Humanizing Selling in an AI World

And thank you, Linda, for joining us. I'd like to say a few words about Linda before we start. Linda has shaped an entire generation of salespeople, teaching them how to sell, how to be more consultative, how to be more effective. And She shifted an entire industry, especially the banking industry, away from pitching products towards understanding customers. And her training includes educational psychology. And she's also worked with Dr. Albert Ellis, the Rational Emotive Therapy founder in New York City. And I think that's where we should start, Linda. How did you get that gig with Dr. Ellis?

Well, I tell you, I was very, very lucky. I went to a lecture and the next day I was in New York and I was actually looking for a job. And I was walking down the street of Madison Avenue and someone pulled up on a bicycle and said to me, hey, did I see you at the lecture last night for Dr. Ellis? And I said, yes. Started to chat, found out my background, and said, we're looking for somebody to be the director of our school, and we're looking for someone to co-lead sessions with Dr. Ellis. Do you want to come in and apply? And I was— that was a very, very blessed and lucky moment in my life.

So how did that change your view of the world? Because Rational emotive therapy is really based on a different way to think about appraising reality. And a lot of people appraise reality based on their belief system so that beliefs actually override their ability to appraise reality objectively.

Yes. You know, it's what I really learned. I learned so much from Dr. Ellis. I mean, it would take me so long to explain everything. I learned the value of questioning, of empathy. I watched him, I watched him help people. But what I really saw was choice. He let people see that they had choice, that they didn't have to respond the way they responded, that there was an option to really think about the situation and pull back and not be habitual in how they're constantly responding. To really free themselves and grow. So I think it was a combination of things that I learned from Dr. Ellis. Probably the most important thing was the importance of questioning and empathy, and that became the genesis of my consultative selling. When I walked into the world of sales, new for me, I brought that with me.

I remember interviewing Dr. Albert Ellis, and what sticks in my memory is exactly what you say about choice. He said, you know, there's a different way to think about that. And I said, what is it? And then he offered a whole menu of options that you can interpret a situation many different ways. Like when 2 people on a street corner see an accident, they don't see the same scene. They interpret it differently. And it's the same when you're in a jury, in a trial. Everybody sees the events and the evidence differently.

Mm-hmm.

So I think it, He was a brilliant mind and helped people lead a lot more productive lives. And you have helped salespeople become a lot more productive. And now you have written the crown jewel where you talk about humanizing selling in the age of AI. So my first question is really, What made you write this book now?

What inspired me to write the book was the amazing and revolutionary change that I saw in selling. I mean, we all know that AI changed how customers buy. AI shortened the sales cycle. AI educates customers before they ever speak to a salesperson. And, and what's left? You know, what's left? That was a big part of a salesperson's role. And I really wanted to find a way to help salespeople be successful in this brand new environment that they're selling in. How? To help them understand and use their emotional intelligence, their ability to manage their own emotions. And then to understand and care about and respond to how their customers feel and to use that as their competitive edge. I think that their humanity is the differentiation. It's not so much what AI can do, it's what AI can't do. It doesn't have emotional intelligence. It doesn't have a heart. It doesn't have judgment. And customers will always need and crave and want that. So my passion was to, if I could, I wanted to build emotional intelligence into the new sales model for the age of AI.

So in your book, and I've read it and I'm really impressed by the depth that you're offering. And you offer a new term. You talk about the silent voice instead of the term emotional intelligence. So what does silent voice capture that emotional intelligence wasn't good enough?

Well, emotional intelligence, I never, ever would dare to try to replace that term. But, you know, it's a conceptual term. It's big. How do you get your arms around it? How do you access it? And I thought to myself, is there a way? There is a way to make it concrete, to make it tangible, to make it visual so salespeople know they have it. It's always there. They can call on it and it's right there. All they have to do is allow it and develop it. And it is skills involved, and they can strengthen that. So I named it Silent Voice, Hug Your Heart, because precisely that's what it is. We all have it. It's our self-talk. It tells us what to say, what not to say, when to be quiet. And the issue is that some people, most of the time, we don't really leverage that silent voice. We let it sit. Quietly. We don't really listen to it, and we just communicate. We listen and respond out of habit. But we have a choice, and the silent voice tells us that choice. And silent voice interrupts that habit. A good, strong silent voice will interrupt that habit and say, wait, what's the best way to respond at this moment for this particular situation? And the Empathy Assertiveness Framework makes it really clear and simple for salespeople to kind of judge what their habitual way is and how much do they need to have balance so that they can really make the better choices and be more successful when they communicate with their customers and really be of value to their customers.

