THE #1 LESSON THAT CHANGED THIS SELLER'S CAREER IN B2B SALES

Sometimes we just have to look at a problem from a different angle, and then all of a sudden we understand both the problem and the solution a whole lot better. This is one of the topics of today's interview and something that we talked about yesterday on Office Hours. And once you look at it the right way, or a way that makes sense to us, We get it. And I think this all falls back into that premise that we don't learn as fast as we can. We learn as fast as we want to or are willing to. So the critical element there is we need to want to learn more faster and become better at sales because That's how we make more money. And at the end of this interview, he, he has a reveal, his big lesson. And you may look at it differently, but it was really what helped him, our guest, become great at sales. Now, if you want to become great at sales, there's a bunch of ways of doing it. You can do trial and error, experience. Takes about 7 to 15 years in the complex sale. Or you can focus, sign up for a training course, learn from the world's best salespeople at b2brevenue.com. That's where we talk about these issues, show you what really works, how companies buy. You should check it out before the prices go up. b2brevenue.com. The letter B, the number 2, the letter B, my favorite word in the world, revenue.com. Also, have you brought your manager to go see brevitypitch.com? This is turning into an amazing technology to help salespeople become better and make more money. How do you make more money at sales? You become better at sales. You can try and work harder. How about becoming better? Everyone talks about working smarter. How about becoming better? Maybe that's part of smarter. And how do you become better? You get some reps in. You get a little feedback. You do another rep and all of a sudden you become a little better. That's how our little brains work. They connect up all these connections and those connections get tighter and bigger. And that's why I use brevity pitch before I have a big meeting. What do I want to do? I want to run through it at least once, warm up, get that last bit of polish before the meeting. And how do you do that? You need interaction. And that's what Brevity Pitch does. It's an audio interactive sales, uh, kind of companion, coach, uh, buddy. You know, you say AI and you come up with all these things in your mind about being a robot. No, no, it's fun. Check it out. brevitypitch.com.

Here we go. Hey Dave, thanks for joining us today.

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

Well, first, thanks so much for having me. A little background. I am a Philadelphia native and went to Penn State University. There I majored, I studied journalism, English, and theater. And I never really thought about sales as a career. But Little did I know those 3 things were preparing me for sales, in my opinion now. When I got out of school, I started my career as a writer for business magazines, business trade magazines. And there I realized that, I quickly realized that all the sales guys were driving nice cars and seeming to have a lot more fun than I was having and begged and begged and begged and finally got a sales job at that magazine.

So it was Financial motivation, a little envy?

Financial motivation primarily, yes. And they just seemed to have a lot of fun and it was travel. And so I did that for a couple of years and liked it, but I did not love the travel as much. So I got a job in sales at a local newspaper and then there I sat next to somebody whose then boyfriend worked at a radio station. And it was my favorite radio station at the time and I was asking him all kinds of questions and he's like, you should call my boss and sell radio advertising. And I hadn't really given that much consideration. And that was, I started in 2003. So I'm 21 years in radio sales now.

Yeah, pretty easy cakewalk every day. You just take orders.

Simple. Yeah, we, as long as the, you know, used to be the fax machine. long as your Adobe's updated, the orders just come through. It's pretty simple. It's like every sales job. There is no easy sales job, you know that. So like every sales job, mine is no harder than anyone else's, no easier than anyone else's. It's definitely a challenge and it's part of why it's so fun.

And who is your target market?

So in our, so our company, our company can pretty much help advertisers reach anyone. So our target market are advertisers, me specifically, I'm the director of sales for Audacy Philadelphia. So in Philadelphia, our company owns 6 radio stations and we also have a streaming app, an audio streaming app, fastest growing streaming app. And we have a lot of listenership on the app as well. So we can sell advertising there and then some events and other things as well. We integrate clients into all aspects of our brand. So I have 6 brands and as you can imagine, they each appeal to you know, varying demographics. So when we go out and we talk to an advertiser or a potential advertiser, we try to remain agnostic when we're approaching them about what the solution might be. You know, you, one sales team for each radio station and you would go out no matter what the client needed, you would be pitching your radio station. Now you get a chance to be much more thoughtful in your approach and recommend what's best for them.

And is it—

So our primary goal is to sell to the ultimate decision maker. A lot of times it's the owner of the business.

