HOW TO FIX THE BLINDSPOTS BEFORE THE COST US BIG MONEY IN B2B SALES AND SELLING

Today, the conversation's a little bit different, but insanely important. Because if you can see this skill in yourself or come up with a strategy to prevent this, your revenue, your sales is going to skyrocket. Because in the last, you know, 7 years I've been training reps one-on-one. Because one-on-one is very different than in a group.

Very different.

One-on-one, you can kind of dig into their thinking. You can kind of empathize with them. In a group, people are kind of playing team member, so they kind of put on a facade. I guess you get a little bit of that on the one-on-one, but the distinction is You kind of ask yourself, why are they not doing this step? And it's not just one person, it's 95% of the people aren't doing it. And, you know, I sometimes ask and they say, well, I did something like that, which is kind of an excuse. And The reason I ask, it's not an administrative step. It may feel like that, but it is a profound step. Because if you don't understand the game you're playing, how are you going to win the game? And sales, we try and condense it down to a game so it's understandable. Not that it's a, you know, kids playing games, but that it You can condense it because what most people do in sales is every situation is this unique snowflake that's never been seen before and never will be seen again in the entire history of mankind. No, it might be a little off. The people are different. The company's different. The timing's different, but the situation— Has happened a million times and will happen a million more. And I kind of didn't come to this realization of what's causing this until I kind of went on my little weight loss journey because I was smart enough or knowledgeable enough to know that, you know, I don't need a book on dieting. I know it's calorie deficit. I know I'm eating too much. So the first step is become aware of what you're eating. Give up the thing that will have the most reward and be the least painful. Okay, do that. But I'm still a mammal. I still have hunger feelings. And what I learned Was hunger is a survival feeling. We all know that, right? But wait till you're hungry. When you're hungry, it hijacks your prefrontal cortex, meaning that you're not thinking, you're reacting. You are essentially a mammal without that consciousness, without that— sense, that intelligence to know that the hunger— I'm not starving to death. I've got a house full of food, a refrigerator stacked. I'm not going to die. But yet it feels like I'm going to. Now, what does this have to do with sales? We run into this all the time. Send me a proposal. We think that's a buying signal. It might be, but in B2B, more often than not, it's the beginning of being ghosted. It's the end of the deal, not the beginning. They're not going to take that proposal and go down to procurement and issue it. They might, but most likely they won't. They're just looking for a price. But we send the proposal to somebody who has zero budget authority. Little or no political know-how, and has the need but not the means. Now, why is this so critical? Because most of the traps and hiccups and stalls that we run into in the complex sale are preventable. Not 100%, but most are. The ghosting, uh, the single-threadedness, the prioritization, the putting it off— there are strategies, and I teach those strategies. But if you're not proactive in understanding the game that you're playing, that you have some type of visual to know where you are And where you're going and why this is happening. Everybody assumes that it's totally unique, never happened, because prefrontal cortex is turned off. We're not thinking, we're reacting. Our instincts are, I'm a salesperson, I need an order, this looks like an order, I'm going to get the order. But that's not what it is. That's what it feels like. And that's the difference. The distinction between what it feels like and what it is, is the difference between knowing what to do and doing what's going to ruin the deal. Because so much of what we do ruins the deal, mostly because our clients don't know how to buy. And frankly, We know how to service, but do we know how to sell? Because service, certainly in sales, feels organic. It feels natural. And we feel like a jerk if we don't do it. But we're not in service. We're in sales. And I always get a lot of pushback, and a lot of people don't want to accept this. They want to feel right. And people in general don't think, they react. Most of the comments I get on my videos on LinkedIn are misinterpretations of the title, and they didn't listen to the video, didn't watch it, and they put a little comment because they want to express that they know more, that they are better. They— it's a humble brag. It's not a contribution to the video. It's not a reflection of the content in the video.

They didn't see the content in the video.

This hijacking of their brain is preventing them from learning the lesson in the video. Now, most people watch the video and now they They call it remembering because remembering feels better than learning. Remembering says, I already knew it, but I forgot it, or it's not top of mind. Thanks for the reminder. Learning it— oh, wait a minute, this is a different way of looking at it. Very much like what I'm talking to you about right now. And a lot of us don't want to hear it.

Why?

