HOW CURIOSITY CAN BECOME YOUR SUPERPOWER IN B2B SALES

One word keeps coming up with great salespeople. You know, maybe empathy, but curiosity always seems to come up. But what is curiosity? Curiosity is kind of wondering about what you don't know. And to be able to wonder what you don't know, you have to have some confidence. And I was doing some research, like, what's the opposite of Yeah, it's an indifference. Not caring? Oh, that tells us something. That maybe to be curious, we've got to care. But do we have to care about the deal? Do we have to care about the person? Care about both of them? Eh, it's good to care, because the caring becomes the motive to learn, to do, to want To help. We're going to talk about this today because this guest is a little bit different, a little bit quieter than most guests, but deeper in a lot of ways. And he really thinks about sales, becomes a sales nerd in a certain sense, which another way of saying student of the game, being curious about the profession you have that you work in your whole life. And the other thing that comes out of this is the desire to have peers to talk through deals, role-play even. And that keeps coming up because how do we practice in sales? You know, I used to do it with my notebook on my flight to and from the sales call, talking with my engineer or my manager. When I get there? Never really role-played that much, but the talking it through really helps because it gets you thinking, gets you wondering what you don't know, which is a great way to become more curious in a fun way. And if the answer is, I think I know it all, well, that's the problem, not the solution. And this is what I think people are going to end up doing with brevitypitch.com is, you know, you start to think of, oh, it's a cold calling role play. No, it's much more than that. It's a conversation, sales conversations where you can put in the LinkedIn profile of the person you're going to have the conversation with, their URL to their company page. And it'll scour their whole presence on the internet and come up with relevant questions and responses. That's more than a human can do. This is where AI for sales is really going to help. Sending more dumb messages faster, I don't think, is the right use of AI in sales. I think to find intelligence on the internet Good use, uh, to be interactive with us. And, and it's not like a computerized voice either. It's like a real voice. And the ability to do this on demand, not just when your friends and your coworkers are available and interested and motivated. This is the future. Get your manager, go see it. brevitypitch.com. Link is in the show notes.

Hey, Mark, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Yeah, well, before that, 2 things. First, I want to express some gratitude towards you for having me, and then also for all of the content that you've been producing over the past few years. You have a, a very unique way of pointing out some absurdities in our profession. But doing it with an intent of, hey, here's an opportunity to get better as opposed to just straight criticism. So thank you for that. And number 2, I'm such a big podcast fan and this is the first podcast I've been on. I'm, I'm such a big fan that a lot of my friends have made up a game where if I mention a podcast, they have to take a sip from the beverage they're holding in their hand. So, so the BWDO crew. I think you all have to drink now. So appreciate you letting me know that.

Yeah, you're famous.

Yeah, but a little bit of background. So born and raised in the Chicagoland area, Elk Grove Village, Illinois, known for their industrial parks. Somebody asked me once, they have houses in Elk Grove Village? Yeah, yeah, there's a few. Kind of been in this area my whole life. So I'm a bit of a Chicago trope. Big sports fan, man of a certain age. So huge basketball fan, was Influenced by Michael Jordan and Phil Jackson. And I love comedy, improv comedy. I'm a voracious reader, music, but first and foremost, my family, my wife and my 2 kids. That's why I do everything I do.

Well, looks like you're living in the right place for what you're selling. Is that true?

Yeah. I mean, close to an airport first and foremost, right? Because you gotta be able to get on a plane. And get to those super exotic locations like Scranton, Pennsylvania. Yeah. Shout out to Scranton. Um, but yeah, there's, there's so much, there's so many companies from a headquarter perspective in the Chicagoland area. But yeah, I'm, I'm all across the country as necessary.

And why sales for you?

