HOW TO BECOME GREAT AT B2B SALES - HINT IS NOT ABOUT SECRETS

Do you remember learning how to drive? And most importantly, learning how to parallel park? It was probably the, the hardest part of the driving exam for me, and maybe for you, or maybe it wasn't a requirement when you got your driver's license. My point here is that parallel parking is counterintuitive, meaning that intuitively when we want to parallel park, we just pull in headfirst and then back up. But when we try that, it doesn't work. You're too far from the curb and you can't adjust the car to line up with the curb and stay out of the street. It's counterintuitive. So the way they teach you how to do it is to pull up parallel to the car or the space in front of you and then Back in and then pull forward. And this eludes a lot of us. We don't believe it. We don't want to believe it. We want to stick with what seems natural to us. This explains so much of sales and certainly cold prospecting. And especially when I've been teaching it for 12 years now, That everybody follows their intuition. They naturally do. And when it's something that's counterintuitive, they first go into denial. No, no, no, that's okay. I'll do it my way. And then their way doesn't work, but they still rather do something that they're comfortable with that doesn't work versus something they're uncomfortable with That does work. And how do we handle this in other professions? You want to become a carpenter, an electrician, a plumber. There's an internship, and your mentor doesn't allow you to do what is intuitive. They tell you how to do it properly from the beginning, and they understand it's not going to feel Natural to you, organic. It's not going to flow for you, but it's the right way to do it. It's not my way of doing it. It's what works. And this is something that we fight. Today in our interview, we're going to interview a sales rep who had a similar journey to me. Not in sales, but in weight loss. And I use weight loss or any difficult personal change that you have— giving up something that you love, taking up something that you don't like that's good for you. We go through the same counterintuitive process. It doesn't feel natural. It doesn't feel good. So our brain protects us, wants to protect us by denying it, rationalizing it, explaining it away. And today's interview gives several great examples of this. And my point here is that you have to identify these things. You have to almost write them down so that when you're in This denial state that you can say, yeah, Brian told me I'm going to feel this way. I've got to push through. I have to have faith and belief that there is a better way. The better way will work when I become good at it. But there's that time gap between where you are and a few weeks or months before you become good at it where it doesn't feel natural. It is those salespeople that can push through that denial, push through those rationalizations. And in sales, this is what they sound like. Oh, my clients are different. Um, what's the best way to do this? What's your best advice? And then they hear the advice and they go, that doesn't feel natural. I'll do it my way. Or people just naturally Skip it and just talk about themselves. And it doesn't work, but they think they're doing it because they took a course or they read a book or they agreed with something. And this is why I say it's not about intelligence, because none of this is IQ. It's all internal innate emotion. And the sooner we realize this, the sooner we will be able to push through it. But most people naturally don't realize it. Let's get into this interview. I think you're really going to like this one. I'll sum it up at the end and give you some examples from our office hours yesterday, which was really good. So if you're in Start the Conversation, get the meeting, check out the office hours. You can listen to it on the mobile app while you're out running or walking or enjoying your weekend. And check out our friends at brevitypitch.com. The new release I've been working with, it's pretty amazing. It sounds like your clients. It works off the data that you give your clients. You give them your website, your competitor's website, their website. And their LinkedIn profile, and it will build a custom sales conversation in AI for you where you can practice as long as you want to get ready. Because what I found in doing almost anything, it's really the 3rd or 4th try that really goes from a B to an A. The first one's a C. Second one might be a C+ or a B-, then you get to a B, and then the third, fourth one, you pop up into that A category. So check it out at brevitypitch.com. Here we go. Hey Brad, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Hi, yeah, my name is Brad Buchholz. I've been a I've been in sales for the last 30 years. I graduated from college with a degree in mathematics, so guaranteed to never go into sales, but I was in the worst recession and I needed to find a job. And so the only job I could get because there were no jobs was selling auto insurance.

Easy.

