HOW TO MINIMIZE YOUR LOST INCOME IN B2B SALES AND SELLING

You know what no one's talking about ever is lost income. Our income as salespeople. What's lost income? Lost income is the amount of income that you would have gotten if you were winning the winnable deals. The deals that you're already working on, but they slip, they stall, they get reduced, they start over.

Oh boy.

And you may look at that as just a delay of income, but it's really a loss because now we have to spend more time on them, which means we can't spend more time on new income deals. You know, some people call this opportunity cost, but that's too abstract. When you call it lost income, We connect with it. And this is one of the things we're going to be talking about today in this interview. But how do you reduce that lost income and maximize your income? That's what we're all about in sales. It's not just focus and prioritization. Too many people just try and have more and more pipeline, more and more distractions from The winnable deals. If we have winnable deals right now in front of us, do we know how to win them? Or are we servicing them, jumping to help them, but they don't know what they're doing? And if we don't know what we're doing, we've got 2 people who don't know what we're doing. What's the likelihood of this working out? No wonder it's like 80% of forecasted deals don't close in the The same time frame that they're forecasted for. Oh, okay, I'll get it next quarter. But next quarter comes and goes. Maybe next quarter. Maybe next quarter. Oh, wait a second, they bought as little as possible. This used to frustrate the crap out of me because you'd start the quarter, and I noticed the pattern in myself. Have this, you know, 3x pipeline Big deals, uh, should have closed last quarter, but they're definitely going to close this quarter. And they get smaller and smaller. And that's really how I learned that sales is a focus game. It's a skill game. Because I could see other people closing deals, working on less, not as stressed out. I wanted to do that. That's what I talk about in Closing the Complex Sale, is having a game plan for the winnable deals. Not reacting to them, not servicing them, driving them. Let's get into this interview today. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Uh, it's in what most people would think is a commodity space, but it's not. And it's a little old school in that prospecting is done Face-to-face, the drop-by. Remember the drop-by? If you haven't had to do the drop-by, it's like door-to-door for business-to-business. It's, I think, the hardest of the hard. You're there face-to-face, and if you become good at it like our guest has, it's game-changing. Now, hiding behind the keyboard or the phone I use the word hiding like, like that. It still doesn't take nerve to pick up the phone and call a stranger and start a conversation. There's smarter ways of doing that too. Let's get into this interview, and I want to give you an update on brevitypitch.com. I was talking with the founder this week. They've got a new release, yet another improved release, and it's moving much and much closer to being your Sales Copilot, not in the automating the dumb things faster, but in conversing, developing business acumen. Imagine being able to have that coworker that you can talk over different acronyms in the space, standards in the space, competitive advantage, objection handling, Q&A. So it's not just for cold calling, although it's great for that. But what you can do— imagine this— you put in the company that you're going to have a meeting with. Let's say it's a discovery call. And then you put in the LinkedIn profile of the people who are going to be on the calls, and it comes up with most likely topics Questions, objections, and how to keep the meeting going. No other coworker is going to do all that work with you. And the word role play really doesn't do justice to it. Like, I use otter.ai as my kind of personal journaling app. You can get— there's a free version, so you can just talk into it and it translates into text, it keeps the audio as well. And I find this insanely valuable because the transcription is pretty good, so you can read it, or you can just play it and listen to the audio. So when I'm walking around thinking about ideas for videos and podcasts, I just record it. Now imagine being able to do that, but it's interactive. Where I could discuss a topic and it could judge the topic, give ideas, ask questions, push back a little, challenge you. That would be cool. That's what brevitypitch.com does for you. It's the future of becoming better at sales. I know you've got 20, 30 years, but that's all in your head. Okay, sales is a verbal communication profession. Yeah, writing emails, nice copywriting, all that stuff, but that goes away pretty quick. It's the conversations that count. And how do you become better? You got to do it. And the problem today is we don't have enough doing it because it takes so long to get people On the line to get that meeting. Brevity Pitch gets you there a lot faster. Grab your manager and sign up and get a demo of it. Believe me, you'll be wowed, and it's not expensive. It pays for itself in about a week, much like my courses. Let's get into the interview. Here we go.

Hey, Jose, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Hey, so a little background about myself. I'm a staffing professional in, in the staffing, staffing world for 22 long, long years. In dog years, that's more like 44, but, uh, 22 years now. Um, delved everything into from operations Um, all the way to now, uh, leading sales teams, uh, leading teams as big as 22+. Uh, so, you know, that's a little bit about my background. Um, oversaw about $35 million worth of business when I was up north. Um, right now just pushing my teams now to, uh, to understand and really love the sales cycle. My main purpose now, so many years into the game, is now to, um— and, and I live by this credence of each one teach one, right? So We had, you know, like your videos, it teaches people. So, you know, my purpose is to now teach the next generation of great businessmen and women, leaders and salespeople.

