4 MORE THINGS I LEARNED IN 2024 THAT WILL HELP YOU SELL MORE

As promised, I have a part 2 to the lessons learned that I have from 2024. And if you'd like more of these kind of monologue episodes, let me know. Or if you'd like less, let me know. But I got some pretty good feedback from the last one. So let's dig in. I think that the next huge one was what I learned about mindset. Now, I think we all Feel like we have probably a what, B, B+ mindset? Well, there's no limit to our mindset. Think about that. And let me share some examples that aren't from the world of sales. I made the focus of my running this year or Last year in 2024 about building up my speed. And I tried a lot of things. Uh, I did get a running coach and most of that has helped me. Uh, did some stuff with supplements that helped a little bit. Did some stuff with music. But the number one thing, which is kind of surprising, Is that it was really mindset. I learned to detach from what my body was telling me because I also run insanely early in the morning, in the dark, in the woods, on asphalt, but it's old railroad tracks that they paved over. So, it's dark, sometimes scary, lots of animals, foxes, deers, a lot of eyes blinking. Or reflecting off of my light that I don't know what type of animal they are. So, it's a little adventure. And guess what my body says pretty much for the first half of the run or 3 quarters of the run? It says, stop, slow down, take it easy. This hurts. That's what my physical body is saying to me. And Sometimes you hear it. Sometimes you always hear it, but do you listen to it? Now, I've worked with podcasts that kind of help me distract. But what really— I've shared this before— music gets me to distract from it. I tune into the music. I really kind of focus on that. I detach from the physical pain of doing it. Uh, My lungs burning, my legs hurting, everything just, you know, especially in the cold. It's not pleasant, at least at the beginning. When I hit my stride, nothing beats it. I mean, there's been a lot of articles written lately about what makes you feel younger. You start running fast, nothing makes you feel younger. And take it from somebody who needs to feel younger. But that's not enough. That's one thing. And is that really mindset? No. Here comes the good part. To get the speed up, I had to connect with an emotion, an emotion that motivates me, an emotion that is so powerful that the pain is silenced. So, what is that emotion? Well, for you, it might be something else. For me, what seems to work really well is either anger or identity. Let me give you this example. I go through my career and all the bad managers I had or people that told me I couldn't do something or I'm not that good. And I say, I'm going to prove you wrong. Kind of spite a little bit. It motivated me. It does motivate me. And the other one is identity. Who am I? What type of person am I? And I build these scenarios in my head of where I have to step up. I cannot let this get in my way. And I build that scenario up. I connect it with the music. And, you know, it's an hour-long run, but my speed— I'm down 30% on my mile pace, which is more progress than I've made in the last 3 years. I've made in probably the last 6 months, 4 months, 5 months. And it feels good. So what does that tell us? That tells us the body can do it. And that's kind of what I do the self-talk. I go, look, you've done this 1,000 times. This is not a problem. It always hurts at the beginning. You can do this. You've done it before. You got this. And then I start building the story in my head of why I have to do it. I remember certain deals, deals I lost, deals I was beaten in. I remember those awards banquets where I wasn't the number one salesperson and how much it bugged me. And I build that scenario in my head and I try and correct it. And, you know, believe me, I had a lot of examples to work with. But for me, that gets me riled up. It gets my hate on. And that, that I stole from Lance Armstrong. And you may look down on Lance Armstrong. He did cheat. He admits to cheating. Ah. But everyone was cheating. Everyone on his team, everyone on everyone's team. It's been pretty well documented. So is it really cheating when everyone's cheating? Yeah, it still is. And it's wrong. I'm not saying it's right. What I'm saying is that man has the mindset that I would like. Meaning, if you watch his documentaries, 30 on 30, there's one on Amazon Prime, there's a bunch on Netflix. Watch them, study them. Don't get locked into the EPO and the— The enhancements that he got to do it, because he was pretty good before that, and he came back from cancer, and he's riding his bike for a month in the hills of France. It's kind of, you know, it's a hero's journey and everything, regardless of what you think of it. His mindset, his ability to focus And compete. And when you hear him talk, it comes up and it's powerful. Now, why is this so important in sales? Sales is hard, especially if you want to be good at it. And how do you win? You gotta want it more than the other person. A lot of people talk about detaching. In sales and in prospecting, absolutely right. You should detach. You can't get yourself all worked up over every cold call, email, first conversation. You kind of need to be detached so that you don't pounce and ruin it and ruin yourself. But the rest of it, you have to care. You have to attach. You want to win because either you win or you wasted your time and you lost. How you handle both the loss and the motivation and focus to win is what separates people who