Because we have to reflect on ourselves. But I chose the name of this podcast very, uh, intentionally. The Brutal Truth About Sales and Selling. Not the truth. The brutal truth. The brutal truth, meaning this is stuff that you need to hear that you may not want to hear. But It has the most impact on you. Because when I talk to salespeople, a lot of times they're hijacked. They're panicking. They're in that starvation stage, like in the dieting. And that's why diets are hard. It's because how do you manage a primal instinct? Survival, starvation. You're not starving, but you feel like you're starving. So you think you are starving. It's hard to say, well, wait a second. This will pass. And you know what? It does. People have not eaten for 30, 60, 90 days. I don't know what the record is, but people do these long-term fasts. And you know what happens? They get used to that hunger feeling and it passes. But good luck.

I know it's hard, right?

We did—

this is the same thing we're getting in sales. Why do we have the numbers game? Why do we view sales like that? The answer is it distracts us from doing the hard work. We don't want to profile our unique customer profile, ideal customer profile. So, we assume that 1% to 3% or 5% are in market. That's a lie. I did the math. You can do the math. It's 1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000. is in market. It's less than 1%. It's probably less than 1/10 of 1%. If you start thinking that way, a numbers game no longer makes sense. Because if it's 1 in 1,000, it takes 2 weeks to find somebody who might be interested or curious. Well, that doesn't make sense. So I can't think of that.

I'll think of 1 to 5% because I can live with that.

Hmm.

And this is the kind of epiphany that we've gotten in Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting. I take people who are sending 100 or 50 emails a day to sending 5 or just doing other things maybe 5 or 10 times a day. Less than a half hour, and they get more meetings.

Why?

Because they're thinking like a client and not like a salesperson. And it's hard to not think like a salesperson when you're a salesperson. Let's get into this discussion. Me and Dustin are going to talk about this in quite a bit of detail. Have an open mind, because what your subconscious is saying to you right now is, I know that.

I know that.

That's simple.

That—

I'm smarter than that.

Really? Okay.

How many diets have you tried? Or how about this? When you get cut off in traffic, how do you feel? What do you do? Do you hit the horn? Do you flip them off? Or do you let it pass? Which part of your brain are you thinking with then?

Hmm.

You know it means nothing in, in the scheme of An hour, it means nothing. Never mind a day, a week, or a year. Part of what I'm trying to get through is this understanding of sales being a performance profession. Everyone today thinks it's an activity profession.

It's not.

Anyone can be busy. There are a lot of very busy people out there. So busy we have products to do more busy things. Now we've got AI to do infinitely more busy things. But effectiveness doesn't go up, it goes down. But since everyone's busy, we can say it isn't us. Oh, maybe that's the problem. Now, one of the things that I'm trying to work on this year and going into next year is working with Brevity Pitch. The ability to put these types of traps into real live sales conversations that you can practice, that you can role play with, that you can simulate on purpose and in by random to have it Sprinkled into the conversations. We know what they are: pricing, the commodity trap, how are you compared to this thing that is not even in the same market, send me a proposal, uh, just check in with me in a couple weeks, I'm sure we'll move forward. All of those things we need to handle. We know we need to handle them, but do we have A real process, or do we assume that we'll do well in it? And I think this is one of the characteristics that's both good in salespeople and gets us in trouble, is that we build up that confidence to take on these new and unique situations. The confidence is good, but without any preparation, Without any practice, without it— I mean practicing to the point where it's automatic, like driving. We can drive for hours without getting—

maybe not hours, maybe an hour without getting tired.

Remember what it was like driving when you were 16? It was both fun, but you go driving for 10 minutes and it felt like 2 hours because you were constantly focusing. Is my foot on the gas? Is it on the brake? Do I need to put the directional Why isn't there a directional for going straight? I remember having those thoughts. Why? Because it wasn't automatic yet. It took months to get it to be automatic now. And now we drive and we don't, we don't really need to think. We can be on the phone. We can be listening to a story.

Why?

Because it's our subconscious. That's— those repetitions are now there. And I know you think you have that with sales. None of us do. I don't even have that. Why? Because it's a little different every time. And that little difference, you need to warm up. You need those reps. That's why in every performance profession, there is a rehearsal, a practice, routines to become great. Grab your manager, go to brevitypitch.com and check it out if you want to become great at sales. If you don't, well, join the pile.