And why did you get into sales?

So I always say everything is sales, everything. Yeah, some more than others. Yeah, some more than others. I agree with that. But in the staffing world, um, and, and in my world, they go hand in hand, right?

Yeah.

So recruiters have to sell the job to a potential candidate, right? So I started my career as a recruiter, and you have to be able to sell that job to that, to that individual to accept that job offer, right? So you have to sell the company, where they're going, the pay rate, the, the salary, the, the benefits. You have to be able to sell that. to a potential employee. Same thing with sales, right? So you're selling the company that you're working for, and you have to sell what, what, what our value to you is. What, what's our value proposition?

What is—

what, what can we do better than others? What is the main thing that we can do better than our competition? What is it, right? So that's, you know, that's why I got into sales. And most importantly, I think in the last few years, I will tell you, Brian, is, um, in sales, the— my purpose is to give the value of being servient, serve my clients, right? We have to be able to serve our clients and we have to give them something, right? Hey, you know, salespeople, salespeople always say, what about me, me, me, me? Give me this, give me that. No, you know, I'll give you a prime example right now. Um, I have a client that I'm— a prospect that I'm pitching, and I said, here, let me give you this for free, and then at the back end we can talk about our agreement. And guess what? They bit. And since they bit, now guess what? Now our, our conversation is now leading into next steps and next steps, and then an agreement. Then at that point, let's close the deal, and now we're doing business.

Well, that's it. And I think a lot of salespeople have that law of reciprocity backwards. They'll give once they get, but it doesn't work that way.

No, you have to be able to tell your clients, hey, I'm able to give too. Like, you know, what value are you gonna give me? Oh great, I'm gonna sign an agreement and now I got another vendor of the list of 500, right? So, you know, we have to be able to be better, um, for our clients.

And how do you differentiate yourself in the staffing business? I gotta believe that everyone's saying the same thing.

Absolutely. So song and dance, that's, that, that, that's the first thing that, that I get all the time. So I, I say nothing separates us. You know what separates us? One and one thing only: communication. Being able to communicate better than the rest. So if we're able to communicate, if you send me a text message, right, um, at 7 o'clock at night, I'm gonna respond. If you send me an email at, you know, within reasonable hours, 9 o'clock, I'm in bed, right? But, but 8 o'clock at night and I'm looking at my phone, rather than scrolling along LinkedIn, right, you know, you're looking at your email and you're saying, oh wow, this client needs such and such thing. let me respond, right? Because they're going to appreciate that response time, you know. Or, and even if you can't get to it, say, hey, I see your email, um, let me loop back with you tomorrow, let me figure this out, I'll, I'll reach out to you tomorrow morning. Clients appreciate that. So the one thing that I would say to every salesperson out there is the ability to communicate. Communicate better with your clients and they will appreciate that A trillionfold.

Because a lot of salespeople kind of put on a sales voice, a sales persona instead of— because people want authentic communication. Tell me what's really going on. Help me, you know, really dig into what I'm up against and help me solve this. How do you teach that to your reps?

Simple. You just, you hit it right on the nose. Be yourself. If you go in there and, hi, my name is Jose Viltres, I'm from XX Staffing, and, and, uh, I'm here, hidey-ho— people read through that BS. If you walk in— I always, I always like— I, I love icebreakers, right? So, um, my thing is make someone laugh, crack a joke, be authentic, be yourself. Hey, you know, one of my things I, I always say that I have a little thing for every day of the week. So, you know, today I tell everybody, you know, hey, happy Friday Junior. So when they come up to me, Friday Junior, it's not, oh, Friday Junior. I say, yeah, it's Junior and then Senior, right? Friday is Senior because everyone, oh, and that's a conversation starter. So once you break the ice, but authentically, to your point, you have to be authentic and you have to be able to make sure that you reach out to a person's Inner self, so they can actually turn around and say, hey, I'm not the right person, but guess what? Let me, let me, let me call such and such and let me get you to the right person. Because that leads to a— that cycle is always going to work because they're going to see that you're really real. You're not a fake individual. You're not— and I hate to use this term, and this is why salespeople get such a bad rep— the used car sales guy, right? You know, walking in, hi, we We have a great Mazda on the lot over here. You know, you have to be authentic, period.