Okay.

Sometimes it's the Vice President of Marketing and then we do a lot of business with advertising agencies as well. So a lot of our business is done, you know, it's done in a variety of different decision makers and a variety of different levels.

And which do you prefer, the ad agency or the—

Owner of the business. Yeah, the owner of the business is the ultimate prospect and decision maker. We love our ad agency partners in case any of them are listening. But we love dealing with our agency partners. But when you can talk with the owner of a business who, you know, created the brand, lives and breathes the brand.

It's their money.

And it's their money. And our job is to convince them that We're gonna treat it like our, like it's our money and make sure the campaign is effective and delivers on the results they're looking for.

But do they have like gatekeepers where they send somebody to talk to you first and gather the information?

All the time. Send me something, send me something email. So yeah, I tell, it's funny, I give that speech to anyone who's new in our business that remember, you know, the frustrating part about sales is that 90+% of your activity results in nothing. And, you know, the people you want to talk to actually hire people to keep you away from them. So, you know, you have to be memorable, you have to stand out. And that's like, that's hopefully what we coach people to do is to be the most memorable person, you know, the most memorable meeting, most memorable interaction, maybe on email, phone, whatever it be, you know, we try with multiple touchpoints, obviously, and you gotta break through.

Because you raised a good point, because a lot of reps don't look at that 90%. They look at the 10%. They get locked in the 10%.

Right.

But that if you can reduce that 90% or know which 10% to focus on to turn it into 15% or 20%.

Yes.

Have you sensed what that— I'm sure you have.

Oh, sure. You know, we look at, you know, you look at lookalike clients. Right. In our business, you know, the deals are, you know, I would say from call to close on a good process is about 90 days. And then with our business, you're renewing, hopefully assign somebody on for multiple years or maybe a year, you know, in general, a year is the preferred, you know, kind of our preferred partnership. But you have a lot of clients who fly in and out for several months at a time. You have clients who say, hey, I'll try it. If it works, I'll be your best client, you know. So we have to be strong enough to say no too. When you talk about the what deals to focus on, the right type of deals because the last thing we want is somebody out in the market saying, I tried radio and it didn't work.

That must come up all the time or it didn't work the way they thought it would work because—

Exactly right.

Be somewhat in your business.

Yeah, people expect to advertise and the next day the phone's ringing and my God, our web servers are down and, you know, you can't have too much traffic. So it takes time to build a brand. It takes time to create awareness. And, you know, so we have to do a good job of convincing clients that, you know, you didn't sign a 1-month lease, you didn't hang a temporary sign outside of your building, you didn't build a website just to take it down. With your advertising, you need to be present somewhere and you need to be meaningful somewhere.

And what's the hardest part of the sale?

The hardest part of our sale is probably the misconception in the advertise— the business advertising community that radio is an old medium. You know, so that's something that we fight against a lot. We fight against people. And it's funny, not only in our business life, but radio is an interesting thing because in your private life, people are very comfortable telling you, you know, oh, this must be hard. These people must be killing you. Like no one says to the guy selling Chevys like, wow, Toyota is so much better than you. You must be getting crushed. But at the, you know, at the baseball field, it's not unusual for someone to say, you know, radio, wow, like Spotify must be killing you guys. And, you know, what's happening with satellite? Oh, I like Sirius in my car. And so we have to overcome a lot of those objections, those misconceptions that some of the, you know, quote unquote old media is actually very modern and very present. And radio actually is the largest reach medium in our country. So it's something where— Yeah, it is. So Nielsen Nielsen rates television and radio, and 90% of Americans are listening to radio each week. And then you pile on podcasts and streaming audio, and we have access to, you know, our company alone can offer national clients access to more than 200 million Americans. So there's a, there's a great renaissance in the audio space. And so hopefully that, that biggest hurdle that I'm answering, hopefully that'll become a little bit easier as time goes by.

And why did you make the choice to get into leadership?

I was a seller for about 4 years and I always wanted to have a seat in the room. I wanted to be a part of decision-making and to be able to influence that. So I think probably when I first went for management, I probably went for the wrong reason. If you think about it, like I probably went for, you know, I say seat in the room now, it was probably, you know, more power, more, you know, Now, you know, as you grow into being a manager and I think the more comfortable you get in it, you know that you're there to help the sellers and, you know, you're there to, you know, they are your clients now. So I still think of it as I maintain an important client list, but my clients are my sellers. And like any other client, you have to help them grow their business. You have to, you know, you have to say no when it's appropriate. You have to keep them happy. You have to keep them engaged with what you're trying to convey to them. And, you know, so it's a great relationship.