Here we go. There's a lot of either I win or I learn mindset out there. A lot of people learning. I love to see that. It's great. A lot of students out there learning about sales. You see that?

I see a lot of people either making mistakes or failing in some form or fashion with those deals. I don't know if they are learning as much as you put it there. I think they sometimes will keep repeating those same things over and over again. So I know for me, I've definitely had many failures and mistakes, whether it be big or smaller stuff with deals, and it's easy to keep repeating them. if you don't take a step back and really try to self-assess afterwards. So, uh, more than happy to share some of those, but I don't, I don't know if people are learning as much as you're putting it there.

They're telling themselves they are, aren't they? I love that. I either win or I learn. I got— I, I went on down and I really went down this road about 3 years ago because I got so sick of it, and I made a bunch of videos. Not many people got it. But I started asking, so what did you learn?

I'm, I'm all ears.

Tell me what you learned.

You know the only answer I got?

What's that?

It was, I learned I hate to lose. And I was like, okay, you didn't know that before you lost? Well, I knew that. Then you didn't learn anything, did you? If you know it before, that's a reminder. That's not a lesson. Now, do we really— I was reminded that I hate to lose. And this is not picking on people. This could very easily be interpreted as picking on people. It's not. It's a distinction that If you want to get better, how do you learn? And you should learn your own learning system because a lot of people have to experience multiple times before they get it. Other people once. Other people by seeing other people do it. Guess which one's the most effective?

Uh, well, The most effective is to learn from other people because you're not doing it yourself, but you probably learn more when, when you do it yourself, you would hope, if it's a bigger mistake. So I don't know, what are you, what are you saying?

Well, I mean, do you really need to take heroin to know that it's not a good idea?

Good point. Good point. Touché.

I don't need to take it. I trust it. It's probably great. But I know the, the side effects aren't great, so I don't need to firsthand experience that. But in sales, it's kind of— it's different, right? You hear the same things over and over again. You get ghosted. Okay, do we all know how to prevent that? Most of us do. Okay.

Mhm.

Or you get single-threaded in a deal, right? We all know that's wrong, and we all know it's risky. Single point of failure. But is it an intellectual flaw? It's kind of a kinesthetic, a feelings flaw.

Well, they're in charge.

They're, they're, they're the go-getter.

They can make things happen.

If I touch anything, it's going to blow up. They told me that and the deal doesn't close. I mean, how many of us, how many times do we have to go down that road before we know what it really is until it blows up?

That's a great point. Or you don't even realize what it is that caused it because you're just Doing and, uh, going through these aimless process, or you're not really going through process. You're just like acting. You're just like pushing it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You're just sending a proposal or doing whatever your boss tells you to do. So you don't even realize, I bet a lot of these folks, they get ghosted or whatever it may be, but they don't realize why that happened. Like they, they sent a quote, they sent a proposal. They didn't have multiple people on their side. They didn't plan this and that. Uh, they just talked to one person that was manager level, not even higher than that. So a lot of people don't even dissect it and realize why it happened first off. And there's always gonna be the same common things that most likely, and, and then they think just pure numbers or more reacting to other accounts is gonna help overcome that. And they just swipe it under the rug and just keep going. Then it's just a, a numbers game is, I know our favorite term where they just eventually maybe get lucky on a couple. And then the rest of them just keep happening and they think it's just all about grit, hard work, and just persevering through versus they never stop and take a step back of some self-assessment of like, what actually happened with this deal? Like, why did it go off the rails? Why did they ghost me? Why did it stall? And it's just, it's not fun to think through that because you have to look at yourself first and you're going to want to instantly point fingers at the company did something wrong, the prospect did something wrong. My, my company doesn't give us enough resources to make stuff happen, or we couldn't get the discount, whatever it is. But I think it's hard to take a step back and be real with yourself and, and, and just plan time to understand why it happened and, and what you can do to not do that in the future. So. That's a pretty— yeah, go ahead.

Well, what I most often hear is they lied to us, they're playing games. And I'm like, what game are they playing? They're playing a game. And what's that? That's a deflection. That's— it's your fault I hit your car, right?

Yeah.

I know you weren't in the car at the time, but it was in my way. And that's a— I mean, it's a primitive, a primary selling skill, you know. And we, we talk about listening all the time, and we, we run out of time in the call to do the real closing of the call. But it was going so well. We'll have no problem closing this deal.