So that's an interesting question. There's sort of why I got into sales and then why I stayed in sales. And I think the why I got into sales is probably a story that most people tell. Mine's a little unique in the fact that I was working since I was 14 and always gravitated towards sales-type jobs, whether it was cell phones in a kiosk at the mall or sunglasses. And when I got to college, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I still don't really know between you and me, Brian, but I went into computer networking. And when I declared my major, within 2 days, 2 people that I admired, Like pulled me aside and were like, what are you doing? Like, you need to be in sales.

Yep.

And I love communication. So I pivoted to being a broadcast journalism major. That never panned out. Podcasts didn't exist then. But why I stay in sales is incredibly different, I think. Um, and to me, sales is the perfect opportunity to practice a lot of life's truths in terms of, from a psychological perspective, like the illusion of control, the fact that we have a tendency to think we control things more than we do. So it's a good humbling experience to remember, like, we can influence things, we can have a process and follow it, but we can't control it. And then like philosophically, the whole chop wood, carry water Zen Buddhism phrase that's basically like You gotta do the work. You gotta get in the mud and actually—

The listeners are looking for the secrets, not the work harder thing.

I haven't found the shortcut yet, so if anybody has, let me know.

And, but the motivation, was it financial? Was it skill-based? Sounds like you had some innate skills that computer networking wouldn't take advantage of.

Apparently not, or vice versa. Yeah, the innate skills, I think, you know, an extroverted person by nature, although as I've done more and more self-examination, maybe on the introverted side, who knows, right? So it was a skill set, it came to me somewhat naturally. And the flexibility of it was interesting. Now, I didn't start with any flexibility, as most of us don't. Like, I was in a boiler room chained to a A phone. There really wasn't a chain. Grainger, don't worry, I'm not throwing you under the bus, but that's where I kind of started was Grainger and spent 10 years there and just got like a massive education on the fundamentals of sales. So once I tapped into that, I was like, oh, oh, this is a little more complex than the movies lead you to believe.

And I also heard the intellectual challenge there. That seems to be one of the key distinctions between people who really have a passion for sales versus people who it's a job, it pays well.

Yeah. Yeah, I think that's true. It's, it's never the same, right? Each day is a little different. Every challenge is a little unique. Sure, you can have commonalities and insights that you can bring to prospective clients, but Every client's different and there's something exciting about that. And you also get to talk and work with every type of person. You know, I'm in my little Chicago bubble, right? But I get to talk to those Packers fans up in Wisconsin and I get to talk to people on the East Coast and West Coast and down South. And to me, that's very fulfilling to gain different perspectives from all over. our country.

And who are you typically talking to? What's the persona?

VP of operations, folks that are running distribution centers or warehouses, presidents of the company, you know, if we get to the economic buyer level, level, it's usually a CEO. But the champions that we're trying to develop and align with more than develop, if I'm being honest, are operations folks, operations gurus, and I get to learn from them because they're so tenured and experienced typically that they know how to run their distribution centers and implement the type of technology that I'm bringing to the table pretty well. There's stuff I can help with and add, but it's really a humbling experience and a lot of fun.

And give us a sense of the deal. How big are they? How long do they take?

Yeah, so the deals are typically about $1 million is kind of the average, and they'll take, you know, usually about a year.

Wow.

You know, we can accelerate them, but—

We have control, right?

Yeah, we can control them. Yeah. Now typically about a year if you're just kind of averaging it out. Long sales cycle.

And when did you come to the conclusion about control?

Probably through a lot of failure and attempts to control. And I'm still coming to the conclusion every day. Yeah. Probably when I had kids, if I'm being completely honest. That's a humbling experience. Then you realize like, oh boy, well, I don't have any control.

What I found is the people, the reps who go through the child rearing tend to become the great sales leaders because, you know, they're like little reps you come home to, right? They don't do anything you tell them to. It's so true. They're kind of just on automatic. There's no prefrontal cortex yet. It's just food, sleep, fun. Yeah.

Yeah. And then there's a lot of like stress potentially and noise that can get them back into their animal brain where they're not. So there's a lot of reactivity and emotion and, you know, so there's, there's some parallels there too. And to that point, I think an untapped demographic Um, in sales, and you're seeing more representation as the mothers.

