HOW TO BUILD AN UNSTOPPABLE MINDSET IN B2B SALES AND SELLING

Look at other salespeople, the people you work with, competitors, or people in your company, or even clients, and ask yourself, is it that they don't know something, or is it that they can't or have challenges with their emotions? And sales, on our side of it, it's constant. Every day is essentially a roller coaster. You get a deal, you lose a deal, someone ghosts you, someone takes an account away from you, your comp plan changes, uh, the weather doesn't cooperate. All of these obstacles, all of these unforeseen challenges, or maybe you just don't feel good. You wake up, didn't have a good night's sleep. All this stuff affects us, but we really don't pay much attention to it today, certainly not on the sales side. Yeah, you see the silly-ass memes on LinkedIn or wherever about kindness and everything, and even people who used to swear like crazy on LinkedIn now are talking about kindness.

Okay, whatever.

My point here is that We overlook the management and focus of our brain. And this is something that we're not really taught because who would teach us? Maybe our parents weren't good at it. Emotional regulation, emotional focus, whatever you want to call it. Today we're in the podcast, it's called mindfulness just because It's the only term that people probably would know. People think of it as meditation or something, or getting your head straight, or clearing your mind, or all of this stuff becomes overlooked in sales. And I kind of, uh, ignored it too when I got into it, but I used to drive around and listen to motivational tapes. That shows you where I am on the spectrum. And it was helpful. It got me focused. And I think one of the pivot points in my career was— I don't know if you remember Dennis Waitley. I ordered his tapes and he talked about, uh, it was the psychology of winning. And there was nothing really— and today, by today's standards, nothing really new about it. But it was really about personal responsibility, personal control. And this became kind of an epiphany when I was early, early, early 20s, where it was like, quit blaming other people, take responsibility for yourself. You have influence and control over your emotions. You're the creator of them. All of a sudden, my life got A lot better because I quit blaming other people. I first said, how— or asked myself, how am I responsible for this? How do I have control or influence over this? Why am I letting other things, things that I don't want, need, or desire, modify my focus, my life, my motivation? We're going to get into this in the discussion today. I think you're going to like it. It's something that everyone can work on because we all want to get up and be motivated and excited and passionate about what we do. But we're always looking outside of ourselves for that instead of— because it's not out there. Sorry, it's in here. And that's not just Philosophical BS. That's, that's the reality. Once you understand that you're the creator and the controller of it, that's when your life starts to become yours instead of someone else's. What do I hear all the time on LinkedIn? It's like, oh, tell that to my manager. Well, I had a manager my whole career, and some, a few, a couple Okay, 2 were good. The rest were okay, and there were a couple of really incompetent morons that I'm not sure how they got into the role, but I had to live with them. And then we're in between them and the market, our clients. And you think our clients think logically? They say they do, but then They ghost us. Things change. This was the hot priority.

What?

It's not worth talking about anymore. This is all stuff we have to deal with. Let's get into it. I'll sum it up at the end. Also, check out our friends over at Brevity Pitch. I'm practicing with it now, and I just talked with the founder last night, and the next release is going to be completely customizable to your sale. Meaning your persona, your issues, your vocabulary. And what it does is it gobbles up your website, your competitors' websites, your customers' websites, their LinkedIn profile. So each conversation or practice session can be with essentially that exact person. And I did it, um, the other day. It's on my profile. I'm not sure when you're listening to this, but if you go to my profile on LinkedIn, you'll see it where I'm practicing a sales call with the CEO of Microsoft, and they even get it to sound like the person. And I'm sure you're thinking this is too expensive. It's not. It's a lot less than the Do Dumb Things Faster tool that is torturing your prospects. Get your manager. Schedule a demo with brevitypitch.com. You can afford it and we all need it. I love it because it warms me up. I, I get a couple of reps before my at-bat. Why does every baseball player swing the bat a few times before they sit in the batter's box? Why? Because they want to hit the ball. They just don't want to swing. Hit the ball this time. Here we go.

So you think mindfulness plays at all in selling, or is it a bunch of frou-frou man bun stuff? Did I say that out loud?