They told me they were the decision maker. Anybody tell you that before?

I've heard it probably 1,000 times.

Yeah. How many times did it turn out they were the decision maker?

Maybe like 3 out of 1,000.

Or, or this is a sure thing, or this is— how many times do we tell ourselves it's a no-brainer?

It feels good. It feels good to like, hey, that meeting went really well. I'm gonna put this at 90% to close because we had a good meeting and then put it in the pipeline. And then everyone's like excited, like, oh man, your, your, your Q2 is looking great. You got all this stuff in there and then you start believing it. Even though you didn't really do all the work to, to get it there, but it, but it sounds good and it feels good and then it's in the pipeline. So then it becomes real to everybody else and then it starts becoming real to yourself and then you just start repeating this game over and over again. It's, it's pretty interesting how that happens.

And you think that you're the first person who's experienced this in all of mankind and commerce. For the last 200,000 years, this has never happened before. Do you think anyone's come up with a way of preventing it? A lot of people have, right?

Definitely.

Yep. Did you prevent it? Well, I didn't need to. It was going so well.

And how many of us, when we hear, oh, how much does it cost, or what's the price?

What do we say all the time? Yeah, we tell them the price.

Probably. Yeah, probably. Yeah, we blurt out the price. We blurt out the price. We don't push back or we don't, uh, make a range or something like that. We just react to whatever they ask. If they say jump, we jump, right?

And we don't go, well, it pays for itself in 3 weeks. Can we talk about some of the variables that would go into that? Start talking about the why would they get and what are they getting, not what it costs. But we walk right into the commodity trap. They tie us up in it, tie the knot nice and tight, and then we complain why we're in it. Now, again, is it an intellectual thing?

Not really.

We kind of know we're doing it. But it feels good getting the customer a proposal. Doesn't that feel good? It's closing. They need a proposal. How can they close without a proposal, Brian? You want me to slow this deal down? I've heard that so many times in my life. You're requesting that I slow this deal down.

I could have it by Friday.

I bet it's a good-looking proposal though.

It's a good-looking proposal. And I go, well, why would they do it on Friday?

Why? They need it.

They have to have it. They cannot live without it. How many conversations I've had like this? And I go, once you give it to them, what else do they need from you?

What do you mean? Right?

You need the order. They have the order. What do they need? What do you mean they don't get it?

Yeah. Yeah.

They don't need anything. And then what happens? Does it close?

No, nothing happens. It doesn't close.

It doesn't close and they're not calling you back. You get an I'm in a meeting email reply. We'll talk soon. That's all that means.

Yeah, right. Yeah.

And again, this happens once a year to you, maybe once a decade. Happened once, 2008.

No, it happens all the time.

Happens most of the time. And people are surprised because it doesn't behave the way that upsell order works. They've got 50, they want 5 more. That deal closed very simply. I did send a proposal and they did buy it. Why is this different, Bryan? We kind of know.

They should.

Yeah.

I mean, obviously the inbound or the upsell of a great existing customer, that's always gonna be significantly easier than trying to go after a new deal that's competitive. where you're trying to displace somebody or disrupt whatever status quo they have with that particular thing. And, and yeah, with the, with the mistakes, I think we instantly want to point it to the customer, right? To what you were talking about, because it's, we don't want to admit it to ourselves. We want to say that they did something wrong or they did something that was off or they changed it.

The proposal was correct.

Exactly. But it's, uh, that's not gonna help your, your bank account. That's not gonna help the commission or, or the company you work for. So you, the sooner you can admit to yourself, I think before you get to the other stuff, it's like you gotta admit to yourself, hey, I messed this up. I went too fast. I shouldn't have sent the proposal, or I should have been dealing with multiple people a lot sooner and admitting it to yourself. And then Planning for it, making corrections, and then trying to get better and improve. But that's not easy for people to do. People, we lie the most to ourselves. And I think sales, that gets amplified significantly because of it's so competitive and you got other people closing stuff and you just want to keep up with the Joneses. So you just think more work or more action is going to improve that. But rarely is that the case. It's If you can figure out where you are making those mistakes, own up to it, and then address it, that's gonna be way better than trying to double your output or double your calls or whatever it is, because that, that's not gonna be very effective. So, and, and no one's gonna come and save you. That's the thing. Most sales environments, I mean, there could be some exceptions, but if you're more commission focused, like, no, nobody really cares what your excuse is. I mean, there is a lot of accountability with The numbers in sales. So if you're not hitting your numbers, then everyone can see that and there's really nowhere to hide. So you have to look at yourself as much as you can and admit that you made some mistakes, which is fine. It's normal. We're all gonna do it, but then not keep repeating them. Yeah.