And in your business, who is the persona you're selling to typically?

I'm sorry, repeat that one more time.

Who's the persona you're selling to? Is it HR? Is it manufacturing? Is it operations?

So it's a bit of all, so a bit of everything. So Mainly you have to get through the gatekeeper most of the time. So I'm a big, I'm a big proponent of old school. I'm very old school. So I, I love going door knocking. So that's— That's a lost art. I know, I get it. Everybody's email this and, and email blasts. And listen, you send 1,000 emails, they're gonna go into your junk box. Now if you go and knock on a door and say hi, you know, introduce yourself, put a smile on your face, and And you're usually gonna get the first line of defense, which is the gatekeeper, right? So the gatekeeper will be probably the first person you gotta make wonderful, wonderful friends with, 'cause he or she is gonna lead you to the right person. Now, after that, primarily it would be HR.

Mm-hmm.

Now, yeah, so human resources is probably the, the, the go-to, whether it's an HR manager, director, or VP. Those are pretty much the decision makers at that point. Um, they're the ones that are really going to sign your agreement and, and really get, get the functionality going through your firm and connecting the dots. Um, so HR primarily, and then they lead into the plant managers, the GMs, and so on and so forth. So it's, it's a trickle effect. But mainly the first line of defense is always for I would say primarily 90% of businesses that I deal with is always the gatekeeper, especially when you go door knocking.

And how many doors do you knock per day?

So my cadence is, my cadence and my expectation of a team is 15 to 20 door knocks per day. So yeah, so that is, so we generalize going to one general area. Knock on those doors 2 or 3 days a week, right? Not because if you do, if you factor in the numbers, so you do, uh, 3 days a week, let's just say you hit your, your goal of 20, right? That's 60 door knocks in a week, right? So then you have 2 days working in-out rather than out-in, and then you're, you're literally inside the office going through those 20 door knocks and saying, okay, which is a real viable prospect. Let me dig in and do some more research on this company. Is this a real company that I really want to do business with? Do they use staffing? Do they, do they, do they need our value add there? Do they need our services? Do they not? So I like to say trash in, trash out. So it's more of, you know, doing the, the adjustments on that end with those, with those 60 door knocks. And after the 60 door knocks, Brian, You're probably gonna be left with 25 more. If you're, if you're, if you're, if you're a true sales guy and really dig in, or girl, um, and dig in, you're probably gonna be left with 25 real prospects. And then you're gonna dig even further and you're gonna probably be left with 10. And out of those 10, you're— if you're really good, you'll get 7 to 5 signed agreements out of that.

And what makes a great rep in this space? What do you look for?

So a great sales rep in staffing or any sales rep is, to your point, being authentic with yourself, right? Having the ability to communicate. If you can't communicate at any level, and it doesn't have to be a C-suite, right? You don't have to sit in a boardroom with With a CFO or CEO, you have to communicate with the with the ground on the boots on the ground personalities and then make your way up, right? But the ability to communicate and the most important thing, the ability to follow up on a cadence. So salespeople have a very closed mind, and what I say by that is is they look at a target and then they they look at it and okay and then they move on. Right? And then they go, oh, wait a minute, let me look at my CRM, right? Let me see if, if my CRM has a follow-up on it. Oh, I forgot. No, you forgot because you're not communicating effectively with that prospect. Because if you are communicating effectively with that prospect, you're constantly having communication and you won't need to forget. You don't need to go back to your CRM, right? You, you always communicating. And that is one of the Of the keys and the follow-ups. So those are the things that I feel, my opinion.

Well, that's it because money-motivated people don't forget about money. It's like I never forgot about a deal.

Correct. Exactly right. You want to close the deal, right? You want to make sure that, and especially if it's a pretty big deal, right, Brian? So, you know, Um, you know, it took me— one of my largest accounts that I closed, uh, fairly recently, by the way, is about a $5.5 million account yearly, right? Year over year. Um, it took about 8 months for me to close, but it took 8 months of, of first door knocking, meeting the right person, going through the, through the cadence.

Mm-hmm.

Following up with an email, following up with a phone call, wishing you happy birthday, finding out when their birthday is, finding out when they're, you know, Valentine's Day, stopping by with a rose. All those little things eventually is going to get you a seat at the table. And when you get to the table, it's your job now to just lock it in.

Because a lot of reps look at it as they're either in market or they're not. And that's the wrong way to look at it because all your door knocking, they all have staffing requirements. Maybe not today, but tomorrow and the next day. So it is about that know, like, and trust that you're building up with them.