It's very simple.

We love them. We love them. We're lucky. We have a great team.

And what's the hardest part about leading a sales team in this space?

In this space, meaning in the radio audio space?

At your company. Yeah.

A lot of people, there's, you know, the ups, I would say the ups and downs of the business. You know, advertising is the first thing often the company And we could go into the why they shouldn't. Let's just all assume that they should not, right?

It doesn't matter.

Right. We could assume it, but it's oftentimes a lot easier than cutting a human being or cutting something else. So deals can change very quickly and, you know, you could be riding high for a couple of months and then all of a sudden, you know, you're taking a dip and you're wondering, am I good at this? Am I, you know, so part of it is making sure that we tell the sellers and convince them That, look, you have the ability, you have good products. As long as you're making the effort over time, everything evens out and you will have, you know, you'll continue that success. But there are a lot of, there could be a lot of wild swings in our business that our sellers have to deal with.

Yeah, it's a very temperamental decision, advertising, whether it be whatever format, right? Because it's emotional.

It's highly emotional and we benefit from that in some ways. Like we sell, we have the, you know, the biggest sports talk station in our region is one of our stations and we broadcast the Eagles on that station. We broadcast the Phillies. So you can imagine the emotional decisions that, you know, a lot of people want to be around sports. A lot of business owners listen all day. So they want to hear their ads and we have to make sure that You know, look, obviously you want to develop those partnerships with the people who love the brand the most, but you still have to develop the partnership in a way where they're gonna get ROI and that they're gonna see, you know, that they're gonna see those results or else, you know, eventually they get tired of hearing their name and their company name on the radio if it's not delivering results. It's a good gate— it's a good gateway, but it's not, it's, yeah, that's not how we maintain them. But you're right, people buy, you preach this all the time, people buy with emotion.

I, having dealt with it on kind of both sides, I get it because people like look forward to it and then just change their mind on a whim.

Yes.

Agreed. And it's like, as a rep, how do you either control that or recognize it before it happens?

You have to see it coming. And you have to constantly, you know, advertising is also a thing where, you know, the minute somebody, you sell somebody a campaign and it goes live, I always tell the advertiser, look, the first 30 phone calls you're gonna get are from other advertising, you know, vehicles telling you that you make a terrible decision. So if you're selling software, it's not public information that somebody did a deal with you the day they launch, you know, the day somebody's on the radio, I got the billboard people calling them, I got the TV people calling them, I got the newspaper people calling the digital agencies, let alone the other radio companies telling them why You know, wait, wait a minute. I'm glad you're advertising, but maybe you should have made this decision. You should have done something differently. So it's very tricky in that regard.

Well, that's smart because what you're doing is setting a trap for them by telling them this is what's gonna happen.

Yes. Yes. Yeah, we prep them for the calls. We prep them. Here's what they're going to say. Here's, you know, here's what's going to happen. It's a great thing because you see, if they are seeing your ads, Everyone's seeing your ads, you know, not everyone who sees it or hears it is going to, you know, whether it be digital advertising or if somebody hears your ad on the radio, people are listening and people are hearing it. And that's, it is great that their phone rings off the hook a bit. And then when it does, they know that, okay, these people must know what they're talking about, their experience, they know what they're doing, they predicted this would happen. So.

And what do you see reps doing wrong in this space either Past reps, doesn't have to be a person individually or competitors. Maybe that immediate call after competitors.

And look, I'm sure some of our team, I'm sure that I've been guilty of it in the past, right? But I can say that I'm not guilty of it now that you should never call and tell somebody that they made a mistake advertising. You should want to be additive to their campaign.

Yes.

You should not, we should never penalize somebody for choosing to wake up and buy an advertising campaign because the truth of the matter is that very few people wake up in the morning and say, well, I hope a radio rep calls me today or I hope, you know, that doesn't happen. So when somebody does make that decision, the first move should be to tell them how great you think it is that they chose it. And here's what we do. Here's where we're similar. Here's where we're a little bit different. Here's where we might be additive to your campaign. Yeah.