And it's tricky because you're hearing what you want to hear when somebody says, you know, send me a proposal for this $100K thing. I'm the decision maker. We need to get it done. You'll have the order by Friday. Sounds beautiful, doesn't it?

So you—

that's my song. Yeah, right.

So, so they don't realize they're making a mistake because that sounds like that's— yeah.

They're telling me it's stupid to, to do anything else but send it. You're crazy. You're slowing my deal down. But we know what's going to happen. It's happened 3 other times this quarter, a little different, and it's going to happen 3 more times next quarter if you don't come up with a way of really looking. Is this a deal? Half the time I talk to reps, I go, where are you in the deal? They tell me a story about who did this, they said this, I said that, I said this, they said this, then we had a meeting, they didn't go, then— and I'm like, Where are you in the deal? And it usually is, we haven't met yet. Like, okay, it's not a deal yet.

They visited our website 5 months ago.

Yeah. And I've been trying to get a meeting with them. Okay. So let's start there. Why would they meet with you? Oh, they showed that it makes perfect sense, everything. No, that's why you want to meet with them. Why do they want to meet with you or would meet with you? It, it's this wrestling with what's going on in our head and what's going on in their head. And if we're not thinking about what's going on in their head, we're flying blind. We've got a 16-year-old with Jack Daniel's in his hand driving our car, and it's not going to end up well. And we know what happens. 1 out of 10 times they do order it on Friday. The rest of the time they order it next quarter or a year from now because we didn't really manage the deal.

We didn't drive the deal.

Someone else was driving it. And let's say you gave them a great discount to get the price on Friday, and that quote's going to come up next year when they really want it. And that's going to be the starting point.

And since this happens so often, why not have a plan?

What is your single-threaded plan? What is your ghosting plan?

How do you prevent it?

Repairing it's really hard. You know, they've already left for the weekend. Friday's over. You've committed it because they told you, and you think this will never happen again. I've learned my lesson.

What'd you learn?

Was it not to send the quote? Was it not to forecast it? Was it not to discount it? Not to believe those tricky prospects.

It's not their fault.

You want to know the price of things, right? The real price, not the list price. Definitely. You know, next year you're going to buy something. Let's budget for it. We don't know what the motive is.

I was thinking back to some of my days where I was transitioning and what was that trigger that made me really Dive deeper into this and self-reflect and own up to it. And I unfortunately, I think sometimes it may take losing a really big deal that you thought was going to happen, and you probably went and bought a pool in the backyard or whatever it may be because you thought this commission check was going to come in, and then it doesn't close. And that's that can be devastating financially and then mentally. I didn't necessarily have that specific example, but when I Started doing medical device and I previously worked at a company that had a ton of momentum and I just, all kinds of stuff started happening. I lost like 40% of my territory, uh, 3 months in and I didn't maybe realize the magnitude of that at the time, but I was like, okay, that's not a good start. And then COVID happened after and that like a few months later and it wasn't accelerating the type of stuff I was selling. It did the opposite. And I was like, okay, I might be in a little bit of trouble here as far as what's going on and where I came from. So I, I, some, some bigger things happened and it forced me to be like, I, I gotta ask for some help. I gotta do something different. I need to look at what I'm doing wrong. Like, where is it going off the rails? Like, this is very complex. There's so many things that can happen in between. So some, some things happened and it, and it forced me to do that. I'm just trying to think if I would have done it otherwise, maybe, but sometimes unfortunately, I think something bad has to happen like, like that. And then you're like, okay, I gotta get my butt in gear. I need to spend some money on myself. I need to get a different perspective, whatever it is. And then the same thing when I went to a startup compared to working for bigger companies, prospecting became significantly harder compared to before. And I had to figure out a new way to do that, a different approach, because whatever I'd been taught previously wasn't very effective and I couldn't rest on big company mantras for prospecting. So I, I had these trigger events that forced me to do it. I wish I would have been more proactive with it at times, but I wonder if that's usually the case for most salespeople is like some, they lose a big deal or something triggers them versus actually seeking this out. I don't know what you see.