Yeah.

Of the world.

You talk about, you talk about people that can handle the emotional state of other humans. Well, yeah.

And I think the, the work from home or work flex has become almost dominant. Yeah. Where, you know, the sitting in the cubicle thing hasn't been the top priority anymore.

That's true.

Talent. An ability.

Yeah. Which is a great thing because it does unlock that entire different group of folks that have a totally diverse thought process and just valuable insights.

And what made you, or how did you become good at sales?

By doing it over and over. I'm a voracious reader too. I think I mentioned So I would describe myself as a bit of a sales methodology nerd.

Good. Yeah.

You know, it was probably how my wife first got interested in me. No, not at all. She would—

She wants to sit down and talk about top-down, bottom-up. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Prospecting approaches.

Med-PIC, you know, walking through, walking through the DMU at the school. I've always gravitated towards it because I do have a passion and interest in psychology. And to me, there's so much psychology in sales. Um, so again, I give a lot of credit to my early days of sales of really facing rejection, kind of getting those 10,000 hours in, right? Like the high volume cold calling entry-level sales positions. And then working my way up is kind of the term I guess we would use in terms of like sales career to positions with more responsibility and more complexity. So just going through the process, also borrowing all the good stuff from all the different processes that I've been A, trained on and B, self-taught and sort of creating an amalgam of my own process that's true to me. It's not me just trying to follow the Challenger Sale or MedPick or, you know, value-based selling blindly. It's using all the best parts and mixing them together.

Right. Because, you know, if you look at, you know, when I hear MedPick, it's like, okay, it's a checklist, not a sales process.

And qualification process. Qualification.

Yeah. But with an outside looking in, right? Which almost gives you the wrong impression what you should be doing. You should be on the inside, not on the outside scorecarding it.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people, you know, they come up with a great angle and they try and make it the world of sales, and it's, it's too big of a world, you know, because You know, I like to use a game analogy, but the game is kind of infinite. There's the game board, there's no barriers. You have time, you have quarters and years, you've got money, and you got a lot of players. And like you stated, each player at each company's a little different.

Yeah, no, I think that's so true. There's, there's no absolute Uh, one way that, because we're dealing with humans.

Yeah.

And humans are very complex to say the least. And then when you start adding more humans to the equation, you're dealing with more complexity, more variables. You're dealing with unknown unknowns, things that they're not even aware of or things that change. And there isn't a single process or qualification methodology that's gonna Solve that, right?

And that's what I always came out of those trainings all excited. And then I'd go out in the field in 2 weeks, I'd be like, damn, these prospects won't cooperate. They're not following the process. They're changing their mind all the time.

Yeah. What do you mean you don't understand the decision-making process? I mean, you work— don't ask me about our decision-making process because I don't understand it either, but you should understand yours.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah.

And I remember thinking that and then asking myself, like, what's my decision-making process on where to go to dinner? What do I feel like? What am I in the mood for? How much time and money do I have? Do I sit down and analyze that and share it with my friends?

No. And then, and then you make it and it's closed on Mondays.

Yeah. So we go next door.

Yeah, it's so true. And I think a lot of my success is rooted in sort of that reflection of trying to, again, you know, get in the customer's odds are, but basically like, like think about life in their shoes, right? Or how it applies to your life, like you just did with the decision-making dinner analogy. And that's where you get the empathy of like, oh, Yeah, it's not black and white. It's not cut and dry. We're going to live in the gray to the best of our ability, and we're going to continue to stay curious and then be upfront and honest. If we can solve your problem, great. If you have a desire to solve it, fantastic. If you don't, that's fine too. Maybe I can point you in the right direction based on the 20 years of experience I have, or connect you with somebody who might be able to do that. It's relationships, you know, at the core of it. And I think I spent a little time between warehouse automation jobs in the leadership realm in trucking, transportation, kind of building a sales team out there. And you talk about a relationship industry, and that was a really good reminder of like, oh yeah, like there's that too.