And from that, yeah, well, I worked for a company called Survival, which was honestly what I did every day. Yeah, it was great. So, but since then I've kind of found my niche in nutrition. So I have worked for one of the largest contract manufacturers in the nutrition industry. And in the last 12 years I've got to work with some of the biggest companies that buy, you know, supplements and vitamins. And it's probably been the most rewarding thing helping people You know, find a way to a better life and better health and wellbeing, and I get to do it. So every time I make a product or help someone make a product, I really get to, I get to see their benefit from it. So I, one of my favorite stories is my mom told me one day I had given her a bunch of vitamins and she said, I have nails and my hair is longer. And I said, you know, mom, just imagine what's happening inside of you if That's what you're seeing on the outside. And she goes, oh my goodness, are my organs getting bigger? I said, no, they're getting healthier. So healthier. It was, it's been something that I enjoy doing. People, people really kind of come to me and ask, hey, what should I be taking? And helping people's always been kind of my focus. So that's kind of what I do for sales. It's, I don't ever try to close someone. I try to make someone understand what their needs are and find a solution for 'em.

Cool. And did the math major help at all in sales or?

You know what, I can't, I, so I have not done regression analysis in 30 years, but I use math every day. It's the analytical skills. So if you listen to like Alex Hormozi and he talks about his, you know, his $100 million leads and his $100 million offers and you sit there and you think about it, We learn all these skills all through life. We get them from books, we get them from failures, we get them from successes, and they build on each other and they're like compounding interest. So that math gave me a foundation that makes me very unique in a sales role because I look at things from a step-by-step analytical method opposed to here's a problem, here's my solution. I'm like, yeah, I'm like, no, here's, here's what we need to do to get you to the results you want to get to.

So you do have a kind of a process.

You know, this is, so I'm going to tell you my, so before, right after Survival, I, that was a very short-lived job. I did not survive that. I worked for Radio Shack and somebody asked me what's the best sales book I ever read. And it was the pamphlet they gave you your first day of training at Radio Shack. It took you through the steps of a sale and I sat there going, wow, this is so groundbreaking and innovative. How come people don't tell you this? And there are steps. There are, you know, there's prospecting and there's steps in prospecting. There's your introduction, there's your fact-finding, your presentation, your objection handling, your close, and then your follow-up. And in each of those, you have literally millions of micro skills that you can work on. And what I found in my life is I have choke points. There are certain things I'm really, really good at, and I tend to do those all day long. And my increase does not greatly increase on things I'm really good at. But if I want to twofold or threefold my sales, I got to work on the things I'm not good at. So prospecting is not something I've ever enjoyed. I worked for the largest contract manufacturer, so people called me. But realistically, not everybody gets that opportunity. Sometimes you have to get out and find your own leads and then, you know, reach out to them and build relationships and find ways to find out what their needs are and then find what you can provide to them that's gonna help them. And I sit there every day and I spend at least an hour of working on a micro skill that I need so I can get better at being a salesperson. And it's one of those things, it's like, like I always tell people in the post that I do on LinkedIn that my weight loss journey was not, it's not something that has a destination. It's something I'm going to do my whole entire life.

Lifestyle.

Or I will, Yeah, or I'll put it all right back on. And the same thing with sales. You don't— it's not, it's not something where I'm like, okay, I'm the best salesman now. Somebody's gonna come up with a better idea, a better way of doing things, or a different way of doing things. And it's my job to go out there, find that information, and see what I can apply to how I sell. Because that's the other big thing that I always try and tell people is everybody is unique. Everybody has a different foundation for their experiences and their knowledge. And what I try to tell them is you work with what your skills are and your benefits are and then build on those.

Yeah.

