HOW TO BUILD AN A-PLAYER MINDSET AND WIN MORE DEALS IN B2B SALES & SELLING

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So confidence in sales is pretty important, isn't it?

Just a little bit. Just a little bit. I think it definitely takes time to build up that confidence, but you can read right through it, I believe, in some of those meetings. If you don't have the confidence or you're kind of stuttering around your words or you didn't do the preparation, The prospect can kind of see right through that. But that's only one side of it is how do you have confidence in the meetings? But what about outside of that with some of the not so glamorous side preparing and beating up deals? So it's interesting to think about confidence because it's not just us doing this presentation and podcast right now. It's other sides too when you're not in front of the customer.

Yeah, because I've been trying to dissect this B player trap because I think it's probably the top issue in sales where people get stuck because they think what it is is they don't know someone else's tip or trick, when it really is they're overly confident off-field and very confident on-field. And I think at least I and all the salespeople I've seen go through this growth path Where at first they're kind of insecure, nervous, anxious, talk too much, listen too little, blind it with happy ears. And they make it through that first couple years and they build up confidence, which is good. But what they forget is that off-field, when they're sitting around thinking about their deals and what to do next, They're trying to apply the same confidence there, which is a mistake. So it's kind of this paradox. And all of a sudden, when they're not having the success that they previously had, they're still confident and they're like, well, it can't be me because I did good here. But they're not realizing that it's changed. It's not the same.

And you have to, so you have to kind of regulate that confidence, which is not an easy thing to do.

It's not easy to do, but if you don't do it and you're looking at your deals, you're probably not going to do anything proactively until something goes wrong and then it's too late. Yeah. Or someone else tells you and then you think they're criticizing you. I think the best reps are very confident because confidence is the foundation because you can't really be curious unless you're confident and you can't be empathetic unless you're curious. So it's this domino effect. But when you're off field, when you're looking at a deal, you want to be very Almost paranoid's kind of a strong word, but you want to think about what could go wrong because you want to prevent it from happening. So if you're not thinking about it, you can't prevent it.

This is such a great topic and it's so relevant to what I'm doing now because I really try to have a positive mindset, the growth mindset, and that helps me continue to think take things to the next level. It's a lot of the content I talk about. It's a lot of the sales stuff I'm trying to get in front of customers. And that's all great and you have to have that. But at some point, it doesn't matter how positive your mindset is, whatever growth mindset you're doing. If you don't put in the work and dissect deals like what you're talking about, it doesn't really matter how positive. I mean, you can be the most positive person in the world, but if you don't have a process and you're not beating up deals, you're still going to get eaten alive if you're selling anything. Worthwhile and these more complex industries. So I go back and forth where I'm like, am I being too negative on all these deals? I'm like, all I'm doing is thinking of all the bad things that can happen and all these mistakes that I may or may not be making. And then other people, when I'm talking to them, they're like, man, you need to stay more positive. It's like, I thought you were like all Mr. Growth Mindset person, then you're beating up these deals. So it kind of puts me off. I'm like, oh man, am I being really negative when I'm looking at deals. But then the way you're explaining it, I think you almost have to. Also, if you want to be really aggressive and take things to the next level and not get complacent and keep having big numbers year after year, you almost have to have that kind of relentless mentality where you don't, uh, you know, you don't stop prospecting, you don't stop beating up deals. So I, I found myself— it's kind of like an internal challenge. It's that paradox you're talking about where I'm trying to exude this for my business and what I'm doing when I'm selling, but then I also have to be kind of more perfectionistic and maybe more negative on, on the deals of everything that can go wrong and saying, well, we did, we did this wrong, we did that wrong, we need to change this. And it can kind of come off negative. So it's, it's probably a challenge that I have. I gotta continue to navigate it.

It is, it's a huge challenge because a lot of people want to have this steady state. Well, that's nice, but that's not gonna be very effective in sales. And to really tear apart a deal, you have to consider what the competition's doing, what their leadership team is doing, what's happened in the past, and how do you prevent it. Because waiting for it to go wrong means you have to repair it, and repair in sales is near impossible. Oh, well, the CEO says not this year. Now what do you do?

Wait till next year.