Yeah. And what does relationship mean to you? Because everyone says it, but yeah, you know what it means.

Yeah. So to me it's honoring somebody's values, understanding and honoring their values and treating them with respect. They can be different. Their values can be different than mine. You know, my 2 core values are family and curiosity. If their values are, you know, achievement and financial, great, like totally cool. And I can be respectful of those values. And I think that's where it starts. meeting someone where they're at and respecting where they're at. And then you can go further and further in terms of relationship building, I think.

And where's the curiosity come from?

I don't know. That's, that's a great question. Because even my wife sometimes will, you know, after knowing her for 20 years, sometimes I'll still shock her and she'll be like, I, you know, you continue to like, Work on yourself and try to learn. And it's just something that's always been in me. And I also, I also work on it in practice. You know, I'm one of the reasons I do love podcasts is because you get some of the best interviewers on earth talking to other folks. And yeah, it's just, I don't know any other way to be personally.

Well, you know, because I've been kind of studying it, and I think a lot of reps kind of run over the curiosity to get the confidence, like the confidence to talk to a COO, the confidence to go into a new industry, and that curiosity kind of corrupts that confidence for them. It puts a crack in the armor instead of being part of the armor.

Yeah, that's interesting. I think it's making me think of just how curiosity is vulnerability and it's really an admission of—

You have to be confident to be curious.

Yeah, you have to be confident. You have to be confident in the fact that you don't know.

Everything.

And you're never gonna know everything. And I think some of, in terms of like practices that I've, you know, taken up and really focused on, mindfulness was a big one that I stumbled upon maybe 15 years ago. It's kind of the, the word du jour now, but sort of practicing that, just being in the moment, not looking at Slack or my phone or just really being there and Listening to understand, you know, as opposed to listening to take my turn to talk, which I'm sure I've done a couple times on this, on this chat. So we'll keep working on it.

Well, because what do you have as a rep if you're not curious? You can only look for what you want to see instead of look for what you need to see. Because I gotta believe your deals don't just slide through the company. Once the COO wants it?

No, it would be, it would be nice.

No, there's resistance, friction.

Sometimes. Sometimes.

Occasionally.

Every time.

Every time.

Sometimes every time. Yeah.

And how did you learn that? Because I gotta— I don't know Grainger well, but I gotta believe the deals weren't as complex.

No, they weren't. And I think that was sort of the attraction to branch out beyond Grainger into, again, warehouse automation, kind of emerging technology is sort of my, my favorite place to be in where I've been for the last 10 years. Again, the same way I learned how to set an agenda or write a follow-up email, just by doing it and staying open, as open as I can be. Again, I'm a human, there's moments where I wall off. Learning from my mistakes, I think one big thing is like finding humor and joy in the failures in terms— so like one of my favorite things, and anybody who's worked with me or, you know, I've worked alongside, the unintentional comedy of like a bad sales call, the bombs, right? Like share those with people, enjoy them. The awkwardness, like you don't seek awkwardness, like you want to have the best sales call possible, but sometimes things don't go right. Share those stories.

Well, that's vulnerable, right? That's similar to curiosity.

Yeah.

But it gives you the right not to be perfect.

That's huge.

And the acknowledgement that you're not perfect.

Yeah, that's, that's a big one. And I think something that, you know, you hear today a lot about imposter syndrome.

Yeah.

It's like everybody has imposter syndrome. That's from the CEO to some extent down to an entry-level person. And I think there's something liberating in understanding that, especially what I see with younger reps. It's like, You know, the fake it till you make it thing. I never loved that cliché because it's like, no, work hard till you make it. But the essence of fake it till you make it, I get that. And everybody's kind of doing that to some extent.

Well, right, because none of us know what the future is. So we're all kind of moving in this active game that's constantly going with no timeouts. And, you know, we have a prediction, we have some kind of forecast, but none of us knows what's next.