Exactly. Good point there. The trust factor as well. So, um, I will touch on that a little bit. The trust factor, um, you have to build that trust factor so they understand that they can come to you and trust you and saying, hey, I have this hard unicorn, you know, in our industry, you know, many industries they call it a unicorn, right? So they want— and I like to say, oh, you want the purple and pink unicorn with one wing flying in circles and doing the loop? I got you. No, we're going to find that for you, right? So probably not, but if we're giving the effort, yes. And then also setting the expectations with the client and saying, that's a very important thing as well in sales is setting your expectations, right?

Yeah.

So we have to be able to set our expectations with our client and say, hey, listen, this purple unicorn, you're not gonna— we're not gonna get it. You're not gonna get it because you're under market. Here's some market data for you. So you can take a look at where you need to be at to find this purple unicorn. Oh, but we don't want to pay for a, a, a relocation fee or so on. Well, you might have to, you know. And, and I, I always tell all my clients, we're going to be your consultants first, then we're gonna— then we're gonna serve you and sell you, right? And because we have to be able to consult them first and guide them the right way. Because if you don't consult them as a salesperson, you're never going to close the deal. You have to be able to have— give them that real hard consultation and the real truth. Because sometimes they're blinded. A lot of our clients are, are— they just don't know where to go. That's why they turn to us, right? They turn to us for those exact reasons. But we have to be able to provide them real-time data and understand that, hey, listen, this is the real deal. And then give you the expectation of it.

Yeah. And why did you get into leadership?

So obviously, so starting my career as a recruiter, I just evolved. I've personally, I've always felt I was a leader. I was a leader since I was a young man. And I love to lead. Now, one of the things that I grew into leadership— now, when you're very young and you're thrusted into leadership, You don't really know what you're doing. I'm gonna be very candid. When you're 25, 26, even 30, even 33, 34 years old, you don't know what you're doing. You're just winging it. You're like, okay, I'll figure it out as I go. And then you're hitting that, that wall a few times. I think I still have scars on my head from the amount of times I hit the wall. So being a leader was natural to me. I felt like I can I can really, you know, understand what the next generation behind me is going to go through, and I want to teach them. As I said before, each one teach one what not to do. Learn from my mistakes, learn from the mistakes of others, understand how to go about it, how to be fluid. Don't take things personal. A lot of salespeople take a lot of things really, really personal. It's not personal, it's business, right? Um, so we, we have to understand how to teach them, uh, how to teach the next real group of people. As I see all your posts every day, it's all about teaching. And that, that is— that to me is probably the most immense thing that I can, I can tell you outright. So with— for, for instance, I learn every day, and I say this to my team currently right now, the day I stop learning right now is the day I need to retire. I need to just hang it up, forget about sales, forget about serving people, and hang it up. Because you have to learn every day. I want people— I want my young men and women to teach me things because I don't know it all. I'm, you know, I, I'm a dummy, so to speak, for certain things, right? I read those books all the time, you know, uh, you know, sell— you know, Sales for Dummies. I, I would read it because You have to be able to learn.

And where did you get this learning mindset? What did you do as a teenager? Were you—

So, so I, as a teenager, a lot of sports. Um, so that learning mindset came from sports later on in my career. Um, uh, you know, I actually coached football for about 11 years. I coached my son all the way from peewee all the way to high school football. So teaching one another, you know, the fundamentals of things, especially when you're teaching small little children. First, you have to have the patience, right? You have to have— boy, the amount of patience I had.

Then you have the parents.

Yeah, right. So you're quasi their dad, right? I still— and true story, I have a bunch of them that graduated college. A lot of them are businessmen and women. I have a few that made the NFL, um, and they still call me up and they say, hey, Coach. And they still call me Coach to this day, um. But that learning mindset came from there, uh, the discipline, uh, about being disciplined, um, following your cadence, following your heart, um. If you feel it's wrong, change it, right? Pull out, Trust your gut. Your inner gut is always gonna— on the football field, in a dojo in martial arts, which I'm a practitioner, my son and myself. So those things are very, very, very important to me. And that's the part of the leadership that I bring to current teams, past teams, and future teams.

So when you're looking at hiring reps and stuff, do you find a lot of know-it-alls, a lot of people who Absolutely. Yeah.