Yeah, wait till next year. I'll check in in 2024 or '25. That's not a great strategy. But if you know that they're going to talk to the CEO, oh well, pushing it off is a high probability. Has the CEO heard of this before? Do they understand it's already a problem? And if you hear the, I don't know, I don't know, oh, well, maybe we should work on that together. Because the only people more optimistic and overconfident than salespeople are clients. The number one trap I hear in the Complex Sale course is, oh, my champion loves it, wants a proposal. And then it died. Brian, what do you think happened? I go, well, they got all excited and they want to get paid, get money for it. The person hears about it for the first time and all of a sudden they're like, let's wait, let's check it out. Don't we have something internally that can do this? The deal starts all over again or is dead. And the client doesn't feel like telling you because nobody likes to deliver bad news. Nobody likes to get into the objection handling cycle. So they just don't call you back. So you think it's still going, end of quarter's coming and nobody's admitting it, including you, until it doesn't come in. So understanding how to pull a deal apart, understanding how a deal typically works requires some real inspection. And you may think your manager's being harsh when he's asked tough questions— who's the decision maker, what's the criteria, all that stuff— but they're trying to analyze the deal and help you see what possibly could go wrong and how to prevent it.

You have to have some tough conversations with yourself. You have to be real with, with what's going on and There's going to be that game you're probably playing with your manager and what you put in the pipeline. But if you can find somebody, whether it's a manager that you trust or one of the top reps that's willing to beat up the deals with you, I think it's great not only to do it yourself, you need to have your own system to what you're talking about, but also get a second opinion from someone you trust that can look at it too from an outsider's perspective because you get kind of sucked into that fog of war in the deal sometimes and you you lose sight of stuff no matter how much you look at it, or actually the more you look at it, maybe sometimes it gets worse. So if someone else can come and help you too, I think that's a great thing. So I know when I worked at some bigger companies, I had some kind of mentors that were just beast sales guys and they would help me a ton with some of the bigger deals. You can't do it for every single opportunity, but figure out whatever your threshold is. If it's any deal over $50K, whatever it is, and do it for those. And then the smaller ones you can kind of get away with some of the, you know, not deep diving it as much and probably getting away with more mistakes. But yeah, I think you set a threshold, try to find an accountability partner to, with the deal, someone you trust. And it's, it's good to get the outsider's perspective as well.

And I think a lot of people don't want to feel that insecurity. It took them so long to build it up, to both have external evidence and internal confidence They don't want to consider anything less. I see it all the time on my posts. I make a point, and then in the comments they prove that they didn't get the point, but they're adamant that they got it. And sometimes I put a snide comment like, so much for listening, or salespeople are the best listeners ever. Just to make myself feel better. And most of the time I just ignore it, but it just proves that this is everywhere. Instead of them saying like, did you mean this? Or I never thought of it that way. Or how's this different than this? Some kind of inquiry to understand it deeper. Instead of just their reaction to it.

People take feedback personally, especially if it's negative feedback. And that was something I struggled with for a long time. So when you're beating up these deals, you're going to get some tough comments on what you may or may not have done wrong. And I know at times that can, that can be offensive to people. I know me, I was kind of walking on water. I thought I was getting promoted every year, like always making things happen. And I was doing well, but I also had a lot of things I could get better at to really keep taking it to the next level. And I didn't want to hear those real conversations from some of the executives on what I could improve on. And that kind of hurt me at the time because I didn't want to listen to the feedback. So with those deals, you don't want to hear what's going wrong. You don't want to hear that there could be a possibility that it's not going to close. or some things you have to do differently. But if you don't do that, then to your point, trying to repair it is a disaster and a nightmare, and it's rarely ever going to work, or it's going to burn you out if you try to keep doing that all the time. So if you can be open to feedback and be more accountable, realize that you do have some happy years and, and try to navigate that, it's, it's, uh, that's where you want to be. But I think trying to separate it gets really challenging because you have to have that confidence if you're doing these bigger time sales and then how do you kind of be a little more real with yourself outside of that? And it's not an easy thing to navigate, but it's, I think the feedback piece when I started being open to feedback more, that helped me a lot with this, that I, I don't take it as personally.

Yeah.

