Secrets of Closing The Sale With Tom Ziglar

I don't think there's anybody that has had a bigger impact in the field of direct response than Dan Kennedy. The legend of Dan Kennedy should be ignored at your own peril. They're not really lessons, they're kind of laws that you live by. Dan opened my eyes to what small business marketing looks like. Dan teaches strategic direct response that is timeless. His ripple effect touches people who don't even know his name.

The world as we know it was changed because Dan Kennedy became obsessed with marketing.

Welcome to the Magnetic Marketing Podcast with your host, Dan Kennedy.

We are privileged to have a very, very special guest with us. I always, on one hand, worry about stealing thunder by talking about Dad instead of the prodigal son, but I will for a moment. I hold in my hand my hardbound from 1984 edition of Secrets of Closing the Sale by Zig Ziglar. When I went and grabbed it off the bookshelf before the call, I quickly counted and I have 36 yellow Post-it notes in it, 2 different kinds. Plunked there at two different times, and I'm hard-pressed to go five pages without a yellow, pink, or blue highlighter mark and/or a margin note because this is not a book I read. This is one of the books that I use and that that I use a lot to the extent it's not on the shelves with all my other sales books. It's on the shelf immediately above my workstation with the dictionary and the thesaurus and the words that sell thesaurus and so forth because every bit is valid for people who sell through media. As I do as a copywriter, as it is for people who sell person-to-person, nose-to-nose, toes-to-toes. I would argue that it and really everything Zig taught about selling, which Tom and I were just talking about, there's been a generation to a generation and a half lapse since Zig really was a sales trainer. Is not only every bit as valid today as it was, for example, when this book was published, at least this edition of the book was published in 1984. I think it is probably more valid. Rick Goings, the CEO of Tupperware, who I imagine Tom knows as I do, Rick refers to social media as anti-social media because it actually separates people. It only creates the illusion of people coming together. That doesn't mean it doesn't work as a media. It doesn't mean it's not important as a media, but it is what it is. And nothing still beats Nose to nose, toes to toes, person to person, kitchen table, conference room table in an office, hell, riding around in a car together and a sale being closed on a bumpy country road on the way to go have breakfast. Nothing beats it. So this book got a lot of use. Gets a lot of use. It's one of the most beat up of any that you might find in my office. And of course, as most of you on the call know, Zig and I got to know each other pretty well. 9 years, 9 consecutive years, he and I were the only constants on Peter Loew's success events occurring in big— after the first year occurring in big sports arenas mostly with very large audiences. A lot of those cities Zig was on in the morning and gone on to his next stop and was at the time trying to play as many golf courses as you could possibly play too, and I was on last, late in the day. So we did spend a lot of time together in every city, but cumulatively over 9 years we spent a lot of time together. And actually it was seeing Zig speak himself on the platform when I was still very, very young. That, that moved me into that as a, as a relatively unlikely activity for myself. So I have always owed a debt, but that is not why Tom is here. Tom is here for a couple reasons. One, because Secrets of Closing the Sale is re-emerging, and we'll talk about that. And because time under tutelage of Dad and in his own right, he has some important stuff to share with you about the selling aspect of your business. So Tom, thank you for being with us. Thanks for the time. I know you're right smack in the middle of overseeing a product launch. You're on the road and not in the comfort of your own home. And so I appreciate you making the time for the call.

Well, I tell you what, Dan, it's just, it's just an honor to be here. And I was, as I was preparing for the call and I was thinking about it, I remember a conversation we had in a hotel in Dallas, and you just said, do you know why people love your dad so much? And I said, well, I think so, but tell me. And then he said, the same reason people love soap operas. And of course I scratched my head because I didn't know where you were coming from. And then you said, hey, on a soap opera, all the characters are transparent. They, you know, you know about their wins and their losses, their, their strengths and their weaknesses. And, uh, I've thought about that many times through the years. Especially since Dad passed away, because I think his connection, his greatest connection with people was his transparency and his authenticity. And they felt like they could get close to him because he was willing to reveal the challenges and the mistakes that he made. And so that's given me confidence, your words in a roundabout way, have given me confidence when I've messed up, because we all mess up, to realize that, wait a second, this makes me more real. And if I learn from it and share it so that others maybe can avoid the same thing, it goes better. And so I just wanted to start off with that because that conversation, it just stuck with me. And probably 2 or 3 times a year I go back to that conversation we had because it just puts a smile on my face. Helped me identify why people loved Dad the way they did.

