HOW TO COMPETE AND WIN IN ANY B2B SELLING SITUATION

So what is it that great salespeople need? I think what I'm finding out is the number one thing is what's called an internal locus of control. This is a way of viewing the world where you take that personal responsibility for what happens. You don't deflect it and blame others. Where the opposite of an internal locus of control is external, meaning you're a victim of things outside of you, not the creator of the things inside you. Now, this may sound obvious, but catch yourself— happens to me all the time— when something goes wrong. Do you own it or do you deflect it? Do you blame others? Let's say you're running late and there's traffic. Do you blame the traffic or do you blame you not leaving on time? Well, it's easy to blame the traffic. And in sales, if you have this external locus of control, there's always another reason. And this creates the opposite of learning. Meaning, learning is when something goes wrong, you say, what did I do wrong and how do I prevent it in the future? Everybody does stuff wrong. It's okay. If you have an external locus of control, something goes wrong, you find something outside of you to have caused that problem. And you don't learn because all you learn is to deflect. Which is a downward spiral. And today's guest has this internal locus of control, has gone through many different industries. And this is critical because too many people think that sales is solely business acumen. It's— business acumen's a big part, but it's not the only part because we're not here to Just to answer questions and service the prospect. We're here to sell, which is very different. Because if you have an internal locus of control, you learn that clients don't really know how to buy in a lot of cases, unless you're selling something that's known and they've bought it before. How would they know how to buy it? We believe this, and things like MedPic are based off of this external locus of control. The 2 big ones, decision criteria and decision-making process, those are the 2 Ds, and both of them are under the control of the salesperson, not the client. Now, this sounds contradictory. Contradictory. Counterintuitive.

And it is.

But only people who have sold for a long time understand this because they've learned if they let the client do it, the deals don't get done. Because if the client knew how to do it, of course they'd get done. They don't get done because the client doesn't know what they're doing, so they do what they think they should, which almost always turns into a much longer sales process. Today's guest, I think you're going to learn a lot from. Great selling, this internal locus of control where he got excited competing against his family, his father and his brother, which ignited a learning process and a competitive spirit— friendly competition— to become great at sales. Let's get into the interview. And if you want to become great at anything, what do you do? You basically practice. You do it over and over again, get a little bit of feedback, take the feedback, try it again. Much like anything else— a video game, cooking, any sport, any performance, speaking, all of it. What is it? It's repetitions with little improvement, a little bit of planning, A little bit of review, finding a little distinction to become better at, but you have to have that internal locus of control and motive. He has it. You can get it today. The fastest way is with brevitypitch.com. They have a free version called Brevity Play. It's right on the top of the website. Go there, brevitypitch.com, and sign up for Brevity Play. You can practice on your phone. You don't need any username or password, no credit card, no nothing. You can just get going and practice the important ingredients of a great sale, not how I think I should sell, because we all face the same things. We face pricing questions and value versus the cost of it. Clients don't want to focus on the problem. They They want to focus on the product, which is dangerous because all of a sudden you're now a commodity. Don't fall into that trap. So try brevity play, and what will happen is, you know, within— you do a 5-minute drill a day, you do that for a couple of months, all of a sudden you get really good at atomic sentences. selling skills, answering certain questions, getting comfortable getting the next meeting without them stonewalling you and ghosting you. So, go to brevitypitch.com. And here's the interview. Hey, Brian. Thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, could you give us a little background on yourself?

Sure. My name is Brian Schwepman. I've been in sales and sales leadership for, gee, since about 2010. So, that's been quite a while over a lot of different industries. So, healthcare, ergonomics, let's see, middleware, so software, insurance, and also oil and gas. So—

You like variety, huh?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So, was it that you wanted variety or you just— was it just circumstance?

You know, it's interesting. I always do like variety and trying to challenge myself to learn new businesses and new models. I found out the more that I got into the different varieties, that the sales process is still the same. So, variety in the product, consistency in the sales process.

Because I think most people think that their sale is very unique.

Yes.

And certainly, you know, there's industry knowledge, there's company knowledge, competitive knowledge that's unique. But, you know, the administration, the political, the evaluation, they're kind of very similar, aren't they?

Yes, absolutely. Everybody likes to think of sales as an art form, right? But it really isn't an art form when you break it down. There's people who are artful at doing it. But when you break it down, it's still a process. And if you follow that process, you're going to be successful at it. I always point out Zig Ziglar. You know, everybody went to Zig Ziglar classes and quote him and everything else. The guy sold pots and pans. Now, if I was to tell my boss that I wanted to send my sales team to a guy who sold pots and pans, he'd tell me I was a little bit crazy. But the fact is it was the process that got him there. So, well, yeah.

And what got you into sales to begin with? What was the motive? Was it—

For me, The challenge. So, I— It's true.

You guys laughed.

Yeah. Yeah, it was exactly it. I was an entrepreneur by spirit. Once I graduated from college, I opened up a restaurant for 2 years, learned more in those 2 years than I did throughout my 4 years of college. And then, my brother called me up and said, hey, he's got a sales opportunity. He was in sales. My father was in sales.

Okay.

I joined my father and it was probably the family competitiveness competitiveness that first got me into it.

Good.

But then, it was the reward. And it's the reward that not only do you get from compensation, but also the reward that you get of every day I get to go into this competition, me and my competitors that are out there. And I enjoyed that. I enjoyed looking at how were they putting together their presentations? What did they do consistently? What could I bank on that I knew they, how their behaviors would be? So, it became a really fun mind game for me and a constant strategic battle. And so, I was always learning about my product, my customers, and my competition. Because you can bank people are stuck in ruts and they do the same thing every single day. And you can start to bank on exactly which hand they're going to play and when they're going to play it. So, that psychological battle, it was always fun for me.

Well, there's 2 great things about your background. One, entrepreneurship. That mindset works really well in sales. Versus the employee mindset.

Right. It's my business. I'm going to go out and run it. I just have a franchise for that company.

It's my job to make it happen.

Right. Yeah. You can set the goals for me, but my goal's always going to be higher.

Yeah. And the other is an enormous number of people coming out of hospitality do really well in sales.

I could see that.

Yeah, customer-facing, variety, being responsible for problems that you didn't cause.

That's very true. Very true. And I always referred to my sales style as servant sales. You know, you've heard of servant leadership. I look at servant sales as, you know, I'm there to make that person better.

Yeah.

Whatever I can do to make them succeed in their job, to take the challenges that they know of and also the challenges they don't know of. That's the one. And be able to serve them. And if I can do that and make them successful, then I'm successful. But I always tried to have me and my teams look outward. Don't look inside the company of, hey, this is what we do. This is what's in it for us. It's what's in it for our customers.

Yeah. And which of the industries or products did you feel most mapped to your natural skills and desires? Was there a particular one?

Well, there's— so there's a couple that are completely different. But I enjoyed the same. So, there was the selling capital goods into hospitals.

Mm-hmm.

Larger deals, bigger dollars, more competitive. It was high stress. But I loved that because that was a battle every single day of making sure that You had your territory taken care of. Everybody was happy. So, you were spinning plates while still trying to win deals. But then, the other jobs that I've had recently, both in insurance and in oil and gas, that tended to be more of a conversation. It was less competitive. I was there then to truly not as a I'm trying to sell you something. We were needed. And at that point, I was able to really sit down and have open conversations with my customers and understand what their challenges were. And then what we started to do is to look at a year out, right? What do we want to accomplish in this next year? And then we put metrics and goals to that. And then we said, okay, at this point, what do you need to be able to show your boss and your boss's boss what impact that you're making? So that, to me, was so much more probably enjoyable, less competitive. You know, when I was younger, I enjoyed the competitive side and, you know, the battles. This was more towards the latter part of my career, more consultation. And just absolutely enjoyed the heck out of it.

Yeah. And what was the motive to get into leadership versus staying in as a rep?

I, at first, I was kind of strong-armed towards it.

You had to?

But once it— so, you know, it was highly suggested that I do it. Once I did get into it, At first, you know, right when you get into sales management, there's no training to it. So, it was really finding my footing, right?

Yeah.

And trying to find out, do they want a super salesman or do they want a sales leader? Because to me, there's a difference between the two. If I go back to it, if you want to hire a sales leader, then you want somebody to look at the processes, the metrics, the compensation, that sort of thing. As I evolved in my sales leadership, I moved more from the sales expert to more of the sales leader. And that's what I enjoy nowadays is to be able to help train individuals, help them to see outside their normal scope. You know, teaching them how to focus on what's important. And then rewarding them for that behavior, whether that's seeing them advance in their careers or whether it's compensation, whether it's just even a good pat on the back. But it's, it was fun to watch people grow and enjoy themselves at the job.

Yeah.

And I think that's one of the biggest things for me is You're going to work hard, but you're going to enjoy what you do. So, take time to celebrate.

And how long was it before you liked it? Or did you like it immediately? Because it's kind of a fish out of water.

About a year and a half. Yeah, it took me about a year and a half. And I remember one of my buddies who helped talk me into going into sales leadership, about 6 months later, decided he wasn't ready for sales leadership and he backed out. So, he left me standing alone. But it took a while to make that transition because one of the things, you know, when you move from being a salesperson into sales leadership, a lot of those folks were my, you know, colleagues.

Yeah.

And so now, I moved from being one of the buddies to being one of the bosses. And that makes it a hard transition. So, how do you learn to, to make that transition for me and for them.

Yeah.

That was, that was tough. And it did take, it did take a while to do that. It was really about a year and a half that I started feeling like I got my feet, you know, underneath me. But I'll say that process continues to change with every organization that I'm in, that I learn new processes, new ways to be able to look at leadership. So, it's a continuous journey.

And how about like the selling inside? You know, getting the right comp plan, getting the right territories, getting all the things right that the reps need. Because some leaders are good at that and others just, you know, let it go down, slide downhill. You guys deal with it.

Exactly, exactly. And I think that comes back from my days as being a salesperson, making sure that there was always somebody in sales leadership that seemed to be fighting for the team. And once they fought for the team, I would fight for them. And that's something that I've continued to take on in my career is I want to make sure whatever I put in front of them is what I would want for myself.

Yeah.

Reward those folks for bringing on more business to the company. One of the founders of a company that I had worked for always said, you know, if I, if I make $1 and they make $0.03, I hope to God they get rich because the company's making $0.97. I looked at it as If you're going to have a commission structure out there, make sure it's worth it for that individual. Give them the ability and the motivation. Don't put caps on them, you know. Let them, let them go forward. It never made sense to me where somebody would say cap it at 8%. Why would you do that? You know, let the business come in and let that person succeed. As far as territories were involved, That was always tough because one of the things I always wanted to make sure of is if there was a readjustment of territories that you weren't punishing somebody. Because, you know, you can have somebody successful and then every year their territory changes and they're stuck at status quo. You know, you've got to be able to reward your top folks and your up-and-comers. So, you know, find out where they're successful. What their style is. Try to fit those customers to that individual. But then after that, get out of their way and let them succeed.

And did you ever find resistance at companies? Because certainly, well, they look at, they see one person do, you know, 3x their quota and the rest do 80%. New rep comes on, who's the territory come from?

Right, right. Yes, exactly it. Exactly it. Yes. Or they don't understand where the growth is coming from. One of the things that I had was, you know, if you look at prospecting versus farming. And one of the recent companies I was with, I realized that we only were penetrated into 27% of our business.

Yeah.

There was a tremendous amount of farming. Now, that wasn't a, true number. There was a lot of, you know, garbage in there. We had to clean it up to be able to see what the opportunities were. Some of my top folks were growing their existing business 80%. And, you know, management still wanted that new— what about the new account? What about the new account? The new account, if they came in historically, it would be producing at 27%.

Yeah.

You know, we had to build the model to be able to clean up the base so all of our business could be able to grow. And we saw tremendous success with that. But the tough part is to convince not only startups but existing accounts too. It's not always about the newest, shiniest account coming in. What percentage of the business of your existing accounts do you have? And What growth is there from a warm account? You're chasing cold calls left and right. The easiest sale sometimes is right in your back pocket.

And what did you hate as a rep about certain managers? Because you have great managers rarely, and you have a lot of okay managers, kind of The ones that just let all the pressure slide right down to the reps.

That's why I think you described it to a T, right? That's the, the manager who managed upward and not for their people. And you could tell they were looking one way, and that's, how can I get higher on the backs of these folks? And That, that was just deflating because you knew that you were in it by yourself. They, they weren't involved in, in the coaching, in the thought process, you know, trying to have a conversation of, okay, well, you know, where are we here? Where are we there? Where are strengths? Where are weaknesses? I enjoyed more of that camaraderie. Whereas, you know, the other managers who were just looking up or looking at metrics and cracking the whip saying, you know, they were the ones who would always say, work smarter but not harder. And you'd ask them how to work smarter and they'd say, well, that's for you to figure out.

Work harder.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

And what did you look for when you hired reps? What did you have a particular— I mean, I'm sure you've You learned a lot hiring people if you hadn't done it before.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's— there were probably more misses on the front side than there were hits. And, uh, you know what I— what I always said that I looked for is somebody that had something to prove.

Um, chip on the shoulder.

Person that came in overconfident and overcocky, I didn't want to I didn't, I wanted that person who had something to be able to prove themselves. And I would ask a lot about growing up, you know, and, you know, what was, you know, high school like? What was college like? What were your challenges? You know, where do you find success? I found out a lot of folks that had more of a struggle trying to prove themselves. Once they got into sales, man, they were in now an occupation that allowed them to succeed and be seen for who they are. That's the person I looked for. And then, they were always the ones who were eager to learn. And not only from me, but their counterparts, from their customers. Those were the ones asking questions. And those are the folks that I just, once I found them, I absolutely, not only did they become great sales reps, they became great friends. And I learned as much from them as they did from me. Probably, I learned more from them than they did from me.

Yeah, because I think too many managers look for industry experience or Rolodex or Those types of things that— yes, but you have to have kind of that chip on the shoulder or some emotional attachment to winning that goes not just money, but I've gotta win, like you described earlier.

Yeah, it's a validation. And that's, you know, for me it was going up against my dad. My dad did President's Club for 16 years in a row. You know, I'm following the legend in the same company that he's in. You know, I had to prove myself. I, you know, I was version 2.0, and there was no way in heck that I wasn't going to, you know, be able to succeed. So, yeah.

And from the reps, did you get any pushback on the process? Because a lot of people You know, because I always say great sales is following a great process authentically.

Yes. Yeah.

Not the way someone else does it, the way you want to do it, but cover the bases.

Absolutely. And it was funny that the last job I had was in oil and gas. And the very first time I met the team, they said, what do you know about oil? Yeah, you got to be an oil expert. Right? Yeah. I have no idea. It comes in a little can. It goes in my car. And, but I had to remind him I had the process and I had the process to be able to go through and to continue to show what, you know, what worked and what didn't work. And one of the things that I talked to him about was just the focus. Where was their focus with their customers at that time? And what I found out was they were doing a lot of tasks. They were doing tasks that other departments should be doing, whether it was customer service, whether it was accounting, whether it was something else. But they felt like, my God, if I could go ahead and check this little box, then guess what?

They liked me.

And as long as, yeah, as long as they liked me, as long as I did something, then I'm selling. You're not selling. You're an administrator. You're a servicer. Yeah, exactly. And what I had to ask them to do was to laser focus. And I took— what I did is I said, okay, let's look at the amount of millions of dollars that you're selling. Break that down by hour. Now look at the time, your amount of money that you're valued at. Now, do you think— and that's like CEO level, you know, how much money they're bringing in.

Yeah.

Do you think that this customer really wants you to, you know, be handling this customer service work? You got people for that. Make sure it's taken care of. Make sure you follow up on it. But for God's sake, serve the customer and make sure that you're doing things that helps them, truly helps them, and not makes you feel good about doing a task. So, that took a while for some of them to break. Some of them you have to switch out because they, they're so— Get over it.

Yeah. Yeah, because they kind of rely on the, I know how this company runs, I know about the product, I can answer questions. Okay, that's this part of the job. The other part of the job is getting, you know, more access within the account. What do they really want to accomplish?

You're absolutely right. Yeah. How deep and wide are you in there? You know, how well do you know that customer? And if that, that person that you're calling on leaves, are you starting back over from the start? You know, or did anybody else in the organization know that you even existed?

No.

How many times have you seen that where that person who you were calling on leaves and then you go into this dark hole because nobody knows Who's supposed to be in charge of what that guy was doing? So, you know.

What else would you look at? You got the something to prove. What's the next thing? Because you might have something to prove but not have the rest.

Yeah. Their questions and their listening skills. Yeah. You know, how inquisitive are they about not the job necessarily, but the industry? And, you know, as you're talking, I typically will throw out a few, you know, areas where I want to see if they'll follow that string. And if they pick it up, great. I know that they're decent listeners. If they don't and just go, mm-hmm, or parrot what you say, you know, then all of a sudden I know I have trouble. So, that's one piece of it. The other piece is, do they have an entrepreneurial background?

Yeah.

And it can be small. One person that I hired, I hired her because she worked in a In a makeup counter. And she said, when it got slow, what she would do is walk around the mall and start at, you know, talking to folks that worked at the other stores and say, hey, what's going on this weekend? Do you have a date? What's, you know, oh my goodness, you know, let me go grab my stuff and make you up real quick. And so, she took her business out to the customer.

Open.

Instead of standing there waiting for them to come through. I thought, you know what? It has nothing to do with oil and gas, but I like the way she thinks. And it's that thought process that makes you attractive as a salesperson to say, no, I'm going to go out and find it. I'm not going to wait for it to come to me.

I like that. And what do you see most sales managers doing wrong today?

Metrics.

Yeah.

Assigning the wrong metrics. It can come down to when I first came into a job, they were rewarded or measured on how many emails did they send out. And it was amazing, Brian. There were some deals where they said, I need this, you know, as soon as possible. It was 16, 17, 18 emails later because You know, if I ask short questions, I got answers back. Guess what? They think I'm a pure genius because I've sent all these emails. So, are the metrics set up to drive the actions that are truly driving the revenue? Are you measuring the right thing? And 99 times out of, you know, 100, it's measuring the wrong thing. So—

Was there metrics that you use that really gave you insight into what they're doing and how effective they are?

You know, so one of the things I did was come up with a data analyst for our group in a position. And I started looking at what the data told us about the existing accounts, not what they were doing, but what are the results. So yeah, you may go out and you may land a new account. Great. But is it ramping up? Is it actually producing anything? You know, again, what percentage of products do we have in that account? What, what is their business? What should they be doing? So instead of using the metric set of the actions they were taking—

Activity.

Yeah. Measure the results. Measure the opportunities. The light went on. And, you know, I always told them, laser focus on what's important. So, we would go through and during our, you know, one-on-one meetings, we'd be able to look at their top accounts and say, okay, we— this is the opportunity. How are you going to go do it? And then measure it from there. So.

So, kind of like pattern matching, you know, who are the best accounts? Why are they good accounts? What are the rat holes that we get into.

Yes, yes. And where the opportunities— you know, you can fool yourself into where your opportunities are.

Anyone who talks to me.

Exactly. And for God's sakes, you can, you know, convince yourself that that customer is going to pay off. They told me all the right things. And it's all that hope that you have. But if I can look at that data and that data says, yep, this is where it's at. Because if I look at the successful accounts, why is this one doing it but the other one's not? What can I teach that customer and show them how to be successful? So, don't reinvent the wheel every time. The ones that are successful, examine them of why they are. And then examine your other customer to figure out why they're not. And be able to fit those 2 stories together. If you do that, your time is well spent every single day doing what you need to do, not what you think you need to do. Yeah.

So, and did you get pushback internally about that and not having the email, the dials, the proposals, the demos?

Yeah, at first. Yeah, yeah, at first it was, you know, but what are they doing? What are they doing? You know, one of the questions is, You know, your predecessor used to read every one of their CRM entries. And I'm like, no, I'm not. I'd shoot myself before I do that. You know, like, that's, that's like listening in on a phone call, you know, of your kids. There's certain things you just don't want to know.

You're better off not knowing.

Exactly. They're, So there was this metric of, but what are they doing? What are they doing? What are they doing? And it took a lot of change. And you know what? It was a continual process. For some folks, it's, you know, some leadership is so locked into activity metrics. And it doesn't work. You can just get your folks focused on the wrong Yeah.

Pretending to work instead of working.

It's so easy. Yeah, it is.

I mean, all of those metrics are easily faked.

Yes. Especially when they're working at home. You know, I care about results.

Yeah. No one gets comps on activity.

Yeah. And guess what? If you golf on Friday because you nailed everything Monday through Thursday and your numbers are way up, Good for you. You figured out how to do it efficiently. Now, don't guff if your numbers are down. But, you know, for goodness' sakes, I want the results. You know, the tasks are— if you can figure out a better way to do it more efficiently, tell me so I can teach the other folks how to do it too.

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

Well, I would say the best right now is LinkedIn. So, Brian Schwettman. And I'm currently in between positions. So, if you enjoyed what I had to say, hire me for God's sakes.

What he really talked about was that process because every performance has a process. We don't want to admit it. We like to go with our instincts, which is winging it, essentially. Winging it is just following what we feel like to do, what we organically react to. And it feels authentic. That's half of sales. The other half is knowing where you're going and having a strategy to get there. That's a process. And it's shown to have worked Many times in the past. And you have a process because you know if you take certain branches in the path, it's a trap. You talk about the product too much and you don't talk about the problem, you're in the commodity trap. You're seen as identical to everything else. The only difference they want to see is price, and they pick the cheapest. Several of these traps exist. Price versus value. If you're the premium provider, you have to have premium value. But people sometimes don't want to see the value because the price is there. We have to handle that. If we don't, again, they go with the cheapest, not because of money, but because of risk. This is the big difference between B2B and B2C. B2C is usually about their money. So they buy the cheapest because they don't want to give as much as they think it's worth. And B2B, it's getting it done, meaning the political and administrative process is really hard. If you want to learn this, both how to sell with a process and what the buying process really is, not what they tell you it is, It is. But what every company has, a near identical administration process. The political process is a little different, but there's ways of figuring it out and handling it. How many of us have had a deal where somebody just comes out of the woods and says, I don't like this, and the deal dies? Okay, there's a way to handle that. And When you realize what is your most biggest expense every month, everyone thinks it's their rent or their mortgage or something else that you don't want to talk about. What it really is is opportunity cost. That's the difference between how you performed and how you could have performed if you Were a little bit better, you knew the process, you had a system, you had practiced that system and executed it. I bet it's minimum $50K a year for pretty much anybody who is in sales. That's $1,000 a week, $200 a day. That's the difference between where you are now and where you could be. That's your opportunity cost. No one focuses on that. That's where you need to focus, because that's where the improvement is. Everybody looks at the bottom end, my base salary. Okay, that's important too, I get it. It's very comforting. Love a big base salary. The problem is it stays static. No matter what you do, nothing changes. The only way to change it is get a raise or get a new job. On the top end, on the opportunity cost, there's no limit. Only your comp plan. And the higher you go, it's not just linear, it's exponential. Look at those commission rates up there. So you want to go there. How do you get there? You gotta have a better system. You gotta understand the problem better. You have to have a plan going into it. You can still be authentic, but you gotta know where you're going. That's what Closing the Complex Sale does for you. This is my course. At B2B revenue dot com, the letter B, the number two, the letter B, and my favorite word revenue dot com. It's a year-long course. You can pay all at once or in twelve monthly payments. It's not a membership though. You're committing to the twelve payments. I'm giving you a payment plan, not a membership. It lasts for a whole year, and it has. Not only the core content of how to do it and why to do it, it has office hours, which is an hour meetup every other Friday that's been happening for the last 7 years. So they're all recorded and put back in the course, and they cover pretty much every topic in The Complex Sale. So you can search for what you care about, or you can just listen in and get the Q&A. And kind of the lecture part of it as well as a way of really digging into the complex sale. And why do you want to do this? Opportunity cost, baby. That opportunity cost is going to kill you. You won't ever notice it until it's too late though. Let's get that opportunity in the bank. Go to b2brevenue.com. Sign up today.