Why People Fail At "Selling" | Biz To Biz Podcast

You are now watching the Biz to Biz Podcast with Allen and Justin. Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Dusty Rhodes of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's podcast, we'll be talking about how people— why people fail at sales. So, you know, it's a good question. Um, came up— shout out to Sean for coming up with some good ideas for the pod. So what's up, bro?

Yeah, it was a busy day yesterday, my birthday.

Yes, happy birthday.

Crazy shirt, the man, the legend, from my son, and the Miami Heat hat.

Nice.

I figure I'll wear it on the pod.

So happy birthday again, sir.

Thank you. And we had that eclipse and the world didn't end. So the, uh, conspiracy theory was off. There was no earthquake.

I didn't hear any of that.

No, they said there was going to be an earthquake.

I didn't hear that.

Oh well, nothing happened. Power didn't go out, you know, all the things they were telling people to buy food for 3 days.

Oh, that way. Yeah, yeah.

So none of that happened. We had an eclipse and That was it. People were glued either outside or glued to the TV watching the eclipse all over the world.

Not at Nationwide Payment Systems, we weren't.

No, I wasn't, but I put it on for a couple minutes to see the complete blackout that lasted like 2 or 3 minutes.

Yeah, I don't know, I didn't see it.

Yeah, I'm sure it's on YouTube.

Not really interested. Okay.

How's everything going with you?

Fantastic.

Okay. So you're ready to dig in?

Yes, sir.

Okay. You want me to go first?

Yes, sir.

Okay. So with sales, I think, you know, you have to, you know, you get paid to hear no. So that's what I always tell people. You get paid to hear no. And you can hear a lot of nos before you get a yes. So you have to kind of condition yourself that you're prepared to hear a lot of nos from people, you know, no matter what you're— no matter what you're selling. And I think that, you know, that's one thing. Another thing is, is You know, like being in this business for a long time, 23 years, and having lots of salespeople come through here, you know, they'll tell me like, oh, I called on 10 people. Everybody said no, I can't sell this. It's too hard. You know, you can't do that. You might have to call on 100 when you first get started and making any kind of sales. You might have to call on 100 or 200 people. You know, before you develop a possible list of possible people who might buy, and then, you know, start paring that down, you know, like, oh, this was a good person, you know, this one's not so— this one's not that good, and building up a pipeline of, uh, you know, leads. So, you know, you have to break it down into sales.

Like, it's funny you said that because like when you Google why people fail at leads, the number one thing that pops up is an empty pipeline or lack of qualified leads, right? So I think that's a major— I mean, specifically, yeah, it's just that's, that's— it's hard to sell something when you're trying to sell it to everyone and everything.

Yeah, well, you got to figure out, like, you know, so you have to have, like, if you're doing in-person sales, then you got to figure out what are your actions of how to build a pipeline. So in in-person sales, you know, you got to do prospecting. So prospecting is different than making a sales call on somebody. Prospecting is you just walk, go out, go down the street. Hi, my name is Allen. I'm from Nationwide Payment Systems. Nice to meet you. You know, Do you have a few minutes to tell me about your business? And while you're in there, you know, in my business, I'm looking around to see, oh, is the guy have a point of sale system, or is there a credit card machine? And, you know, one of the questions Dave, my business partner, would ask people back in the day was, oh, if you had a magic wand and you waved it over your machine, what would it do that it's not doing now? That's a good question to ask business owners, you know, what's your pain points?

But is that still relevant today?

Yeah, because they might say, well, I have a credit card machine, but I want a point-of-sale system. I just don't know what to buy, or it's too expensive and I need something in my budget. And that's, you know, that's another thing where salespeople fail is they don't ask enough questions, you know, about the business to learn about their sales process that they have currently, and then they try to shove a product in there, you know, versus, you know, listening to the customer. How are you doing your sales today? What's working? What's not working? What problems are you experiencing?

Right.

