THE #1 THING THAT SEPARATES THE BEST SALESPEOPLE IN B2B SALES AND SELLING

What I've noticed, certainly in the last 5, 6 years that I've been interviewing solely the best salespeople in the world— not thought leaders, not trainers, not authors, but practitioners, people who do it every day, have done it for 5, 10, 20 years, more— is a particular mindset. And that mindset is about being able to perform, how well you sell, not how many people you contact. And this is a cognitive bias that we have in that we love quantity. And this is killing sales. It's not increasing it. Just think about, do you want more? We want more revenue. And people naturally think that means we need to contact more people. No, you need to contact better people in a better way. Let me give you an example. I have this person who's been in the course, Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting.

Um, Twice.

Why? Because he wants to master starting the conversation. Because it's a skill. It's not a knowledge. Yes, there's knowledge in it, but it's how well you apply it that makes the difference. And this performance mindset versus the activity mindset or the knowledge mindset has been one of the key distinctions Of the great salespeople and leaders that I've interviewed. And people often misinterpret this as, oh, hire athletes. Well, it's not that they're athletic. It's that they have 5, 10 years of experience competing, getting coached, taking feedback, Having peer pressure to do the right thing, not the instinctive thing, the right thing to win the game. It takes us as humans a little bit of time to make this switch, to fight these cognitive flaws in our DNA. And that's why a lot of people think salespeople are born Not trained. And you can agree with that to a certain extent because you try and train them and sometimes it doesn't really work. Certainly the 2-day type thing or the 1-day or the workshop thing, that's the knowledge. It's not that the knowledge is wrong, it's that the person applying the knowledge has to apply it every day, all day. And that's the hard part. That's the performance part. Because every time I talk to a sales leader, it always comes down to volume. And that is the opposite of quality. All you want is quality. Do you really want bad leads, unqualified leads, contacts? Do you want real pipeline? People who are engaged in a sales process, have the problem that you solve, need a solution to that problem? Or is it somebody who just came to a webinar and works at a nice big company, so it must be a big pipeline, a big potential deal? You want quality. At the end of the month, you get paid for what closes. Not what's in the pipeline. Today, you would think that everyone gets paid for activity. Boy, we'd all be billionaires if we got paid for activity. But we don't. We get paid for the results, the quality. And once you give a manager these toys, the CRM, the engagement, the whatever, What do they do? More, more, more, thinking that more equals better. No, more is the opposite of better. It's the distraction from better. And I think that word is key. If you understand that it's a distraction, meaning that it makes you feel better, it's a donut, it's a cookie. It's not food. It's a distraction. It tastes yummy. It feels good, but there's no nutritional value in it. 15, 20 minutes later, you're hungry again. You've consumed 500 calories. You feel it a little bit, but there was no nutritional value. That's what we're doing today. And this guy in the course was able to get a meeting and a conversation started in less than 6 hours with a CRO of a unicorn. Okay, I would have taken more time, but that's not me, or he's not me. And does it work every time? No, nothing does. But when a CRO compliments a sales rep on their approach, hmm, maybe there's something to it. Instead of trying to entice people, scare people— those are the two mechanisms that salespeople use today— or the over-personalization and reference, reference Relevance. Well, they determine relevance. Personalization. It's all nice. It's all good. It's not bad. It's just overdone. And when everyone does it, effectiveness goes down. Now, before we get into the interview, have you grabbed your manager and checked out brevity pitch? When you talk about quality, it's those quality conversations. And no matter if you do it every day, all day, you certainly can get better. You can practice without potentially losing a deal, having a deal slip, having a deal minimized. And this is not enablement. Yeah, there's enablement part of it. Learn how to talk to that persona, learn how to answer questions about particular business acumen. But it's really the engagement that you want, and how you do that and how comfortable you get with it determines your effectiveness. Because at the end of the quarter or the month, Does it really matter how many conversations you had? It matters how well those conversations went. And they are the linchpins of the deal. You can't change the product. You can't really change the client. But what you can change is the quality of those conversations. And you might think to yourself, well, we record all of them and then analyze them. Well, that's too late. It's nice. It's good to have feedback. And let me tell you what it's going to say, because I've been using those tools for 10 years now. The only thing you get out of it is you probably talk a little bit more than you should and listen a little bit less. But didn't you know that before the call? Didn't you know that 10 years ago? What you need to do is get the feedback Interactively, to be able to practice and polish those skills. And you may think, well, I've been doing this 5 or 10 years. I don't need that. You don't need to make more money? Oh, that has nothing to do with it. Everybody thinks to make more money is just a job change or just a better territory. But here's the secret. It's a better sales conversation. is what's going to get you more money. You can fight it, but it's the truth. Let's get into the interview. I'll sum it up at the end. Uh, I've got a great guest. I think you're really going to enjoy it. Here we go. Hey, Jeff, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Sure, absolutely. So husband, father, been in sales fundamentally my entire career, spent 4 years coaching college football and then jumped right into sales and haven't looked back. Been both in an individual contributor role and then the past 20 or so years in sales leadership roles in a variety of industries, but primarily professional services and financial services industries. Yeah.