And you've got a customer who really doesn't understand your business too.

True.

Or doesn't understand marketing in general. Sometimes.

Sometimes. Sometimes.

Yeah. How often is it they're trying radio for the first time?

I would say that if we have, let's say we have about 1,000 clients a year. I would say that probably about 10% of them are trying it for the first time in some capacity.

And are the deals typically battling for budget? Or are they—

The new business deals are generally, we created budget, we created budget with an idea. It wasn't something that somebody was planning to do. That's on some of them. On other deals, obviously there's a new business opening and they have a marketing budget planned and they bring people in and where we reach out and they then once one radio company reaches out, they want to do their due diligence and call the 3 or 4 major companies in the region, hear from all of them, then they get it for budget. I think your best path to winning the majority of the budget is to really give the advice on what the client should be using.

Yeah.

Right. We, there are stations that target demographics that we don't reach. So if a client hears from me that, hey, in addition to A, B, and C that you're using with me, this company here offers D. And, you know, that might be something that I can't offer you that you might want to add to this. So a lot of times we'll have that talk with them. And if you can gain their trust and if you're genuine about it, making, you know, honest recommendations, ultimately, I think you're gonna win the majority of the budget.

And how can you tell if a deal is on track in this space? I guess 90 days is pretty tight, but still.

If they're engaged, if we don't hear from somebody, if they're ghosting us for longer than a week, there's big trouble in my opinion. So we try and, you know, we try and have a tight timeline and, you know, to have mile markers along the way. Hey, if we're gonna launch by this date, we need to be talking about what the commercial is going to say, the copy, what, you know, are we gonna want voice actors? How are we gonna need a jingle? Are we gonna do this? So if they're engaged throughout that process of the creative, generally, I think you're in good shape and they're serious about it. If they disengage at that point, it's a high probability that you haven't overcome all the objections.

Yeah. And what separates a great rep in this space from an okay rep?

I would say curiosity, you know, somebody who really wants to learn because the beauty of our business is that you can meet with an automotive dealer at 10 AM, a restaurateur at 1, and, you know, a banker at 3 and talk about all the different challenges that they have. So So you get, you get like a radio MBA by going on enough sales calls. And number 2, people who can block out the noise, someone who can stay focused. You know, it's, I think in any sales organization, there's always a lot of chatter. There's always a lot of inside drama, outside drama. There's always something going on that can distract you if you choose. So the key is however many hours are needed for that business development activity, that is sacred. that you're doing that every single week and building that habit and just, it's a non-negotiable that, hey, during these hours I have new business outreach and nothing is going to get in the way of that.

Yeah. And is the outreach the phone mostly? Is that the most effective channel or is it the drop by or is it the—

I believe phone is still the most effective. I think follow up, obviously follow up on all the touchpoints on email, on LinkedIn, everything that everybody would say. But I think that So few people call now that I think you stand out more. And then in a business like ours where, you know, we operate really within like an 8-county region, we walk in. So like, I encourage our people that like walk-ins are very effective because especially look, post-pandemic, people stopped walking in as much as they do, as they did in the past. And the walk-in is very effective and it's where you get a, and you get a lot of street cred from the business owner. There isn't a business owner in the world who doesn't appreciate the walk-in. They might not meet with you, but I think they respect it. They respect the idea of a walk-in because somewhere they took that leap and they did something uncomfortable to start a business. So they know that it's uncomfortable to walk into a place and introduce yourself and to, you know, and try and get a meeting for which you were not invited. Right. So I think in general, they respect it.

Yeah. And the curiosity, how do you tell that in an interview or how do you tell that before It's too late.

It's a great question. I think you have to ask people, I think you have to ask people a lot about how they, how they learn because it's not just about what you read anymore. I don't think, I think it's, you know, how do you learn new things? Like when you learn something, how do you learn it? What's, you know, what's the easiest way for you to learn? What's your best way of learning? I think that I ask a lot of, you know, legal but personal questions, you know, about their background, their family, about, you know, kind of trying try and find out who they are. And, you know, how did you, how did you choose the college that you, that you went to? Like, what was your process there? Like, like, a lot of times that's a, that's a way to see how someone— that's a big decision for somebody. It might be the first major decision a human being makes, right? About, you know, you're, you're 16, 17 years old, and you're going to decide, my God, I'm going to move out of my parents' house, and I'm going to go live somewhere else for 4 years and be on my own. That's really the biggest decision for most people. Right? So I think that's a good question to ask. You know, walk me through that process. How did it work? Right? Who else was involved in that process? You know, to see if they bring people in and see if they talk to others, to see if they do it on their own, to see if they needed to visit places or if they just read about places. I think you can learn a lot about somebody from asking that question.