So if somebody is closing a lot more than you, number one, find out what they're doing and see what you can take from them. Number 2, Alex Hormozi says a great thing. If someone's outselling you, Find out what they're doing and do it 10 times more, and then you will outsell them. But the most important thing that I always try to tell people is you have skills that are uniquely you. And if you don't find a way to sort of utilize those, if you try to be somebody else, it's not going to come off as being— it's not going to be honest. People are going to see that. If you be who you are, you are going to be the very best version of who you are, and people will pick up on that. It's honest. And when people go, hey, you know, trust is key to sale. So going back to my survival, best sales guy I ever worked with, his name was Sonny. And Sonny was the guy who sat right in front of me in a call center. And he turned around and looked at me and he goes, you're a horrible salesman, aren't you, Brad? And I said, I'm new. And he goes, well, let's work on that. And he said, if you can make people laugh, you're halfway to them trusting you. So try and make people laugh, try and make them feel comfortable. If you can get them to trust you, you can sell them anything because they're going to believe you. And I had watched him sell somebody auto insurance and then leave the facility, take him to a Honda dealership and then sell him a car. And he did not work for Honda. That's pretty good. And I just sat there going, Okay, there's a lot I need to learn. So there are a million people like Sonny out there. There's a million people who have learned what works for them and learn from them. Try and apply what works for you, but it's not always going to work for you. I'm a funny big guy. It's not going to be the same if you are someone who's analytical or someone who really likes to dove into data. I mean, Use your skill sets and what you're good at. And when you do that, people will pick up on your honesty and you're trying to help them. And all of a sudden their barriers come down and then they'll listen to you.

And what do you see as your strongest sales characters? Is it humor or is it storytelling or?

So I, storytelling is number one. So Jim Kwik wrote a book called Limitless. And in the book he talks about how You can learn the first 10 elements of the periodic table by this story. And the amazing part is that story sticks with me about a year and a half after reading the book. I can remember those first 10 elements because I can't forget the story. If you can show somebody a story and you can make them kind of see, oh yeah, that would apply to what I'm doing or what I'm going through, they'll never be able to, you know, forget what you told them. And they will associate you with a solution opposed to you with a problem.

Because I think a lot of people when they hear story, they just translate it into pitch, right?

Because that's what they know. So a pitch is part of your presentation and that there's no way around that. You have to explain why your product is gonna work for them. But I do storytelling All the way through my relationship with a, from a prospect to a close. I mean, I talk about, you know, to get people to open up to you, you have to open up to them and you have to make that trust and that build that relationship. And the best way to do that is tell them stuff that you've gone through. And if you tell them, oh, I've done this, I'm a great sales guy and I've, you know, made millions of dollars, then they're going to look at you and go, I don't like this man. But if you say, you know what, I screwed up and got fired from Survival in the first 5 days because I was a horrible salesperson, people go, okay, I want to hear what this guy's going to say because this is probably going to be funny. And, you know, I just try to be honest with people. I learn every day. That's kind of my number one principle is I don't know everything. I try to foster a growth mindset in everything that I do. And if I can learn something from, you know, I'll listen to a brand new sales guy and I'll hear him on the phone and I'll go, wow, that was great. That was something I had never considered before. And I'll walk over and tell him, listen, what you just did, that came from who you are as a person. Build on that. That's your strength. And then I'll try and incorporate in, and a lot of times I can't because it's not my skillset or not my experience level. But I will always tell someone when they do great because I think that's the sad part about what happens in sales. Everybody tells you what you've done wrong. And if you only hear negative stuff, it's kind of like going to a bank. If you only make negative deposits, your bank account grows in the wrong direction. So I try and fill people with positives and constructive ways to improve on what they need to work on.

So, you know, after working with Sonny, what was your next mentor? Because so auto insurance is, you know, it's transactional. It's probably pretty different than what you're doing today.