Now, I always think back to like career planning. And if I would've told 19-year-old Mark that he would be selling autonomous mobile robots, because people's buying patterns would've shifted, I would've been like, first of all, I would've been like, what happened to your hair, man? Like, where did it go? You've lost a lot of it. And then I'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about. 44-year-old Mark, like, doesn't even exist right now.

But how did you adapt to such a dramatic increase in the complexity of the sale? Dollar amount, more people, less known. I mean, even I know who Grainger is, right?

Yeah. I've been fortunate that You know, and again, we kind of look back and we sort of shape our narrative to have it make sense, right? But it was sort of a gradual step into the higher complexity. From Grainger, I went to a company called Packsize. I think you talked to Sasha, who was a peer of mine. And those are a little bit of smaller deals, but a very disruptive, like, fantastic technology.

Yeah. And then This experience. Great route.

Yeah. So it's like, it happened gradually. And then the one thing I think that does separate me is I, and I learned this at Grainger, again, what a place to start a sales career at. I can't say enough about Grainger and it still is. I still have friends there that have celebrated their 20th anniversary. My hiring class was strong or it was just big, one of the two. But when I get into these new roles, and if it's a technology, because a lot of them, they're emerging technologies, nobody really knows much about them. I put in the self-study work. And really what I do is I apply, again, basketball, Chicagoland. So a lot of my first sort of mentors are from the world of basketball. So Coach John Wooden and his 4 Laws of Learning, you know, so it's It's explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition. And that was a big thing that unlocked like how to go get what I needed. So yeah, sure. In sales, they'll give you the explanation. Really what's missing is the demonstration oftentimes, what I experienced.

Yeah.

So I just, I hold myself accountable for getting that myself. That's on me. Anything that the company can add is just a bonus.

And, and plus you need those reps where Granger, you were getting the reps, but here you're probably much fewer reps just by the sheer dollar size.

Yeah, fewer reps. So again, something that would make me cringe back in the day was role-playing, but now it's like, We do it, my peers and I, in order to be able to, yeah.

Yeah.

And we look forward to it again and we do it in a way that's fun and not, not cringey. Maybe it is cringey. It probably is for some people. It's not for me because I know the value of the repetitions and it's part of the way I learn. And maybe it isn't for everyone, but for me it is. I have to get the reps in.

Of course it is. Yeah.

I would think so.

But, well, the problem is most people get the reps In large real deals where, you know, it goes wrong or it doesn't go as right as you'd like it to and there's no do-over.

Yeah. Yeah, that's true. I think you can get the reps at the early part of the sales cycle on a more complex deal and then you have to sort of rely and understand on the process. As you go through it. And I've always been a process-oriented person that I enjoy a good process. And I also will make a process mine. Um, again, there's like the non-negotiables that they're going to want, and I will check those boxes gladly. But then it's like, how can I, you know, like something as simple as a CRM, how can I utilize a CRM for my benefit? The CRM is not going anywhere.

No. So am I going to give up on it?

No, I think it's here to stay. I think CRM technology is here. I hate to break it to you.

It's not a trend. No, I think it's here.

Yeah.

Well, I think too many reps practice the plays and forget the process, which is the whole game. Yeah. And get really good at that first call, the presentation, the demo. But then where's the ball, right?

Yeah. Where do we, where do we toss it next?

Yeah. Now what do we do? We got an order, right? Yeah.

You drop back, you've got the perfect protection, but there's no receivers. They forgot to, they forgot to put the receivers in on the field sometimes even.

Well, that's the part that I always saw missing was that after that you know, great first call, or maybe you have a demo second call, or even a proof of concept. Nobody really talks about the rest of it, but that's where the deals either close or they don't. That's why they slip, stall, or minimize. How'd you learn all that? Was that probably at DealSize or PacSize?

