to ensure that I consider everybody's needs because you are my number one person. Of course, we can see that. And I'm very much focused on making sure that as we've uncovered our value supports your goals, your challenges, whatever they are. But what about this person? And I'll start to sort of put in some suggested, my sort of suspected economic buyer.   Andy Whyte: I'll be like, what about this person, the CFO let's say? Normally I find when I work with people in that position, I find that as much as they care about the things you are looking at, they're actually more interested in the total cost of ownership or they're thinking more about how quickly this is going to return on investment or what the opportunity cost will be. What do you think about that person? Is her name Stephanie or CFO? When you typically work with her what sort of things does she ask? And then you're into a conversation then and then you can hopefully take the opportunity.   “I think everyone has bought into the idea of how important it's to have champions, right? But what we tend to do is we build our champions up and we do a great job of that, but then we kind of just sort of sit back and look at them, bow before them and think what a great job we've done of building this person that really loves us and our product. We don't actually put them to work for us. We don't ask them to do the difficult things that we really, really need them to do for us like sit on a procurement call with us and stick up for us where procurements try to disvalue our solution.” – Andy Whyte · [41:07]    Andy Whyte: If they're a true champion or potential to be a true champion to sell to them basically the value in them introducing you directly, which I think we just don't do enough. We just never ask the question. And this is another thing and I'll only say this very quickly, but I think in our industry, except for the odd daft, pretend sales guru on LinkedIn, I think everyone has bought into the idea of how important it's to have champions, right?   Andy Whyte: But what we tend to do is we build our champions up and we do a great job of that, but then we kind of just sort of it back and look at them and sort of bow before them and think what a great job we've done of building this person that really loves us and our product. We don't actually put them to work for us.   Andy Whyte: We don't ask them to do the difficult things that we really, really need them to do for us like pull legal calls forward, sit on a procurement call with us and stick up for us where procurements try to disvalue our solution, or bring other people into the meeting, get security to take a call rather than you fill in their 30 page document, all those types of things.   Andy Whyte: What champions can really help us accelerate our progress with we almost sort of shy away because we don't want to like, oh, we want to waste them. I don't want to upset my champion. I don't want to actually put them to work because then they might not be my champion again. And then, hang on a minute, what if I don't actually win the deal at all? And that's the way they should be thinking.   Will Barron: I think a lot of what you to describe comes down to the paperwork process as well. So physical paperwork or just the buying journey within the account of a lot of salespeople and I've been guilty for this in my medical device days of, hey, I got in, I spoke to the surgeon, I ejected, I went KFC on the way home and had a nice snack. And now I'm sat in front of the sofa job done, but it's just got into this black hole. We no idea what's happening within the account.   Will Barron: That might be the actual champion, but I've not guided that person. What I do is do a demo with them. They love the equipment, but then maybe they don't know what to do next, but we are selling these products and services day in, day out so we probably got a pretty good overview across the market of what needs to happen, the paperwork that needs to be done, who needs to be in front of who?   Will Barron: And I feel like a lot of salespeople just allow it to go into the black hole, tick a box, and then move on to the next inbound lead that they get as opposed to doing account based selling or account based marketing of mapping out the account, working out who the actual champion is, the economic buyer, the other steps of medical or MEDDPICC or wherever acronym that whether qualification methodology that we incorporate, we want to use in corporate or telling us to use something else.   The Consequences of Missing Steps in the MEDDIC Framework · [43:30]    Will Barron: You've got to see this through because what's the point in just doing that initial few steps if you're not going to get a deal at the end of it? It's a waste of your time, it's a waste of company resources. Is there anything else that we need to add to that, Andy, to encourage salespeople to… I'll ask you this in a different way. So we can use medical or MEDDPICC whichever you prefer. Does the framework work if we miss steps out or does it have to be done not necessarily in order, not necessarily one person, but does it need to be done within the account to maximise our chances of getting the deals done?   Will Barron: What I'm saying is if we feel lazy and want to skip a bit or we feel our confidence for whatever reason is down on that day, we don't ask a tough question, are we immediately dropping the effectiveness of medical MEDDPICC just rapidly or is it possible to still get deals done by just doing this kind of willy-nilly?   Andy Whyte: Yeah. Great question. The way I'll answer this question is how I think about MEDDPICC which is that I think about it as being three pillars. And I don't think anyone would ever argue with the importance of these three pillars in selling, which is the first pillar is value. So understanding the value of our solution, how we do it, how we do it differently, all that sort of stuff. Second is stakeholders, which is not just who, who, but it's also each stakeholder has a different value.   “It's long known that the biggest lever you can pull in terms of enhancing your performance as a salesperson, as a sales team, as a company is not the amount of opportunities you have. It's not the average selling price opportunities. It's not your conversion rate. It's the time you take to close those opportunities. If you can improve that one, that's the one that'll have the biggest impact on your overall performance.” – Andy Whyte · [44:51]    Andy Whyte: They're interested in different paying challenge they're trying to solve. So those two are very interlocked. And the third one is process and this one is the one that gets the least attention, but it's also the one that can have the biggest impact on your performance as an individual. It's long known that the biggest lever you can pull in terms of enhancing your performance as a salesperson, as a sales team, as a company is not the amount of opportunities you have.   Andy Whyte: It's not the average selling price opportunities. It's not your conversion rate. It's the time you take to close those opportunities. That is if you can improve that one, that's the one that'll have the biggest impact on your overall performance. They're all important, of course, but if we were just to bring up share screen now and start scrolling LinkedIn we would see 100 posts about pipeline generation, cold calling this, cold calling out videos, blah, blah, blah, which is all good. Not knocking it for a second before we saw one about conversion rate or about selling price selling value.   Andy Whyte: And then we'd probably see 1,000 before we'd see any, if at all, about the length of the sales cycle. So those sort of three pillars that I mentioned are all important. And if you were to think about MEDDPICC sits on top of those and it gives a framework so that you can make sure you are focused enough on each of those pillars. If you were to miss off one of those pillars and you were talking about missing off the process, then it's going to have a really big impact.   Andy Whyte: And I always say this, is people will often say, I have this, well, I don't have a saying, it's an industry saying of no champion, no deal. Big champion, big deal. And people go, oh, hang on a minute, Andy. There was this one time where I didn't have a champion and I still closed the deal. So obviously that doesn't work. And it's like, well, yes but I bet if we looked at that deal you weren't actually selling, you were order taking.   Andy Whyte: I bet your product and the marketing that your company did surrounding your product and the pain and the need that the customer had you could have swapped you in and put anybody of any role who can just answer questions would've still sold that. So you are taking an order. So to your question, I think every time you put a little bit less attention onto, let's say, the letters of MEDDPICC as you put it, you are qualifying worse. And people don't lose deals because there's no close lost reason of poorly qualified.   Andy Whyte: What poorly qualified lost deal reasons look like is no champion, price was too expensive, couldn't get access, competition got ahead of us. Those are the reason. That's poor qualification because if you have MEDDPICC in lockdown you're even going to have one or two things. You're even going to have complete visibility of where you are in the deal. And you can see if you're winning or losing. It's like looking out a very clear day. Your deal is you can see everything, you see everyone, all the stakeholders, everything you need to see.   Andy Whyte: And because of that you're going to know where you stand. And if you are looking out of that window into your deal and you see that you are losing, then you should qualify out unless you can fix it. The only way you're going to be able to fix it is if you have a champion. All of the things, all of the common objections about price, competition, not seeing the value priorities, urgency, all those things. We all have tried and tested tactics, if you like, of overcoming those objections and they're always very good.   Andy Whyte: We are good at them. That's what makes us good salespeople, but we can only deploy those tactics if we have a champion to deploy them for us because otherwise we're just sort of talking into an empty room because who's going to take the good news we use and pass it onto other stakeholders for us?   Will Barron: I think to double down on your analogy there, if you don't think there's a champion, you probably just haven't uncovered the champion and they've gone in and done all of a sudden hard work on your behalf and you're not even thanking them at the other end of it. Especially in a large corporate deal, nothing happens. There's so much status quo. There's so much emphasis on just not moving. There's the risk, there's the burden of taking on the…   Will Barron: You might reduce your pain by 20% by using the product, but you're going to have to increase pain just for that short instance to get it implemented, to get everyone else on board. So there's probably always a champion there, you just weren't aware with them. I feel like I want to wrap up the show with this, Andy, in this thought that, and I'm going to use it, I love your LinkedIn analogy of scrolling through and it's all cold calls, cold emails, stupid polls about stupid nonsensical things.   Will Barron: There's very few people talking about process, methodology further down the sales funnel and the buying journey. And the water is somewhat muddied and murky in the fact that now a lot of companies will have SDRs, BDRs, account management, customer success. Everything is getting split up, but the goal here isn't to generate leads. I don't care about number of leads. I care about number of customers out the over end of the process. Of course, the more leads we can generate, the more effectively that turn into customers, the better.   Will Barron: But we get paid on people signing up to the product and then retaining them a lot of time. We don't get paid on the number of calls that we make, the number of emails that we send, and the number of people that we annoy with poorly qualified sales processes that just turn into junk in the CRM.   Parting Thoughts · [49:56]   Will Barron: So with that, Andy, I appreciate you, mate. I appreciate everything that you're about. I appreciate these frameworks. I appreciate your knowledge. There's not been a question that I've thrown at you in this episode that you've not been able to answer. With that, tell us about the book, the training and where we can find out more about you, sir.   Andy Whyte: Yeah. Well, thank you very much. That's very kind of you to say. So people looking to find out more, our proposition is very much around helping organisations to enable MEDDPICC in their teams. So for me you can Google MEDDICC, MEDDPICC and find blog posts that will tell you what the letters mean and what they stand for. That's LIKE scratching the surface of what actually it becomes to be a full organisation using MEDDPICC.   Andy Whyte: And so what our proposition very much is about is giving everybody enough expertise about MEDDPICC, not just on the knowledge and the wisdom of how and what it is, but how to actually execute it. We talked a little bit about economic bio, how actionable tactics strategies you can use to bring MEDDPICC into your deals, into your teams so that it can become the common language.   Andy Whyte: So like you just said there across SDRs, BDRs, AEs, CSMs, leadership, even go-to-market teams of product marketing, of marketing of all the teams surrounding the customer, they can use it as common language. So everyone is more cohesive, everyone knows exactly what they're looking at with customers and they're much more efficient as an organisation. In the best bit the customers prefer it as well because you orientate around the things that matter to them around value.   Andy Whyte: So that's our proposition. There's a book which you can find on Amazon. We also have an online course called the MEDDPICC Master Class. But before, if you are just sort of thinking, well, this sounds interesting you just want to dip your toe to the water, we also have a YouTube channel as well which you can find lots more of me talking about this kind of stuff if that's what you're interested in.   Will Barron: Amazing. So I'll link to all of that in the show to this episode over at salesman.org. With that, Andy, thank you for your time, your insights on this doubling down on the fact that I just fired a load of random questions at you that were basically nothing to do with qualification of MEDDICC and you went through them all absolutely seamlessly. So that shows your expertise in the space and with that I want to thank you again for joining us on the Salesman Podcast.   Andy Whyte: Thank you, Will, and thank you for all you do for our industry.

Josh Braun helps salespeople book more meetings and reduce the chance of getting ghosted without them having to sell their soul. In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Josh Braun explains his simple step-by-step framework for successful cold calling and rejection minimization. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Josh Braun Sales Training Expert Resources: Joshbraun.com Josh’s LinkedIn Joshbraun.com/shop Stop Cold Calling | Get Guaranteed Phone Ready Leads™ Transcript Will Barron: Hi. My name is Will, and welcome to The Salesman Podcast. On today's episode we're looking at how to cold call effectively. Today's guest is Josh Braun. Josh helps sales people book more meetings and reduce the chances of getting ghosted without you having to sell your soul. Josh has been on the show a bunch of times and there's a total value that's going to come at you in this episode, sales nation, and with that, Josh, welcome to the podcast.   Josh Braun: Will, thanks for having me back. You are an energetic guy. I'm always pumped up at the beginning of that intro. I feel like I want to run a marathon, but I'll sit here and we'll do the podcast.   Will Barron: So here's a question for you to pull the curtain back for the audience. Am I substantially more animated doing that intro than in the 10 minutes we chatted before the show? Is there a dramatic difference between the real Will and podcast Will?   Josh Braun: Podcast Will and the real Will are similar.   Will Barron: Well there you go.   Josh Braun: They are similar. They're energetic, and positive, and you want more of them.   Is Cold Calling Still Effective in 2022? · [01:10]    Will Barron: I don't know about that, especially not in this space. Maybe one Will per industry might be an appropriate number of us too before we just take over the planet. So with that, Josh, we'll jump into cold calling, and I want to dive into process, what we should be doing, in a second, but let's set up the topic here with somewhat of a cliché question that get gets asked every year, and we all know the answer to it because it's going to be a short episode if the answer is no. But is there still opportunity for straight up cold calling in 2022 as we record this, or do we need to use social selling, and cadences, and emails, and meeting people, knocking on doors to set up a cold call? Can we have success just picking up the phone and cold calling people right now in 2022?   “If the person that you're trying to get in front of has a phone number, then cold calling is a channel that can be effective for starting conversations with people. But can also be an ineffective channel depending on how you're making a cold call. All channels can be effective or ineffective. Emails can be really effective or ineffective. A movie can be amazing, but it could also bore you to tears. So it's never the medium really, it's how you're executing the medium, and if in fact that person can be contacted with that medium.” – Josh Braun · [01:40]    Josh Braun: So if the person that you're trying to get in front of has a phone number, then cold calling is a channel that can be effective for starting conversations with people, but can also be an ineffective channel depending on how you're making a cold call. All channels can be effective or ineffective. Emails can be really effective or ineffective. Movie can be amazing, but it could also bore you to tears. So it's never the medium really, it's how you're executing the medium, and if in fact that person can be contacted with that medium. So if that person can be contacted and you are proficient or good, and we're going to talk about that on this podcast, then the phone is a good tool that you have in your toolbox. Is it the only tool that you have in your toolbox? No. It is one of many tools that you have in your toolbox for stacking the odds in your favour for starting a conversation with someone that you want to get in front of.   The Effectiveness of Using Cold Calls as the First Line of Contact During a Cold Outreach · [01:30]    Will Barron: If we are pretty confident in our data and we've got a phone number, obviously ringing someone up can be the quickest way to go from A to B, ask a few questions, book that meeting, get it formally in the diary. So let's say we've got great data. Is the phone the first thing that we should do, or are there other steps to this process for the average salesperson who's consuming this in the average marketplace that they are selling into?   Josh Braun: So if you're good on the phone and you have good data, and you have one more tool, which we're going to talk about in a second, I think the phone is a really good first tool to use. And the third missing piece to that I want to talk about briefly, let's assume that you're good and let's assume the person can be reached and you have good data. The third piece is the problem with traditional cold calling is you make 50 dials even if you have good data, and even if you have direct dials. And maybe if you're lucky, you talk to one or two people. You get phone trees, you get gatekeepers, the numbers are bad even if you have “good data,” some of them doesn't pick up.   Josh Braun: That problem has been solved in a couple of different ways. One of the ways that I use is I use a service and what this service does is they pre-call the leads before you do. And they determine people that are most likely to pick up the phone. What that means for you is instead of you having two to three conversations for every 50 dials, you have 10 to 12 conversations for every 50 dials without adding any new technology to your tech stack or outstanding any annual contracts. The benefit of that is you can get better faster. You can get data faster, you can have more conversations. You can do it without that, it's just you're not as efficient. It just takes you longer. You need more people to do the same job. So that's the third piece of this is to have something in your stack, that's stacks the odds in your favours for actually talking to people that you want to actually talk to, so you're not sitting there dialling and not having conversations.   Will Barron: So I want to get into what is good. How do we know if we're good? There's a lot of sales people listening who think that they're probably killer on the phone, and they probably suck. So we're getting into that in second. But just before you mention it, do you want to plug that software or because you purposely didn't name it then, or do you want to not name it on the show?   Josh Braun: Sure. It's not software. So there's a gentleman that I work with. His name is Ryan Reisert, and the name of his service is called Phone Ready Leads. And it's a pay-per-use service. And again, he has a team of people that will pre-call the leads and increase your connect rates. So if you're struggling with low connect rates and you have good data, he might be someone to look into to be able to get you more at bats.   Are You Good at Striking Conversations with Cold Prospects? · [05:10]   Will Barron: Cool. Right. Well, let me start this episode over at salesman.org as well. Okay, Josh. So how do we know whether this is objective or subjectively? How do we know if we're good on the phone? How do we know if this is something that we should be focusing on? How do we know if this is a skill that we should be leaning into? Because maybe is our competitive advantage in the marketplace?   “You can't get good at anything that you haven't been taught, and you can't get good at anything that you haven't deliberately practised.” – Josh Braun · [05:47]    Josh Braun: So, well, you're good at doing these podcasts, but I would imagine when you first started doing the podcasts, you weren't as good as you are now because everything that you're good at now, you weren't as good as when you first began something. If you're a golfer, when you first started playing golf, you weren't as good as you are if you've been playing golf for three or four years. So you can't get good at anything that you haven't been taught, and you can't get good at anything that you haven't deliberately practised. So this process, and good is something that you can learn and practise. So we're going to talk a little bit about what good is on a cold call, but it's not something that you're born with, just like you're not born being a good golfer, and it's not something that's ever finished. Just like you're never finished being a good golfer.   Josh Braun: It's an ongoing progress of learning and getting better. I would imagine the same thing with you as a podcast host. I've noticed, and I've been following you for a long time, you've gotten better with each episode because you're honing your skills. So for people that are listening, be patient and treat this just like learning any other skill. First, you have to know what good is. You have to be taught what good is, then you have to deliberately practise good and just be a little introspective. Observe how your calls are going, don't judge yourself and just start to think, “Hey, what did I do on that call? What do I want to focus on? How'd that feel?” And you will get better each day if you just work on those things.   How to Know If You’re Good at Cold Calling · [06:50]   Will Barron: How do we know if we are good? And I agree what you're saying in that this is kaizen, this is continuous improvement. What worked in cold calling five years ago is not going to work now. Millennials are coming up in the marketplace. I'm 35, I'm in that age bracket, we are now starting to get a budget and perhaps we like to be approached differently than generations have come before us. So everything's constantly fluxing the marketplace, your skillset, even your mood and attitude and stuff during the day. So with that all said, how do we know whether we should be leaning into this or not? Because I guess that both leaned into our own skills and the marketplace that we're selling into as well.   “I don't believe that everyone has to be good at everything, but if you have an appetite for getting good at the phone, I think it's a million dollar skill. At least it's been in my experience and the people that I've worked with. But if you don't have an appetite for it at all, and you don't think it's a good channel, what I always say to people is, don't do it.” – Josh Braun · [07:48]    Josh Braun: Yeah. I'm a big fan of playing to your strengths. So if you have people on your team that are really great at writing emails and they're getting good response rates, they love that, double down, let them do emails. If you have someone to that's good on the phone or has an appetite for being better on the phone or wants to learn how to improve being on the phone, let those people make the calls. So I don't believe that everyone has to be good at everything, but if you have a appetite for getting good at the phone, I think it's a million dollar skill. At least it's been in my experience and the people that I've worked with. But if you don't have an appetite for it at all, and you don't think it's a good channel, what I always say to people is, don't do it.   “My job isn't to change someone who doesn't have an appetite for wanting to change, my job is to work with people who have an appetite for wanting to get better in a particular area.” – Josh Braun · [08:18]   Josh Braun: I get emails all the time that say, “People don't respond to voicemails and they never pick up the phone. Cold calling and voicemails suck, I would never use them.” And what I say is, don't do those things, because my job isn't to change someone who doesn't have an appetite for wanting to change, my job is to work with people who have an appetite for wanting to get better in this particular area. And we can certainly talk about that on this podcast, what does good mean with regards to a cold call and get you on the path, but you have to have an appetite for it first. You don't want to force people into something.   Josh Braun: This is a big problem that I have when I'm training sales organisations, is oftentimes people are told you have to go to sales training. And a lot of people don't want to be there and guess what? They're not engaged, they're not going to get anything out of it. So I think you have to have this mindset of, “Hey, I want to get better at this. I want to do this,” and then you can lean into it a little bit more.   The Best Cold Callers in Sales Have These Distinct Traits · [09:02]    Will Barron: So how do we know if we are good, Josh. Is this a, we make 50 dials, we get on so many calls and we book so many meetings. Is this a case of, we can use a cold call we know objectively or people in the organisation that we use cold calls to shorten our sales cycle by two months? Because we want to improve, and I want to give the audience a way to say, “Well, okay, I'm making progress.” How do we measure where we are, measure where we're at? And then how do we know that we're winning?   Josh Braun: Yeah. So, we'll talk a little bit about what a good cold call is in a second, but the way you'll know when it's really simple is how does it feel? So when you're connecting with people and you have a conversation, how did that experience feel for you? You don't have to judge yourself. You don't have to score yourself. Those things might bum you out a little bit, but if you just are a little introspective and say, “Hey, that call felt a little wonky, what was it about it that felt wonky? It seems like I was talking a little faster than I normally talk.”   Josh Braun: So that's an observation. I'm going to assess the call. I'm not going to judge my call. I'm going to assess the call, and I'm going to say, “I was talking a little fast, maybe next time what I'm going to work on, I'm going to focus on slowing down my speech a little bit. What did I notice on this call? It looks like I was talking over the prospect. I'm going to slow my speech down and I'm going to pause for two seconds after the prospect's done talking, and I'm going to work on that a little bit.” That's going to get you much further in terms of progress in getting better than beating yourself up, telling yourself all the things you did wrong, and that you suck. You don't suck, you just haven't been patient enough and practised. So shift from judging to assessing and observing.   Josh Braun: And I have found for myself and for the people that I coach, when you have that mentality of just observing and being thoughtful about what you're observing and assessing, you get better because you start to hone in on things. And if you're a coach, you might say, “What do you think about slowing down your speech a little bit?” “What do you think about maybe pausing for a couple seconds when someone's done talking?” And then just focus on one thing at a time, just like you would golfing or playing tennis, or the piano, you will get better just by doing that.   Assessing the Effectiveness of Your Cold Calls and Filling in the Gaps · [11:13]    Will Barron: Sure. So is this a first strategy then? I'm making this up the top of my head, but it seems like it could be appropriate, what you're saying here, Josh. We have a piece of paper next to us as we run through our calls, we don't need to show this to anyone. This is our document. Perhaps we write down one thing that went well, one thing that we want to improve on, and then we can see if we are becoming good, if we can eventually see if we are good then perhaps there's a lot more positives than there are negatives on the page. That might be comparing week one to week 27. Is that a fair way to go in about measuring our success, our journey to success, and also whether we are good or not. Is that a fair way to go about doing this?   Josh Braun: Yeah. And I wouldn't even focus on the negative. So, well, let me ask you a question. I don't know. Do you play golf?   Will Barron: No.   Josh Braun: Okay. What do you think the first question is that someone asks someone when they come off the golf course?   Will Barron: Your score.   Josh Braun: What's your score, right? That's the first thing a lot of times people will ask a sales rep too, “What's your score?” How many meetings did you book? A better question is what did you learn? Because when you talk about what do you learn, you're going to get better. You're going to say, “Well, I learned that stroke didn't feel so good. I got a little stiff here. I'm going to need to work on my hips a little bit.” So I wouldn't even focus on anything you really did “wrong” because it's going to get you into this negative space, perhaps. I would focus on just observing and assessing, what did you observe? How did it make you feel? And what do you want to focus on to make you feel a little bit better. And just pick one thing and you will just get better.   Josh Braun: The meetings are a byproduct of just getting a little bit better. You don't finish a marathon, you train deliberately for four or five months, and the marathon finishing is a byproduct of the training. And if you just don't beat yourself up and focus on the negatives, which takes away from that, and you just focus on assessing and observing, you will get better. And you'll also feel tremendously better as well about yourself.   How to Get Better at Anything · [13:13]    Will Barron: So I've never run marathon, I know you do triathlons in that, Josh. I've done a bunch of half marathons. Surely though, to use this analogy, you still set a goal of, well, I'm going to run so many miles this week, or I'm going to lead up to the event and then pull back for the few runs beforehand. So we still need to know what good is, what success is and still move towards the target, right? I just want to counteract your point here of, you don't run 10 feet and then have slightly sore toes, and then sit and ponder about your toes and not initial run, do you?   Josh Braun: No, I think, in that analogy you might go for a run and maybe you were able to only run 15 or 20 steps and you might say to yourself, “Well, how did that run feel? That really hurt. That really sucked.” And then I might say, “Well, what else might be true? The run did suck,” you only ran 10 feet, and it did hurt, but what else might be true is you just started running. And anytime you start running in the beginning, it's going to hurt a little bit, right? And so hurting when you run is a natural part of getting better. So on a cold call, it might be the same thing. Well, that really went dicey. I spoke to three people, and all of those calls were negative. They didn't really go anywhere.   Josh Braun: Lots of fact they were negative. But another way to look at it is they were negative, but you also just started cold calling, and you've only had 15 connects in your whole life. And anytime you pick up a guitar and start playing, it's going to hurt your fingers. And that little shift, it might seem very insignificant, but it changes the wiring in the brain and motivates you to want to learn more rather than focusing on the suck. And so what I'm suggesting here is that there's always multiple lenses to view these things from. There's the, “Oh my God, my toes hurt lens,” but there's also the lens of, “I just started running,” and my toes are going to hurt a little bit because I haven't run before.   Josh Braun: This movie was terrible about these cheerleaders. It was so thin and uninteresting. However, if I asked someone who was a cheerleader about that same movie, they might say, I found it fascinating because I used to be a cheerleader. You're in a car driving, and you flip off the person that cut you off. That person's such a jerk. The other lens is, “Well, maybe that person's in a rush to the hospital, I hope they're okay.” And I think in sales we have a tendency to only look at it through that one lens and we beat ourselves up instead of building ourselves up.   Will Barron: Sure. I guess there's different ways to look at it. I know myself when I've got to do these kind of things and when I'm learning new skills, I don't respond to what you're describing, Josh. I respond to the stick of, “Hey, just get 50 calls done. It's going to suck, it's fine. After 50, it's going to suck less, and then you just keep going.” And the discipline for me is the thing that gets me through this. And then judging what's good, what's bad, and documenting that result. Then I ended up with a feedback loop of well, the first 25 sucked, then there was one that was great. Then 10 sucked, then there was one that was great. Then it is five sucked, and there's one that's great. So with that said, we've quite a lot the emotional side of this now. Hopefully the audience can pick an angle on this, of how they're going to get through the suck, so whether it's discipline, whether it is being introspective and documenting either mentally or on the page what they have improved upon and they can build that feedback loop for themselves.   The Step by Step Framework for Successful Cold Calling · [16:38]    Will Barron: Is there a step by step framework? Is there a step by step process of what you should be saying on a cold call? Because I feel like if there is, then we can nail that, a lot of this other stuff just disappears because most people can sit down and say, “Right, I can make five of these calls right now.” Then obviously you make five and you can carry on for the rest of the morning, if that's what you choose. I think the hardest bit of a lot of this is that initial momentum and making that first call of the day. And obviously this has helped with structure. So do you have a structure that you teach, Josh? Is there a way to go about this that you can share with the audience?   Josh Braun: Yeah, let's actually start it with step number one and step number one is often missed because people want the script, but there's a really important step one, which is, you have to stand for something. Let me just tell you a quick story. Well, you might know about this product P90X. Does that ring a bell, or am I ageing myself. Do you remember that product?   Will Barron: I've never used it, but yeah, I only do training with barbells, but I understand the product, a training from home high intensity training, right?   Josh Braun: Yeah. I don't know if you know this, but when they first started marketing that product, they did about 15 versions of that commercial, and they bombed, they couldn't sell any P90X DVDs. And then Tony Horton, who's the guy who's in the video, and the creator had this brilliant idea. And this was his idea. And you can see this on YouTube if you Google it. It's a 35, 45, second black and white thing. And he said, “The problem with traditional work outs is that you do the same thing over and over again. You lift the same weight's the same way and your muscles plateau. They don't get any bigger. In fact, they get smaller and you don't make any progress. What you need is muscle confusion.” Now that's a word he made up. “And when you confuse your muscles, when you lift heavy weights one day and light weights the other day, and you do this exercise this way and this exercise that way, you confuse your muscles and then they grow.”   “When cold calling, you have to know something that your prospects don't know that can hurt them.” – Josh Braun · [18:45]    Josh Braun: What he's doing here, is he's having a point of view. He's standing for something. The reason I'm bringing this up is that everybody that you call, no matter what you sell is working out today somehow. They have weights and they're working out a certain way. You have to know something that they don't know that can hurt them. So what is it that you know that they don't know? So if they kept working out today the same exact way, what would happen? I'll tell you another story that illustrates this point, because it's so important.   Josh Braun: Several years ago, I was in the mall with my wife and I did not need anything. I was keeping her company. We were going to grab dinner afterwards. I walked into a Fit2Run store for no reason. So if the store associate said, “We got these new sneakers,” I'm going to be like, “Not interested, got new sneakers.” If she said, “Can I help you?” I'm going to say, “Not interested, bad sneakers.” But she didn't do any of those things. She looked down at my sneakers. She said, “Are you a runner?” I said, “Yes.” She said, “What distance?” I said, “I'm training for my first marathon.”   Josh Braun: And she said, “Have you ever had a running gate test?” And I said, “What's that?” And moments later, I'm on a treadmill in the Fit2Run store. She freezes the frame, zooms in on my ankles and says, “Look, your ankles are over pronating.” I'm like, “Yes, so what?” She said, “If you're running in sneakers that are not made for pronated feet, you can get injured on long distance runs and get sidelined, get shins splints and runners knee. If you would like, I could look at your sneakers to see if they're made for pronated feet.” And about seven minutes later, I'm buying new sneakers and insoles because she had a point of view. She's standing for something. So step number one, and this is where a lot of sales people just say, “Well, I got better sneakers,” is what is it that you know that your prospect doesn't know. That's step one.   How to Overcome the Zone of Resistance When Cold Calling Prospects · [20:10]    Will Barron: So let's stop there for a second. If you got an example of this, Josh, I'm assuming with your social media presence, you don't do a lot of outbound calls. I'm sure all your training is inbound, right? Same with us. A lot of what we do is inbound. If you were to do an outbound cold call though to a VP of sales, a potential training client, what would you stand for? What would be an example of how you'd implement this?   Josh Braun: So, I love how to start this exercise with the problem with. So again, and I'm [inaudible 00:20:43] this to our sales trainer. But Steve Jobs 2007, iconic iPhone speech. If you haven't seen that, you must watch. One of his iconic lines was, “the problem with smartphones is,” and it wasn't just one smartphone. He had them all listed on the screen. At the time the Nokia, the Palm, the Trail, the Motorola, all that stuff. He goes, “The problem with smartphones is they're not that smart. It's these keys that are fixed in plastic. Well, every application wants a different set of keys, so it just doesn't work. Interesting, it worked like five minutes ago.” That's the point of view. That's the perspective. So for me, I would say something like this, “The problem with traditional cold calling is that prospects are in the zone of resistance when they hear sales pressure.” You start to pitch your product and they pull away.   Josh Braun: It's the same reason when you're in the mall and someone says from a kiosk, “Can I ask you a question,” you turn around and walk. You're afraid of the pitch. Prospects feel that way all the time. So what you need is an approach that ditches the pitch. Now what you're hearing when I do this Will, is people nodding their heads. Going, “Yeah, I've been in the mall.” “Yeah, I see that ditch the pitch,” and the brain naturally goes to, “What do you have?” What's the answer to that. We're going to get on that in this podcast, but that's how I position when I do outbound, that's the story that I have in my head. I don't do a cold call like that, but in my head I'm like, “That's the Tony Horton version of what I do.”   Josh Braun: It's this idea that traditional cold calling is all about the pitch, and the value proposition and overcoming objections. And yet when you do that, people go into what I call the zone of resistance. It's a natural reflex reaction to sales pressure. It's why you tell someone in a department store you're just looking and literally buying something five minutes later. You don't want the pressure. And so people will say to me, “Well, what do you do?” And now we're into the next part that we're going to be talking about.   Will Barron: Perfect. Okay. So that is written down, it's on a plaque, it's on our desk in front of us and it's a constant reminder, I guess, for us at salesman.org, we make selling simple. Selling's over complicated, it's complicated with tools, with processes, with people, with ideas, with management, who haven't sold anything in 30 years trying to teach you how to one system or another. So we make selling simple. So I've got it on a post-it note. There we go, Josh. I've got it on a post-it note. It's stuck on my laptop to remind me. That's step one, what's step two?   Why Cold Calling is More Like an Infomercial · [23:00]    Josh Braun: So like what you said there, and I want to be very clear, this is like an infomercial. If you're saying to yourself it's simple, that's too generic. I can't see that infomercial in my head. So this exercise I called infomercial, you should be able to see the black and white version of the infomercial. So right now, today, when people get sales training, they're using seven different mechanisms. And let me show you the problem with these seven different mechanisms. They're from the '80s, and therefore buyers react this way. The problem with traditional knives is they go doll, and when you slice a tomato, look what happens, spurt all over your white shirt. What you need is this Ginsu thing. So I want to stress that this is an exercise that you gloss over. Most people that I talk to can't pass the infomercial test. And the litmus test is, can I actually see it?   Josh Braun: I can't see simple. It's not crispy. I know you have this positioning. Perfect, Will. We can delve into this. But can you actually see it? Can you observe it? Can you see the movie in your head? Don't do product training, do problem training, get a really good understanding of what's sucked in your prospect's life before they switched, and feel that. And it's a feeling, like, “Oh my God, that tomato, it's splatted all over that white shirt. That's awful. What do we have?” Well, we got this thing called a Ginsu knife. “What is that?” It cuts cans and tomatoes perfectly forever without having to be sharpened. “That's awesome.” Sure. So I just wanted to punctuate that before we go to the next step.   Will Barron: Well, look, let's spend 30 seconds on this. You can help us refine it. So maybe it's not visual. But when I share that with people, you use the word feeling, this feeling kit. Most sales people that I speak to, and obviously not everyone's a fit for our product and training, but most sales people I speak to, most sales leadership, they are overwhelmed with the training in the marketplace. They're overwhelmed with the sales stack, they're being bombarded by… At this point now, they weren't a few years ago, but billion dollar companies with big advertising budgets. And yet they're tuning into this like pleb podcast, right? We get 700,000 downloads a month and people are tuning to this way more than any podcast from every sales technology company or any sales training company.   Will Barron: So people have that rapport with me when I speak to them, typically before I pick up the phone. So when I say we make selling simple, we use training frameworks to take all the pain out and add process to your sales team's delivery, that's what I pitch. How would you humbly help me refine that?   