But why sales for you?

Well, you know, it's interesting, you know, my background, I mentioned like I coached college football for 4 years and so there's a little bit of a competitive streak in me.

I bet.

And, but it's interesting, the, you know, and again, I didn't realize this at the time, but I think to replace that camaraderie from the locker room, from a team, and the discipline needed to perform at a high level on the field is very, very— I mean, you can just trace it back to what you need to do to be successful in a sales role, right? Because you're all typically, you're operating within a team environment.

Yeah.

It's consistency in efforts, consistency in approach. Right? It's being able to handle the failures and the rejections and the losses, et cetera. And it's about the closest thing you can come to kind of replacing that competitive fire, right? Where you're always looking for something to compete on. And so, but ultimately, you know, looking back, it's really, you're competing with yourself. It's because of the amount of rejection and the pushback and, you know, You know, in baseball, if you bat .300, you're making the Hall of Fame. And in sales, if you bat .200, you're probably going to President's Club.

Yeah. Right?

It's true. Yeah.

But college football coach, did somebody kind of tap you on the shoulder and go, Jeff, this is not what you should do the rest of your life? What was the—

Actually, yeah, that's a great question. So I was, fortunate to be hired as a coach at the school I played in and I played at Division 3 level football. So I had 2 other jobs back then when I was coaching. So there was no money.

No money in it.

Yeah. And one of my older brothers was in sales and he said, hey, why don't you meet with the president of my company? And it was in the computer industry back selling computers. to corporations back when you could make a lot of money doing that. And the president and I hit it off and he said, how do you feel about— I was living in Pennsylvania. He said, how do you feel about Florida? And I said, oh, I love Florida. He said, great. I want you to move down there and open up an office with your brother who was— my brother was down there. So the, the Kylie boys went after it down in Florida and really had a great time. That kind of got me hooked on the whole sales process.

And was your brother one of your first mentors as far as selling or?

Oh, no, no, no, no, he was not. He was not.

Did I touch a nerve?

No, no, he's a great salesperson, but his style and my style are totally different. And so I actually had a very good mentor. It's a great story if you don't mind. So I'm living in Miami and I'm, my territory is Central Florida. So any sales meeting I have, I'm on a plane flying up to Tampa or Orlando. And so I book a couple full days of meetings and there's a guy who's a sales, I don't know what his title was. He just flew around the country and kind of rode along with salespeople. And it was a, I was in the networking business at the time. And so I met him at the Tampa airport. And he said, what's our schedule like? And I said, well, we have a meeting at 10 and a meeting at 12, a lunch. And he said, all right, cancel the first 2 meetings. And I go, excuse me? He goes, yeah, cancel the first 2 meetings. He goes, I gotta take you somewhere. And so we jump in my rental car and he takes me to the public golf course by the Tampa airport. We play a round of golf and he just preaches and mentors and talks. For the entire round of golf on just getting to know me, getting to know what my motivations were and what my what what any anxiety I had, etc. And so Jim was a great mentor, and we we we rescheduled those meetings for the following day. And and he he was just a very interesting guy, and he kind of he's the guy who kind of put into my head that's. You're not sell— I don't sell. I'm having conversations with people and trying to identify if there is a problem that my organization or that I can solve. Maybe it's not my organization, maybe it's another organization, but that's been my approach in sales my entire career. So I've never, I've always been in sales, but I've never felt like I've been selling. I've always felt like I've been solving problems or potentially solving problems for organizations or for individuals at those organizations.

Yeah. And is that what you attribute your success to?