will win. We all think it's skill, and isn't that part of skill? It's a big part of skill. Is that showing up and caring? Because you're not gonna think about what to do, what it will take to win unless you really care, unless you really are attached to it. Will you? I mean, I remember some deals where, you know, at night without going to bed, I headed to the airport to get the first Or the last flight out of the night to get back in front of the customer. Now, most people would just go to bed and go to sleep. Yeah, you can do that. I wanted to win. I wanted to win more. How bad do you want it? Now, this mindset stuff, it's not just what you think. It's really how you control yourself. That subconscious, that body that's telling you to stop, telling you this hurts. There's always another customer. Okay, sure, sure, you go ahead. How do you suppress that? How do you regulate that? And how do you regulate the attachment and detachment? It's not easy. It's not automatic at all. The automatic stuff is to quit. I can't tell you the number of times I wanted to quit the run. This year, once. I had what I— it was clearly something was a pull in my knee about a mile into it, and I thought it would just warm up, and I went another half a mile, and I go, this isn't getting better. I should quit. I should go back. That was the right thing to do. The 99 other times, it was would be the wrong thing to do. It's hard to tell sometimes. Your body lies to you. Your subconscious lies to you. It's just trying to keep you alive. That's all. No no biggie. So how do you? Get these emotions to work for you, because that's what a mindset is, is your ability to focus on what you want, gather together the feeling that you need to win. Look at every sport about it. Knowing how to do it is— you need it. You need that. Getting into the right state of mind to execute it well. Takes effort. And let me give you some examples of the best way to do it. It's not just telling yourself. I would definitely find some, some type of mindful practice, 1 minute a day, as a way of you being able to regulate your emotions. You consciously decide how you want to feel instead of reacting. To how you feel. It's not easy. It takes a lot of practice, whether it's meditation or breathing or, you know, exercise is good, but you still need a little bit more than that. Just before a call, just say, how do I get into the proper state of mind? Right. This— how do I become curious? What is the right level of confidence for this particular call? Am I overconfident or am I insecure? This emotional regulation is probably the most understated part of sales that nobody really talks about. People talk about burnout and the effects of it. But not the prevention of it. And in every performance profession, you hear people doing this, whether it's entertainment, athletics, whatever. People are getting that they need to align what they want with how they feel. And be able to regulate that, control it, focus it, turn it on, adjust it, turn it off. Now, the key is to find something that you will do and you enjoy doing because it will work if you do it consistently. 1 minute a day. You can get plenty of free examples on YouTube, iTunes, If you want to spend a little money, get things like Headspace or 10% Happier or Making Sense with Sam Harris. I got all 3. I like to switch them up a little bit, but I notice when I do it, I'm insanely more effective and it works. And you're learning about it, especially, you know, Sam Harris. Some people don't like his politics. I wish he didn't talk about politics because that's not why I listen to him. He is a brilliant man. He is Stanford trained. He's not a whack job. And he's been doing this for a long time. And what few people know or don't know about him is that he suffers from tinnitus, which is ear ringing. He's had it for quite a while, and he uses meditation to focus his brain to not hear it, to focus on something else. And if you've ever had that, even for a short period of time, it's pretty annoying. I've had it for A short period of time, and it is life-altering in the wrong direction. So he has been able to change himself and how he manages that. Now imagine if you could do that about sales, especially if you feel like you're not a curious person. Or what most salespeople, they're too animated, they're too hyped up, They're too caffeinated sometimes, and they need to pump the brakes a little, slow it down, connect with the client. Because if you're selling to people all over the country, there's different speeds, shall we say, that people like to speak and talk at. So If you're going to do something about learning how to sell, learn how to manage your own internal dialogue and your reaction to your feelings and how to turn them on, adjust them, and turn them off. It will make your life even out of sales so much better. Let me get on to the next one. The next one I did an episode about. I wrote about this, uh, probably 3 or 4 months ago. It's on decisions. Now, we need to understand how other people make decisions, biases. How do they really determine a decision? How they think somebody did something or didn't do something? Like buy something. And a fantastic case study that I found— it's not in sales, it's in law— is the Karen Reed trial in Massachusetts. This case, at first glance, seems open and shut. Uh, this couple was out for drinks one night. And they were invited to a house for an after-party. Karen Reed, the girlfriend, drops her boyfriend off at the house, waits for the okay for her to come in. She never sees