That's a great point because nobody asks that.

Yeah, I don't ask. Yeah, I mean, we, you know, on a resume you see where somebody went to college. So I think it's an easy— how did you choose? Yeah.

And if you get the, oh, it's a great party school, that might not be a great answer.

Well, for radio sales, that might be terrific, Brian. It might be a fantastic match. I went to Penn State, so I can't criticize anybody for going to a party school. But yeah, I understand what you're saying. Yeah.

And is it still a relationship sale?

100%.

Yeah.

So it's client entertainment, it's relationships, it's, you know, there's a lot of emotion when someone's on the air, when their company is out there and they get feedback. There's a lot of emotion about the radio stations. I mean, these are products that are designed, these are brands that are designed to be interesting and memorable. So you have people, everyone has an opinion on our product, good or bad, which is great, you know, and it's not just like, no, I use the other software. I've had people say to me, I hate your radio station. Like this guy in the morning says this and this and his terrible opinion. And at the end of the rant, I just said like, thanks for listening. Like, this is great. Like, you obviously love the radio station, you know more about it than anybody. So it's definitely, yeah, it's a highly emotional purchase in many cases and the relationships are very deep because there's a lot of transactions, right? And it's not, our sellers are not in a job where they close somebody and then, oh, the engineer will take care of it, or you'll have an account manager who will guide you the rest of the way. Our sellers, right or wrong, so you could argue that the structure is correct or incorrect, our sellers close the deals. They handle getting the copy and the creative and the commercial on the air. They're part of that process. They're not writing the commercial, but they're working with our producers and doing all of that and handholding the client. They take them through. I have clients who, I have sellers who, you know, they're out there collecting the checks, they're out there handling the pay portal for the client. So soup to nuts, they're involved in every aspect of it. So it's to say it's relationship selling, the answer would be 100%. Yes, a lot of trust testing.

I would have thought you might have said likability before curiosity. Was there any reason why you didn't or?

Because I think likability is like a prerequisite. Like it's a, I think it's like that's the COVID charge is that you have to be likable. I think some sellers cannot be super curious and still be very successful, right? They can be it, right? And but like, so yes, likability is extremely important.

And why as a leader did you not choose to divide the labor like everyone else is doing?

I'm sorry, why did I choose to what?

To not divide the labor, have like the pre-sale or the SDR, sales development rep, and then the account exec and the customer success person.

So candidly, I don't, I didn't design that structure. But I don't disagree with the structure. So I would say that the reason why is ultimately in our business with most of the clients, you know, we have a lot that are signed for a year or multiple years, but most of the clients are on for a quarter, couple months, something like that. So having that seller engaged in the entire process, it's really, I say to our sellers a lot, we're in the customer service business. Like, yes, we sell audio advertising. But we are in the customer service business and you have to show at each step of the way that the service is there and the touchpoints are there. And this goes back to me talking to you about the fact that other venues are calling them, right? From the billboard client. So let's say the billboard client, the advertiser, the billboard seller rather is calling 3, 4 times a week and is charming and doing a good job and walking in and my rep has passed it off to somebody whose job it is to execute, well, they're losing that personal touchpoint. We're gonna lose that business. So I think for our particular business, our structure is correct. But answering your initial question about relationships, yes, that creates a scenario in which this is a pure relationship business.

And how do you handle The absence of attribution, which marketers, and I gotta believe the owners of the business, you know, that's what they care about, the traceability between the ad and the revenue. Yeah.

So you're teeing me up because it, for the first probably 15 years of my career, it was a guessing game in many ways. It was, you know, hey, get a vanity phone number and we'll see how many calls came in or You know, like it's the old joke of John Wanamaker, half my advertising is wasted. The problem is I don't know which half, right? So like that was the old world. In the new world, we do have attribution and analytics very detailed. In fact, on the, on the app, it's very easy because I can see that I dropped an ad, delivered an ad on a particular device. And then I can see if that device went into a store with location services. I can see if that device went to the website that I asked them to go to in a commercial.