Correct. So I worked with a gentleman that I was very fortunate to work with. His name was Mike Granite. And Mike— so early in my career, I worked for the World Trade Center Association, and I have an MBA in international business. And Mike was kind of my mentor on selling internationally. And he said, best business you can ever get is selling to somebody in another country because they really have to rely on you and they have to trust you and you have to come through for them. So if you can find somebody that will buy from you in Europe or South America or Middle East or Asia, that's somebody that really trusts you and they're going to be with you forever. And to this day, I have customers that I've worked with For the last 20 years, and you know they call me on my birthday. They call me on Christmas, and they're friends. And anytime you can have that sort of relationship, it's harder to do when you're selling. You know a a product like you know contract manufacturing because people are really looking for what's the best price you can get me because I have a bottom line I have to meet. But when it comes to international sales, Mike always told me. Those people are going to be your lifelong friends and they're going to help you. And, you know, I can get on the phone and call any of them and say, hey, I'm having a problem in customs in this market. What do you suggest? And not only do they suggest a solution, they go, let me make a phone call. I'll get that taken care of for you. And it's been one of the greatest things I've ever done. So Mike, we lost him a few years back, but he was probably one of the best international business people I've ever met. But international sales, is kind of doing domestic sales on steroids.

Yeah.

It's, you know, building that relationship, building that trust. I mean, because it's language, it's culture, its business practices are all different and you have to kind of interweave into that. But it makes domestic sales so much easier when I know the culture, I know the currency, I know how to do business, I know what sort of requirements they're looking at and I know what's going on day to day in that market.

And how do you stay out of the commodity trap? Because I gotta believe that your clients or prospects want to put you in there and go directly to the bottom line.

So there are gonna always be people that are, I mean, there are, there are buyers that are very, very sophisticated. They know what my competition does. They know where everybody's priced. They know what raw materials are priced at. And there's no way, you know, there's no way around that. But you have to show them. For them, it's more a question of, can you hit the price target? But can you hit the price target and have a product that's at the highest level every time that I don't have to worry about so I can just put you off my plate? But there will always be people that are going to be commodity-driven and price-driven. The ones I love to go after are the ones who have a problem they can't solve. If you can find somebody that has a problem they cannot solve, then that's where your margins come in because getting them their promotion by solving a problem that they've been facing or the company's been facing, they don't care what the cost is. They're gonna be sitting there going, no, this needs to get done. What can you do to help me get this done? And I'm like, I have A, B, and C. B is a little more expensive than A, but C, is gonna be exactly what you need, they always take the most expensive one. They're not worried about the price at that point. They're worried about a problem. And if you can find the situation, the problem, what the implications are, and you meet that need, that customer's yours.

Did you notice any corollaries when you were losing weight between being successful at losing weight and being successful in sales?

Absolutely. So discipline is discipline. And the one thing, again, I'm quoting like 27 books and I apologize. The book Mastery said, if you want to be good at something, you have to learn to love the plateaus. And losing weight, I would lose 10 pounds and I'd be at the same weight for like a week and a half. And at that point you start questioning, oh, come on, I could cheat today. I've You know, I could go and have a bag of chips or I could go and go out with some friends and have a nice dinner. And I'm like, no, that's— this plateau is my body readjusting to my weight loss. I need to keep pushing through. And then you would always push through that plateau. Sales, everything is exactly the same way. You have to learn to appreciate when you're not making progress, because that really is progress. You just don't see it. It's very minute, but all of a sudden, you know, being told no 100 times, you're learning 100 different ways not to run into that same no. So I always try to go, nope, that was a great call. It didn't come out the way I wanted it to, but I learned something and I'm going to be positive and go to the next phone call.

But you had that You know, that those subconscious feelings, the chips, going out with friends.

Oh, absolutely. So I'm, I'm an avid believer in conscious and subconscious mind, and I think we have all of those habits. Again, Atomic Habits by James Clear. You know, those are, those are programmed into us since we were kids. Right.

And eating's a survival impulse.

It is. And honestly, dopamine is a very, very strong chemical. It's why people do a lot of what they do. And having to find dopamine from other things that are positive can take you a lifelong journey. But when I started seeing, hey, I get the same rush from going to the gym and working out and seeing advancements with my bench press or my bicep curl, that was for Dave. Legle, who would love that joke. He, it's one of those things where when you see the progress from positive things, you can start replacing and start, you know, unwiring a lot of those negative things that had that same dopamine release.