It's usually something very painful. You're really fighting your instincts.

Yep.

And most people find it really hard to do it. That's why dieting is so hard. You've got a primal instinct that says, I'm starving to death. And then your, your conscious is saying, no, just 500 calories less a day, we'll lose a pound a week. Guess who's going to win? And if people— I can't die at my My DNA doesn't accept calorie restriction. Every excuse in the world. And the excuse is more of the problem than the action, because the excuse tells you you're right when you're wrong. When you say the client's playing games because they're not doing what you want them to do, they're, they're doing what they want to do. And this is my number one law in my book, is people will always do what's in their own best interest despite what they say, including ourselves. But there's a conflict. What's in your own best interest when you get that deal that doesn't close on Friday? Is it to learn?

That's painful. That's admitting this.

It's a rookie mistake, yet a lot of veterans are doing it right now at the end of every quarter. Is it that they don't know, or they're betting that this is the one out of nine that's gonna close? And then when it doesn't, whose fault is it? Oh, it was political. It was oh the economy. Did did you see what happened in Japan? The Nikkei was down 12% this week.

How were they going to buy anything?

It's this wrestling and you got to, what has to happen is you have to interrupt, which is more primal, me winning or me being comfortable with myself because it's going to happen again.

Yeah, I mean, that, that law you mentioned is, is so true and, and you have to factor in, it's the people you're talking to, most likely you're talking to a small, medium-sized, bigger company. They're not the owners of the company. Most people that are selling, they're probably not talking to owner of a company. So they don't have the type of skin in the game that you, you might say to yourself in the head. If you're talking to an owner, that's a little bit different. But if you're talking to a director at a company that has 5,000 employees, I mean, They're gonna look out for themselves. They're not gonna— I mean, they, they say that they want— they say they wanna help the company, and I'm sure they have good intentions, but ultimately they wanna help themselves make their life easier. But it's hard to think about this stuff. And yeah, it's, it, it's so true that the, the excuses on the economy are, are always the best. The government, I mean, that's all stuff you can't control. So if, if, if you're gonna make excuses, on stuff that you can't control, you're going to drive yourself crazy and you're going to keep telling yourself lies and keep doing it over and over again. You got to focus on what you can control, which is usually yourself. And what— yeah, well, good point. I guess you can't— you need to think about it that way so you can control yourself. But, uh, that's, that's where it's really opened me up, is, is just admitting to it. being okay with it and then trying to improve. But you have to document it. You have to map it out. You have— there's so many things that can go wrong the more complex it is and so many distractions. I think this day and age more than ever, it's like we have so many distractions. It's so hard to keep people's attention even when you're talking to prospects. It's like you gotta really be dialed in and plan on the front end because it's just, you know, my phone's going off, social media here. I mean, you can barely keep people for 5 minutes without them you know, wandering. People are on all these conference calls and meetings and they're doing other stuff. They're multitasking. They're not even paying attention. So it's, it's like, because of what's happening with everything out there, like, it's going to get worse if you don't start doing this stuff. It's going to keep, it's going to keep compounding the wrong direction. So it's like I've said before, it's choose which hard you want to do. It's having those really painful big events where you lose a big deal or something bad happens like that. That's not fun. I mean, you learn a lot from it and helps you eventually, but it's way better to do stuff on the front end, which is hard in a different way. And, and that's gonna help you make more money, most likely.

Yeah. But you know which one people will do? You know, I know it's very rare that somebody will really sit down and, and I, I see them through the process because they kind of know, but they're not comfortable with it. Okay. Then they see the result of not doing it. Then that becomes a little bit, bit more uncomfortable than them doing it. Because we have to ask hard questions during the sales process. We have to push back sometimes. We have to do things that aren't service-oriented. They want a proposal. We might want to ask some questions, if for no other reason, to make sure we're getting them the right product. But asking for a proposal might be a buying signal, but it might not be. And everyone's, oh, that's obvious. I know that. Okay, well, look at your pipeline. How many people with those new accounts are you talking to more than one person? And do you realize the sign-off stages? I used to love to ask that. Well, they can sign off on it. Sorry, they can't.

How do you know?