Right.

And on the over-the-air radio, we can marry our commercial trafficking system with our clients' Google Analytics. And then we can show them how much web traffic occurred within an 8-minute window after their ad. That's kind of the currency in our industry, an 8-minute window. How much additional web traffic over your normal flow of traffic went to your website within an 8-minute window after your ad aired? So that has really changed our business over the really recent history, probably about 5 to 7 years where it's been widely, widely used. And it's been a game changer for us because you're right, in the past people would just guess. Now we can say, okay, not only can we see within an 8-minute window, but I can tell you which ad is resonating better with a client, with an audience rather. So hey, maybe my, you know, we thought that sale, sale, sale in the commercial would be the messaging that would resonate most. But it turns out when we talk about service and when we talk about, you know, the owner answering the phone and having a personal relationship with the owner of the business in the commercial, you actually got way more web visits from that. So let's add that. Let's air that ad more often, right? We can look at different day parts that are doing better in commercials and which ones are generating more web traffic. So there's a lot of attribution in our business that did not exist in the past and it's extremely helpful.

And is that enough for them? Because like, if say you're driving in the car, you hear an ad, I want to buy that, but I'm driving.

Right.

Okay. I'm not gonna be out of my car for well over 8 minutes.

Right, right.

Yeah. When I go to my desktop.

There's certainly lost, there's certainly lost attribution. And I think that happens with any, of course, yeah, with any industry. So certainly, while it's, you know, nothing's perfect, It's light years beyond where we were several years ago. So that has been great for most of our, many, many of our advertisers are connected to our attribution and analytics system because they want to hold us accountable as well. It's a great accountability play for us. You know, it's not like I'm walking in later and saying, you have nothing. We got more websites than I was expecting. Your rates are doubling. It's more about, hey, look, every couple of weeks, let's take a look at this. Let's have a service call where we're walking you through the dashboard here and showing you this is how many web visits are occurring per ad airing in this time of day, that time of day, this station, that station. Here are the ads that are working better than others. And is this what we were all expecting from the campaign?

Yeah.

And hopefully you can draw back to that initial CNA where you agreed on how success would be defined. And, you know, hopefully the analytics and attribution help you You know, figure out if the campaign is working and if not, you optimize the campaign.

And if you were to give one piece of advice to anybody who wants to become great at sales that's doing okay, what would you tell them?

I would say that the light bulb moment for me was, so the answer is sell them what they need, not what you have to sell, right? So like, forget about what you have to go out and sell. And it was a light bulb moment for me. I wish it happened earlier in my career, but it was probably about 2, 2 and a half years into selling where I pitched this lady everything I could possibly pitch her. And it was no, no, no, no, no. It was her job to tell me no, basically. But I could tell that like we had a good rapport and we were out at lunch one day and I eventually said like, what would you buy from me? Like, what do you need? And she laughed at me and she said, you finally asked the right question. Like, I need to— it was a law firm. And at the time, this is many, many years ago. So it's gonna sound very dated. But she's like, our law firm is helping companies expand their businesses in China. We have a special, you know, we have a lawyer who specializes in that and it's a big growing part of our business. So if you could put something together that would let business owners in this region know that our firm specializes in helping them expand into China, that's something I would buy. So fast forward, you know, we had a news, we have a news radio station. We had a business breakfast where we invited hundreds of business leaders in. We talked about, you know, America's expansion into China and the growing, you know, all the issues surrounding that. We had experts on a panel and everything. And of course, one of those experts was from the law firm and it turned out to be a great event and it turned into a wonderful relationship where then it was I figured out, okay, this is what she needs, you know, in any scenario. And like, let's just develop something specific for her rather than me running out with, you know, hey, I have the May package, let's do this.

Right. Here's the special.

Right, exactly. So I wish I learned it earlier. But thankfully, it eventually happened.

Well, it's a great example. But how do you teach your reps how to do that? Because they're so focused on what we do versus what They need.

Yes, we teach them to go out with no sales collateral with the intention of not bringing out any sales collateral. I talked about how journalism, studying journalism helped unknowingly help me in sales. It's about asking questions about, it's about getting to the true story. It's about digging and digging and digging until you find out what the actual story is here, you know, because you can walk in any business.