Because I'm using weight loss as a metaphor for the complex sale.

Correct.

It is. Because you start off, say, 10 pounds just to round it off.

Yeah.

Second week, third week, fourth week, you got 5 pounds down and you're like, somebody calls and you want to go out for happy hour.

Correct.

And, and the, the point being that there's all these things that pop in when you're not getting the results you want with your weight loss.

Did you ever think, oh, I can't lose weight, or this doesn't work on me, or my body type's unique, or—

So, so I was, I was a swimmer. When I was in college and I graduated and I put on 60 pounds and I felt really not, I didn't, I didn't like how I, I felt.

Yeah.

And I kept telling myself, well, I was a swimmer, so my body had set its metabolism at such a low rate that, you know, I can't lose weight and there's nothing I can do. And I'm like, that makes total sense to me. And I started believing that. And I was flying home from Pittsburgh after a horrible golf outing, and I was on the plane and I was looking and it was an article discussing Mike Phelps and his commitment and how he trained. And I looked at him and I'm like, wait a minute, he's, he's not swimming anymore. How come he doesn't weigh 60 pounds more? And I go, maybe it's not the swimming. Maybe that was just an excuse I gave myself.

Yeah.

And I started going, okay, I need to, I need to find out a different way of thinking about this. And so I said, how many, how many people do I know that swam have kept the weight off? And all of a sudden it was more than, than 1 or 2. It was everyone. I'm like going, okay, so I'd just been lying to myself for 30 years. And at that Yeah. So I could, I could, and you know what it came out to me is I would, I would diet great during the week, weekends I would, I would lose 3 pounds during the week, gain 5 pounds over the weekend, and I would just do that over and over again. And over 30 years you put on 60 pounds. So all I really needed to do was change my weekends. So I think the same thing happens with sales. Is you do— I see where you're going. I caught on. It only took me about half an hour, but hey, I'm bright. No, I, yeah, because I will call people and I'll be told no and I'll be told no and they'll say, you know, this doesn't work for us. This doesn't work for us. But I've learned that out of all the people that I reach out to at any moment in time, at most there's 5% that want to buy my product. 95% are potential, but they don't need my product today. They have other issues they're worried about. And if I keep hitting those 95%, I'll feel like I'm not doing my job well. And then once I started realizing it, it's just a numbers game. And if I have 100 people that I'm talking to and 5 of them can buy and I have to find those 5, that's challenging. But if I change my lead base to 1,000 and now I have 50 people that need to buy from me in any given day, now it makes it much more enjoyable to go after prospecting and reaching out to people and saying, hey, by the way, I wanted to let you know of something great we just did. Or hey, I read an article you posted and I just wanted to say hey. And when I've done that, I would say at least one every 50 touches, somebody comes back and goes, you know, I was looking for your email the other day because I have an idea for that thing we were talking about. And I go, you know what? I am right here and I'm open for your ideas. How can I help you? And, you know, it's just a matter of not getting frustrated. It's nothing to do with me and it's not personal when someone doesn't want to buy. They're not saying, Brad, you're a bad person, or Brad, you can't lose weight. It's more the question of I'm not ready right now. And that doesn't mean it's not gonna work.

Well, also in a time-based sale where it has to be right at the right time, right?

Yeah, correct. And you have to, you know, there's a, you know, we make our own luck. If you're sending out 10 emails a day, your chances of getting to what you need to get done are very, very limited. You send out 200 emails a day, your chances go up 20 times. So, you know, it's totally up to you how much effort you want to put in is how much, you know, you know, if you don't like the crops you're growing, it's probably the seeds you're sowing. So if you want to have better crops, plant better seeds.