Because I've sold for 30 years and I ran into this my second year in sales, and everyone says they can sign off for everything. They can sign it, but it's not legally binding. How much economic approval do you think they have? Oh, up to a million. No, no, they don't.

10,000 maybe.

I've interviewed CFOs, CEOs, and I always ask them, even CEOs won't be spending that money without talking to people.

Who are they going to talk to?

What do they think? I think too many people get comfortable on the service side of sales and the personality side of sales, and they think that transfers into the more complex sell. It's helpful, but it's not enough.

And how many of them can really articulate the game?

You know what they all say? You know, you, you propose an idea, you handle the objections, and you close strong.

Oh, really?

Maybe is that your— is that your top interview question you ask sales reps? Walk me through a deal. It's a good one.

I used to when I hired.

Yeah.

And the clearer they could get, which usually wasn't clear, you know, it was like he said, she said, then we did this, then we did this, it went south here and then it went better. And I threw a Hail Mary and it closed and it's like, I don't know what you just said. You know, draw, draw it out. Give me a timeline. Oh, then it becomes tricky because they're following their instincts.

And a lot of times your instincts are enough.

Usually it is on the service side, but it's not on the, you know, cold outbound building up a territory side.

It's a different world.

For sure. Is it— was there something in particular that triggered you? Was it, I guess you said your second or third year when you transitioned to sales that you saw some of the stuff happening and you knew you needed to take a different approach and think about, think more about how companies make decisions versus what we want to do? Is that— was there one thing like you lost a deal or something and then it was like, boom, I gotta look at this differently?

Yeah, I went from selling a Very, very complex long-term sale, hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe 5 deals a year. And I liked that sale. Then I went to selling a $15K product, which is much more transactional. And what, what ended up happening, I'd either lose deals or the deal, they wouldn't buy anything. And you had to, those were the days we had to travel. On site, bring the computer, show it to them. And I started, you know, what are the signals? I started talking to all the reps.

How do you know if—

how do you get the next meeting? How do you get them to really surface the issues? Because to get there, I had to get up early in the morning, get on a plane with an engineer. It's not something I like to do every morning.

Right?

Yeah.

And to do it for nothing, you know, you wake up at 4 in the morning and fly to some strange city to give a dog and pony for shits and giggles. It's like, no, don't want to do that. So, you know, qualify hard on the phone, make sure the right people are in the room, get the next meeting, lock out your competitors, dominate their time, get commitments. And a lot of people, that's a lot of work.

Well, I want to get paid for that effort.

And we did get inbound, which was good, but it was hypercompetitive and we were not the king in the market. We were way behind, or we were kind of the up-and-comer, but the other company had a couple of years on us.

Got it. Yeah, I guess so. The more you can be proactive with this and actually address it before something happens where you lose the deal or whatnot, that the better it's gonna be. So hopefully that's helpful to people out there that they can self-reflect and, and be more open to being real with themselves and, and not making these bigger mistakes or, or failures.

Now, we naturally think that this is about intelligence, how smart you are, what your IQ is. If that was true, wouldn't all smart people be nice and thin, have the body they want?

They know how.

See, everybody thinks every problem's a how problem, how to do it. But a lot of things are Us managing our own emotions, our own thought process. And to do that, we can't be in that panic state. Maybe panic's too strong of a word, but we can't be in the game to understand how to win the game. To win the game, you have to outline it, draw it out, uh, put it onto something— on your screen, your computer, your iPad, your whiteboard, your notebook. Because this was the tipping point in my career. Um, I did it a lot when I was selling big expensive stuff. But I had plenty of time then.

You know, too much time.

If you're only doing— I mean, I had my biggest year, I did 5 deals. That's it. That's like 1 every 2 months. That means you have a lot of time to be thinking about the deals. But that's a rarity. What most of us have is we have 5 deals A week, maybe a month. I don't know. I don't know your business. But when the volume goes up, the amount of time that we have to think about each deal goes down. See, I went from that big sale to these smaller deals. Average deal was probably $30K. So it's— I had to do a lot of them. And when you do a lot of them, Uh, it's— you don't get the, the downtime to really strategize, pick apart the organization, multi-thread to the level you want. You kind of got to prioritize, and the amount of effectiveness that you have during those live interactive conversations is critical. And what I noticed was, hey, I'm running into the same issues over and over, whatever they are, whether it's price or ease of use or, you know, the transfer of ownership during the POC or the evaluation. And I go, well, why don't I come up with a strategy for each of these? And then I did that. That was insanely helpful because let's face it, we're going to hear the price question on pretty much, what, 80, 90% of the calls. We're going to get the send me a proposal request on half of them. We're going to get the delay. Why do it now? Well, we can do it later. Why not? No rush. We're just Want to make sure we know what's going on out there in the market.