So if I hear this correctly, is we need to become aware of the silent voice of our self-talk. That's number one. And number two is that we need to observe and edit and improve that voice to be more appropriate and effective in any situation.

Exactly. Think of the silent voice almost as a little vehicle. It gets you to your emotional intelligence. It's a tactical, visual way to know that you really have it. You just have to really use it and develop it and treasure it and let it really help you.

So let's, let's talk about the empathy assertiveness framework because just after I read your book and I was thinking about that, you know, here's empathy, here's assertiveness. And I had this conversation with Michael Weening, who is the CEO of Calyx. And he's a very talented leader. He has worked for Canon, for Bell Canada, for Salesforce. He worked in Europe, worked in Asia. And he has been CEO now for 10 years. And I ask myself through that lens of empathy and assertiveness, how does a leader become effective? And in this conversation, I discovered that he tells his people, don't let me be wrong. So he shows respect for other people's voices and he listens to them. And he also says, if you want to be a successful leader, you want to help other people become successful. So you want to focus on the success of other people, not on your success. And, and I found that, that empathy assertiveness framework applies to everybody, whether it's a salesperson or a CEO. And, and I want you to sort of help me understand How can sales leaders learn that and become very effective, that they are not overly aggressive or they are not overly sympathetic and become pushovers?

The, the goal is to achieve balance, truly achieve balance. Um, maybe I can explain how I arrived at that and then how leaders can actually use it. I chose the emotion of empathy and the action of assertiveness as the overall framework. And then, I said to myself, what is the most, the broadest possible range of ways that salespeople or sales leaders or CEOs, as you just mentioned, what's the broadest way that they communicate. And that was pretty easy for me to figure it out because of my— I must have seen 1,000+ sales calls. Either I was on a sales call or I was observing a sales call or I was coaching one in a seminar. And it became really clear to me that there were 2 universal dimensions: empathy and assertiveness. And I think if sales leaders really think about Both of those, empathy. Many, many salespeople and CEOs have a tendency to be empathetic. So, they listen more. They question. They really care about what the customer is saying. They're more tuned in. And under that umbrella of empathy are wonderful characteristics. Tolerance, patience, flexibility, warmth, and so on and so on. And then some people have a bias for action. So they jump in, they have an answer, they have a thought, they have an experience, they have the solution, and they're not too in tune to where the other person is. And under that, umbrella of assertiveness are wonderful characteristics: drive, competitiveness, confidence, action orientation, fire in the belly, and so forth. I think a leader has to really think about— it's always been the most outstanding performers, the best performers have a balance of those. But in the age of AI, in this new age, Empathy has become even more important. It is the super skill now. And empathy and assertiveness are not opposites. When you're assertive in the right way, it's really empathy in action. So I think for sales leaders, especially at the level that are participating in the conference, to really think about their— this Their own choices. And we see that so many salespeople have a default pattern. They continuously just use that one pattern and they're out of balance. And in this new environment, empathy isn't a nice thing to have. It's survival. It is a way to differentiate. So I would think that sales leaders would Hopefully lead with empathy. And that doesn't mean they're not assertive. It means they're assertive in a way that they care and they want people, as exactly you said, to succeed. And they have to make some changes to do that. So, you know, and you know what's really inspiring is how many industry leaders, you know, such as what you've just mentioned, For instance, Satya Nadella at Microsoft.

Right.

He says and actually uses the word passion. It is his passion to instill empathy in everything he does. And he talks about his products and his markets and his customers and his team and his partners. And then Mr. Wang, He's wonderful. He's defining smartness as this intersection between technical astuteness and deep human empathy. So I think for sales leaders to lead now, you know, to really listen to their silent voice, to really develop a balance, the key is to have the balance and to know which to use when. And to know that many salespeople are assertive, that, you know, and they've been rewarded for it and they've, you know, been complimented about it. And now it's time to really make a balance because that will make them more effective.

Linda, you talk in the book about AI is a double edge. It's a double-edged sword. What is the edge that helps us and what's the edge that is going to hurt us? If we don't pay attention and achieve balance.