Yeah, because I see myself and other salespeople kind of coming up with those rationalizations like we do with our weight loss, whether you're a runner or a swimmer or you're Your DNA is different than everybody else's and doesn't adhere to calorie restriction.

Exactly. I'm magic. That was kind of the one I was going with. I'm the only one in the world who can't lose weight.

Or, you know, I've heard reps say, oh, no one can sell this product. Well, there's a company there that has 20 salespeople. They didn't do that on pure speculation, right? That somebody wants that product or needs it.

Yeah. So So, and, and a lot of what I do now is exactly that. It's, it's finding a use for a product. So a lot of people, people, people don't know it. People, it's new to them. So when I go and talk to them, they're only going, I've never heard of this, and say, that's why it's innovative. It's that good. And they go, okay, but it, I still have to solve that need. Is it sugar reduction? Is it, you know, increasing shelf life, you know, sustainability? Is it, making the consumer feel more comfortable with what they're reading on their ingredients labels. You know, I have to find what that need is. So if I don't do my job, if I don't do my fact finding and find out what that customer's facing, then I'm, I'm never gonna sell 'em. If I sit there and go, it's like, what's the old saying? Don't sell the drill, sell the hole. And if I don't know what the hole is, then you're absolutely correct. You're never gonna sell the drill. There are a lot of drills. I sell a solution to people. I find out what their needs are, and then I show them, if you do this, this, and this, it's going to work better for you, and you are going to end up having better sales. You're going to keep your customers longer. They're going to be happy and feel good about themselves. That's my goal.

And what's your professional driver? You know, it doesn't sound like it's purely money.

It sounds like it's more intellectual, more I think if you go after money, you're in trouble. I think that I was driving, I live in a very nice part of Southern California and I was driving on a hill going to a client and this Ferrari passed me and I looked over at it and I said, yeah, I'd rather have the Ferrari in my head. I would rather have my knowledge and my experience be my value. I don't want to park it on a, you know, on a street when I go in to meet with a customer. So my driver is always to be a better version of who I am, to be better than I was yesterday. And for the products I'm selling now, I really get to make the world better. I am taking a material that is being produced and I'm making the company go to zero waste. And that means nothing is going into landfills. That means this amazing product is being used 100%. And I feel really good about that because, you know, I did the money thing. I was very successful. I sold lots and lots of stuff, but at the end of the time, you know, you're gonna, what, buy another Rolex? You know, I mean, how many Rolexes can you wear at one time? And I wear a Fitbit now, so it totally makes, you know, all those seem stupid. I would rather be happy every morning I get up with what I have done the day before and know that's my genesis to make this day a better day.

And do you have a system to keep track of these micro skills? But because I really like that, you know, the classic dissecting a problem into tiny pieces, tinier pieces, tinier pieces, and develop something that's really simple.

So I have notebooks all over my workplace. I have them right here. I keep notes on my phone and I always sit down and go, hey, why do I not have the type of leads that I want for this opportunity? And I go, well, because I don't know what the opportunity is. Then I go, okay, then I need to break down why what the opportunities are, who those players are, how you talk to those players. And then I kind of work through those choke points going, okay, then I get to a new choke point. And one day my choke point's gonna be, I don't have enough material to sell to everybody. And then I win because I've sold everything that I have. And that's my goal is to be—

You kind of gamify it in your mind.

Yeah, I am going to sell everything that I possibly have.

And do you have a hobby that kind of works with this, like video games or—

it sounds like a video game. I'm a third-degree martial artist. So I do martial— yeah. So the greatest thing about martial arts is when you're my size learning how to do a jump spinning roundhouse kick, you fall a lot and look really stupid. But what ends up happening, you do it enough times, you start looking like you think you're supposed to look. And so I fall a lot in sales. I fall a lot in dieting. I fall a lot in martial arts, but it's not how you fall, it's how you get up and keep going. And that's the one thing I've learned through all of the stuff I've done is you're going to fall, you're going to fail. That's how we learn. It's how you get up and go, okay, what did I learn? What's my hot wash? What can I take from that? What can I do better next time? And then move forward. And if you do that every time and don't get discouraged and don't take anything personally, sales is fun.