Because I, it may not be correct. It may be, it may be attacking, who knows? It may be arrogant or from Mount High to the minions. But that doesn't mean it's not true, or it might have some truth to it. I, I, over the weekend I was at this party and my friend's kid, who's freshman in college, I've known him since he was born and we used to play catch together. And his dad asked me to help him with his pitching because he wanted to be a pitcher. I had pitched early in Little League. And in college, he pitched a no-hitter. So for a pitcher, that is like a hole-in-one. It's a— it's an anomaly. And at the party, all his teammates were outside drinking and partying it up. And I asked his mom, I go, where's Jerry? Oh, he's up, up in his room watching this video. I go, can I go say hi? He goes, yeah, go say hi. So I go upstairs, I knock on his door, and he's in there watching— not the no-hitter, he's watching this guy who had a home run off of him. And he's playing the pitch back and forth, back and forth. I go, why are you doing that? He goes, that's never going to happen again. And that mindset Is the difference between a performer and somebody who's just lucky. He's looking for every little inch. He wasn't beating himself up about it. He was trying to find out how to do it better. That's the mindset we have to have with sales, but we have to have it before the pitch is thrown. Too much in sales, we wait until the deal is dead or dying before we take action, and it looks desperate and contrived, and it usually has to do with huge discounts or concessions. But it doesn't have to be that way. I don't know how many QBRs you've been through, but I remember, you know, at these startups you'd see the reps present the same deals at every QBR. And I used to look around, I go, is this déjà vu or what? Same room, same person, same presentation 90 days later. And they're forecasted and then they slip and— but they got bigger. That's, that's— and the deals never close. And they're not looking for why the deal isn't closing. They're looking for the silver bullet that'll get it to close. Talk to Mr. Big Cheese, offer up this new feature, give them this thing. And they do all that and it still doesn't close.

I love the athlete comparison because that example is really good. But if you're in a bigger game or bigger Championship, I mean, you only get one shot that year. So if you lose, you make mistakes, you're not gonna be able to come back until a year from now if it's like towards the end of that cycle. So I heard someone say there is no regular season in sales because once you lose a deal, if it's a bigger deal, enterprise type deal, I mean, you may never get a shot again with that account, or maybe it may take 2 or 3 years to get another shot. So once you lose it, it's like boom. So if you think of it like an athlete like that, That pitcher who's not beating himself up, but he's realizing what mistake he did make, and nothing's ever going to work 100% of the time. So how do you kind of come up with a process to dissect your meetings or your opportunities and your deals that's effective for you? And I think that most people don't do that. And all these other professions, because I mean salespeople can make doctor money, lawyer money, CEO money, but there's no annual certifications or continuous training or anything compared to all these other professions. And if people would think of it more like that, of like, what can you do weekly, monthly, annually to continue to get better? And doing these postmortems and beating up deals, having some type of process. But I think because there's nothing consistent across the industry, it probably makes it tougher. But, you know, like your course or whatever it may be can really help people and keep thinking of yourself like an athlete because you're not going to get another chance once you make that mistake, depending on what type of deal it is. You're not gonna be able to recover or it's gonna take you years to get back into that account and you're gonna have to go find some other account. So it's, if you can think of it like that, and I, I use that regular season, there's no regular season in sales. And that just reminds me all the time is like, I don't, I don't wanna kill myself here and like beat myself up too much, but I also am not gonna get another chance with this account. So I have to make sure I prevent everything as best I can.

Yeah, because the time is going by, it doesn't stop. You can't reverse it. It's a continuum. And if you mess up, you can't go back. So that's why it's a prevention profession. And what I don't like about, like, the degree analogy, because doctors don't stop learning, right? They go through internship, And then they, they're usually partnered with a more advanced doctor. They work for them and they start to learn. I've got another friend who's a world-class chef. He's got the nicest restaurant in the town I live in. And what does he do on his vacation? He goes to Europe and he stays at the nicest hotels, not for the hotel. He works the kitchen.

Wow.

So he contacts the chef and you think the chef is there? No, no, you're not coming in here and stealing my secrets. Here's the difference between chefs and salespeople. They want him in there.

Why?

Because they become a better chef when they work with someone who's equally or better than them. And he's self-taught. He didn't go to cooking school, self-taught. And you say, well, how hard is it to cook? Depends how well you want to cook, right? We all have microwaves and Hot Pockets, but that's not exactly what a lot of people will pay for.

That's, that's my cooking. Don't call me out too much.