I certainly do because I am definitely, I'm almost a skeptic in some sales environments where I really need to validate what the problem is and more importantly, validate whether I can solve it. And I have, there has been many situations and some of my former employers probably will cringe hearing this. There were many scenarios where I recommended someone else. I didn't recommend my company. I recommended someone else because at the end of the day, it's a relationship, right? Know, like, and trust. Like, I want people to trust me. I don't buy anything from someone I don't know, like, and trust. Never bought a single thing, right? And I just find that what gets a rise out of me in the sales environment And I've been doing it for a long time. It's not closing the deal for me. I mean, that's great, right? We all want to close the deal. But what's, what really gets me excited is finding an opportunity, a problem that I know that we can solve. And it's a very complex environment. You have to navigate a bunch of different personal and organizational roadblocks or challenges. That's what gets me excited. And if you find those and you have a good solution, I know fairly early on in the sales process that we're probably gonna close it.

Do they have to have active pain or were you good at—

Yeah, you know, I was having a conversation with a client the other day and I said to them, I said, you know, I don't know if there's any buffoon buyers left, right? Like, like, I don't know. I haven't found any in a while, right? So I think the job of a true sales professional is really understanding the organization and what the challenges are. You can create an issue, right? You can uncover an issue that the prospect didn't even know they had. But in order to do that, you need to be very well versed in the industry, their industry, their challenges, what their competition is doing, and more importantly, what your solution can provide. Yeah. If you, right. I mean, to me, that's the key. That's the mark of a true sales professional.

Yeah. And you were selling for pretty big companies too.

Yes. Yes. So I have been, It's funny, I've been very fortunate too because I've worked for organizations where outside of selling computers early on in my sales career, I've never really sold a product. So I've always sold services and I think that provides a significant advantage in terms of being able or not falling down the commoditized path, right? Your product's not getting commoditized or undercut in price. I mean, of course that happens in services as well.

Yeah.

But I've been fortunate to work for organizations where I truly felt that what I was representing, the service I was representing really had significant advantages for the buyers of that service, right? So it was easy to get behind it, easy to be proud of what you were doing, etc. And I've met salespeople that haven't been able to be in those situations in the past and I'm sure that's pretty challenging. But yeah, I mean, the big companies that I've worked for, Called on large organizations. And I think that's something that probably excites me or attracts me to the complexity of the sale. The larger the organizations, the more complex. And especially today, I mean, it's buying committees for the most part, right? It's very, very rare that there's single, single buyer.

Unfortunately.

Yeah.

I mean, typically there's one person who really cares.

Oh, there's always one person that really cares. There's, you just have to find that person.

Now, how did you avoid the commodity trap selling services? Because I gotta believe that whoever you competed against could say similar things to you.

Oh, sure, sure. Absolutely. I think part of it's a discipline in the sales process. And, you know, I forget who the individual was, took a great— it was a— we were in a sales conference and one of the morning sessions, they brought in a negotiator who was actually part of the SALT treaties, right? The SALT II treaties, the nuclear treaties. And he was telling stories, but he— it was one of the most powerful things I heard that stuck with me. And this is, stuck with me for the past 15 years. He said, when you're negotiating, you need to care, but not that much. You need them to care, but not that much. In other words, you need to be prepared to walk away. And, you know, I'm gonna try and tie this back to, it's easy to walk away when you have a robust pipeline. It's much More difficult to walk away when you don't have a robust pipeline, which goes back to what I said, I think initially, which was the consistency in your approach, consistency in your work effort, doing the same level of prospecting each and every week, right? If you don't do that, you won't be successful in sales. You just won't. It's just the reality.

And you did that obviously, and that transferred from football, right?

Right. The two of these. Oh, absolutely. It's, well, you know, it's funny and, you know, you, I'm a sports fanatic, but football is really interesting because you are, the players are working out 2, 3, 4 hours a day for 10 games, for 11 games. So it, people that play a sport and their ability to remain consistent in their training and their diet throughout the year. Yeah. For a very, when you look at it, it's a short window. I mean, baseball, we'll put baseball aside, right? But But to have that motivation and that discipline and that persistence, it's easily transferable to the sales, to a sales role, easily transferable. You know, someone, I actually posted this, this quote was great. He said, the magic you're looking for is in the work you're avoiding.

It's true.