And they definitely did. So I'll just throw you a softball to start with. Tell everybody a little bit about growing up with Zig and winding up in the family business and one or two kind of lessons learned about all that. Then we'll get—

you got it, you got it. Uh, you know, growing up with Dad in the house, he had some books, and the strangest thing would happen. We'd go out to eat and people would come up to him and they would just tell him how his words or his books changed their life. So I grew up with that. But as good as he was out in public and on stage, he was even better at home. Dad was an introvert. In the house, he was kind of quiet, but he was also very intentional. So whenever we had conversations, they were really engaging conversations. And he was extremely goal-oriented. He had a dream. And he had this passion that drove him every day. And to boil it down to one thing is he would wake up every day wondering what new thing he could learn that he could share with somebody else that would help them be, do, and have more. He just got the biggest joy out of that. And of course, when that's your mission, what do you turn into? I mean, you really become that which you focus on. Try to master. And that was the number one lesson that I learned from Dad is, for me personally, is the number one habit we can create, the number one thing that we can do, is we can choose the input that we allow into our minds. Some of it we can't choose, but we got to be defensive on the negative stuff that comes in. We got to kick it out. But the majority of the things, the people we hang out with, the books we read, the things we watch, We can choose that, and when we choose the right information, that gives us such a huge advantage in life. I went to college and did the normal college stuff. I thought I was going to be a professional golfer. Got married right after college, and so I had a golf habit and a wife to support. And I came to work for the company, and I started off in the warehouse. If anybody listening has an old cassette tape program, my fingerprints are probably on it because I moved from the warehouse to our duplication area where I made audio cassettes and VHS tapes. And then I moved into sales and then up through the company from there. And it was, you know, I had that epiphany. And I don't know if everybody gets this chance in life, but the epiphany that says, wow, this is what it's about, this is what I'm for. But we were doing a big event and this man comes up to the product table and I'll back up a little bit. It was an Amway event and there was going to be about 30,000 people there and Dad was the secret surprise guest. So nobody knew he was coming and we had set up our product tables and we had tablecloths on all the books and all the cassette tapes so nobody could see who it was. They opened the door and the rush starts happening. Guy in the door. He'd probably been waiting in line for 2 hours already. He looks over at the product table and the, the tablecloth had kind of pulled itself back and he could see the picture of Dad. So he comes over and he goes, is Mr. Ziglar going to be here? And I looked at him and I said, yes, but don't tell anybody. And I covered the, the picture up so nobody would see. And then he said, well, is he going to sign autographs? And I said, yeah. He said, well, where's the line going to be? And I pointed over about 2 tables down, and he said, well, I'm going to go get in line. And I said, hey, wait a second, you know, it's only 6 o'clock. He doesn't go on until midnight tonight. There's not— nobody's even going to know there's a line until midnight. And the guy said, that's okay, I'm going to go wait in line anyway. So 2 hours later, I couldn't believe he was still there. I went over and I said, "What's your story?" And he looked at me and he had a broken accent. Turns out he was from Central America and he'd moved to the US a couple years before and he moved in with his brother in Chicago. And after he'd been there 3 weeks, he said to his brother, "I really need to learn English." And his brother handed him a book and he said, "Here, translate this book from English into Spanish." into Spanish, and in the process you will learn English and it will change your life. And so right there, in a line that nobody knew about, this guy starts crying about how the book See You at the Top saved his marriage and helped him. He was an alcoholic. It helped him get his marriage back and get sober. And that's when I realized that, you know, it's real important to sell, it's real important to do well in business, But if you can package it and if you could give that little bit of extra of just that foundational stuff, and my life changed that day. I realized we weren't in the book and tape business, we were in the life-changing business. And that kind of set it off. I ended up 23 years ago becoming the president and I'm the CEO and it's just been an amazing thing, time. But I just go through the things in my life of, what was going on, and that was the turning point. So to this day, I travel all over the world speaking, and it doesn't matter if I'm in Papua New Guinea or Poland or the US, when I walk into a room, it's with friends and family because they've been touched by Dad's message. And so I'll just conclude that little, who is Tom Ziglar? Tom Ziglar is probably the most blessed person you'll meet.

Well, I was thrilled to hear that you were, you know, sort of reinvigorating the sales education side of the business. I think that developing good attitudes about and learning how to sell maybe changes as many lives as as anything else. It certainly turns unconfident people into confident people and unprosperous people into prosperous people. So let's talk a little bit about selling and what do you think are sort of the most important eternal principles, and what do you think the, you know, the modern and modern media adaptations of them are all about?