You know, AI is a tremendous tool. And I think it could be a wonderful tool for salespeople. It certainly gets work done faster. It accelerates productivity. It can make them smarter and make them bring more value to their customers. I think the bottom line is that it can make salespeople more productive and more successful. You know, they could take over routine tasks. It can organize things for them. It can, you know, make sure that they're getting all the information that they need if an organization really needs, you know, cross-functional. As far as what can hurt us, you know, there are concerns. You know, it is the most consequential technology that I think any of us, many of us could have ever dreamed about. You know, and there are concerns about quality. They talk about work slop and think slop, and there's concerns about job loss. But I think there's really a much, much deeper— you used the word hurt— something that can really hurt us. And I think what can really hurt us— there's so much research pointing to this, and there's large-scale research that has just come out which was really, really troublesome. And what it said was that AI atrophies the very qualities that it can't produce. And they talk about critical judgment, critical thinking. And the one that hit home for me really was use of emotional intelligence. So I think sales leaders really need to instill in their people that it's not AI first. You know, you can't outsource your thinking. You have to use AI to enrich your thinking, challenge your thinking, but not think for you. And, you know, I just— and fortunately, there are a lot of alarms being sounded about this. And I just read that Pope Leo put out a statement for the church about technology and that it threatens to undermine humanity. Without some moral oversight. And they're initiating, I think it's called an Exercising Empathy program in 7 universities internationally this fall.

Wow.

Teaching empathy. So, I think there are enough alarms going off that we need to really be careful and protect our humanity. We cannot afford to lose that. And that's, that's the, the hurting part.

Yeah. And in your book, you describe it very well as you use the term cognitive surrender. And it sort of describes for me the idea that if you use AI blindly without critical thinking and without using your sound judgment, You can end up making bad decisions.

Yes, that is some research from Wharton. And what they found out was when AI is wrong, the professionals did much worse than if they had never used AI. But the really troubling part was that they remained confident in AI. That experience didn't show them the risk. And I think the point they tried to make, and they make very clearly in this, in the research, is that you have to double-check AI. You have to really verify and check the sources and not just ask AI for the source, because sometimes that won't be right, won't be correct. And in my book, I use some quotes that are meaningful to me and I think would really help the reader. And I double-checked them. I went to the source, not just to that. And I went to like a CNN interview or I went to an article in Time. And 30% of my quotes had to be adjusted, some a little bit and some deleted.

Wow.

So, you know, we have to double-check. And again, that's where the sales leaders are so important to really make sure that they check and tell people, where have you verified this data? Have you really verified it before we present this to our client?

Now, you, as someone who is a leader in the training field, you, you've observed different flavors of training, and you have found that when it comes to emotional intelligence training, Salesforce has saw— have seen a 50% lift in conversion Well, IBM, a 20% boost in closing rate, and HubSpot, a 21% increase in closed sales. So what is driving those results?

You know, Gerhard, it's emotional intelligence. It is, you know, selling is an emotional business. And finally, we're really seeing that, and empathy so powerful. Empathy changes minds. Empathy builds trust. Empathy makes the person more memorable. Empathy makes— and, you know, Jill was talking about how important confidence is. It makes customers more confident in you, that you're more authentic to them. They believe you more. And, you know, I can give an example of that. I went to a lecture Very recently, and there were 2 men at the podium to introduce the guest speaker. And the first one reviewed the resume and it was stellar. You know, every university you can want to be impressed by, award after award and experience after experience. And then the second man said, before our guest comes up, I'd like to tell you a story. And he told us a story of this man. Of a 15-year-old boy who displayed such courage and such kindness and such maturity at 15 that, that really changed how I think the audience felt. I mean, you could feel the emotion in the room, and when he came up, we had a different perception of him, much more. And then the interesting thing is now it's been maybe 10 days, I don't remember one cognitive fact from the resume, but that story will stick with me, you know, for a long while. Emotions are powerful, and selling is an emotional business, and we need to develop that ability to empathize. And, you know, what was talked about earlier, I think was mentioned, it's hard to change a pattern, that default pattern. We're used, you know, we're used to it, and it takes diligence, and it takes being thoughtful about it and being intentional and practicing and really practicing it. And that again is in the hands of, of the leaders in your room.

Linda, your book also suggests that salespeople ask a lot more you questions instead of just business questions. So how does that change the conversation?