Well, I mean, martial arts is a great metaphor for it because it's repetition with tiny nuances of improvement.

Correct. Exactly. And it's funny, you know, we learn, we like, going back to my thing earlier, my mathematics was the foundation. My martial arts is my foundation. My swimming was my foundation. Getting up when you're, you know, a 10-year-old, getting into a swimsuit, going to a pool when it's raining, and then doing 2 hours of laps. I mean, you learn a level of dedication that, you know, most kids don't get. And I always sit there when people say, I'm going to put my daughter into gymnastics, and I go, oh, that kid's going to be an animal when she's my age, because that is such a great way to learn discipline. But it's, you have to learn discipline. It's a muscle. You have to build it every day and you have to sit there and go, there'll be days I want to, you know, stay in bed and not do it. But nothing gets accomplished staying in bed. Everything happens good in your life as soon as you get up and start going. And, you know, great ideas without action are useless. Mediocre ideas with action and development become million-dollar ideas. So it's the action and the development of what your skill sets are. That's where things really change. So those people who have products, they say, oh, you can't sell this. I go, no, you haven't learned how to sell it yet. You know, what was Einstein's quote? He goes, no, I learned 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb. You just need another 999 ways to learn how to not sell that product until you're selling it every day.

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

You know, I'm very active on LinkedIn. I would love to just have anybody who wants to reach out and talk to me. I sit down and help anybody who, you know, who wants help that, you know, I've had people reach out to me and say, hey, I'm trying to change roles. You just changed roles. You know, what did you learn? And I will sit down with you, call you and tell you what I've learned and how to maybe role play it out. I just wanna— You know, you never know the people that you help one day are going to end up being great customers from you. So I help everybody I can because who knows what's going to happen in the future. I might end up working for that person.