Okay.

So that's one way. But then the real tipping point was when I looked at the whole process from prospecting to successful referenceable customer. How do I keep that moving? And what are the issues? When do they arise? When I run into this problem, what could prevent it? See, this is the hard part, the real hard part, the prevention, because we're mammals, we're reactive creatures, we're not prevention creatures. Let me give you some examples of that. How many people save for their retirement? You know, they say the average American's got $1.50 in their bank account. People don't do it.

Why?

Because it requires forethought. How many of you have life insurance? Oh God, who wants to think of that? That's why we don't have it.

We don't want to think about that.

Anybody who has dependents should have it. And I'm sure you're saying, oh, well, we have it at work. Well, that's one year salary. That'll get you through a year. Is that enough? Probably not. We don't want to think about it, so we don't do it. Same is true with sales. We don't want to think about losing, so we don't do it. But you need to think about, am I losing? And if you're not— if they're not telling you you're winning, you're losing. Why do we fall in the RFP trap? Because it looks like a deal. It feels like a deal. We don't want to think that somebody else wrote this and that this is really just paperwork to fill up the file for the audit. And guess who wants you to do it? Your manager. I can't tell you the number of times my manager would come in and it's like, oh, here's an RFP. And I know they've already— they bought the the competitor's product 3 years ago. Oh, it's our chance to get back in.

Good.

Oh, but they don't want to meet with us. They don't want to look at it. Uh, in some cases they will just to prove that they did a market study. Okay, is that a real meeting? Are you that good that you can get them to switch? Is it that type of market where people do switch? What's that likelihood? Oh, another thing I ask people to put their deals— put a close date on a deal that you think is closable. Everybody puts the last day of the quarter. Why? That's not thinking, that's reacting. People don't want to think until they have to. And when they have to, the deal's lost. That's the repair. We've got to think before. You can't get life insurance after you die. Everyone is more than willing to buy flood insurance after the flood, but that— nobody sells it after the flood. It's insurance. You see my point here? This is a A cognitive flaw in our evolution that we aren't— we have not evolved this much, this fast, because let's face it, we are hunter-gatherers. We haven't been doing this type of stuff, B2B sales, for what, 50 years?

50 years.

Not many. And the people who write books aren't the people who did it. They're the people who taught people how to do it. They never did it. You know, the, the best-selling sales book out there is by 2 guys who've never been on a sales call, yet they're telling everybody what the best salespeople do. How would they know? Can I write a book on heart surgery? You won't find me near a hospital, but I could make up some stuff that sounds logical, but no cardiac doctor is going to buy it because he's going to be like, what the hell do you know? You aren't through medical school. You've never opened up somebody. Oh, it sounds nice, but in sales, that's perfectly passable. Perfectly passable. If you really want to become great at this, go to b2brevenue.com right now and check out the course that fits your need. What's your pipeline look like? Is it empty? Start the conversation. Get the meeting. Learn how to prospect the way people want To be prospected. It's organic and natural. In the last office hours, there was a CEO in there and he goes, Brian, this is freaking gold. He told the story of connecting with somebody he had known and he did exactly what I told him to. And he had this wonderful conversation at the CEO level. In minutes. Doesn't happen all the time. I don't know your level of skill, your level of comfort, but it's possible. Now, if he had sent his value proposition, his cold email— God, talk about not knowing how to sell. If you're sending cold email That's not selling. Everyone's doing it. It's not unique.

It's not—

you think it's relevant. It's relevant to you as a seller. Sorry. What you need is to have a conversation. Start where they are. Are they at the curiosity stage? I don't know. I never met them. So they're probably not curious about my product or the problem that I solve. They're probably unaware. I start there. Let's build it up. Sure, it takes time, but the time passes anyway. So you can either have a great conversation or you can be trying to get the 15 minutes to show them what you do. That's not selling. That's Shark Tank. We'll see you next time. Check out the courses, check out Brevity Pitch, and thanks for listening.