So one thing that I do say is that if people bring their habits from their previous firm or wherever they were before into the new one and they come in gunslinging, you know, Aaron Rodgers, you know, just slinging it, you know, all over the place, right? So it's And you have to work with that as a leader. You're saying, okay, let me reel them in. Let me pull them back a little bit. Let me settle them down. You know, let them get their cadence right. And I understand and I respect what you've done in your past, but this is the way we're doing it now, right? And since you're in this organization, this is the cadence we have to follow. And I would love to hear about what you did in the past because maybe I want to implement some of those things Here in this organization, because some of the things that you've done in the past, maybe I'm not doing them, and I want to learn from that. Right? So I want you to help me grow grow the business. Right? And grow each other as as salespeople. Because it is. I mean, I I still follow old school Mofu Bofu Tofu funnel system. Right? So bottom of the funnel, top of the funnel, middle of the funnel. You know, old school. A lot a lot of people are going to be listening to be like, wow, that guy's old school. So you you know. You know, that I still follow that and I still teach that because it holds people accountable to what they put in their funnel.

And what's the most difficult type of salesperson that you've experienced? We talked about the know-it-all. Is it because some people, they need to make the mistake themselves to learn? They can't learn from others' mistakes.

Yeah.

They have to touch the stove no matter how many times you tell them it's hot.

Sounds like me. Sounds like me, honestly. So I'm being straightforward, I, I hit that stove a lot of times, uh, a lot of burns on the hand. Um, but yeah, I, I think over time that, that's— that salesperson, that rep, um, to your point, the hardest rep to deal with is the person that just does not want to take guidance. just absolutely just does not want to take guidance at all, um, and just wants to do things their way. Um, if— and I learned this later on in my career— to become malleable, right? You have to be malleable. You have to understand that you have to be able to take that information that's given to you and apply it. And once you apply it, then you'll see the, the the results from it. If you don't apply what's given to you, how are you going to find results? If you, if you want to be a maverick and go wherever, wherever you want to go, it's going to be crash and burn, man. So, you know, unfortunately.

Yeah, because, you know, there's two sides of that, because sometimes their way works for them. And sometimes they just are stubborn.

This doesn't mean I totally agree.

So how long do you wait to figure out if they're stubborn or they're the good type of maverick where they've got their own unique style and it works for them?

And I agree. And funny you say that. I've recently, not too recently, I've had a few reps that I learned that their style, you know, Example, what that rep specifically was a fantastic, uh, uh, relationship builder. Fantastic.

Yeah.

But Lord have mercy, he could not close. He just could not close the deal. I mean, built the relationship, got the, the right decision makers, got them there, got us to the table, but he could not close. So I figured that out in a long time, and he would be like, nah, I got this, I'll take care of it, I'll close it. And, and then, and then that's when you put the expectation, right? And you say, okay, hey, Joey Bag of Donuts, check this out. You'll have 30 days to close this, right? And if not, then by day 25, I'm gonna step in. And, and then, and then what happens is he turns around, he or she turns around, and Joey Bag of Donuts says, okay, day 25. And he'll come into the office. Head down. Okay, I need your help. And then that's when they start waking up, when they're hit with the reality of, yeah, I need to learn a little more. So to your point, sometimes you gotta let the maverick go and they gotta hit and they gotta figure it out themselves.

Well, it's great that you observed that and you came up with some boundaries that were reasonable. And both people could agree because, you know, we all go through that kind of instinctual stage in selling where we do what comes natural to us.

Yeah.

But then real selling is counterintuitive. It goes against our instincts. We kind of have to close. We have to bring it to a conclusion. We have to get a deadline, take action.

Absolutely. And if you just can't do what feels good all the time. I agree. It's, you know, I see a lot of sales reps a lot of times just, just, okay, I'm gonna put it into the CRM. Okay, look at my pipeline. Numbers, numbers, more numbers, more numbers. Revenue is the number that we should be looking at. Only one that matters.

Not the numbers.

Okay.

You're, you're a, you're a data entry clerk. Like that— no, it's about coming to a conclusion, closing the deal, figuring it out, finding the pain, helping them with their pain, closing it out, and then moving forward. But to bring it back a little bit, just to reel it back, a lot of salespeople, I always say, especially in staffing, um, It's not over because when you close the deal, now you got to put your account manager's hat on, right? Because now you gotta— now you have to, to manage that account because, okay, now you're giving it to another department, right? To operations to, to fulfill and, and, and fulfill their needs. But if you're giving it away to another department as a salesperson, you have to loop back. And there goes back to my, my, my previous about follow-ups, right? You have to put yourself on a cadence to come back and say, okay, now I gotta manage this account because that's my revenue, that's my money. And a lot of salespeople don't realize that, that if you lose that account and you don't follow up with them on a regular basis, there's a possibility you don't know if you're doing the right thing or the wrong thing, right?