But what if salespeople had that mindset? Here's the mindset of salespeople. I'm not telling you what I do. You're an idiot. I'm a genius, right? Or I've been doing this n number of years. Okay, how's your W-2 looking? And what happened to that deal?

Oh, that was politics.

Well, that's what a deal is. It's nothing but politics. It's people. Well, what are they doing? They're deflecting instead of sitting down and going, pulling the dish apart. Because let's face it, how hard can cooking be? Every great chef in the world puts all their secrets out in their cookbook. Why? Because that's just a tiny bit of it. Everyone thinks that's the whole thing, but there's nuances to it. And you learn this by teaching other people that even the simplest thing could be misinterpreted or Done a little bit off, and if you don't have the mindset, that chef mindset, think if you had that and you hung around other great salespeople. Talk to me about your deal. How did it work? What did you run up against? How did you prevent it from getting stuck? Most of them, they come from a big company and they go, "Well, I made this amazing call," and they heard about my company, which everyone knows about and has standardized on for ten years, and they were interested. interested in this new product. So I did an executive half Nelson and we got it closed. Was that really selling? You happen to be on the rocket ship going to Mars. You're not the, you're not Elon Musk, you're just a busboy. I think too many people give themselves way too much credit and not enough blame. And this is not about beating yourself up. It's about having a mindset of constant improvement.

You are the average of the 5 people you hang around with most. So that's outside of work for sure. But if you think of that with work, like what if those 5 people you're hanging around with most are the top sales reps at your company or another company or friends in the industry? So if you're surrounding yourself with those people that are crushing it, eventually that's probably gonna lift you up as well. And I think Having that giving mentality, because I don't mind helping people or showing them what I'm doing or dissecting deals or getting someone else to do that with me. Because a lot of, unfortunately, even if you tell people all this stuff or those cookbooks, no one actually, a lot of times people don't follow up with it. So it's like, who cares about giving away your advice? I mean, as long as it's not proprietary, but if you're helping people and giving them that feedback, I don't mind doing it at all because unfortunately most people don't even follow up with it anyway. So I don't mind having that giving mentality, but also being kind of a little more humble and admitting to your mistakes and sharing that with people and being open with it. But I think surrounding myself with the right people has been a key thing too, whether I was working for a big company or smaller company. Like if you lock yourself in with some of these elite people that are, you can see they're moving up or they're doing big things. Like that's the people you want to learn from and kind of tie yourself with and have a little bit of a giving mentality. You don't have to give all your time away and, and just be a little humble with mistakes. I, I used to not want to admit any mistakes or blame whatever the politics you were talking about, but if you admit to some of your shortcomings, I think people respect that and it helps you get better too.

Because if you don't admit to it, how are you going to prevent it the next time?

You're not, you're just gonna be blindly confident like we were talking about at the beginning.

Right. And do you just want to be a passenger on the bus or you want to be the driver of the bus? And when I talked to the chef who, he put out 2 books and I go, what's the feedback when you, you talk to somebody who read the book? They all ask the same thing. You left out an ingredient, didn't you? He goes, I didn't leave out any ingredients. Then they, the next one is you left out a step. I didn't leave out any steps because what do people do? They buy the cookbook. All his sources for every ingredient is in the back. So you can buy all the ingredients from the store, farm, whatever. All the utensils are listed. Every step is made out, but the dish doesn't come out the same. Why? The talent is different. That's the difference we have in sales. But what do people do? They blame the book. The book is wrong. And this is natural. It's human. When I was a software developer, I used to blame the compiler. And my manager goes, yeah, 1 out of 1,000 times the compiler's wrong. 99% of the time the engineer's wrong. And that was an epiphany to me because I changed my mindset. I assumed I was wrong. And when I was in sales, the biggest epiphany I had was I assumed I was wrong. I changed my mindset from something else. It was me. I didn't do a step. I moved too fast. I was overconfident. I was pushing. I didn't talk to enough people. I believed what the champion was telling me, even though it didn't make logical sense to me. And I went along with it. Now, is that my fault? Yes, it's my fault if I want the deal. The objective is to get the deal, not just to make a friend. Yes, you want to be friendly, but the objective is not to make a friend. When I made that change, all of a sudden the ownership and the responsibility pointed at me, which I have control over. I don't have control over my champion, the product, my manager, anybody at the customer side. I have influence over them. But not control. And all of a sudden, I started doing the right things, preparing like crazy for meetings, keeping track of what typically goes wrong. How did this deal compare to good deals and bad deals? Was it a better match for a good deal, or did it look more like the deals that don't close?