Okay, I'll share the, the most important principle to me, and when it comes to sales, and I learned it I think God planned it this way. When I moved from, you know, doing the duplication of our cassette tapes and VHS into sales at our company, that was in the day when the phone would ring and I was an inbound phone salesperson. They trained me for a week and then the first sales call I got And I was scared because I'm young. I've never done sales before. The first sales call that I get, this man, and he—

and he's—

I'm talking to him and I'm like 25, and this guy has got to be, I mean, old, mid-50s, maybe 60. And so I'm a young guy and I'm scared, and, and this guy calls in and he says, He says, Tom, he goes, I'm glad I'm talking to you. I've got a real challenge. I need your help. My son-in-law and daughter are going through a really tough time. My son-in-law is a dentist. We love him. And they are in a huge financial crisis. They just bought their practice. He still has student loan debt. And they've got 3 kids under the age of 5. And their marriage, they're going to survive, but it's rocky right now. What programs do you have that I could buy my son-in-law and daughter that they could listen to that would help them? And so I made the classic sales default mistake. I started telling him a list of stuff, and about 20 seconds into it, He said, Tom, just stop. Here's my American Express card. Why don't you go ahead and send them anything you think they need? Is it okay if we pray? And when I think about that, I realize I had nothing to do with that sale. That sale was built on the reputation and the integrity of my father. Because who do you call up and just say, here's my credit card, send me what I need? And so the principle there is that we have to hold sacred our reputation, our integrity, and, and that we deliver on what we promise. And then there's a huge moral responsibility that comes on that, because here I am, 25 years old, and half of my brain is like I can send him one of everything, you know, because he said— and the other half of my brain is, oh no, you can't, you've got to send him only what he needs. And then it just— it was like I was just— I went through this little mini, you know, sales course under pressure going, that's right, you do what— you send exactly what they need. And you know, you don't hold back, but you give them everything they need, everything that's going to solve the problem they have. And so I think that is the principle that's timeless, is we do it with integrity. We build and hold it and create a reputation. And I think the new interpretation of that is there's all these justifications that go on. Well, you know, if I can do this, then this will happen and so on. And that's a slippery slope. One of my friends and mentors is Seth Godin, and he was in our office and we were talking about this. He said that he focuses on the scalability of trust. I'd never heard that phrase before. So what he means is that in every interaction, whether he is writing his blog post or speaking or face-to-face with somebody, his goal is to scale trust, to build more trust. And then he probably read and listened to Secrets of Closing the Sale as much as anybody on the planet. And in the book Secrets of Closing the Sale, Dad points out that there's 5 reasons that people don't buy: no need, no money, no want, no hurry, and no trust. And the biggest is no trust. And so I just thought it was interesting that Seth built his whole, he builds his whole career, his whole focus on overcoming people's number one objection, which is trust. If you have trust with somebody, then when you bring a solution that fits the problem that they have, they're going to take action. And so that is just, to me, that is the, that's the, you know, the core foundation is that integrity and trust is the byproduct of integrity.

Well, you know, there's a couple of things. One, from a marketing side, seamlessly integrated with selling that we talk a lot about how everything that happens before the sale is at least as important, if not more important, than what happens during the sale. And so the reason a lot of people don't close sales, even if they memorize secrets of closing the sale, is that they're trying to make a fundamentally impossible sale because everything that needed to happen before it hasn't happened. And one of those things is some level level of trust, if not real high level, what I call predetermination to do business with a given person and only with that person. And so people are, you know, they tend to separate these things. Advertising separated from marketing, marketing separated from selling. All of it separated from fundamental integrity and make it all about the mechanics. And the mechanics matter, but I mean, I teach that the two most important things are who you are and who you are to the person who is going to be the buyer. We know in environments, professional environments, chiropractor, dentist, orthodontist, financial advisor, etc., who that person is to their prospect controls their income a whole lot more than what it is that they do, how they do it, how well they do it, etc. And so that's absolutely in in keeping. You know, when you do the old sales, kind of what you started to fall into on that very first call, products, services, features, benefits, incremental claim of superiority, price, most people are really looking first for— they can't really judge product. They're looking for who they can trust to help them judge product, all right? And there's all sorts of ways to get there and there's all sorts of ways to even accelerate it. But boy, if you don't have it, then selling purely based on the— on the arguable merits of the product itself is pretty tough. So what are you teaching now that is exactly the same as Dad taught? And what are you teaching that's new?