Because they're only gonna tell you when it's the wrong thing.

Right.

Absolutely.

They don't call you up to tell you you're doing a great job. They don't call you up for something messed up.

Not, not at all. And, and I, uh, I mean, you have the 2% that, that will, but other than that, though, then absolutely not. But, but other than that, yeah, you, you need to understand that you have to wear many hats in sales, right? Sales rep, sales account manager, and then account manager and then move on. Because as an account manager, hey, listen, that brings more revenue to the company because you did the hard part already. You closed the deal as a salesperson. You closed the deal. Now what's, what's the follow-ups to bring in more revenue? That is so important. And a lot of salespeople forget that. They just close the deal and run to the next one. And they forget about it. And, and that kills your whole portfolio, right? Your book of business gets dwindled down yearly if you don't go back to your clients and just check in. Hey, a simple phone call, a simple text message. Hey, how you doing? Hey, how we're doing? Hey, how we're going? Just a simple, how you doing? That's it.

And how do you keep them focused on the whole game? Because people can get really busy and get comfortable getting busy because being busy feels like you're being effective.

Great question. And, and, and I will answer you this way. I would say yourself as a leader being involved. You have to be involved. You have to be in the— what I call the muck, right? You have to get down in the muck with them. You have to go ride-alongs. Jump in a car with them. Let's go, you know, half a day. Let's drive around and let's go do what we got to do. Let's go visit some of your clients. Let's go. Let's go see how you're doing, right? So as a leader, you have to be able to be in the muck with them. You have to be able to, to feel what they're feeling. You can't— as a lead, a lot of leaders, and I will tell you this, Brian, a lot of leaders sit on a perch and look down, right? And they say, okay, Joy, a bag of donuts. Jenny, bag of donuts. Let me see what you're doing. Let me check the CRM. Right? And if you're not involved, you know, daily or every other day or weekly, you're never going to be a successful organization. Last but not least, continuous training. I gotta tell you, man, like, you know, a lot of salespeople, they do a 1, 2-day training and they— They think they're done. And they're like, Okay, go, go, go to the wild.

Go.

Yeah, go, little padawan. Go. Like, like, what? How do you expect them to succeed? You have to grind. You have to bring these people in on a weekly basis. And listen, I'll sit in my, in my conference room with the entire team and okay, all every single one of them in the room. How was your week? Great. How was your week? Great. What's your wins? What's your losses? What's closest to the fire? What's this? What, um, how many objections did you have? What, what's, what's the pushback here? Oh, I see this is on the bottom of your funnel. How close are you with here? What can I do to help you?

Simple.

And, and then we'll go through that whole training process weekly, and that is something that is so important. And what lacks in a lot of organizations, that one thing, yeah, is a continuous training, right? And the development. Because if, if you expect them to, hey, go ahead, paddle on, go find, find the next big one, it's not gonna happen.

Right? Because they know what to put into the CRM to keep the manager off their back. They're not idiots. Oh God.

Listen, Brian, So my son, my 26-year-old son, was just promoted to an account manager in his firm, right? So he's in the sales game now as well. And he just closed his first deal. So this was a big thing. And he's actually texting me back and forth and he's going, well, I'm trying to close this client and And they pushed back and they said, um, 25%. Said, can't— and I'm like, and I'm gonna stand my ground and say, no, it's only 30%. I'm going— I'll say— I said, hey, you're gonna lose the client. So this is what my suggestion is to you. I'm texting back and forth and I'm going, okay, you're going to match the deal, right? But what you're also going to do is ask them for 1 year of exclusivity. Because you're a better firm, you're larger, you're this, you provide service, and you're gonna get me. And then he said, okay. He texted me back 6 PM that night, 7 PM. Dad, you are an OG and you are the best. Close the deal. Thank you. And, and again, so, and then my pushback to him, I said, hey, Where's your boss? He goes, oh, she wasn't there. I was like, hmm, problem with your leadership, I see. And then, you know, and, and that's my pushback because why— I understand my father and I understand we're in the same field, in the same industry, and by all means, please come to me. But at that point, I would say, where's your leadership and your training, right? So that's the part of things that you That they need to understand that they need to have that training and development on a continuous basis. And especially someone that's an account manager, Brian, for 2 months. I mean, well, that's a point taken.