My hair is getting a little longer. I don't know if you're calling me out or, or what, but I, I think, I think when people think of mindfulness, especially with sales, there's a lot of kind of stigmas and all these different things people think of Immediately of yoga, meditation, breathwork, and a lot of that woo woo type of things that you were mentioning, and that kind of gets frowned upon or shunned, or oh, that's not good enough to be for for salespeople. So I think there's a lot of misconceptions about mindfulness, and I'm by no means an expert, but I think there are a lot of things with mindfulness that can actually benefit salespeople, whether it be gratitude, intention, visualization. I think first off, people. Just don't realize all these other things are actually part of mindfulness, and they really can make a difference. I know for me, I'm a lot of salespeople. I'm very high strung. I'm very processed. I'm you know competitive, focused. Want to make things happen. If I'm not being productive, I feel like I'm not accomplishing anything. But I I don't need more of that. I actually needed more of something else that would kind of settle me down, which I found to be a lot of things that are part of mindfulness. So when I realized that I'm already that type of personality, which a lot of salespeople are, and that's something like mindfulness can really benefit me and, and bring me down to a level to not be as stressed out. That's where I really started grasping it and saw how it could make a difference from a sales standpoint.

Well, let's start with a definition. What does it mean to you just so that we're talking about the same thing?

So I look at it more of There's, there's a few things I think are a big part of it. First off, gratitude is a big one. No, no, no.

But gratitude has a whole, it's a whole thing, right? But what, what is mindfulness versus meditation? Yeah, I think it versus something else.

Yeah, I think it more of just having intention instead of being so automatic and reacting to the world. You're being more mindful and you're actually, you know, taking a step back And thinking about it. So having intention with, you know, where you want to go as a person, what you want to do in your career, and just really being mindful about it. And then that's kind of overarching, and all those little other things that we just talked about are kind of part of that. But I look at it as just really knowing who you are, where you want to go, and not just reacting to the world, but being more kind of proactive with that type of stuff.

Yeah, because I see it. You know, people describe it differently, but I think it comes down to detaching from that, what you call automation, which is the feelings, the river of emotions, sensations that we get all day. And I think why people don't either like it or embrace it is they don't think they need it. And it becomes this catch-22. They can't see that they need it. That's because they need it. And it's the same thing with kind of sales. They think they did everything perfect, so they're not going to look for what they did or could do better or differently. And it just turns into this downward spiral. And it's like how you characterized your automation, the, the driven, competitive passion. That's good. But you need to detach from that because that's good In a lot of cases, but bad in other cases. It's not great when you're trying to go to sleep, right?

No, it's so true. I mean, I, I would find myself in the middle of the night or before going to bed, like 5 or 6 things about work would just pop in my head and I'm like, man, I gotta go write 'em down. So I, do I put a notepad next to my bed? Do I email myself real fast? So I mean, it was getting to a point where it was like, you gotta find a way to kind of detach and break away and And a lot of the tactics that are part of mindfulness really, really helped me. But I would imagine just from a lot of people I work with in sales, they tend to be very competitive. That's one of the biggest traits. So this probably happens to a lot of folks. And then when they hear the word mindfulness, they get, you know, they kind of run away and it's, it sounds like work or it sounds like going to a yoga class, but there's a lot more stuff that goes into it that can really help salespeople.

Yeah. Because they say, hey, I'm not depressed. I got lots of energy. I'm optimistic. I don't need This, and I think they're the ones who do need it. Because if you can't sit quietly and forget about meditation or any particular use or application and just calm yourself down, change your state— because we all want to be in the flow state, everyone talks about it— it's like, well, why can't you then? Oh, I'm, I'm busy.

I'm over here.

I'm really worried about this deal. Well, guess what that is? That river of thought that is consuming you, that you are on automatic. And, and most people go through their whole life on automatic. And I look at it as like, it's almost like a hybrid car where, yeah, it goes on battery 5, 10, 15% of the time, but it's mostly on gas. And most of us are on that subconscious conditioned intuition, uh, feeling-based drivers, and occasionally pop in a prefrontal cortex adjustment. They're like, oh, remember what you like? Oh, that's a waste of time. Oh, this is okay. And we can see it in other people, but we can't see it in ourselves. So, and you talk to all these great sales leaders, it all comes down to 2 things at the very highest level, you know, will and skill. Well, guess what will is? Yeah, part of it's discipline and grit, but part of it is being able to evaluate the willingness to walk away from a waste of time. That takes will. And then people just blurt out emotional intel. It's a lot of things. And I think today reps need to become aware. I think it's more aware today, but the need comes earlier than I think a lot of people manage. Because let's face it, we live in a roller coaster. And I think today what people are doing is just detaching.