Well, we have a saying in our office. People will call in and they'll say, what's What's new in sales? And we'll say, do you want what's new or do you want what works? Just because what's worked 20 years ago, 30 years ago, 50 years ago, it works today. You've got to build a relationship. You've got to build rapport. You've got to have that trust component. And it can't be just a conversation, right? There's got to be— a specific plan and process that you walk through to uncover needs and understand what their desires and goals are to find out if what you're offering is a fit. And so what we're selling and doing now that we used to do, it's pretty much the same way. It's the same thing. It's the same principles. It's the same ideas. They're timeless. It's interesting to me that there's— I don't know what I want to call it, a renaissance or a resurgence of this idea that what is old is new again. And the reason is, is I think, and you and I have talked about a little bit, you know, social media, the internet, the ability to create massive lists. And, you know, I'll just tell you, we have 4.5 million fans on Facebook.. But I don't know the formula to convert that into customers whose lives are being changed. I mean, our whole goal in our Facebook strategy is simply to get them on our list so that we can then build a relationship. So the number of likes you have is not an indicator of success. The indicator of success is what type of relationship did the people that you're in contact on a regular basis with, how does that go? What that means is for the last 10 years, maybe a little bit longer, there's been this huge crutch and that is, hey, you know what, I can just stay here and do these things and you have the illusion of selling. You have the illusion of creating a tribe. The reality is it's a component of what needs to be done today, but it is not the end-all. And so what that means is when we go out in the world, the old-fashioned, you know, gosh, how do I walk into a meeting and say hello and introduce myself and ask some really good questions to find out what they really need, that art or that skill or that science, it's rusty. It's not where it should be. And, and that's where we see the real need today. It's what we were teaching when Secrets of Closing the Sale first came out, but now it's almost like there's a generation of people who didn't even grow up in the environment where that happened. It just wasn't natural. And so we're bringing that back. Now the good news is, is that you can take a lot of components from technology and online, and you can reinforce and build and deliver content in a way that is much more efficient, much more powerful than just one mechanism. I believe that balanced learning is really the key, and that's reading and listening and having conversations in a classroom and online courses. All of that combined is, you know, that is your best solution. And different people learn in different ways.

Go ahead. I don't want to miss a critical point that you made, and it's a writer downer for everybody on the call. There is an enormous difference between a list and a tribe. Um, and, and I mean, I see it all the time, the In speaking, in National Speakers Association, the cocktail lounge conversation even amongst sober people was always the speakers round robin, can you top this, of how many engagements they were doing in a year. Somebody would start with some sane number like 40, and you would wind up with somebody claiming to do 882 engagements in a 365-day year. What has happened here with online media is, you mentioned likes, is what I call the fake metrics. Is the pursuit of and bragging about how many Facebook followers you have, how many viral retweets you have, how many likes you have, etc. And you are absolutely right. Not only doesn't that necessarily translate into real influence or into monetization. But in many ways it can get in the way. It can be a false, delusional security blanket that something is going on, you know, that really isn't. People can use all that media to tell their story, but how many people are interacting with you like the guy who was going to wait in line for 6 hours to tell you his story? So this media is really broadcast media. It's not interactive and relationship media. I mean, I see people in comparable and competitive environments and the guy with 3,000 people on a list, but they actually are also in a tribe, they are real followers. If it's somebody in our kind of business, they're real students. He will whip somebody with 500,000 on a list. That's all it is, is a list. And the real value dynamic I think is, you know, is unchanged. It is relationship and it is does that person feel, you know, that they're in a real relationship. And I think your other point is important too, is these are skills that have been allowed to atrophy with a lot of people. And if you're 40, 50, 60 and hiring, you are hiring people who have never been exposed to these skills. For a time were led to believe that they weren't, you know, that they were unimportant, that they were a historical footnote rather than a currently valuable and important thing. And so with them, you're starting kind of from scratch. A couple of years back, I said all my clients, there was a big article about the trouble Wall Street companies were having trying to get their newest employees to make a phone call. They just wouldn't do it. And I hear the problem from clients all the time today. They don't want to get on the phone. They want to text. They want to email the proposal, you know, etc. And this woman, it kind of goes all the way back. You'll remember Zig was in business for a while with a telephone training company. I think it had the name of a fruit in it. Strawberry Communications. There you go. See? Yeah. And you know, it was like how to answer the phone and how to make a phone call. And we had a program called Effective Telephone Techniques. Here they are all these years later. This woman had built up a firm in New York that was doing $20 million a year, and here's the business. I'll bet it still exists. This was 2 years ago. They were, I would call them phone babysitters. She called them on-site phone coaches. Who the company would hire to sit next to the young employee and make him make a phone call and sit there and coddle him along until he had made enough of them that he would do it. And so we've got a period of time where these relationship skills, real relationship skills, have kind of become— gee, they've become secrets. And, you know, businesses need them desperately. I guess the last question I have for you is about the the willingness to push to close, to be assertive, forceful. And that— so a lot of people only saw Zig in late years as the gentle paternal, you know, personal growth guy, may not even have be really cognizant of this. But when I was first learning to sell, I mean, I got the thin-skinned, deaf to a no, I've got their pots and pans out in my car and they've got my money in their kitchen drawer and I'm here to make these change, and I'm not leaving until I do. Um, you know, I, I got that, um, is what I got before anything else, um, from my study of Zig. The, the permission slip, if you will, um, to— I would use the word aggressive, your dad probably wouldn't, but to aggressively, you know, drag the guy across the line at the end. How do you balance that? What do you have to say about that against the whole issue of, negative attitudes about selling and salespeople and about people's qualms about it, how they, how they feel like that's inappropriate.