Yeah, PacSize again, and then leading a team at PacSize as well. And really starting to mentor folks is when I started getting those reps in. I always enjoyed helping others out and kind of sharing like my mistakes. Folks did it for me as well. So the old pay it forward, just try to live in service as much as I can. But then the unknown benefit of that was like, oh, I'm getting more reps in. And I always say it's a Mentees too, like you're gonna end up teaching me as much if not more than I teach you, and that's totally the case. And if you're a good coach or leader, eventually they should be better than you as well. So at PacSize, I mentored a ton of people. They gave me that opportunity, which was great, and then I had an opportunity to lead a team, and it was interesting because you were getting those reps in, and you could kind of see from a high level more of the entire process. But the muscles that were involved in the earlier stuff were starting to atrophy. And that's why eventually I was like, I'm going back to individually contributing because it's, I love it so much. But yeah, I think sharing in others' opportunities and strategy building was very helpful.

Yeah. You know, because it's like, like business school goes to case study based, which is the reps. And it's so much easier when you're not emotionally engaged in the deal to kind of see the issues because your own needs aren't blinded.

So true.

You know, you can be curious without it affecting your income.

Absolutely. And you don't know these players as personally. They haven't triggered you or put you in the zone of resistance. They put your rep— I think peer-to-peer, like mentorship and review, and we do that a lot here. I've, I'm fortunate to be on such a great team of such talented reps of varying degrees of experience. And I, I could say that for all the stops in my career. Again, the people have been very lucky, but we'll get on a call together, myself and one of my peers, and we'll just kind of rip each other's deals apart, like not in a, like a malicious way. Which is like, have you thought about this? What about that? Oh no, I haven't. And there's no sort of power dynamic there, right? Where it's my boss who also is great and I can have these conversations with, but there isn't this, okay, is he judging me? Is he judging the way I'm responding to him?

It's like, I gotta be an imposter. I've gotta pretend I've got it covered.

Yeah. What does he want to hear? It's Like, no, to truly understand and learn from deals that don't close, and spoiler alert, most of them don't close, especially at the complexity level that I'm at. You really have to be open to exploring all of the areas and find what you could have done differently. I can do that in any deal. And maybe that's an indictment of my ability, but no, I can find opportunities to improve every time.

You know, I've, I've been, you know, a big studier of this for a long time and I've, I notice it in myself that the things I don't want to do, I tend to forget and get distracted by the things I do want to do. And you don't recognize it until it's too late.

Yeah.

It's the way we— our brains work. You know, we do it, our champion does it. Have you ever had a champion go know exactly all the details? No, they just think it's going to go right through.

Yeah, and that's a great point. What I, what I heard there from you is again applying the reflection and experience of yourself to other people, which I think is so key to realize, like, they're not just sitting here thinking about you and your company and your deal. Like, they're barely thinking about you. Nobody's thinking about you.

Hey, Mike, how you doing?

Oh, Matt. I get Matt all the time.

That's how much they're thinking of you.

Yeah. Okay. And those are my favorites. Like I was called Matt again. I was called Mike again. Like, yeah, it's pretty fantastic.

And that peer-to-peer, I think that's the future if reps can do that. Because the only thing I got really out of a QBR was listening to other people's deals. And I try and keep track of the big deals and what they said the quarter before.

And here they are again.

Yeah, same one.

And, and you could always tell if they were going to close it, whether they had the details, the steps, the issues. If they were just frosting over it, hoping that it's just going to slide right through, even though it didn't slide through last quarter.

Yeah, it's like, good luck.

And I think it really comes down to the— were they curious? Do they want to know what's Stopping the deal. Yeah, they don't want to know.

No, no, it's, it's like, because if they truly did, they would find work. Lots of work. Lots of work. And again, there's so many clichés in our wonderful profession. And, you know, the old discovery never ends to me is about as good as it gets. Because if you stop having that mindset of curiosity, You're done with that deal. That's where you can't control it, but you could certainly ask questions to under— you can understand it, right?