It's really true, right? And some great salespeople I've had on my teams and one person individually, He makes a tremendous amount of money. He's always the top salesperson. He's not on my team anymore, but we stay in touch. And to this day, he has a paper, like a, you know, Daytimer paper calendar. That's what he uses. And you look at his calendar and he has an hour blocked off Monday through Thursday for prospecting. He doesn't work on Fridays. He golfs on Friday, which he should be golfing on Friday. But every single day he spends an hour. Now, he may not be cold calling, he might be networking, he might be whatever, but he blocks out an hour every day. And I've always told people on my team, if you just do that, you will have a pipeline that you can rely on to meet your goals. Just if you do that.

Well, what are some of the other work that people avoid?

I think people avoid meeting prep.

Yes.

So you've got the sale, it took you forever, you got the sales meeting, maybe you're going down the level selling path and you're bringing your sales manager, sales leader, And you decide to prep 5 minutes before you walk into the building. It's just, it's not the, the odds of success go down dramatically and the success in converting that first meeting to the next meeting in the sales process. Yeah, I believe. Yeah, go ahead.

Well, it's a big thing because you wouldn't think about playing football Going on that field without warming up, without—

Having a game plan.

Right. Let's see how— let's see what they want to do.

Right.

I had a manager used to say that to me. Let's see what they want to do. And I'm like, well, I think I know what they want to do. It's one of 2 or 3 things. Let's come up with a plan.

And a lot of people know, well, I've been doing this forever.

I know how to sell. Imagine a player coming up to you and saying, you know, Jeff, I've been playing football for almost 10 years. I know football back and forward. You're laughing, right? So what?

Absolutely. Absolutely. But I think it's, and again, I'm not throwing, you know, I don't throw anyone, any organization under the bus, but I've seen it actually increase. the past 5 years, 6 years.

Yes.

Um, and I think part of it, you know, during COVID COVID, there were some pros and cons, not many pros, but one of the pros was you could have 5 or 6 sales meetings in a day during COVID because everyone and the prospects have embraced Zoom or video conferencing, right? So, but I think one of the downsides was that was, oh, it's a Zoom call. I'm like, it's even more important to prepare.

Yes.

Right. Like, who—

You don't have a captive audience. Right.

Who's gonna be watching reactions? Who's gonna be like, like there's all kinds of intricacies on a video sales call that you need to think differently about. But I think because it was a video call, a lot, you know, I heard a lot of times like it's a Zoom call, we'll prep, you know, I have a 12:30 Zoom call, I'll see you at 12:20. I don't know. No. But, but I think also, Brian, and again, you know, sales leadership, the— there's so much focus on reports, CRM, what's your call activity, what's all that. And, you know, from my perspective, a sales leader has 2 jobs. It's to deliver results and to grow your team.

Yeah.

And what I have learned, that may not work for everyone, but what I've learned is if I really focus on growing my team and by growing my team, that doesn't mean adding more salespeople, it means growing their skill set. The results always take care of themselves. But I think a lot of sales leaders are focused on the results and making sure that the CRM is updated and Did you get your call reports in? I asked, I had a conversation with a business owner and it was great. It's just someone I know, we're just catching up and he was complaining about his sales results and he has a sales leader and is the sales manager. I said, well, how many, when's the last time the sales leader went on calls with the sales reps? Because I don't think he does that. And I'm like, He should do that.

That's his job.

That's his job. I don't know, you know, ride-alongs, coaching, you know, sales coaching. And I don't know how many sales training classes you've participated in your career. I've participated in a lot. I think I've walked away with some stuff from sales training, but I think what a lot of people fail to realize is salespeople have already Different attention spans and retention is not their strong suit. And where does sales training come in, comes in is in the field. It's not in a classroom. It's not in a meeting room.

Absolutely.

It's doing it and then immediate feedback after that sales call. You should have pivoted here. Why did you say this? That sort of thing. So I'm a bit of a stickler in terms of getting in the field with the troops. and driving their skill set, improving their skill set, their recognition, their conversational skills, their ability to read a room, right? Prepping, all that sort of thing. If you take care of that, I strongly believe the results will be there.

And most are sponges for that.

Oh, oh, they love it. They love it. The biggest challenge that I coach sales leaders on is Don't take over the call.

Yeah, don't hijack it.