Well, that's part of the new sales model that I offer that can be put, can be added to salespeople's current models. The current models just fall short. They just do. And they need to be adjusted. And one of the things that you would change is in the model, something I call unlock. And that's finding needs. We all know the parts of the sale. We know needs. But instead of, customers generally explain their business problems in terms of their business needs. And once you really understand those needs, especially if they're complex or if a lot's at stake, or if you're sensing the customer is really hesitating something that seems very logical to move forward with, you go beyond just the business needs to understand the customer's emotional needs. And the you questions get at that. And, you know, they're not easy to ask. And salespeople and I talk about tone of voice and pacing and timing, but they need to be asked. And it's, you know, how are you feeling about that? How's that impacting you? Where else is that being felt in the organization? Asking those questions are critically important because for one, your solution now is going to be deeper and broader. You're addressing the emotional needs also. But most importantly, customers make their decisions based on their emotions, not logic.

Yeah.

And you need to understand that and address that. And, you know, neuroscience tells us that emotions are processed before the cortex can analyze anything. So it's, you know, feel first and rationalize later.

Exactly. So are there any gender differences when it comes to assertiveness and empathy in selling that leaders should be aware of?

Well, yes, you know, consistently women use more empathy. when they're communicating with their customers. And female leaders do the same consistently. Women score higher in emotional intelligence when they're tested. I mean, there's such data on that. Now, that doesn't mean every woman, and that doesn't mean that there aren't men that don't have that sensitivity and warmth. But in general, women display emotional intelligence And rank higher in emotional intelligence. But with that said, I think if the sales leader is working with his or her team, it's better to just treat people as individuals, just as individuals and not in terms of gender. And as individuals, listen to your silent voice and ask people, what do you need from me? How can I be helpful? How is it helpful for me to coach you? How do you want to be coached? And then really listen. And even Even if you disagree with it, listen to what they're telling you they need and believe them. Give it a shot. Believe them and work with them that way.

There's a story in your book about a salesperson who lost a deal based on a technicality the night before closing, and he won it back with a hug. Can you share that story?

Yes, my client actually told me this story. He said that he was meeting the night before a very big deal was to close. He was meeting with the president and the EVP of a multinational conglomerate, and the president told him because the tax laws changed, they were doing none of their deals, including the deal that my client was counting on. It was really this— the survival of a department. And he said what he did was he stood up and the 2 executives stood up and he went over and he hugged each one and he left. Not a word. The next morning when he was giving out what would have been the last bonuses to that team, he was called to the phone and he said the president was on the phone. He said, we did your deal. And hung up. And he looked at me and he said it was completely illogical. It must have been the hug. Yeah, so again, emotions win over logic.

As Zig Ziglar said famously, logic makes people think, emotions make people act.

True.

So when you use logic, you can create the best educated customer, they won't buy.

That's right.

Right. Final question. Buyers using AI as well. So buyers get a tremendous advantage. They get a head start on the salesperson. So there's less time to build trust. So what Do salespeople need to do to establish trust faster?

That's, that's really a great question. In the model that we've been using for the past 30 years, it's a valid model. But as I said, it falls short. Empathy was never a part of that model. And in the new sales model, I think empathy has to be, and assertiveness when appropriate, built into every single piece Of that sale. And I think when you think about the beginning of the sale, the launch of the sale, rather than just do cursory, what I call surface rapport. Now, in the book, I really help people understand how to do a different kind of launching of that meeting and really to use a different kind of preparation and keen listening to really find nuances, opportunities in that short period of time of the opening to really start building trust right there and then. And then throughout the— and then we build that into every single aspect of the sale. And in the book, I give before and after examples, many, many, many of them for each piece where the customer says the exact same thing to a customer, to a salesperson without a silent voice. And then to the salesperson with a silent voice, and the conversations are dramatically different, and the results are dramatically different. And then I analyze each. So I think it's a matter of empathy will help them build that trust in the shorter period of time that they have. And I and. connect with the customers. So, at the point of decision and because they have a shorter time, the customer is usually a little closer to that decision point, a lot closer. And how do they really at that point differentiate and have the trust necessary to win that business?

When is the book coming out?

Okay, the book will be out the beginning of December.

And when is it available on Amazon for preorder?

Well, a preorder, it'll be in a week. And on my website, they can do it now if anybody would be interested.

What's your website?

My website is lindarichardson.com.

Easy to remember.

Easy to remember.