DO YOU KNOW THE #1 THING THAT WILL GET THEM TO BUY NOW?

Hey, before we get into the interview, I want to make sure you're aware of our other podcasts, the Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers show, which is a very quick, under 5 minutes in most cases, sometimes just a few minutes where I answer your questions. You can just send me any question to my LinkedIn profile, Brian G. Burns, and I'll put it in the queue to answer. Also, the Sales Leadership Show. If you're looking to get into sales leadership or you want to hear from the world's best sales leaders, that's where I interview them. Check it out, the Sales Leadership Show. Also at b2brevenue.com, you can learn all about all the courses. Links are in the show notes below, as well as our link to our partners over at brevitypitch.com, the fastest, easiest way to become great at sales and practice. Before it's showtime. Here we go. Does sales always have to be complex?

I think sometimes we can make it a little bit too complex. Obviously, there's a lot of situations where you have long deal cycles, multiple people involved. It can take months or years. for things to close. And that is complex in nature, but it's how do you make it simple and easy for yourself, first off, but also for your customers is something that I think we can overcomplicate sometimes because you can get sucked into all that complexity and then your customer gets confused or maybe you get confused because you're not keeping it simple.

Because I see a lot of people reacting to what somebody says. Instead of guiding them. And I think if you let the customer lead the deal, it's gonna not close. Because what, what does most people do when you go to the mall or go looking for a car? What do you do? You think about it, right?

Mm-hmm.

But you want it. And you end up going home and maybe buying it on Amazon or go to another dealership and buy there. And I think part of our job is to kind of lead people through the process, guide them instead of react to them.

I agree. I mean, back when I was doing a variety of things with medical device or dealing with Home Depot, I would try to see myself as a project manager. And I know we talked about that before and that I was guiding them through the implementation or guiding them through the process, and that helped keep it consistent. Having the weekly meetings, whatever it was, became an extension of them, and it was guiding them through that. But I had to do a little bit of extra effort that was not probably normal for a lot of people. I had to be proactive and set those up and do all the work beforehand, but it's way better to do it that way than to react to it. And then who knows what's going to happen with the decision, and maybe Nothing ever happened. So I found putting in that extra effort, doing the guide thing that you're referring to, project manager, whatever you want to call it, that helped me get things to the finish line more often than not. And you become a bigger part of their team and you get to know them at a different level when you start doing stuff like that. It's not easy to get to that point, but if you can go towards that, I think it can be very, very effective.

Yeah. So you need a system. You need to know where you're going. And I think too many people just use the company's system, which is discovery call, presentation, demo, propose, negotiate, close. That, that never works though. So you got to find out, well, what's missing and why does it not go through? And what ends up happening is people want to look at other things.

Why?

Well, they think they should. Instead of you kind of taking up their time and, and nudging them in a particular direction and preventing the things that typically go wrong. So if you don't have a system, a process, then you're naturally going to go with your instincts, which are usually the worst thing you can follow. This is about what you want, not what they want. And you end up giving a proposal to somebody who has no economic authority, and then they don't call you. And you go, boy, that's simple. Simply lost.

A lot of painful memories coming up there when you said that, and I'm sure a lot of people too that may be listening. But yeah, it's— I mean, it feels good to send that proposal. It feels good to do all the stuff you're talking about, but it it feels like you're being effective, but you're really not getting anything done. And I mean, usually going back to the complicated part is I think people, we think that we have to tell them every single thing about the product or the service, all these features and benefits. And that is overwhelming in itself. And the reality is nobody typically cares about any of that. Maybe some of the technical folks care about some of that stuff, but you have to be in the right time, right place. But we, we tend to do that feature and benefit dump because it's, it's just something we know or we're taught to talk about that.

Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, it's easy. We have it on our one pager right there and we just blurt it all out, but that confuses people and it just puts you more of a commodity because you're just like everybody else is pitching about their products and their features and their benefits when the reality is it's, it's usually something unrelated to the features and benefits that is probably gonna get it to the finish line or whatever bigger initiative or problem that they may have at the company. So it's getting away from the features and benefits and trying to focus on the process, like, how do we keep this moving along? Like, what, what do they really care about? And having that mapped out, it's, it can take some effort for sure on the front end, but it's way better than doing it on the back end and, and having to clean up stuff.

Yeah. And people won't do it because they have to think. And, you know, I, I know how it feels. I have to do it for a bunch of people because they won't do it. And I'm like, okay, so what happens here? And what can go wrong here? And thinking through it. And the brain does not want to feel pain, so it'll do anything to avoid pain. And it naturally goes to what they like to do, and that is typically not what the client cares about. So ask yourself, why are they going to buy? Do you know the answer to that? Oh, they need to. Well, now that's not why. What happens if they don't buy? Well, they're going to be mad. For how long? Who cares there? Why do they care? And nobody teaches this because everybody's like, well, make sure you hit this competitive knockout. And there's a time and a place for those things. But do they ask? Do they care? Probably not. And I think a lot of people just need to slow down a little bit and connect with the other person and find out, you know, how are they doing it today? What are the issues with that? What does leadership think of that? And remember that the person you're most likely talking to is a user buyer. And they have an opinion, but they— their opinion doesn't matter as much as their managers, which doesn't matter as much as the VP, which doesn't matter as much as the CEO. And you're selling to the company, not just to your champion. And does your champion have a backbone? Are they a false champion? Are you thinking through that? No, you probably heard, send me a proposal, and you're good at that. You know how to do that, and you think that's a buying signal. No, that, that's just a big trap. Now you're in the commodity trap, and guess what? They got a proposal from 2 other people. Are they going to buy anything? Are they going to change? Why are they going to change? Why now? Think through the, the fundamentals, the first principles Of a sale. You know, you have to have a problem. You have to have someone who cares about it. It has to have an economic back— backing for them to do it. Does leadership care about it? How do they view it? They may not view it as a product will solve this problem. They think you're just doing it wrong. So buying a product is just pasting over the problem instead of solving the problem. And people wonder why they get ghosted. They get ghosted because they don't need anything. And once you give them everything they need, you're asking to be ghosted. And all you have is a check-in, follow-up, touch base, see how it's going. And is that selling? That sounds like being a clerk.

Or, or a nuisance, the, the way you described that one, for sure. But it— and it's, it's also You touched on something for sure that I've, I've made this mistake is trying to put too much into one conversation or too much into one meeting. And I feel like I have to get all these different things checked off and ask every single question. And then the reality is most people you're talking to probably can't give you more than 30 minutes. First off, maybe you can get a little bit longer than that. It just depends on the context. But, but what about just going deeper on less and, and like really Spreading spreading it out a little bit because that gives you reasons to keep keep moving. But I think we all try to cram everything and just get it done in one meeting and close it, or two meetings and close it when it really should be a much longer process. But it feels good to get it all out there. But you're probably not conveying it the right way. You're not really getting to know that person. I mean, like taking a step back and actually just being a human first and trying to learn more about them. I think that just gets glossed over these days, and it's of course you you gotta. balance that part too. But I, I think we just try to cram the whole process into 1 or 2 meetings and then we think just sending a proposal after that and shoving it down their throat is gonna be effective. But I've definitely tried to get better about going deeper on less, the things that I think they care about. And then it gives me more ammo to keep the momentum going in the future because I, I have more things to talk about. Because if you, if you give them everything you have, like all away, then like, oh dang, I don't even know what else I can talk to them about. So you have to—

you're building the trap for them. Here, let me dig the trap. You push me in it, cover me up, and we're over. We're done.

Yep.

And what are the 2 things that I hear from every great sales rep? It's curiosity and empathy. Where's the curiosity and the empathy there? I gave them the proposal. That answers their curiosity. No, no, it's you being curious about them, what they're doing, what they're going through. And guess what? You want more calls, not less. And if they don't buy in the 1, 2, 3 call, maybe you need 4, 5, 6, and 7. The objective is not to call— close them in the shortest amount of time. It's to close them. If it takes another week and you get the deal, that's a whole lot better than pushing for something you're not going to get today. And I think people try and— oh, maybe they're not qualified. Well, it's a deal, it's not one person. And how many people are you talking to there? I bet if, if you look down your forecast How many people are— if you put a number next to the revenue, everyone puts $100K, $200K, and big round numbers. Why? Because it feels good. No, put down the number of people you're talking to there. If it's not 3, don't forecast it. If it's 1, don't even make it visible because it's not going to close. And if it does, you're lucky, not skilled. Big difference.

I doubt many people are doing it that way. They're probably doing it the exact opposite with— they have that one champion that they think, they think it's going to take it home, and then boom, it blows up in their face last minute. But, uh, yeah, the pipeline is definitely interesting part of that. Uh, the other thing is that people— I mean, we have so much distraction going on these days, and Our phones, TV, it's just nonstop with different things that we have going on. So if it's not in my calendar, I'm not going to remember it, or I'm not even going to know I'm supposed to do that at this point with all, all this different stuff going on. And I think we forget that too, is that people, if you overcomplicate it and do all these crazy things and try to shove it down in one meeting, like they're not going to remember very much of it anyway because you're, you're giving them too much information. So it's like, how do you— simplifying it also helps too with this distraction age that we're in with all this stuff going on is like, how do you keep it simple? Like, what do you want them to really remember and focus on about you or your company that, that, that they care about or that's worth their time? Because we can't remember anything just as humans and all the stuff that we have thrown at us these days. And if it's not on the calendar, if it's not important, if it's not resonating, then it's just gonna, you know, they're gonna move on to the next one and just completely forget about everything that you talked about. So that I always try to remind myself of that too, is of how distracted we are and how can I make it as easy and simple as possible for them to commit to the next step or whatever it may be.

And people come down to one thing. We're buying it because of this. Do you know what this is? I don't know. Then that you don't know why they're buying, you know, because I watch these trials and murder things and it's like you ask the juror, it comes down to one thing, one piece of evidence, one thing that makes sense to them or Doesn't make sense to them. Not the totality. One thing. So why not pound on that one thing until they get it? And then they are able to convince other people, or at least engage other people and help you engage other people. Because the single-threadedness, everyone kind of knows it, but does anyone do anything about it? Oh, I'm going to hurt their feelings. Oh no, they may not like me. They're going to go with the competitor because I talked to one other person there. I don't want to break rapport with them. Now, they're critical, but the company's buying. And I remember people telling me that, don't, don't go above their head or they won't buy. I go, if I don't go above their head, they're not going to buy. And I've had people tell me, don't, don't talk to anyone else here. I go, well, we're gonna have to talk to a lot of people here. You are, I am. This doesn't happen by me or you. It happens by us doing stuff. Are you down for that? Or do you find that a threat for whatever reason? If you find it a threat, they might be using you. For whatever reason, to learn about something, to get a competitive quote, to look good, whatever it is. Why are they doing that? Probably because they don't have any authority or authorization, or it's completely on them. There's one person that wants this, but who cares? They're not going to buy. And if people don't buy, it's a waste of time. You know, we keep going back to look, look at your time and how much of your time did it take to close the deals that did close. And the rest of it was just either bad judgment or practice or whatever you want to call it to make yourself feel good. But it was probably 95% of your time. So when you tell me how busy you are, And you'll never get it to be the opposite. But are you really working the deal or is the deal working you?

I was about to throw in some, the economy or maybe the competition or the status quo. I was just trying to come up with some excuses that you probably hear pretty often about why that it doesn't happen when in reality it's Trying to be laser-focused on your judgment and which deals are likely to succeed. But yeah, no, I mean, that's a great point on the single-threaded for sure. I guess you just get comfortable, right? You get, as you said before, you're dating that person and you feel comfortable and you think they have it in the bag and it's good to go. And then next thing you know, you're completely dating that person and you're not talking to anybody else at all, which is not a good thing for the deals. So It's how do you think of that on the front end? And, and you got to have some tough conversations. And if, if you're really serious about your profession and closing the deals and getting the commission, I mean, you're going to have to map that out and plan, plan ahead for that. But I guess we just get stuck into that, that trap because it feels good and it's, it's, uh, the, the way it typically goes. But, uh, yeah, and you don't want them to feel overwhelmed. I mean, going back to the, the guide thing and the project manager, I mean, you want to You want to help them talk about making it easy. So they, they do have to go up against a lot of stuff internally. The more you can simplify that, the easier it's going to be for them to convey that. But like, how do you help them battle that stuff internally? Because we always forget about what happens behind the scenes when we're gone, which is 95% of what happens. But like, who are they getting beat up by? Like, what questions are they getting asked? Like, who do they have to talk to? Who else? You know, what committee pops up out of nowhere that has to go through it? And We forget about trying to equip our champion or champions with, with that type of stuff too. And I think that gets overlooked all the time. And I know a big part of, you know, some of what you talk about too.

Yeah, because no manager tells their underlings, hey, go buy some stuff today. We need some products in here. They don't do that. It's an unnatural act. If you don't believe that, try and get something bought at your company that's above the credit card limit of your manager. Watch what happens. Does everybody hug you? Thank you for fixing the company. No, they're like, we don't need that. We've got this. Or we'll get that next year. That's not a priority. You just need to work harder. You're distracted. You need to get focused. That's what they're running up against. But we think it's like, oh, they need to do digital transformation. No, that's not what they're thinking. They're thinking, how can we live without this? Not how did we live without this? And there's all this pushback. You've got security and legal and procurement, right? And does anybody think through and arm the person with what they need? Because guess what that person's going to say to the CEO when they ask them, why are we doing this? We need it. Then they're going to say what it does. And then they're going to say, well, doesn't our current vendor do some of that? Well, it does some of it. Well, call them. And when you've been in enough of those meetings, physically be in those meetings. See, today no one's in those meetings physically, so they have no clue what's going on in those meetings.

Right.

I've been in those meetings, and that CEO is not asking for a discount. They're asking, why do we have to do this? Why can't we push this off? And only when they have to do it do they focus on price. And what does everybody do? Wait a second, they haven't called me back. Hey, I can give you 10 points if you can get it done this quarter. That's selling. And that's a tool. I'm not saying don't ever use it, but if that's your go-to, now what's the person going to do? Hey, you remember that thing you said no to? We can get it for 20% off today. Oh yeah, that'll work. And yeah, some rep replied to my, uh, never negotiate with purchasing video. What if it's apples to apples? And I go, you know what? There's no 2 apples that are identical. No, we're selling exactly the same thing. I go, are you identical to this person? No, they're better than me. Well, that's why they're buying from him. And procurement doesn't decide who bought, who they buy it from. They only administrate it. And of course they're going to ask for a discount. And you enable them to ask for that because other people give it to them who don't know what they're doing. That's a clerk. That's not a salesperson. And you might say, well, it's more efficient to do it this way because they view it as a numbers game, that enough people, enough proposals go out there, some have to come back. That's the law of reciprocation, Brian. No, that's, that's what you think the law of— you're not giving anything, people. That's not a gift. A proposal is not a gift. That's your bill for something. It's not a gift. If you think that's a gift, thank the utility company every month. Thank the mortgage company every month. Thank you for your gift. And here's $4,000.

Definitely not a gift. Yeah, on those mortgage and electricity bills. Yeah, it's so true. So true. The proposal is not a gift whatsoever. It's self-serving with what you're trying to get done and make money. So the other thing is throughout the process, I feel like sometimes the vendors or the sales reps can Overcomplicate a demo, for example. It's like, you know, you shove demos in people's faces and then it's people that maybe aren't even technical or they're on the business side, whatever. And then you're doing this technical demo and it's people that have no idea what is going on. So I think there's also, you can go too fast and send proposals right away and cram everything in. But there's also where you force stuff that people don't want to see and it makes more, it just makes it confusing and puts mud in the water type thing. And then making people sign contracts or NDAs, like there's just all these like weird little business things that I think people do throughout that process that I think adds a lot of complexity that doesn't need to be there, that, that's really just smoke and mirrors. And it's, it's more of a mirage.

It doesn't really matter, you know. Yeah, it's like, remember, little girls used to have these fake ovens with a light bulb in it that would heat up some paste. that would turn into a cake. It's playing chef. We're playing business. I love the NDA example. You know how many NDAs have made it to court in the last 10 years?

Zero.

Zero. You know how many NDAs were signed in the last 10 years? About 10 million.

Yeah, at least.

It's the most worthless piece of paper. It's playing business. Let's swap some stuff. Because now we'll be in the cone of silence and we can share the industry secrets. It's like, you know, we're at the time where they're going to announce the new Apple phone, new iPhone, but we all know what the features are. They've been out for 6 months because somebody's— Mark Gurman is studying every little vendor, satellite pictures of the parking lots in China of which vendors are getting the most funding. There's no secrets anymore, you know. Most people put out their whole strategy on LinkedIn, you know. And I had a CEO ask me, it'd be great if we had this secret shopper capability that would learn about the vendors. I go, yeah, it's called LinkedIn. Yeah, just go to their company page and everything they're doing is right there— who they're hiring, how much money they've got, their whole marketing plan. Stop playing business, start doing business. And I think so much of this playing distracts us from the doing, you know, because I used to get the NDA all the time and I go, well, give me 5 minutes, let me call the legal department. I just go in another room, sign it, and give it to them. Do you want a copy of that? No, I took a copy, don't worry about The biggest, right? Let's, let's get down to, let's talk about what matters. And I even sold into the intelligence community. I had a clearance, but there was this whole process you had to go through to be read into the program. I go, I, you guys do one thing. I know what you do. I don't need to know the details. Okay, let's get into what you can't do today and what you'd like to do. I don't need to see who you're doing it with. And all of a sudden you get people talking about what they really care about. And the key was to get them out of the facility. Let's go grab a coffee at Starbucks. Let's go down to the cafeteria. And all of a sudden people open up. That's the simplicity of sales. And everybody puts their sales voice on, their happy ears, and they do what they're told and nothing happens. And then how could they not feel misguided?

Spot on. I actually did a, a, uh, hike meeting recently, and that was such a great change-up because I think people are so Well, first off, it's hard to get in-person meetings these days compared to what it used to be. Second, everyone has this Zoom, Teams fatigue just from like having to show your face and put on the dog and pony show. So, but like doing something physical, like walking or whatever, doing a hike, it just, I mean, opens people up so much more. And you talk about all kinds of different things. You learn 10 times more than you would in a stuffy business Zoom type meeting. So it was very refreshing. And that goes back to what we're talking about is like, you gotta Be human first, make it simple, make it about them, and like actually talk to them like that. And then, you know, who knows where that one could lead, but it was just a great idea. He actually, it's, he does that all the time. It's one of his trademarks. So I just thought it was a pretty cool idea because it gets people out of their comfort zone. They're more open to talking. It's, it's fun. You know, you can post a picture about it, whatever it may be. And it's, it's just a great idea. It's not, we don't need to overcomplicate some of this stuff. It's like actually just doing some basic things and making it about them and all that type of stuff. But I think maybe the deal sizes, the money, the companies pressuring us, that makes us start overcomplicating stuff and going all these different directions that we were talking about. So it's, I don't know if it was always like that, but it's definitely like that right now.

Yeah. And I used to do that when I was interviewing people. I hated the sitting down and the playing the roles. I go, You're probably sick of sitting down all day. Let's head out and go for a little walk. You want a water? And you go for a walk and all of a sudden people are human again. And that's what you want. That is the simplicity. What we do is we set ourselves up to fail and then are surprised why we fail. Because all those people that you sent that proposal to, they're not telling you the truth. Oh, my manager's reviewing it. It's in his inbox. It hasn't been opened. That's not reviewing. And I don't know about you today, but my spam folder is just as active, more active than my in folder. And it's so bad I have to check my spam folder before I tell somebody I haven't received anything yet because Apple has not caught up with the amount of spam. So the AI doesn't— can't tell the difference anymore. So I think really break it down to first principles and think of these elements and just follow the elements, not get bought into your feelings in the moment or what you think a salesperson should do. Even bigger deals, more deals, faster deals. That's what it's all about. Sign up today. Put the excuses away. Yeah, excuses feel good, but they're expensive. Excuse— you know what the excuses are costing you? Tens, 50, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in lost income.

Really?

Yeah. The difference between where you are today— let's say you're making $150,000, decent, decent income, but you know there's other people in your industry making $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. Well, how are you going to do that? You all think it's just about getting a better job, a better territory, a better manager. They can help. Go do that. Then what happens? It's still you There with those leads, trying to close those deals. And do you have the game? Few people do. Everyone thinks they do. Why not prove it? The market tells you what you're worth. Accept it. Now become better. And the way to become better is to improve every day. Really Make a daily routine of learning and developing because it's not at the knowledge level. You have to become unconsciously competent at these skills, which takes time, repetition, and emotion. And I show you how to do it, how I did it, how I've taught hundreds of people to do it. But you have to want to because I can't Force you. A lot of people wish I could. So do I, but I can't. So sign up today. We'll see you next time.