Their story, right?

Right, exactly. It's not about the— like any other relationship, the less you talk, it's not about us, right? The better off you are on the podcast where I'm talking so much. But so you're winning this one. But it's, it's the questions, you know, thoughtful questions, nothing that you could find out online. You know, in my business, don't go out and ask them when they started or how many locations they had. Don't ask anything that could be found on the internet. Don't— do not waste their time, but try and get to the heart of, you know, what their challenges are as a business owner. And if you can help them, because sometimes maybe we can't, right? It's rare, but it has happened where we're like, I don't think we're a good fit, you know, and I don't want to take somebody's money and have somebody out there saying that radio, I tried radio and it didn't work. That's the worst thing for me in the world, that sentence.

Great.

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

I'm on LinkedIn and I'm on all the social platforms, but LinkedIn I think is where, at Dave Skopetich. So tough name to spell, but I'm sure it'll be on here, right?

I like that part about going out with no collateral, no brochures. Trying to force the reps to ask about the client. What's the client going through? Instead of focusing on the product or the service. Now, this is typically what I call the commodity trap because when you act like a salesperson, you naturally are going to be asked questions about the product. What's it do? How's it work? How much does it cost? And that's good in the business consumer space, but in the business-to-business space, that's terrible because all of a sudden the connection between problem and solution are decoupled. And how do you keep the deal moving? Because they're only going to talk to you about the product. What you want to do is to talk to them about the whole situation, what they're going through, to really understand what they're trying to accomplish. And they may not even know. They just must be sometimes just looking around. Haven't you done that? Start searching stuff on the internet or online somewhere because you just have a hunch, a need, a curiosity? As salespeople, we want to build off of that. Keep that conversation going, not just about the product. If it's just about the product, that, that's all they need is the product. And until they need the product, they will not communicate with you. I really enjoyed this conversation. If you want to become great at sales, don't copy what people are doing that isn't working. Learn what does work. And if you have to do 100, couple hundred a day, it's clearly not working. Go to b2brevenue.com. Check out the course, Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting. It'll fill up your pipeline with great qualified meetings and conversations that turn into deals. See, what we think sales is about is this compelling pitch. Well, that's a commercial. In business-to-business, it usually requires a conversation that turns into interest. But how do you get that conversation? I teach you how in an organic, natural way. It's not pitch-oriented. There's no cold calling or cold emailing or cold social or whatever else you think the way to do it is. Selling can be without pushing, and I teach you how because it works. It's always worked. It always will work because it works at the mammal level, not at the human level. Also, how's your pipeline looking? The year's coming by pretty fast, isn't it? Are you closing those deals? As we talked about in the interview, 90% of our time is spent working on things that don't close. That means we only get paid for 10% of our time. How do we increase that? You don't— it can't be 100%, but it can be better than 10%. And wouldn't that money be better off in your pocket, having a great year, great vacation? If you want to close those deals, check out Closing the Complex Sale. And there's nothing else out there like it. Let me explain why. You got somebody who sold for 30 years, who's now been teaching sales for another 10, and all of a sudden I share what I found to be the best and the most effective ways by both having done it and showing people how to do it in all kinds of industries. And how do you learn? You got to have an example, a case study, something as close to what you do as possible. You also want to see easier deals and harder deals. And what do people run into and what's the contrast? And here's the big mistake people make in sales. They learn just enough to get by, just enough to make their quote or make their personal goal. And then they take the foot off the accelerator and the car kind of stalls. Sound familiar? I get it. You're exhausted. You made your number. You made your goal. Do you really want to keep learning more about sales? Well, you better, because it's the one crazy career where they, they make the handicap a little harder every year. The only way to outsmart smart them is to learn how to do bigger deals, more deals, and less time. And where are you going to learn that? On LinkedIn? No, you're going to learn that at b2brevenue.com. And you have access for a whole year, and you don't have to pay for it all at once. I have a 12-month payment option, not a membership. So it's— it is a commitment, but instead of having to pay all at once, you pay in monthly. So you can amortize the cost over the benefit because you will be getting more meetings. You will be closing more deals. You will have to do a little bit of work, but it will pay off. B2BRevenue.com. We'll see you next time.