it. She waits about 9 minutes. She needs to go to the bathroom, and he doesn't Come out. And she's not sure why. She drives back to his house, which is only 5 minutes away, continues to call him through the night, and later falls asleep, gets up, he's still not home, and goes looking for him. Well, she goes back to the house, and here he is on the lawn. Dead. Now, this case, as reported in the news, has a lot of evidence that she hit him with the car. That's the—that's what the prosecution is trying to sell to the jury. There's a couple problems, though. Logic: one, her car. Didn't have any damage that morning, not until later when the police took it. Her boyfriend is laying on the ground with no jacket on. He wasn't wearing a jacket and one shoe. And the weather that night, the temperature went down to 18 and had a high of 26. But yet he— his body temperature at the hospital was 80 degrees. And he looked like he got beat up. His eyes are black. His head, which was the cause of his death, looked like he either fell on something or got whacked on something, like a cut right at the neck and the bottom of the skull. Now, this intrigued me because I love Mysteries. And how do you convince a jury that she's innocent? Because she was brought up on charges of hit-and-run manslaughter. I think they even called it murder. And how the jurors made the decision scared the hell out of me. And it should about for all of us in sales. Because in sales, we think decisions are clear, economic, and logical. It could not be further from the truth. Buying decisions are typically emotional, personal wins, and justified with logic. Everybody knows that. It's been taught for years. But how do you deal with that, especially as the defense attorneys who were essentially the salespeople for the defense. Now, I look at it from a sales standpoint, and I watched, you know, some of the trial. I watched a lot of the summaries on YouTube. It's all over YouTube if you want to look at it. It's a lot, so maybe you don't want to look at it because— And it's a rat hole, meaning the The more you learn about it, certainly for me, the more I believe she's innocent. I'll explain why. My opinion. I'll justify my emotion with logic. Now, I know what it's like in 18-degree weather with lots of jackets, gloves, hats, scarves. Being well prepared for cold weather, it's still cold. And if you were laying on the ground for essentially 5 and a half hours, you would be an ice cube. Your body temperature would not be 80 degrees, it would be 25, maybe, maybe zero. You'd be an ice cube, especially you're not moving, you don't have jacket or gloves, and one shoe. So this made no sense to me. And if he was hit by a car, he would look like he got hit by a car. There would be an impact point, a little bit of road rash, and, you know, where he fell. He wouldn't have black eyes. Hmm. And then you got to ask yourself, Why would she do it? They're having a great time. They're filmed at the bar. Everyone's having a good time. It's not like there's a fight going on or anything. And then there's the forensic, uh, digital data where they show his Apple Watch or Apple phone data. They see him dropping off at 12:21. And taking 3 flights up. And then it stops at 12:26, I believe, monitoring the movement of the phone until I think it's like 30 minutes later, the phone moves, I think, 80 steps, which would be the exact distance from the house. To where they found him. And then she's not acting suspicious. She's the criminal in this. Everyone else is acting suspicious, deleting phone calls, talking to each other, deleting texts, getting rid of their phones. A lot of Suspicious behavior. And he's got these, what's clearly animal bites on his arm. It's not road rash. I've had road rash, a lot of it. I fall on the trail all the time when I'm not paying attention. You know, it's a scrape. It's a— there's missing skin and it's red. He didn't have any of that. If you've ever seen anybody, if you have a cat or a dog and you happen to play a little rough and the cat or dog bites you, you know what it looks like. It's a deep scratch. And these were gouges. And the people in the house happen to have a retired police dog. And the dog happens to be rehomed. Shortly after that. And the owners of the home where she dropped them off, they sell the house. And the people who own the house know everybody in town, meaning they know the police chief. There's a brother who's on the police force. They're best friends with the state police investigator. And one of the alternative suspects Is one of their kids. Now, I, I don't know what happened. I have a theory. Now, now look at it from a sales standpoint. How do you get this person off? Meaning, how do you prove or reasonable doubt? Now, from a sales standpoint, the defense attorneys were really skilled But I think Karen Reed, the client, was trying to throw too much stuff at the juror, trying to— too much data, and they overwhelmed the juror, the juries. And everybody on the jury started having biases because taillight was found at the scene. But not in the first investigation. They didn't find any then. They found it, what, 12 hours later after they got her car. And they invert the video from the police station where the car was stored and they show the investigative police, state police guy Right behind him, right at the taillight. So, I mean, there's clearly shenanigans going on here, but there's jurors sitting there for 3 months and they have all this data, but they, they cherry-pick, or they're basically picking the piece that they