Don't hijack the call because everyone knows you can sell. You want to get your salesperson to sell. That's what you want. So.

Yeah, maybe save it, but don't take it over.

Right, right.

And what do you think makes a great salesperson? I mean, you know what makes a great football player? What makes a great salesperson?

Yeah, I think, you know, you have 2 ears and one mouth, right? So I think the ability to listen is extremely important. I think a high level of empathy and ego drive, I think, are important. I think quite frankly, you need to have some competitiveness Within you in order to be successful in a sales role.

Yeah.

I don't think you can avoid that. If the successful salespeople can't avoid that. And it's really interesting how many people are in sales and I don't know, it'd be interesting to, if they went through a personality assessment, DiSC, you know, one of those types of things. I've done that and it's been, I've been amazed at how many people sales is not the right fit for them. It's not the right fit for them. They happen to fall into it. They just took the first thing that came out. I've had an opportunity to hire a lot of young people moving in that want to get into a sales role in the financial services industry in my career. And the ones that were really successful, and again, it sounds like this entire call is about this, but the ones that were really successful, they all had an athletic background. They all were very competitive and they all had a high ego drive and empathy, right? They all had that.

Yeah.

Now I've had other salespeople that have been very successful that didn't have that. But I think you improve your odds if you can be really, really thoughtful on the interview process. I see a lot of check the boxes on interview processes and boy, if you could double the amount of time you spend on interviewing your salespeople, You probably reduce your churn by 40-50%. Yeah, I think it's real, it's really important.

Well, that competitiveness, that's what creates the caring. Yes, right. You either— exactly, you want to win internally, you want to be the top of the leaderboard, and you want to win the account from your competitor.

Exactly.

You have to have some kind of emotional drive to do that, right? Otherwise you go home, right?

You go home or you don't make, you don't do the outreach each day that you're supposed to do or you don't really work that networking event or you, it's just you're going through the motions, you're checking in at 8, you're leaving at 5 and You almost have to eat and live and breathe this stuff to be successful. You pick an industry, but the other thing I think to be really successful in a sales role is you really need to embrace the opportunity to build your knowledge about the industry, right? About the industry and the solution sets, et cetera. You have to invest in that.

Yeah.

Because as I said, there's, I haven't found a buffoon buyer in several years. And so when you're meeting with a prospect, they've done a lot of research already. Yeah. Right.

That they're way down the path and you still have this much interest in your product and this much interest in the industry and what other people are doing.

Right, right. And then, you know, it's the, It's the great, great line. It's not a great line, it's a bad line, but it's just like, hey, I want to come in and learn more about your company, or I want to learn more about your industry. It's like, I don't have time to educate you.

Educate anybody. I want you to bring me something.

Right, right.

And that meeting, you get an hour, they don't want to hear about the product for an hour. They want to hear about a new perspective, a different perspective, a knowledge, because we have that vantage point. They don't talk to 5 or 10 companies a day.

And they don't have exposure to 5 or 10 companies that are already using my solution that have reaped the benefits. Yeah, right. You know, so, so the ability to You said it, bring something new to the table. Tell me something I don't know. Yeah, that's, that's really important, right? Especially the higher up you go in the organization.

Yeah, they rely on product knowledge or sports and weather, which, okay, they don't need a weatherman, right? And yeah, you can talk sports, but is that progressing anything? A little bit of rapport is good.

Yeah, you build rapport. Look, but, and again, I can remember back booking first sales meetings with prospects on, and we're gonna go golf, right? Like, it was great. I, people don't have the time to do that. They don't appear to have the time to do that. Now, once they're a client, they might, Yeah. Right? So yes, you wanna do small talk, you wanna build rapport, right? Establish some credibility, build some rapport, et cetera. But don't take the whole meeting talking about the game or, or, you know, whatever.

And what got you into fractional leadership?

So it's interesting. So I was, I just, I have a couple of I'm involved in a couple of small businesses on the side. And what I, what attracted me to that was I have a lot of friends and relationships, small business owners who they need that $250,000 sales leader.

Yeah.

But they don't have a budget for a $250,000 sales leader and they, a lot of them are managing their sales teams on their own.

Yeah.