Yeah. When you go to the dojo, the instructor doesn't say, go over there and do 50 kicks and come back in 2 weeks. No, it's every time. Warm up. Let's do this. Okay, go against each other. Okay, let me show you what you did good. Let me— what you can do better.

Exactly.

And separate the performance from the performer.

Exactly.

No one's saying you're bad or you're not good or you're dumb. It's just you're learning.

And that's part of leadership, right? Leadership is teach, teach the others so they can get better. I just had a recent conversation, Brian, and I said, with with a rep, and, and, and they said, um, him and I had a long conversation. And I said, I said, you know, there's one thing that I, I want, I want you to understand from this conversation. And he said, what's that, Jose? And I said that I want— I need you to be better than me. And he goes, why? He goes, why? He said, you're, you're the best. I said, no, no, no, I'm not the best. Trust me, I still make mistakes. I said, The reason I need you to be better than me, and I want you to really understand this, is because if you're better than me, you're, you're gonna rise up in the ranks, but you're also gonna make my job easier. A lot of leaders don't really realize that, that when you lift someone up, your job becomes easier. You really get to say, oh, okay.

You're gonna do the job of 5 people.

No, like, you really need them to understand that they need to be better than you. That's just what it is.

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

You can go on LinkedIn, follow me on LinkedIn. I'm not— I have to get myself out on social media. My wife always tells me this, so I don't have a— no, definitely not. We can have a long conversation about that one, especially Congress passed But anyway, that's another story. But I don't have an Instagram or anything like that. But LinkedIn, it will be the Jose Valtres. Just look me up and I'll be glad to connect with you.

The MMA stuff keeps coming up and there's got to be something to that, right? Because it's really a great analogy to sales. Because we think, oh, if we knew how to kick, punch, and we see someone else do it on TV, looks pretty simple, doesn't it? How hard can it be? Until you try it. Until you get a good punch in the face. And what makes you great at MMA can make you great at sales as well. Because it's not just knowing how to punch. It's practicing the punch, practicing the kick, getting the rhythm down, having it become muscle memory instead of prefrontal strategy thought. Because the thought does go away once the body starts moving. It starts going intuitive. And how to build up the right instincts, because we're born with the wrong instincts with sales. We're born not wanting to talk to We're born wanting to talk about ourselves, not listen. We're born thinking about what we want, not what the client wants. That's what I mean by our instincts don't serve us well in sales. So we have to rewrite those instincts, and that takes an enormous amount of reps. And most people never get it. 20, 30, 40 years, they never get it. Why? Because it's really hard to change our instincts, but it's possible. It's very possible. You know, I was talking to somebody the other day who has this growth mindset, but then was wondering, can he change his personality? Well, you got a growth mindset, don't you? You know, you were probably one person in high school, a different person in college, a different new person in the workplace. I know I have changed enormously. In high school, you probably wouldn't recognize me. Probably in college, you wouldn't. I didn't want to talk. I didn't like meeting strangers, but I liked money. I liked being successful. And I knew the current path I was on, even though at the time paid well, It was fixed income. I'd get 5 or 10 points a year in a raise regardless of how hard I worked, and I worked hard, or I'd have to switch jobs to get a 20% increase. But you could only switch jobs every 3 to 5 years at that time. Today, that, that role pays a lot better, but it's still not as good as B2B sales. When I learned how much business-to-business salespeople made, I didn't believe it. I, I was like, cut it out, that can't be true. Then I saw it on paper. I talked to other people and said, yeah, it's true. And I was like, well, they don't work as hard as I do. Well, they work hard in a different way. And I said, I want some of that. And I probably went through the same journey you're going through. Where you try and make up for the lack of skill with volume. And that, you know, that can work, but it's not the right way to go. Why? Because my health, even though I was in my early 20s, went to hell because I was stressed out. It wasn't lifestyle, it was work style. I was just pushing myself too hard, working 7 days a week, every waking hour, stressing myself. And the next year I said, I'm not going to do this. I learned, you know, what did I learn as a software developer? It's the person who really thinks through the problem, who really gets into it. Digs deeper and deeper, not the person who types the fastest. And then I go, let me apply this to sales, and crushed it the second year in sales, number one in the whole company. And then it kind of went to my head, which is the worst place for it to be, because you need to keep that curiosity. The confidence is Good in most cases, but bad in a very few cases. When you're overconfident about a deal, you're not going to see the holes in the deal because you're overconfident. You need to be a little bit paranoid about the deals, a little insecure, a lot curious. And then I started documenting How did they go down? And I spent the next 25 years working on that system, breaking the deals down into tiny pieces. One, because I wanted to win, and I was so competitive. The idea that there would be one other person in the company who said they were better than me— oh, burn me. Keep me busy. up at night. Focus me. Part of it was unhealthy, but part of it just drove me. And I'm not saying to do that for yourself. I'm saying learn how the complex sale works. It's not what they tell you at your company. What they tell you at the company, you all know, look in the CRM. It's qualify, present, demo, propose, negotiate, close. Well, that's a pretty high-level view of a deal. It's not wrong, it's just incomplete. Because where do the deals die? Very early, usually before you even know it. It usually dies when you give them the proposal. Dead, gone, ghosted.