feel supports their feelings. Crazy stuff. Well, I don't know, should I call it crazy just because I don't agree with it? I think what the defense attorney should have done was focus exclusively on the timeline, because there's all kinds of digital data showing the exact timeline, and there's eyewitnesses that see her As soon as she arrives, they see her in her car alone. She's got the internal light on. She's looking at her phone, waiting for him to text her to say, it's cool, come on in. And she's alone. So if he's not in the car, he's got to be in the house. But I think that the attorneys, they just gave too much data. And I think we do this in sales. We give our clients way too much information sometimes because we think the more we give them, the more likely we are to win. But sometimes the more we give them, the more we confuse them. Or Gives other people things to focus on. If they focus solely on the timeline, 'cause it's basically 9 minutes from the time she arrives to the time she gets back, leaves and gets back to her house. And there's all kinds of evidence that's missing. My point here is, think through how your clients are making decisions. What biases do they have? Do they bias against an incumbent, bias against or for the brand leader? A lot of people have bias of how their website looks. You know, I've seen that all the time. Well, they think the prettiest website must have the best product, or they like the name of the product, or they get a referral, so they assume it's the best product. It's our job to break those frames, get them to focus on what we want them to focus on, not everything. And this is kind of the features and benefits dump that a lot of people do. And because what we're trying to do is find something that sticks instead of asking them about symptoms, And problems. Because if you don't get to the symptoms or the problem, it's just a nice-to-have. So I would really work and be conscious about how your clients are going to make decisions and look for these biases because they exist. You can ask questions like, what do you see as your alternatives? You could do nothing. You could go with us. You could do something internally. What are you thinking? Which one do you feel is most advantageous for you? Because managers think it makes economic sense. ROIs are proven out. Why aren't they doing it? There's something else there. Find that out and change it. The next one I have, this is neither new, but I'll expand on it because it really is blocking a lot of people from becoming great at sales. It's the knowledge trap, meaning that people feel If like they know something, that they're good at it. And this is why people don't really get sales, because knowledge is the first step. You have to have the knowledge. Think of any performance. Let's take golf, just some arbitrary sport. You can read a book about golf and learn the rules, the objective, a little bit of strategy. Which club to use, how hard to swing, mistakes most people— you get the knowledge pretty quickly, but it takes the rest of your life to become mediocre at it. This is really what sales is. Now, in sports or any other performance, the knowledge part, people would laugh at you. Well, yeah, sure, you need the knowledge, but you need the reps. You need the What you get from doing it thousands of times, the distinctions, the nuance, the context of it. In sales, we kind of forget that, or we do— we think that that's kind of gravy instead of core. It's core because the knowledge is the easy part. And this is from somebody who teaches knowledge. I teach people about the complex sale. I teach people about how to start conversations with strangers and get meetings. The knowledge is not that hard. It's the execution. It's the doing it. And then, because when you start doing it, what interferes? Back to mindset. It comes— if it doesn't work, you think it doesn't work. No, it might be the wrong person, might be the wrong time, it might be the wrong approach, might be some little nuance that you didn't think of, or some word triggered them in the wrong way. Who knows sometimes? But you have to find out or find somebody else. And in the knowledge trap, It really is standing in the way between you and becoming great. Because certainly the know-it-alls— this is the quintessential knowledge trap. They think because they know it or they can put a platitude to it that they are good at it. Knowing the platitude is fooling yourself into knowing it. 2 ears and one mouth. We all know that. Oh, it's all about relationships. Name a million of the sales platitudes. That's okay. You know it. But can you do it before you need to do it? One of the most important things you could do is write down your process so that you're not going from your feelings. You're going from your logic. And that way you can analyze it and augment it, elaborate on it, expand it. But we all think we can do that in our head. We can't. We think we can. We can't. That's the knowledge trap. Now, are you in it? Hmm. Or are you stuck in it? Don't go into it. The knowledge is just the first step. It's the doing and how well you do it, how well you do it with that specific person, what is what matters. And the knowledge trap usually kills curiosity because you think you're already good at it, or you think you know what the client Is going through instead of being curious about what they're going through. And also, people think if it does— if they don't win the deal, that they stink. You have to separate the performer from the performance. When you can do that, you can