Okay, I'll give you a couple of thoughts and some experiences. First off, Dad said in the book Secrets of Closing the Sale, he said selling is a transference of feeling. It starts with an absolute conviction that your product or service or solution is something that's going to benefit the person you're talking to. And if you know it is, then you have this conviction and this— and they see it in you. They know that there is no doubt or holdback in what you are talking to them about. I remember one time we were doing an event, I think it was out in Phoenix, and Dad was selling his product package. And I'm sure, Dan, you heard him sell a few product packages along the way. Even though he was speaking on motivation, he would sell a package at the end. And at this particular event, it was our own event, and we were running the product table, and a couple of my team members came up and said, hey, we've got couple of people who want to talk to you. And we had 2 people come up and they said, you know, we paid money for this ticket and Zig's, he's selling from the stage. We don't think that's right. And I was younger at that point and I really hadn't dealt with that before. And I said, well, okay, what can I do to help? And I helped them and they just really wanted to pass it on. So at the end of the day, we're riding back to the hotel and I said, hey, Dad, you know, We got 2 complaints today. And dad just, he got a little sly grin and he shook his head side to side and he said, son, if we don't get at least 3 complaints, we haven't sold hard enough. And I just, I took that in and I'm like, really? You know, because the brainwashing is, you know, don't offend anybody. Don't sell too hard. Don't do that. But then he looks at me and he goes, And he says, "Son, the reason I say that is because there's nothing in any one of my programs that I know that if they will apply, that it will change their life." And so in the context we were in, I would rather have a couple of people thinking we went a little hard than to have a couple of people almost there and walk out without it because it will change their life. And so one of the kind of side hobbies I have is I study Hebrew. And there's two words in Hebrew for sale. One of them is just a transaction. It doesn't have much moral value at all, just describes, you know, the exchange. The other word for sale is a high moral word because in Hebrew the words have moral values to them. And this word is a very high moral value. And what it really means is this: it means that you look into the future of your prospect and you anticipate a pain or a problem that you're going to— that they're going to have, that they're going to experience. And what you're really doing is anticipating that pain that they're going to have in the future, and you're preventing that by selling to them. And so for those of us who are in the profession of sales— and I, you know, even though I'm a CEO, I'm a salesperson first. I wake up every morning and realize that I have a moral calling to help other people prevent pain in the future. That's pretty cool. And so where do you draw the line? It's when you look at your solution and say, is it 100% something I can stand behind with integrity? Does it solve that problem that I say it does? And when I can say yes to that, I build a relationship the right way. I sell with conviction. I let them know my feelings. I give them every reason. And then if they say no, that's okay. They're rejecting what I've offered them. They're not rejecting me. But I've given them every opportunity to get on board. So that's my take on it. I think I read something, you know, Dad was a big believer in training, obviously our own, and when I went to others and I went to the sales program. And they did this study on the top 5% of salespeople. And they boiled it down to this one thing. The top 5% in any industry do the same thing, and that is this. They make more presentations to qualified prospects.

That's it.

And then they defined what a presentation is, and then they defined what a qualified prospect is. And I never forgot that because a presentation has relationship in it, it has rapport, it has understanding the need, it has overcoming objections, it has the close, it has all those things in it. And a qualified prospect is, you know what, don't do presentations to people who aren't qualified because you can't maximize your potential that way. And so part of the process is we've got to know if we have that right qualified person in front of us.

So Tom, again, thank you very much.

You got it.

Thank you so much.

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