You know, and, you know, so if you take a look at like fast food restaurants today, or QSR as they like to call it, quick service restaurant, right? So you look at the labor shortage, and then in California now there's $20 minimum wage they slapped on all the fast food places out there, right? So what did they all do? They all ran out, they got kiosks. Now when you walk, they were already having a employee problems. So they were already moving in that direction, but now everybody's moving in that direction. I mean, you see, you see it around here. You walk in some of the places and they have 2, 3 kiosks sitting there and there's not even a cashier anymore. So, you know, you have to kind of figure out like, oh, what, what is your pain point? Like, I was doing a demo for a guy for a restaurant and he's like, "Well, I don't want tablets." And I said, "Well, why don't you want tablets?" He's like, "Oh, well, it's too difficult." And I said, "Well, you know, what, when you're, if you're," he goes, "I don't have enough staff." So I said, "That's the reason why you should have tablets, right?" As I said, let's say the waitress comes over to the table and she's holding the tablet and the customer says, "Oh," you say to the customer, "Oh, you ready to pay?" Customer says yes. Okay, great. Take out the tablet, pull up the tab, hand it to the customer. The customer sees the total, their whole bill. They hit the button to pay, put in the tip, stick their card in, or do a tap and pay, right? And they're out of there. If you're not using a tablet, now the waitress has to walk over to the point of sale, print out a ticket, walk back to the customer, Customer writes down the tip, gets the credit card, walks back to the point of sale, puts in the credit card, runs it, brings it back to the person, right? Because maybe they didn't put the tip in. Then they have to write the tip down, give it back to them, then pick that up, go back over to the point of sale and put the tip in. They're making 4 or 5 different trips to the table when they could just been bam. Or it could have been they just walk back over and grab a tablet and come back and they pay the bill.

Right.

So you can cut that, you know, with the right technology, you can cut down the amount of work that your, you know, your employees are doing and be more efficient. So it's about asking questions like, oh, what is your sales process? You know, what is there lacking in it? Or, you know, and, and different things like that. But, you know, even like online, you got to still pro— if you're doing sales online, you still got to prospect because you're, you know, going in Facebook groups or commenting on LinkedIn or, you know, getting forms in off of a website. And then you still got to work those leads. You might have to call somebody, they say, 6 to 8 times to make a sale.

That's for everything.

Yeah, for any kind of business. Doesn't matter what it is. So, you know, 6 to 8 times.

6 touches at least, right?

So, you know, you have to be— also, one of the qualities you need to have is to be persistent.

Yeah, for sure, right?

So learn to hear no is not a bad thing. I had a guy ask me once, he's like, oh, when I was out on the road selling, he said, oh, when are you going to stop coming in here and trying to sell me? And I said, when you tell me no to stop coming. So I said, oh, you're going to open up in 2 days. You got to sign up for credit card processing with somebody. What are you waiting for? So whatever. He finally signed up with me, but he wasn't in a rush.

Right.

And, you know, so you have to, you know, so, you know, somebody— when somebody says no, no, no doesn't always mean no. You could go back 6 months later. The answer might be yes, but you have to be persistent. Being able to hear no, being persistent, following up. These are all things that have to, you know, you absolutely have to do. And if you put, if you're out prospecting or you're building up lead lists and things like that, you just gotta keep pounding those, pounding those things down, you know, with emails, phone calls, whatever that, whatever, you know, that might be. And then keeping in touch and then, you know. Right.