take your performance and analyze it. Instead of just saying, I'm good, I'm bad, I'm a B player, I'm an A player. Okay, does that help though? Probably not. Either makes you feel too good or too bad. Look at the knowledge trap. Don't go into it. If you're in it, get yourself out of it as soon as you can. It's a crutch. It's not a capability. And my last one, what's the future of sales? A lot of people ask me this, and a lot of people focus on the technology of sales, but the technology is basically just doing something faster or more often. And if you're doing something really well, technology helps. If you're doing something really bad, It may hurt. I think the future of sales is what it's always been. It's always about know, like, and trust. That's why we have salespeople. If they could sell the product through the website without salespeople, the company would. The company hires salespeople to connect and engage with the marketplace. We've lost that. We've switched to it being just an activity. It's not. It's a performance. It's how well you do it, not just how many times you do it. It's not simple labor. It's a profession. It's a performing art. If you will. It's hard to describe. It's hard to measure. It's hard to learn. It's hard to identify. And that's why we have things like talk-to-listen ratio. Everybody wants to turn sales into accounting. It's not, and it never will be. Unless you get a lot of inbound. If you happen to be a company that can't keep up with demand, go nuts with your CRM. And what I'm seeing today, certainly after the pandemic, is people are buying into the face-to-face selling again, actually going to the physical place. Now, this is the most expensive and inconvenient way to sell. But it's also the most effective. Meaning, if you've ever been face-to-face in the same room with a prospect, it's a whole lot different than doing it on Zoom. A world different than doing it on the phone. Infinitely different than doing it on email. I mean, email is much more like marketing than it is sales. Sorry. And I think a lot of people today think selling is email. You're wrong. Email is one channel. Phone's another. Social— there's word of mouth. There's all kinds of channels out there, but everybody focuses on the number of spam you can send in a day. If it works for you, continue it. If it's not working for you, Find another approach. Maybe start the conversation and get the meeting. Well, that sums up some of the things I learned in 2024 that can help you sell more in 2025. So how do you get those reps? What, what I've been doing with brevitypitch.com is sitting down with their clients. The sales leaders and tell me what happens at the end of the quarter. What happens to the deals? Why do deals not close? What do you believe that reason is? Some people tell me it's, uh, they're not talking to decision makers. Some people tell me, uh, they're not talking to us at all. They're ghosting us. Uh, sometimes they just buy as little as possible. Now, how do you prevent this? There's certainly moments in the sales process where people can prevent this. Some of the most important ones are problem-solution-oriented selling, where you're talking about what they're going through, symptoms of their problem, and understanding who cares about it. Why do they care about it? And exploring that instead of talking solely about the product that moves you right into the commodity trap. And then you lose on price because you're the premium product, but you walked right into the trap and you're surprised why they picked the lowest cost product because it's a commodity. Now, if you're a sales leader and you want your team to become great at this, Separate the performance from the performer. Give them the reps before they need them, the skills, because they got the knowledge. They know how. But sometimes they don't do it because— most of the time they don't do it because it doesn't feel authentic. They don't have the unconscious competence Of it, or they just are in the moment and they buy into the prospect's frame, their view of the world, and they just answer the questions. And I talked about the stages sales reps go through. We got to get them to at least the competitive stage, at least nudge them towards working with a champion, and then be able to work without a champion. Because what happens when you have the champion? You tend to get single-threaded. Even though you know other people, you stick with one person, and that, that person's doing most of the selling internally. How do you get the reps from that knowledge? Because I'm sure you spent money training them to be able to execute that. These Micro skills that are critical. They're advanced skills. They're doing the things that you've taught them or the trainer taught them that they need to do, but sometimes they don't do. You're not going to find these on the call recordings, and even if you do, it's too late. They've done it. Horse is out of the barn. You can tell them to do it differently next time, but telling them and having them have the confidence to do it, have the instinct to do it, is very different. It's the future of sales. I'm working with them deeply on these micro skills so that they can learn it and execute it in 5 minutes a day. That's it. That's all they— all you have to do. 5 minutes a day and they become competent at doing it, not knowing it. brevitypitch.com. Thanks for listening. Uh, tell me what you think of this episode. Share my content if you see it fly by. I'd be your friend for life if you do. We'll see you next time.