And it's really not the best solution. You know, it's kind of like running a manufacturing plant 4 hours a day. It's not the most efficient way to, right? And what I found too is that I mean, for me personally, it's just the variety, right? So I have, you know, a manufacturing client, right? I have a financial services client, have a solar company, right? So the interesting thing though is all those various and different industries, but they don't, none of them have a proven and repeatable sales process. So it's very difficult for their salespeople to be consistently successful. Because they don't have a plan. There's no plan to follow. There's no path to follow. Plus, I just love, I love seeing the excitement in a sales team when there's some attention, you know, applied to them, right? And there's someone there that's willing to help on a consistent basis.

Right.

Maybe it's just someone to even bounce some ideas off of.

They want to be understanding.

Talk them off the ledge.

Yeah.

Right. Right. So it's been a lot of fun. It's been a lot of fun for me to do it.

Yeah. And you hit on process. Do you find a lot of people without a sales leader kind of just in reaction mode instead of proactively guiding somebody through a process?

Yeah, I think there's 2 things. There's one is there's no path. So I think organizations where there's not a sales process and a proven sales process in place, most of the reps are winging it, right? Like they're trying different things, etc. Or you have the other scenario where you're the— there's a top sales rep who closed 80% of the business and everyone else tries to follow that person and what they do, but they're incapable of doing it because that person is a Cowboy, right? That person works with whatever reason, wings it for them. It works for them.

Yeah. And they're not good at articulating why they're successful.

Right, right. And so if you have a process that's proven and repeatable that you've built, you've seen success from, your top salesperson can follow that or not. Most of the top salespeople are cowboys, which is fine. But all your B and C players can follow it and maybe your D player becomes a C or B by following that process because now there's a plan, there's a roadmap.

Yes.

If you get this response, this is what you do, right? If you get this response, this is what you do. It's the opportunity to build consistency in your sales results and to elevate your sales team. Yeah, cool.

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

Um, accelerate2win.com, Jeff at Accelerate to Win, or I'm on LinkedIn, um, Jeff Kylie. So it's, uh, easy to find me.

So how do you get that performance mindset? Catch yourself. Catch yourself when you think you just have to do more. More leads, more LinkedIn connections. And ask yourself, how can I take a step back and get a little bit better? Start where they are, not where I am. We all, as sales reps, we all know where we are. We're ready to take the order. We're ready to close it. But that may not be where the client is. And you may not know where you are with the There's nothing better than hearing how other people do it, having a structure, having a coach who has been through it before, and then have lots and lots of examples, lots of game tapes to see, feedback from other people, distinctions of what's an A versus an A-minus. That's how you really learn how to sell. You may not be getting that at your company. You're most likely not because they're set up for the inbound, the warm inbound, the easy deals. But how many of them do you have? They didn't hire you to close the easy deals. They just assumed it was going to be easy. How hard can it be? It's just talking to people. Well, try it. How hard is it? And by being able to have a framework that's proven, that is based off of not only experience, off of psychology and science, somebody who really studied it, who's not just giving you war stories, as anecdotes, but who's given you the real structure of how a deal works, how strangers become friends, become coworkers, become colleagues, become trusted people. I hate that word advisor. Isn't that— it's total BS to begin with. How many salespeople do you trust? Hmm. How many people do you take their advice as independent and impartial? How can it be? If you ask me about sales training, I'm going to give you a very biased opinion because I'm in it. It may be still true. Doesn't mean it's wrong. Doesn't mean it's not completely accurate. It's just naturally biased. What we have to do in sales is have that framework so that when our instincts kick in, we can ask ourselves, am I thinking this because I want to think it, or am I thinking this because it's true? Let me give you another example. I've been talking about this murder case quite a bit because it is so intriguing and so analogous to the large complex sale where people say things like, I know what happened. I, I listen to them on YouTube. You can too. Search anything about Karen Reed. Because what's great about this case, I mean, obviously it's tragic. Someone died. But from a salesperson's perspective, this case screams how people think. Cognitive bias. Let me give you one hard example: authority bias. Authority bias is the belief that you will believe people in authority over people not in authority. Essentially, you'll believe the police. You'll believe the courts. You'll believe what the press— I think— I'm not sure many people believe that anymore, but certainly authority. And especially when the family of a police officer is going to believe in authority, they're going to have authority bias. So the people in the family are automatically saying things like, I know what happened. Well, what happened? Well, she hit him with the car.

Why?

