In this week's episode, hosts Brandon Lee and Carson V. Heady explore the transformative journey in sales methodologies with Lee Salz, author of "Sell Different!" and "Sales Differentiation."
Delving into the concept of a sales contrarian, the discussion unveils how traditional sales tactics are being reevaluated for modern effectiveness.
Key Points Discussed:
◾ Value-Driven Discovery Calls: Emphasizing the importance of making discovery calls interesting and focused on the buyer rather than the sale
◾ Maturity Assessment in Sales: Introducing an innovative approach to assessing and enhancing sales team maturity for better performance.
◾ Shifting Sales Mindsets: How adopting a contrarian perspective can lead to more successful sales strategies by challenging conventional wisdom.
◾ Importance of Sales Process Over People: The critical role of a solid sales process in ensuring sustained sales success, rather than relying solely on individual sales talents.
◾ Utilizing LinkedIn for Sales: Strategies for leveraging LinkedIn effectively to establish subject matter expertise and engage potential clients without direct selling.
This episode emphasizes the need for sales professionals to adapt and innovate in their approaches. By reimagining sales from a contrarian viewpoint, there's potential to transform challenges into opportunities for growth and success.
In this week's episode, hosts Brandon Lee and Carson V. Heady explore the transformative journey in sales methodologies with Lee Salz, author of "Sell Different!" and "Sales Differentiation."
Delving into the concept of a sales contrarian, the discussion unveils how traditional sales tactics are being reevaluated for modern effectiveness.
Key Points Discussed:
◾ Value-Driven Discovery Calls: Emphasizing the importance of making discovery calls interesting and focused on the buyer rather than the sale
◾ Maturity Assessment in Sales: Introducing an innovative approach to assessing and enhancing sales team maturity for better performance.
◾ Shifting Sales Mindsets: How adopting a contrarian perspective can lead to more successful sales strategies by challenging conventional wisdom.
◾ Importance of Sales Process Over People: The critical role of a solid sales process in ensuring sustained sales success, rather than relying solely on individual sales talents.
◾ Utilizing LinkedIn for Sales: Strategies for leveraging LinkedIn effectively to establish subject matter expertise and engage potential clients without direct selling.
This episode emphasizes the need for sales professionals to adapt and innovate in their approaches. By reimagining sales from a contrarian viewpoint, there's potential to transform challenges into opportunities for growth and success.
Welcome to Mastering Modern Selling Relationships Social and AI in the buyer-centric age. Join host Brandon Lee, founder of Fist Bump, alongside Microsoft's number one social seller Carson V Heddy and Tom Burton, author of the Revenue Zone and co-founder of Leet Smart, as we explore the strategies and stories behind successful executives and sales professionals. Dive in to business growth, personal development and the pursuit of excellence with industry leaders. Whether you're a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, this podcast is your backstage pass to today's business landscape. This is Mastering Modern Selling, brought to you by Fist Bump.
Speaker 2:We're buddy to Mastering Modern Selling, episode 74. Carson is here with me today. I'm Brandon Lee Carson. Heddy, we're missing Tom today because he is home sick. He's probably on the couch watching Love Boat Love Boat reruns, maybe watching our episode, you know. But we wish Tom well. We hope he gets better.
Speaker 3:But for everybody we got to.
Speaker 2:That's right. We have a great show and I think, Lee, this is gonna be a high energy show. I think Carson and Lee are gonna get really revved up and going.
Speaker 3:I'm already revved up Like we were just talking in the green room and like Lee's got me all kinds of fired up, so I can't wait. There we go.
Speaker 2:Look at the way we start. So everybody on the podcast, we welcome to episode 74. We appreciate you and, like, if you love what we're talking about, we'd really appreciate the give us a quick review, share us with your friends all of that fun stuff. We'd be really grateful for it. And then everybody that's live with us, whether you're on LinkedIn, you're on Facebook, you're on Twitter, you're on YouTube, wherever else it is that we're streaming these days we'd love to have you join us. So if you throw in the comments, love to hear who you are, where you are, but any questions you have, any comments you have, we want you to be part of this conversation.
Speaker 2:We live in a modern world, right? Just cause we're the ones on screen doesn't mean we're the only ones talking. So come and join us and let's get on the show. We'll get moving on it. So this episode is called Re-Imagining Sales a journey from sales contrarian to sales champion. Our guest is Lee Solz. He's the best selling author of Cell Different and Sales Differentiation. Lee, welcome to the show and then tell us what the heck does this sales contrarian thing mean?
Speaker 4:Thank you, Brandy. You know I was hoping we were gonna talk love vote. I mean, you just brought me way back. My parents would go out on Saturday nights, I'd be home with my grandmother and we'd be watching Love Vote, followed by Fantasy Island, and I'm just going to go-.
Speaker 3:I'd always walk in and my parents were watching Dallas.
Speaker 4:Oh, sure, yeah absolutely who shot JR.
Speaker 2:My reference was for me in the 80s, when I was home sick and my parents worked. It was on the couch watching Priced Is Right, love, vote reruns and then Twilight Zone. I think that was my three.
Speaker 3:Young and the Restless was always on during the day.
Speaker 4:Carson, how about with you, man? I wasn't watching that.
Speaker 3:No, I didn't want to, but somehow. I got hooked and I still remember the storylines, but I digress.
Speaker 2:Yes, wait was Young and the Restless is Young and the Restless. A story about DDRs.
Speaker 3:I'm not gonna take the bait. That's a joke, yeah. Boy, you just threw a fastball down the middle and you just took the Carson. That's a good one, that was good.