Cold Calling 101: Always Start with a Problem · [25:25]     Josh Braun: So I love that, because you started with the problem, right? If you notice, if you're listening to this, and of course you're listening to this, if you're listening to this, that Will started with a black and white version. They're overwhelmed by all these… Imagine the kitchen analogy. They're using 10 or 15 of these tools to grow with. You got a spatula, you got a fork, you got a scrapper, you got all this stuff. It's a lot to handle, you got to go keep running back and forth to get the right tool. You got to clean seven tools and everyone's going to be nodding their head. I call it the head nod. Just like what Will did. Yeah. And then brain is naturally going to go, “Well, what do you have?” “Well, we got this tool. It's an all in one tool. It's seven barbecue tools in one. So you only have one to clean, and it's right there, handy for you whenever you want to grill.”   Josh Braun: That's essentially what Will is saying here, to use a grill analogy is that he has instead of using nine or 10 things and having these things be confusing and having a bunch of stuff that doesn't talk to each other, you've got one thing and it's really easy to use and simple to clean. It's the contrast that Will did, but most people have a time with this because they've been focused on the after version. But just like P90X, if they just showed the person with the six pack abs, that doesn't really hit you unless you see the before version when they're about 40 or 50 pounds heavier. So I thought you did that really well, Will.   Crucial Assumptions You Should Never Make in Sales · [26:52]    Will Barron: Thank you. I appreciate that. Okay. So if that's step one. I'm conscious of time, Josh, so we might have to rattle through some of these. Give us step two.   “When you assume that everyone's a fit for what you have, what ends up happening is people go into the zone of resistance because you're going to try to be talking people into things, and pitching everyone, and thinking that you're a fit for everyone. So instead, shift away from that and discover if the person has a problem that you could potentially help with, rather than assuming.” – Josh Braun · [27:12]    Josh Braun: Okay. Step two will be really brief. Of course you think that the person you're calling can benefit from the thing that you have, that they have a problem, that their training and they're plateaued, but you don't know until you talk to them. So step two is letting go of assumptions, and detach them from the outcome. Because when you assume that everyone's a fit for what you have, what ends up happening is people go into the zone of resistance, because you're going to try to be talking people into things, and pitching everyone, and thinking that you're a fit for everyone. So instead shift away from that and discover if the person has a problem that you could potentially help with, rather than assuming.   Josh Braun: The mantra here is, I'm for some people, but I'm not for everyone. That intent is going to change what you say, because your thoughts, what you think going into the call, changes what comes out of your mouth. So step two is detaching from the outcome and letting go of the assumptions and testing to see if the person has a problem, rather than assuming they have a problem. And now we'll get into the actual framework. But those two things are really strong foundational elements.   Will Barron: Sure. So, this is prior to picking up the phone, we are focusing on these two things, right?   Josh Braun: Yes.   Why Role Play is Such a Crucial Aspect of Improving Your Cold Calling Outcomes · [28:13]   Will Barron: Cool. Okay. So we are in the right mindset, are there to diagnose potentially a problem, and then book a meeting. We're conscious of that, Josh. What do we do when we pick up the phone and it starts ringing and our heart starts going, “Oh, crap. I should just do something now. I thought I've done some work, but now I'm actually going to do the work.”   Josh Braun: Let's go through a real cold call. Let's role play it. I'm going to just put myself on the spot here. And I'm going to make a cold call to Will. And were going [crosstalk 00:28:30]-   Will Barron: Sure. I'll be a small business owner, right?   Josh Braun: Yeah. No, you be you. And we're going to go through this, and we haven't rehearsed this, so this will be a good process. And we're going to go in and out of role play, and I'm going to dissect what's going on. So just to set this up, we mentioned at the beginning of the call, that when we start to pitch at the beginning of a call, it feels like those mall kiosk people. So what you're going to hear is no pitch. You're going to hear me being a little interested in how will is getting a particular job done today to see if there might be an opening, and we're going to save the pitch if they're even is one for the end. So we're going to walk you through four steps. And the first step you probably heard of bazillion times before, but I'm a big believer in it is we want to get Will's permission to talk.   Josh Braun: Now, why is that? Really briefly, if I told Will I would pick him up at 5:00 for dinner and I didn't show up until six, I would feel bad because I'm incongruent. My actions are incongruent with my words. So when someone says, “Sure, I have a second,” they're more likely to hear us out for part two. You could think of this as four little levels of a video game, and we're going to be asking for permission to get to level two. So Will picks up the phone, and in a very calm voice, I might say something like this. And there's a lot of ways to do this. “Hey, Will. My name is Josh. We've never spoken before. You have no idea who I am; complete stranger here, but I was hoping you could help me out for a moment. Do you have two minutes?   Will Barron: Sure. What's up my friend. What's up Josh?   Josh Braun: Okay. So what did I do here? So I'm using a time commitment, so Will knows this isn't going to be an hour. I'm asking for help because people are wired to help, and I'm using a tonality that's not, “Hey, Will, this is Josh, can you help me out for a moment?” Kind of calm, because when you're calm, you're more inviting. So, that's going to be level one. And then people are going to say, “Sure,” about 70 or 80% of the time. And then what I'm going to do is this I'm going to see if Will, is even the right person that I need to be speaking with. Because even though you've done a bunch of research, this person might not even work at the company anymore, they might not go there anymore. So in a very humble way, I'm going to say this, “Will, are you still the person that's involved with getting sponsors for your podcasts? Or is that someone else since you've gotten so big?”   Will Barron: That is me, Josh. For the purpose of this role play it's me, but do not email me about sponsorships anyone who's listened to this episode. But yes, Josh that's me. I deal with that.   Josh Braun: Okay. So that's step two is, am I talking to the right person? And notice the phraseology? “It seems like it,” it looks like. That implies that I've done a little research. Now, one of two things is going to happen there. You're either going to get the response that Will gave you, which is, “Yeah, that's me,” or “I'm retired.” And don't you want to know that at the beginning of the call rather than going through your pitch? Or “I don't do that at all. That's not me.” In which case we could talk about another path if we have some time, but we'll go through the happy path first. You can see the big picture here. So Will's just going to say, “Yeah, that's me.”   Josh Braun: I'm going to go to step three now. And step three is what's called… So step one, permission. Step two, person, is it the right person? And then step three is what I call poke and peel. I'm going to be poking around a little bit to see how Will's getting the job today done, and I'm going to peel the onion a little bit. I might say something like this. “So Will, how are you currently going about getting sponsors today? Are you like reaching out via cold email? Are people mostly coming to you, or is it a combination of both?”   Will Barron: It's typically inbound leads, Josh.   Josh Braun: Inbound leads, just inbound, or are you doing any outbound as well, or it's all just inbound?   Will Barron: It is all inbound, but I would love to have the time or the help to do some outbound stuff as well. Josh, I feel like we're not at full capacity, and we need a little bit of some secret source here, mate.   Josh Braun: I'm sorry. Not at full capacity?   Will Barron: Correct.   Josh Braun: It seems like I'm missing something here. When you say not at full capacity.   Will Barron: We have ad available.   Josh Braun: Okay. So look what I'm doing here. So the poking was, I'm asking a little bit about how he's doing the job done today. And the peeling was notice I use a mirror, and I know you and I are big Chris Foss fans. “I'm sorry, not at full capacity?” So I'm poking around a little bit. And now I'm going to shift to asking the question that's going to get Will to think a little bit differently. And that might sound like this. “Well, I know you've been doing this for a while. I'm sure you've batted this around, but have you considered using a company in addition to what you're doing now, to be able to find high value sponsors to fill that ad space without you having to actually spend any overtime doing it? I'm sure you've gone down that road before.”   Will Barron: I have considered it, but not gone down that road before, Josh. We're just so busy, mate.   Josh Braun: Okay. So pause here. The question is, “Have you considered,” right? “I'm sure you've thought of this before,” this is for captivated IQ. “I'm sure you've thought of this before. Have you considered automating your commission payouts? I'm sure you've batted this around a little bit.” I'm saying the phrase, “have you thought about this?” “I'm sure you have thought about this” to not hurt Will's ego, and then I'm asking a question that's going to get the prospect to think a little differently about how they're currently getting the job done today. So, “But Josh, have you considered incorporating a Kinstretch into your triathlon training?” “What's Kinstretch?” It's a approach that's used to make sure you don't get injured. It's complimentary.   Why You Should Never Hurt a Prospect's Ego · [34:07]   Josh Braun: I always want to compliment what Will is doing. Notice I'm not asking Will to rip and replace anything. I'm saying we can compliment this. “Have you considered this.” And notice he's leaning into this. At some point in the call, what ends up happening oftentimes is Will says, “Well, I'm sorry, what do you do? What's your deal?” And then he's asking me the question. If he doesn't, I might say, “No, it sounds like this might be a fit. Will, I know I'm calling out of the blue here,” step four, going to pop the question, “Would you be open to investing,” not spending, but investing, “15 minutes later this week so I can share a few ideas with you about how you can generate these sponsors, but without you having to actually lift a finger?” What I'm doing is, I'm proactively to Will [crosstalk 00:34:48].   Will Barron: That sounds incredible, Josh. We're in. I'm all in. Sold. Send me the contract, mate.   Josh Braun: We wish all the calls were that easy. But what I'm doing is I'm proactively addressing your objection. We only work for people that are doing inbound, and without you having to lift the finger, right? We're only talking to people that have accountants already. So someone wouldn't be able to say, “Well, we have an accountant for that.” We're talking to people that have accountants about an approach to obtain employee retention credits that typical accountants miss. I have no idea if that's the case for you, but is that something you've considered working with a specialty accounting that only specialises in ERC credits? Well, how does that work?   Josh Braun: “I know I'm calling out of the blue here,” “would it make sense to invest 15 minutes, maybe Thursday or Friday, so you can see what your options are.” Look at the phraseology. So you can review what your options are. It's not assumptive, so it's going to lower the zone of resistance. The words really matter here. I know we're going through it quick, but each word is very deliberate so as not to create any pressure on will. I am always listening for sales pressure, and I'm going to defuse it at every chance I get, and I'm going to try to prevent it from happening by being very selective with my words.   Rejection is at the Core of Cold Calling. Get Used to It · [36:34]    Will Barron: Josh, I did a full share about this the other day, so we don't need to go too deep into it. But if we communicate the way you just communicated, and clearly with your background in teaching sales, training VP of sale, you are perhaps 20 years ahead of some of the audience here. So we have to burst some of that in mind, right? And I know you've got trading products, which we'll touch on in a second where the audience can learn some of this perhaps, but say we get 80, 90% of Josh Braun's skillset here. Should cold calling be a nice, simple, and almost enjoyable activity for salespeople to do when they're confident in what they're saying, when they are unconsciously competent in the wording, so the brain isn't going a million miles an hour trying to source things out in real time. Should cold calling be something that maybe you don't look forward to it, but that you do when you end up on having a nice few conversations over the course of 20, 30, 40 dials, you end up potentially really sparking a few conversations and helping people?   “The trouble salespeople get into is when they attach their self worth to the outcome. No one's rejecting you as a person, they're just rejecting what you're saying.” – Josh Braun · [37:44]    Josh Braun: Yeah, it's a tremendous amount. It's a great question. And when you say enjoyable, I enjoy going to the beach, I enjoy biking. It is work, and there is going to be a lot of resistance, because of the nature of the dynamic. The prospect knows that a salesperson has a vested interest. That's the whole problem what I'm suggesting with this approach is that we're trying to lower that zone of resistance. And when we do that well, and we have the right intent where we're okay either way, of course we care about the prospect, but we're indifferent to the outcome. The trouble salespeople get into is when they attach their self worth to the outcome. No, one's rejecting you as a person, they're just rejecting what you're saying. And so when you do that, it's almost like I feel like I'm on a golf course, and I'm calm and I'm swinging the club, and I'm going to the next hole. And there's a bunch of holes.   Josh Braun: The way I view cold calling is like you're walking down a street with a bunch of brown stones, and there's a door up there, and there's four steps, and there's prospects standing in front of the steps, and there's unlimited steps, unlimited brown stones. And I'm going to approach people, strike up a conversation with them and see if they want to invite me up the steps. And if they don't, that's okay because back to the mindset, I'm for some people, but I'm not for everyone. And I'll be really calm, and I have ways to diffuse sales pressure. I'm just going to keep going to the next brownstone.   “You don't control how people respond to you, you only control what you say. And when you let go of things you don't control, it changes the game, not just in sales, but in your life as well.” – Josh Braun · [38:40]    Josh Braun: So it's not so much it's enjoyable, but it's peaceful and calming and you're not going to get anxious. And you're not going to have this debilitating feeling of rejection when you adopt this mindset because there's nothing to be rejected about. You don't control how people respond to you, you only control what you say. And when you let go of things you don't control, it changes the game, not just in sales, but in your life as well.   Parting Thoughts · [38:50]   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. I'll wrap up with that, mate. For people who want to know more, because we've only obviously briefly scratched the surface of this in today's episode of Sales Broadcast, tell us where we can find more about you and then any training that you offer as well that is relevant to the audience on the back of this conversation.   Josh Braun: Yeah. So I've got a joshbraun.com/shop. You can find my stuff or joshbraun.com/learn, you can read about a lot of content or on LinkedIn.   Will Barron: Amazing. I was too slow on the button then to go back to the two boxes. I thought there was going to be a longer pitch phrase. Succinct, very like you, Josh. I appreciate that, mate. I appreciate you, appreciate your insights, and I want to thank you again for joining us on The Salesman Podcast,   Josh Braun: Ditch the pitch. Well, ditch the pitch. Always a pleasure. 

Do you know why your prospects buy? In this post I’m going to explain why your prospects buy products by sharing the 5 step value ladder. The Value Ladder There are only 5 levels of value that you can offer a potential customer. When you offer your customers levels 1,2 or 3 of value you are replaceable. They do not care about you. Your customers will screw you over whenever they can. At levels 4 and 5 of the value ladder however, which I’ll show you in a minute, your prospects will be begging you to work with them. At level 5 the customer will give you every single penny they have, to keep doing business with you. They will beg you for your product! So would you like to be in the position of having your customers begging to give you money, rather than you begging them? Then let's start at level 1 on the value ladder. Level 1 – Meet specifications The first level on the value ladder is when you meet the specifications laid out by your prospect. This is where a prospect is looking for X feature and by chance your product happens to have this feature. Unfortunately, there is nothing to differentiate you from your competition at this level and so wining this type of business comes down to dumb luck most of the time. Trying to hit a sales target when you’re only providing level 1 value is like putting the lottery on and then standing outside their offices, with your hand out, hoping that you win the jackpot. So let's move up the value ladder, to level two. Level two is where you provide a good product to the customer. Level 2 – Good product This is the level of value that everyone thinks they’re sat at. Everyone thinks that their products are great but, in most markets, again everyone’s products are pretty good and so there is very little differentiation. And so again… winning business here usually comes down to dumb luck and the ability to follow up with a prospect often until they relent and give you their money. That’s a tough way to sell each day, right? Level three is when things start to change. Level three is when we start to remove luck from our selling environment and replace it with hustle. We’re at a level 3 of value when we provide a customised service. Level 3 – Customised service This is where we start to differentiate ourselves in the mind of the buyer. This is when they start to say “Oh, Salesman.org is more expensive than reading a few sales books but the training is personalised for me and so I don’t mind paying more”. So, how many times have you battled with prospects on price? They’ll bring up your competitors. They’ll say “I ain't signing no contracts” at the last minute to force you to discount… I’ve been there and it sucks. That pain starts to disappear at level three on the value ladder as in the mind of the buyer, you’re now different to all of the other that are companies pitching them. You now, finally have an advantage. But things really start to fall into the sellers favour though when we get to level four which is reliance. Level 4 – Reliance When you get to this level of the value ladder the buyer-seller dynamic changes. This usually happens in one of two ways – A) Built on top of your product A current customer builds part of their business on top of your product. For example lots of companies use Salesforce.com to store customer data and then build their own marketing and sales systems on top of their platform. If you’re Salesforce.com in this situation you know that there would be so much damn pain for their customer to move to someone else that they’ve basically got the contracts locked in until their customer goes bust. At this point it’d be easier to stop Donald Trump saying stupid things than it would be for a competitor to break into your account and displace you. B) They NEED you for growth Alternatively, you can reach the reliance level of the value ladder by selling into a new organisation, when they need your product so desperately to grow, that without you, their business is likely going to fail. An example of this would be selling financial services to a startup who needs the influx of capital otherwise their business is going to die. This again makes them reliant on you. Again, at this point, the buyer wants to work with you, as much as you want the commissions of working with them. The final level, the God tier of value in B2B sales is level 5, multiple reliance. Level 5 – Multiple reliance This is where I’d aim to be with my medical device customers when I sold surgical camera systems. Sure it’d be great to have 10 operating rooms in general surgery using our equipment. But then when gynecology and urology also become reliant on your equipment and support something magical starts happening… You find yourself having meetings with the CFO of the hospital, rather than department managers. You find yourself in the middle of conversations about expanding the hospital and their potential equipment needs, rather than hearing about an influx of cash and having to cold call people to learn more… When you get to level 5 of the value ladder you become a businessperson, not a pesky salesperson, who is always pestering and chasing people down. Opportunities come to you; your prospects WANT to work with you. Selling becomes fun! How would that change your day to day? So Will, that’s all well and good, thanks for the theory random 5 level theory… But how the hell do I get to this magical level 5 on your stupid value ladder? That doesn’t even really look like a ladder? Climbing The Value Ladder Well if you’re not starting at level 2 which is having a good product the answer is simple. Change jobs. Stop making life hard for yourself. Find the best product in your industry and start selling their sales management on hiring you. So assuming you’re starting at level two of having a good product, how do we get to level three and offer a customised service? Lets use the example of me selling medical devices. Clearly I wasn’t able to customise my products to my customers needs. Everything I sold had thousands of hours of research, development and testing before it was even allowed to be marketed and so I didn’t have any leverage to customise at the product level. So, instead, I customised the service I provided to my customers. I’d explain the value that I, personally, would add to the prospects in their surgical education, training, hospital business problem solving and more. And honestly, this was all I really needed to differentiate myself from a lot of my competition. Most of my competition were lazy. They wanted to get in, make a sale and get out. So I took a lot of their business by making the extra effort to play on level 3 of the value ladder. To get into levels 4 and 5 of the value ladder you need to up your game. The simplest way to put this is, is that at levels 4 and 5, you must solve your prospects business issues. This means that YOU personally must be able to – A) Make introductions Make introductions within your industry to get your prospects in front of people that can help them move forward. B) Provide insights Provide valuable industry insights that the prospect can’t get elsewhere. For example with the sales leaders that I work with who have their teams in Salesman.org, I can share an incredible amount of information from our SalesCode Assessment data on what traits they should look for when hiring. C) Tie the wins What I mean by tying your prospects wins with yours is that you should be looking for ways to help them improve their own customers experiences. If you can do this and improve their revenues directly, you’ll become indispensable to them. And finally then to go from level 4 to 5 you need to become dispensable across multiple departments within the organisation. It’s all of course easier said than done but once you retrain your selling brain to focus on the level of value you can give to prospects, rather than focusing on what you can take from them, you’ll find that more and more people want to work with you and the game gets easier. Summary To have success in modern sales, you must start at a value level of 3. Then focus on solving real business problems, personally, to get to level 4, then finally do this across multiple departments in the prospects company to become a level 5 seller and really start to win.

Jason Bay is the Chief Prospecting Officer at Blissful Prospecting. He’s on a mission to help reps and sales teams turn complete strangers into paying customers. In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Jason explains what is and what isn’t working in the world of cold email sales outreach in 2022. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Jason Bay Chief Prospecting Officer Resources: Blissfulprospecting.com Jason’s LinkedIn BombBomb – Video messaging platform Transcript Will Barron: Hi, I'm Will, and welcome to the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we're diving into successful cold email trends for 2022. And our guest is Jason Bay. Jason is the chief prospecting officer over at Blissful Prospecting. He's on a mission to help reps and sales teams turn complete strangers into paying customers. And with that, Jason, welcome to the show.   Jason Bay: I'm excited to be back, Will.   Will Barron: I'm excited to have you back on, mate.   Jason Bay: We were just talking. It's been a couple of years since we jammed last on a podcast, so I'm looking forward to being back.   Will Barron: A couple of years. You are perfectly suited for this topic of cold email, cold outreach. Perhaps we'll touch on other areas of cold outreach as well. We'll dive into some trends.   Will Barron: It'd be interesting to see the difference between what worked last time we spoke and then what's perhaps working in the marketplace right now in, what? We're in February 2022 as we record this. So let's start by setting some benchmarks.   The Average Cold Email Response Rate in 2022 · [01:00]    Will Barron: We want to measure our cold outreach. We want to see if we're having success or not. I don't know if you've got finite numbers on this. If not, the gist of things will be more than appropriate. Jason, what is an average cold email response/reply rate in 2022? And then what should we be aiming for? How do we know if we're having success?   Jason Bay: Yeah. It's really hard to find good data on this actually. Clearbit's got some stuff that you could take a look at. I've noticed a downward trajectory in the data in the last two or three years.   Jason Bay: So Clearbit's data says less than a 1% reply rate to a cold email. And you think about that, and I don't know about you, that's a lot of work to get a response. You've got to send a hundred emails out to get a response. That's a lot of work.   Jason Bay: Right now with Outreach, Salesloft, any of the traditional sales engagement vendors, they're all seeing a very similar pattern of that reply rate going down. Now, what is good? Depends. It depends on what you're selling, the transaction size, how many meetings that you need to get, the level of personalization.   Jason Bay: And to give you a range here, if you were selling enterprise, let's say, some of my clients, and they're selling, let's say, a customer experience or employee experience solution into a large company where the deal size might be 500,000-plus at a minimum size, I'm going to expect 10% to 20% reply rates on those emails because I'm working 20 accounts at a time.   Jason Bay: And I'm taking the time to actually look for triggers in the company, I'm researching the individual. Maybe I'm listening to a podcast interview with them. I would expect the reply rates to be much higher on those and meeting volume to be much lower in that case.   Jason Bay: And at the very other end of the spectrum, you have people selling stuff that's very transactional, very SMB type of thing. And if what you're selling has at least a 10,000 to 12,000-plus US dollar… I don't know what that translates into to the rest of the world's currencies.   Will Barron: Don't worry. Everyone talks in dollars on the… I'm a British company. We sell our product in dollars. That's where the world's at, I think.   “If what you're selling has at least $10,000 or $12,000 annual contract value, it's worth doing a little bit of customization on the emails. But you're not going to spend an hour researching someone to sell them something that's a thousand bucks a month. You don't have the time to do that.” – Jason Bay · [03:03]    Jason Bay: Okay. If it's at least $10,000 or $12,000 annual contract value, it's worth doing a little bit of customization on the emails. But you're not going to spend an hour researching someone to sell them something that's a thousand bucks a month. You don't have the time to do that.   Jason Bay: So you might have reply rates more in the 3% to 6% range, and then you have everywhere in-between. So I think you need to do some sales math and think about how many deals do I need to be closing on a quarterly basis? You've talked about this a lot.   Jason Bay: How many deals do I need to be closing on a quarterly basis? And how does that backtrack into my closing rates and how many qualified opportunities that would need, how many intro calls that would be? And then you backtrack into the outbound metrics. How many outbound activities does it take to create a meeting?   Jason Bay: You've got to work your sales math a little bit in order to really figure out what is a good or bad reply rate for you. But I can tell you, regardless of the scenario, 1% is not good. That's a little too much work.   The Difference Between Cold Emailing 100 Prospects and Spamming 100 Individuals · [04:03]    Will Barron: I love it. I was going to bring it back to what you said, and you ended with it then, Jason, it's a lot of freaking work for not a lot if you are sending… Well, are you sending a hundred emails at that point or are you spamming a hundred emails at that point? I guess we need to define what spam is to discourage people from doing it to a certain extent, right?   Jason Bay: Oh, yeah. Definitely. So the difference between spamming someone and cold-emailing them is… I think it's the accountability. A lot of these automation tools, the part that's kind of tough is oftentimes you don't really hit Send to that person. You might hit the Send button and it goes out to a hundred people, but you're so removed from what you're actually doing.   Jason Bay: The way that I would compare it is, not to get political, but any kind of politician that is making a big decision that impacts a lot of people, whether that's going to war or something that impacts taxes or underprivileged people, they're so far removed from most of those decisions, the way that we do it here in America at least, where they don't really feel the accountability of their actions.   Jason Bay: In a very small form, we're doing that with our sales engagement tools where we hit Send in a sequence to a couple of hundred people, we didn't actually hit the Send button to Will Barron, the chief revenue officer at this software company I'm trying to get a hold of. And we wouldn't normally hit the Send button on a lot of the stuff that we're sending.   Jason Bay: So the difference between spam, I guess, and cold email, to answer your question, is how purposeful am I in reaching out to this person? Did I pick out this person, this company? Am I reaching out to them on purpose? And am I making it evident to them that this was intentional?   Jason Bay: I'm not approaching you like a list. I'm approaching you as an individual. And there's ways that you can do a hybrid of both. But that's how I look at the difference between the two.   “I like to think of cold emails as would you send that email to your mom? Would you send that email to a friend? Would you send that email internally to someone in your organisation? And if they would just click Spam, then it's probably a crappy email.” – Will Barron · [06:07]    Will Barron: Yeah. That makes total sense. I like to think of it of, would you send that email to your mom? Would you send that email to a friend? Would you send that email internally to someone in your organisation?   Will Barron: And if they would just click Spam, then it's probably a crappy email. Leave it to marketing to send those emails and to warm up a client list if that's what you need, as opposed to… It's a terrible use of a salesperson's time to go about it that way.   How to Gauge the Success Rate of Your Cold Email Campaigns · [06:35]    Will Barron: Just on these numbers… And I want to get into trends and what's working, what isn't working, what's changed in a second. But is this a rubbish way… Having asked the question and listened to your response, Jason, is this a rubbish way to measure success of the response rate of a single email?   Will Barron: Should we be looking at the response rate of a campaign or a cadence that probably includes social selling, LinkedIn? Whether that's cold calls included, knocking on doors as well. Should we be looking at our success and response rate from starting cold outreach to then giving up on cold outreach with a prospect versus the response rate of a single email?   Jason Bay: Yeah. I'm so glad you asked this question because we do have to step back and take a 10,000-foot view. So I look at outbound, I like to think of it as a game of odds.   Jason Bay: So right now, when you look at this in terms of probability, I already mentioned that email, there's a 1-in-100 chance that you get a response to your cold email. With cold calling, it's not much better. According to Gong and what I see across sales teams, it's 1.48%, sometimes I'll see it around 3% or 4%, but of a chance of a positive outcome from a cold call, not even getting a meeting, just the next step of some sort. So basically, the person didn't ask you to take them off your list.   “The number one thing that we are driving with outbound is we want a qualified meeting. So we want a meeting that has a chance to turn into some sort of opportunity. So outbound is a very simple equation where number of qualified meetings equals volume times quality.” – Jason Bay · [07:55]    Jason Bay: So I don't know by you, I don't really like those odds. Those are really low odds. And the thing that we have to think about is that the number one thing that we are driving with outbound is we want a qualified meeting. So we want a meeting that has a chance to turn into some sort of opportunity.   Jason Bay: So if you look at outbound as a very simple equation of number of qualified meetings equals volume times quality, and there's a few things that go into that quality metric, but you can manipulate that equation any way that you want. You just have to start with the number of qualified meetings that you want to get.   Jason Bay: So if we use some really simple math, you can say, hey, it's five qualified meetings that I need to get because I sell enterprise, let's say, and I'm an account executive, that I need to get per month. A lot of times, the way people try to manipulate and get to that number is they really focus on the volume piece.   Jason Bay: So they might have a 1% conversion rate into a meeting, let's say. So that volume is like 500 prospects. That's one way that you could do that. And I'm pretty sure 1% of 500 is 5. You can correct me if I'm wrong, Will.   Will Barron: I feel that the pressure is on me now to double-check all the math in real-time. I'll have my Post-it note with a load of equations on it.   Jason Bay: Yeah. So that's one way that you could do it. But the other side, the quality side is really what I help most companies with. And that's a combination of your message, whether or not the prospect is a good fit, so the prospect fit, and it's also your soft skills.   “I look at outbound as a three-part framework of identify, engage, and create. So we can get to that qualified meeting mark by making sure that we identify good-fit prospects. And then that middle part, engage, that's our ability to start a conversation through emails, phone calls, all of that kind of stuff. And then the create part of that equation is how do we secure a meeting and turn this into a qualified opportunity? And typically, we're going to have to objection-handle in order to get the number of meetings that we need.” – Jason Bay · [09:27]    Jason Bay: So if we look at this as a framework, and this is where we can kind of go in and out, you mentioned cadence, I look at outbound as a three-part framework of identify, engage, and create. So we can get to that qualified meeting mark by making sure that we identify good-fit prospects.   Jason Bay: So it doesn't matter how clever or great your email is if it's not going to the right person at the right company, and that we know about the language in which these people talk about their priorities and problems, which we should spend some time on.   Jason Bay: And then that middle part, engage, that's our ability to start a conversation. So that's your emails, your phone calls, that's how you sequence, all of that kind of stuff. And then the create part of that equation is how do we secure a meeting and turn this into a qualified opportunity? And typically, we're going to have to objection-handle in order to get the number of meetings that we need.   Jason Bay: So to your point, it's a combination of all of those things. The email is only going to be as good as the person that you're sending it to. It's only going to be as good as your soft skills of being able to write a compelling message. And then the actual message itself. How am I talking to the person about what they're focused on, their priorities, problems that get in the way, et cetera? Yeah.   Jason Bay: So I want to look at all three of those areas. And I'm happy to get as tactical as you'd like to. I have example emails that we can talk about, all kinds of stuff. So we can get as tactical as you'd like, Will.   Will Barron: Cool. Well, we'll use that framework for the rest of this podcast. Now, one thing that's just cropped up in the mind of maybe 70% of the people listening to this, the 30,000 people that are going to listen to this, they're driving to work, they're going, “Jason, this sounds great, but it sounds like a lot of work, mate. That sounds like a lot more work than what I'm doing just clicking Send to spam 10,000 people that marketing have just given me.”   This is Why You Should Customise Your Emails and Not Just Spam the Marketplace · [11:10]    Will Barron: Can you just reiterate, you've already touched on this, but can you reiterate the numbers here of maybe it seems like a lot of work up-front, but you're going to send way less emails to get the same or better results? Just to any naysayers who would like to spam, just to knock that on the head before we get into the tactics.   “When you have to spam 500 people in order to get a meeting, you’ve potentially alienated hundreds of people that will never do business with you just simply because you're an email spammer. I think people don't take into consideration that when someone hits Unsubscribe or wants you to take them off your list, you can't ever communicate with them again.” – Jason Bay · [11:42]    Jason Bay: Yeah. It's like, why should you even care about having quality as a side of your approach? For sure. It's a fair question. I think about a couple of things. One, when you have to email 500 people in order to get a meeting and you look at the conversion rates on that and all of that other stuff, you potentially alienated hundreds of people that will never do business with you just simply because you're an email spammer.   Jason Bay: I think people don't take into consideration that when someone hits Unsubscribe or wants you to take them off your list, you can't ever communicate with them again. If someone asks you to take them off your list, you can't communicate with that person ever again.   Jason Bay: So if your goal is you're selling enterprise and you need to talk to chief technology officers or CIOs or whatever, you're putting yourself on a blacklist where your company can never contact these people ever again.   Jason Bay: I've had clients before I come in and work with them where their entire domain of email addresses is blacklisted. So they're trying to reach out to this company and nothing from the @company.com name will even come through to any of their email inboxes. That's how serious these companies are about it.   Jason Bay: So I like to think about… This is called second-order thinking is the mental model behind this. It's the consequences of the consequences. Right? It's the effect of the effect, in other words. So a way that you can think about this is what will the result be in the next one hour? What will be in the next one day, one week, one month, one year?   “Just because something will get you meetings here in the next hour or next day doesn't mean it's good over the long-term of what's going to happen over the next year. So we have to separate decisions versus outcomes. Also, just because we can get an outcome that we want in the short-term doesn't make it a good decision, and vice versa.” – Jason Bay · [13:06]    Jason Bay: Just because something will get you meetings here in the next hour or next day doesn't mean it's good over the long-term of what's going to happen over the next year. So we have to separate decisions versus outcomes.   Jason Bay: Just because we can get an outcome that we want in the short-term doesn't make it a good decision, and vice versa. Just because we don't get a good outcome short-term doesn't make it a good decision to get long-term results. So we really have to think about that. So you run the risk of burning out your market.   “I’ve also noticed that the people that respond to very spammy types of emails are never really great prospects.” – Jason Bay · [13:34]    Jason Bay: The other thing too that I noticed is that the people that respond to very spammy type of emails, they're never really great prospects.   Will Barron: Yep. I knew you were going to say this. This is exactly my experience and exactly my experience with the students in our training programme that come in from just spamming cold calls, spamming cold emails. They're like, “Why does everyone I speak to hate me? This sucks. I'm just getting rejected.”   Will Barron: And they're coming with this hard, thick, emotional shell. And then they're unable to have empathy for the customers that aren't, by happenstance, the right place with the right product at the right time.   Why You Never Want to Be Identified as the Spammy Salesperson by Any of Your Prospects · [14:15]   Will Barron: It makes me laugh so much the fact that you almost counterintuitively, by spamming people, you're starting the relationship as the spammy salesperson. And you've got to do so much work then to get just to level grounds with them to be able to have an adult business conversation.   Jason Bay: Yeah. Let alone the quality of that prospect. A lot of my clients are selling into chief executives at Fortune 1000s or large companies with 5,000-plus employees. And these C-level folks are really smart. You're not going to get any meetings with smart people that know that you're spamming them, that can tell you did zero research. You're just not going to get meetings with those people. You're going to get meetings with all the garbage in that list.   Jason Bay: So I would think about that. And we can address the time thing too because, basically, what we're doing is we're saying, hey, if we're going to do some up-front work and set up a system, we then can maintain over the long run a lot easier. But this is a lot more work to set up in the short-term up-front than for you to just write a couple of really bad email templates and to hit Send. So it is more work up-front for sure.   Will Barron: But then you get, you might have enough analogy for this, but I like to call it the Flywheel Effect. And this is HubSpot terminology. HubSpot talk about this all the time, the main sponsor of this show.   Will Barron: That you get that flywheel spinning and you start to build that momentum and you get a few deals from it, and then you're going to get referrals because you've sold appropriately and you've added value. Then you've got insights from your original customers that you can then share via cold outreach as an appropriate message. This industry insight that only you have as a salesperson, you can share that. And it goes bigger and bigger, and bigger.   Will Barron: And then you've done so much work six months ago, the leads that you spoke to that were like, “Oh, it's not the right time, I'm not going to respond to this,” they then have the problem, they have some kind of critical issue within the organisation and you're top of mind, you've done all the work, they reach out to you.   Will Barron: And this isn't as glamorous and as sexy as the idea of the Wolf of Wall Street where you're just calling people. Two grand, two grand, and you're just going through these numbers and crushing it. But I don't know that that's ever been a thing. And certainly, I'm 35, I've never seen that in any companies I've ever worked in that you were capable of doing that. I think that's a Hollywood stereotype of salespeople as opposed to what's really possible in the modern world.   