No, if I could, if I could go back 10 years ago when I was earlier in my career, I wish I would have embraced a lot of this stuff sooner because in some ways you do want to be on autopilot with certain habits. Those, those productive habits, it's good to be on autopilot with that. But most of the autopilot that people are doing, they're just reacting and reacting too quickly. So maybe you're people pleasing too much. So if your customer asks for something, you're just like, boom, automatic, I'm going to make it happen. Type thing. You, you react too fast, so you're going too fast through the process because you're using more of your emotions versus logic. So there's all these things where you can just be on autopilot reacting quickly to, to the customer or to your company when you're in that sales role. So something that kind of helped me, which I, I think kind of rolls up to mindfulness, is, is really kind of that intention part where I would I wanted to know where I wanted to be a few years from now. So I kind of wrote down a vision of what that would look like. So that included work, that included some sales goals, that included some other personal stuff, but I wrote down in detail where I wanted to be a few years from now. So I kind of call it a 3-year vision and specifics of like, how many hours a day am I going to be working? Where am I going to be living? Am I going to be on the beach? Uh, what am I going to, what's my lifestyle going to be? Just all this stuff in kind of paragraph format. And then once I kind of wrote out that vision. I knew where I wanted to be, so it was easier for me not to just react to everything. I could kind of actually take a step back and understand that challenge or situation and really assess it based off where I was trying to go. And that's from a very kind of deeper long-term play. But if you do that same thing with your deals, with different things going on versus just reacting with that kind of rollercoaster mentality, I think it's going to bode well for folks. So it, it, it kind of branched. I was kind of surprised when I started really digging into mindfulness because it really branches into a lot of different things that we talk about in sales. People just don't think of it as part of that. But, but intention was a big one, which I kind of paralleled into that, that 3-year vision, which has really helped me from a professional sales standpoint, but also outside of that as well.

Yeah, because if, if you don't have that, because people say goals, but what does everybody do? make a million dollars a year. And then they, they write it down. It doesn't either— it motivates them for 15 minutes and then they forget about it until they open it up a year later and they go, oh yeah, didn't do that. As opposed to, you know, where do you want to go with your life? You know, you don't have to make a vision board or anything, but have something in mind, even if it's just early retirement or it's, you know, something you want to do on the side. Having both your identity and a plan for yourself so that you don't get stuck every day in the grind. And let's face it, the number one sales process is what? It's wing it. Wingit.ai.

That's your, that's your favorite one. Yeah.

Which is basically just reacting to what the customer wants. So we're reacting to somebody who doesn't know how to buy. So we're not going to spend time learning how to sell. They don't even know how to buy. And then we wonder why it goes wrong and we don't reflect. And then you get on LinkedIn and one sales influencer says, uh, detach. Then the other one says, all right, you got to give a shit. Well, wait a second, if I'm detached, why would I give a shit? Or if I give a shit, how do I detach? Which one's right? Well, they're both right in certain contexts, right? If you're prospect— cold prospecting, you can't be attached to every email and cold call you send. You go crazy. But if you've been working on a deal for 3 months and you don't care, you're not attached to that, you're not going to see the things that you need to see. And you're just going to listen to your— oh, call the CIO. Oh, oh, never thought of that. You're just going to do whatever you want someone else tells you, and the deal's already in the, in the ditch. So I think reps really have to understand and dig into this, and whether you call it mindfulness or whatever you call it, understand how your brain works and start playing with it, start focusing on it. Because everyone is still in school mode. Do I know this? What book is that? I read the book. Now I know it. Okay, read a book on golf and tell me how much better a golfer you are. You will not be much better. You might figure out something, but you got to read it and then do it, get some feedback. Get some more feedback, read some more, try it. And, and this is what we run into sales is that it's not really a well-understood profession. I think it's up there slightly close to witchcraft to most people. Most people think it's just talking. If you ask anybody about the complex sale, tell me how it works. Well, it's about, you know, going to power, bringing value. Bunch of platitudes. That's how people view it. No one can really draw it out and tell me exactly how it works and where it gets stuck. And when you— I talk to reps all the time. Somebody with 15 years of experience can't tell me where his deals get stuck. Been at the same company 8 years. I go, you close 100%?

No, no, no, no.

Well, they didn't close. Where did they not close? What was the last point of contact that you heard? They don't want to hear it. And this, if you don't embrace this, you're missing the biggest part of the game. Because everybody thinks the game is showing up and knowing about your product and your competitors and being trustworthy and efficient. That's taking an order. And B2B sales, it's just so much more complex. And people say, oh, you make it sound more complex than it is. Well, taking an order is easy. You're right, that's not complex. Now go get an order. Go out there and find one, create one, and tell me how I'm making it more complex than it is. And the things that I've gotten out of it is there's no limit to— or we don't know what the limits are to what you can do with your mind as far as it controlling your state, your attitude. Because what is attitude? It's a feeling, right? If you're pissed off, you got a bad attitude. Just closed a big deal, got a big 7-figure check. You got a great attitude. It's not consistent, right? It's conditional. So how do you control it or be able to recover from the bad one and not have the good one just take you away on a kite? It's a lot.

It's a lifelong question that I've been trying to figure out. I will say on the bad situations, because we all know in sales you're gonna have, you're gonna lose deals, you're gonna have bad weeks, bad months, bad years in some cases, depending on the situation. But when you lose that deal that you're really, you've been working on for months, you put a lot of sweat equity into it and for whatever reason it doesn't come through. I mean, that can really Throw people off a loop, and it can mess up a whole year because that, that bad deal can turn into a kind of a ripple effect, being a bad month, bad year, etc. So I've, I've had several that I've lost over the years, and with what I do now, it's, it's definitely very personal because I'm scrapping and clawing with, with my own business. So I, I don't have a lot of, you know, backup options or salaries to rest my laurels on. So when I lose something, it definitely hurts. So I have to give myself A day or so, just to kind of be a little pouty, whine and complain a little bit, and just let get it out of my system. So I give myself a little bit of time just to kind of do that. Recognize I'm going to be in a bad mood, so maybe don't go around friends and family that I don't want to be in a bad mood with. And so I just let myself kind of have a little bit, little bit of time, and then I go back to what are some things that put me in a better mood? Is it working out? Letting out some of that frustration is that maybe I did mention the gratitude stuff earlier, but if you, at the end of the day, if you go back and look at what you do have, even though you lost that deal, you're still in a very good spot compared to most people. So that kind of helps me just reflect of having that perspective. It could be way worse. I mean, salespeople typically are able to make executive-level money. You make your own schedule, you get to travel around. I mean, there's a lot of really positive things. So I kind of just try flip the script of, okay, lost the deal, but I'm still in a very good spot compared to most people. And those type of things have really helped me get over those deals. Obviously, there's different levels depending on how big of a deal it was, but I've learned to get better at that so it doesn't just wreck my whole week or month, what have you. And then when you're doing well, I mean, everything's easy when things are going well. It's like my first 10 years of my career, I was working for an a great company that had a ton of momentum. So it's just kind of riding that wave and things tended to keep going that, that direction. But you can get overconfident, right? You can get complacent, you can get kind of borderline cocky at times. So how do you kind of have that mentality to not get complacent and kind of catch yourself? So I worked for companies that were always kind of like that anyway, which, which helped me. But I think a lot of people get too overconfident when things are going well. And then they just go through the motions. They wing it like you were talking about. And then bad stuff tends to happen if you don't kind of do that, because someone's out there trying to get your business. Someone's out there trying to win that deal too. So if you don't stay aggressive, even when you're on top, you're going to get passed up. So I think those type of things I think about a lot, whether things are going well or the other direction. And that helps me kind of be not too far lean to one way or the other.

Yeah, because no matter what, we're always in some kind of state, and our ability to control that, manage it, and not have it go off the rails is pretty important. And I think today people are just like numb. The monkey with the cage— no matter what I touch, I get shocked, so I just sit here numb, shaking, you know, because prospecting is painful, not prospecting is painful. So what do they do? And I, I think what a lot of people are doing today, and I, I, I'm starting to figure this out, that the, the KPI activities— reps are buying into it because it distracts them from what they know they should be doing.

Hmm.

I had this great interview and it's like his epiphany was that I stopped doing the KPI and I just prioritize. I go, who do I need to talk to who's going to matter? And then put my focus in on this. Because when you're doing something and your sale is complex and prospecting is hard, activity is the easy part. Anyone can do the dials and hope no one picks up, leave a voicemail, and you feel like you accomplished something, but you didn't. You distracted yourself from what you know you should have done because managers assume that those 50 dials are high-quality targets. But if they were high-quality targets, you wouldn't need 50. You need 5. Well, we don't know they're high. They should be high quality. And everyone's got this optimistic view. And this like thought leader was telling me that, oh, there's only 5% of the market's actively looking for your product. I go, let me ask you a question. You think 5% of the population's looking for a new car right now? You know how many people that would be? That'd be 150— no, it would be what, 150,000 or 300,000? Trying to do my math.

It'd be a lot. It'd be a lot.

Like 5 million people looking for a car. No, it's probably like 1/100th of that. How can you tell? Well, how many people are hitting your website? 2 or 3 a day. What percentage of the market you have? Let's say you only have 1. That means 200 or 300 people in your market are currently looking for something. And how many are there? Millions, right?

Yeah.

Well, that's not 5%. We say 5% because it, it makes us feel good. It makes us feel like this is not a complete and utter waste of time to just fill up the cloud with a bunch of left voicemail, sent email, left voicemail, sent email. Imagine how much disk space there is in the world that just has those 2 comments, thinking that that's work, that's data that somebody's working on. Now we are distracting ourselves in so much of our deal. We do what our customer asks because I guess we should, or I don't know what to do. You don't know what to do because you're not thinking. And this is the difference between when you think about your mind and being able to detach, is it— are you reacting? on an emotion? Are you thinking through a process? Now imagine not thinking in chess. I don't know if you ever played chess.

A little bit. Yep.

Yeah, because you don't have to just think about where you're moving. You got to think about how they're going to react to that move, and then you got to think about how you're going to move then, and then you got to think, am I trapping them? Are they trapping me? Now, if you took the sales rep's approach, it would be as fast as they can, make as many moves as you can. That doesn't win the game. And if you can really detach when you need to and attach when you need to, that's a big part of it. And know when you should. That's the hard part. But how many people would just hold on to a deal And not let it go.

Happens all the time, and their managers are probably telling them to do something to get it back too.

Right? Never give up. Never give up. And you're like, well, is it a real deal? Why aren't they talking to you? Why aren't they telling you the truth? Why don't they want you talking to other people there? Why don't they show up to the calls? Well, they seemed real interested at the beginning. They have to use us. I think the power of this is probably just as much as a skill set, because the skill set without the steering isn't much use. And to be able to use the skill set at the right time, you got to be able to regulate your emotions. Because You know, when you see a salesperson, you react to how they're behaving, right? If they're overly nervous or low energy, that's very different, right? As opposed to somebody with a big smile and puts their hand out and says, hey man, how's it going? You know, great post the other day, right? I love it. It's a very different thing. And that's a conscious thing. And it's something that we kind of, we own. But we don't know we own this.

Definitely. And I found when I just took more time instead of doing those KPIs and prospecting that you were mentioning where I was just pounding my head against the wall and you get worn out from that, I spent more time just planning and thinking about what are the top deals, where could they go wrong, what are the top accounts I want to focus on for this year. And I spent a lot more time just thinking and blocked that off in my calendar, and that actually made me more effective. So it is counterintuitive, I guess, that whole reaction thing of just that Type A personality that I was talking about of getting things done and checking off the box, doing the KPIs kind of does that, but you're going the wrong direction to your point. So when I actually worked on less, but I went deeper into these deals I thought were more likely to succeed and try to figure out where things were gonna go wrong or what could happen, I was a lot more effective. And then taking another step with, with the whole mindfulness thing, I, I also try to visualize my day, visualize being successful in this different stuff. And I, I feel like that's been a huge thing for me too, is anticipating those tough conversations or those challenges, objections, whatever it may be, kind of prepping for that, visualizing it. Seeing myself being successful at these meetings, that was kind of taking it another step further. And I do that pretty much daily as well with, with bigger things that I know I have coming up. So I think just taking time to think, most salespeople don't do that, whether you want to call it mindfulness or whatever it may be. And that's a huge part of kind of my schedule and agenda weekly. And then I also, visualization is definitely kind of under that mindfulness umbrella, but seeing yourself being successful. with whether it's deals or getting promoted, whatever it may be. I think there is something to that if you keep doing it consistently and you're kind of set up for that success and you already are going through the motions before you even get there.

Because think about great sales and sales in general and B2B. It's all counterintuitive. It's nothing about us and our products, about the client. It's about listening. It's not about talking. It's about being curious and empathetic and compassionate. Those aren't reactions. They take forethought. To be able to think like someone else, you have to first think like you, right? And that, you know, they say kids can't get that until they're like 7. I go, no, they don't get that sometimes till they're 70. Some people never get it. And also, we can't be thinking about our reaction to it because most of what we're doing kind of is a threat to our ego, isn't it?

Oh yeah.

Right.

When you lose a big deal or—

Well, lose a big deal. Someone doesn't show up, they show up late, they forgot what it was about. That's all kind of a little ego dig, isn't it? It's disrespectful, right?

For sure, for sure.

But if you react like that, that's not constructive. So you kind of got to— you've got to be thinking like that. It's like, okay, I know this, this is my top priority, but it's not theirs. And most salespeople can't wait to talk, and— but your talking probably doesn't progress anything. But did you think through any questions? Did you plan for the call afterwards? Did you review what you thought about and how well you did and what you could do better? And did you put that someplace? And this is why people don't want to write things down, because they don't want to admit that they have to do that, that they, they can't do it from the hip. That there is not an innate skill. And too many people are just going from their innate skill instead of developing this because it is completely counterintuitive. But nobody will tell you that except for me.

And it's, it's hard to, to, to do some of the things we're talking about. It's, it, it's counterintuitive. It's hard. It's Different. It's change. People don't want to embrace change. Just, I mean, we try to get our customers to change all the time, but then we won't do it ourselves. So it's, you know, there's that side of it. But I think if you can see how it helps you close, close more deals, become a better person, you're going to feel better if you're doing all this type of stuff. And you're not going to be spinning your wheels doing hundreds of activities. You're going to be focused on, on the right place. And then when you get into the mindfulness side of it, there's a Obviously a ton of benefits of how it can help you from a sales standpoint. But outside of that too, there's, there's huge things as, as well. And we didn't go down the path of all the yoga and breathwork stuff that is woo-woo, but I, but I do do yoga and breathwork too. And that, that's also something that it's, it's really hard to do that stuff too. So it's another challenge for me. And then I think when you keep embracing these challenges proactively at work, outside of work, it helps you get ready for all these ups and downs. So. The more I do mindfulness activities, whatever you want to call it, it helps me get ready for the roller coaster of sales, which I think is a good thing too.

I think most of us think we're pretty good at this until we're not, until something goes off the rails. We have a bad day. We get in a minor car accident or our territory Unexpectedly changes, comp plans change, and then we take a— we get hijacked. Our brain gets hijacked by our emotions. This is the type of thing that in sales we got to kind of be aware of and work on pretty much every day, all day. Catch yourself, have a little moment to bring yourself back to what is important to you. What's helped with me is I do an audio journal. I just kind of turn on Otter on my smartphone, and I'll just walk around the house updating myself on what's going on. But through that, I'm able to think through the things that I want. Do I go back and read them? Rarely, if ever. But the idea is that I talk, I connect up my prefrontal cortex with my reptilian brain, and all of a sudden I figure out who's been in charge today. Is it really your prefrontal cortex, that smart part of your brain, the part that thinks logically, or is it your emotions? We know people buy for emotions and then justify it with logic. And I think this comes into why it's so hard to learn something like sales. One of the hard parts is that you have to assume that you don't know everything about sales. That's why people early in sales do so well. Sometimes because they're sponges. They don't have false beliefs that get in their way. Maybe they trust in a mentor or a manager or a leader of some kind or a coworker who becomes their prefrontal cortex, who gives them the logic of how things work that will hopefully tamp down those instincts Because our instincts are emotions. And our instincts, until we really get great at sales, probably 10, 15 years into it, are 100% wrong in sales. Let's face it, talking to strangers, what's our instinct? Stranger danger, right? A stranger does not mean a potential friend. To us, we think of it as a a paycheck. But are we trying to build rapport with that person, connect with them as a human being, or do we just view them as somebody who can buy my stuff? Also, we're moving at 100 miles an hour. Our prospects aren't moving sometimes at all, sometimes in the opposite direction.

Why?

Who wants to hear from a salesperson about a thing that they don't think they need or want. We have to build that up. And, and here's a great example. I see all these idiots on LinkedIn thinking that, oh, 3 to 5% of their market is in market for their product at any one time. Um, that is a ridiculous assumption. That is an optimistic self-serving assumption. It's probably less than 0.001% are actively— you can tell how many hit in your website and your competitor's website. If you own 30% of the market, you're seeing 30% of the active pain in your territory, in your world, in your TAM, total addressable market. What I see in sales, that's happy ears. Why do we have happy ears? Because it serves us. And here, this is one of my big epiphanies from last year, is that I notice with myself, anything that isn't pleasurable, I tend to forget to do. So if I don't have a list, a checkbox, a Post-it, some type of reminder to do it, I tend to forget about it conveniently. I bet you're right too. How long has it been since you paid that bill that's sitting on the dining room table? How long have you been waiting to have that thing repaired that you know it needs to be repaired? It's a hassle. You tend to procrastinate or conveniently forget. And this is human nature. Nature. So if—

let's face it, most of the stuff in sales is stuff that is painful.

Talking to strangers, asking for things, suggesting things, uh, interrupting people— all a little awkward. These are all things that we need to process and give meaning to because our brain is doing it anyway. And I've I've kind of gone down this rat hole my whole career. The problem, or the great part, is I didn't go deep enough and I wasn't consistent enough. I treated it like everything on the roller coaster. When I was doing great, I didn't pay any attention to it. When I was doing bad, all I did was pay attention to it. Or it kind of, it takes a while to calm yourself down and And be rational and think through it. So when you think of yourself and selling, what if you could every day jump out of bed in the flow state and focus in on the things that you need to brush off a hangup or a lost deal or a ghosting, uh, be able to prioritize your time based off of logic and not emotion. Everybody's working off of emotion. It's natural. It's instinctual. It is counterintuitive to do it off of analytical logic. Now, just logic alone isn't enough because you sit down, everyone did their goals for the year with their prefrontal cortex, right? And they said, oh, I'm going to triple, and then I'm going to do 200 cold calls a And then I'm gonna work 6.5 days a week. And then a week goes by and you're like, what?

What did I forget?

Oh, everything?

Yeah.

Make this a project because it's you. And people always are asking, how could I leverage more? Well, you are the means of production in sales. Your mindset is at least half the issue. Work on it. On it. It's not about reading a book. It's not about knowledge. It's about doing, and doing it when you don't need it. If you really want to become great at sales, there's 2 major character— 2 major skills: starting conversations and closing the deal. I cover those 2 things in 2 separate courses because people tend to have one or the other problem, or both. If you have both, take both courses. You can do it simultaneously or sequentially. It's up to you. But here's the part about sales that people don't get. If what I'm teaching you goes against your instincts, it doesn't mean I'm wrong. It means your instincts haven't evolved to the point of what they need to, to become great at sales. And I see Because the number one thing that happens that first month in the course is a little bit of pushback, a little bit of resist— this is different. This is not 100% about me and what I want. I have to think like someone else.

Uh-oh.

Well, I want to make you great at sales. Do you want to make you great at sales? That's the question you've got to ask. And, uh, Your subconscious is saying, I'm fine right now. It always does, doesn't it? It always says, I'm fine right as I am. I don't want— I don't need to change. You're perfect just the way you are, unless you want to make more money. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. See my stuff fly by on LinkedIn. Give it a little like, a little comment, a little share. Check out the Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers podcast.