Right. And especially if you've seen a pattern, because I'm sure in your industry, this is a big change to how they do things.

Oh yeah.

So you're selling change. Just as much as you're selling a robot, right?

100%. Yeah.

Yeah.

And that was probably when I think back to PacSci and their founder, Hanco Keesner, who's just a brilliant person and one of the most pure salespeople on earth, but also can explain quantum physics to you. Wouldn't think of himself as a seller, but maybe he would. I mean, he talked about the components of change in terms of You know, the psychosocial aspect of it, the performance and the financial. And I think the psychosocial, that fear of change is often overlooked. Yeah, we can build a business case to show you the financial. We can give you a white paper or case study to show you our uptime. How are we going to handle the human nature that is fear of change? And that's where There's some tools and tactics that you can put into place to help with that. But even talking about it is a start.

It is, because as reps, we're thinking it makes logical sense. It's a no-brainer. But they still don't do it. And what do we do? Lower the price. It's not the price. It's that emotional comfort that they have and that this is going to work out that they don't even share with you.

Yeah, it goes back to that vulnerability. And again, I think sometimes the best way to get there is to model it in yourself. And that's how you build trust and find the right people who are willing, because it is a certain type of person and persona that is willing to take this risk.

Yeah.

And implement the new technology. But when it goes right, those people end up on the COVID of industry trade magazines, which I know was one of their goals as children. I'm sure of it.

Yeah.

But they're celebrated, right? It's, it's a good thing.

That's it. And people always think it's intelligence and it's like, it's emotion. No one will ever tell you it. No CEO ever said, I was scared.

So true.

Change scares me. They don't say that.

Fortune 500 CEO says he's scared and his stock price soars like—

Hillman 11. And you know, there's no sales process around that, right? It's like you've got to anticipate it and assume it's going to be there even though no one's telling you that they're scared. And I gotta get 'em comfortable with this change.

Yeah, that's the challenge.

Yeah.

But it's also like the best part of it because it helps. Yeah. And, but it also helps us tap into that within us if we're open enough to it. And that's again, back to why I stayed in sales. It's, it's all of that. I'd rather be doing nothing else than exploring all of that with folks. Yeah, it's, it's the best.

Cool. Hey, really appreciate your time today, Mark. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

onwardrobotics.com is where I'm at. They can find me on LinkedIn. And yeah, I'm out there.

Now, how else do you get that camaraderie, that feedback, that Case study approach. I got one place in my courses.

That's the approach I take.

It's not just Brian telling you how deals work or how to start conversation and get meetings. I do some of that, but the majority of it is talking with individuals, solving each particular use case. And what I've noticed is the people who are the most curious and the most motivated and the people who stick with it the longest have the most success. That's pretty much like how everything works in life. But what's unique about sales is it's hard to teach and harder to learn because to learn it, you have to kind of put your instincts aside, your feelings, your needs. The outcome that you want, to learn what the other person wants, because that's when the magic happens. Because we in sales, we're taught, you know, logic. We're taught what the product does, how it works, how it's better, why people need it, answer questions, handle objections. That's great if you've got enough warm inbound. But what happens if you don't? That cold outbound is just the opposite. They don't want to talk about you or your product because they don't know you and they certainly don't care about your product, even if they have the problem that you solve. You have to get them talking. You have to get them to want to to talk with you. And a cold call is really a have-to. They picked up the phone, they either hang up or have to listen and talk and interact with you. But what if there was another way? And I've come up with this analogy, I'm going to make a video about it this week, is that what people are doing today in prospecting is pretty much identical to trying to find a job By submitting your resume on the website, which, if you don't know, is the worst way to get a job.

Why?