Jason Bay: Yeah.   Will Barron: Let's get into tactics because that's what we're all here for. We're 15 minutes into the show and I think we're doing a bit of selling now, hopefully, to convince people because I think we're on the same wavelength with a lot of this stuff.   Applying the The 80/20 Principle to Your Cold Email Activities · [16:47]    Will Barron: How do we go about identifying who are… This is a whole episode in its own right. I appreciate that. For the specifics of cold email outreach in 2022, what do we need to know about a customer? What's the 20% of things that we need to know that's going to get us 80% of the results so that we can then send an effective cold email to them?   Jason Bay: Yeah. This is a great question. You wanted to know about trends in this episode too. This is the trend that I have seen really in the last couple of years is a lot of the tools are allowing you to sift through information a lot quicker.   Jason Bay: So what I want to do, I call this the perfect fit identifier, is with any type of cold outreach, whether that's cold email or I'm running a cadence or sequence or whatever it may be, what I want to think about is how can I retrace past successes? So where has my company had the most success? And I'm just going to reach out to companies and individuals and follow that same exact pattern and then I'm going to build upon it.   Jason Bay: So there's three kind of areas if you were building a Venn diagram that you'd want to look at. There's perfect fit on the account level, on the persona level, and then there's the values level. The values one I'll talk about here in a second, that's the most overlooked part, and it's also a way that you're going to customise the approach.   Jason Bay: So on the account level, let's say that it's one of two scenarios. People are usually either assigned a bunch of accounts or it's a bit of a free-for-all at your company. And maybe you have a territory you're working and you can reach out to anyone that you want to. Either way, you're going to have more opportunities than you can reach out to at a time.   Jason Bay: So on the account level, what I'm looking for is who best represents our case studies, our best success stories, the shortest sales cycles, biggest average deal size. I want to look for the verticals, the industry verticals, and the types of companies that best represent where it's going to be easiest for me to sell to, I have case studies, we have lots of content to show them.   Jason Bay: I want to be able to reach out and to cold email and say, “We've worked with companies exactly like you and they've dealt with these types of problems, and here are some of the things that they're doing. Can I share a case study with you or can I share a piece of content with you?” Whatever it might be.   Jason Bay: So I want the prospect to feel like, “Hey, we've worked with tonnes of people like you before.” On the second part of this, on the persona level-   Will Barron: Just before we move on from that, Jason-   Jason Bay: Oh, go ahead, Will.   Will Barron: … What does that look like practically? Is that we go through our CRM, find the top 10 biggest deals, and then go to those companies' competitors and say, “Hey, we've worked with X. We can do the same for Y?”   Will Barron: Do we look through the top 100 deals that we've ever done within the organisation and go, “Well, they were this company size in this kind of location, and we spoke to these individuals within the company?” What do we need to do very literally to put that into practise?   Jason Bay: Yeah. Good question. So CRM is a good place to do that. That's where I would start. And if you've closed a decent number of deals, I would just look at the deals that you've closed because those are the best stories that you can tell.   Jason Bay: But yeah, CRM, your deals that you've closed, your company's closed, whatever it might be. And I'm going to put those companies into a tool like LinkedIn Sales Navigator and I'm going to look at patterns across some of these companies. So, industry, employee count size, department growth, what's in their tech stack, et cetera.   Jason Bay: And then I'm going to look in my prospect list of a hundred accounts, let's say, and I'm going to look and see, out of these a hundred, which 20 or 30 are going to be the best to prioritise first? Because they best represent what's in our CRM and what we've closed, they best represent the case studies that we have. And again, I'm looking at industry employee count and demographic types of things.   Jason Bay: The other thing that you could look at too is some folks sell a solution where you can go onto someone's website, let's say, and you can see if they need it or not. So let's say you sell something that's a customer support type of solution or customer experience solution, and maybe part of what you do to make sure an account is a good fit is you go on their website and if they use a chatbot instead of an actual person, that makes them a good fit. So you're going to look for those kinds of indicators. So that's on the account level.   “People reverse-engineer closed deals, but usually, they only reverse-engineer from what happened in that first call or what happened in the second call, but they don't reverse-engineer how the meeting was landed for some reason. I don't know. People just never focus on that, yet it’s such a valuable process.” – Jason Bay · [21:14]    Jason Bay: On the persona level, I really want to… People reverse-engineer closed deals, but usually, they only reverse-engineer from what happened in that first call, what happens in the second call, who did we multi-thread into this? They do all of those things, but they don't reverse-engineer how the meeting was landed for some reason. I don't know. People just never focus on that.   Jason Bay: So take those deals that you looked at, those clients that you've personally closed, let's say, and what I want to do is reverse-engineer the outbound motion. So literally, who did I decide to reach out to? Who responded first? Who was the first meeting with?   Jason Bay: So I want to look at champions, influencers, and then decision-makers. And people can be a combination of one or all of those things, depending on the size of companies that you sell to. But I have a company that I work with that sells an automated welding solution. It's hardware as a service and software as a service. So they want to reach out to people in manufacturing and operations.   Jason Bay: One of their big champions they noticed they get the first conversation started with is at these manufacturing companies, it's plant managers, it's people that manage a plant. They're most impacted by the labour shortage around welders, for example.   Jason Bay: So I think another big mistake people make when they're figuring out who to target is they'd be like, “Well, I need the chief operating officer to sign off on this, so I'm only going to reach out to those people. They have all the decision-making power.”   Jason Bay: And you're like, “You know what? The chief operating officer is not even going to be in the plant where this tool would be installed, and they wouldn't be working with the people running the software either.” There's such bigger things that this person would be working on that they're not really going to care about that kind of stuff.   Jason Bay: So you need to have a mix. Theirs, it's manufacturing and operations. And the VPs in both of those areas are typically the biggest champions and influencers and decision-makers in the group, and then we have plant managers and folks like that that we would talk to.   Will Barron: That makes sense. I've had a bit of a revelation on this in the past 12 weeks or so, Jason. And this might be useful for you if you're selling to teams as well, sales teams. The person that is signing off on a lot of our Selling Made Simple Academy, the audience know where to find that, our training product, in the corporate environment for more than five to 10 people upwards are HR.   Will Barron: I would've never thought to sell into HR. And it's only that people come on as individuals and then they go, “Well, our company should be using this and I should be getting it for free. I shouldn't be spending my own money.” So they go and sell it internally on our behalf, we give them a commission for doing so if we get a deal done.   Will Barron: And HR is signing off on loads of our deals for onboarding new reps. So they're buying it for their entire teams and then buying extra seats for new people that are coming on board. I've got no data on this, no track record. It's only that I saw it happened twice in November, two decent size deals for us.   Will Barron: And then I sent an email to everyone who… We have a list of people who are in the product and who are trying to upsell it within their own organisation. And I said, “Hey, maybe you should drop this to HR.” We did a bunch of deals in January via HR. The CSO or CMO still signed off and had the budget, but it all went via HR.   Will Barron: And again, this is a trend that has probably existed for 10 years. I've only just picked up on it. Maybe it's just me being dim and not seeing the trend and not noticing these people in on the meetings on the email threads. But we've driven a couple of hundred grand in revenue just via noticing that alone. So finding out these trends can be incredibly powerful, and I'm talking from my own perspective here.   Jason Bay: Yeah. That's really interesting. I haven't noticed that before. And you gave me a little hack, actually, I need to start using.   Will Barron: Yeah. [inaudible 00:24:43] talk about it off-air. I'm explaining the pathway of it. The audience would find it interesting. You might find it interesting. But yeah, HR, not their budget, but they're the champions because they seemingly, in these enterprise companies, are organising a lot of the onboarding for new sales starters rather than you'd think a sales manager would be sat next to them going through all this.   How to Find and Get the Most Out of Your Internal Champion to Win the Deal · [25:04]   Will Barron: So I made the assumption that we are selling to VPs of sales. In reality, even though VP of sales, CMOs, CROs have the end budget, HR is the one going and doing the work on our behalf and grabbing that budget and getting these deals done.   Jason Bay: And that's really what you're trying to figure out when you think about the person is I'm trying to find the person that is working in a department that's going to have a lot of energy and passion around making this happen. Who cares about this the most? That's what the champion is.   Jason Bay: For me, it's always been sales managers. These are typically the people I interact with the most throughout the sales cycle, and they're able to do the work for me outside of our sales call time together to organise the troops, get their VP sold, all that kind of stuff.   Jason Bay: You bring up a really good point here in that you got to find those people. With the HR folks, for example, so this is kind of a messaging thing… Actually, well, I don't want to… I should probably finish this. So there's a third part of this before we get to messaging. But I think the HR one is a really good example that we can use.   Jason Bay: So we have accounts, personas, and then values is the other big one. This is the one where you can reach out to a company that seems like the perfect fit, you're talking to the perfect person, but they just don't really care about your solution. So I'll give you an example. Customer experience was something that I talked about earlier.   Jason Bay: If I'm reaching out to a Walmart, let's say, nothing against Walmart, but their value prop is being the lowest-cost provider, it's literally on their website. So it's not that they don't care about their customers. It's that, to be the lowest-cost provider, that doesn't typically mean that you're investing a lot in the customer experience.   Jason Bay: There are other things that are more important to them to hit that mission, that value of being the lowest-cost provider. So that would make Walmart not a great account in most cases if you're selling a solution like that.   The Three Personalization Buckets You Should Know About · [27:09]   Jason Bay: So the values, what I'm going to look at, is three buckets, and these are the three personalization buckets that we would use too. It's education; so what are they educating their customer base about? That's going to be a little bit more applicable if you're selling to companies that are also B2B.   Jason Bay: I'm going to look at accomplishments; so what does this company brag about? So that might be company awards. It might be workplace awards that they've won. It might be how they're so awesome with certain things. It might be testimonies. It might be case studies.   Jason Bay: And then the last bucket is investing; so where are they investing their dollars? Are they hiring people right now? Are they acquiring companies? Are they merging with companies? Are there new products coming out, new services, et cetera? And tech stack is a really big part of that too.   Jason Bay: So if we were looking at that customer experience solution again, I would be looking for customers… Or accounts, excuse me, that have clear signs that they care about customer support and they care about customer experience. So are they really proud about displaying their response times and their 100% guaranteed policy? And have they won awards around the level of customer service that they add? Do they have content about the service, et cetera?   Jason Bay: So I'm looking for those three buckets as well, and that's going to drive a lot of the messaging that I'm going to send these folks.   Will Barron: Got it. Got it. The answer to the following few questions for me is sign up to Jason's course training. And this is, obviously, more in-depth there and he'll hold your hand and help you through it.   The Messaging Matric: Understanding The Engagement Elements of a Cold Email Outreach · [28:51]    Will Barron: But let's assume now that we've got what we think… We can use the scientific method to make a hypothesis and test and refine some of this over time, right? But we think, via our hypothesis of what our product does, the value, the account, the personas within there that we're in… We've got the right people. We've got a list of 10 accounts.   Will Barron: What does the engagement element of this look like now? How can we take what we've learned and turn that into an email? We'll stick with email specifically. But an email, or it could be cold outreach [inaudible 00:29:11], but we'll stick with email. An email that gets a response, that elicits some kind of reaction in the buyer.   Jason Bay: Yeah. So we want to create what's called a messaging matrix. And this messaging matrix is going to give us swipe copy for emails, it's going to tell us what to say in a talk track, et cetera.   Jason Bay: So what I want you to imagine is I want you to pick a prospect out and I want you to imagine that the prospect is on a path. I call this the prospect path. So they have a current state. And in this current state, they have priorities.   Jason Bay: So there are initiatives. This year, in 2022, as we're recording this, there are two or three things that are at the top of their priorities list. And what you're going to find is there's actually a pattern across all of the people that you reach out to around what they're typically trying to accomplish.   Jason Bay: And then there's things that they're doing to get that job done right now. So there's the solutions that they're using, strategies, tactics, competitors maybe that they're using to help make way on those priorities.   Jason Bay: And then somewhere along that journey, they run into problems. These are things that get in the way of those priorities, these are things that are impeding their team's progress. And then they have aspirations, so things that they're trying to accomplish six to 12 months down the road.   Jason Bay: I want to give you an example of what some of this sounds like. And then what we can actually do with that is I'll talk to you about how that translates into an email. So I work with a company that sells into VPs of human resources. And it's not a staffing company necessarily. It's more of a company that has a software solution where people can go in and hire some of these factory workers and people working on the floors and that sort of stuff.   Jason Bay: So with these VPs of HR, what we found out about the prospects is they want to accomplish a couple of things. So there are two big categories and priorities of things that they want to accomplish. And I'm looking here at their messaging matrix. So one of those is employee satisfaction and productivity, and the other is HR effectiveness.   Jason Bay: They got this information because we looked at all the sales calls, all the discovery calls that they do, the demo calls, and we just asked prospects, “What are your top two or three priorities this year? What would make this conversation relevant for you?” Et cetera. All you got to do is ask.   Will Barron: I know I'm interrupting you, Jason.   Jason Bay: Oh, go ahead.   Why You’re Likely to Get More Done By Simply Asking Your Prospects What They Want · [31:30]    Will Barron: And I'm sorry to keep butting in here, but I think that needs reiterating. How much of a hack is it just to ask your prospects what they want or previous customers what they wanted and what you delivered on and what got them interested?   Will Barron: Salespeople just never… Companies never do this. This is how we found out about the HR hack, getting our product into these enterprise organisations. How important is it just to ask your prospects and ask your best customers, “What did you want from us? What did we provide? What made you reply to an email?”   Jason Bay: It's the oldest advice I could possibly give someone that creates any type of content, right? You're 35, I'm about to turn 33. It's the advice we read about 10, 15 years ago or whenever we got into sales around the language, right? Just ask your customers.   Jason Bay: And there's a bunch of different things we don't have time to get into with how you can find that information. But the bottom line is I would just ask. Every sales call moving forward, before you dig into it, hey, just to keep the conversation relevant for you today, what are the top two or three priorities that are most relevant so I can make this conversation as useful for you as possible today? And people will just share them with you and you're going to find patterns, and you need to write them down word for word.   Jason Bay: So I'll go through one of these. So for the VP of human resources, it wasn't just employee satisfaction or productivity. It was how do we take care of existing employees to increase our workplace ranking and retention?   Jason Bay: So it was very specific around how do we demonstrate that we're a great workplace to work for so that we can win awards and use as a recruiting tool? How can we retain people so that we have great Glassdoor reviews and we have positive references and things like that?   Jason Bay: So the current way that they're getting that done, so that's the next part of the messaging matrix. We got priority, how they're getting it done right now. They're relying on in-house employees to get the job done. So they have an in-house team of recruiters that are going out and finding these people.   Jason Bay: The problem with that is that their current solution leads to a lot of turnover and burnout, workers don't feel valued, and there's a lot of job abandonment due to poor working conditions, long hours, and shift inflexibility. So this is stuff that's happening on factory floors like let's say an Amazon, for example.   Jason Bay: So once I know that's the problem, then I'll look at the aspirations. So what do these people, when they come into sales calls, what do they tell us they're trying to accomplish in six to 12 months? They want to be able to focus on culture, diversity, and inclusion, to hire and promote from within, and increase employee satisfaction and retention.   Jason’s Guide to an Effective Cold Email Strategy · [34:10]   Jason Bay: So that was a lot of information right there and you might be like, well, how the hell do I turn that into a cold email, dude? That's a lot. So the cold email structure, I'm going to give you an example. I'll read off the email. I'll give you an example of what it sounds like first and then we can deconstruct it a bit.   Jason Bay: So here's the email. And it actually follows a very close kind of template to the messaging matrix. “Hi, Andrew.” Personalization. “Saw that you're offering a $1,000 signing bonus, on-demand pay, and retention bonuses for the positions you're hiring for right now.”   Jason Bay: So you remember the three values that we talked about around education, accomplishments, and investments? Well, one of the signs of investment is hiring people. And when you look in those job ads, you can see how they're incentivizing people to work for their company right now.   Jason Bay: So that was that first line. Saw that you're offering a $1,000 signing bonus, on-demand pay, and retention bonuses for the positions you're hiring right now.   Jason Bay: This next part is I'm going to speak to the priority of these VPs of HR that I talked to. This got me thinking about how you plan on increasing the speed of hiring and reducing the cost of acquisition, a focus I'm hearing from many VPs of HR in a similar position.   Jason Bay: So all I did was circle back to the priority, the thing that people are trying to accomplish. And this actually is in alignment with that second priority, the HR effectiveness. How do we improve our hiring practises to increase the speed of hiring and lower the cost of acquisition? This is exactly what they would tell us, word for word. So I'm using their words in the email.   Jason Bay: And then I'm going to drop a couple of names of companies that we've worked with. Coca-Cola and Good Foods are using our help to avoid running into labour bottlenecks by keeping hiring costs down and hiring timelines short.   Jason Bay: So that was the big part that they talked about was a problem. And again, this is actually from that second priority, not the one I listed off earlier. They said costs are high, candidate quality is poor, timeline of hire is too long, it's very labour-intensive, and candidates are not responding to our job ads. So I addressed that right there.   Jason Bay: Coca-Cola and Good Foods are using our help to avoid running into labour bottlenecks by keeping hiring costs down and hiring timelines short. Can I get an opportunity to share how this could be helpful for you at ABC company? Jason.   Jason Bay: So I've incorporated, in that email, all of those elements. I've talked to the priority, the thing that they're trying to accomplish. And I'm going to read that second one off right now, just so it's less confusing.   Jason Bay: So the priority, again, was HR effectiveness. How do we improve our hiring practises to increase the speed of hiring and lower the cost of acquisition? What am I doing to accomplish that right now? I'm working with an outside firm or I'm using an in-house recruiting team.   Jason Bay: That's a problem because costs are really high. When we work with an outside firm candidate, quality is poor, timeline to hire is too long. Or an in-house recruiting team, the problem is that it's very labour-intensive and candidates are not responding to our job ads. And what do I want? And I want to improve our hiring process so that we never run into a labour bottleneck ever again.   Jason Bay: These companies are literally having to put production on hold and turn away orders and business because they can't hire fast enough. So my email is just addressing all of those things in that order.   Jason Bay: We can go ahead and pause there. I'm sure you have a lot of questions on the email. We can go in-depth and break it down. But an email like this would get a 5% to 10%-plus reply rate. If we send it to the right person, we look for that hiring trigger. And we know that the language is really sharp too because we tested a bunch of iterations of this.   Why Simple, Professionally Written Emails Yield the Best Results · [37:36]    Will Barron: My question, Jason, is when this is done correctly and we've done the work up-front and we know what we're talking about, and we're making a few assumptions here that the salesperson is somewhat knowledgeable about the industry, their product, their space, otherwise, it'd be very difficult to come up with these other than asking.   Will Barron: Obviously, any chimp can ask you your best customers, why they want to work with you and all this kind of stuff, and the problems that they've had, and trends that they might have in the future.   Will Barron: So assuming that it's a relatively educated salesperson, they've been through the process that you've just outlined, and they've put all these steps into place, that was quite a simple, straightforward, logical email. Is that what it should look like?   Will Barron: Because if I got an email like that in the circumstance that you just outlined, if I was that potential buyer, at the very minimum, I'd go, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” And if I don't respond right now, I'm probably not clicking the Spam button. And maybe it might take a few more emails because I'm just busy and you need to catch me at the right moment where I've got my calendar open, where I can say yeah, let's jump on a call.   Will Barron: But should the email just be as succinct and as logical and as… That was quite a professionally written email as well. I'm assuming there was no weird GIFs in there and memes and stuff to try and grab attention, right?   “People think they have to be really creative but I like what I refer to as a boring approach. You don't want to bore the prospect to death, but I want to be so insanely straightforward and obvious about what my email is about that the prospect is not having to invest any willpower into figuring out what my email is about” – Jason Bay · [38:59]    Jason Bay: No. Yeah. So you mentioned something really good. People think they have to be really creative. I like what I refer to as a boring approach. You don't want to bore the prospect to death, but I want to be so insanely straightforward and obvious about what this is that the prospect is not having to invest any willpower into figuring out like, I don't know what this is. Does this even apply to me?   Jason Bay: There's some stuff going on on LinkedIn right now that I think is a little bit concerning, where the content is, basically, if you confuse the prospect, they'll respond to you. And I'm like, “I don't think so.” Especially an executive.   Will Barron: You might get a response, right? But the response is what we talked about at the top of the show of you're now the spammy salesperson who's conned the prospect into getting on a call, and that you're immediately 20 steps behind where you could be if you sent a more appropriate, adult, conversational email where it's, here's where you are. Here's where you want to be. You're blocking your pathway. Perhaps here's how we can get you from one side to the other.   Will Barron: A bit of social proofing that we've done this for other companies similar to yours, similar size, similar industry. Even better if it's a competitor because hey, you don't want them getting away from where you are. You probably want to work with us as well.   The Most Effective Cold Emails are Simpler Than You Might Think · [40:13]   Will Barron: Are we over-complicating all of this, Jason, in the fact that that is just a straightforward professional email that can be templated in the idea of, you might do things differently, but this is how we structure our emails, of current state, future states, what's blocking them, how you get from one side to the other, social proof that they should listen to us.   Will Barron: Is that enough to get attention? I'm asking you the same question again because I really want to double down on it. Is that enough to get attention? Or do we need videos? Do we need to be doing an email, immediately calling, adding them on LinkedIn, and then doing some weird bullshit on LinkedIn to get their attention as well?   Will Barron: Or it's just a well-researched, well-written, professional, but still somewhat conversational… We're not being weird. We're not typing a letter here in 1984. But is just a professional, straightforward, conversational value-adding email like that enough?   Jason Bay: I don't know if it's enough all by itself. I think that definitely couple it with a phone call. So the cool thing about this messaging matrix is those two priorities that I mentioned, employee satisfaction and productivity and HR effectiveness, that's the same thing I've used in my opener for a cold call.   Jason Bay: Hey, Will. Jason with so-and-so company. You got a minute for me to tell you why I'm calling? You can let me know if you want to keep chatting. Will says yes.   Jason Bay: Well, hey, I'm talking to a lot of VPs of HR right now and I'm hearing them prioritise one of two things. I'm really curious what it is for you. One is around employee satisfaction and productivity. So how do we take care of existing employees to increase our workplace retention?   Jason Bay: Or two, HR effectiveness. How do we improve our hiring practises to increase the speed of hiring and lower the cost of acquisition? I'm really curious, which one of those two is a bigger focus for you right now?   Jason Bay: So I think the messaging repurposed, this is how you can reduce some of the work. So if you repurpose that same message into phone, I could record a video too, Will, with that. I could say, hey, I could share my screen on the video and do something really simple and just narrate the research as I'm doing it.   Jason Bay: Hey, Will, I was on your website. I saw that you're offering a $1,000 signing bonus, on-demand pay, and retention bonuses for the positions you're hiring for right now. Typically, what I hear from people like you is a focus around one of two things, bam or bam.   Jason Bay: You're just repurposing the same message across a different medium. So repurpose. Repurposing is the big… I mean, it's a huge content marketing hack, as you know, right? You take these episodes and repurpose a best-of. Or you take five episodes on cold email and you just summarise your best parts of it and you put it into a video on YouTube, right? It's content marketing 101 to repurpose the stuff.   Jason Bay: Statistically, less than half of people are going to open up the emails that you send. So make sure you're repurposing that content and reusing it.   Jason Bay: So to answer your question, in email… And I don't think you were asking it in this way necessarily. I just want to be clear for everyone listening and watching. Sending one email, no matter how great it is, probably not going to get a response if you only send one email.   Jason Bay: I need to send multiple emails to this person. I need to call am. I need to reach out to them on LinkedIn. But I don't need to do that in a way that is inauthentic. I could just repurpose the same messaging across those different mediums.   Jason Bay: One of the things I really like to do is to bump emails and to not do it in a pesky way. So I would bump this email if they didn't get a response. And in two days I wouldn't say, “Hey, did you get my email? I noticed you opened up my email but didn't get a response.” Or, “Hey, I noticed I haven't gotten a response from you.” Just a simple, “Any thoughts?” Any thoughts? Question mark. Jason. That gets a pretty high reply rate.   Jason Bay: So a really simple bump email can work really well. There's another type of bump email that works pretty good too. So we did talk about GIFs. The best GIFs are the ones that you make. So if you could make a short video or a GIF of you holding a piece of paper that says, “Any thoughts on it?” And you're pointing up at the email.   Jason Bay: BombBomb is a video platform, they popularised that approach, to give them credit. I've seen that work pretty well too, but I wouldn't send that to a VP of operations.   Will Barron: No.   Jason Bay: You know what I mean?   Will Barron: I was letting you finish that, Jason.   Jason Bay: I might send it to someone in tech.   Will Barron: I was like, “Maybe don't send that to the CEO.” Maybe that you not send that to a Ballmer over at Microsoft or someone. But I really appreciate what you're saying there.   Will Barron: We've not got time. We'll have you back on in the not too distant future to dive into this deeper because I think you might be into some of the psychology of this as well and understanding it. But when you share a similar effective message over and over, you add a layer of congruence to what you're sharing with the prospect.   Will Barron: And it might be one, two, three. There might be layers and there might be layers of the same problem on you, so to speak, for the prospect. But when you're sharing one, two, maybe three different problems and how you can solve them for the prospect over the course of a week, a month, six months, whatever it is; depending on the size of the deal, what it's worth, and appropriate doing; you're congruent. And that shows the prospect that you're adamant in what you're doing.   Will Barron: What a hack does is go, “Well, we can do this. And we've got a discount on next month. And then this week we've just added this feature which might not be relevant but might be relevant. Hey, can you get back to me on this and this?” And you go all over the place and you have commission breath, and it sounds desperate. You're just trying anything to hook them, to claw them in.   Will Barron: Well, if you've got a great product that solved this problem for people similar to your prospect, it's almost going from all this, from a standpoint of, hey, it's almost inevitable that you're going to work with us. I'm going to keep following up because I'm a professional.   Will Barron: And eventually, we're going to get a time booked in the diary. And whether that includes a GIF or not is obviously going to depend on the person. You can send me a GIF all day. I love GIFs.   Will Barron: But you send in a congruent message with regularity. I don't know if that is a real word, I've just made it up. Over the long-term, it shows that you're a professional salesperson, as opposed to someone who's just going to do, as you alluded to before with this weird stuff that's going on on LinkedIn to trick people into getting on calls and follow up on emails.   How to Avoid Stone Age Selling · [46:26]    Will Barron: You're not having to go back to the stone age of selling, which is manipulation, weird five-word hacks to get into someone's subconscious and drive up their 11 levels of emotion and all this weird stuff that happened in the '80s and '90s.   Jason Bay: Yeah. You don't really got to do a lot of that at all. I think of this… Your sequence is like a personalised ad campaign. The average person needs to see an ad six to eight-plus times in order to even click on it. And that's from something that they might like actually. That might be a retargeting ad that they are seeing from Amazon or Nike.   Jason Bay: So my advice is always, don't go into this situation where you're prospecting to someone and you expect to have better brand awareness than Nike or Google because they have to put multiple impressions in front of people to get them to click on stuff too. You're no different.   Jason Bay: You're probably not working at a company that has that level of brand recognition. Most of us aren't. And if you are, that's awesome, but most of us aren't. So treat it like a personalised ad impression where you're putting a custom message or ad in front of someone.   Jason Bay: They're not going to always click or respond in everything that you say, but that doesn't mean that that first email they didn't respond to wasn't a big reason why they responded to the third or fourth email or why they decided to pick up your call.   Will Barron: Yep. It's almost like we're telling a story, right? It's progressing. There's going to be peaks. There's going to be troughs. We're going to try and raise emotion. We're going to try to add logic to it. We're going to make things simple. Maybe there's an element of making things more complex. And then you go back and forth, and it's going to be an experiment.   Will Barron: And we'll wrap up with this. We're using the scientific method, right? We're making these hypotheses, we're testing them. What I find is that when salespeople get that message, they just can dominate a marketplace. Maybe it lasts six months, maybe it lasts 18 months, depending on what's going on in the market, your competitors, and what your customers are doing as well.   Parting thoughts · [48:35]    Will Barron: But that's when salespeople hit target, hit target, do pretty well, make some money, and then just make stupid money for six months, 12 months, and when sales becomes an incredibly lucrative and fun place to be. So with that, Jason, tell us more about Blissful Prospecting. Tell us more about the work that you're doing over there and how we can get in touch and follow you, mate.   Jason Bay: Yeah. This is super fun. This is what I eat, live, breathe. I prospect every week. Outbound is my thing. There's a couple of ways that you can get more of what we talked about today.   Jason Bay: So blissfulprospecting.com, tonnes of free content on there. So we got a podcast. There's guides, webinars, all kinds of stuff that we're doing there on outbound. And then if you're a rep, we have a programme called Outbound Squad, and it's pretty cool. So you get coaching from me, you get a community that you get to interact with, and just all of my best course content that companies like Zoom and Medallia and some of my other clients see, same exact content there.   Jason Bay: And then I also work with sales teams too. So if you're wanting to implement something like this, we have an accelerator programme where we take you through this. You get to work one-on-one with me over six weeks, and that's a lot of fun. And we deliver some good results there too. So blissfulprospecting.com is the best place to check out everything.   Will Barron: Great stuff. We'll link to blissfulprospecting.com, your podcast, everything else that we talked about, and I'll probably link some blog posts of the specific things that you've mentioned in this episode as well where appropriate in the show notes of this episode over at salesman.org.   Will Barron: And with that, Jason, I appreciate you, mate, for your time, your energy, your insights on this. The fact that I think you're a man after my own heart of putting this into frameworks and systematising a lot of it as opposed to just dumping it out there and hoping people can follow along.   Will Barron: I appreciate that from you and your work, mate. And with that one, thank you again for joining us on the Salesman Podcast.   Jason Bay: Yeah. Thank you for having me.

In sales, facing rejection is part of the game. But just because  rejection is a given for salespeople, it doesn’t mean you have to let it drag you down. In this post, I’m sharing 5 ways to overcome rejection that’ll put you in the right mindset to pick  yourself up, and put yourself on the path towards blowing past your sales goals. Sales rejection hurts Now, if you’re in any kind of sales role, you know how it feels to be rejected by a prospect It’s happened to me. It’s happened to you. It’s happened to the greats like Ogilvy, Ziglar, Carnegie, even that guy from the ShamWow commercials. Is that surprising? It shouldn’t be. The point is this—even if you’re selling the most amazing, mind-blowing, revolutionary product on the market today, some of your prospects will say “no” when you call or email them.  sno. And when that happens, it can be demoralizing. It can sap your motivation to keep making calls. It can throw you off your trajectory towards hitting your goals. And it can ravage the sense of fulfillment you get from connecting people with a product you truly believe in. But the motivation, the drive, the purpose—it can all be restored when you reframe rejection with the five concepts I’m going to share with you in this video. And these aren’t “hacks” or “quick wins” or any other (frankly bullshit) jargon terms. There is no quick fix for this kind of stuff. BUT if you want to take this given of sales and turn it on its head, you can start by internalizing these 5 concepts about rejection. 1: The Prospect Isn’t Rejecting YOU The concept that the prospect isn’t rejecting you personally. They’re rejecting your pitch, product or timing. There’s a reason we started with this one. Because honestly, this is the concept you’re going to easily improve  the most from. Concept #4 is similar but more on that in a sec. Now, when you hear that dreaded no, the dial tone, or the deafening silence on the other end of the line, it isn’t necessarily you that the prospect isn’t responding to. It’s what you’re saying that they’ve ignored. There are two main reasons you’re getting a negative response with your cold outreach Reason #1: It’s Your Pitch If your pitch isn’t hitting all the right pain points, then your prospect isn’t going to see the value of your product. The lesson here? Refine the pitch. Dive deeper into who your audience is, what makes them tick, and what problems they’re grappling with. Reason #2: It’s Your Product If after tweaking your pitch you’re still getting too many negative responses, your product just might not be a fit for the market. If that’s the case, it’s time to do some real research and re-evaluate your target audience. 2: Your Prospect’s on Autopilot Next up, it could just be that your prospect is on autopiliot when you try to engage with them. This concept is mostly for cold-call situations, but it can apply to cold emails, social messages, and a slew of other outreach methods too. When you’re reaching out to your prospect, you’re jarring them out of being on autopilot. They’re knee-deep in the numbers, organizing their desktop, or doing one of a million other things that, guess what, have nothing to do with you. When you give them a ring, they’re still in that other mode. And that means they’re going to respond reflexively with a “no” rather than do the work of understanding what you’re trying to tell them. Think of it like this—when you walk into a shop and some spotty teenager stands at the door and asks if you need help, you automatically and instinctively say “no”, right? Same goes with your prospect on a cold call. Again, the buyers state of mind is not your fault. So appreciate this, humbly when you do interrupt your prospects and ask if there’s a better time for a follow up call. 3: You’re Playing a Numbers Game Point number 3, remember that to a certain extent, you’re playing a numbers game. When you get down to it, sales is a numbers game. If you’re doing good work and documenting your wins and losses, you already know that it takes working with on average, say, four prospects before you close on one of them. And if you’re not keeping track of these metrics, I highly recommend starting today. This information on your win/loss ratio tells you that for every perceived failure (a hang-up, a negative response, a no response), you’re actually getting one step closer to closing a deal. So rather than dwelling on the “no”, think of them like the necessary steps to securing a “yes” from a prospect and converting them into a buyer. Now, similar to concept #1 (the prospect isn’t rejecting you personally) is the next concept #4. Both are valuable lessons you can use to learn about your prospect and actually sell them better, later. 4: A “No” Often Means “Not Right Now” A “no” from a prospect when selling to them, often means “not right now.” And in fact, it rarely rarely means “never, forever.” You might have the perfect product, a primo pitch, and a very qualified  prospect. But if the timing isn’t right, they’re still not going to be able to give you their business. This, however, is not a loss. Instead, it’s up to you to determine the why behind the prospect’s “no” before cutting the conversation with them short. If the prospect gets back to you with “Oh, it’s just a really busy quarter for us” or “we’re right in the middle of a transition period,” this is a sign that you should reach out later on. So, ask them when is a good time to follow up before hopping off the phone. With a few simple questions, you’ve turned what other salespeople would perceive as a negative experience into potential business further down the line. Alright, last but certainly not least is an idea you should remember for the rest of your sales career… 5: This Is Just Business This is just business. When you get rejected, you aren’t being attacked. You aren’t under assault. And the prospect isn’t going to jump through the screen via Zoom and strangle you for pitching a product they don’t like. The stakes—the real stakes—are actually pretty damn low. You’re just doing business. And you’re just doing it for a company that you represent. The sooner you adopt the “it’s just business” attitude, the sooner you can accept that: No one is going to actually hurt you here. You’re just doing your job. That’s all. And the sooner you learn to cope with rejection, the better you’re going to be at that job. Simple as that. Summary So there you have it—5 concepts to keep in mind any time you get that dreaded “no” during your cold selling outreach. And if you want to be truly successful as a sales rep, you should: Reframe your rejections using these five concepts Learn from your mistakes Adjust your strategy accordingly Because when you can do that, nothing will be able to hold you back from crushing your goals.

Geoff Woods is the Co-Founder & President of ProduKtive, the training company behind The ONE Thing and the host of The ONE Thing podcast. In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Geoff explains what it means to actually be productive and how we do more of it. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Geoff Woods Host of The ONE Thing Podcast Resources: Geoff’s LinkedIn The1thing.com Book: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results Transcript Will Barron: Hi, I'm Will. And welcome to the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we're looking at how you can prioritise your time and become effective. Today's guest has been on the show a bunch of times, I've had tremendous value from every time Geoff has been on. Our guest is Geoff Woods. Geoff Woods is the co-founder and president of ProduKtive, the training company behind The ONE Thing and host of The ONE Thing podcast. Geoff, welcome back to the show.   Geoff Woods: Will, great to be here.   Will Barron: I'm glad to have you on, mate. Last time, you gave me, and we don't need to do this again because it was a little bit painful, but you gave me a bit of a pain in the arse. A pain in the arse? You gave me a bit of a kick in the arse, which gave me some pain points that I resolved and the business is doing way better on the back of it. So I thank you for that. And for people who are unfamiliar with that previous episode, I'll link it in the show notes of this one over at salesman.org.   The One Thing Preventing Salespeople From Prioritizing Their Time and Becoming Effective Sales Professionals · [00:49]    Will Barron: And with that Geoff, becoming effective, right? Let me phrase it in The ONE Thing kind of language here, what is the one thing out of everything else, what is the one thing that typically holds sales people back from prioritising their time and becoming effective in the marketplace?   Geoff Woods: Feeling like they have too much to do and not enough time. I remember when my full-time job was as a salesperson in corporate sales. You wake up with big goals, you are naturally an ambitious person who not just sets goals, but you go after them with enthusiasm. And it can be really easy to see all the stuff that's on your plate, knowing the number that you got to hit, telling yourself, all the things you got to do to get there. Along the while, you've got all these administrative things you've got to do, you've got all these customer issues you've got to deal with and you can be really busy and look up at the end of the day and genuinely wonder, “What did I get done?”   Are You an Effective Salesperson? Here’s How to Gauge Yourself · [01:55]    Will Barron: Is there a definition, Geoff, of what effective is? Because I feel like if we were having a leadership conversation or you were coming in and coaching an executive team, “Well effectiveness for executives is this, this, and this.” Is there a broad definition of what being effective in a role is? And how does that then apply to sales people?   Geoff Woods: Well, I think we need to start with, what does it mean to be productive?   Will Barron: Sure.   “There's a difference between being busy and being productive. Being busy is just taking a lot of action. Being productive is taking action on the most important things.” – Geoff Woods · [02:15]    Geoff Woods: There's a difference between being busy and being productive. Being busy is just taking a lot of action. Being productive is taking action on the most important things. I think first and foremost, Will, people have to get clear on what matters most. Then once you're clear on what matters most, are you being efficient and effective at doing those things?   “People have to get clear on what matters most and ask themselves if they’re being efficient and effective at doing those things. A simple question you can ask yourself is, “Am I doing the best that I can do? Or am I doing the best that can be done?” – Geoff Woods · [02:26]    Geoff Woods: A simple question you can ask yourself, is, “Am I doing the best that I can do? Or am I doing the best that can be done?” I think a lot of us will rely on our natural abilities, we call it being entrepreneurial, and we muscle our way to a result based on our natural abilities. But the truth is, if you really want to be effective, we've got to acknowledge that other people have gone before us.   Geoff Woods: And frankly, the best that you can do today is irrelevant. If that's your focus, you are actually imposing a ceiling over your achievement. The opportunity is to ask the question, “What's the best that can be done?” Study the best of the best, model that behaviour and make it your own. That's a whole new ballgame.   Will Barron: I find this fascinating, right? So when we're training people in our training programme over at salesman.org, part of what we do in the very first workshop is go, “Right, put your sales target to one side for a second.” And everyone's like, “Why? That's what I'm here for.” Well, kind of. But then I explain that a sales target, depending whether it's a small company, big company, comes from just weird random places.   Will Barron: If it's a public company, “Well, we've got to do more than what we did last year. So the shareholders get value and the stock price goes up.” Okay, so what does that mean? Well, forget everything that happened in the past. Forget the market as it currently is. Your sales target across the organisation is this. Then it's broken down your sales leadership divisions, right? Then it goes down to a sales manager who may like you, they may not like you, but they want to get their targets as small as possible for the team so that they've got the most chance of hitting their target. Then it goes down to your territory. Then it goes down to your customers. Then it goes down to what's happened on the territory in the past.   Why Targets and Quotas Should Never Be Your Primary Focus in Sales ·  [04:15]    Will Barron: And by the end of it, and tell me if you disagree here, but in my experience sales targets don't really mean all that much. So we're aiming towards a number that's important because we've got to hit it, we've got to smash it to make some money, right? But there's an opportunity here for self-limiting. And also if there's a number that makes us feel uncomfortable, the opposite of this, of not putting in the effort. Because we feel like we're never going to get there on this, am I right here, sometimes, maybe quite often, an arbitrary number that doesn't mean anything when you look at it as to the actual scope of revenues available in the marketplace for you to collect?   Geoff Woods: Well, I think we can spend a lot of time debating if the number's the right number or how important the number is. But at the end of the day, the thing I learned in sales is you don't get a say. The number's the number. So I think the question we can ask is, how does that serve us? And I think this is where we have to acknowledge what is the purpose of a goal or what is the purpose of that quota? A lot of people think it's to achieve a result.   “The purpose of your goal is less about the result and more about informing who you have to become to achieve that goal.” – Geoff Woods · [05:24]    Geoff Woods: The thing that I've learned being in partnership with my two partners who co-authored The ONE Thing is that the purpose of that goal is less about the result and more about informing who you have to become. So I think a lot of us know what it feels like to have a number and we can break that down into monthly targets. And we wake up today and we go, “I got to close a hundred grand.”   “Unfortunately, most people don't know how to turn expected results into an activity.” – Geoff Woods · [05:54]    Geoff Woods: The problem is, based on that, what should be on your calendar today? And that's where people go, “I have no idea.” We don't know how to turn a result into an activity. And I think that's the opportunity. Whatever the number is, it's been handed to you. Who's the person you have to become that exceeds that number? What do your activities have to look like? What are the type of accounts you are going to focus on? Who are the call points? What's your approach going to be? And how do you make sure that as you go through your day, your time is an investment and not an expense?   Will Barron: So we'll get onto this idea of… Because we've got a training on this and it's an hour-long workshop. And maybe you subconsciously put this into my brain in previous conversations, that you're not going to hit the goals unless you become the person who's capable of hitting the goals, right? And this has gone back into philosophy, there's other people who commented this. We'll come back to it in a second.   Will Barron: But I just want to double down on this idea of, because I think I might have not explained it very well and I want the audience to comprehend this. I'm not saying that we should debate numbers. I'm saying the number is almost irrelevant in our performance, in that there's only so much cash in the marketplace. We are a person that is capable of achieving so much of that cash. And so, as long as the number is appropriate that we're going to make money and it's not 27 million when the marketplace is only going to have the opportunity to, no matter who we are, to provide a certain amount under that. As long as it's appropriate, the number is irrelevant.   The Way to Achieving Goals is By Becoming the Person Who’s Capable of Achieving That Goal · [07:40]   Will Barron: So coming onto this idea then of… Because this is quite out there, right? People sometimes take a bit to comprehend this, this idea that you can set a goal that's unachievable until you become the person who can achieve the goal. Do you have a better way of clarifying that because I struggle to get those words out and communicate it? But I know that when this clicks and when it's clicked with me in the past, that I've had to make changes, I have to hire people, we've had to change our coaching to be able to achieve these goals, immediately I feel like a wall has been lifted. I feel like there's been something dragging at my heels, pulling me back in my performance that's suddenly let go.   Will Barron: I can come up with all these metaphors to describe it. But do you have a way of talking about what we touched on there, describing it in a more eloquent way than what I have done?   Geoff Woods: Sure. So for those of you who are listening via audio, I'm now showing my document camera and I'm going to doodle some things. So I'll narrate what I'm doing. So there's three types of goals and I'm drawing an axis where there's an X and a Y axis. On the vertical axis, this represents the size of the question that we ask. The higher up we go vertically, the bigger the question. The bigger the question, the further out to the right, it requires that we search for the answer.   Geoff Woods: Now, most people, when they set their goals, set them based on what they think they can do this year. So they're looking at their current skillset. They're looking at their current comfort zone. It's a relatively small question to ask, which means they don't have to search for that big of an answer. And they set a goal that's doable.   Geoff Woods: Now, if you're listening to this show, that's probably not you because you're investing in your education. So you're probably used to setting stretch goals, going to the outer edge of your comfort zone and skillset and setting a goal that, you know what, I'm not a 100% sure, I'm going to have to stretch to get there. So we've got doable goals, we've got stretch goals.   Geoff Woods: Here's the problem, neither of these are where extraordinary lies. Because we are still shackling ourself to our current skillset and our current comfort zone. But the thing that we also know, that we sometimes forget, is our knowledge, our skillset, our comfort zone, we can change that over time. So the thing that I've learned from my partners is to ask questions that are so big they require that you search for answers that are so far out there. That you set goals that we call impossible possible goals. You're not even sure if it's possible.   Geoff Woods: I think Elon Musk is a great example of this. He said, “You know what? I'm not just out to build an electric car. I'm not even out to build the greatest electric car ever created. I actually want to develop a human colony on Mars.” And he set a goal that's so far out there that people are probably thinking he's crazy. But once he set that goal, it required that he reverse engineer who's the person he has to become today so that when he takes actions, they're on the trajectory that could line up with that future.   Geoff Woods: So I'll give you a real world example of this. When my partners, Gary and Jay, wrote The ONE Thing, Gary looked to Jay and said, “How many books will we need to sell in the first week to hit number one bestseller status?” And Jay did the research and he came back and said, “Gary, I think we need to sell about 40,000 copies in the first week.” Will, do you have any sense how many copies the average business book sells in it's lifetime?   Will Barron: I'll give some context. A guest on the show recently who's had a pretty successful book launch did about 4,000 in the first week.   Geoff Woods: That's amazing.   Will Barron: Yep, exactly. Because the average business book sells 500 in its lifetime because that's all their friends and family will buy. They needed to sell 40,000 in one week. So that's rare air. So Jay comes back with a plan for 40,000 and Gary looks him and says, “You just showed me a plan to fail.” Jay said, “What are you talking about?” He said, “Well, no plan ever goes according to plan. So if your plan, if everything goes perfectly on your plan and that gets us to 40,000, I can almost guarantee we're going to miss. You need to show me a plan for a 100,000 copies in one week.” Which after Jay got up from the foetal position, he went and got to work and he came back with a plan for 100,000 copies. Will, guess how many copies they sold in the first week?   Will Barron: I don't know, go on.   “It's not about setting the goal, whether or not you hit it. It's about setting a goal that requires you to change your trajectory. It requires you to change who you are. Ask yourself, what knowledge am I missing? What skills or habits do I need to form so that I can take the current trajectory I'm on and increase the slope so that whether I hit the number or miss it, I'm going to end up further ahead than where I was.” – Geoff Woods · [11:53]    Geoff Woods: 44,000. So here's the point, it's not about setting the goal, whether or not you hit it. It's about setting a goal that requires you to change your trajectory. It requires you to change who you are. What knowledge am I missing? What skills or habits do I need to form so that I can take the current trajectory I'm on and increase the slope? Whether I hit the number or miss it, I'm going to end up further ahead than where I was.   The Question You Should Ask Yourself if You Want to Get to Where You Want to Be · [12:25]    Will Barron: How do we know? Because it's one thing to have yourself, so the answer to some of this is get your company to come in and do some corporate training, right? And help leadership trickle this down to sales people. So with that to one side and we'll cover that towards the end of the show, Geoff. Because clearly, that's part of the answer, have a coach like yourself come in and do some of this. And I'm lucky enough to have had you coach me live on the show a few times.   Will Barron: But for people who aren't lucky enough to be in that position, how do we know if we've asked a big enough question that gets us to where we want to be? Because seemingly, the question can always be bigger, right? And at some point it's just obnoxious and undoable as opposed to something that's going to change us as a person and allow us to make big strides in our career.   “If when you're asking yourself questions and you immediately know the answer, you're thinking too small.” – Geoff Woods · [13:13]    Geoff Woods: If when you're asking yourself questions, you immediately know the answer. You're thinking too small. When I think about how much income do I want, I'm putting myself in your shoes. “How much income do I want to make this year?” If you pick a number that you go, “Yeah, I think I can do that.” You're probably thinking too small. And this is just I can speak to this because I've been put in this position and I've been asked to double that number and then double that number again.   Geoff Woods: The moment I hit the point where I'm going, “There's no fricking way I can hit that.” That's when they're saying, “All right now you're thinking big. Now ask the question, fast forward and imagine you hit that increased target, how did you make it happen? All of a sudden you're leveraging a different type of thinking and you can turn those into action.   Geoff Woods: So I'll give you a real example. Last year in our organisation, one of the parts of my job is driving growth for the business. I set a quota for myself as the leader of the company for revenue. About six months into the year, I realised I was on track to hit the number. It was inevitable that the trajectory, it was going to take us there. So I raised the number by 150%. Now we're talking big numbers so that's material. And once I set that goal, I said, “What will my activities have to look like to get us on that trajectory?”   Geoff Woods: Two months later, I realised we were going to hit that number. We were pacing to hit that number. So I doubled that number. So if we're doing math, it was about 500% of the original number. We finished, we just barely missed the elevated number. Yet had you told me at the beginning of the year, “You are going to do X in revenue.” When originally I was only thinking of Y, I would've thought you were fricking nuts. But the moment I realised our actions were in alignment with a trajectory to hit our goals, I raised the goal, which required me to change my actions.   Geoff Woods: The moment our trajectory was putting me on pace to hit that elevated number, I raised the goal, which required us to change our actions. This number, we've tripled that number as a goal.   Overcoming Limiting Beliefs and Setting Big, Audacious Goals · [16:45]    Will Barron: So I love this. I'm on board with it. I'm just, and I put myself in this box, I'm just trying to visualise this for a, and I use this term endearingly and I include myself in this group of people, Geoff, and you in a prior life probably was included this as well. What about the knuckle-dragging salesperson who's driving in the car right now, who's listening to this, who's going, “Right. I can only send so many emails. I can only make so many calls. I can only get so much better at what I'm doing right now. I was aiming towards my sales target, I thought that was logical. So you're saying I need to double my sales target and have my own target that I'm aiming towards and hopefully I'll end up at 150%, 180% of revenue, whatever it is. But I can only do so much of the activity that I'm already doing.” What do you say? I can guess where you're going to go, but what would you say to that person?   Geoff Woods: Well, I'm going to do for you what a mentor did for me when I was back in my sales career. And this is when I knew I wanted to start a company, just had our first child. I'm already working 50 hours-a-week in my full-time job. I'm not sleeping at night because we've got a brand new baby, plus trying to take care of my wife. And I want to start a company. And my mentor looks at me and says, “Geoff, you're asking the wrong questions.” He said, “What would it take for you to double your income from your day job, working half the hours.”   Geoff Woods: And I looked at him and I said, “That's not possible.” He said, “how do you know?” And he said, “That's your homework. I want you to come back and present me with a plan to double your income working half the hours. So you could free up time to start your side business on the side without sacrificing your family.” And I came back with that plan.   Geoff Woods: And what I learned, Will, this is the 80 20 rule. The idea 80% of our results come from 20% of our efforts. It applies to activities, it also applies to customers. I could focus and had a track record of focusing on the low-hanging fruit, the customers or prospects that were right in front of me that I knew I could get the quick deal. And you know what? A good sales funnel, you've got a percent of them that are quick deals.   Geoff Woods: The thing I wasn't doing that I started doing was asking the question, “Who are the 20% accounts that if I just closed, those would drive 80% of our revenue?” And it didn't even take 20% accounts, it was two to three accounts that by closing those, just those accounts alone, I hit my quota less hours with less stress.   Geoff Woods: Now, most people could think through and identify what those accounts are. The problem is those accounts are not the easy accounts. They're not the ones you just get to walk in and do the quick one call close. It doesn't work that way. You've got to identify the right stakeholders. You've got to build relationships. You've got to build champions. It takes time. But if you are clear that by taking that goal and reverse engineering it to activities, you could get really granular on things that you could do every week that in the short term don't seem to move the needle much, but gradually then suddenly it unleashes a next level of growth.   Will Barron: Some of this is opportunity that's available. And everything has an element of luck to it, right? You've got to be in the right place at the right time. A trigger event happens in the account and just randomly, you can clean up on it. But a lot of this is just playing the right game, isn't it? You've got to be doing the moves that maybe your competitors aren't. And you experiment with some of it and you have to test some of it. But if you don't make the moves, there's no chance of winning.   How to Ask Bigger Questions and Demand Better Answers From Yourself · [20:03]    Will Barron: That's something that I've learned from growing our business and the training that we are doing. And engaging with sales people who some of them are at a point of whupping me at sales, even though they come to us for training and coaching and a bit of polishing up. A lot of them are just playing games that other people in the marketplace aren't. And again, is the first step just to wire your brain you're allowed to play these games?   Geoff Woods: Yeah.   Will Barron: Everyone in the company is doing cold calling, you are allowed to do something else. Because a sales manager doesn't care if you smash quota, right? As long as it's legal and ethical and somewhat moral, they're going to be encouraging you aren't they?   Geoff Woods: Yeah. Well this is a journey of asking bigger questions and searching for different answers, which we need to acknowledge most of us were not taught to think this way. Because we were literally graded in school based on our ability to have the answer, not to say, “I don't know, let me figure it out.” If you did that on a test, you'd fail. And we were told that our future relied on our grades. So therefore, the quality of our future depended on the quality of us having the answer.   “When we are talking about achieving our goals, when we are talking about actualizing our potential, it is not about having the answer. It is about asking questions that are so big that make us stop and go, “Great question. I have no idea, but let me go search.” – Geoff Woods · [21:04]    Geoff Woods: But here's the difference, you get into the real world, that's not how it works, not how it works. Especially in this specific scenario, when we are talking about achieving our goals. When we are talking about actualizing our potential, it is not about having the answer. It is about asking questions that are so big that make us stop and go, “Great question. I have no idea, but let me go search.”   Geoff Woods: Fast forward, I want you to imagine, I want you to think whatever you think you might make this year. And I want you to ask yourself the question, “How might I earn double working half the hours?” And if you find yourself saying, “That's not possible,” I'll ask you a different question. Fast forward to the end of the year and you are celebrating because you doubled your income and you worked half the hours. There's no question mark, you did it, it actually happened. Truth.   Geoff Woods: How'd you make it happen? What did you start doing that you weren't currently doing? What did you stop doing that you're currently doing? And what did you focus on that drove the majority of the results. You pause the episode right now, look at the timestamp for where in the episode we are, you go grab a pen and a paper and you sit down, turn your phone off, shut your email down. Sit down for 30 minutes with a pen and paper. Write those questions on the paper and search for those answers. Game on, baby.   Why Eliminating Bad Behavior is the Key to Consistent Success · [22:28]   Will Barron: Which is more important, changing the things that we do or eliminating things that we're currently doing?   Geoff Woods: If you do the first, you naturally do the second. If you change what you do, that could encompass eliminating things. Now, if we want to get really granular, if you want to look at it through the lens of start doing additional things versus stop doing current things, I think that's going to be a case-by-case basis. I think the way that we, a lot of people here, are wired is to try to add more. And hey, if you've got a cushy sales job and you're working 30 hours-a-week and you've got lots of free time, I've had one of those jobs before, maybe you can start adding more things.   Geoff Woods: I think a lot of us, if you feel like you already have too much to do and not enough time, you may want to pull out your little gardening shears and start pruning the roses. Start cutting back. That's harder though. That's hard.   How to Subtly Nudge Someone Into Becoming the Best Version of Themselves · [23:38]    Will Barron: How do you, Geoff, if you're coaching someone and Sam of the salesperson's listening to this now, he's going, “Okay, I'm going to ask. I'm going to, I pulled over. Literally I'm the best student ever, pulled over on 22 minutes and 10 seconds or whatever it was. And I've asked a big question and I'm going, Of shit, I have no idea how to hit this.” Okay, so box ticked, box ticked.   Will Barron: And then he's going, “But there is some risk to this, right? I'm in a nice cushy sales job right now. I am driving a nice company, BMW. I am slowly paying off my mortgage and I get to go on one holiday a year and I'm somewhat happy. I'm a high performer. I feel like I could do better, but doesn't everyone?” How would you, and let's say you know Sam, and you know that they're capable of more and there's over people in the organisation who are doing twice as much of what Sam's doing and you want the best for Sam, how do you nudge them past that bit of status quo?   Will Barron: How do you, because I just scream at people on the phone when I'm coaching them and eventually. And I just abuse them and bully them and eventually they come around to it, but that's clearly not the best way to go about it. How do you subtly nudge someone so they can be the best that they can be?   Geoff Woods: The short answer is, we don't. We're not for everyone. The subtitle of The ONE Thing is, “The surprisingly simple truth behind extraordinary results.” We are not for people who want to good results. We are not for people who want great results. We are for the small percentage of the population that wants to taste extraordinary. And by definition, it's beyond the ordinary, which means this is not for all of you.   Geoff Woods: I don't know that we are for the people that need the nudging. We're for the people that their current circumstance, the gap between where they are versus where they want to be is so painful for them that it's like their leg just got broken. We're for them because we are not here to motivate anybody. We can motivaid someone, we can aid them on their journey. We can't motivate anybody.   “If somebody needs to be pushed, to be motivated, then their current circumstance is not painful enough to justify them making a change.” – Geoff Woods · [25:56]   Geoff Woods: So if somebody needs that push, then their current circumstance is not painful enough to justify them making a change. Now let me say, Will, you know my story, I've been there. What kept me in medical device sales was I was comfortable. I did not have enough pain. But when a colleague of mine had a stroke at 35-years-old and all of a sudden I've got a stay-at-home mom with our first child and a big fat mortgage in Orange County, California. And I'm watching our bank account go almost to zero because oh yeah, by the way, my company changed my comp structure and I lost 40% of my income.   Geoff Woods: All of a sudden, I didn't need anybody to motivate me to make a change. I had my own internal motivation. I was unwilling to accept the current state. I had to make a change. There was no ifs, no ands, no buts. That's who we're for.   Can a Salesperson Do Extraordinary Things in a Typical Sales Role? · [26:55]    Will Barron: I might be at risk of just losing my entire audience here, Geoff, and you might bankrupt my business. Can you do extraordinary things in a sales role or is this reserved to company founders, startup founders, people who want to partner with organisations?   Geoff Woods: Of course.   Will Barron: Is this open to salespeople?   Geoff Woods: Absolutely. I mean, I think back to my medical sales day. There was one guy, I mean his entire career, we're talking 30 years as a professional salesperson. He's at the top of the stack ranks, president's club everywhere he's been. And the gap between him and everybody else wasn't even close. And I trained with him. He's the greatest salesperson I've ever come across and he didn't do anything extraordinary on a day-to-day basis. He did simple things consistently that unleashed extraordinary results.   Geoff Woods: I'll share a story that's an example of this. We've all lined up dominoes before. And if you stood them up and lined them up correctly, well, how many did you have to knock down with the flick of a finger to actually knock them all down?   Will Barron: Isn't this an illustration in the book? I feel like I can visualise it, right?   Geoff Woods: It is.   Will Barron: Obviously the first one, right?   Geoff Woods: Yeah, the first one. So back in 2009, there was a group out of the Netherlands that broke the world record for domino falls. They lined up almost 4.5 million dominoes. So you and I, most we've probably lined up is 28 because that's how many comes in a box. 4.5 million.   Geoff Woods: Now, what I want you to do is I want you to imagine that you are the leader of that group and you are walking up to 4.5 million dominoes lined up in dazzling display. Imagine what that even looks like. Now on the count of three, I'm going to ask you to just lift your hand because on the count of three, I'm going to ask you just to imagine you're flicking the first domino down on the count of three. Let's do it together, one, two, three. Will. How much effort did that take?   Will Barron: Very little in the moment.   Geoff Woods: Very little.   Will Barron: Probably six months of stress and near heart attack and strokes before I get to that point though.   Geoff Woods: Yeah. I mean it's almost effortless, the flick of the finger. Now what's amazing is you actually just unleashed 94,000 joules of energy. Which to put that into context, I want you to imagine how much energy it would take to do 545 consecutive pushups, that's how much energy you just unleashed with the flick of a finger.   Geoff Woods: So the flick is an ordinary thing. It's a small action. But if it's the right action, if you stood your dominoes up correctly, done consistently, unleashes a massive reaction. So for any salesperson, you have the opportunity to do the small actions that unleash the massive reactions   The Little Sales Activities That Drive the Biggest Results · [30:02]   Will Barron: And the small actions to make the analogy, to make the metaphor… Well, I guess it's not a metaphor, analogy.   Geoff Woods: I can give you a bunch of ideas off the cuff. Step one.   Will Barron: Well, it's your prospecting, right? It's the calls. It's the emails. It's the cadences.   Geoff Woods: Yeah.   Will Barron: It's all the small steps you make over and over that lead to that one or two large deals that… I've experienced this as well. We're doing it right now. We've got one deal on the books that I'm waiting for the invoice to come in, that is going to be as much as what we did in three or four months last year, a training contract. But it all comes from this content. It comes from the calls. It comes from the emails. It comes from being in bullshit that you don't want to be in. And maybe I need to think bigger of how I can engineer myself out of these meetings. Maybe that's a question I need to start asking. But it's all these little things build up to that big dominoes getting knocked over at the end, right?   Geoff Woods: That's right. I mean, simple, time block and protect the time for lead generation. Actually set a goal for lead generation, whether it's an hour a day, three hours a day, four hours a day, depending on the type of sale that you're in. Where you are not just following-up, you are generating leads. Then there's lead follow up, follow up on your leads every week. Really simple.   Geoff Woods: Here's another one, ask more questions than you do telling. It literally took me until I started studying coaching, professional coaching, to understand what my sales leaders had been saying my entire career, “Do not sell features and benefits. Only ask questions until you truly understand the customer's problem. And if, and only if, you think you can solve their problem, do you start talking about what you do.” That's super simple. Most people don't do that.   The Journey to Extraordinary Results Begins With This One Simple Step · [31:45]    Will Barron: Is the goal here, or let me phrase this another way, should we picture this that we're in this journey, we are the hero of our own story and we need to ask these big questions ourselves, maybe via the help of a coach, mentor or people have been there and done what we want to achieve. Should we picture it as we are the hero in our own journey, in our story? Or really, is this formulaic? Can you copy? Can you go through a step-by-step training plan and it promises X and achieve X? Or is all of this, when we start to get to these extraordinary results, a personal thing that's very difficult to systematise for someone to give you a way of doing it?   Geoff Woods: I actually think they can be the same. If you actually study the hero's journey, if you look up, Google, formula to the hero's journey, meet hero, hero has problem. Because hero has problem, hero's life gets worse. When hero is almost at his lowest, introduce mentor, introduce guide, introduce the coach who starts teaching hero certain things. Hero starts implementing what mentor shares, life gets worse for hero. But at true rock,-bottom, hero learns something. Hero changes. Hero starts doing different activities. Hero makes progress. And here's what hero actually learns by reflecting on his journey.   “We can all be the hero of our own story, but you can't actually be the hero without the guide or without the mentor.” – Geoff Woods · [33:16]   Geoff Woods: So we can all be the hero of our own story, but you can't actually be the hero without the guide or without the mentor. And that mentor is oftentimes sharing the model, the system, the approach to a better way of doing things. We cover this in The ONE Thing, it's one of the three commitments to achieve extraordinary success.   Geoff Woods: The first is, you must follow the path of mastery. It means committing yourself to a lifelong journey of mastery. The third is living the accountability cycle. When things go well, celebrate, raise the goal. When things go wrong, look in the mirror, ask what can I do differently? In between mastery and accountability is moving from E to P, from being entrepreneurial to purposeful. From doing what comes naturally based on our current circumstances, our current comfort zones, our current skill sets, which are irrelevant because they impose a ceiling over what's possible.   Geoff Woods: And instead, looking for what's the best that can be done. And modelling that behaviour and following its systematically so you shatter that ceiling of achievement. And all of a sudden, the ceiling just goes to a new level. Which means you're missing the next level of models and systems to get to the next level. And it's a lifelong journey.   Parting Thoughts · [34:36]    Will Barron: Love it. I love it. I've got nothing else to add, Geoff. I want to end on that high. Tell us with that where we can find out more about you, ProduKtive, The ONE Thing, the podcast, what you're up to, mate. Tell us where we can find out more about all this good stuff.   Geoff Woods: Yeah. So if you're listening to a podcast, just on your podcast player search for The ONE Thing, The O-N-E T-H-I-N-G. The podcast is in the top five percent of all podcasts in the world. Every week we share stories of people or give guidance just to help you get a little bit more focused. So you invest more of your time and spend less of it.   Geoff Woods: If you'd like to learn more about what we do as a training and consulting organisation, the website's the1thing.com and that's with the number 1 in the URL. So the, then the number 1, thing.com. As an individual, you can learn about our training programmes, our goal setting retreats. If you're a leader in a company, we have a very simple system that helps leaders take their teams from being busy to being productive. You can request a consultation, we'll hop on Zoom and walk through what it looks like.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. Well, I'll link to all that and everything else that we talked about, the hero's journey, the book behind that, in the show notes to this episode, over at salesman.org. And with that, Geoff, I want to thank you for your time, your expertise. It's always a pleasure interviewing. No bullshit, mate, it's genuinely a pleasure to interview you on this show when we catch up. And I want to thank you again for joining us on The Salesman Podcast.   Geoff Woods: Thanks, Will. Appreciate you, man.  

Brad Klontz is an expert in financial psychology, financial planning and applied behavioural finance. He’s also the author of “Money Mammoth- harness The Power of Financial Psychology to Evolve Your Money Mindset, Avoid Extinction, and Crush Your Financial Goals” In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Brad explains why we all have weird beliefs around money, why this holds us back, and how to break through and improve our relationship with money. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Brad Klontz Resources: Book: Money Mammoth by Dr. Brad Klontz Dr. Klontz on LinkedIn Discover your Money Scripts here Transcript Will Barron: Hi, my name is Will. And welcome to the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we are getting into improving our relationship with money, and how that's going to help you in sales and hopefully in your personal life as well. Today's guest is Dr. Brad Klontz.   Will Barron: Brad is an expert in financial psychology, financial product, applied behavioural finance and more. He's also the author of Money Mammoth, Harness The Power Of Financial Psychology To Evolve Your Money Mindset, Avoid Extinction and Crush Your Financial Goals. Brad, welcome to the show.   Brad Klontz: Will, thanks so much for having me.   Here’s Why You Should Be Teaching Your Kids About Money From the Word Go · [00:47]    Will Barron: I'm glad to have you on, mate. The audience will know this. We just had a false start recording the episode. We'll try and keep it as real as we possibly can. So I'm going to ask you the same question that I asked you three seconds ago, Brad. And we'll go for it, but it seems like our relationships with our financials, our relationships with money, this should be something that we teach kids.   Will Barron: This is something that almost every society on earth has to deal with as teenagers, as adults as going into retirement age. Am I off the track here or should all people have learned at least from what we're going to talk about today at a young age, and we seemingly don't?   Brad Klontz: Obviously, I think you're right. Money in the United States is the biggest source of stress in the lives of Americans. The American Psychological Association does a survey on this every single year. And it's upwards around 70, 80% of Americans say it's the biggest source of stress in their lives, but it's not something we talk about it. So in schools here, we don't even teach kids the basics of personal finance, let alone the psychology underneath it.   Brad Klontz: And in the studies we've done, it's the psychology that matters. Like the biggest problems we have are people aren't saving enough for the future, they're spending more than they make. I've yet to find somebody who doesn't know better, who doesn't know that they shouldn't do those things. And so for me, why aren't we doing it? It's all about our psychology around money.   Defining Financial Psychology and Behavioural Finance · [01:58]    Will Barron: So is there a definition of financial psychology or applied behavioural finance? Is there a way to define that before we dive into it and dive into the common sense of this? And then maybe there's some elements of this that aren't common sense that we should be implementing as well?   Brad Klontz: Yeah. I should come up with a really good definition. You're putting me on the spot here. I've based my entire life around this field, but I've never really come up with a good definition. It's basically the intersection of the science of psychology and what we know about human thoughts, behaviours, motivations, emotions, what we know about that and how it relates to our financial life. And more importantly for me, is our financial outcomes. So what are we getting in our financial lives? And if we're not getting what we want, that's where a deep dive into our psychology around money can be extremely helpful.   Will Barron: That makes total sense. Okay, then. So I feel like you've probably been asked this question a million times. So I don't want to dwell on it. And I want to get practical of how we can use or we can improve our psychology of finance and money in the rest of the show.   Who’s to Blame For Our Lack of Financial Understanding? · [03:05]   Will Barron: But whose fault is our lack of understanding in some of this? Is it our parents having a certain psychology or belief system or way of talking about money that indoctrinates children? Is it schooling that goes one way or another and university? Is it society? Where do our current beliefs and the psychology of money that we have currently, where does all this come from?   Brad Klontz: Well, Will, I'm a psychologist. And so of course, it's your mother's fault. So that's who we like to do in psychology is blame your mother. But I think it's a combination of those factors. And all those things matter. All those things matter. But what matters most to you as an individual is probably your upbringing. The home you grew up in, the messages you received from your parents or whoever your caregivers were.   Brad Klontz: And not only that, but your family history that sometimes goes back for generations around some of these beliefs around money and outcomes. And that's what's been really fascinating in our research is a lot of these beliefs are unconscious. We're not even aware of them.   Brad Klontz: For most of us, we just have this set of beliefs around money that's clanking around in our subconscious, that's leading to all these results in our lives, but we're not even aware of where those beliefs came from. And sometimes we're talking great, great, great grandparents set us up on this course in our relationship with money.   Practical Steps Towards a Better Relationship with Money · [04:31]    Will Barron: From your perspective here as an expert in this space, do we need to go down some weird Freudian path of reliving our childhood memories of where … My dad used to always say, he still says it now, “Money doesn't grow on trees.” Money's literally made of paper. Money literally grows on trees, up until recently in the UK, now it's all gone plastic.   Will Barron: But all these weird things, do we need to go down this pathway of laying back on a sofa and having [inaudible 00:04:58] yourself, Brad, or a psychiatrist drill into us and understand all these issues? Or is there a better framework or mechanism to perhaps bring to light things that are holding those back and then resolve some of these issues and put perhaps better beliefs in their place?   “If you're getting what you want out of life financially, you don't need to do anything. Just keep doing what you're doing.” – Brad Klontz · [05:20]    Brad Klontz: Yeah. So that's a tough question. And the bottom line is this, if you're getting what you want out of life financially, you don't need to do anything. Just keep doing what you're doing. And then the other answer is depending on the level of how you're feeling stuck, how you're feeling like you're hitting some sort of invisible glass ceiling around how much money you're making, how you feel about your outcomes in life, your income, your net worth, how you handle credit.   Brad Klontz: If you're struggling with that, that's where the deeper dive can become extremely beneficial. And I don't think you need to necessarily talk to a psychologist around it unless you got some trauma around money, which is not that uncommon.   Brad Klontz: Sometimes we have to unwind some really intense emotions because those emotions will lock a certain belief pattern in your brain, and that belief pattern is what's getting you the results you're getting. So it really comes down to how much you want to transform your relationship with money.   Will Barron: Okay. Then from that perspective, and I'm trying to add layers to this here and add context for the audience. If a salesperson, and I find this common with our students in our training programme over at salesman.org [inaudible 00:06:20] academy. A lot of people commit into the training being uncomfortable talking about money, when the whole job presides around the idea of, “We are going to give you this value. We're going to solve this problem in exchange for this cash.” Because we have to exchange something here, and cash is obviously a universal way to exchange value.   Will Barron: For a salesperson to have success talking about large sizes of money that in their personal life they might be uncomfortable with in the business world, do they need to solve their own financial demons or is it possible just to work on the outward perception of this, of being comfortable talking about money in the corporate environment?   Limiting Money Beliefs That Might be Holding You Back · [07:04]    Will Barron: I've not phrased that question very well, Brad, but our own personal demons about money, our own thoughts and beliefs about money, whether negative or positive, are they likely to hold us back when we're talking about money in the corporate environment, when it's not ours and it's not the person we're selling to, but we're represented in an organisation as we go into these deals?   Brad Klontz: In my experience in trying to intervene with people or help people in my various capacities and with the people I train and coach and everything, absolutely yes. If you're tripped up around some sort of issue, how can you not leak that into your conversations with people? Or for example, let's say that you have a real negative association with money, like in your family, in my research, we call it money avoidance.   Brad Klontz: So you were taught rich people are greedy, money corrupts, there's virtue in living with less money. You shouldn't talk about money. If this was sort of ingrained in your brain, of course, you're going to have trouble doing this. You might even feel bad when you start making money. And so this can really trip you up. So depends on those messages you were getting and how intense they were, that really tells us where we need to go from there.   Will Barron: As you say that, my mom passed away five years ago now. But when I was a kid, maybe I was a young teenager, 13, 14, 15, I remember really vividly, the house my dad still lives in now, we were driving back and there was a fella in a nice suit and a nice fast BMW. And my mom drove past him.   Will Barron: And I can't remember if he did something or tried to change lanes or something like that. And she went, “That dude's an asshole.” I remember sitting there going, “You've never met that fella.” I was like, “Why is that?” And she goes, “Well, look at the car he is driving.”   The Subconscious Moments From Our Upbringing That Shape Our Perceptions Around Money · [09:02]    Will Barron: And so there was obviously some kind of issue with my mom there, then she was trying to inadvertently pass on to me. But that stuck as a moment in my mind of, “That's not true. That guy is financially successful. That doesn't automatically make them an asshole.” So are these the kind of moments that we're looking for that could shape our thoughts and views on money? Or is that anecdote just totally way off there?   Brad Klontz: No. So we call those financial flashpoint type experiences in our lives. And it's a perfect example. Now, what's fascinating, Will, is that you had, I don't know if it was your age, I'm not sure if it was your wisdom, but there was part of you that said, “I'm not sure that's the full story, mom. I'm not sure that's the full story.” Now, that's what most of us don't do as kids.   Brad Klontz: And it depends on how these messages come at us, and the message that like, if you had an unconscious sort of negative association of people who drive luxury sports cars, it would make sense to me. What's amazing though, is many people aren't even aware of those early experiences. All they know is they have this negative association with it, where they look down on people or they project attitudes towards them. And it can really trip us up because to your point, you don't know anything about that person.   Brad Klontz: And it might be okay to drive a car like that. It just might. You have to be able to entertain that possibility. But many of us in childhood, we get these money scripts, which is what we call them in our studies, these beliefs around money.   Brad Klontz: And for many of us, it's subconscious. We're not aware of it because it's conversation like that with your mother but it's happened 1,000 times in your childhood. And all you know is that you associate certain things with money. You don't even think about where it comes from.   “Our studies have shown that beliefs around money that are subconscious and come from our childhood experiences end up predicting things like our income, our net worth, and a whole host of financial behaviours.” – Brad Klontz · [10:22]    Brad Klontz: And what our studies have shown is those beliefs around money that are subconscious for many of us, that come from those experiences, end up predicting things like our income, our net worth, and a whole host of financial behaviours. So they're incredibly powerful.   Here’s How to Know if You’ve Got Money Issues That Might Be Holding You Back · [10:56]    Will Barron: Is there a way to, because some of this is almost paradoxical because in your subconscious, you don't realise that you've got these issues until perhaps you reach some kind of glass ceiling and then maybe you just doubt in your own skill as opposed to these avoidance of feeling stuck. I think the two words that you used there, Brad. How do we know if we've got an issue that's holding us back before we reach the point where it becomes obvious? And at that point, we've wasted 10 years of our career just holding ourselves back for no good reason.   Brad Klontz: Yeah. So I think on a preventative nature, it's a good idea to know yourself. We can think of the metaphor of relationships. It's probably a good idea to know yourself and know how your attitudes about a relationship, your attitudes about marriage or not getting married. All this stuff it's really helpful to know who you are as a person. Like some of that self-awareness. I think the self-awareness around money is also very beneficial. It can keep you from getting into trouble.   Brad Klontz: I'm a fan of self-awareness in general. Obviously in sales, it really helps to know yourself. And so I think it'd be incredibly beneficial before you get in trouble around it. And the weird thing about money is we don't really talk about it. So in the example of relationships, when you're in school, you're dating. You're talking to your friends about this date, that date, what you're looking for in a wife or a husband or a partner.   Brad Klontz: These conversations happen all the time. You get to see this modelling out with your own parents, with your friends' parents. None of this happens with money. People don't talk about it. We have a lot of shame around money. There's a lot of shame. When you talked about Freud, Freud identified that. You said that there's a tonne of shame around money. We feel ashamed that we don't have enough. We feel ashamed that we have too much.   Brad Klontz: We feel ashamed that people are going to judge us. And so all that shame leads to silence. And when there's that silence, there's not the opportunity for us to sit back and sort of shuffle through beliefs and decide, “Well, I don't want that one. And how does your dad look at money? Oh, I like that. I'll pick that one.” We don't have the same opportunity to challenge, be aware of those beliefs and change the ones that aren't working for us.   A Practical Action Plan to Help You Understand Your Own Negative Perception About Money · [12:40]    Will Barron: So by the book and work with you, Brad, is half the answer to this question, of course. I'll plug on your behalf. But what does this look like practically? Is this, for a fellow like me going down the pub with a bunch of my mates, who maybe I want to bring in an older fellow who earns way more than me, and maybe I want to bring in someone else who's less focused on money and has a different type of career or they're semi-retired or something like that.   Will Barron: How do I go about practically without, as I say that I'm visualising sitting around the campfire and singing kumbaya and kind of getting a bit hippy with some of this, how do I go about understanding my own obsessed negative thought patterns? Is it just a case of getting around people who have different perspectives and just openly talking about it? Is this a super simple answer to a long and convoluted question?   “Your financial outcomes in life are based a lot on your beliefs around money, how you were brought up and what socioeconomic status you were born into.” – Brad Klontz · [13:34]   Brad Klontz: Well, I love the idea, Will, of picking the brains of somebody who is further along than you are. So the bottom line, you have to understand this, your financial outcomes in life are based a lot on your beliefs around money and how you were trained and what you were brought up and what socioeconomic status you were born into and what they taught you about money, what they taught you about strategies.   Brad Klontz: And so it can be really helpful to kind of do like a little deep self analysis dive, where you ask yourself questions like, okay, so what are my memories around money? How did I feel about the socioeconomic class I grew up in? What did my mom teach me? What did my dad teach me? It can be really helpful to reflect on that. What are some of those early experiences I had around money? All that is really, really useful.   Brad Klontz: But in terms of adopting new beliefs that will help you further your career, make more money, grow your net worth, that's where I think you really does help to get in front of somebody who's at a step or two ahead of you, or they're doing what you want to do, they're making what you want to make.   Brad Klontz: And you sit down with a student with an open notebook and you're like, “Tell me how I should start thinking about money.” And you pay very close attention to what they say because you want to adopt that mindset if you want to get those results.   Why Most People Never Attain Financial Success · [14:39]   Will Barron: How much of this? And you're a scientist. You may not be familiar, but regular audience know this. I've got a background in chemistry. I'm a published scientist. How much of this is very literally, if you're around the right people and you've got the right strategies for long enough, you're going to become financially successful? How much of this is luck? And how much of this is just people getting in their own way? People have talent and there's opportunities in front of them, but they are subconsciously choosing not to take them?   Brad Klontz: I think a lot of it comes down to, and in Money Mammoth, as you mentioned, one of the metaphors we use is the concept of a tribe. So you have a socioeconomic tribe. This is the way that humans have evolved for our entire time on earth. Except for recently, the last few hundred year, we're in tribes. We have a tribe, a hunter-gatherer tribe, 100, 150 people. This is how we've developed our entire psychology as a species.   Brad Klontz: And so if you're in a tribe and it's socioeconomic tribe but people who don't have money, they have certain attitudes about people who do have money. They have certain habits, they have certain beliefs. They're going to teach you how to survive. They're going to teach you how to thrive within that context, but they can teach you nothing about how to live and thrive and survive in a middle class context for an upper income class. They can teach you nothing about it.   Brad Klontz: And as a matter of fact, they're going to teach you probably bad things about it because they don't like that other tribe. This is built into our psychology too. We want to kill those people. We want to take their stuff. And so really ultimately, if you want to climb the socioeconomic ladder, there's a bunch of psychological difficulties in doing that. Number one, you're going to have to abandon the tribe that you're from.   Brad Klontz: And if you know people, if you've experienced it yourself, who've climbed the socioeconomic ladder, a lot of times, there's a bunch of hands trying to pull them down. And emotionally, they feel like they're abandoning the people who they love the most. It's one of the reasons why we see people who come in the large sums of money blow it. Lottery winners lose all their money. People inherit money and lose it all.   Brad Klontz: And one of the reasons we do that is because it pulls us further, further away from that tribe, which makes us feel incredibly anxious, because historically, if you were abandoned from your tribe, or if you moved away from your tribe, you died. So it's an existential panic that happens for us.   Brad Klontz: And so it's really tough. I think psychologically is the hardest part. In terms of bettering your financial life, and in order to do it and do it well, you really have to study this new tribe and this new culture and learn how they think and how they navigate the world.   Will Barron: For sure. Now, I want to come back to … And this is slightly off topic, maybe, happiness and stuff at the moment, and where this ends. Do we have to constantly go through the tribes and end up sat on $100 million yachts next to Jeff Bezos to kind of satisfy our needs here. We'll come back to that in a second. But anecdotally, I've got a lot of pushback at the moment.   Will Barron: And I'm sure the audience will do this when they start crushing in sales, they start making a bunch of money. I'm getting a reasonable amount of pushback at the moment from friends, a few members of family, because I'm looking at buying an expensive car. I'm looking at buying this expensive [crosstalk 00:17:46].   Brad Klontz: Will, you're such an asshole. No, I'm just kidding.   Will Barron: Well, it's almost like a passive aggressive kind of all, maybe that money could be better spent elsewhere. But I'm not really, even after the car, I want to be in this specific … I'm not talked about this too much on the podcast yet. I want it to be a big reveal if and when it happens.   Will Barron: But I'm just as interested in being part of this car, their owner club, and they've got a really good network of events and there's loads of small business owners. And I know spending X amount of dollars, pounds on this car will probably come back in deals and contracts and sales training, because I'm working with a bunch of people who are also in this kind of owner's network. And I feel slightly uncomfortable about it, all of these.   Will Barron: And I understand to a super base level, some of what's going on here of different people's thoughts and beliefs. And I can see it becomes obvious in them as I kind of talk about this car and the networking and the events that they have and all kind of stuff. And I can see it in a few of my friends, and again, a few members of family that they are almost projecting how uncomfortable they are with their financial status onto me.   What to Do When Friends and Family Project Their Money Issues Onto Your Financial Decisions · [19:05]    Will Barron: And not proactively trying to pull me back from this, because they want the best for me. I'm sure they do if you ask them honestly, and you explain the situation, but I can feel that a little bit of tension. What do we do, Brad, when other people, the audience who are listening to this feel that as well, maybe they've just had a absolutely killer year.   Will Barron: They've made a crap, some money in commissions and they're looking at a new house, new car, whatever it is that's pushing their own boundaries. How do we deal with people when they're not being, they're on our side, they want us to win. But again, maybe they're projecting some of their issues onto us.   Brad Klontz: It's a real challenge. And because to your point, these people love you. They care about you. It's not like they're interested in your demise. They're unconscious around what they're doing to you. They just know that you're leaving the comfort zone, and this feels uncomfortable.   Brad Klontz: And sometimes they'll even say, “Well, people are going to look at you at this way or that way.” And you're like, “I don't care about people. I care about you. I care about my tribe and I'm getting this from you.” And it's something we accidentally subconsciously do to each other, but really it does come down to that socioeconomics comfort group that we're in. And it's challenging.   Brad Klontz: First of all, it's easier when it's subtle and slow. So when your income grows gradually over time, you learn to adjust to this situation. You learn that you frankly, some of your friends leave you. Some of your family can be upset at you. But when you get a lot of money really fast, that's when it's extremely challenging.   “I say this for dramatic effect, but when you grow your financial capacity, you're either going to have to get rid of your money or get rid of your friends. And if you don't do one of those two things, it's going to be uncomfortable. And it's going to take some time for you to adjust to this.” – Brad Klontz · [20:32]    Brad Klontz: And I will tell people, I say this for dramatic effect, but you're either going to have to get rid of your money or get rid of your friends. And if you don't do one of those two things, it's going to be uncomfortable. And it's going to take some time for you to adjust to this.   Why It Might Be a Healthy Move to Drop Some of Your Friends Once You Improve Your Financial Capacity · [20:44]    Will Barron: And from a psychological perspective, this is me saying this, is it fair to say that that might be healthy for you? It might be healthy for you to grow and leave a few people behind?   Brad Klontz: Healthy, not healthy, for me, it's like, well, what do you want? And I feel like you have a right to better your life if you want to, financially, and try to talk about it with the people love most, and just understand that some of you, if they have that like money avoidance pattern, where they have this deeply held belief that money is bad and there's virtue in having less money, and the only way to get rich is through corrupt means.   “People have this belief pattern that rich people are greedy or bad. Now, ironically, in our studies, the people who really strongly believe that rich people are bad are also the ones who most desperately want to be rich themselves, which is really sort of a fascinating conundrum psychologically.” – Brad Klontz · [21:20]   Brad Klontz: People have this belief pattern, rich people are greedy, bad. If you really strongly believe that, now, ironically, in our studies, the people who really strongly believe that are also the ones who most desperately want to be rich themselves, which is really sort of a fascinating conundrum psychologically.   Brad Klontz: But just understand this, they are going to give you a lot of negative energy towards this because that's how they look at money. It's not personal to you. They love you. They want to be close to you, but it's going to be intense. It's going to be psychologically really intense and emotionally difficult for you.   Will the Chase for More and More Money Ever Come to a Stop? · [22:00]     Will Barron: Sure. Well, I'll go on the record. It's fine to leave people behind. I've left friends behind. They are doing just fine. I'm doing just fine. And this leads me on to my next question, which is, where does all of this end? Because it seems like, so I'm from a lower middle class background. My dad was a middle management and then runs his own small business. And mom always worked in hospital pharmacies.   Will Barron: It is kind of like this weird golden lock zone of no flores, but also no kind of like issues with food and housing, anything like that. I've surpassed respectfully what my parents have ever earned, way beyond that. And I feel like I'm getting close now with some business stuff that we're doing to breaking beyond where I've been for the past two or three years to the next level.   Will Barron: And that to me, and probably told the audience is exciting. The number is that we're earning the revenue, what we're taking home, is almost like a game that I like to play and I like to see increase. Now, I don't think I'd be sad if the business just collapsed. I think I'd just have to find something else to do. I'd have to go back to a sales job.   Will Barron: I don't take it personally. So taking that out of the equation. When does this end? Or does it not end? Do I end up an 80-year old fellow chasing rather than a couple of million revenue a year, 100 million revenue, and this just continues onwards? Or is there a set point where people tend to go, “Okay, well, I'm now earning three times more than what my parents did. This is kind of a natural level where people start to slow down and become comfortable.”   Brad Klontz: Yeah. For me, it's just a matter of preference. I don't like the pathological part of always wanting more. It can be very pathological. There are examples of people who do do terrible things and sacrifice their family and their health for more and more and more. And sometimes they're trying to fill an emotional hole.   Brad Klontz: Sometimes they grew up in poverty and they have this belief there'll never be enough money, and they're really anxious about it and they're scared. And so they run through life very anxious and scared. And that's no way to go through life either. So it depends on the route to the pursuit. But I feel like having goals is fun. You mentioned, Will, that it feels like a game to you. Play the game, have fun. I don't think there's anything wrong with it.   Brad Klontz: But understanding that ultimately, there's no amount of money that is going to answer the big questions in life for you, which is around connection, around passion, around purpose. And money can help with that. But money doesn't magically solve all of humanities existential problems. Now certainly, if you're lower income, which is how I grew up, if you're poor, not having money will make you depressed and miserable and cause all sorts of problems in your life.   Brad Klontz: So there is that sort of middle class, getting up there, making sure that you have a roof over your head, that you can provide for your children, that you're not going to bed hungry. Now obviously, hitting that point I think is really important. I hope everyone gets there. But really when you get into those upper echelons of upper middle class higher, a bunch of money's not going to magically solve all your problems.   The Correlation Between Happiness and More Money For People in the US · [25:05]    Will Barron: I'm remembering this. I think this is somewhat cliche and I don't know if this is totally out of date, but I remember reading in whatever book it was, that around $80,000 in the U.S was a point where every dollar added didn't increase dramatically the amount of happiness that people had.   Will Barron: Is there any data behind that number? And is there a more accurate? What I'm trying to get at is, is there a benchmark where the science tells us that people at this benchmark, money is a nice-to-have as opposed to something that is going to dramatically decrease the levels of happiness?   Brad Klontz: So we can talk about it after the podcast and put on our nerd hats on the science on it. But basically, there's been a lot of research that has shown that the median income level, household income, which is around that 70, 80,000 mark here in the U.S, that there's no statistically significant correlation between more money and happiness. There's been some dispute around that. But I think in general, it makes a lot of sense because if you feel like you're part of the tribe.   “In psychology, we call it relative deprivation. So this is a fascinating concept that says how you rate yourself financially in terms of how you're doing is not based on an objective number. It's subjective and it's based on the people you're around. That's how you decide whether you feel rich or you feel poor. If you're in a village and you have three goats and everyone else has one goat, even though you might not have running water, you will have the subjective experience of feeling wealthy and feeling like your things are going well. And otherwise, if you have a $2 million mansion but everyone else has a $10 million mansion, you're going to feel relatively deprived and poor.” – Brad Klontz · [26:16]    Brad Klontz: So in the broader United States, if you're making around the median income, you don't feel like you're deprived. You don't feel like you're suffering. And what we know in psychology, we call it relative deprivation. So this is a fascinating concept where how you rate yourself financially in terms of how you're doing, is not based on an objective number. It's subjective and it's based on the people you're around. That's how you decide whether you feel rich or you feel poor.   Brad Klontz: If you're in a village and you have three goats and everyone else has one goat, even though you might not have running water, you will have the subjective experience of feeling wealthy and feeling like your things are going well. And otherwise, if you have a $2 million mansion but everyone else has a $10 million mansion, you're going to feel relatively deprived and poor. And so it's really in relation to our comparison group. That's how we decide whether we have enough money to feel like we made it or not.   Will Barron: I love this. This makes total sense. I started off in St. Helen working town. And my first sales job, I felt like I was absolutely crushing gay. Then moved to the south of the UK, just outside Cambridge. And I was like, I have skin compared to all of these suckers down here. And now back up in north leads in the north UK, for people who're listening from Europe and the UK, who are familiar with this, that is a somewhat affluent place.   Will Barron: And again, I'm kind of at the, not the bottom of the tone pole, but in kind of the middle to bottom of, where we live, there is so just insane houses that is even a stretch for me to visualise the fact that I've got the possibility of living in one of those someday. Now, they're just people. A lot of them are self-made entrepreneurs, small business owners, as opposed to clearly, it's unlikely that it's going to turn out that I'm the prince of some foreign, tiny country, and I'm going to get given 100 million on the back of not doing any work.   Will Barron: So it is achievable for me to get into those, but I still feel like we are looking at those houses, and the there's one particular house around the corner as a Rolls Royce sat outside. And I'm like, “God, that's a stretch for me to imagine myself there.” So, Brad, we've covered why people feel these ways back and forth about money.   Will Barron: We've covered that there are some psychological or subconscious issues that can hold people back. What do we do if we want to proactively push into this? What if I, from a place of sort of, “Other people have got mega houses where I live and Rolls Royces, why can't I have it?” From a healthy place as opposed to a narcissistic place of, “I'll take their shit from them.”   in psychology, we call it relative deprivation. So this is a fascinating concept where how you rate yourself financially in terms of how you're doing, is not based on an objective number. It's subjective and it's based on the people you're around. That's how you decide whether you feel rich or you feel poor.   Money Scripts: Understanding Your Relationship With Money · [28:45]    Will Barron: How do we position ourselves, and how do we change our psychology around money and finance to enable us to push towards this? Do we have to just fake it till we make it? Do I need to go to a Rolls Royce dealership, sit in the car and tell myself, “This is just a car. I could have this one day.” How do we go about making those big leaps forward possible psychologically so that we can put the hustle in and make it happen as well?   Brad Klontz: Yeah. So understanding your money scripts, understanding your family history, understand if you do a real conscientious dive into your financial mistakes and really take credit for them [inaudible 00:29:23] All the studies we've done on ultra wealthy individuals, they have more of an internal locus control. They blame themselves for their problems. They are sort of the instrument of change and blame in their own lives.   Brad Klontz: That can be a really, really helpful mindset. It actually separates middle class and lower income people from people who make it up into the upper echelons of wealth is this earnest desire to look at, “It's not that I had a bad customer, it's like, what could I have done differently in that sales process?” That's where the goal is. That's number one. Number two, understand your money scripts.   Brad Klontz: So I have a website, moneysscripts.com. You can take the test that I'm talking about that we've used in many of our studies. It'll put you in a category. You can read about the research on those categories. Understanding your psychology can really help. And then you mentioned it too, Will. I almost feel like it is a game for you. And you keep moving to neighbourhoods that push you.   “When you're around a bunch of people who are having entrepreneurial success, you're way more likely to have entrepreneurial success. This is just how human beings work. By the way, this works either way. Like all of a sudden if you lose all your money, if you want to learn how to survive, hang around people who have lower income. Many of them are very happy and they spend their lives doing incredible joyous things.” – Brad Klontz · [30:15]    Brad Klontz: Like when you're around a bunch of people who are having entrepreneurial success, you're way more likely to have entrepreneurial success. This is just how human beings work. So if you could put yourself in front of people who are having the experience you want to have. By the way, this works on either way. Like all of a sudden you lose all your money, if you want to learn how to survive, hang around people who have lower income. Many of them are very happy and they spend their lives doing incredible joyous things. And you need to learn how to do that.   Brad Klontz: So get yourself in front of people and around people who are having the experience you want to have, and study them as if you are a psychologist yourself. You're an anthropologist. You're trying to figure out, okay, how do they think about things? How do they handle money? How do they approach business? Become extremely curious. And that's how we learn. And that's how we grow.   Logic Versus Emotion When Tackling Your Money Beliefs · [31:03]    Will Barron: Final question, Brad, before we wrap up and you tell us more about the book, where we find it, more about you as well. But how much of this is logical in that, say I end up buying this luxury car, buying into this brand and this lifestyle that is definitely not going to follow because it's just going to be sat in a garage and probably use it once a week, once a month. It's just going to drop in value over time.   Will Barron: But say like I buy into this idea, and I start going to these car meets up. I start engaging with these much more wealthy individuals than what I am but I perhaps aspire to be. How much of this is logic of, I need to speak to these individuals and say, “Oh, well, this person is running this type of business. They're doing this. Or this salesperson is working this way or that way.” How much of it versus logic is then emotion of allowing yourself to get wrapped up into that?   Will Barron: And allowing, I don't know if this is like a shortcut to your subconscious of allowing events or places or conversations to happen that inspire you and that side of the fence. How much of this is logical, we can be proactive about it, versus emotional, we need to be in situations where maybe some of it happens to us?   Brad Klontz: Yeah. I feel like the logical aspects are the easier part, to be honest. I feel like it's pretty simple. It's pretty simple. If you want to have a certain outcome, you find out how people get that outcome. Read some autobiographies and then just go ahead and do what they did. That's kind of how, I don't want to say it's easy, but it's simple in that way. It's like, just do this set of instructions and then you can get where you're getting.   Brad Klontz: Now obviously, we got to take the random billionaires out who struck it rich in one generation. There is no playbook for that. There's elements of luck associated with that. But in terms of bettering your life, there's a playbook. Find the playbook, read it, and then do what they did. Now, a lot of times you might not want to do what they did. It might have taken more than you want to to give in to do that, but find the playbook could do. I think the emotions are much more difficult.   Brad Klontz: When you said you're going to buy a sports car, I said, “Oh, there you are being an asshole, Will.” Your mom mentioning that to you. It's incredible that you have that conscious awareness, but if you had a negative association with it, I almost guarantee people who've had an experience like that, they're just not aware of it. Or they've heard their family talk about people who drive those kind of cars. It's that unconscious sort of association that really can trip us up.   Brad Klontz: And so I think it's really to your benefit to look at your psychology around that and ask yourself, why wouldn't it be okay for you to do that? What sort of associations do you have on that other tribe? Are they accurate? Is this just a way to look at them so you can feel better about yourself?   Brad Klontz: I think approaching it with a lot of curiosity, can be extremely beneficial, because what happens is we have these automatic thoughts and beliefs about those people. Poor people are got poor because they did this. Rich people are like that. And a lot of it is based on partial truths and misinformation.   Will Barron: Yeah. That makes total sense. I do a daily journal and I catch myself, this story anecdote with my mom. I knew it at the time. I remember of thinking it at the time, but it came up in a journal. I knew I was prepping for the show, Brad. So I was like, that might be a good anecdote to bring up on the show.   Will Barron: But then as we talk about it, it seems even more ridiculous now. And I should just completely forget about it. And I think I forgot it, but I think I didn't hold onto it as, I didn't agree with my mom at the time. And I'm pretty sure I don't agree with it now. But then even just getting out there, talking about it on this show, writing about it in my journal, when it came up the other week, I feel like that is almost therapeutic in its own way.   A Practical Approach to Improving Your Money Beliefs, Getting Richer and Improving Your Relationship with Money · [34:31]   Will Barron: Am I over complicating all this? Or do we just need to be practical? Hang out with rich people if we want to get richer and just do what they do? Have I just spent half an hour going way too deep and we could have wrapped up the show and had a nice succinct episode within five minutes?   Brad Klontz: Yeah. The problem is that you won't go hang around those disgusting people unless you look at the beliefs around those people first. That's part of it. But to your point too, I think whichever way you can get there, the fastest is the best. I will say this too, one of the problems is that, and you run into this all the time with sales people too, is they get too big for their riches.   Brad Klontz: They try to project themselves as having more than they actually do, thinking that this is what wealthy people do. And all the studies on wealthy people actually show that they do the opposite. So the ones who are most likely to flash wealth are the ones who actually have less of it, which is really fascinating because everyone starts thinking, “Oh no, I know this ultra rich person who does it.” That is not the majority.   Brad Klontz: And here in the U.S, the majority of millionaires are self-made. It's upwards of 80%. And when we do studies on those individuals, I'm talking people 11 million in net worth. They are vigilant around money. They're savers. If you ask them how much money they made, they would tell you they make less than they do.   “The only way to become wealthy is to hold onto net worth to save it. And if you're spending it on depreciating assets like cars, it needs to be money that is throw-away money for you because buying cars is not an investment. That's money that's going to go down in value.” – Brad Klontz · [35:59]   Brad Klontz: And so it's a fascinating thing because many of us try to emulate this stereotype we have of rich people, and actually that's not how people become rich. They become rich by, it's net worth. And the only way to become wealthy is to hold onto net worth to save it.   Brad Klontz: And if you're spending it on depreciating assets like cars, it needs to be money that is throw away money for you because that's not an investment. That's money that's going to go down in value. And so looking at it as a luxury, people don't do that unless they can actually afford it, or they're not in the ranks of the wealthy for very long.   Will Barron: The people I know that have the type of cars that I'm talking, and I'll tell you off air in a second about it, Brad, they drive like a crappy, old banger as their main car, then have a prestigious sports car or even super cars from this brand locked up in a nice pristine garage.   Will Barron: And they like to polish it and look at it and drink up a coffee sat in the seat every morning. But they're all wearing crappy polo shirts and ripped up jeans and crappy trainers. And they're all typically salespeople who had success five to 10 years ago, who invested appropriately and are now killing it on the back of that. A lot of them got into property and things like that. Obviously they're small business owners who have just like hustled and grinded their way to where they are right now.   Will Barron: So yeah, I think you're right. This seems to be people who are doing less well [inaudible 00:37:09] who don't have the cash to just flash and show off. Then there's a weird gap in the middle, where my partners, my message is a doctor. So I see a lot of [inaudible 00:37:18] it's by flashy cars when I know exactly how much they earn, and I earn way more than what they earn.   Will Barron: And I'm not driving around in a flashy car day to day as my main vehicle. And wearing Gucci t-shirts and all this crap and nonsense trying to play this bling game. And then you see the actual wealthy people on the other side are all dressed like scruffs, haven't had hair cut in three months, but actually have the wealth to back it up. So I think there's an interesting dynamic there. Right?   Brad Klontz: Very much so. Good observation. And social media, it's a toxic place that just lies to you about how wealthy people go through life.   Social Media and How It Has Changed Our Perception of Wealth and Money · [37:28]   Will Barron: Yeah. I will go on record. There's very, very few rich 23-year old driving Lamborghinis in real life who have actual wealth. There's probably a handful in the west world who have made it themselves, but there's a lot of people on Instagram, young fellas, young girls.   Will Barron: I'm 35. I'm saying younger than me who are driving these ridiculous cars, living this lifestyle, whereas it's just a facade. It's not real. They don't have the wealth to buy a 400 grand car. They're hiring it. They're borrowing them. They're taking pictures next to one part in the street. And it's just not real.   Will Barron: Social media, it's another conversation for another time, Brad, I think. I don't know if you've got research data on this, but with it being a relatively new phenomenon, that must have changed people's perceptions of wealth together.   Brad Klontz: Yeah, it does. And back to that, relative deprivation psychology. Before, it would just be, we would be exposed to people in our neighbourhood. And somebody had a nicer bike that was shiny and we'd feel a sense of deprivation like, “I want that bike.” Now a bunch of it's false too.   Brad Klontz: But you see on Instagram every day, all these people who seem to have a happier relationship than you, driving a nicer car in front of a mansion. You have no idea if any of that stuff is theirs. But what it does is it triggers a sense of deprivation inside of you. And if you notice and you click on those profiles, they're all selling something. They're all selling you a course on how to become wealthy. And they know that they trigger your sense of deprivation that it'll help them sell their get-rich-quick course.   Will Barron: Yeah. And look, to be blunt, the audience will know this. Well, that's why I'm not talking about this car. I'm not naming brands. I'm not doing anything on that front because I'm not sure how to approach this with our audience, because our whole brand, Brad, is based on the back that I'm just this knuckle dragging salesperson like the audience. I'm still doing sales calls every day.   Will Barron: The business do great, revenue wise, but I'm not taking anything out of the business. The business is growing and I'm still skinned every month by the time all the expenses are paid, because I want to do it along with the audience.   Parting Thoughts · [39:50]   Will Barron: So with that, mate, and just for anyone who's new to the show, hopefully that gives a bit of context as to why I'm not showing off this car that we may or may not be buying in the next few weeks. But Brad, tell us about the book, Money Mammoth and where we can find out more about you. And you mentioned the website earlier on as well. Tell us about that link as well.   Brad Klontz: Yeah. So Money Mammoth is my sixth book. Wow. I can't believe it's been 6:30, but had my latest research on there. For example, one study, we got people to save 73% more after just spending an hour of have them visualising their goals and doing weird sort of vision board stuff, but 73% increase in savings.   Brad Klontz: So I've got the science and techniques in there in Money Mammoth. I'm @Dr. Brad Klontz on social media. And if you want to learn more about your money scripts, I put it online, moneyscripts.com. That's the test we've used with, I'm going to say almost 100,000 people now and done studies on.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. Well, to all that and the shown it to this episode over at salesman.org. With that, Brad, I want to thank you for your time. The fact that you're doing actual research on this and not just pulling ideas and thoughts out of thinner is really important to our community and your community as well. So I appreciate that. I'll just plug you on that point specifically. Oh, thank you for your time and your expertise and for joining us on the Salesman Podcast.   Brad Klontz: Thanks, Will, it was a lot of fun.

Andres Lares is the managing partner at Shapiro Negotiations Institute and the author of Persuade – the 4-step Process to Influence People and Decisions. In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Andres explains his 4-step process to influencing your prospect’s buying decisions. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Andres Lares Negotiations Expert Resources: Andres on LinkedIn The Shapiro Negotiations Institute Book: Persuade: The 4-Step Process to Influence People and Decisions Transcript Will Barron: Hi, my name is will, and welcome to the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we're going to be looking at the four-step process to influencing buying decisions. Today's guest is Andres Lares. Andres is the managing partner over at SNI. He's the author of Persuade: The 4-Step Process to Influence People and Decisions. He's been featured in Harvard Business Review, CNBC, Entrepreneur, ABC, Fox, and many other places as well. With that, Andres, welcome to the show.   Andres Lares: Thank you for having me.   Will Barron: More than welcome, sir. You are coming on the show to talk about a topic that we've covered a bazillion gillion times on the past, influence persuasion. I love covering it, because everyone has different insights, different aspects to this. Am I wrong? This is one of the most fascinating topics that two humans can talk about, right?   Andres Lares: I was about to say, you can't cover it enough. It's one of those things that if you think in your professional life and your personal life, you really can't avoid. Negotiating and influencing is something you do all day, every day.   The Art and Science of Influence and Persuasion · [01:00]    Will Barron: For sure. Okay. I want to ask you a really lazy, loaded, leading question, because I think it ties into the content from your business, your training, and the book and stuff as well. I think this'll give us a starting point for the conversation, and we'll see where we go with that. With that, Andres, can the, I'm going to say, the art and the science of influence persuasion really be broken down into just four steps?   Andres Lares: As I think about the answer that, two things come to mind. The first is, I did economics in university. I took a very much, in the economics discipline, really, models are meant to balance giving you something that's practical and actionable and meaningful, but also being simple enough that at the end, you are capturing what you need to capture. Otherwise, very quickly, you get lost in the weeds.   Andres Lares: I think that's the mentality around this four-step process. The second is, it's not necessarily the four steps only to influencing and persuading. It's more the four steps in the decision-making process. As a result, you take advantage of those, and by better understanding those, you're better able to influence and persuade. That's the structure behind it, if you will.   The Four Step Process of Influencing Buying Decisions · [02:00]   Will Barron: Sure. Give us the high-level overview of these four steps. Then, we might not cover them all, but we'll break down some of it, and we'll see if we can leave the audience with some practical steps to improve their ability to influence and persuade.   Andres Lares: Perfect. The four-step process is, and I build this up like Maslow's hierarchy, if you will, for those that have taken psychology 101, in Maslow's hierarchy, it's a pyramid, and the base layer is building credibility. Building credibility, without it, if you think about a commercial that might have a dentist, when they're selling toothpaste, they might have an athlete. Why is that? Because you want to build credibility, you want people to listen.   Andres Lares: It's that base layer. Without it, people, they don't care. There's so much noise out there, that that's what allows us to figure out, is this someone or something I should listen to or not? Credibility.   “People make decisions emotionally, and then they justify rationally. And we can't say that enough because all too often, especially salespeople, are trying to persuade others with logic. “Here's the five reasons you should do this. Here's five of our clients that should make you feel more comfortable.” The reality is, people make decisions emotionally then it's the logic that helps them justify it.” – Andres Lares · [02:59]    Andres Lares: The next step is engage emotion. Really, perhaps the key takeaway of this model is really that, people make decisions emotionally, and then they justify rationally. Really, we can't say that enough, because all too often, especially salespeople, really all of us, are trying to persuade others with logic. Here's the five reasons you should do this. Here's five of our clients. That should make you feel more comfortable.   Andres Lares: The reality is, people make decisions emotionally. Then, it's the logic that helps them justify it. They're sleeping at home at night thinking, “I think I did go with the right decision, because,” whatever the logic is. Then of course comes the logic. First, you build credibility, then you engage emotion. The next step is the logic, and you demonstrate logic. The key there is to do it in a very practical and precise way.   Andres Lares: Then finally, those first three steps were actually from Aristotle. In 350 BC, he taught ethos, pathos, logos. That's credibility, emotion and logic. Of course, I say that to practise what we preach, because with a little bit of extra credibility, if you don't believe us, who is this guy telling me this? Aristotle's someone you probably trust, and there's a lot of credibility there.   Andres Lares: We added on top of that, is facilitate action. I think as a salesperson, anyone can relate to, “Will, is this something that you really want to move forward with?” Oh yes, it is. “Are you excited about,” oh yes, I am. Then, all of a sudden, you don't hear back, and all this momentum is gone. Facilitate action is meant to do that. It's talking about, okay, what are some ways we can keep that momentum, to make sure that the wheels don't fall off?   Credibility and Why It’s So Important in the Sales Process · [04:30]    Will Barron: When we talk about this, I've not got my iPad idea, otherwise I'd draw this out, because I think visually, this would make a lot of sense. When we talk about credibility being the base, if someone does not … A salesperson selling some kind of, I don't know, a software product, Sam the salesperson is selling software product. If he's not credible, can he or she lean into the credibility of the company? Then, if they're not credible, does that just then wipe out any chance of influencing a potential customer into making a purchase?   Andres Lares: For the last part, it does wipe it out, because we won't even give the light a day. If Sam the software salesperson knocks on Will's door and says, “Hey,” and basically, it stops after that. You don't listen. You want to move on to the next thing and just discredit it. What happens is, how do you do it? Most salespeople, most people don't really have credibility necessarily. They're reaching out, potentially cold. That's of course why warm leads are so much more valuable, because there is credibility. It's passed on, because Will knows I'm this, or knows Sam, or whoever it is.   “One of the ways to build credibility is to borrow it. What you would do is you'd borrow from your company, you would borrow it from peers, you'd borrow from experience, etc. The easiest one is company.” – Andres Lares · [05:3]   Andres Lares: If you don't have that, then that's exactly what you do. One of the ways to build credibility is to borrow it. What you would do is, you'd borrow from your company, you would borrow it from beers, you'd borrow from experience, whatever you borrow it. The easiest one is company. If you're in software sales for a large firm, then look, you don't have to necessarily think about Will specifically and what I know, but you've got confidence that, if you're a Microsoft salesperson, we've all heard of Microsoft. There's trust there in the almost trillion dollar cap that it is.   Andres Lares: That's absolutely one of the ways to do it.   How to Borrow Credibility From Your Company, Peers, or Sales Managers · [06:15]    Will Barron: I just want to be … Because some of these conversations I have, we end up in all theory, 45 minutes go past, and there's nothing practical. I want to layer as much practicality as we can into this episode as we go through this, Andres. With that said, if somebody's listening to this and they're going, “Crap, I don't have that much experience in this space. Maybe I'm just straight out of college, my first sales role, and the company I'm selling for is a startup. No one knows who we are.”   Will Barron: Is it practical to advise that person to gather as much experience as they can in that role as they possibly can, but then maybe move to a big organisation, and make selling as easy as possible for themselves, by being able to leverage the credibility, borrow the credibility, to use your wording, of the company, of amazing clients and previous deals that've been done?   Andres Lares: There is something to be said for that. I think at the same time, you don't necessarily have to go to the bigger company to gain their credibility, because then you can get your own credibility and borrow it from elsewhere, not just the firm. Just as a unique example, what does this look like too? I think you said something about practical, and I do want to get to that, because I think for listeners, okay, how do I do this? Hypothetically, I'll give an example from us in our world.   Andres Lares: If we're talking to a pharmaceutical company, what's the best way for us to use emotion, but also at the same time, build credibility? Those first two steps. When someone explains, here's the challenge that I have. It's one of the questions that we ask right up front, why are you calling us? Tell us more about your situation. The first thing we'll do is briefly walk through other examples where you've dealt with exactly that kind of situation. Which, if you're a startup, as long as you have at least more one other customer, hopefully there's going to be some overlap there.   Andres Lares: You don't necessarily have to say, “Hey, look, this is Microsoft or Amazon or Cisco. Of course, you've heard of us.” You could say, “Will, you talked about the challenge that you have, where you are having X, Y, and Z. We've dealt exactly with that sort of situation. Here's what we did.” You walk through A, B and C. What happens is, you don't even have to get specifically to the client name, but your ability to understand what their challenge is, and start getting to some ideas around solutions. You haven't laid out a framework, because you probably don't know enough to do that, but you've at least walked them through saying, hey, not only did I listen to you, but I've also been through similar situations before.   Andres Lares: That's an example of very simple way to borrow credibility from the experience you have as a company. It doesn't necessarily mean you have to point to that, hey, trillion dollar company, the big one, it could be a startup that you've never heard of, but now, oh, okay, they understand me, they've done this before.   Will Barron: Sure. I think a layer on that as well, there are billion dollar, trillion dollar companies that no one's ever heard of anyway. Before we hit record, I mentioned my first sales job, job at a company called Johnson Matthey, multi-billion dollar company, mine most of the precious metals on the planet. If you look up the prices of precious metals, it's usually set by Johnson Matthey. No one's ever heard of the company. I think two thirds of all catalytic converters in cars use the precious metals, which make up the main price of a catalytic converter, from Johnson Matthey.   The Benefits of Being Specific During the Sales Process and What it Does to Your Credibility · [09:10]    Will Barron: Again, no one's ever heard of them. When you start to use storytelling, you can finesse, is that a fair way of describing this? You can borrow credibility without having to name clients, and still talk about big numbers. What am I trying to get at? I'm trying to walk a line here between, we don't want the audience to lie about a customer that doesn't exist, but it's also appropriate if we can't name company names and stuff, to still tell stories. Not being able to talk specifics is not necessarily, or should not, not being specific, be a barrier to someone telling a story, or is a story still effective at building credibility, even if there's a reduction in specifics, names, locations, and people within. More general stories still built credibility.   Andres Lares: I think there's a lot there, that starts getting into the nitty gritty, I think it's worth dissecting, because I would say specificity is important, but specificity in who exactly the client is, when exactly you worked with them, isn't as important. Specificity is important, because it makes it more real and more relevant. An example from the book, we talk about how in just a totally other example, if you say that a price is $10, versus you say the price is $9.59, it conveys that $10 seems like a general number that's been rounded up, and then $9.59 gives automatically the brain of the other side starts to think, there must be a reason it's $9.59. It's almost a more credible number, that's less likely to be negotiated down.   Andres Lares: That's an aside, but that same specificity concept translates to the story. People understand at this point that, hey, I can't tell you exactly who this client is, or whatever may be, but the specificity piece is important. You want to be more specific about the challenges they face coming in, and the solutions you provided them to overcome that. That's when the specificity I think is most important. Not necessarily in exactly what industry, exactly what company, who exactly you worked with.   Andres Lares: Those sorts of things, you can get away with. That's what makes the story more compelling. The idea is you want Will to sit there and think at the end of that conversation, that I've been through a situation like this before. I trust that because of that experience, I'm a valuable asset to you, that can help you find an optimal solution. That's really what the story's saying, more than, “Hey, I've done this before with company X specifically.”   Will Barron: Got it. On that then, is this, and credibility might be the easiest one to do this upon, but is this measurable? Can we say, this person has X credibility, this person has Y credibility? Again, I'm thinking of this from the perspective of the audience, where they want to improve, but it's very difficult to improve that something, if you can't put a number on it, or if it's anecdotally, “Oh, I trust that person, but I don't trust that person.”   Can We Really Measure Our Credibility? · [11:59]    Will Barron: Can we measure credibility specifically? Then we can touch on some of these other points as well.   Andres Lares: We've played around with that for a long time. We've struggled to find a foolproof way to do that. I would say, something we've talked a lot about is, there is a hierarchy, if you will, and credibility has a lot to do with the quality of the relationship. Those two are very closely aligned, because essentially, credibility is basically trust. There's a little bit more to it, but essentially, those are very well-correlated.   Andres Lares: If you think of it that way, if you want to figure out, okay, what's the credibility you have, think about a prospective client, our client, and think about all the little things. For example, if you call them and you leave them a voicemail or you send them an email, how long do they take to call you back or email you back? Have they ever asked you for advice? Do they typically take your advice if you potentially provide a few nuggets, even without being requested? Those sorts of things. Your conversations, are they very transactional nature? How much do you talk personally, and get beyond the business relationship?   “If your prospects respond fairly quickly to your emails, they ask you for advice, or they clearly value your opinion, then your credibility is quite high. If none of those are happening and they only come to you when they need pricing, and you're essentially a rate sheet, then your credibility is probably pretty low.” – Andres Lares · [13:19]    Andres Lares: If you answer all those questions, then I would say it's actually very similar to body language, which is someone we cover in our book, which is, one thing doesn't tell you much. It could be just a mood or very specific, it could be a lot of factors are there. It's hard to read much from one response, but over the body of work, over a few months, if all those things are happening, they respond fairly quickly, they ask you for advice, they clearly value your opinion, your credibility is quite high. If none of those are happening and they only come to you when they need pricing, and you're essentially a rate sheet, then your credibility is probably pretty low.   Andres Lares: That's how I would answer it, rather than having a specific process to figure that out.   Will Barron: Makes total sense. That impact of someone that you're prospecting, someone that you're working with, asking you for advice is so important. I don't think this is really talked about in any sales books that I've seen. It's a question that we include in our sales code assessment in our training product, because it really does set the bar between salespeople, and I won't go too much into this, I don't want this to be a pitch for the product kind of thing, but it really just separates salespeople in the data that we've collected, of the cliche salesperson who's a consultant, versus the salesperson who's just spamming cold emails, as many people as possible, trying to just get the right person at the right time, with the right product by fluke and by look, more than anything else.   Will Barron: That question of, hey, do your buyers ask for your advice, ask for your opinions, ring you up, and anything other than what is the price, or how do I get started? That is a massive differentiator in our own internal data, as to a salesperson who's in control of the sale, as much as we want to be, as the buyer goes through the buyer's journey, versus again, someone who's just spamming for the right person at the right place at the right time.   Why Patience is Key When Trying to Build Credibility · [14:48]    Will Barron: Is there anything else you want to add? I want to go through as many of these as we can. Is there anything else you want to add to the credibility? I think that makes sense. I think that is objectively measurable for the audience now as well.   Andres Lares: The only thing I would add is, it takes patience. The only factor we haven't talked about is … In the book, we talk about really, the name of the game is to speed up that process. That's what we all want to do, as salespeople, we want to get to a point where we are credible in the eyes of a potential client, or a client, and do so as quickly as possible. That is the name of the game, but no matter what, even with the best system, even the most experienced and effective people, it takes time.   Andres Lares: That's part of just one other practical tip. If we're talking about building credibility, if I'm talking to Will for the first time, okay, let me get you a proposal and I'll send it to you by end of day Wednesday, and you purposely set a milestone that you can then do.   “You cannot build credibility and trust in the first call. You can begin to, and you want to give yourselves those opportunities and take advantage of those opportunities, but it really does take time. So patience is key when trying to build credibility.”  – Andres Lares · [15:58]    Andres Lares: Then also, I'll follow up with you the following Wednesday, just to make sure, to check in to see if you have any questions. You do that. Then, a week later, you give yourself these milestones and these activities, and things that you say you're going to do, and you do them, and you build reliability. That's another quick way to build it. I bring that up because as much as you're speeding up the process, as you can tell, that takes time. You cannot build credibility and trust in the first call. You can begin to, and you want to give yourselves those opportunities and take advantage of those hacks, if you will. It really does take time.   Andres Lares: Patience is the one other factor I would throw in there.   The Emotional Piece of Rapidly Trying to Build Credibility · [16:12]   Will Barron: [inaudible 00:16:12] emotion, how much of this is actually in the control of the salesperson, and how much of this is in the upbringing, the four patterns, the beliefs, the cultural elements of the buyer themselves of, we're taught as kids, stranger danger and all this kind of stuff. How much of that is the variable, versus our skillset in the marketplace, to be able to attempt to rapidly build credibility?   Andres Lares: The emotion piece, I think, if we segue to that, is something that you have control over. Not complete control, certainly, but you certainly have control over … I'll give you the example again, a lot of studies around this, we did it in our book, but there's a lot of them out there, which say that people are more afraid, and it's more powerful to lose something, than it is to gain something.   Andres Lares: The simple example that is, that Will, as an average person, will feel more pain if he loses $100, let's say, at a casino in roulette, then he will if he gains $100, he makes $100 from playing that same game. Just as an example of that, the crudest example, the reason I bring that up is, then, when you're talking to someone, if you want to engage emotions and you want to really compel someone to be activated in this conversation, and engaged, you might spend more time on, okay, walk me through, explain to me the challenge you face, and why is that so frustrating? You get them talking about it.   Andres Lares: That is a lot more compelling on the flip side, and going straight to the solution on the positive. That's just a perfect example of, you don't have complete control. The person doesn't have to go along with you, which is some of the art, if you will, that you get them going along with you. The science tells us that, if you get them talking about the struggles, the challenges they face, and how it makes them feel, what would happen if they get beyond that, that is something that's going to engage in emotionally, in a much more powerful way, than going straight to the solutions.   Andres Lares: That's where the credibility and the emotions start to bridge together, where the story would say, I've seen conversations like this before. Here's a solution we came up with. I want to go back to what you're facing, and dig in a little more, and you start really asking questions about that. That's where you now start balancing step one, step two, in that process.   Why Building Credibility Should be Enjoyable · [18:30]    Will Barron: Should this process be, fun might be an extreme word to describe it, but should it be an enjoyable process for the buyer and the seller? Because, if you take away the sales element of this, of, I'm going to sit down with Andres, he's going to tell me some stories, he's going to build some emotion, there might be a bit of a logical element to this, to bring things back down and to wrap things up. Hopefully, I'm going to get some kind of benefit out of it, and I'll be able to move forward with this, or stop this pain point, or something like that.   Will Barron: If you talk about this from a, even a therapy perspective or a mentoring perspective, it sounds like it's going to be really productive and everyone's happy. As soon as you mention sales, and you sprinkle that in, everyone's a bit nervous. Barriers come up in the mind of the buyer a lot of the time, and salespeople feel like they're almost battling for attention. If this is done by someone like yourself, who's highly skilled in these steps of influence and storytelling, and all the other stuff that we're talking about, should this be an enjoyable couple of phone calls between buyer and seller?   Andres Lares: First of all, I want to put that in my bio, that Will Barron has said I'm highly skilled in this area. There's a couple things. One is, we've all heard that people don't like being sold too. I think that's part of this too, that if you think about, we always laugh. In some of the sessions, our facilitators will often share a very relatable story about going into a store. If we go into a store to buy a pair of pants, or a clothing store of some kind, and you'll come in.   Andres Lares: What's the first question you're asked? Is, “May I help you,” from the store person, salesperson. What's their immediate response? Is, no, I'm okay, I'm just looking. What's interesting is, we've come in, and we could just be looking. In many cases, we're coming in looking for a specific pair of pants or shirt or a sweater, but we would rather go find it ourselves rather than literally take advantage of this resource that is meant to do exactly that.   Andres Lares: If we were to say, “Hey, I want this sweater in large,” that's their job is to help us do that. Instead, we don't want to be sold to. We say, we're just looking, to get that space, to make our own decision and to get that space. I think that's a perfect example. I think we have to keep that in mind.   “The salespeople that are genuinely curious in a process that’s truly collaborative are very successful because the other side senses that genuine curiosity, and so they're more willing to share. They truly are collaborating. That's how you get to the best solution.” – Andres Lares · [21:01]    Andres Lares: To your question, I would say, what drives all this? In some cases, it could be fun. I think the best salespeople enjoy it. I think the differentiator we saw from the most successful salespeople, is there's genuine curiosity. When they're doing what we talked about, they really are curious as salespeople. That's today's challenge is to learn about, what's Will struggling with, why, what have they done before, and then to come up with a solution together with Will. Those that see it as, there's genuine curiosity in a process that truly is collaborative, are very successful, because the other side senses that genuine curiosity, they're more willing to share. They truly are collaborating.   Andres Lares: That's how you get to the best solution. Now, it's hard to do, and that's the art maybe less than the science, but the genuine curiosity is the biggest driver, I think, of that.   Will Barron: I think a lot of this, I use that example that you're talking about there. You go to Levi's to buy a pair of jeans. Most of the time, there's a spotty teenager there who you're just like, get out the way. Then, you spend twice as long in there, trying on different jeans, when they could just tell you, because all they do is sell jeans all day, and they could've saved half an hour of messing around. Yet, we turn them down.   Will Barron: If you flip down on its head, if you're lucky enough to go and buy a luxury watch, an expensive watch, or a car or something, if you're going into a Rolex store, Omega store, whatever it is, and you're damn well expecting someone knowledgeable is going to come over and hold your hand, because that's part of the service. You might even get a glass of champagne or something, if you make a purchase on the spot there. That's part of the experience.   Statement Against Self Interest: The One Thing You Can Use to Build Credibility Fast · [22:10]   Will Barron: What can we do if, we'll use Sam the salesperson, he's selling HR software, it's super boring, but Sam is curious, and he does really care about his customers, and he cares about the fact that if he serves them well, he's going to get a big fat commission check at the end of the month as well, to be real about it. How does he change the perception of the prospect to shift them from the Levi's store rep, that when they walk into the store, they're not interested, to, hey, I'm actually here to add value, and you're paying for my time, whether you realise it or not, if you make a purchase, because the price of the product is factoring in the fact that we've got staff here, and we've got training, we've got all the facilities.   Will Barron: How would you go about changing the perception of a prospect on, whether it's via before you reach out, if you're trying to warm up a lead before you get on a call with them, or on a call, or wherever it is, how would you change the perception that you're actually there to help them, as opposed to, you are a pesky old-school salesperson just trying to grab cash out their back pocket?   Andres Lares: I think even in the example you brought up, we've talked about that first step, credibility. The person selling the Rolex has the credibility to borrow from Rolex. Rolex is a world-famous brand. That comes with the expectation that that salesperson will be very knowledgeable with the product. The value they bring to the table may not be, they don't need to sell you on buying a watch, and they don't need to understand why you're buying a watch necessarily, but they certainly, at the very least, need to have a lot of product understanding.   Andres Lares: That's what you're tapping into. The value they bring to you is when you ask, okay, what's the difference between this one and that one, those sorts of … Tell me more about how these are made, or whatever it is that you're interested in finding out, they should be a valuable resource there. Them being a valuable resource is how they prove and demonstrate their credibility.   Andres Lares: I would say in the other case, there's a couple of ways that Sam, selling HR software, for example, can do that. One is using statements against self-interest. To quickly do that, again, it has to be genuine. The concept of, I'm not sure this is going to work for you, sometimes is done disingenuously. Your HR software probably doesn't work for everybody. For example, there may be a sweet spot of companies too big or too small, or some industries you're more or less likely for that to work.   Andres Lares: That's a perfect example of, if you're generally having the first few minutes of a conversation around, Will, I've got a few questions for you, and then based on that, we can pretty quickly find out whether or not this could be a good fit. Now, and this would be the million-dollar piece to it, if every single time you go into those few questions, and it's always a “good fit,” then, your process isn't necessarily really genuine.   Andres Lares: If that truly is, and here's what's crazy, I can tell you that, I've had this, we've had salespeople on our team had this, and I've been on podcasts before, very successful people talk about these stories, where you sometimes will get a better referral and long-term client from people that you can even say at the beginning, where it truly isn't a fit. You build credibility by saying, Will, right now based on your size, I'm not sure it makes sense to go to our payroll services, our HR services, but let's keep in touch and figure it out if it changes.   Andres Lares: Then, what happens is, if Will moves to another company, think about how much credibility you build by bringing that up, by being very clear around, look, in this case, it just doesn't make sense. It's not fitting a square peg into a round hole.   Andres Lares: I think statement against self-interest is a big one, where you walk through. Again, if every single time, you're asking those questions early on to qualify, and every single time they're a fit, then it's probably not … You've got to adjust that a little bit. If there are a few times where it isn't a fit, and you can tell that person, or at least not a fit at the moment, then I think that's a pretty effective way to build credibility, and to get that early on.   Andres Lares: I would say that happens even in the prospecting stage. It's not like, Will, I know this will work for you, but instead it's, I only need 10 minutes of your time. Look, in the third email, when I haven't even got 10 minutes of Will's time, I'm going to send him an email, here's three or four questions you should start thinking about. Then, based on a brief conversation, or even you answering by email, I could tell you if it's even worth your time to spend 10 minutes. That kind of concept again is, there's credibility to that.   Andres Lares: There's empathy there, where they understand that I'm busy. They're going to figure out for me, whether or not this is worth my time.   Should You Be Using Manipulative Selling Techniques Even When They Can Potentially Yield Intended Results? · [26:25]    Will Barron: When we're talking about being, because I'm conscious about being flippant and cliche about this. When we talk about being authentic, we talk about being genuine, to make this practical for the audience, obviously most humans, depending on how perhaps your brain's wired, we have a gut instinct, gut feeling, whatever we want to call it, of someone is lying to us. Someone is manipulating, something isn't right.   Will Barron: Maybe there's a level of skill with … It becomes a manipulation then. Maybe there's a level of skill of manipulation, where you can overcome that feeling that people have. I think a lot of salespeople believe that they are incredible at influence and negotiation, when there's no evidence at all that they are, myself included. I used to think I was killer, all of this stuff. I'd read a few books on it. My real first sales job was working in medical device sales. I'd be dealing with surgeons all day, and they all think that they're amazing negotiations, and it's a bit of a boy's club, and we'd all be battling over these things.   Will Barron: Then when you start doing real deals with actual deal makers in large organisations in the corporate world, you soon realise that, I soon realised, I didn't actually know anything. I was not necessarily from a malicious place trying to manipulate people, but I was trying to just smash through barriers, and talk over people, and do weird tricks and things to try and take control of a situation.   Will Barron: Now, when I negotiate, it's very much from an authentic place of, here's the deal, you can either have it or not have it. You're not going to change my life either way. That's where things are. Deals come in so much easier, cleaner and smoother on the back of that.   Will Barron: My question, Andres, is, for the average person, should they focus on just being real, authentic, not bullshitting and trying to learn some of these skills to put people on the right pathway so we can help them, or is the scope to … Is it possible to manipulate people, is what I'm getting at, in a buyer/seller relationship? Not necessarily from a long-term perspective, from a short-term. Could you teach us black arts and black magic and some witchery, and maybe we've got to have a weird shrine, and we've got to sacrifice a sheep or something, before we jump onto the call.   Will Barron: Is it possible to manipulate people and get deals done, or it's just so difficult to do, that we should just focus on the softer skills, the easier stuff that we're talking about here, that actually gets results? That's a terrible question, but I'm going to let you try and answer it anyway.   Andres Lares: I'm all of a sudden going to take this to left field for a second, because the answer to that, actually, I want to make a connection to the Tinder Swindler. It's big on Netflix. Your question, can you manipulate? I think the answer very much is yes. For those that haven't watched the show, I think the title says it all, but there definitely is the ability to manipulate.   “The reality about manipulation is that if it's against their will, it’s really not something you want to be doing.” – Andres Lares · [29:44]    Andres Lares: I think, and it's one of the reasons, when we wrote our book, one of the first chapters is about that, is about the ethics. It's short, because we could write so much about it. There could be a whole book on that. The reality is, what we say is, if it's against their will, is that really what you want to be doing?   Andres Lares: It's also so short-term. Short-term, eventually you'll find out, eventually, it just doesn't feel good. Eventually, it catches up with you, and that's, for us, when we're training people, we're training for a sustained process, that they can continue all the way through their entire career. If anything, if you're in sales, those relationships you build, they begin to really … It's like a snowball. They really begin to pay dividends over the course of your career. I'm sure you've seen this, where friendships you've made, business relationships you've had for five, 10, 15, 20 years pay off no matter what you do in referrals and advice and everything else.   Andres Lares: There definitely is the ability to manipulate. It is hard, what's authentic and what's not. I think it starts with, at the core is, do you believe in the product or service that you're selling?   Andres Lares: I think that that's almost underappreciated. If you're in sales, that's the first piece you need to do, rather than necessarily getting into that big company we talked about earlier, there is an advantage to the credibility, you can borrow from a really big company everyone's heard of, but more important than that is, do you really believe in it? That alone, you'll naturally, even without thinking about it, that's going to ooze out of you, because you genuinely feel like, if they listen to you and it's a good fit, you're going to be providing value.   Andres Lares: That's the first step. If you want to do it naturally, that's the first step. Then, there's some other aspects that are trained. I think the trained piece is around, really, like you said, asking questions to understand what their needs are, in a way that the answer can't always be, this is a perfect fit. If those two are happening, I would say you're probably 90% of the way there. Then, that last 10% really is the art and science that you can fine tune over experience, do the training, experimenting, all those things take you to the last little bit, but those first two are, in my opinion, very significant.   Negotiation and Influence in Sales. It’s Not That Complicated · [31:35]   Will Barron: Is it fair to say then that me in this conversation, and maybe some of the audience as they look into negotiation, influence? Is it easy to over-complicate this?   Andres Lares: It is. I think, and that's why I know in your podcast, it's something that you talk about, the simplicity and the ability to execute. This is exactly why the book is the four-step process, and not the 72 ways to persuade, because the reality is, if you go back to the four we talked about, even if you haven't read it, even if you know aren't an expert in each area, just even the concepts alone. First, you build credibility.   Andres Lares: The first time you're reaching out to a potential client, you want to figure out, okay, how am I going to gain credibility? Why are they even going to care? Where's my perceived credibility going to come from? Engage emotion. I'm not going to go straight the logic. I want to attach this to something that they care about. Then, the logic is, how do I do that? Whether it's a story or something very … A logical consequence or conclusion based on the emotion and the credibility. Then finally, facilitate action. Okay. Let's do things to, whether it's providing options or maintaining momentum, let's do things that make it more likely that we are going to be able to advance the sale.   Andres Lares: If you think about just that process, again, an example of simple, if you and I talk today about 77 ways to do something, none of them will resonate. If we stick to four, the likelihood that those four will resonate is significantly higher, and that they'll be usable is significantly higher.   Will Barron: Okay. We'll wrap up the show with this, Andres. Are each of these segments, and say, we're trying to do this on, just to simplify our example here, we're going to try and do this on one call. The prospect has booked a meeting into our calendar. We have enough credibility that they want to speak to us about our projects or services. We've borrowed credibility from elsewhere. Maybe we are genuinely experts in our space as well.   How to Take Your Prospects Down the Path of Credibility, Emotion, and Eventually Taking Action · [33:34]    Will Barron: They want to speak with us. The emotion, the logic, the facilitate action, they go in that order. Are we doing emotion, and then we transition to logic, and then we transition to facilitating action, or is this more of a washing effect, where they knock into each other, and there's less of a hard transition between each one?   Andres Lares: I would say the latter. I think it's important, especially, most of us are selling remotely, or there's a significant remote piece of it. Just one other practical tip that I think will answer that question is, as an example, you're talking to a potential prospect now, and especially for those folks that may have been selling in person, but now have to continue to sell remotely due to COVID. If you think about, okay, credibility starts from the emails, the setting up a call, all the things you've done to even get the call. You probably have some credibility enough to at least get the call.   Andres Lares: Then, generally, again, for those folks that used to meet in person, they would spend an hour with someone at their office or at their manufacturing facility or whatever, they're used to running the sales process in one way. I would say, now you've gone online, now, you've probably gone from an hour, an hour and a half, to 30 minutes, and it's online. Engage emotion. If you follow that, where they start going back and forth, what would you do in those 30 minutes?   Andres Lares: While most of us feel the need to rush through the sales pitch, “Usually I've got an hour, but now I only have 30 minutes.” Instead, do these exact opposite, which is, those 30 minutes, you can send a proposal, you can send a PowerPoint, you can work through it on email, all the details of the things that you want to do from a logic perspective, all of the value proposition, you can do all that, but you cannot replicate the relationship with the bonding and the emotional aspect of the sale.   Andres Lares: Those 30 minutes should really be totally on emotion, totally on discovery, because everything else, you can do after. You do that because, if you do enough of that in the richest medium possible, which is the video call, then that allows you enough credibility, and you engage enough emotion for them to even care about the logic that you're going to share thereafter. The sales space, the value proposition, the PowerPoint, whatever you're going to send after.   Andres Lares: I bring that up because it is like the waves concept, where there's back and forth, and it isn't perfectly linear. It is a building of the pyramid, but it isn't perfectly linear. I think that goes into something we cover in our selling virtually programme, which is, even these and these podcasts, I would tell you, when I do podcasts, I think it's a richer conversation when there's video. Whether or not it ends up being broadcast or part of the podcast, because you can see the person, and there's the body language, the feedback.   Andres Lares: I think it makes for a richer conversation. It's the first time you and I have met, but I feel like I know you better, and I hope you feel the same. It's just a little bit different than it would if it was completely audio-based. Hopefully, that example has a practical tip, but also answers that question of, there is some grey areas between the stages.   Will Barron: Yep. That makes total sense. I'm conscious of time, because we could do an episode on each one of these four steps individually, and how it's twined, and another episode on … We could even role play some of this. I think there'd be value for the audience. There's one thing I don't think we've covered yet, and I want to wrap up the show with this, and this idea of, we're not doing this to someone. Tell me if I'm wrong here, but we're not throwing this out at someone.   Will Barron: This is a conversation. This is seeing their body language, as you mentioned, their cues, their triggers, if they're interested, if they're not in their head. Is there anything that we need to be looking out to, perhaps in one or two lines for each of these steps, for how we know that we've achieved that, and we can move on to the next one?   Here’s How To Know If You’re Credible Enough · [37:20]    Will Barron: What I mean by that is, how do we know if we've got credibility when we're on a video call? How do we know when we've ticked a few emotional boxes and we're now ready to talk about logic? Because some of the audience will take this conversation, try and turn it into a script, and just say it verbatim, hoping for a positive outcome. Again, tell me if I'm wrong. I feel like this is something that is done conversationally, as opposed to, I'm doing it's to you, Andres.   “When building credibility, you're not doing it to someone, you're doing it with someone. And I think if you've got time with the person, then they deemed you to be credible, because it's easier to say no than yes. We all have competing priorities and are busy. If you've allowed Will to take 15, 30 minutes of your time, there's enough credibility there for he or she to allow you to do that.” – Andres Lares · [37:57]    Andres Lares: Spot on. I think, I would summarise that with the two words, you're not doing it to someone, you're doing it with someone, is the first answer. Absolutely. I think that's critical. Then, for each one, I think the earlier ones are easier. Credibility, if you've got time with the person, then they deemed you to be credible, because it's easier to say no than yes. We all have competing priorities and are busy. If you've allowed Will to take 15, 30 minutes of your time, there's enough credibility there for he or she to allow you to do that.   Andres Lares: Then as far as emotion, I think if the person cares, if the body language is, the eye contact, video-wise, if that makes sense, if you can tell they perk up and are wanting to share more, the emotion's engaged. I would say logic is probably more around buying signals. At that point, you just start to progress. There's the buying signals of asking for pricing, or asking more specific questions. Then, the facilitate action's probably the opposite. It's one that you don't wait to see whether you're getting those signs, you're doing it anyways to make sure it doesn't happen.   Andres Lares: Part of facilitate action is, I think as salespeople, it's harder to resuscitate a sale than it is to continue all the way through. When we lose momentum, it's hard to regain it, just like it's easier to sell to a current client, and grow a current client, than it is a new one. I would say, that one's actually the opposite, where you don't want to be waiting for that cue, “I think I'm losing this person.” You want to act as if you're not even going to let that person get to that stage by continuing to facilitate action and keep the momentum.   How to Move Into the Close After Successfully influencing Buying Decisions · [39:10]    Will Barron: Final question for me, this is the third final question I've asked you. Should this come to a crescendo with a closing statement? Does it make sense to move forward with this? Should this big ball be getting faster and bigger and boulders removed, as it moves forward throughout the conversation? Or, should there be peaks and troughs, and should it be more chill, again, or should it be like, we're building up speed, we're building momentum, we're building that emotion, we're layering in the logic, and towards the end of it, it's like, yes, we're rocking and rolling?   Andres Lares: It does build, and I think I expected a little bit of that when we started doing our research. Our research was, we did a research of 1000 decision makers around the world. We were trying to take away a bias of a specific culture. I expected to see more of that. We covered, for example, soft and hard closes, and whether there is that buildup into that big ask. I think one of the things that we quickly learned is, that doesn't really happen, because each one's so different. If you see a sales process as just learning about the other party, figuring out if there's a fit, and then connecting your solutions to it, it's that simple. I don't want to oversimplify, but really, it is that simple.   Andres Lares: Then, each one's going to be a little bit different. Some people are going to … You're going to need to apply a little bit more pressure, because maybe they're changing the status quo. They've had an incumbent supplier, or, as you said, HR software partner for many years, and you've got to move them off of that. That might require a little bit more aggressiveness with a, does that make sense? Should we give this a go? Put a little bit more, not pressure, but take it up a notch.   “The most effective way to get someone to believe something is if they say it.” – Andres Lares · [41:05]   Andres Lares: Versus in some other cases, you want to take the opposite approach, which is, you share, share, share, focus on credibility, focus on building that emotion, and give that person that space, because he or she, again, may not want to be sold to. They'll be more … I will say, one piece that ties us all together is, and we cover this in both our influencing and persuasion class, and as well also, our negotiation, which is, the most effective way to get someone to believe something is if they say it.   Andres Lares: We're better off asking a question of, Will, what would your world look like if you were to save 10 hours a week based on your HR software? Again, those are too cliche, maybe not the perfect question, but that concept, and if you were to say, that would allow me to do X, Y, and Z, that's a lot better than, this will save me 10 hours of time, so that will allow you to do X, Y, and Z. Who believes me? I'm just a salesperson.   Andres Lares: You may not believe me, until I gain enough credibility. Until then, asking a couple of those questions that have you come up with that, and it may not be the immediate response. It isn't, you ask Will this perfect question, and expecting to say, wow, that was a good question. I'm sold, and where do sign. That's not going to happen, but now, you've planted that seed. For that next conversation, you can assume that that person's thought a little bit about it. Now, that's the area we're going to spend a little bit more time in the discovery phase.   Andres Lares: Hopefully, that's not too all over the place, but I think we're talking theoretical, we're also talking practical, but one of my goals was to give us few practical tools and tips that people could use immediately after they listen to this. That's another one, try to find a way you can ask that question to get to that answer, rather than tell the other party that.   “Your sales calls shouldn't be weird. It should be someone who wants to speak with you, and you want to chat with them. You want to see if you're a good fit. If you're not, fine, ask for a referral, you can follow up later on down the line.” – Will Barron · [42:20]    Will Barron: I love it. My biggest takeaway from this show is something that I know, but I didn't know five, six years ago when I started the podcast, and when I was still working in a sales role, but I now for experience, having done thousands of sales calls for our training product, that your sales calls shouldn't, this sounds ridiculous, your sales calls shouldn't be weird. It should be someone who wants to speak with you, and you want to chat with them. You see if you're a good fit. If you're not, fine, ask for a referral, you can follow up later on down the line. As you mentioned, they might change jobs. They might go to different companies. Budget appears six months down the line, whatever it is, you just stay in contact, add that little bit value, share some industry insights every quarter, whatever it is.   Will Barron: The conversation, you don't have to be best friends with the person that you're chatting with, but it should be a half decent little conversation. It shouldn't be weird. You shouldn't be reading from a script, the next step number 27 than in the manipulation formula. Because even as you mentioned earlier on-   Andres Lares: I feel like … when you start saying that, I …   Will Barron: That would be an interesting show in its own right, to look at the black arts of influence and negotiation, and see maybe what we shouldn't be doing with some of this. I feel like, what I'm taking away from this is, it should be just a fun … Fun's a strong word. It should be a constructive conversation between two adults, talking about a business problem, and whether the business you can represent solves it. There shouldn't be no pressure. I know we're talking about negotiations, influence and persuasion here.   Will Barron: A lot of those words have a level of pressure tied to them. In the negotiation, most people assume I'm trying to win a negotiation. As opposed to, we're trying to compromise and come to a solution that everyone's onboard with. This is societal, this is culture and films that, there's no boardroom negotiation in any film where everyone's like, “Oh, I enjoyed that conversation.” You have some pastries and a cup of coffee and you just have a chat about things. It's obviously culturally, negotiation has things tied to it.   Why Your Sales Conversations With Prospects Should Never Be Weird · [44:30]    Will Barron: Am I on the right tracks here that, a sales conversation, as we just outlined, when we've got credibility, especially if it's an inbound lead where the prospect wants to speak to us, we should just be having a nice chat with them?   Andres Lares: Yeah. It's hard though, because I think that requires confidence. I love the way you said, and I agree, fun might be almost too strong, but not a far stretch to say enjoyable. That's the thing, and we get to one other piece we didn't cover at all, though, [inaudible 00:44:51] building is, people like doing business with people that they like. That's a part of it. That is a means to an end. If Will's the nice guy that you enjoy talking to, you're more likely to talk to Will, which makes it more likely for him to make the sale.   Andres Lares: There is an immediate advantage to doing that. If you enjoy it and they enjoy it, good things will come from it, no matter what. That really can only come if you're genuine, if you have enough confidence, because early on in your career, you're reading from the script, because you're thinking, I really don't want to screw this up. You said something earlier today where, you've gotten to a point in your career where you say, look, this is it, and if it doesn't work for you, that's okay. If it does, great.   Andres Lares: That confidence that you have. Just to be fair, if you're starting your career, you're not at that point. You don't have the confidence to feel like you have the ability to do that. I can certainly relate to that, and early on for anyone's career, that's a stage where they're in. The enjoying aspect is, I think, highly underappreciated and underrated.   Parting Thoughts · [45:50]    Will Barron: Sure. I agree. I joined this conversation. With that, tell us a little bit more about NSI, and tell us more about the book, and where we can find it as well.   Andres Lares: Yeah, absolutely. The Shapiro Negotiations Institute, the acronym is a global negotiation influence and sales training firm, based in Baltimore. We do work all over, and actually, excited to share that we've been doing, I think, five languages, and now we're up to eight. Certainly, taking that global to the next level. Then, the book is behind me there, right behind my head, Persuade. It's exactly that, The 4-Step Process to Influence People.   Andres Lares: If you've heard today, that's what it's all about. I really appreciate meeting you, Will, and I enjoy your podcast very much.   Will Barron: I'm glad to have you on. I will link to that, everything else we talked about in this show, in the show notes of this episode, are at salesman.org. With that, Andres, again, genuinely, I don't say this in every episode, love to have you back on the future. Love to dive into this in more detail, and thanks again for joining us on the Salesman Podcast.   Andres Lares: Thank you for having me. I'd love to.  

Jeff Bajorek is a sales and prospecting expert who helps B2B sellers rethink the way they sell. In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Jeff explains the traits of high performers and how you can become one today. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Jeff Bajorek Sales and Prospecting Expert Resources: Jeff on LinkedIn Jeffbajorek.com Rethink the Way You Sell Podcast Book: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth About Extraordinary Results Book: Awaken the Giant Within Book: Finite and Infinite Games Transcript Will Barron: Hi, my name is Will, and welcome to the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we're looking at the characteristics of top sales performers with my guest, Jeff Bajorek. Jeff is a sales and pro expert who helps B2B sales rethink the way they sell. You can find his new podcast, Rethink The Way You Sell, on everywhere, right, Jeff? And with that, mate, welcome to the show.   Jeff Bajorek: Thanks for having me. It's good to be here again.   Characteristics of a High-Achieving Sales Professional · [00:49]   Will Barron: You're more than welcome. I think this is the fourth time we've had you on. We'll touch on the podcast Rethink The Way You Sell towards the end of the show: where we can find it. I know it's a new and exciting project for you, so I'm happy to get it out there and promote it to our audience. But with that, mate, we're going to touch on this idea of characteristic of top sales performers. And you, when we lined this show up, used the word characteristics. So what does that mean? Is this a personality trait? Is this our DNA? Is this things that we've learned? What defines a characteristic of a salesperson? Then we'll dive into the ones that make the difference when we're all trying to hit quota.   “I think there's a 5% difference between mediocrity and super-stardom. It’s the little things that really make the difference between those top performers and everybody else.” – Jeff Bajorek · [01:05]   Jeff Bajorek: Yeah. I've been saying for years: I think there's a 5% difference between mediocrity and super-stardom, and while there are certainly things that are innate to us that may make us better intuitively at some of these things than others, there's nothing on this list that I don't think anybody can do. We can all be just a little bit better if we have some focus in these areas or for these characteristics. So it's the little things. I'm trying to codify the little things that really make the difference between those top performers and, really, everybody else. And I think it's something, if people want to aspire to it, they can get it.   Can a Person Achieve Sales Success Without the Characteristics of a High-Achieving Salesperson? · [01:51]   Will Barron: Can you have sales success without these characteristics? And I'll give you an example here that I've seen; undoubtedly, you've seen as well. You'll be at a company, whether you're selling there, consulting there, whatever you're doing, sales leadership in their company. And some new kid will come along who doesn't know the product, doesn't know what they're doing, and then they have an amazing first six months and they crush everyone who seemingly does know the product, does have all these characteristics and does know what they're doing. So does that disprove these characteristics, or is it likely that this individual just has a bunch of these characteristics naturally and that's why they crush it?   Jeff Bajorek: Well, it's important, and I'll probably get a bill for this, but my old mentor used to say all the time, “Look, we don't sell in a vacuum.” There are things that happen outside of our control that impact our results all the time. So that fresh-faced kid right out of school comes and has just a tremendous first six months, first year, and rockets to the top of the leaderboard? Yeah, that can happen. That can happen by dumb luck. That can happen by doing the right things, maybe for the wrong reasons or not knowing why he or she should be doing those things.   Jeff Bajorek: But as far as sustained success… Okay, year one was great. What are you going to do when your quota gets jacked up? What are you going to do the year after that? What are you going to do to retain those customers? Or what are you going to do to continue to find those things that are really going to move the needle for you?   Jeff Bajorek: And Will, I think this might have been something we talked about in the past. It's worth talking about again, regardless, but there are a lot of people who get moved into leadership positions, get promoted beyond their real skillset, and their problem is not that they weren't successful before. It's that they don't know why. And so when you get into a leadership role, particularly, and you just say, to your reps, “Just do it like I did. This is how I always did it. Put it out there,” it doesn't usually work because there isn't that understanding or clarification behind it.   Will Barron: I don't think I've ever talked about this on the podcast before. Hopefully this will be a good analogy for the audience. My first medical device sales job was a company called Olympus that's super well known; the products are the best for flexible endoscopes and pretty good for rigid endoscopes in the marketplace.   Will Barron: Well, I took over on my territory from the ex-managing-director of the company. So he was managing director for… His name was Doug, right? Managing director for a decade. And then I think basically he had a few kids, maybe he had twins or something, and so he's like, “Right, I'm going to take a few steps back. I'm going to go into this senior sales role,” three or four years, whatever it is, have that work-life balance, whatever he was after, and then he'd go back into the managing director role, which he did. And I think he ended up moving to the States and taking over the business over there later on as well.   The Truth About Luck in Sales · [04:59]    Will Barron: So I didn't really understand this when I first joined the company, but I thought sales was just super easy and simple. I was the example that I've just given at the top of the show, of: I come in, there's a bunch of deals already happening; I ought to just show up and hand over the order form to get some signatures. Absolutely crushed it that first year. So of course, what happens? My target doubles the next year and things get a little bit more tight from that moment onwards as I had to deal with my own mortality in sales. Right? So I love the way you describe that of the environment, the marketplace, things are in flux, and it is fair that people just have luck sometimes when they jump into sales roles, isn't it?   Jeff Bajorek: Yeah. And I don't think we should hold it against those people. I think we should reserve judgement , obviously, because hey, we'll see what happens next year, but look, you fall to a good gig? Great. There's a lot of jealousy, right? You see people on teams: “Well, she's doing great because she took over from the managing director.” Okay, whatever. I mean, there's no room for that. I don't understand how that helps you as a seller. Right? So if we could stay away from that petty stuff, I think we'd be a lot better off.   Jeff Bajorek: But look, luck happens. Good territories happen. I worked in medical device sales too. What happened when a whale of a customer decided to move to your territory? Hey, you know what? It means a lot of responsibility too. Maybe it was a gift that landed in someone's lap, but now they got to figure out how to continue to deal with that. Right? And it's not as easy as everybody thinks, so let's move on. What's going to be productive for you, regardless of what's happening two counties over?   How to Identify a Top Performing Sales Professional · [06:18]   Will Barron: So with that in mind, then, things that we can control, hopefully: what are the characteristics, Jeff, of top sales performers?   “Great salespeople don't apologise for being in sales. When you're in sales and you're proud of the profession, it means that you're constantly trying to solve problems for other people.” – Jeff Bajorek · [06:37]    Jeff Bajorek: I've boiled it down to seven, and I think where I've gotten feedback where I'm missing something, I'm actually not missing it; I just categorise it a little bit different. So I think the first one is they're proud to call themselves sellers. I think first and foremost, great salespeople don't apologise for being in sales. And so that's something that is pretty simple, not always easy to wrap your brain around, but when you're in sales and you're proud of the profession, it means that you're other-oriented. You're trying to solve problems for other people, and I think that comes through in personal branding really well too. I mean, I'm really proud to help people the way that I do, Will, and I know you are too, and I just think there's still too many people apologising for helping people the way they do.   “One of the only ways you can sell more is by spending more time selling.” – Jeff Bajorek · [07:40]    Jeff Bajorek: The second big thing is that they have a really strong why or purpose, and behind that, we got into just a minute ago the pettiness of some salespeople and wondering about what's going on in the territory next to them. But when you have a really strong purpose, you're focused. You're disciplined. You create really, really strong boundaries, and that helps you get organised so you spend the time that you need, the time that you can, doing the things only you can do. And that's really, really powerful in terms of just not being distracted, because look, one of the only ways you can sell more is by spending more time selling, and that means boundaries. I think top performers treat selling as a vocation, not just a job, and we can get into that. I mean, it's continuous improvement really inspired by the work that they do. Top performers take responsibility for their own outcomes. That means doing what needs to be done to get the outcome for the client, not just saying, “That's my job,” or, “That's not my job.”   Jeff Bajorek: And then just the last few: they think about what needs to be done, not how to do something. They're not following any paint-by-numbers sales manual or playbook. They think about what needs to be done and then they execute in the best way that they can. I think this is probably the biggest one.   Jeff Bajorek: The last two: they create an environment to buy rather than just pitching a product. And they also keep their swagger, which is a great mindset. And they lean into adversity. They make sure they always move forward and they are really channelling that inner rock-star when they do their best work. That's my high level running through that, Will. Where do you want to go deeper?   Why You Need to Treat Your Sales Career as a Vocation · [08:45]    Will Barron: What does it mean to be in a sales career as a vocation, and on top of that, when does your sales role allow you to do that? Because if you're selling some crappy product for a crappy company, it's very difficult to turn that into a vocation. And maybe it's your first job out of college, or maybe you were struggling and you got let go during the pandemic so you just had to grab any sales job that was available. What does it mean to treat your sales role as a vocation, and then what jobs and positions enable you to actually do that?   Jeff Bajorek: Well, I think any job enables you to actually do that, and there are some people out there right now who aren't selling for the company they want to be selling for near the end of their career. Maybe there's a short lifespan in this role. That's okay. But think about what you're doing. Think about the way that you interact with and impact other people. And even if this is a short-term stop on your career-long journey, there's still a lot of greater, broader concepts that you can put into play selling what you're selling right now. So I think it's just seeing the bigger picture, and if this is a step along the way, then great, keep your eyes open for opportunities elsewhere. But while you are where you are at, do the best work that you can and figure out how you can be a little bit better.   Jeff Bajorek: Again, it's continuous improvement. It's looking at not just your weak points, but look at the ways that you can double down on your strengths. Test things. Maybe this is a laboratory. You've been to these same shows. Well, I used to love going to trade shows and especially when it wasn't in my territory, because I would run into my friends and my colleagues. I'd run into their physicians, and I'd run into a lot of physicians that weren't really being called on by anybody in a company, and that was a laboratory for me. I could see which openers would work. I could see which questions were going to get some thought and things like that. And nobody lost, right? There was nothing to lose. So are you tinkering? Are you playing around a little bit?   Will Barron: Are you familiar with the book The One Thing?   Jeff Bajorek: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   Will Barron: Have you read it, right?   Jeff Bajorek: I have.   The Only Characteristic You Need to Become a High-Achieving Sales Professional · · [11:08]   Will Barron: Out of these seven traits, is there one of them that, if you've got it, makes all the rest of them either obsolete or unnecessary? Is there one thing that you either need to have right before the rest of them will fall into place, or is there one thing that if you have it and you can leverage that in your sales role, the rest of it doesn't really matter?   Jeff Bajorek: It's like asking me to pick my favourite child. I love that book. I love that concept. It's tough to get these down to just one, and I think even if I did, it would be that the other would fall underneath it. And I think it's either taking responsibility for your outcomes, or thinking in terms of what needs to be done, not how to do it. And I think thinking in terms of what needs to be done, not just how to do it, probably it's arguable which one is superlative to that.   Jeff Bajorek: And having a broader scope, seeing the bigger picture, I think… And maybe that's just it. Maybe we just combine them all, because all of this is about seeing the bigger picture, right? It's boundaries, it's your professional reputation, it's your mindset. It's the tactics of things aren't as important as that broader framework of understanding the rules of the game and putting yourself in position to win. And that, I think, when you look at top performers, they're seeing things differently, and it's because they're giving themselves permission to see things differently.   Jeff Bajorek: When I started my career, similar to yours, Will, I took over a territory that my new managing director, if you will, had, and there was a rep between me and him. But I would sell with him and we'd be in the field together, and I would look at him and say, “Wow. Do I need to be like you in order to sell this way, in order to sell this product?” And then I'd go with other senior reps and I'd be like, “No, I don't do it like him either, or like her either. Huh.” But then I step back and I'm like, “Okay, but what are they all doing? What's the common theme?” And I think a top performer understands those common themes and creates an ecosystem for themself to work within it.   Will Barron: I think a lot of this comes down to… And I'm surprised you didn't say this. I'm surprised, but I can understand, because as I say this, I feel like some weird leadership guru who wrote a book that was three pages of content and then the rest of it was just nonsense, like most business books out there, when we talk about the importance of your why and the importance of your purpose and the importance of knowing who you are, stuff like this. There's a lot of woo-woo, nonsense, leadership mumbo-jumbo in some of this content.   Will Barron: But as I said, I feel like that goes above everything else. I don't mean your why as in, “I want to save the world with my sales job,” because you're not going to save the world with your sales job, right? You're going to go and help people, you're going to exchange your expertise and time for money, and then you're going to pay off your mortgage, put your kids through college, whatever it is, buy your nice car, go on holidays and maybe retire early and then move on to something that's probably going to have more impact, if that's what you care about.   Why It’s So Important to Find Your Why in Sales · [14:35]    Will Barron: But that why, that purpose, that then leads you to question the game that you play. It leads you to not seek permission to see things differently. It leads you to become perhaps unapologetic as a salesperson. Is there a thread there of the why that you have and the purpose that you have, even if it's as simple as, “Hey, I grew up poor, I don't like having debt and I've got to pay off this mortgage so that I feel confident and calm and secure in everything else in life; that's going to lead me to be proactive in my sales to do the right things and to close some deals”?   Jeff Bajorek: Well, I mean, along those lines, that's why there are seven and not one, right? I mean, we can argue about which one is more important or a bigger concept or whatever, and I mean, I'm not going to argue with you and your point as the guy who had a podcast called The Why and The Buy for five years. The importance of that purpose is not lost on me, right? And I think it's really interesting. This is fun campfire talk, right? Let's dig into all of this and bring up these different points, right? I mean, that's what I love about what guys like you and I do. So, yes, I won't argue with you, but if we talked about this again tomorrow, we may come up with different answers, too.   The Traits You Should Drop if You Want to Enjoy Long-Term Sales Success · [16:20]     Will Barron: Sure. I want you to argue with me. I want you to battle me over it, because the problem that I've got in the show at the moment, Jeff, is I'm inviting people on that I want to speak to. Right? And we're all on the same wavelength, so the conversations are 80%, “Oh, this is a good point. Yeah, I agree. This is a great point. Oh yes, it's fantastic. Oh yes.” The audience think we're just sat there stroking each other's egos. So with that, feel free to battle me on some of this, right? Are there any personality traits, or to use your language here, are there any characteristics that we need to extinguish or leave behind that will hold us back? So some of it is the inverse of what we've talked about so far, right?   Jeff Bajorek: Right.   Will Barron: But is there any other, even anything counterintuitive that we need to drop to have success in sales?   Jeff Bajorek: Yeah. I think salespeople need to readdress their dysfunctional relationship with failure and they need to address their dysfunctional relationship with rejection. And I don't mean get thicker skin. I don't mean be tougher. I mean, you need to redefine what failure and rejection are, and, I think, learn to thrive, right? Learn to embrace what those things do. Now, I don't think there's much rejection in sales at all, because I don't think rejection actually happens till someone hears you out and then says, “Will, I see what you're doing there. That's not for us.” That's rejection. Right? Most of what people call rejection in sales is really people just never having paid any attention, and I don't think you can be rejected unless someone's paying attention to you. So the getting hung up on during your cold-calling blocks and things like that, not only is it not personal, it's also not valid as rejection. So stop saying you're being rejected all the time.   Jeff Bajorek: The other thing with regard to failure is are you learning something? Every sales call that I learn something that helps make me rather better at my next sales call, that's a win. And again, it's that broader scope, right? If that sales call didn't go the way I thought it would, and so now I see this small picture, this small deal here, not being able to advance, and so I'll probably lose, okay, whatever. But if I step back and say, “I'm going to be doing this for probably another 30 or 40 more years and I just learned something there that will alter the trajectory of the rest of my sales calls for the next 30 or 40 years even in a small way,” that's a win.   “Every failure is an opportunity to learn. If you choose not to learn, that's a real failure.” – Jeff Bajorek · [18:49]    Jeff Bajorek: That's a big win, because those little steps continue to add up, and no step is too small if it's headed in the right direction and you keep taking steps, right? So let's be real about what we're doing here, and that's what I mean about that scope, right? So quit trying to do it right. Think about what needs to be done, not what everybody else is doing. And every failure is an opportunity to learn. If you choose not to learn, that's a real failure.   The Link Between Sales Success and Developing the Characteristics of a High-Performing Sales Person · [18:59]   Will Barron: How much of sales success comes down to these characteristic? Some of the characteristics that we've described are soft skills. Some of them are more logical things that we need to learn and implement, right? How much of it comes down to, for example, these characteristics versus what you're touching on there, which is the scientific method, which is we make a hypothesis, we test it in the marketplace, we get results, we then refine our hypothesis, and we do this forever because the marketplace is constantly changing. We are constantly changing. The product cycle is changing as well. How much does success in sales come down to, for example, the seven characteristics that you've just described, which we could write a book about now and it'll still be relevant 20 years from now, versus a scientific method, which is this logical iterative process.   Jeff Bajorek: Well, I think there are elements of both, right? Because there are certain non-negotiable things that have to happen in a sales process, which is why the science exists. But in terms of being able to impact more deals, I think the art part of selling lies in these seven characteristics here. So I definitely think it's both, and I'm thinking now, “Okay, there you go, just agreeing with Will again.” It's having the emotional intelligence to know how to react differently to different people. It's paying close enough attention to understand where those hot buttons and buying motives are. It's reading between the lines sometimes, and you can't read between the lines if you're just following the manual that they gave you during onboarding. Right?   Jeff Bajorek: So I mean, there's this nuance that has to come about. You can only really learn and develop by stopping and reviewing the tape after your call, listening to your sales calls, being in the moment regularly enough to pay attention where you made a misstep or where you said the wrong thing or whatever it was. All of that stuff comes about in some way, shape or form through these seven characteristics. But the science is: step one, we pick up the phone; step two, we send an email after we left a voicemail message that gives them another way to hear from us or another way to reply to us. The iteration is different from the approach, but you cannot succeed without some of both.   Will Barron: I agree. I agree. This is the-   Jeff Bajorek: No, argue with me, Will. We talked about this.   Will Barron: This is literally what you said, Jeff, of the science versus the art of sales: why some people jump into a sales role and because of their upbringing, because of whatever it is, the high levels of self-esteem, they don't have an issue with rejection, right? They don't take it personally. It could be the job they did as a kid. It could be the subtle subconscious whisperings from their parents or family members.   Will Barron: I know it as an adult now engaging with kids and I go, “What'd you do?” “Oh, well, I run a small business.” “What does that mean?” “Oh, well, I do this and I take people there and the gap is the value and that's what they pay me for.” “Oh.” And if someone talked to me like how I talk to… Because my friends have young kids and that now. If someone talked to me as a kid the way that I talk to other kids, I would have known what an entrepreneur was at five and I would have wanted to be one and probably still would have gone down the sales role.   Will Barron: And young… I say young. I'm 35. I'm talking about the 20- to 25-year-olds that consume the content, and perhaps I go back and forth over emails with. A lot of them want to be entrepreneurs. A lot of them want to be the next Elon Musks. So the first thing is, you're not going to be Elon Musks by… Reserve yourself, check your ego [inaudible 00:22:42] door. No one emailing me for advice is going to be Elon Musk, because you're emailing the wrong person. You need to be in front of Elon Musk, as much of a hit on my ego as that is. But then I would recommend to them that sales is the process to go through.   How to Develop a Better Relationship with Failure and Rejection · [23:20]   Will Barron: So with all that said, some of this is perhaps innate. Some of it is learned. Some of the science side of things is immeasurably based on iteration, and is constantly in flux. But with that said, to get practical, we can wrap up the episode turning a few of these thought processes into a practical application for the audience, Jeff. How do we practically form a better relationship with rejection and failure? How do we go about reprogramming our brains if we do get slightly… We don't tell anyone at work. We don't tell our sales manager. But maybe we do get slightly miffed when someone hangs up the phone, or we do get slightly bothered, and we take it personally when we've emailed someone and we've had a few calls and we've sent an invoice and then they say, “Oh, we're not interested any more.” How do we practically get over some of these things and change the relationship that we have with rejection, failure and even the permission to see things differently, which you said earlier on in the show?   Jeff Bajorek: Yeah. I think it's stepping back and seeing the bigger picture. We can be really crass and say, “Well, you got to crack a couple of eggs if you want to make an omelette.” Okay. That's tired. That doesn't resonate so much any more. Don't just tell me I need to be tougher. But think back to when you started. Think back to what you were trying to accomplish. To your point, think back to your why. Why are you doing this? Why are you choosing to sell the product that you're selling, work for the company you work for, serve the people you serve? What is that gap that is illustrated, and how do you fit in, and what is your role to help these people move forward? If I don't have someone's attention, that's a me problem. That's not a them problem. Right? So sometimes it's taking responsibility for why those supposed rejections or failures continue to happen, but also recognising in the grand scheme of things, you're taking these little steps forward.   Jeff Bajorek: And I think so much of what we see, particularly when we're early on in our careers, we don't understand the long-term ramifications. I go back; my son, who's going to be 11 here in a couple of weeks… It was four or five years ago. I mean, he fell off his bike for the first time, scraped up his knee, and he thought he was going to bleed out and die right there, because he'd never done that before. So he didn't realise that, okay, it's going to feel better soon. Stings right now; it's going to feel better. He thought he was going to bleed out. You know what I mean? And so without that perspective, he doesn't know any better.   Jeff Bajorek: But as you grow, and if you're in your early to mid 20s, I'm going to tell you right now, everything you're doing right now is going to have impacts that you won't recognise until later. And I can tell you the older I get, the smarter my parents get, particularly the things that they told me when I was growing up that I didn't want to hear and then I find myself telling my kids for the same reasons, right? Perspective is that kind of thing that is very difficult to appreciate until you're in that position. So take my word for it. Take Will's word for it. If you can see the bigger picture and the bigger value to these steps you're taking right now, everything else gets so much less significant, and your ego doesn't take such a big hit and you learn to reframe those obstacles as opportunities. And that's what I want to encourage people to do.   Will Barron: What you say reminds me of this idea of second and third and 22nd order consequences. And the best example I've got is you buy a TV and you're like, “Well, I'll just buy a telly. I can afford it this month.” Well, and you've now got a big, nice TV, so you go, “Well, maybe I'll buy an Xbox.” And then you go, “Well, I've got a TV and an Xbox, so I'll just play 20 minutes of games each evening. It doesn't matter. Right?”   Why You Need to Start Taking Accountability for Your Actions · [26:50]    Will Barron: Well, that 20 minutes of games might take up some of your training time or even just your actual relaxation time, which allows you to recharge for the next morning, which doesn't mean that it's going to spiral into some game addiction, but it means over next 15 years… Because games are designed to be addictive, right? The whole element of 90% of computer games is to pull on the dopamine and serotonin cycles to get you to play and buy the next one and to enjoy it as well. There's an element of fulfilment that could come from media like that. But by making one purchase decision, you've then had second, third, fifth, 27th order consequences on the back of that first decision. And the younger you are as you listen to this, the bigger the impact of that over time, right?   Jeff Bajorek: 100 percent, and good luck keeping video games to 20 minutes. It's easier for me to just not play at all. But you're right. What are those little things? I mean, how many times have you heard it? Just read 10 pages in a book a day. Doesn't matter you're not getting through books as fast as your friends are. You're probably still reading more than most people do. Practising something… You get back to 10,000 hours of dedicated practise. You can get those in 10-minute increments if you want. But when you really think back to it…   “How many sales reps out there don't have one customer conversation a day? There are a lot of them. If you had one meeting with a customer or a qualified prospect every single day, your numbers would improve and you'll be in the top 5% or 10% of people who have booked calendars.” – Jeff Bajorek · [28:07]    Jeff Bajorek: You know what? This is another great one. How many sales reps out there don't have one customer conversation a day? There are a lot of them. If you had one meeting with a customer or a qualified prospect every single day, your numbers would improve, or you're in the top 5% or 10% of people who have booked calendars. It's not as often as you think.    “No step is too small so long as it's headed in the right direction and you keep taking those steps.” – Jeff Bajorek · [28:36]    Jeff Bajorek: There's a lot of getting ready to get ready in sales. And so when you think about what real execution looks like, I said it before, no step is too small so long as it's headed in the right direction and you keep taking steps. Take those steps and step back and appreciate what a step really looks like.   Jeff’s Purpose and Why It’s So Important to Him · [28:46]   Will Barron: Jeff, I can share mine if you like as well, but what's your why or your purpose? You've multiple podcasts. A new one should be out now as we say this. Books, content, tonnes of followers on LinkedIn, everywhere else. What's your why? What's the purpose behind all of that?   Jeff Bajorek: I live for that moment when the light-bulb turns on over someone's head and they realise they can do something that they didn't think they could do before, because they thought about it differently. And that's where Rethink The Way You Sell comes from, right? I remind people what needs to be done, I show them how to do it, and then I make them believe that they can. And that had to happen for me, and when it did, oh my goodness. Life-altering, family-altering, generational impacts on the way that I interact with people on the things my family's able to do. And it's not just financial stuff. It's the way that I look at things that makes my whole life more fulfilling. So for me to be able to help people think about things a little differently, think things through differently so they can see possibilities they've never seen before, it's the most rewarding thing. I mean, and it's similar to parenting in that. And that's my why.   Will Barron: Dude. Yeah. You're making me feel uncomfortable. My why is super-selfish, and totally built on good principles, I think. And I think to achieve it long-term, you have to build a business that adds just tremendous value, and you can't cook corners. There's no opportunity to not do anything the right way.   Will Barron: But I read Awaken the Giant Within, Tony Robbins' book, that I think he wrote in the '80s. I've literally got a box of them out there, big cardboard box, and anyone who… No, I will not say this on the podcast. I was just about to say, anyone who wants a copy, I usually send them one. Typically, when I'm chatting with people and they're not a good fit for the training programme or something, I'll send them a copy. So that is not an open invitation, because I'll end up spending the entire revenue of salesman.org sending people books. Right?   Will Barron: But I read the book, and it helps you outline your values as a human. Now, two of my top ones, and perhaps they're interchangeable, were safety and adventure. Now these do not mix very well, right? You cannot go on many real adventures and masculine hiking, mountain-biking, rock-climbing, the kind of stuff that… I mean, the golden retriever [inaudible 00:31:30] kind of thing. A lot of these adventures are inherently unsafe, even just to a certain extent. And that's what makes them an adventure, right? Otherwise you might as well strap on a VR headset and just wander around some computer-game environments and see the same sights, but you're not getting that intrinsic adventure out it.   Will Barron: So I've got this issue of adventure and safety. Adventure and safety. So maybe this is not my why or purpose. Maybe this is my mission, but my mission is to semi-retire at 40, and I'm well on the way of doing that, and that is: mortgage is paid off, investments all sorted. If I still own the business, there's people in there taking my place and it runs itself. All the business has been sold and the content machine has been sold.   Will’s Mission and Purpose in Life · [32:20]   Will Barron: And so that's what I'm driving for 24/7. It's why I'm willing to put in the extra hours. As I said earlier on this bit of a rant, I know that to achieve that long-term, especially if you're [inaudible 00:32:27], you've got to have a sound business that adds drastic value to a scalable number of people. And so you can't cut corners. You can't be ripping people off. You can't be saying you're going to do one thing and not deliver. You've got to deliver and go above and beyond everything you say, right? So maybe I'm rephrasing this slightly wrong, but would you agree? Is that my mission or is that my purpose, especially in the medium term?   Jeff Bajorek: I would say it's your mission. I don't know that that's your purpose. I think it's your mission, particularly because it's time-bound, and you know what? I don't even know if that's the criteria, but you said earlier you're 35 and you want to be out by 40, or at least able to be out by 40. That, to me, creates a sense of urgency. That makes it feel like a mission. Like I said, someone who understands these terms may argue with me and they might be right, but I don't see myself stopping.   Will Barron: Sure.   Jeff Bajorek: That's why I think of this as being more of my purpose. You know what I mean? I was joking with my mom a couple years ago. I'm like, “Yeah, I don't think I'm ever going to retire.” She's like, “Oh my God, are you okay?” I'm like, “Yeah, I love what I do. I don't think there's ever any reason to stop.” If someone's going to be willing to have really fun, meaningful conversations with me and then send me a check afterward, yeah, why would I ever stop? There will be a time, certainly, where I do less of that. But this is what lights me up. So I don't know, Will, but I think regardless, it's that thing that drives you, and you have something that drives you, keeps you focused, keeps you disciplined, makes you put up boundaries, makes you execute at a very high level. And that's the important thing. We can argue the semantics. Most people don't have that. So start there.   Finite and Infinite Games · [34:20]    Will Barron: Yeah. We'll wrap up this and you can tell us about the new show. It's a fabulous idea, and I've not read the book, but I've heard people talking about it. I think it's called Finite and Infinite Games, something like that. And it's this idea of in your life, there are some finite games, which is for most people, and to be fair, I think it's most people listening to the show right now, sales people, sales leadership, and maybe small business owners who listen to the show as well, of there's a finite game there. In sales, you want to go in, you want to ramp up your time to success and make that as short as possible. You want to make as much money as morally and as ethically and as value-adding as possible, right? If you're killing it and you're winning, you're making a tonne of money in a modern B2B sales role. Right?   Will Barron: But then there's infinite games. So for example, I play drums, and I'm okay, not great, but I've just got back into doing rudiments. So if you're familiar with guitar or piano, these are the scales of percussion instruments, right? And I've not been playing songs. I've just been doing rudiments every day for the past 14 days. And that's an infinite game, because I'll never be perfect at them, because you can always speed them up. You can always change tempo. You can always do syncopation between your hands and your feet or whatever it is. And so maybe my mission is my finite game. Maybe I need to have a think of what my infinite game is, the goal longer-term in my life. And maybe it's just adventure. Maybe that's the end goal. Adventure in safety. Rock-climb with a crash helmet on. I don't know what it is. So some juxtaposition of those two. But we'll wrap up with that, mate. Tell us, with that, the new show: where we can find it, what it's all about and anything else you want to drop on us and share with us, Jeff.   Parting thoughts · [36:00]   Jeff Bajorek: Sure. The show's called Rethink The Way You Sell, and it's a departure for me from where I'd been previously in podcasts, just trying to put out a weekly show and have interviews and things. This is really content-focused. It is going to be released in seasons, so in chunks around a subject matter, versus just having subject-matter experts on talking, right? So it's less a social experiment and much more of the spearhead of my content. And so there will be webinars tied to these seasons, and there will be content and courses tied to these seasons, and really just bringing together what I've learned over the last going on 18 years now and putting it in a way where people can focus on this rather topical season at a time. And I'm having a bunch of fun with it. We've recorded some original material. I'm repurposing some older stuff that's still really pertinent. My producer, Doug Branson, and I are having just a ball with the formatting and everything though too. So check it out. You can find it anywhere you find podcasts. And yeah, I would really appreciate giving a shot.   Will Barron: Great stuff. Well, we'll link to it in the show notes to this episode, and all the books and everything else that we talked about in this episode is shown over at the salesman.org. With that, Jeff, I want to thank you for your time, your expertise. I'll just say this, mate: I enjoy just chatting this stuff with you. Some guests come on and it's like, “Well, okay, well we've covered the topic. That's the end of the show.” But I'm conscious of time here, otherwise I feel like we could have done over half an hour just pontificating about sales, life, careers, and how all this cycles back into performance at the end of the day, mate. So I thank you for your time, your expertise, and for joining us again on the show.   Jeff Bajorek: Thank you. No, it's always fun, and now there's another dimension that I didn't realise we could talk about, because I never met a flam-diddle that I didn't like. So we'll leave it at that.   Will Barron: Amazing. Cheers, Jeff.  