Speaker 2:Layed it in there. Does Young and the Restless count as our movie reference for the day? Not really.
Speaker 3:We're gonna have to try harder.
Speaker 2:Okay, let's try harder. Well, lee, tell us a little bit about yourself and your experience and Sales Contrarian. I love it, I love Contrarian, so bring it on.
Speaker 4:Thank you. So I'm a sales management strategist and I work with sales organizations to help them develop strategy, process and tools to win more deals at the prices that you want. That's the trademark expression that I use. And to your point about Sales Contrarian, I look at the entire journey from the first time we pick up the phone and we're prospecting all the way through. We get a signed order or a signed contract, we got customer service, we got account management and I'm looking at these old school methods and saying I'm not sure if they ever really worked, but it's time to get the dust off of the process and look at a new way to approach things.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. So we've got a bunch of bullet points on our agenda that we may or may not get to them in the right order, because I know there's two things that I'm really excited about and I know Carson's excited about Is value-driven discovery calls. I think that is huge important, because most discovery calls are boring and focused on sales, not the actual buyer. And then we want to talk about your maturity assessment. So, carson, where do we want to start?
Speaker 3:Yeah, no, I think let's give us a little preamble too. Lee, like you said, a mouthful as you started, and I think one of the things you and I talked about right before we jumped in was you're embarking on a pretty strategic change that not a lot of organizations. A lot of organizations do a great job of talking the talk, but as far as really adopting the change and the effort that's required in creating and nurturing a sales culture, it's pretty daunting. So you take us on the journey. Like, how do these conversations usually start? What do you see as kind of the biggest pain points that organizations are grappling with? And then how do you diagnose and treat these situations?
Speaker 4:Okay. So that's a great start, and I'm going to share a quote from one of my CEO clients. He's got a great line. He says there's the business that happens to us and the business we make happen, and most can't distinguish between those two.
Speaker 4:Right, there's a business that happens to us, business we make happen, meaning when the economy's cooperating, we got a great differentiator interest rates are low, not much competition. We look like we really have this sales game nailed. And that's when sales leaders, owners, presidents, ceos, they say why do we need to invest in sales? We're killing it. Then we hit economic headwinds. We've got tough competition. Maybe our differentiator isn't a differentiator anymore. The economy's not cooperating. We go boy these salespeople. They can't sell anything, they're terrible the same group, mind you. And it's because we don't have the ability or we do have the ability, the desire, to distinguish between the business that happens to us and the business that we make happen. And that was one of the reasons why I developed the assessment tool, which we'll talk about later but being able to have that framework in place so that your salespeople can produce the results that they want.
Speaker 3:The people on the front lines know the difference. I'd love to hear.
Speaker 3:I had an amen moment when you said that, and I'm surprised our chat isn't lighting up yet with folks saying an amen moment, because what you just said, lee, really resonates. It's fascinating to watch, and what I've usually seen as a common trend with organizations is that they may invest in a sales training of some sort, but it's a one and done, you know they'll do it. There's no followup, there's no practical execution, and you better believe that if somebody goes out there and they're trying to develop new muscle, that you agree in the sales training, hey, this is great, this will make me better. But then you go out and you do it a few times. It doesn't feel good and I go back to what I call my comfortable way of failing. So I would love to hear from your vantage point where have you seen these really succeed and what do you think is the biggest thing that organizations today need to be considering if they're serious about developing a sales culture?
Speaker 4:So can we go with a little time machine? We're gonna go back in time. We're gonna go back to the future, if you will.
Speaker 3:I have to make reference. We got a lot of time.
Speaker 4:You have your movie. You want a movie? I give you a movie.
Speaker 2:Okay, we're going back to and our favorite movie that gets talked about the most on the show ever So-.
Speaker 3:I also have to say so. For Valentine's Day, my wife gave me a Doc Brown clock. He's hanging from the clock, so Brandon off to show you guys.
Speaker 4:It's amazing, I love it, Wonderful. Okay, so I'm gonna take you back now to high school science class, the Heated Adams Workshop. Right, they gave you a Bunsen burner, a flask of water, and what you did was you took the flask of water, you put it over the fire the heat, if you will and the atoms went crazy, bounced it off the walls and as soon as you took the heat away, they returned to a static state, and I share that story. When executives reach out to me about me coming in and doing a keynote, a training program, what have you? And they say so, let's say I'm gonna come in for some period of time and then I'm gonna go away. So tell me about what you have in place today to reinforce the work that I'm gonna do with your team.
Speaker 4:And if the answer is we don't have anything, my counsel to them is not only should they not bring me and don't bring anybody in, because you're gonna have the heated Adams experience. You're gonna have a team that gets all fired up for a couple of days and then they're gonna go back in the field and say what is that I'm excited to go do? There's no reinforcement, and so some of the work that I get into with clients is developing sales playbooks, and I don't do that unilaterally. I don't sit here in Minneapolis and say, let me tell you how to build your sales organization. I'll host these brain show sessions with their team around a wide array of topics, mine out the information from their team and then put it in an organized fashion in a playbook and say, okay, now we've determined the right way to sell for your organization. Now let's get everybody following those best practices.
Speaker 2:Lee, I'm curious of something just personally how often do you hear a team, you go through that and you do your analogy and you say, if you don't have something in place to keep this going, don't hire me, but don't hire anybody. How often do you get a CEO or a sales leader that just look at you like a deer in headlights?