Yeah.

My engineer was like, you're driving yourself crazy. And it's like, well, you get paid on the deals that close. How much do you get paid on the deals that don't close, even though you have a better base than I do? He goes, keep driving yourself crazy.

Yeah, it puts more pressure on yourself, but pressure is a privilege. And if you can make a certain amount of money, then if you can navigate that Emotional regularity with confidence, it makes a ton of sense. So going back to the beginning, having confidence in the meetings in front of the customers in general with what you're doing, obviously that makes a ton of sense. But being a little more perfectionistic, I don't wanna say pessimistic, but beating up your deals to your point, I think is, is really where, what a gap for most salespeople. And that was similar to me as I'm still in that process. But I think you can look at it as a negative thing, like, oh, why am I being so negative on this deal? But it's not a negative thing. It's like, hey, I want to make money. I want to close this deal. I don't just want to be friends with these people, even though they probably like me in one way or the other. But this is going to help me close more deals and make more money and keep my sanity. So a lot of times you get these meetings and people don't prepare the right way. So it's like, why do all that work to get a meeting if you don't prepare for all the stuff that's going to happen? It doesn't make any sense. So It's like you just expect yourself to perform and be confident. But if you don't prepare on the back end, everything you're talking about, it doesn't make any sense.

And to become great at sales, the best way is to model somebody who already has become good at sales and to hear other people who have become great at sales and the journey that they're going through, the false beliefs, The misnomers, the mindset issues, all of the stuff that gets in our way between where we are and the income that we want. Let's face it, we're in sales because we're money motivated. We're competitive. We want to be better every day than we were yesterday. And how do we do that? Just really, you know, read a book, listen to a podcast. That's good. Good start. I like it. But then you have to take action. And then you want both tactical and strategic ideas. You want mindset. You want strategy. You want to understand how companies buy. You want really deep content and examples, case studies, so that you can learn from other people's mistakes.

That's what I'm here for.

I'm here for you to learn from my mistakes. And boy, do I got a lot of them. So go to b2brevenue.com, sign up for the courses. There's 2 major ones. Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting fills up your pipeline, gets rid of that problem of, oh, I don't have enough leads. I don't have enough meetings. It gets those conversations started with the people you want to talk to. Now, it's not about a pitch. It's about a conversation. Now, everybody thinks of conversations when you're talking or you're online at the same time or you're on the phone or Zoom at the same time. That's not a conversation. A conversation is when the client is talking about what they care about, what they're interested in. And that is what we call qualification, where we can sense where are they and how do we build up that curiosity in Into interest, into urgency to get a deal. And these are skills that we need. They're lifelong skills that we need in sales. And then how do we get a deal closed? Yes, anyone can take an order, but what if they don't know how to get it done? You got a new account where you're trying to get a big change done internally. What are the issues? If you're not planning that through, Odds are it's not going to get done no matter how much your champion wants it. So winning the complex sale solves that problem for you. Why waste all your time on these false positives or these no decisions? Because they don't pay very well. They pay 0.0. What you want to do is pay a lot. So sign up today. Invest in yourself. You're the asset in sales. Quit waiting for somebody else to approve it or train you. See if you can get it expensed. That should be your first sales obstacle. Your first sales challenge is how do you get your company to pay for it? Just go down, tell your manager you want to do this. I put a little example email in the show notes right below here. Swipe up and take a look at that. And if they won't, you got to ask yourself, why won't you? Why won't you? Oh, it takes time. Well, you work all day. You're working wrong all day. Why not improve that? There's the time right there. Oh, the money. Brian, it's money. Well, you make more money if you become better in sales. And Start the Conversation pays for itself the first week because you're gonna get at least 2 meetings just learning from the very basics of it. Closing the Complex Sale will pay for itself 100 times over. Students in it tell me it's the best money they ever spent because they now have control over their deals. And it doesn't end. Some give up. Some give up after they win their first deal and they think they've got enough. No, come back. Come back, keep going. You can get 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. And 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.