Tripp Kramer is an author, podcast host, and the owner of Tripp Advice, where he helps shy men from around the world excel in their love lives by showing them how to develop solid-steel confidence. In this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Trip shares how salespeople can beat rejection and implement a state of unshakable sales confidence. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Tripp Kramer Dating Coach Resources: Book: Magnetic: Cultivate Confidence, Become Rejection-Proof, and Naturally Attract The Women You Desire Book: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance How to Talk to Girls Podcast Tripp on LinkedIn Tripp Advice on YouTube Transcript Will Barron: Hi, I'm Will, and welcome to the Salesman Podcast. On today's show, we're going to talk about how to build unshakable confidence. Today's guest is Tripp Kramer. Tripp is a dating strategist for shy men. He's the author of Magnetic, and he has over 970,000 subscribers on YouTube. He's killing it over there. And with that, Tripp, welcome to the show.   Tripp Kramer: Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here. It's always fun to be in a podcast that's not directly related to meeting women and attraction and those things. So it's fun to be here. Thanks for having me.   Will Barron: Dude, this works the other way around. We have so many guests on the show that have nothing to do with sales because sales after six years, 750 episodes is boring as heck. There's only so many ways you can talk about picking up the phone, sending an email, and sales cadences and tools. So I appreciate you coming on the show, mate. Hopefully it'll be fun for you and it'll be, I'm sure, insightful for the audience.   Tripp Kramer: Yeah, absolutely.   Confidence as Described By Tripp Kramer · [01:01]    Will Barron: Just to jump straight into this, we're going to talk about confidence. I like to define things and then we'll make things practical for the audience later on. Do you have a definition of what confidence to you is and how do you define it? I've noticed in another episode of doing podcast, you mentioned the word calmness. How do you define confidence?   “The formula for confidence is competence plus the ability to step into the unknown.” – Tripp Kramer · [01:20]   Tripp Kramer: So I have a formula for it, which is competence plus the ability to step into the unknown. That would be what confidence is. So competence plus the ability to step into the unknown. And so I can break that down even further. Competence just means that you are skilled in something, that you feel good at doing the skill or the action of whatever it is that you're trying to perform, right? That's competence. So you're going to have a feeling of confidence when you are competent in whatever it is. So even that could be with sales, that could be with meeting women, that could be with playing an instrument, whatever it may be. But I also like to add in there the ability to step into the unknown because people who are able to step out of their comfort zone into an unknown space and they do that action regularly, they are someone who has more confidence.   “The people who are able to step out of their comfort zone into an unknown space and they do that action regularly, that’s someone who has more confidence. So that means that if you're always doing things that scare you, that frighten you, that are out of your comfort zone, if you consistently do that, you're actually going to feel more comfortable when you are doing something for the first time.” – Tripp Kramr · [02:04]    Tripp Kramer: So that means that if you're always doing things that scare you, that frighten you, that are out of your comfort zone, if you consistently do that, you're actually going to feel more comfortable when you are doing something for the first time. So when you continuously do new things, you already feel this kind of confidence inside of yourself of like, “Oh, I'm used to this feeling. I know what this is like to do things that scare me.” And so even though it might still scare you to try something new, if you've done this so many times, it's going to be a little bit easier. So I'll give an example of my own life.   Will Barron: Sure.   Tripp Kramer: Is that I have a lot of experiences with doing public speaking. I wouldn't consider this public speaking by the way. This is, I think it's very different, but public speaking meaning, you're speaking in front of a lot of people. But one thing I've never done before was officiate a wedding. So my friend, one of my best friends, he asked me to officiate his wedding. And this is a whole different type of public speaking, right? It's like you are in charge of one of the most important days of this person's life, two people's lives plus two families. So this isn't just like, “Oh, I'm going on stage and I'm talking about whatever it is that I talk about.” And also depending on what scares you, your friends are there, maybe your family's there. So there's a lot of eyes on you that I can build a lot of fear or tension. And while I was nervous to do it, it wasn't as scary as it would've been if I didn't have some experience with public's speaking. And I don't mean like the skillset in public speaking, more so, I've experienced the fear.   Tripp Kramer: I know what it's like to get up there and speak in front of people. I know what those emotions are like. So I knew what was going to happen. As long as I practised enough, there's no getting rid of the fear that's inside of you, that adrenaline. But I know from previous experiences that once you get up there and you start talking, you're going to be super nervous for about 90 seconds and then it's all going to dissolve. And just knowing that was enough to give me confidence in that arena. So actually that was a little bit of competence because I've done it before, plus the ability to step into the unknown, this unknown space that I'd never done before. So that would be my formula that I teach guys. And I say guys because I'm a dating coach for guys. So that's where we usually talk about it.   How to Become Bolder and Increase Your Levels of Confidence · [04:50]    Will Barron: Without getting too nerdy, but if we consider this an actual mathematical formula, can you increase your skill level to compensate for a lack of… I'm going to use the word boldness, the ability to jump into the unknown? And then inversely, if you don't have the skill set, perhaps you're new to sales or you're new to the industry that you're selling into, can you on a lack of skill increase the boldness that you have to achieve the same amount of confidence overall?   “How bad you want something does translate to confidence.” – Tripp Kramer · [05:32]    Tripp Kramer: I think so. Yeah. I also, I don't put this part of the formula, but I do discuss this concept. Is how bad you want something does translate to confidence, to stepping into the unknown, getting out of your comfort for its own, whatever you want to call it. There's that desire, right? I just believe, if you don't have that big of a desire, your fear or your boldness, your lack of boldness will just keep you at home doing nothing. But if you have a really strong desire, like if you're on a sales call and you're like, “I need to make this sale.” Right? There's times when… and I know this, I've done sales calls. I've done hundreds and hundreds of sales calls, by the way. I know we didn't really discuss that. But if you feel like I need this sale, I need to make rent money, right? There's a strong desire in you.   Tripp Kramer: It's like you got to make this happen. You got to just get in there and play your A-game. Michael Jordan, I got to just get something inside of myself that's going to go. I got to perform, and I got to do as best as I can. And I think that that can outweigh the fear that one might have, that desire. So for example, I work with guys who want to meet women and it's very scary to approach a woman, that's what we talk about. Mainly that's where the confidence formula comes from and all that. And it's very scary to do it, but it gets to a point where not every guy, depends if you're successful or not, but the success comes down to the guy saying I've had enough of this. I'm sick of being scared. Sitting here doing nothing, being scared to go approach that woman, or having so many regret of I had an opportunity but I didn't take it. And then finally, and I know I got to this point too. So I experienced this myself, is your desire outweighs the fear and then that allows you to take action.   Will Barron: Does a-   Tripp Kramer: I don't know if that answered your question, but hopefully it did a little bit.   How to Grow Your Confidence When You’ve Got No Skill or Experience · [07:43]    Will Barron: It does. And I want to touch on fake until you make it in a second. I'll circle back to that, but I can't remember the quote and I'd butcher it anywhere. I'm terrible repeating quotes on this show. I always get emails from people saying I've got it wrong, but there's a Tony Robbins quote, similar to what you're saying on the lines of a decision is made in an instant, but the build up to that decision can take as long as it needs to take. And that's my experience with starting a business, getting into sales in the first place. Meeting women back when I was super shy as a younger fellow. I didn't have the ability to turn on a level of extrovertedness that I have now, which I've learned via selling and being rejected time and time again, right?   Will Barron: So I appreciate you for saying that, but at what point in this scenario… and we can paint a picture of a… let's say to add real context to this, there's a young lad called Sam who's watching this. He's just got out of university, college. It's his first job, and he is suffering from perhaps a lack of confidence in both his skill and his boldness to jump in and make cold calls. Do cold emails, knock on doors, whatever it is because he is fearful of rejection. And we can talk about what rejection is perhaps and whether we should be fearful of someone saying no. Maybe we can talk about that in a second. But is the process that Sam, our example here, needs to just go through the pain, do it over and over, mole in the fact that he's not making any money and his colleagues are crushing it all around him to the point where there is that moment of snap, and he makes a decision to push through some of this and change things. Or is there a way to narrow that timeframe and speed all this up and become confident quicker?   Tripp Kramer: I mean, that's where the competence comes in. So I'd say that's where the competence comes in. So if you're someone who's scared of rejection, I think, when it comes to cold calling, unfortunately, I think that you got to get a couple under your belt, and that's where you really just got to push yourself to do it. I think it's the mindset. Here it is. It's the mindset of knowing that you're not going to make the sale. You're just going in knowing that I'm not trying to make the sale, I'm just trying to get good at this process. And that mindset forces you to become outcome independent so you are not just focused on, “Well, I got to make this sale or I got to perform really well.” And this is identical to what I teach guys with meeting women. It's the same thing.   Tripp Kramer: They get really scared because they don't want to get rejected, and they're trying to get the number. And there's something really valuable there that they want is they want that number or they want that approval from the woman, whatever it may be. And I say, “Go into that and don't focus on what's going to happen in terms of the outcome that you desire. In fact, let's move that outcome a little bit closer.” So instead of going, okay, I need to get the number. I need to get laid. I need to get a girlfriend. How about let's just go into, I need to have some conversations with some women. So with guys who are into sales and trying to get good at sales, why not just, I'm just going to go and see what happens. And you become more of an observer, and you stay a little bit more present and not so outcome dependent.   Tripp Kramer: So then in theory, this should help the fear go down a little bit. And that's what I've done with everything in my life too, is like anything I wanted to do because I learned this is, well, I'm just going to go and I'm just going to try. It's not really about failure. And it's funny how our mind is so powerful. We can just create all these labels that we create for ourselves, and then it causes the emotional distress. The fear, the lack of confidence for someone who's just graduating, who's saying I'm going to do this for the first time. You're not meant to be good at it. In fact, if you do get a sale, beginner's luck, 100%. It's like that's just what you have to do, you have to jump in and you have to try it, and you have to see what happens. So more curiosity than it is, a strong desire to get that outcome that you're looking for, which is probably the sale in this case.   Building Confidence is All About Boldness But Being Desperate Enough to Put in The Work · [11:57]    Will Barron: It seems to be… Tell me if you agree with this as well. There's two weird paradoxes here that everyone will know. The first one I always call it a commission breath. So when you're desperate for the sale, you're perhaps talking to people that you shouldn't be talking with, and they can smell that desperation on you via the phone and things don't go quite as well as when you're just trying weird tactics to close them and drag them back in. So if you've got commission breath and you're desperate, you're less likely to close a deal than if you're calm, you're confident. Your pipeline is full. You know that it's just a numbers game. At a certain point, you know that you're going to have four conversations and you're going to close one of them and everything's going to be great. So there's a paradox there of being desperate leads to less sales. Being calm and cool and collected leads to more sales.   Will Barron: But then there's an additional paradox here, which you mentioned earlier on, which I call gun to head selling. So back in my office, in the room next door, I've got a picture, big blown picture on the wall of a… We don't have guns in the UK, obviously. So I have no idea what gun it is, but as if the gun is the barrel's pointing down at me. And if I've ever been soft, if I'm ever going, “Well, I'll do that tomorrow, or that deal make me feel uncomfortable, or this should probably have another zero on the side of it.” The hero of this story if I was in a film would stick a zero on and see what happens to the conversation. I look at that picture and I call it gun to head selling, and I go, “Sod it, let's give it a go,” and it forces me to be bold. It's a prompt to be bold.   Will Barron: So it seems, and paradoxically, you've got to push things out there and test things. And you've got to put yourself under pressure of failure to have higher levels of success. So there's this weird paradox of you can't be desperate, but you've also got to pretend there's a gun to your head and there's an element of desperation to push you forward. Is that fair to say?   Tripp Kramer: I would say so. And I want to throw in something interesting too. There's also times when you can feel over confident. So you are so confident that you go into maybe a sales call or maybe even with a woman, and you feel that it will just happen for you like that. The confidence is so strong that you're like, “I'll make this sale.” No problem. And then you know what you do, you throw away all the principles and then you don't make the sale, and you get humbled. And you go, “Oh, wait a second.” And this happens to me a lot too, by the way, with sales, when I'm signing people up for my programme. I'll be like, oh, thinking they know that this programme is the best, because I'm so confident in what I teach and what I sell, and the results that guys get.   Tripp Kramer: But I can't throw away the principles because the person on the other end of the phone, they don't know that. And so I can't just go in too calm. You still got to be on the ball or else, again, you're not going to get that sale. Even for women, you go in too confident, but you're too calm about it, or you just like go, “Oh, this woman's just going to like me because…” Just because you feel that way, well, they don't know that. So you can't throw away the principles of building attraction, just like I don't think you can throw away the principles of what it means to make a sale. So I just wanted to throw that in there as well. I feel like that's another thing that I've come across, you got to make sure that you're still sticking to the guiding principles of what makes the sale.   Comparing Confidence, Shyness, and Arrogance Using a Simple Bar Chart · [15:25]    Will Barron: Would you say then perhaps confidence is… if we have a bar chart, this would be better if I could draw it out, but I'll do it with my hands in the air. And this is super unhelpful for the tens of thousands of people who are going to listen to this episode, but play along if we can. We have a line. In the middle, we have confidence. Perhaps one side we have shyness and then the other side, I would call it arrogance. And we're trying to be bouncing somewhere in the middle. Is that a way that we could perhaps visualise this?   Tripp Kramer: I think so. Yeah.   Will Barron: You don't sound convinced on that.   Tripp Kramer: I mean, I have another thought.   Will Barron: Sure.   Tripp Kramer: Okay. So I would say here's shyness and here's confidence, if we're looking at the spectrum. So on this end is full confidence, this end is full shyness. And arrogance, because you said that was on your spectrum, all the way to the other end. Is that correct? Arrogance.   Will Barron: Yep.   Tripp Kramer: Yeah. So I would almost say arrogance is kind of off this chart. It's like something different. It's actually insecurity. I think that people, and that's why I take it off the chart, because it doesn't really mean shyness either. It's just arrogance is someone who is equally, almost could be equally as insecure as the person who's shy, right? The person who's shy is insecure. We know that. But arrogance is also, again, not on the chart because they're not shy, but it's kind of similar to that. So that's why I would take it off of that chart. If someone who's arrogant, that's someone who needs to tell people or show people what they have, whatever that means.   “An arrogant person is someone who needs to tell or show people what they have. This could be a skillset, it could be an item, an object, whatever. And they need to show that or need to say it because they actually don't feel good about themselves. So they want that validation. But if someone knows they're good at something and they're secure with themselves, they don't feel the need to tell everyone.” – Tripp Kramer · [16:51]    Tripp Kramer: Could be a skillset, it could be an item, an object, whatever. And they need to show that or need to say it because they actually don't feel good about themselves. So they want that validation. So I would say the spectrum is full confidences on this end, and you're actually super secure. So the person who's super confident and super secure, they're not trying to show off. They don't need to show off that, because they know they have it. If someone knows they're good at something and they're secure at themselves, they don't feel the need to tell everyone, right? I mean, that's my thought.   How to Measure Your Levels of Confidence · [18:06]    Will Barron: That makes sense. I guess where I was going with it is maybe arrogance. I can change that word, but almost like an irrational confidence. So a confidence when you don't have competence and perhaps you're not jumping into the unknown. You're just arrogant in that you are assuming confidence as opposed to having other people kind of validate the skill set, the boldness, and anything else that ties in. So with that then, Tripp, I think this is useful to define things, right? Because then we know what we're aiming towards. Before we get practical, is there a way to measure confidence knowing from the audience that want to improve this? Obviously, if you can set a number on it, or there's an objective way to measure it, we can see progress, and obviously, that's self-fulfilling from a motivational standpoint and another standpoint as well. Is there a way to measure your confidence so we can see where we're at and hopefully where we want to go?   “Confidence is the point where you're taking action and not caring to fail.” – Tripp Kramer · [18:49]    Tripp Kramer: I think that when you know you're confident or at least the start of confidence, it's like your… I don't want to say inability. It's the point where you're taking action and not caring to fail. I would almost say that is a good measure. It's not really quantifiable. Could be, I guess if you measure how many times this happens in your life, but it's saying I'm going to step into the unknown or do something that's hard, or do something I'm scared of. So any of those three, and you just do it anyways. I think that there's a level of confidence in that, and that's what would be the beginning of confidence. And then I think it becomes excitement. So for me, talking about sales, I don't remember ever being nervous. I probably was. It was so long ago.   “When you start doing something new, at first you're scared, so you don't have the confidence. And I think you're always going to be a little nervous, but once the excitement exceeds the nervousness, that to me is a sign of confidence, because if you start to get good at something, you're probably more excited to go and do it.” – Tripp Kramer · [19:43]    Tripp Kramer: I think I was always more excited because I just learned how to sell and that was fun. But even let's just say with women, right? At first you're scared, so you don't have the confidence. And I think you're always going to be a little nervous, but once the excitement exceeds the nervousness, that to me is a sign of confidence, because if you start to get good at something, you're probably more excited to go and do it, I would imagine, right?   Will Barron: Well, it creates then a feedback loop, right? I think it might be Angela Duckworth's book, Grit. I'm sure she talked about it on the podcast with me, this idea… Oh, no. Whoever it was. I'll link it in the show notes, the previous episode that we touched on this. But it's this idea that talent is just how lucky you are at the beginning and then how many other people register that look, tell you how good you are and then at the age it happens. And then all of a sudden, you're talented because you've had this positive feedback loop that, hey, you threw a lucky three pointer when you were 14. The coach said, “Well, done well.” And that fed back into you practising more because of social pressure and other things as well. It's probably maybe similar with dating and women and that kind of world, but also in sales. I remember the first day in my first proper medical device sales role, my boss was like, “This is a list of surgeons that we currently work with. They love the company, they love the product, give them all a call, book yourself in and just go and have a chat with them.”   Will Barron: So I was like, “Okay, that makes sense. That's not particularly scary.” But then the bastard just sat behind me. So we're in a conference room and he sat at the desk behind me. I could feel him just staring at the back of my head. So obviously, you get there like, “Well, okay, he's now listening to everything that I'm saying.” And my confidence from this task, which is a simple enough task to do, an appropriate task to do for a medical device salesperson, my confidence just shot into the ground because I had someone critiquing me. But now the first call went well, second call went well, my confidence went… His name was Steve, Steve buggered off then and went and do some actual work as opposed to just pestering me.   The Role of Luck and Positive Feedback When Trying to Build Competence and Skill · [22:01]    Will Barron: But if my first call would've sucked, my confidence would've went down and then he probably would've tried to give me some advice and coaching. Depending of how my ego was back then, that I might not have took that on board. And then you can quickly spiral out of control and go into the other pathway. So a lot of this, when you're first starting off, when you're trying to develop competence and skill, a lot of it, tell me if you feel the same, Tripp, especially from the dating, it's just luck.   Tripp Kramer: Well, if you get to that point, yes, sometimes I think. Sure. Yeah. Sometimes it's luck. I mean, if you like have a quick win, I believe that can be luck. And what's interesting is something you're saying is I deal with a lot of guys though that don't have a positive feedback loop. So I think the real question is, how do you get good at something with the lack of positive feedback? Is there a way to get good at something without a loop of positive feedback because I'll have guys go out and get rejected so many times. So they're not getting any positive feedback from those interactions. It's like you have to artificially create a positive feedback. It's like you have to tell yourself to keep going. And then I say that has to do with resilience. And so I feel like resilience is the key.   Tripp Kramer: Now, I guess hopefully, someone's teaching you resilience unless you kind of figure it out on your own. Maybe you're listening to a podcast like this or you have a coach of some sort, but that's really the biggest thing, and that's the hardest thing. And then when it comes down to luck, hopefully you get it. I know I definitely had some luck when I was doing sales for the first time, when I was first signing people up to my men's coaching programme. And I did have some big sales of guys that, I mean, I don't even know now that I think about it. I don't even know if it was luck. I was really putting in the right effort. I was doing the things I needed to do. I guess it was kind of lucky that it was someone who was very wealthy and then they could sign up for my programme.   Will Barron: I think you're underestimating yourself there. So we did a show a couple weeks ago on the science of luck and serendipity, right?   Tripp Kramer: Oh, interesting.   The Science of Luck and Serendipity · [24:04]    Will Barron: The science is super clear that you engineer your own luck. And if you are an optimist, your brain will look for patterns of success, and so you'll prospect people who are more… It's unlikely that it just happened chance, that you got on the phone and in touch with people who happened to be wealthy. Even if you weren't consciously doing it, you knew that they were a better prospect, and so you probably engineered those calls. If a 14-year-old called you up or got on your diary and you had a sales call with them, you're more likely to… I don't know if this would be true for your business, but you're more likely to… I would be more likely to cancel that call, free up the space, and then it's some rich dude who's got a Lamborghini in his profile picture or whatever, it shows some kind of affluence, I'm more likely to take that call. So it's not luck that that person showed up, it's serendipitous in that you've engineered that environment to have success from.   Tripp Kramer: Yeah. So optimism, it sounds like. That's one factor. Also this kind of sounds a little bit like law of attraction, which I don't really believe in that, in the kind of woo-woo sense. But this is what I believe the law of attraction really is, is you are looking towards and thinking about the goal, right? It's like you know that an affluent person is probably better to get on the phone with because they're going to have the resources to purchase your thing versus someone who's 14. So it's really understanding your goal and how to get there, and being so zeroed in and focused on what that is. So then you're generating those opportunities for yourself. And I guess that's the luck formula, isn't it? It's preparation plus… I forgot.   Are Confident People Rejection Proof? · [26:00]    Will Barron: It's just the number of swings that you have at the bat that you are happy to be positive about. And this leads us into this idea of rejection, right? Are confident people, Tripp, rejection proof, or do confident people still feel the pain of that girl ghosting them or that customer slamming down the phone and calling them an asshole because they cold-called them before they got to work or whatever it is? Do confident people still feel that pain or do confident people… it's just water off a dog's back, it's not personal, it's not anything, they're just rock and rolling afterwards?   Tripp Kramer: I think that most people do feel it, it's just the scale in which they feel it. So I think that someone who's just starting a business, who's getting rejected and they're just broke and there's no money coming in, no sales being made. Everyone that rejects you is going to be a harder punch to the gut. But I think that as someone who has had a lot of success is that, yeah, I think there's still going to be a twinge of, “Oh, that's stung.” But I think it gets down to the point where it's so small that you feel it because you're human and you'll feel it, but how long will it really stick with you?   Tripp Kramer: I'd say probably not too long. Once you've had the competence and you've gotten the reps in, and you've gotten all the rejections that you've had in your life because you're going to get rejected always more times than not. So it becomes a little bit more numbing. I think it's all from experience, and I hope that's motivation for that Sam character. Is like, you got to get the reps in. So time to start now. Stop worrying about whether you're going to get that sale or what's going to happen with it. You got a long road, let's go. It's time to start.   Will Barron: How much of this-?   Tripp Kramer: Don't let it beat you down.   Mindset Versus Discipline in a Salesperson’s Journey to True Confidence · [27:50]    Will Barron: How much of this, Tripp, when we talk about resilience, you've used that word a bunch, I totally agree with this, how much of this comes down to mindset versus discipline? And just for another layer of context, the first training in our training programme over salesman.org, it's called selling by the of numbers. We get your ultimate goal for the next 5 to 10 years. We break it down as to how much revenue you need to bring in each year, each quarter, each month. How many calls, emails, what cadence you need to achieve that amount of revenue versus your target. And then we give you a daily target of… And it blows people's minds when we do this. Because typically, it's like you've got to make 10 calls and send 4 emails a day. You just got to do it reliably over years to make it happen.   Will Barron: It's not complicated. You see people's stress levels and the pressure and the emotions kind of drop when we get to that final number when we go through in the coaching and the one-on-ones that we do. So that's the discipline side of things. How much of resilience come down to doing a process like that, and then sticking to it and having discipline versus the mindset of being an optimist? The mindset of being rejected and not taking it personally. Obviously, the answer is both but where's the place to start if we're trying to become more confident? Do we need to focus first on the discipline or work on our mindset?   Tripp Kramer: I'd say mindset. I'd say mindset because you'll get killed faster. If you don't have the mindset and you're going into with the techniques, the tactics, the discipline, and doing what you need to do, it is possible that you will end up crashing and burning. But like you said, it is both, because like my formula says, confidence equals competence. So you kind of have to act to build that confidence, but I do feel that if you don't have some sort of mindset going into it, you have a risk of crashing and burning. But there will be very minimal risk of crashing and burning if you go into it saying, “All right, man. This is a process. I know this is a process. I'm going to get really excited when I finally do get a sale, but I don't want to have the expectations too soon because I'm just starting this process.”   Tripp Kramer: Say that to yourself, that helps with your resilience, and then you can go into your discipline as you call it, and doing and taking the actions. So then when you start to feel that overwhelm of it potentially not working out, because you're going to have low numbers when you start anything, you can come back to that mindset and that gets you back on the bike even faster, right? Fall off the bike. You want to go on and hop on the next day and try, or do you want to do within five seconds and try? So I hope that with the mind you get on faster, so you can get better faster and therefore build more confidence through the competence act. Time is of the essence, especially when you're trying to build confidence.   The Quickest Way to Cultivate the Right Mindset for Building Confidence · [31:20]    Will Barron: Do you have any thoughts from a practical standpoint of how to instil the… Because what we're saying here is not rocket science, right? Other people have covered similar ground on other podcasts. But I find that whether it's a book or speaking to someone like yourself, Tripp, with a wealth of knowledge in this area, or listening to a podcast or a mentor, sometimes something just clicks and then it goes in your brain and then you go, “Okay, that's common sense. I've just not been doing this for the past 25 years for some reason. I've no idea why.” So with that said, do you have any practical ways, even with your clients maybe, to drill some of this mindset stuff home? You mentioned the law of attraction, I think it's bullshit. I think you're alluding to as well. I don't think it's bullshit, I know it's bullshit.   Will Barron: We've had someone from the film on the show to talk about how bullshit it is. But with that said, are we doing affirmations? Are we sticking Post-it notes to remind ourself consciously of what we are setting out to achieve on our laptops, our work laptops? Are we having a coach getting on a call every week and just beret us and bully us into doing it until it becomes from a good place before it becomes natural? What's the best and quickest way to implement the mindset side of things so that seemingly everything else can fall in place?   Tripp Kramer: Well, all those work on some level, right? I mean, I think the best thing you could ever have as a coach, because you have someone else on your corner who's helping you do the work, and they're dedicated to helping you do the work. So obviously, that's going to be the best that you could do. But even with a coach, like I coach guys, I'm still going to tell them something that they need to do to coach themselves. Because when they're in that moment, when they need to go and talk to a girl, I'm not going to necessarily be there. And maybe I could, right? And then I don't know, that I'm with them forever, but there's going to be a moment, no matter what in their life where they're not going to have someone in that exact moment. So what do they do? Well, I think the best is, I guess, we can call it like an affirmation or just a reminder.   Tripp Kramer: And I don't necessarily think that you should be even putting it in your phone or anything. It should be something you memorise, and just to remember. And I literally say this to my clients when they're going over and approaching a girl, is they have to tell themselves that they're doing this to get better, to practise to do the approach to talk to her, or whatever they're trying to get better at. They're not trying to get her number. They're not trying to take her home because there's other things that need to be done to get to that point. So you need to focus on what do I need to do today to get myself to go over and approach her and talk to her, because if that's not going to happen, then nothing's going to happen. So you have to remind yourself in that moment, and maybe that's something with someone to do with sales.   Tripp Kramer: I like to say also it's kind of specific to what it is that you're trying to learn. And this is a way of what's called deliberate practise. So in the very, very, very beginning, if you're a beginner salesperson or you're just starting to approach women, then the object is to just pick up the phone and have a few things that you know you can say. Or for the guy it's just to go up to the girl and have like a couple things to say and that's it. And then see what happens and see where you can take it. And then you can come back to the experience and you can reference the experience to then see what needs to be done better. So the big overall idea is, remember, you're trying to get better at this skill, which hopefully makes you more rejection proof or makes you feel more rejection proof.   Tripp Kramer: And then whatever it is that you're trying to build. So maybe like for example, in sales, okay, now you're like all right, I'm comfortable making the calls, but I'm not really so good at building rapport. It's good to build rapport in a couple minutes in when you're first talking to someone. Again, I'm not a master at sales, but then I know that's one thing that I've learned. And then it's like, all right, let's get really good at rapport. Let's just take this call and let's get so good at rapport, and let's see what happens there. And then maybe you start getting good at that and then you go to the next technique, and the next technique or whatever it may be. But it's about kind of being aware of where's my sticking point and then zoning in on that sticking point and nothing else. So that helps you build confidence in that area because it's pushing you and motivating you to do the action to then build the competence   Will Barron: You have just made this super practical for the audience, I feel. All we've got to do if we are unconfident, if that is a word, inconfident, unconfident, if we-   Tripp Kramer: So I've researched this a lot, unconfident is a word. Unconfident.   Practical Step-by-Step Guide to Ultimate Confidence · [35:37]    Will Barron: Unconfident. If you are unconfident with cold calls, you should break your cold call up into segments. Just getting through that first bit of the barrier, the fence that the prospect is in inadvertently, but obviously going to put up because they're busy and you've interrupted them. Okay, you've done it. Just do that 100 times, 50 times. Then you've got to share the value. Then you've got to break the thought process that they're in so they give you an actual answer rather than an instinctual answer. Then you've got to close the next. And if you just break things up, you could do this on a tally chart, and just don't do this with your best prospects perhaps. Do this with a list of customers on a Friday afternoon that you're just going to burn through that perhaps you're never going to be able to sell to anyway. You don't want to do this with all your best prospects and leave a bad taste in their mouth, but just burn through 100 calls of, “Hey, I got the hook. I got the hook. I failed, I failed, got the hook.”   Will Barron: Use a tally chart, go for 50, break it up into different steps. That over the course of a few Fridays where you are being lazy and you probably weren't going to do much anyway because you just chill out on a Friday at work which you shouldn't do, but people do. And it is what it is. A month of that, four afternoons of that, you're going to come out with different person and go back to the very top of the show. Your competence is going to be way higher and you're not really jumping into the unknown anymore. You don't need the boldness because you've seen every excuse, every objection that's going to come your way. And then you can perhaps transition this to your prospects that are more likely to close, more likely to buy, and have better success and results from it. Is that a practical step-by-step guide to-?   Tripp Kramer: I would think so. Or even for sales people, once they get really good what's the last step? I would say objections, right? Sure. I feel that's the hardest thing to get through, and in all the steps. So objections, why not just practise that with your friends or just in your room by yourself. Just pretend that someone gave you that objection and practise what are you going to say to that objection, whatever the objection is, right? The money objections, the time objections, I got to talk to my wife objections. I know all those common ones, and just be so good and be a sniper and like, “Okay, I know all the objections and I know what to say when they give me the objections.” And then those like sub objections, because there's always like the main objection and then they say something else, it's another objection.   Tripp Kramer: And what do you say to that? Because you're going to be responding to that. And so I feel you can even practise that on your own. Of course, it's a little bit harder because you don't have someone who has their own personality and own experience to kind of throw you off and things like that, but still you can practise that. I even had guys, if we were to correlate this to meeting women, I have guys you can practise conversation in a room all alone. And I teach guys a method to do that, which is you go to Google, you type in random word generator. There's a bunch of websites where if you press a button, it just generates a random word from the dictionary. And so what you do is, every time a word pops up, you practise with that word.   Tripp Kramer: So let's say it's garage, you practise saying a statement based on the word and a question based on the word. So for example, for garage, it might be, “Oh man, I haven't had a garage in a long time. I parked my car in the street. ” Or a question would be, “What's the biggest garage you've I've ever been to?” Again, not that interesting, but you're coming up with a statement and a question. So what is that doing? That's actually helping you with continuing conversation because conversation is a lot of it, not all of it, but most of it is listening to what someone's saying and going on a tangent off of what saying, based on what they're saying. So that means that if you can do that little exercise at home and practise that, you are going to get good at being really quick on your feet to then be able to continue a conversation based off of what someone is saying.   Tripp Kramer: Instead of maybe just asking a lot of questions. Again, this isn't related to sales. The point when I'm saying here, well, actually it could be in the rapport section. So I take that back. Building rapport, and they say something and then you continue a conversation based on what they're saying. So that's something you can do at home. So another thing, what I'm saying here is where are the areas of this skillset that you might be able to practise without even having to go on the call or the approach? And of course, it's going to be like level medium or level easy when you're doing it on your own, and it's always going to be level hard when you're with that person, because you don't know what they're going to say next, but you can train for that and it can become easier. So there's a way to get confident without even doing the actual literal skill.   Will Barron: So two things, I don't want to plug it too much because the audience will know all about it. Our training programme has a software tool called The Sales Coach that will throw objections at you and get you to handle it. And also in the training product, I do role plays. I'll jump on a call with members of students within the programme, we put the videos in where appropriate. We don't want to make anyone look too stupid if they're struggling. We want to help them, right? But we put the videos in the community. The community feed back, I feed back at the end of the session as well. And there's other coaches and there's other sales trainers who could do similar things with you. But yeah, you're right.   Tripp Kramer: Cool. That sounds super valuable.   Will Barron: It is. I don't want to plug it too much as the audience will-   Tripp Kramer: No. See, can I just say something here?   Will Barron: Sure.   Tripp Kramer: Fuck that. Can I swear? Fuck that. Plug it. It helps. You have something that helps. I'm trying to… I think that's a mindset too. And by the way, I'm guilty if it's still because I said the same thing as you. Not to plug, it's like why wouldn't you plug? If I was a person who was listening to this and I needed help and someone said, “Wait, there's a programme where I can go on and they throw objections at me and that's going to help me get better. Thank God they said that. I need to get that. I need to get to the next level.” So anyway, going off on a tangent, so I feel that we need to plug the things that are valuable, and that's what sales is, right?   Tripp Kramer: It's saying like I have something… So I'm on the phone, I have something so valuable. The pen, right? That's fine. That's like in Wolf of Wall Street. I have something so [inaudible 00:42:13] pink, fem little pen here, and I know that the person on the phone, if they're a good lead, they would just crush it if they had the pen. So it's like my job as a salesperson to do anything I can because they don't know, they're on the other end. You know they don't know, it's your job to let them know in any way possible that the pen or the phone, or whatever it is that they need, that they're struggling with, that they need to get this thing. I don't know, that's how I feel sales. And there's a lot of different ways to do that, but they have to know and it's your job to know. And if it's not a fit, it's not a fit, right?   Tripp Kramer: It's like, well, they were never someone who is going to be a good lead. I get on the phone sometimes with guys who are interested in coaching and if I know that like it's not really a good fit, I'll just let them know and we just get off the phone and so be it. Or if it's like, “Oh, my gosh, this person has the problem that I can solve for them.” And I know 100% that if they sign up for this programme, they are going to solve the problem and be so happy that they did it. The problem is they don't know that yet. So I need to do everything in my power to get them to know how powerful it is. Of course, going back to the plug, this is not a sales call, this is just kind of plugging things so people understand that they have opportunities. I don't know, I feel it's the same idea. I try to do it on my podcast, I'm like sign up for coaching. I'm like, “You have to, it's so good. Because I know it works and I know that you need it.”   Will Barron: I'll be totally blunt and honest with you, and the audience will enjoy this as well, Tripp. And we can wrap up with this point, mate. I don't plug it so much on the podcast natively as perhaps I could do because we cannot… and this is a good problem to have. We just can't fit as many bookings in our diary for myself and the other sales reps in the team. So every time I plug it, the diary gets booked up for the next week, and then I get loads of emails complaining. So I want people sign up for a call to see if they're a good fit when it makes sense to them as opposed to me not being confident and strong in the pitches that come on the show. But for other people, that makes total sense, what you just shared. And you should be proud and excited, and what's the point in…   Parting Thoughts · [45:12]   Will Barron: Your job as a salesperson, it's not to add value to the customer. It's not to be their best friend. It is the bottom and the basic of everything, is to drive revenue. And so it's your duty, corporate duty to the shareholders if it's a large organisation that you work for, to the founders if it's a smaller organisation. If you're a small business owner, to your freaking self if you want that nice car and that big house and that swimming pool to make these deals happen, and obviously, that comes from being confident and confidently pitching and sharing. So I appreciate that, mate. We'll do some kind of code in the show to this episode and we'll give you a commission for plugging the show on our behalf. I appreciate that. With that, Tripp, tell us where we can find out more about you. Tell us where we can find the YouTube channel and the podcast and everything else that you put out as well, mate?   Tripp Kramer: Yeah, for sure. Well, if you're listening to this on the podcast, I think your next step would be if you like what I'm saying here or if you're a guy who's shy or you are a person who wants to learn about being better at communicating, and more importantly, in that sense, meeting women and attracting women, you're going to want to go to my podcast called How To Talk To Girls. It's called How To Talk To Girls. That's on all the podcast platforms, so you'll find it. And then if you're on YouTube or listening to this, I don't know, somehow in any other way, all my other social media is Tripp Advice, which is the name of the company. So you can find me on YouTube. I have over 1,000 videos giving free advice on how to meet and attract women.   Tripp Kramer: And some guys, if they're like, “Well, actually, I'd like to just really take the next step,” I suggest you get my book, which I guess I'll plug here. Why not? So the book, people love books. I wrote one, it's called Magnetic. And funny enough, in the title: Cultivate Confidence, Become Rejection-Proof and Naturally Attract the Women You Desire on Amazon. Check it out if you want to take that next step, if you want to really learn the full system that I teach, and it's only like 10 bucks on Amazon. Check it out and you'll learn a lot. Otherwise, come check me out on the podcast or the YouTube channel.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. We'll list the book, the podcast, everything else that you're up to Tripp on the show notes to this episode over at salesman.org. Tripp, I want to thank you. Again, I appreciate… I always say this for guests like yourself. I appreciate you've took a bit of a tangent to come on a sales podcast, but I think everything that we chatted about is totally relevant. So I appreciate you taking that bit of a leap into the unknown to come on the show and I appreciate you and your time and for joining us the Salesman Podcast.   Tripp Kramer: Cool. Thanks for having me. Glad I did it. Glad to be here.