Why?

Because they don't know what they're doing. It took me a long time to figure this out. And once I did, I had to take ownership of that. You can hope and wish they figure it out, and sometimes they do. About 10 to 20% of the time they do. But do you want to lose that income? That's your money. You worked for it. Sure, you get your base salary, but That's just to control you. The base salary isn't for you to do the work. The base salary is so you don't go off and do what you want. You do what they want. You show up, you sit through the meetings, you enter stuff in the CRM, you smile and nod. That's what the base salary is for. The commission is for closing deals. Yeah, you see some bluebirds come into the person next to you. Get that out of your head. You have no control over that. The things you do have control over is the winnable deals that you have. So look at them, ask yourself, is it winnable? And at what cost relative to the other deals that you have? And when I started doing that, I started winning more, more big deals. And I wasn't running around like a crazy person. I wasn't stressing out. I was still pretty stressed, but I wasn't, uh, to the point of, you know, becoming sick, you know, getting a cold or some other affliction that, you know, took a while to recover from. When you learn the game that you're playing, you can start to win the And it's not the platitude game that you're hearing about. It's not the numbers game and the spreadsheets that people put out. Every time I see that, I see that person has no clue what selling's about. That's querying. That's census taking. That's not selling. That's checking in and seeing if anyone has any interest. Or it's just juvenile. It's, it's, it's laughable to somebody who knows how to sell. And all the money is at the back end of the sales game, meaning that 90, 95% of the people are just trying to make their quota, and that top 1 to 5% They're making the mid-six figures, seven figures. Takes time to get there, but it doesn't start until you start. It doesn't happen naturally by just being there for a bunch of years, and it doesn't happen by just joining another company because that's usually more of the same, not Better or different in better ways. Can be, but who knows? If a manager isn't pulling you over, then it's— you're probably going to get the worst territory, not the best. Go to b2brevenue.com, check out the courses. There's 2 major ones: Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting. Fills up your pipeline, takes all that pipeline Prospecting Anxiety Away. I show you exactly live examples of how to start conversations with complete strangers. No pitching, no cadence tools, no dumthingsfaster.com. It's organic, natural, and it builds up this powerful skill called empathy. Empathy, compassion gets you to connect with other people, gets them talking, and that's when the magic happens. It's not when we're talking, it's when they're talking. Counterintuitive. And you get to recapture some of that lost income. I bet it's 30 to 50% right now.

Yeah.

You can look at it, choose yourself.

Look at—

I bet you have your forecasts from the beginning of the quarter. I used to save them. You know, first week of the quarter, I would save that forecast off to a file. And every week or so, I would look at it and I'd go, I'm delusional. What was I thinking? It's focus. It's not activity. You gotta do something. You gotta work hard. But work hard on the things that are closable. And if it's not closable, why are you working on it? And if it's winnable, how are you gonna win it? It's a thinking game. It's not just a throw something against the wall and hope it sticks game. Reduce that lost income. Wouldn't you like a 30% raise? 50% raise? 100% raise? How's that gonna happen? 99% of the people today think it's by changing jobs. Okay, you tried that. How'd that work? After the second or third time you try it, you might wake up to the realization that, hmm, that's not the answer. What is the answer? Becoming better. Understanding the game you're playing, digging in deeper, becoming a student of it. Ask yourself, how would you do as a martial artist? Not you physically, but with your mindset and approach. Just use the metaphor for MMA versus selling. You know, are you—

do you study it?

Is it written down? Can you articulate it to someone else? Can you debate it on why it is what it is? Or are you just assuming that it looks simple and you've been doing it long enough? Well, the market tells you how good that's working. Are you listening?

Are you listening to the market?

It's not me. I'm not buying anything from you. Listen to the market. It tells you the truth. We'll see you next time. See my stuff fly by on LinkedIn.

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Check out the other podcasts, Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers, and the Sales Leadership Show.

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