You heard the rationalization, that journey of change, because that change, certainly weight loss is a great example. It's a lot like the process we go through sales. There's a simple equation that but takes a lot of repetitions, and the result doesn't or isn't visible for weeks, sometimes even months, before you really start to feel the difference. But you have to push through that journey. The denial. Oh, I don't need to lose weight. Or, oh, I'll start next week. Remember that diet that starts next week or tomorrow? Or maybe I'll fast tomorrow. And then when you start it, you go, well, maybe I can have one cookie. A cookie never hurt anybody. What's a piece of cake? No one ever died from eating a piece of cake. The rationalization, the denial, and that's why most people fail at diets and we need pharmaceuticals to reduce our appetite. And we, we say, oh, dieting doesn't work for me because I'm a swimmer. I've had friends tell me, oh, my DNA, we're oblivious to diets, or this is just My body type. Now, that there's some truth to all of those, a tiny bit of truth, but we know the equation is calorie deficit. If you have a calorie deficit, the calorie— your body's going to burn more than it intakes, and eventually it'll show up on the scale. It may not at first because of water weight or homeostasis. Your body is readjusting. But eventually it does show up. Takes a lot longer than you think, but it does. And it's that pushing through those false beliefs, the innate denial, and it's really homeostasis. Check out homeostasis. It's something that kind of surfaced in my life and my awareness a couple years ago because it's Embedded in us that, uh, for nature, natural reasons, we do not want or like big changes in our life, uh, whether it's weight loss, rest, work, anything. Our subconscious and our nervous system wants to bring it back to a certain level. And you'll see this in all aspects of people's lives. And we can see it more easily in others than we can in ourself, because ourself, we have to deal with what's going on in our mind, the feelings that we're processing. Uh, and this is really what I'm seeing with salespeople because Sales— what happens is our subconscious is pushing us to survive, meaning that we need an order, we need meetings, we need to justify our existence within the company. So we need the outcome, and we assume that to get that outcome is just a straight line from where we are to where we want to be. But that is rarely the case. If people come to us, that's different. There's already interest and we can talk about the product and the features and how it works and how it's different and how it's better. But when we're going cold outbound, we can't go direct, meaning we can't be talking about the product and how amazing it is because there's no Reason for them to listen. There's no reason for them to care. We have to build up a know, like, and trust relationship with them. Because think about when you open your inbox or your voicemail or you pick up the phone, we have caller ID. We see who the email's from. We know people want something. How do we get around that? Now, There's 3 doors into any person or company. There's the front door where you just go and say, hello, I'm Brian. This is what I do. This is why you need it. What do you think? It's the pitch. There's the back door where we go, okay, you don't know me, but you know my friend Joe and Joe knows you. So have Joe introduce me and vouch for me. That's the referral. It works. It's pretty effective, but it's insanely limiting. You can only do, what, a handful of them a quarter? That's the back door. The side door is what I teach. Everyone's going to the front door. Some people have the back door, but everyone can use the side door. The side door Is knowing how psychology and human nature works and hacking it. It's basically filling in the chambers of the little spindle on the vault, and you're basically just okay. A little to the left, boop boop boop. A little to the right, boop boop boop. A little to the left, boop boop boop. Click. Open the safe. It's the side door. The side door, it's not a secret, it's a skill. Because everyone thinks it's a secret where you just have a subject line and a call to action. No, it's a skill. It's counterintuitive. It takes a little bit of pushing through, uh, denial and rationalization. to get it to work. The challenge in Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting is not the amount of work. It's the pushing through the counterintuitiveness. This is what surprised me when I taught it online. When I could do it in person, I would have 2 days with the people. And so it was much more like the plumber and the mentor analogy where I go, this is how it works. This is why it works. Let me show you how to do it. And you had dedicated time and the manager there mandating the course. So people were a little bit more bought in. And I find it different that when somebody invests their own money in it, they're not— they're more judgmental and that they're not able to push through it. And this is the challenge of the new smart. See, the new smart is people have access to the best teachers in the world today online. Every major expert has got either a course directly, indirectly, some free content, content that you can construct into your own teaching. But it requires the student to push themselves through these stages, to be their own Um, mentor in a sense. Even if the person is helping them through the process, the student has the responsibility to ingest and apply it. And that's where it falls down, because salespeople are looking for the front door, the secrets, not the skills. And I got to tell you, there's no secrets in sales. There really aren't. It's all out there. The skill isn't out there. The secrets are. So quit looking for the secrets and build the skills. Knowing the secret does you no good because you've got to develop it into a skill. Everyone has access to Chris Rock's jokes. They're on, they're on Netflix, they're on YouTube. Write them down, try and present them. You will not become a professional comedian. It'll take you 5 years of practicing those jokes or similar jokes to even justify a fee for being a comedian. Now, sales doesn't take that long. But it does take those reps, much like what you heard Brad talk about as far as the martial arts.

Kicking—

we can all kick. Anybody who has a leg can kick, but you can't kick like a martial artist. And that's what Bruce Lee said. I don't worry about the person— I'm going to mess up the quote because I'm not prepared to say it, but— Who Who? His point was, I worry about the person who practiced the kick 10,000 times because it's gonna become a really powerful kick. That's what we have to do in sales. And that's why I kind of talk about brevity pitch a lot because in our head, we are great raconteurs, storytellers. But when we open our mouth, we're kind of ah ba ba ba ba ba, and it doesn't come through smooth and silky. It comes through rocky and all at once and or in spurts. This is what we need to do to become great at sales. If you like secrets, go find them. I want to focus on skills because skills stick with you. Skills become your assets. Skills become the generator of your income.

That's it.

Thanks for listening. Check out the Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers podcast. If you see my stuff fly by on LinkedIn, give it a little like, a little comment, a little share. Tell somebody about the show. Thanks for listening.