That's the front door. Everybody goes to the front door. And what does everybody put at the front door? Gatekeepers, because it's the front door. Bouncers, people checking ID. That's what we put at the front door. Why? To keep the riffraff out. They only want to let in the people they want in. Okay, that's obvious. So do I go to the back door? Well, the back door in business is personal existing relationships, but there's very few of them. You can get a couple meetings out of them. I did when I started my business. That was what I started with. Good old Backdoor Brian. Yeah, he'll find a way of getting into that account. But the problem is there's not enough of them. So you run out of them after a couple of weeks. But then there's this side door. And the side door nobody talks about. Like it's a mystery. But it's real.

What's that?

Honestly, and you see people doing it. The side door is being creative, skirting through the BS, connecting with the other person like a human being. Well, how do I do that? Well, it's too much to tell you in a podcast. It's not that it's hard. It's just different, and different feels weird, especially when it's different than what you've been doing in sales forever. Because why'd they come up with the numbers game? Because it's not effective. If you told people, uh, this works 1 out of 100 times, uh, One meeting a week? That's a lot of work to get a meeting, isn't it? Creative, but show me how. That's what Start the Conversation, Get the Meetings about. I show you how. It's still a lot of art to it, but if you break the art down, much like karate moves or a magic trick, you break the magic trick down into It's little simple steps, the reveal. Then you practice it. That's the hard part because people say, well, I now know the trick, but the trick doesn't work the way Brian does it. Okay, then you need to practice the trick like every magician. And I hate to use the word magic because It kind of alludes to something mystical, but this is just simply a skill that when practiced enough, that when it becomes part of your personality, it becomes automatic, comes across as what probably most people would call charm. But then I say charm has this condemnation of Manipulation. This isn't— this is organic. This is how mammals and strangers have been talking and get to know each other forever. Once we industrialized, that's when it went wrong. We created the front door, and then once the front door— everyone went through it, then all of a sudden we put a gatekeeper at the front door. Then all of a sudden, what do we do? Oh, we just wait at the front door. Be smart.

The front door is crowded.

And here's the only difference between the resume analogy and the website. The company puts on the website what they're looking for. They don't do that for us salespeople. So our ad, our solicitation that we send in as a cold email rarely hits, but we keep doing it because we don't know what else to do. Or we may do it on another platform. We take the same spam ad solicitation and we send it on LinkedIn or Twitter or any other possible way of getting a message. Or now we're texting it to people.

Yeah.

People will appreciate that. Instead of focusing in on what you want, when you learn what the other person wants and you give it to them first, that's where the magic happens. If you want to become great at sales and you're willing to invest a little bit of time and a little bit of money, go to b2brevenue.com. If you're not, You should ask yourself, how are you going to get there? Do you want to do the 10,000-hour thing? Remember, that's about deliberate practice, not just working. Anyone can show up. Few people can do the work. The real work, like what we heard today in this interview, that's the real work. It's thinking it through, coming up with a mental model of your deal. Really becoming curious about how it works. That's where the magic happens. And believe me, you want the magic to happen. You may be cheap, you may be lazy, but if you're listening to a sales podcast, the lazy part isn't really there. The cheap part, eh, it's amazing why salespeople are so cheap. They make the most, and maybe it's that they work so hard for the money. I get that part, believe me. If you want to become rich, go to v2vrevenue.com. Check out the courses. If you think they can help, sign up. There's 2 videos there, one on how they work, you know, the exact steps of how you log in, the video format. Office hours, one-on-ones. And then the second video is Which Course Is Right for Me, which is the only question that people really ask. It's not hard. It's really— you're putting something in front of you. You're creating your own objection. It's very simple. If you need pipeline, start the conversation, get the meeting. If you've got enough pipeline, you're getting leads, you have opportunities, but they're not closing, They're not closing fast enough, or they're not closing large enough. Closing the Complex Sale is the other course. They both run for a year long. That means you have access to it for a year. You could go through it in a day if you possibly could. You could leave it running all day long, or you savor it like a fine wine for a whole year. And really milk it and get the most out of it. And believe me, those are the people I like the most. Why? I get the most out of it working with them. To Pete, the dabblers— dabble, answer your questions, but dig in. That's where the magic happens. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening.