HOW TO DETERMINE IF YOUR DEALS ARE GOING TO CLOSE THIS QUARTER

Got a great one for you today. Got a sales leader who worked his way up 25 years in sales and the lessons he's learned, he's going to share with us today. And I think you're really going to enjoy this because he's got a system and he's been a longtime listener of both the podcast and my LinkedIn content and YouTube. So, we have a lot in common and Which makes it good because we've got similar views on sales. But a lot of things that people can learn and apply today. And what I'm learning more and more is that sales is hard because it's so counterintuitive. Now, I've mentioned this before, but it's hard to internalize until you see it, until you feel it. Either in your own situation or you see another rep. And this is one of the things I'm really working hard with the team at Brevite on, because we first started off with full conversations, full sales calls. That's insanely helpful, but it takes a little bit of dedication and time. A sales call can go for a half hour. Sure, you can keep it to 5 minutes, 10 minutes, but We end up doing a lot of the rapport building instead of the real tough parts of sales, the counterintuitive parts where we talk about or ask about the problem versus the product. We fall into that commodity trap very easily. Send me a quote. We do it instead of finding out what's behind it. Pricing, we give it instead of Finding out more information from them. So what I'm doing with them is like, let's break those little talents, the little questions and answers and skills into atomic examples that are randomized so that people don't know that's what they're going to get sometimes. And you can think of these as objections, but I think it's, it's much deeper than that. That's kind of a superficial view of it. It's much It's much more, how do you handle something when you're not ready for it? And what typically happens is we choke and do whatever they ask. Why? Because that's what our intuition tells us. That's what our instincts say. We go into fight or flight, and we don't want to fight, so we just give them whatever they want. Now, if you're a sales leader, I'm also working once a month with the Brevity customers going through what do they see at the forecast level, at the one-on-one level, that can be prevented by putting together these talents, these little drills, these little skills, and break it down into just a A couple of minutes a day. But if you do it over and over again, you start to become your instincts. It becomes part of you. It becomes that unconsciously competent, that final stage of learning. See, because our instincts say to ourselves, if I know it, I know it. I got it.

I'm—

I got it. I'm okay. But that's the first stage of it. It's like, I know how to play golf. You hit the ball close to the hole. I get it. But go ahead and try it. Oh, that's the hard part. And in sales, we don't get a second chance. We think we do, but we rarely do. So let's get into this interview. This is one of the ones that you probably want to take notes on. Save it, listen to it a couple times, especially when you got a big deal and you're wondering if it's closable, closable this quarter, maybe your priority. Here we go.

Hey Derek, thanks for joining us today.

As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

So I've been in sales, oh gosh, with the exception of my time in the military, 25 years. And it wasn't, you know, it's not like I grew up wanting to be in sales, but it's one of those things that I think a lot of us fall into. We can get that later if you want to. But my 25 years has been primarily in the B2B technology space, networking hardware, SaaS, any, anything that is networking related, I've sold or touched in one way, shape, or form from, from publicly traded companies all the way down to bleeding edge startups.

Yeah. And how long were you in the military?

Oh gosh, uh, I did, I did one enlistment, uh, signed up for 4 years, but unfortunately I was, I was in an accident and so I got out. I was like 2 and a half years in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Did you like it or—

Uh, yeah, actually, you know what, I loved it. Um, I, uh, I was a medic.

Oh nice.

And, and it was something that I, I really enjoyed. I love the Any veteran who's hearing this will understand this. There's, there's a camaraderie that you experience in the military that you will never, ever duplicate in the civilian world. Yeah, I loved it.

Yeah.

Has any of that helped you or gotten in the way in sales or—

Actually, yeah, it helped me a lot from the point of view of strategic thinking. Right. So, so, gosh, one of the big things in the military, I think it's Marine Corps doctrine now. I was a Navy guy, but I was attached to the Marines as a corpsman or medic way back when. Uh, the OODA loop, right? And so the OODA loop is— was designed or created by a guy named John Boyd. So if you've ever seen the, um, the Top Gun movie, Maverick.

Sure.

So John Boyd, that, that was loosely based on him.

Yeah.

Uh, he was the ultimate fighter pilot, and, and the— he literally wrote the book on, on air warfare dogfights. But he creates something called the OODA loop, and it's, it's basically an acronym for observe, Orient, decide, act. And it's this constant loop of movement, right? And he has— and this is where we get to the sales part for me. He once said that whoever can handle the fastest rate of change survives.

Well, you certainly get a little bit of change in sales, huh?

Yeah, especially in tech sales. So when I started— boy, oh boy, I'm dating myself here. When I started in When I started in tech sales, people were rocking like 28K modems. Remember the dial-up? Ma, get off the phone. I'm trying to download a song. And, you know, you're waiting like half an hour for a 5-minute song. And the change has been nonstop because you look from where we were there, the dial-up, to everything's on the cloud and broadband, and now we're getting to AI. And the B2B sales, especially on the tech side, is always very difficult because not only are you navigating all the things you talk about very eloquently, Right? Of selling and the revenue prevention department. But you're also every few years you have to upgrade your knowledge based on what am I selling? How does it work? How does it fit? What is the value proposition to what I'm selling? And is there a value proposition to what I'm selling?

Yeah. And who cares about it? Right?

And who cares about it? Yeah.

How do they want to hear about it?

Yeah. And it's interesting because it's and how do they want to hear about it? It's You know, before we started the call, I was kind of like fangirling over you because I was a huge fan. And folks in the audience, if you haven't read The Maverick Selling Method, I think it aged really, really well. Selling in a New Market Space also is really good. I don't even know it's still available because I bought mine back in—

Sure.

Right.

You can still get it on Audible.

Yeah. I don't highly—

The Maverick Selling Method.

The Maverick Selling Method, highly recommended because it's aged well and it'll shave— look, I'm doing a plug for you, but it's well deserved. It's aged well and will serve you very well in your sales career regardless of where you are in your path.

Yeah. And it kind of fits with your Top Gun thing where you're like, there's a sequence.

And yeah, yeah. But again, in sales it is observe. Okay. So, so what's going on around me, right? What's going on in this case would be like the, the, the macroeconomic environment, your ecosystem, what you're selling into. Orient yourself. Okay. Now I've seen it. Now let's, let's orient myself to what's my current reality. Then you're gonna have to decide. You have to decide what are you gonna do? How are you gonna, you know, and then find is act. But I think the thing that most companies get wrong, and I, and I love the, the, the way you have these sarcastic video bits that you do, making fun of, of executives who have— are completely clueless. We can get into that later. It's, it's that, that, that, that loop, that OODA loop is nonstop. And the problem is, I think a lot of corporations will do it once, like, okay, we're good for the year.

That's it. 5 years later.

Seriously, you know, so, so, so I, I wrote a book And in my book, it's called The Strategic Sales Leader. And in the book, I talk a lot about how most strategic execution fails. All companies plan, but depending on the research study, it's Harvard Business Review, it's Bain and Company, 70-90% of all strategic executions fail because they get stuck in that. All right, we planned it and then we put off the side and, you know, the strategy collects dust. But us in sales, It's dynamic. It's always moving. It's always constant. We're always adjusting.

And that's hard to keep up with if you're not used to it.

Yeah, it is. I think it's, it's getting harder, you know. So Salesforce did a study, 2024, July. And, and in this study, they said that 67% of salespeople said they were not, not going to hit their quota this year. And 84% reported last year they did not hit their quota. And 12.5% said that it's harder to sell this year than it was last year. So just in one year, things have changed dramatically.

Oh yeah, I've noticed it just talking to other people, my business. I'm not sure what it was because unemployment's still pretty good.

Yeah, I think there's a period of uncertainty. Yeah. And when people are unsure of what the future looks like and, you know, you can never be sure of the future, but you have a basic idea of the direction it's going in. But uncertainty scares people, terrifies people.

Yeah.

And you've talked about this a lot. You know, most of the deals I've lost in my career, whether it was as a sales professional or as a sales leader, was the status quo.

Yeah. And have you become good at telling if they're going to move or not? I mean, because that's a sense, right? There is a, a judgment that goes on because it's a huge investment.

Yeah. No, I'm, I'm banging on with my forecasting. Uh, it, it's part art, it's part science, it's part understanding your sales team, understanding, uh, the— one of the things that, that, um, I've always asked for when I get to a new organization is, uh, do you have any Data on the closing ratio, closing, you know, win rate of the team. I want to understand. Nope. That's really important. And but to your point, yeah, I do have a solid understanding of the forecast. I mean, here's, here's the important part. Sales leaders have this, this mistake where they like to get in at the very end of the sales process, like the cavalry. I'm going to save this deal. But anecdotally, yeah, anecdotally and research has shown that, that sales leaders need to get involved in the first part. and their win ratio increases, then it also helps you weed out the, you know, the status quo or the deals that have a low probability of winning. So one of the things that I coach my team on is getting really good about prequalifying. And we're in sales, we have happy ears, right? We want to make— think the best. But, but— and you'll appreciate this, again, doing research for my book— the average sales professional only spends 28% of their time selling. The rest is spent on administrative tasks. And again, God bless you for the great jobs you've done to sharing the you know letting the people know about that. And the rest is deal management. So so we're only selling 28% of the time. And if you can if you can if you can give your team more freedom, more time to focus on deals that have a higher probability of winning. And again, I've had I've had to tell some of my team members look no this this is vaporware. It's a crap deal. It's not going to go anywhere. Just take it out of your forecast. And they you know they grumble and whatever. And later on. They're like, oh yeah, you were right. You know, it didn't go anywhere.

But let's stick to the status quo thing. What do you ask your reps to ferret out whether it's a deal or an idea?

I'm such a, like, I'm old school and contemporary, right? Back in the old days, they had BANT, right? That acronym. And I kind of fell in love with a PAT, which is pain, Authority, consequences, target profile, timing. And it's just, you know, you want something that's easy for the team to remember because complexity kills compliance. And the biggest thing I want to know is what's the pain that they're feeling? How much is it costing them? Can you enumerate to me what this is actually costing them in dollars? And then who has the authority to make this move forward? Is because I don't care if they— The poor dude who's the network engineer who's suffering this pain, but it doesn't get felt up higher up the rank, the food chain, doesn't matter, right? So who has the authority? And then there's the consequences. Whose head's gonna roll if you guys don't do something about this in the organization? If there's no consequences, there's no deal. And then you get into the last 2 really is what's their timing? They're like, well, we'll get around to it eventually, we're not sure. And then there's the target profile. Is this customer someone that we actually engage with? We win deals. with regularly. And it's a simple acronym, but that, that one really helps. I think MEDPIC gets just, oh God, too into the weeds.

Too much.

Too into the weeds. And again, complexity.

Outside looking in.

Yes. Right. Yes. Yeah.

As opposed to what yours is, the inside.

Yeah. Yeah. And then, and then, you know, the last part of that, that's not covered really by the acronym really is Do you have a sense— I talked to my team— do you have a sense of the internal politics of the organization? There's the official org chart and then there's the unofficial.

Yes.

Informal.

Yes. And that's the one that'll make or break.

That's the one that works.

That's the one. And if they can't answer that question, like, move on. You don't even know how this organization works. And you have— and I talk, I talk about the map to the money, right? And I think I might have learned that from you, actually.

Yeah, that's my bag.

Yeah, that's, that's you. See, shit, it's been like, it's such a part of me now. I forgot I learned it from you. But, but I ask them, show me the map to the money. And if they can't walk me through it, again, we do this in the very beginning, not at the end when we're trying to rally the troops and it's the end of the quarter, the end of the year.

Last week.

Yeah.

It's not in procurement. It's not happening.

Forget about it. Right. So, so that, that, that early stage is critical towards what happens later. And also, like we talked about, it's less time and energy. It's less wear and tear. It's less stress on myself and the team.

Right. And I think a lot of reps get real comfortable with that champion.

Yes.

But they don't really query the champion. Who else other than you cares about this? And why?

Yeah, you bring up a good point. And again, again, the research I did on the book I wrote, and you'll appreciate this, because writing, writing a book, it's one thing to have your own lived experience. You're like, well, yeah, but this is across the board. So then you have to do the research to make sure that it meshes. And that's— I have 161 footnotes in my book, which has made me crazy. But, but you get to this point where it's, it's— I kind of lost my train of thought there. I'm sorry. Where was I going with that?

Talking about they, they were getting falling in love with the champion and the champion.

Thank you.

Almost single-threaded.

Yeah. So, so, so part of the research study was that, that there was a time when the stakeholders usually, and this is average, right? In a B2B organization was around 5. And then now there's about 11 to 20 stakeholders in an organization. And within that, there's the primary decision makers and the internal influencers and then their day-to-day users, what have you. And again, this, this is part of that map to the money. It's, do you, do you understand who those, those people are? And the sales cycle's gotten longer because we went from 5 to, let's say, now they're saying 11 to 20 stakeholders.

Right.

And, and people are buying a lot of little things as opposed to a few big things. So, so there's a lot of little decisions and toes that are getting stepped on and egos that are getting bruised.

Yeah. And, and that, so that goes back to the, the internal politics. And, and if you don't understand the internal politics in terms of everyone in, in an organization has their own little fiefdom.

Yep.

And they have their, their P&L that they're responsible for. And it's if they go with the solution with you, if they say yes, what's the win for them personally?

Personally.

How's that going to impact their career? How's that going to impact their career personally? How's that going to create their potential of getting a promotion or getting fired? You know, when the, when the economy imploded in 2008, for the first time, at least in my experience, I saw a lot of high-level CIOs, CTOs, director of networks, what have you, getting fired because They signed off on, let's say, $2 million, $3 million upgrade to their network, and it didn't work as advertised. And they were done.

Yeah. And people don't think about that and no one admits it, but everybody's like, right, you're like pulling the little straw out and seeing what happened. Was it Jenga? Is that the game?

Jenga. Yes, it's Jenga. Yeah.

Yeah.

But, but, but there's so many moving parts. And I think part of being a great sales professional is being a psychologist.

Yeah.

And you took— right? And you talked about evolutionary psychology, which, which I'm a huge fan of, and I was anyway. So when you talked about it, I was like, yes, yes.

Right. They're little tribes, little teams.

And you have to understand—

Informal organization.

Informal. And that will kill you or make your career if you understand those.

Yeah.

Yes.

And there's usually like one person that everybody knows. They— that person knows what they're doing, so they let them do what they want.

It's, it's, it's challenging. And the other thing too is change. We're change agents. And I think sales professionals lose sight of that. You know, everyone's so focused on units and widgets and boxes, but we're change agents. And I think people lose sight of the fact that change is hard, even when it's a good change, even when you want to make the change. And I could point out, oh gosh, New Year's resolutions. Come on.

Yeah.

The failure rate for that, uh, right? Seriously, right? There was, there was a phenomenal, uh, long-term study done in hospitals, and the gist of it was that people had suffered massive heart attacks, had to get heart stents, what have you, and they were told, look, if you don't make some serious, severe life changes, uh, start working out, just walking, uh, you know, clean up your diet, give up the Ho Hos and Twinkies, whatever it is, right? you're gonna be dead. And, and at the bottom of this long study, less than 10% made the personal changes.

Yeah.

Think about this for a second. Your doctor, you just had a massive coronary event, you almost died. And they probably put in a heart stent or did whatever they did. And when they followed up with these people 2 years later, only 10% had followed with that better, that change in their life. The other 90%, 90%, had either had— had either died or had— were brought in for another coronary event and had to get, you know, a heart bypass, quadruple bypass, or what have you to survive. So if people are— have a hard time making change when their life's at stake, what do you think you and me as sales professionals are going to do for an organization?

And it goes back to, you know, evolutionary psychology. It's our prefrontal cortex that wants to lose the weight, but our Primal brain is saying, you're dying right now. I want food. I need some sugar, some alcohol, and a nap.

Yeah.

And it always wins because it's telling you, you're gonna die now if I don't get my food.

Yeah. And then, and then on top of that, you know, one of the things about sales professionals we have to be aware of is the macroeconomics. Are you in a boom period? Are you going into a recession? You and me, we've been through, we've sold through several recessions. Yeah. You know, so, so there's, there's that other thing where I, I'm worried for my fellow sales professionals if we're about to enter recession, that they won't be ready for it.

Well, you know, certainly the ones that have been kind of service reps.

Yes.

Reacting, responding.

Yes.

Nice people.

The customer service, they're not salespeople. That's customer service.

Yeah. And I'm getting, you know, tell me as a leader, I think people kind of go through these stages, but some people get stuck at them. There's a service rep and then there's the competitive rep and then there's the change agent.

The change agent, sometimes also called the trusted advisor. And, and, but it takes time to establish a relationship. Here's, here's the thing that's also interesting, right? And this goes back to my research. So customer retention is absolutely imperative with, especially let's say hypothetically, and I don't wanna jinx us, that a recession's around the corner. Your ability to hold onto your existing customers is, is, is the difference between you maintaining a job or getting, or getting laid off. And that's, that's, it's terrifying because, again, I'm trying to remember the research here. You're getting, getting a new customer is estimated to be 5 to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one. And the probability of selling to an existing customer is about 60 to 70%. So your probability, because they know you, they like you, you've built some rapport.

Papers in place, everything.

Yeah, papers in place. Hopefully, hopefully they've had a good experience with whatever solutions you bought them, right? And now compared to getting a new customer. Now, the research I came across says that the probability of you winning a new customer is between 5% to 20%. I've seen averages around 17%, right? So that's less than 1 in 5 versus the 60% to 70% chance of an existing customer. Yeah, the solving the recession is going to be really interesting if we're heading that direction because the people who, like you said, are customer service reps and aren't change agents, Oh, yeah, it's gonna be a rough period for them.

Yeah, it is.

And I think that's what we've been seeing a little bit this year.

Yes.

Is that when there's no inbound, what do I do?

Oh, and yeah, and it's interesting because the time to prepare, what's that saying? Dig your well before you're thirsty, right? So if you haven't dug that well, you better start doing it now. You better tighten up those relationships with your best customers. You better start getting yourself out there, however you do it. good in a way where when the customer is ready for you, they will find you. And I think you've talked about this, but, but we talked about status quo, right, on one end of the spectrum. Then on the other end, there's actively seeking solutions, which is where, like, that's, that's blood ocean, man. That's the chum, the sharks. We're tearing each other apart for it.

Yeah.

And the closing ratio, again, we talked about this, 5 to 20%. Research studies show 17%. Where you need to be is the window of dissatisfaction. And I think the problem is most salespeople don't live there. Maybe they don't know about it because they're too busy over here and they're actively seeking solutions, having a dogfight with everyone else.

And I think people would rather send email all day than really do real prospecting, right? Network with people, start conversations, have trade shows, have user groups, have reasons to be together.

Yeah.

That aren't just taking an order.

Yeah, you, you, you have to do it now. And the other, the other, there's another component with that. And, and, and, and this, and this speaks to, this speaks to the, the way you thrive in, in bad economic times. And that is, that is, are you selling to keep a solution that keeps the lights on, the bread and butter stuff? Are you selling strategic innovation?

Yeah.

And, and, and you have to be able to pivot really quickly. You have to be able to pivot really quickly because the— if the economy goes sideways and then, uh, the— some of those deals in your pipeline you're working on were towards more geared towards strategic innovation and would like to have, they're gone. And what— and if you don't have any of the bread and butter must-haves, keep the lights on type stuff, you're dead in water.

And, and knowing that, because that goes back to kind of like your qualification in forecasting.

Yes.

The consequences.

Well, well, that's, that's, that's a question again, on, on the teams that I've led, it's a question that comes up periodically. Well, actually on, on the regular, because again, it's like I'll say, is this bread and butter or is this strategic innovation? And if, if they can't tell me that, oh, you got problems and that's a red flag for, and then we're gonna have to drill in deeper.

Yeah. And if, and that's kind of a primary thing because, and that's what we don't look for that because we hear what we want to hear.

Happy years.

Yeah.

It, it's the happy years. Yeah.

And we don't really learn until it goes south.

And even then sometimes people don't learn.

I mean, I, I think it's interesting because, and that you're right, we don't learn because we call it No decision.

Right. And we don't learn. And then, and then there's the other part. You know, most of my battles have always been internal with the upper management.

Yeah.

And that's why I, I'm a big fan of your videos. I crack up. It's also because they're painful, but they're true. And they're also funny because most of my battles are fighting the internal nonsense of, to your point, let's do more of what doesn't work.

It doesn't work. Let's do more of it.

But, but I, I'm telling you, with the exception of like maybe, I think I've been in maybe 2 organizations where they didn't do that. Everywhere else is, well, this is not working. We better do more of it.

And, and I've had people who know it doesn't work go into management and do it. And I'm like, don't you remember that it didn't work and it just gets everyone busy and angry and depressed? Yeah.

But Well, here's the thing too. So, you know this, the average VP of sales, their tenure is around 19 months now, right? So it's very short-lived. And a lot of people who failed upwards end up in those positions because the challenge too is you have a lot of people and I'm talking like chief revenue officer, chief sales officer, all that nonsense, and VP of sales. Quite a few of them came up through product marketing, came up through sales operations. They weren't actually salespeople. So, so if you're dealing with that, you're basically in kind of like the 7th circle of sales professional hell.

Yeah, right, because they're good if there's the automatic inbound, the tornado. Anyone can do that though. That's an admin job. That's not a leadership job.

Yeah, and, and, you know, and sometimes people will say, well, I've got, you know, say 20 years experience, and I'll say, well, do you have 20 years of experience or do you have 1 year repeated 20 times? Um, I, I had a sales leader— this is not to bag on, you know, shred on sales leaders, but I had one who the last time he actually sold was 1989.

Yeah.

Sold in 1989, the last time he sold. And then he got out of sales for some reason and got into sales ops and somehow he found himself to be right. So his whole career was sales ops.

Forecasting.

Never carried a quota for like— yeah. So he carried a quota for 3 years and I looked it up because I was really curious about this because we used to go back and forth over a lot of concepts you talk about, about, well, let's double down on doing things that don't work or how many phone calls are they doing? I'm like, no, how many great conversations have they had?

Yeah. With—

and this guy's— yeah. And this guy's sold like 1980, 1988, '89, '90. And then he got into sales ops and then somewhere around the 2000s he became a sales leader. And he— and but the thing that's interesting is, is watching a sales leader who actually knows how to sell, how to motivate, how to lead, or someone who basically just bangs you over the head about your quota every 2 minutes.

Yeah, it's very different. And I've— I have a You know, the Sales Leadership Show where I only interview those people. It's inspiring because I want reps to know that they're out there. It's not all accountants.

Oh man. Oh, God bless you for saying that because there's so few of them. And again, I've been doing this way too long. And then I did a startup stint where I— and I'd recommend it, startup world. I learned a lot really quickly, but I wouldn't recommend because it's 70-hour weeks and the venture capital is beating you over the head about unrealistic, you know, reaching unrealistic numbers. But, but the sales individuals right now who are dealing with the coming environment are gonna have to start thinking like, like guerrilla warfare leaders.

Yeah. You gotta do your own prospecting. You gotta, your own network. And yes, and that's it. And people come to me and go, they're not on LinkedIn or they don't find any value. And it's like, you're not using it right.

They're, they're, they're not. And they don't necessarily, it doesn't all have to be LinkedIn. And I'm dating myself here. This is going way back, right? to your point, it's got to be social media, LinkedIn, shit, YouTube— pardon my language— YouTube, whatever it is. When I first was getting started, and this is actually after 9/11, the dot bomb implosion, it was ugly. And I was with one particular company. I survived 4 rounds of layoffs. We literally lost half the company. This is a networking manufacturer. Like, whoa, this is ugly. I started writing articles back in the days when people read magazines for the top industry publications tying problems to solutions. But I wrote it in a, in a very business-oriented way so that the person who read it, who was, let's say, CIO, CTO, could send it to their, I don't know, their CEO or their CFO, and they could understand it. And that I had a whole bunch of inbound leads coming in from that.

Yeah.

And I did that for many years. But if you're a salesperson, you're depending on your marketing department to bring you leads.

It's dead. It's dead.

You're done. You're so done. And I don't want to terrify everyone who's hearing this. I want to inspire you to think differently. And again, when I talk about thinking like a guerrilla warfare leader, think guerrilla warfare is you're on your own. You have no logistics, no supply. No one's coming to rescue you. So you have to think, okay, How, how do I get in front of my ideal customer? How do I make them aware of me when they get to that window of dissatisfaction? And then you, you start, the wheels start going and you start getting that momentum, the pipeline starts building up. And if you do it right, if you do it right, consistently, you'll have a constant influx of inbound leads that you generate yourself that nobody can screw you out of.

Yeah. It's it. And I think There's no other choice. I mean, people can try and find that company that's in the tornado, but good luck.

And, and, and we're, we're definitely coming through that period where if you do the things that we've talked about, and again, listen to Brian, buy his book. Again, I'm a big fan of the Maverick Selling Method and, and be a student of the game. You talk about this a lot.

Yeah.

Be truly a student of the game. Understand human psychology, understand evolutionary psychology. And, and, and model if you can, if it makes sense, model the top performers in your industry, if it makes sense in your company. Sometimes, let's get real, some, some top performers in a company, basically they're being fed deals because, you know, they were fraternity brothers with the, you know, VP of Sales or whatever. But if you do those things, you're going to fare well.

Right.

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

So you can reach me, you know, go to amazon.com. The Strategic Sales Leader: Mastering the Art of Vision, Strategy, and Execution. If you're, if you're a sales leader or aspiring sales leader, it's— I guarantee you I put everything that I've experienced the last 25 years into that book. Also, you can reach me on Instagram at Hardcore Leaders, Hardcore Leaders, plural. Or, you know, look me up on LinkedIn.

Now, we talked a lot about instincts in that interview. The weight loss one is a classic one because people, they know how to lose weight. They know why they should lose weight. But when they feel that hunger, they feel deprived, And their survival instincts take over and they say, I need that cookie. I'm gonna die without that cookie. And somehow we find ourselves walking into the kitchen and getting that cookie. But if we could really talk to ourselves, connect with that subconscious of ours and say, you'll be fine, you'll live, you could live probably 60 days without that cookie. Or anything else except for water. But we don't— our instincts don't believe that. If they did, we'd probably all starve to death. So our instincts serve us, but not very well in sales, because we go through these stages. And it's important to understand this because it will help you determine where you are in your progression. And we all go through them. Some people faster, some people slower. What we need is a drive to get to the next level because otherwise we become comfortable at the current level. So we all start off as that service rep. We learn the product, we're conscientious, we're responsive, but we fall right into the commodity trap. Why? Because all we know is the product. And we answer all the questions. We give lots of proposals, extensions, whatever the customer wants. Customer's always right, right? They know what they want. They know how to get this done. But we don't find satisfaction in this level because a lot of people don't buy. Why don't they buy? Because they don't see any difference between you and anybody else. So they go with the cheapest or the easiest. For them. So then we progress to the competitive rep where we know our product and our competitors and we're willing to fight a little about that, really get the client focused on that. And a lot of people think this is the pinnacle of sales. Nope, it's not. It's just the second step. And we Are surprised when they don't buy. We got the technical win. Why didn't they buy? Well, lots of reasons. The person that we're talking to doesn't have enough authority or political capital or ambition to get it done internally. Well, they don't know how. Now, the next level, we understand that and we work with champions and we start to learn how companies buy and we start to guide people through it. But to get to that level, you have to be dissatisfied at the competitive level because the next level requires a whole nother counterintuitive skill set that you have to adapt to. It doesn't feel natural, it doesn't feel organic, and it doesn't feel authentic, and it doesn't come across that way, certainly at first. But You have to believe that that has to be done, and you don't know how to do it, and you're uncomfortable doing it, so you might not do it, or you might do part of it and rationalize the rest. And that rationalization is the opposite of learning. It's coming up with a false belief that you now believe is true. And now you're going down the wrong road Feeling you're on the right road. It's hard. I get it. I went through it. And if you don't have kind of somebody who knows the ropes and can show you and give you feedback— and the hardest part is you have to ask for feedback. You can't audit the courses. You have to participate in the courses. And we had a great one-on-one yesterday where, you know, I was walking the student through why they did what they did. It was natural. It was organic. It was authentic to them. What I was teaching, he didn't feel it was authentic to him yet. He felt the other person wants business, business, business. And sometimes they do. But If you talk about their favorite topic, believe me, they will talk. And great selling is completely counterintuitive. And it's hard to understand. So we always revert to our instincts. Why do managers focus on activity? It's instinctual. If they're busy, somehow, some way, it might work out. It's a numbers game, Brian. No, it's not. It's only a numbers game if you don't know how to sell. If you don't know how to sell, you're going to be very busy knocking on a lot of doors, seeing if there's any interest. And today, interest finds you. Finding interest is near impossible. You can create it, but that's a skill, a counterintuitive skill. None of us were taught to talk to strangers. Remember being a kid? Your parents would yell at you, don't talk to strangers, stay over here, stay away from unknown people. And some of us may have been naturally, instinctually outgoing, and that's why you probably got pulled into sales. But that's just one skill. You got to know when not to talk. And you've got to move from statements to questions. Oh, that's a lot. And then what really got me after the office hours was how hard this is, because what you need is to build up the confidence to have a peer-to-peer conversation, which is a talent, but then not get too confident. That you're overconfident. See, it's that equalization. This is why sales is so much of a mindset game, a self-management, self-regulation game. And a lot of us don't have experience with that. And this is kind of why sports and any performance background is good, because it requires a lot of self-regulation. Certainly, if you're a comedian, being up on stage, it's not a sport, but it's kind of a game. A comedian will spend a whole year, 365 days on the road to develop 1 hour of content in a year. Now, we don't have that time, that type of time. We've got to get Lots of deals done in a very short period of time. And we have to do it all day. So how do you, how do you manage that? That's a lot of self-regulation. That's a lot of, you know, confidence, but not overconfidence. Excitement, but not too much. It's a lot. And that's why sales is hard. But if you know it, you can start working on it. If you ignore it, it kind of drifts backwards. And this is what I see with a lot of salespeople. You know, they get the Dunning-Kruger effect and they never get out of it. Or what you get is the platituders. You see them in my comments where they didn't really watch the video or listen to it, but they say control the controllables. You know, it's like, okay, whatever. You didn't get the point of the video. You're not a good listener. People think that if they know the platitude, they have the skill. No, anyone can say the platitude. Few can implement the skill to the right level. And I get that it's hard, but ignoring it doesn't make it easier. It just means you're getting worse and not knowing it. You've got to be conscious of that. This is kind of what I teach and giving you an exact example with lots of people, with lots of feedback, lots of examples and case studies. And this is why I run the courses the way I do. Learning the material is not that hard. It's not a huge intellectual challenge. It's a big emotional regulation challenge But that is regardless of how you sell. If you want the world to buy your way, you wing it. That's what winging it is. It's just going with your instincts, which in most cases are pretty good, but we tend to cave. Send me a quote. Give me a discount. Uh, give me a call next year. Have you heard that recently? If you're ready for that and you've got a good system for it, it might not be that bad. But if you don't, it's over. Game over. Find somebody else. The problem is making up for that in today's world is really hard. Getting somebody live is really hard. And they do not want to hear about you and your product.

Sorry.

And that's if you're at the first 2 levels of the sales. That's all you know what to do. You got to learn more because those people are not the people crushing it. Those are the people trying to find a job where they— that skill is enough to crush it. And those aren't many jobs out there. You see those people trying to be sales experts after 5 years of experience on LinkedIn. I love that. I felt that way too. My instincts told me I was great because I had a great couple of years, but I learned a whole lot more. And I've learned so much more by teaching sales because you can kind of see what the person's going through and find a way of communicating it to them and connecting with them. And Without trying to lose them. Some people you lose immediately where they, they just can't think outside of their view of the world because internal to them they are 100% right because they feel 100% right. That's their instincts talking, not their brain. And the problem is we all feel our instincts are the best. And they're the best for us. At this particular moment. But are they the ones that we need to become the salesperson we want to become? That's why it takes so much internal determination to become great at sales. But ignoring it doesn't change it. It only makes you feel better about being bad. At sales. So it's up to you to decide which you want to be. If you want to become great at sales, you have this internal locus of control. Go to b2brevenue.com, check out the courses. If you don't have an internal locus of control, do not sign up. If you, you think your instincts are the best for sales, do not sign up. You'll be disappointed. Because what you'll always do is blame somebody else for why it doesn't work. And the only person to blame is yourself.

It's the truth.

I'm sorry, but this is called The Brutal Truth, not the truth you want to hear. It's the truth you need to hear. We'll see you next time.