Speaker 4:Pretty common and actually very quickly the conversation shifts to tell me about that playbook thing that you do, because they very quickly recognize that whoever they're gonna bring in doesn't have a magic wand, so they're not gonna come in, do something for a day, two days, three, whatever it is, and boom, you're gonna triple your sales results. That's just not gonna happen, not if you don't have a framework in place to get the results that you're looking for.
Speaker 3:What are the old school tactics that need to go, and what do we replace them with?
Speaker 4:Great question, so I'm gonna stir it up a little bit. One of my. There we go. One of my-.
Speaker 2:Is the contrarians coming out?
Speaker 4:Love it. One of my counsels to executives and people may bristle at this, but I'll explain Love your process, like your salespeople. That successful sales organizations are founded in process, not in people. Salespeople are gonna come and go. That is the nature of this world. It's not like when our parents took their first job and they retired with a gold watch in that same position. You get a couple of years, they move on.
Speaker 4:I had this one client. I would get phone calls and emails and texts on the weekends at night saying so and so just resigned. It was catastrophic Every time a salesperson left and the reason was they had no process, they had no system. So this was a business where there was high turnover in sales. It was to be expected. And the CEO said tell me how we reduced the turnover. And my question back was what if we can't? What if we accept the fact that the turnover is just gonna be and we need to build the business based on that Meaning? Let's develop a process, let's put the systems in place, knowing that people are gonna come and go. It's gonna happen.
Speaker 4:So we did that for every vertical market that they served. We built that framework out and you know what happened? The calls went away. I would connect with her one day and she said oh so, and so just moved on. That's okay, we hired someone else and they're just gonna pick up where the prior person left off. And it was interesting. Before that, when I ran sales reports for each of the vertical markets, it looked like an EKG report. You get this. You could see when someone left and when a new person came in. Now it was because they were founded in process. Now I'm not saying don't be good to your people. Yes, you take great care of your salespeople, but the foundation if you look at any successful sales organization, the foundation is not the salespeople, it's the process that's in place.
Speaker 3:I like that you call that out, lee, because I feel like, yes, be very, very good to your people, but in an ideal world, my team's a destination team. I have an organization that's a destination and there's a succession plan. People are gonna move up, they're gonna move out, we're gonna attract new talent. We wanna make it an attractive place for talent to come, but it's gotta be rock solid with process or, frankly, if it's not, people aren't gonna wanna stay, they're gonna get frustrated and they're gonna leave because of the lack of process.
Speaker 4:Exactly, exactly. So those are the kinds of things when we talk about this whole sales contrarian thing there's a lot of advocates for let's just go hire great salespeople. So you asked for sales contrarian. I don't believe there's an entity called a great salesperson, and I can prove it. I love when executives take me to task on that. I'll ask them. I'll say how many of these so-called great salespeople strong resume, great track record, polished, look have you hired and they failed in your company? If you believe there's an entity called a great salesperson, then you must also sign up for one of two of the following given that they failed, either that salesperson arrived on your doorstep and completely forgot how to sell, or your company is the worst company in the history of business to sell. For which is it Cause? You said you believe in great salespeople and they had it. See, the issue is the word great and where it's placed Every sales role.
Speaker 4:It's like a fingerprint. The factors that lead to success, failure, underperformance vary in every single role, and one of the mistakes we make when we're hiring salespeople is we start the process by recruiting and getting a talent pipeline going. That's not the first step. The first step is to analyze the role and understand the performance factors, the factors that would cause someone to succeed, fail or underperform in it. And then, once we understand that now we say, okay, now we know the DNA that we're looking for and we put a candidate evaluation process in place to expose the matches or lack the rub between those two. So now we're not looking for great salespeople, we're looking for the right salespeople with the potential to be great in this specific role.
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh, we got like five episodes of content just in what you said in the last two minutes there, I think. So I've got like three questions and I won't overwhelm you with them, but I am curious about that last part that you said. When we're looking for the salesperson to match, the role are we getting into, like disc profiles, predictive index tendencies, what are you looking?
Speaker 4:at there? Great question. So I am not a fan of any of the sales assessment tools that are out there and my issue isn't the science, it's the way we use them. In the hiring process. We put way too much weight on that tool. So if it says don't hire them, we knock them out of the process.
Speaker 4:So if we're gonna put that much weighting on it, let's just skip the entire interview process, all the other steps. Give them the test. If they pass, we hire them. If they fail, we don't Too much emphasis. But if we go through the step that I described the performance factor steps and I described that in my book Higher Right, higher Profits you understand the role then what we're saying is and this is what I say to clients all the time I want you to take that assessment tool, go back to the consultant that you're buying it from with this performance factor portfolio and ask that consultant to show you how this instrument is gonna help you identify the matches or lack thereof between the candidate and those factors. So if we're using it as one data point, that's a healthy way to use it in the process. It's a way to expose matches or lack thereof. But if we're gonna use it as a judge and jury. It's not a good use for it.
Speaker 2:I love that. I love that and I've got an example of that. I mean my largest, most successful company I built. We did that around. All of our roles is. We built out what the role needed to do and we used a tool called the Sibmon Survey that got into people's tendencies. What activities did they tend towards naturally and what activities did they tend to avoid because they didn't really like doing them? And we did this like okay, well, they fit, they're gonna naturally go do these things and they're gonna naturally not do these things. They're a perfect fit and it seemed to be a really good recipe. I like that.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So when you look at these performance factors, let's say you have writing skills on the list, because so much of what salespeople do is writing right. There's emails, there's proposals, right. And I get these calls from the executives. They're saying my salespeople, they can't write, they can't put two words together in a sentence. Now with AI, it's getting much easier.
Speaker 4:Products like Grammarly, which I swear by, I use it all the time and I'll ask them how did you evaluate their writing skills before you extended an offer? And you know what answer I get Dead silence because they never did so. If you're saying a highly impactful performance factor is writing skills and you're not assessing it in the evaluation process, well then you're gonna get what you're gonna get, which is not good. We're called Correct. So they say, okay. Well, how can I assess that? I'm like well, there's a few different things you can do.
Speaker 4:One of the things that I like to do and it allows them to measure a number of different vantage points is to write a few scenarios, realistic for their business. But someone could answer if they weren't from that industry. So you'd write a little paragraph and have them respond in writing in how they would resolve that particular issue. So, for example, you'd say you present a proposal, you thought everything was on track and the prospects response is your price is too high. What would be your approach to resolve that issue?
Speaker 4:So there's several things you can measure. One is writing skills, because you're asking for it in writing. See if there's philosophical alignment, to see if their approach to navigating that issue is in alignment with what you would expect one of your salespeople to do and a whole host of others. For example, you would say ask them when could you have this for me? And if they miss their self-imposed deadline, they're out of the process. Because if they can't meet their own deadline, there's no way they're gonna meet yours or prospects. They're not gonna have that for it. Now, if there's an emergency and they say, hey, by the way, this just happened, I'm not gonna be able to meet that deadline, they communicate that that's perfectly fine, but if they just miss it, they're out.
Speaker 3:I wanna kick this going down, because you're hitting on something that's really important not only to sales leaders, who can and should be looking for different types of experiences that are relevant to what they're hiring for, and I don't think that a lot of them do that effectively. And on the flip, they think, hey, I'm just gonna go out and find somebody that's selling for my competition and I'm gonna go nab them, and then they come and they fail, and then they wonder why. But the reality is.
Speaker 3:I love where you're going with this, lee, and so, not even from a sales leadership vantage point, but also as a seller today, what are some of the new skills that we should be looking for as sales leaders and accumulating as sellers, especially in the rise and advent of social selling and AI? I'd love to get your thoughts on that.
Speaker 4:Sure, but I wanna come back to something you just you talked about, about hiring from the competition. That's the lazy way that we go about it, and I have to tell you my own personal experience. I made this mistake. I call it my greatest day in sales management. My worst day in sales management. It was the same day.
Speaker 4:So I was in the technology training industry and we were going gangbusters and I heard one of my competitors wasn't doing very well. So I get a call from this guy, sales person from this competitor, representing himself and five others, saying, hey, we wanna come play for your team, and I became starry-eyed. I'm like, oh my gosh, this is, you're looking for talent. I got a half dozen guys that wanna come play on my team. So hang up the phone. We schedule time for them all to come in, run into the GM's office, tell them about all this stuff. We start re-forecasting numbers. We haven't met these guys yet. We're re-forecasting our numbers and how well we're gonna do they come in. I wouldn't even call them interviews. We didn't interview. We practically had the offers ready to go as soon as they walked in the door, played ahead just a couple of months. Every one of them failed. And when I look back at that it's like of course they failed. There was a complete mismatch because I described the other company as a competitor. But our businesses were so different. They were selling individual training courses to companies. We were selling comprehensive certificate programs primarily to individuals, career changers. So, yes, it's the same technology, yes, it's education, markets completely different, price points completely different and a whole host of other differences. And it was so obvious as I look back and go and we never should have hired any of them. But we get blinded. We hear hiring from the competition. The reason I call it lazy is we go. Well, I don't have to teach them the industry. I don't have to teach them the product Done.
Speaker 4:When I was in the employment screening industry I remember I took over this role had a whole big sales organization. I had this one woman on the team and she had been selling for four different employment screening companies in her career and I traveled with her and everything she said in the prospect meeting was factually correct. Problem was she could have had any business card in her hand and that meeting would have been identical. The entire industry had become vanilla to her because she didn't see any meaningful differentiators. She was selling employment screening, if you will.
Speaker 4:So I don't advocate for hiring from the competition as a winning strategy. I say those are the ones that are the toughest to evaluate because you call it an interview, right, you're meeting with them, they know the language, they know what you want to hear, it's a fun, enjoyable conversation, but if you haven't put in place what we talked about before, those performance factors, and for each of those performance factors you've identified ways to evaluate the match or lack thereof. So interview questions is one of them, writing technique, like we talked about, is another, but they need to go through that same level of scrutiny as someone outside the industry, even more, to get past this fabric of they know the jargon, if you will. So I can determine if they're going to be a success right here in my organization.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think it's almost like I would and I've hired from externally, but they've got to add something that my team doesn't have today. If there's a experience that I'm trying to level up my team on that they have, if there is some type of skill set or an area that I think they can elevate to some of the parts, absolutely I'm not going to just add them for adding them to stake.
Speaker 4:Yep, but the question you were asking me was around today's tools. So let's start with LinkedIn. That's a huge, huge question. Today, if someone sends you an invite, you can measure with an egg timer how quickly you're going to get a solicitation Right. You get a tip tick, tick, tick. Hey, buy my stuff.
Speaker 4:Well, that's not an appropriate way to use LinkedIn. The beauty of social media is and Brandon and I talked about soft line if you decide you want to be seen as an expert in, let's say, babysitting, you could do that in 30 days without creating one video, without writing one blog post. If all you're doing all day long is sharing information around babysitting, the world very quickly will say ah, you're an expert in babysitting, you didn't make a video, you didn't write any content. So, with salespeople, when we're looking at the opportunity, again, I'm going to focus on LinkedIn because obviously that's the biggest business platform. They need to be sharing content related to the industry they're in to demonstrate subject matter expertise. But then go a step further and engage in conversations in the group Again not saying buy my stuff, but creating an environment so that others look at them and say you know what when I need this?
Speaker 4:I need to talk to Brandon because he clearly has what I need and that, to me, is such a foundational expertise that they've got to have. It can be taught. The question always, when we again coming back to those performance factors, what do you want to teach and what do you not want to teach? Because there are some things you say we can teach it but we really don't want to. And there are other things, like resiliency, where you say I don't think you can teach someone to be resilient. Either you are or you're not. So those are some of the decision processes that you have to go through when you're considering sales talent.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and Lee. I want to address real quick everyone that's listening. We know there's Hello.
Speaker 4:Brian, your audio just went out.
Speaker 3:We just lost your audio, brandon. Uh-oh, brandon, maybe having some technical difficulties, so I'll just mention. I think we need to find it.
Speaker 4:Please stand by.
Speaker 3:What I think he's trying to say is that we know some comments are coming through, but we weren't able to funnel them in into the stream.
Speaker 3:So if you've got some comments, we'll make sure to address those here shortly. And I think one of the areas that we want to kind of shift to, Lee is around we're seeing more and more the shift and the need to acknowledge that we're in a buyer-centric market. I love that you called out earlier the benefits of working in an environment where we're almost gifted or we benefit from the climate that we're in, and I've worked in cloud for years and obviously there was a very big boom and then there were economic headwinds and then you find out what you're made of and you know. But now buyers can arm themselves with so much, they have so much information at their fingertips and it's only going to become more and more with the advent of AI and how they can arm themselves. I'd love to get a feel for how do you work with sales organizations today to really build that culture, that innate culture around buyer-centricity and infusing that into discovery calls and really every step of the sales journey.
Speaker 4:So one of my favorite questions to ask salespeople who knows more about the world of potential solutions in your industry you or the people you sell to? I've asked that in every industry you can name, in countries all around the globe. Every single time I've gotten the same answer it's me. I know more about the world of potential solutions than the people I'm selling to. So we have the internet, we have AI and all this other stuff. Salespeople will always have a greater expertise than the buyer and my gosh they should. They're the ones that are representing it. So when you understand that you have both an obligation and an opportunity, I believe in sales. We have an obligation to help people make an informed buying decision because of the expertise that we have and that gives us an opportunity to shape buyer decision criteria, because they don't know how to buy what we're selling, even the most trivial. I have a client in Theta. Minnesota has a lot of idiosyncrasies and put your own punchline in there. One of the interesting ones is every homeowner and every business contracts for their own trash removal. So on Wednesday mornings today is Wednesday there's a parade of garbage trucks coming down my street representing every hauler that you can imagine. So I need to purchase these services. It was interesting when I bought my home here, the first thing I did not first, but one of the first things I did, I went to Home Depot and bought garbage cans. You don't do that here. The haulers give those to you. They want you using their cans and you would say, boy, it seems pretty easy to buy trash services, very straightforward. Well, it's not. There's a game that's played in this industry. What these haulers do is they put a cheap number in front of you. Let's say we're going to charge you $9 a month to pick up your trash, and then you get your bill and it's not $9 a month. There's all these fees that are added in. Now we just think, if you look at your cell phone bill, you go well, fees, that's just a part of the bill. It's not. These haulers create these fees. They innovate these fees to add margin to your account and the general public doesn't know that. So they just get lured by. Oh, I'm paying $12 today. If I switch to you, it's $9, and they get the bill and they're paying more than they were before because the other hauler has added all of these fees. So something as simple as trash, we don't even know how to buy garbage services, you can imagine what it's like when you're talking about a complex solution that most salespeople are selling. So we have this opportunity to shape buyer decision criteria. Now, just because we know that we know more than they do about the world of potential solutions in our industry than they do, that doesn't mean that they agree with you. You can't go in and they say, oh, my goodness, thank goodness you're here, because I didn't know how to buy this stuff Because of the internet. They feel like they do.
Speaker 4:So one of the things we've always talked about in sales was the importance of questions Like there's questions that we have to be asking to lead them down a path, so that they see what we see. If we make statements like well, you know, I know more about this space than you do, so I'm going to tell you. Tell you about what you should know when you're making an informed buying decision. We're going to make for a very short interaction, but if you ask questions, lead them down the path, like one of my favorite questions, or I should say, the response I look for is you know what? No one's ever asked me a question like that before. That's how I know I'm providing value, not with the statements I'm making, but rather the questions that I'm asking, because what I want them to do is think differently about the world of potential solutions they could have.
Speaker 3:I love that. I spend a lot of time with salespeople and it's all about don't go for the low hanging fruit, don't go for the obvious Right. Sometimes you got to shake things up, ask very provocative things and, honestly, I don't care what sales methodology you subscribe to. I think there's a lot of great benefits in a lot of them. At the end of the day, you want to be thinking about what is the unique, differentiating way, not only that my company can help these folks and how I can help the folks, and sometimes it's about getting in there, creating something, bringing some mutually beneficial relationships to the table, and then getting the heck out of the way, like I'm just a sales guy. But, lee, you said something earlier that made me feel like I'm like a noble knight when you said we've got this obligation to inform people of your help to make an informed decision.
Speaker 3:I take pride in that, so thank you.
Speaker 4:That's wonderful Way to go. So let me tell you oh, you're back, Brandon's back.
Speaker 2:Yeah, he was in a time machine.
Speaker 3:I think he was in a time machine. He was watching the live show.
Speaker 4:No, he was watching a love boat episode. That's it and I don't mean to interrupt.
Speaker 2:I just I'm back, but please keep going, Okay.
Speaker 4:So let's talk, because obviously what we're talking about is some of the discovery issues. Right, and one of the big issues. I'm actually on this mission with discovery. I want to get rid of the word, because if you ask salespeople about discovery, what do they always think about the questions they're going to ask and what they're going to tell and show somebody? And another favorite question I ask them I say, okay, so if I agree to take a meeting with you, obviously you call it a discovery meeting. What do I get out of it? And you know what I hear back? The same as the question before nothing, definition, silence, that issue, right, there is why prospecting is so darn hard.
Speaker 4:We've conditioned people to believe that unless you're actively seeking something, don't meet with a salesperson, because only they get value out of it. So the word that I like to use and I'm not going to say innovated this that consultation. So my hobby when I'm not doing the sales thing, I'm a competitive power lifter, and when you do that, you wind up with various ailments, and I'm dealing with a neck issue right now. So a couple of weeks ago I went to the doctor because of this neck issue. And if you think of why I went to the doctor. I went there to become wiser about the circumstances that I'm having and understand the potential remedies. That's why I went. I would not have gone to the doctor if I thought I was a scientific experiment and only he got the benefit of that time with me.
Speaker 4:So if we have the mindset of a consultation and we say I need to figure out what meaningful value can't you say value, meaningful meaning. It has to matter to me that I'm going to provide during this interaction and then I'm going to communicate that when I'm prospecting Because when I'm prospecting if it's a voicemail, it's an email, god forbid you get the person live. If all I come across is that traditional salesperson, I want to meet with you using the two words. By the way, I tell salespeople all the time. There are two words you want to get out of your vocabulary it's I want. No one cares what you want, except one person. Do you know who that is? It's not you, it's mom. No one else cares what you want. So we owe it to the state to their benefit.
Speaker 3:I'm gonna start listening to Lee every morning before I go to work Because you got me so fired up, and so this is very similar to a conversation that I was having very recently, because it's that same exact thing around discovery, using the same medical analogy we try to go in and diagnose based on what we want the outcome to be. That's the point. They don't wanna talk to us or care talk to us about those types of things. They don't care what we love to do or what we want to do, but the reality is, if I show up and it might be helpful if I throw out a couple of ideas where I think I could add some immediate value hey, I know some folks in this segment of my organization that have helped organizations like yours do X, I'd be happy to introduce you. There's a story that I could tell or something along those lines Cast a wide net.
Speaker 3:Don't try to diagnose before you get the consultative meeting. There you go. Cast a wide net. Try to make it sound like it's gonna be a value to them and that you're actually thinking about ways that you can be valuable to them Instead of just saying I'd love to get a meeting to review your portfolio or review what keeps you up at night, like we've got to stay doing that.
Speaker 4:Well, along those lines I tell sales people the word discovery is a kitchen item. You don't say that to someone let's have a discovery meeting. You've just said let's have a sales call, I'd rather have brute canal. I mean, no one is looking forward to that experience with you. You don't say let's schedule a discovery experience. You just told them you want to have a meeting for you, Then have it by yourself. So, Brandon, you asked me about this whole sales contrarian thing.
Speaker 4:So let me throw this right down the gauntlet. You ready Go for it.
Speaker 4:Every sales training program out there says you begin that meeting by setting an agenda, and it sounds like this what I want to do today is ask you some questions and tell you about our stuff. What I want to do today? So prospecting is so darn hard. We're lucky enough to finally get one of these meetings and we screw it up in the first few seconds by saying what I want to do today. What I advocate for is not making a statement, but rather asking a question. For this to be a great use of your time. What do you want to make sure we talk about here today? Those two things have done. That question was two things for you. First of all, it conveys that you genuinely care that they get something out of this interaction, and the answer truched the course for the whole meeting. Sales is an open book test.
Speaker 3:And that's true of every meeting you're ever in. You need to arrive at what's the desired outcome at the onset.
Speaker 2:Amen and Lee. How much. Going back to the hiring and the assessment and just for lack of a better word a personality profile, whatever the system you have. How important is that? I mean because that's a different mindset entirely than a lot of the stereotypical perceptions of a hard charging salesperson that goes in and says, hey, for this to be valuable, it's going to be all about you. That is very, very different than the normal view of a great salesman.
Speaker 4:Correct. So this whole mission about being a sales contrarian that we keep coming back to is building this awareness, this recognition that and what I'm talking about here today. I'd argue this conversation we could have had in 1930. I don't believe people want to hear what I want to do today, in 1930, anymore than they want to hear it in 2024. I think we just did it wrong and we just kept replicating that over and over and over again.
Speaker 2:And I don't have it with me because I'm not sitting at my desk, but I would be holding up how to win friends and influence people, because I always come back to that book. Like that book never lies, it always comes back to how you treat people, how people feel when they're with you. Are you speaking in a way that they feel heard and seen and valuable, or are you talking about you? I mean, that's the foundation of that book.
Speaker 3:Exactly, exactly, and people were more tolerable of bad sales tactics before because they needed us to fill in the blanks more before than they do now.
Speaker 2:Well, and it goes back to what, Lee, what you were saying, at the very beginning, your CEO client of yours had said we don't know the difference between sales that happened to us and sales that we create.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 2:And we thought I mean, I've said this many times when I first got into sales, my first job, I thought I was really good at cold calling. It wasn't until later that I realized that they just needed information from me and they were using me Right. It was that I was good.
Speaker 4:Yep, exactly, exactly. So let me come back to something we talked about. One of the questions I asked salespeople about who knows more about the world of potential solutions, and I mentioned that that was an opportunity that we have. So let me tie this into prospecting. There's a strategy that I've developed. I call it my unknowingly strategy and it works tremendously well Based on that premise that I mentioned before, that we know more about the world of potential solutions in our industry than the people we're selling to. So in that prospecting strategy of unknowingly the question of the last salespeople I said OK, we agree, you know more than they do about the world of potential solutions in your space. So what are those? What are the things that you know that you find they don't know? So we talk about the outreach. For example, I'm working with a company. They handle property tax management and they have found that most companies are unknowingly overpaying property taxes. So we developed a campaign around this unknowingly theme. So the subject line to email is unknowingly overpaying property taxes. I'm pretty sure that it's going to get opened.
Speaker 4:If you think about when we make a decision, no matter what it is, we always want to feel like we've made an informed decision. We may not have bought the most expensive, we may not have bought the cheapest, but we feel, whatever decision we made, we did it in an informed manner. Someone comes along and says you're unknowingly doing something, you're unknowingly out of compliance. You get the Labrador effect, the huh, you know the dog would put the head. What do you mean? And so the obvious response is what do you mean by that? And I always tell salespeople if you're going to use this strategy, you better be ready for that. Question Door is open. And if you're not prepared with where you're going to take the conversation from, there, strategy is going to flop. So you can't just say, hey, I like that unknowingly thing. Let me put that in place. When they say to you, what do you mean by that? You have to have a game plan to take them through that conversation.
Speaker 3:I love that.
Speaker 3:I feel like, as sellers, you've got to be very intentional about understanding the things that you have control over, like the quality of messaging, how you show up. I learned a lot my first year as an account executive when I would take a counterintuitive approach to doing outreach. I would listen to what I was being told as the reason people didn't want to talk to me, and then I would almost form this counterintuitive approach that basically turned it on its head, like a lot of people didn't want to talk to me because they didn't want to buy anymore. They already felt like they were very informed in that area of technology, so elevating the conversation was part of it.
Speaker 3:You can control what you say and how you get or earn that meeting, but also every step of the process. There are different things that you can do to have a higher probability of getting the desired outcome, but you have to make it all about them, and that's the buyer's specificity element of it. They don't care what you want to talk about. I think they were very tolerant of some of the verbiage that we would choose to use as sellers for decades upon decades because they relied on us more for information, but right now it's like playing the Super Bowl every week. You've got to bring your A game and, lee, I love what you said about prospecting because it is.
Speaker 3:It is challenging. When I talk to salespeople, some of the biggest beefs they give me is how hard it is to prospect, how they don't enjoy it. I've always personally enjoyed it because I take it as a challenge, like what can I do or say to earn this meeting?
Speaker 3:What is the unique approach that I want to utilize in order to get that meeting. I guess where I would love to go with you next is, as you spend time with salespeople, what has been the biggest aha moment that you've had? How has your approach changed over time of working with sales organizations and salespeople?
Speaker 4:This was one of the shocking things to me. So I've been doing this since 2007. I expected most of my conversations were going to be this difficult, challenging, complex issue and it's not. It's mostly rudimentary, elementary basic, foundational conversations. I have two sons involved in college baseball. One just graduated from college. He was a hitter. My other son's still in college. He's a pitcher.
Speaker 4:And when I would take them for lessons when they were very young sure, it was revolution, it was new. But then as they got older and they go for lessons, expecting, like these pearls of wisdom, I'm going to throw 10 miles an hour faster, I'm going to hit the ball 50 feet further. They were hearing the same things over and over again and they were told you know what? That's the same thing the professionals are doing, Right, hitting off a tee. You learn that at six years old you hit off a tee Major league hitters. Joe Mallard just got ducted into the Hall of Fame, talked about how many balls he hit off a tee every single day as a major league player. So we're looking for this silver bullet and the reality is, if you do the fundamentals well, the sales take care of themselves.
Speaker 3:I love that Because I was watching this thing earlier today about Kobe Bryant the same thing. He was a student of the game he took 1,000 shots a day.
Speaker 3:You don't have to be the most athletically gifted athlete to be a champion. You nail the fundamentals and it's not going to work every time. Your process isn't going to work every time and you will modify your process. You will take on new tools. New relationships will matter, tools will come in and out, but at the end of the day, nail the process, nail the fundamentals, and if you do it over and over again, you're going to be successful. Period.
Speaker 4:Sorry, I cut you off. No, when I work with salespeople, a lot of times I get the. That's not always going to work and I say, absolutely, you're right. I don't think anybody's holding you accountable for 100% closing rate either. So the idea is to move the sales needle and when I take them through in keynote talks, for example, if we could be just 10% more effective in every step of the sales process, multiply that out and see how many more deals you end up with. Incremental gains is what we should. Be insatiable in our search for Incremental gains. If, like for example, we talked about the technique, about the agenda, not a statement asking a question. Is it going to work every time that you're going to have this miraculous experience? Of course not. But if I just made you 10% more effective in that step of the process, multiply that out through the rest of the sales journey.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you go from a 250 hitter to a 400 hitter in baseball, you're in the Hall of Fame and it's not massive changes to your swing, it's tweaks, it's finding consistency.