Yeah. I mean, you're— it's the life of a salesperson, I guess. I don't know. I mean, with digital marketing sales or, you know, building websites, a lot of the times it's word of mouth. Um, from building websites for a person. Hey, who built your website? Oh, Justin did it. Who's doing the SEO? Justin's doing that. Well, SEO is a little bit different. People find me because SEO, I'm good at it. So, you know, people are looking for SEO near me, right? You know, but sales, uh, yeah, I, I mean You know, like people fail at sales because one, they don't know how to talk to people. I think, you know, like, you know, I was talking to somebody outside the other day and about my daughter getting a job for selling insurance. And the guy's like, you should come and work here because the way you just stopped all of us, you know what I mean? And the way you're talking. You could do this job, no problem. And I was like, I'm sure I could. I don't want to. I don't, you know, I'm not a very friendly person. I don't really give a shit. You know what I'm saying? I just don't. Like me having my own business for over a decade, you know, it's, I work with who I want to work with. So that's, that's a, that's my own fault, right? Like, it's one of those things where I'm not going to be as successful as someone, you know, doing the same thing as me because, you know, they're working with anyone and I'm not interested in supporting someone who's doing some bullshit that, you know, or selling something that I don't agree with or It doesn't align with my moral compass. Like I always say on the podcast, all money ain't good money. But, you know, I think that's the main reason why people fail at sales, because they don't know how to talk to people. They just don't listen. They don't listen to, like you said, their pain points, or they're too— they're not educated enough to understand a pain point. And then they just talk like me and Allen Kopelman argue all the time because I've always said price. Pricing isn't an offer. It's— there's no, you know, what's the value that someone's going to get from signing up with Nationwide Payment Systems? Just saying they'll save a buck, that doesn't mean shit to 90% of the people in the world. I'm— you know what I mean? Like, it's not enough for someone to make a, a, a huge decision on changing their— the way they operate their business. You know, a lot of people are stuck on Well, this is how I've been doing it. You know, I'm paying this amount. I'm used to paying this amount. What is the real value? You know, like, that's the— and that's just educating yourself on the product or, or, you know, service that you're offering to— you're trying to sell. Yeah, I thought it was interesting that 55% of salespeople fail to meet sales objectives. That's kind of the people who do sit like— that's why my daughter was so freaking miserable all the time, bro. I'm, you know, I, I'm glad she got that job around the corner, but it's like kind of also like, I hope she finds something else to do with her life because it's like, it's just sad, you know what I mean, to watch people like struggle so much to try to figure out how to make some money anyway. But yeah, that's what I, you know, that's what I had about, you know, the top 5 was empty pipeline, lack of qualified leads, not having listening skills, talking more on price than value. And then the, you know, the percentage of 55% of people fail at sales.

I think today, like, business owners need to take a serious look at, like, technology. And how technology can help their business and not look so much at the price tag of that technology because maybe that they look at that a lot and they go, well, this is gonna— like, we had a big customer that we were working on for about 6 months with, uh, one of the sales reps. And, you know, the— that just drive—

that right there would drive me nuts. I would literally like That's why I, it's not that I give up, I just move on.

Well, you have to know like when to say next. Like the people weren't saying no to the whole thing. They just couldn't wrap their brain around how much money they needed to spend because they had a point of sale system that was basically aged out. So there was no more support for it. It's not PCI compliant anymore. The software is no longer supported and they just wait until the whole thing is falling apart and then they're like, okay, now it's time to make a decision because we got two broken stations. We can't get it fixed. There's no more software support. Now we'll spend the money. Well, why didn't you spend the money like 6 months ago? We had a restaurant.

But if it ain't broke, why fix it?

Yeah, but at some point you already know it's—

I mean, at some point.