Speaker 2:That's it. You know, as we're wrapping up, I kind of summarize and you guys tell me if this is an easy and accurate summary. Be other oriented, be about your buyer, buyer centric, and go to the basics, ask good questions, Listen, serve and then rinse and repeat over and over again and don't expect 100% success.
Speaker 4:Now there is one thing that I can tell them. I can tell our audience that I personally guarantee you will increase your closing ratio. I guarantee it works Right. Everybody wants to hear that. A ratio, it's a numerator and a denominator. Right? The numerator is a number of wins and not denominator is number of proposals.
Speaker 4:Cut down the number of proposals you put out. They're earned because we make a statement. We don't ask you to make a statement. I'll put together a proposal for you. Okay, I'm not committed to do anything. You want to go do some work and put a proposal together? God bless, have at it. So if we look, you know we talk about qualifying up front. You know for to see if they're the right fit. Same thing for a proposal Qualify, Do they have the authority to do anything with it and do they have a desire to do anything with it right now? If they don't, why are we putting together a proposal You're not going to win. So if you want to increase your closing ratio and, by the way, have more selling time to go after the real deals, cut down on the number of proposals you're putting out. Put them out in the right circumstance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but sending out proposals make us feel good. What's the term you use, Carson? We fail comfortably, or we comfortably fail yeah.
Speaker 3:I remember years ago.
Speaker 4:You got to be in it to win it. Oh my God, you got to be in it to win it.
Speaker 3:Years ago that I was in the call center, we had just started this call center and I was leading the operation. We hired a bunch of new sellers and you know these folks would walk around and, oh my gosh, I just got asked to send out a proposal and they were walking around like they had closed this massive deal and I was saying to myself, like you know, you're never going to talk to this person again. In actuality, you know, because customers, just like you know they're very well-meaning but they're not confrontational people. They don't want to. You know, that's why I always tell people a yes or a no is better than a maybe.
Speaker 3:So I would rather know are you invested in being down this path, going down this forward, or you have to see what we might be able to do together or not? And if we're not, I have resources, I can go elsewhere. That's fine and good, and a lot of people because they want to see what you can do together. That's why they go down the path. But yeah, I love that approach, lee, great call out, and I love that as we kind of wrap up too, I'd love to spend a little bit more time, too, on your assessment, anything else that you can tell us about the sales organization maturity assessment. What sets it apart? Why did why and how did you come up with it? And how is that adding value for people today?
Speaker 4:So the first thing is, my wife laughed once you heard the name of it because she's like maturity you I was going to say, at first glance I'm like I definitely shouldn't take it, because I don't Exactly see.
Speaker 4:That's the problem we have. So this was 10 years into making, and I'm going to start by saying it's free, so we're not trying to sell you anything and the website is assessmysalescom. So there are three expressions that are commonly used synonymously to describe a sales organization Sales department, sales team and sales force. I look at them as stages of maturity that we started today sales department and we graduate over time to a sales team, but the ultimate performance level is sales force and what this assessment does. By the way, it's not for salespeople and it's not going to answer the question of can you sell or not? That's not what this is.
Speaker 4:This is a mirror test for owners, presidents, ceos, coos, sales leaders, and the answer you're going to get is have we built the sales organization framework that can produce the results that we want? Because so often we say let's just hire a bunch of salespeople and hope for the best. Yeah, we talked about this earlier. Our foundation needs to be in process. So this is going to delve into new client acquisition, account management, sales management, hiring, onboarding and compensation. So you're going to get an evaluation score as well as here's what you need to do to move to that next level of maturity Plus, I'm offering a complimentary consultation to anybody who completes it and wants to review their results.
Speaker 3:Not a discovery, not a discovery, and it is not a sales call in any way, it's all about them.
Speaker 4:Assessmysalescom, thank you.
Speaker 2:There it is. Well, Lee, thank you so much and I want to let everybody know hey, we did not ignore you all day today. I know Nora is telling us that there's comments that she sees on LinkedIn. We are not seeing them inside a re-stream today. I have no idea why Technology. So we are so sorry. We know we have a great audience. Usually you guys give us great comments and we bring you on and you join the conversation and we just kind of, you know, dropped that today, but it wasn't intentional. So please forgive us and Lee. Thank you so much, Carson, I think you're pretty fired up. Lee was a great guest. Did you get your movie reference in, or are we just going to go with Lee's movie reference today?
Speaker 3:Hmm.
Speaker 2:You got a summary in there.
Speaker 4:Well, Carson, you actually did it and you didn't realize it. Oh boy, there's a scene in Bull Durham where Kevin Costner is talking about the number of additional base hits you have to get per week to go from an average, easily forgotten ballplayer and an immortal in the Hall of Fame, and the answer was one One more hit a week was the difference. So you reference that. When you said 250 to 300, there is your movie reference.
Speaker 3:And when you speak of me, speak of me well, bull Durham.
Speaker 2:Bull, durham. I love it All right. Well, carson, finish us up, and Lee, thank you so much for doing it.
Speaker 3:This was awesome man, Really great show. Thank you for being on and thanks, everybody for being on with us as usual, with mastering modern selling. Until next time, happy modern selling.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you for joining us today on mastering modern selling.
Speaker 1:If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe for more insights. Connect with us on social media and leave a review to help us improve. Stay tuned for our next episode, where we will continue to uncover modern strategies shaping today's business landscape. Learn more about Fist Bump and our concierge service at GetFistBumpscom. Mastering modern revenue creation with Fist Bump when relationships, social and AI meet in the buyer centric age.