What I'm saying, you already know it was end of life. We had somebody else in a— restaurant club, and their system was at end of life. And the manager— we showed them the software, and the manager, one manager didn't like it because he thought he should get— he, he didn't want to pay, thought the price was too high. Another man, the other manager liked it, and then the main decision maker person liked it. And then their system was really old. The software wasn't supported anymore again. And then stuff started breaking and they didn't— you know, you can't get any more replacement parts because it's not available. Right, right. Unless you're going to go search on eBay or something and find stuff and then you're just throwing a Band-Aid on it. And then they finally decided like, okay, we want to do this. How fast can we get it done? And we were able to complete the project in about 17 days. Which was, you know, super fast considering it's usually a 30-day process. But I think that, you know, if you're asking the right questions and the business owner really starts to look at things like, oh, should the waiter, the waitstaff be making 5, 6 trips to the table every time somebody pays? Or they could just be making 1 or 2 with a tablet. And then how much faster can you, if you're doing that, How much more efficient can that person be? Because now they can spend that time that they were doing walking back and forth, waiting on a customer versus just doing action. And I think businesses need to look at that because it's just super, super important. Just like kiosks, right? I mean, if you have a quick service restaurant, or let's say you do takeout, Right. You know, do you have to— you know, I was at a restaurant the other day and people were going there and they were trying to get takeout and all the employees are busy. Then they got to call over one of the waitstaff or a manager. They could add a kiosk. The person could have went up to the kiosk, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, put everything in. And there used to be like $5,000 or $10,000. Now you can get a kiosk for like— if you were using our point of sale, it's just another terminal. So it's very, very affordable, right? But still, they're not very expensive now. And it takes the payment and everything. The order goes in, goes to the kitchen, boom, boom, and you're done. So, you know, businesses need to start thinking about this automation because as the bigger companies like the McDonald's and Wendy's and put it out there and where you see kiosks and other types of businesses like Target, I saw a kiosk at Target the other day for something. I don't know what it was for. If you could order something off of the kiosk, right? When you— the more and more you see this stuff, or ordering off your phone, right, then people are gonna— people are gonna get used to that and expect that even in a small to medium-sized company, right?

So kiosks are popping up everywhere. I mean, that's It's a given. Um, people better start learning to do something. Yeah, that's all I know.

All right, learn, learn some new skills. I mean, it was funny, I got a— I was reading—

I'll be a carpenter. That's what I wish I would have did. I really do. There's some— not that I regret doing what I'm doing, but, you know, I wish I would have learned to I would have took my, you know, my uncle, um, he's a carpenter, like a real carpenter, and like he can make anything. And I'm at the age where I wouldn't mind making myself like a kitchen table or a new bookshelf. I can make a bookshelf, that's simple. Um, what's, uh, something that's a little bit more kind of—

chair. Okay, chair, that would be complicated.

No, they're not easy to make, right? Um, you know, that type of stuff. I kind of wish I would have listened to him and went on a few more road trips with him. Shout out to Uncle Randy, he's doing well. Yeah, he sent me a picture. I'm thinking of him because he's, he, uh, he's struggling with, uh, MS, and he, uh Just, uh, he sent me a picture this morning. He went and caught some fish, so he's doing okay.

All right, well, prayers for him.

He's doing great.

I had sent a video to Sean the other day, was the guy Dirty Jobs, Mike Rowe.

Yeah.

And he was saying that, you know, in the current environment, let's say, you know, people are getting older, right? So every 5 guys in the trades that retire Only 2 people are replacing those 5 people. And that's been happening for the last 5, 10 years.

I definitely believe it.

And there is a serious, serious shortage.

All the kids want to be a basketball player, a football player, a rapper, or a barber.

Or a barber. What am I, rap? They want to be rappers. Music. Yeah.

I mean, but that's— music is kind of easier now to get paid from. Like when I was doing music, when I was a teenager, we didn't have the social media. You know, and right now it's like direct to consumer. So if you got something that's catchy and maybe some merch to go behind it, it's actually not a bad idea.

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you got— if you're popular in high school and there's 5,000, whatever, I don't know how many kids are in high school now. Not— there's not like it used to be, you know, there's 1,000 kids in your school. Well, let's say 2,000 and you got a fan base of 500 of those people and they're, you know, most likely most of them have enough money to buy a t-shirt, you know, that can, it goes a long way. You know, I've been, I've been trying to, you know, I'm just an entrepreneur at heart. So like I was scrolling on Instagram yesterday morning and I seen this guy talking about how simple it is for someone to put together a product line. I don't want to say which one because I sent it to my daughter and I think she's going to actually go through with it. But it just makes sense, you know, to sell if you're— if you have that, you know, I guess for me it's like the gift of gab, right? I came from— I come from the land of pimps. So like my mama sold suits to pimps. So like I grew up around pimps. Like literally, this has been on my mind a lot lately. So if you got the gift of gab and you're able to talk to people without feeling like embarrassed or, and you know, that's where sales comes in to what I'm talking about. Like, you know, you can be really successful. Like you really could. Like I'm sure if I really wanted to and I, you know, I found something that I, you know, like, was, oh my God, you know what I mean? Was passionate behind, right? I'd probably really be good at selling something, you know what I mean? But, uh, my point is, like, you know, if you're, if you're in high school or something like that and you see something that's popular and, you know, you're, you're, you have— you're popular as well, right? Take advantage of that for sure, because I'm— I mean, you could be putting yourself through college off selling, you know, something as simple as a hat or t-shirt or whatever, you know. There's a lot of products that are popping, you know. People like nowadays, cell phone cases for instance, you know, customized. I don't know, you know what I mean?

Yeah, there's people selling stuff everywhere on Etsy, on Shopify. You can You can make t-shirt designs and have it, you know, fulfilled by a third party, and you don't have to carry inventory.

And you don't need a physical location for any of this stuff. You could do pop-ups at, you know, like, uh, those little— what are they called— markets. Um, what are they called?

Pop-up— this is like at a farmer's market or a craft fair or an art fair, right? And even, and even like, I drove past a couple of shopping centers recently, and they were looking for pop-up vendors for the shopping center. Like, they were going to take one open space that they had and let people put small pop-up shops in there.

Yes, that's, uh, on the weekend, big thing right now.

Yeah, because a lot of, a lot of shopping centers have empty spaces, so rather than leave the space empty, they'll let 2, 3, 4 people go in there and put in a pop-up shop, and then There's this organization in Fort Lauderdale called Zero Empty Spaces.

It's aimed for artists, but, um, they do the same thing. Like, they find vacant stalls or whatever, you know, storefronts, right? And, uh, they ask artists to come in there and, you know, sell their art.

It would probably be pretty good business to do pop-up stores, be a vendor and say, oh, you want to have a pop-up store? And then go out to the landlords and get the space and then charge people for the— charge people for the space.

I mean, this is one guy I know, he's got his own clothing brand. He literally rents U-Haul trucks and drives to like vintage street markets, you know, that type of vibe. Sells it right out of his U-Haul truck. It's, he bought the U-Haul truck, right? But yeah, man, shout out to that guy. I can't remember the name of his clothing brand.

No, but sales, that's what you got to do. You need to be successful. You know, you gotta be a hustler. Like Justin said, you gotta, you gotta, you know, you gotta learn to listen, say, learn to listen. It's okay to hear no. You got to prospect, you got to make sales calls, you got to do follow-ups.

You know what you're selling, man. Like, I cannot— like, I let people go through the motions sometimes, like if they're trying to sell us some sort of platform or marketing whatever, and I literally— a lot, 90% of the time, I'm like, dude, you suck. I don't tell them that, you know. If they're good, I let them know that they're good. You know, I'm like, yo, you know, if I wanted this really, I would purchase it. Like, you sold me, like you did, you know what I mean? Like the guy from ZoomInfo, right? He did a great job. Like, he was killing it for real. Like, he knew the product top to bottom, you know what I mean? He knew how it could help us. All kinds of things. It's just too expensive. Yeah, you know what I mean? And that's what I told him flat out. I'm like, bro, I would— if it was, you know, like up to me and we had the budget and all that other stuff, I'd buy it like that. But you know what I mean, we don't have the budget for it. It is what it is. I wish you nothing but the best.

Yeah, that's one thing I don't like is when this product— even people come to me now with products and they want us to have it all all the money up front, like, oh, it's $3,000 for the year, or $10,000 for the year. I'm like, the credit card—

that's not the sales guy's fault.

No, no, I know that's not the sales guy's fault. I'm just saying, like, that, that type of thing for products are— that's super, super hard to sell.

Anyway, man, if you got any tips for salespeople, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you. If you're like the top number 1% of sales in your company, get at us. Let's chop it up, man. That's today's podcast. Follow us on B2B Vault on YouTube. Smash that subscribe button for us.

Peace. Peace out. Carpe diem.