Because the police told me, and I am the brother, sister, mother, father of a police officer. That is ingrained in our DNA. So, for them, and they see evidence that points 100% the other way. The person who's supposed to hit him with the car is at home. When they're there, somebody is seeing them, watching them alone. He's not in the car. He's in the house. But people don't want to believe it because it fights their authority bias, their instinct. Now, do you have the Quantity bias? Does quantity feel so enticing? If I could tell you I can get you 1,000 replies, does that excite you? Without knowing reply to what? Who's replying? Why are they replying? What's the intent behind the reply? That's the The quality of it. And, you know, I kind of picked this up early in sales because I got into sales to make money. I wasn't a natural salesperson. I was probably the opposite of a natural salesperson. I was the, the wallflower in these meetings who wanted to just study what was going on and answer questions. And then I had to become the person leading the meeting. I didn't feel comfortable doing that. I didn't really want to do that, but I needed to do that to get the deal closed. So I became that person. I changed my personality. I changed my value and my belief system to match what I wanted to accomplish. Now, a lot of times I'm interviewing people who you would think are natural salespeople. People like today, somebody who grew up in a football culture, a team culture, a sports culture, a competitive culture. That kind of molds you that way. Doesn't mean you have to do it. You can do this on your own. I did it on my own. I wasn't an athlete. I didn't play on a team sport. You know, I ran cross-country one season in freshman year. I liked running. I really didn't like, you know, running with other people, nor was I fast enough for it to really, you know, have a great feeling to it. It was essentially exercise. So I don't have that, but I created it. I changed myself. If you don't change this part, you're going to be very busy and wondering why you're not successful. And you— what do you do? You get busier. You buy more tools to do more dumb things faster. Why is that so universally accepted today? As the way to sell. All you see is, oh, we need more data. What's the hottest company out there right now? Oh, some data company that lets you do really dumb things insanely fast, faster than you ever could do dumb things. There's no time limit in the many dumb things you can do during the day. But is it increasing revenue? I don't think so. Maybe compared to what they were doing before, their old dumb way of doing it, maybe it's smarter. Well, it's not smarter, it's the same thing. It's just doing it with more people. And they're thinking, well, now we can scrape their website and come up with something really relevant. But you have to assume that they're going to read it, that they're going to care. And what's the first step in change? What is it? Let me look through. It's denial. It's not acceptance.

That's—

and we take that as an objection. That's not an objection. That's the natural reaction to change. And what do we do? We fight the objection. Then we get into an argument. And we close for the next meeting. And they don't show up. Oh God, does that sound familiar? That's all preventable. Not 100% of the time, but a lot more than this. If you really want to learn how to start conversations with strangers, sign up first. Get the meeting. Start the conversation. Get the meeting. If you're in deals and they just don't seem to close or seem to be taking forever to close, Closing the Complex Sale is the course for you. Now, everyone sends me 3 pages of their situation and then tells me, I don't know which course I should take. Or my favorite, should I take both courses at the same time? Well, I don't know. Your level of interest, your level of curiosity, your level of commitment. You can do it. But why are you asking me? Do you not know your own issue? Some people are just so worked up, so frazzled that they don't. They need the clarity. It's, it's this simple. If you're in B2B sales, And the course, the cost of the course, the ROI is in 1 month minimum. If you apply it, if you learn, if you try it, if you accept it, if you fight your own instincts and say, hey, maybe Brian knows what he's talking about. What do most people do? Well, that doesn't feel comfortable. How can I do this? My way? Well, what's your way? You know, just put it into a cadence and hit a button? Well, probably is not going to work that well. And that, that guy that I talked about who got the meeting with the CRO in less than 6 hours, there was no pitching, no product talk, not at all. No scaring, no enticing. No begging for time? Not at all.

Why?

Because that doesn't work. You're assuming that they are in active pain. They're not. They may be a little curious, but that's it. Sales is the type of thing that you either want to master or you become an amateur. A clerk. And I use the word clerk— it is a pejorative, meaning that being a clerk in the complex sale, you better hope your boss likes you because clearly the results won't be there. Sales is a lot more than just being a service clerk, being the nice smiley guy answering questions. That's what I mean by a clerk. clerk reacting to what a prospect wants to do versus what a sales professional does is guides the client through the process because they do want to buy. They do want to change, you know, because I know what that's like. I recently made a decent purchase, but it took me a long time to get I could have done it probably a year earlier. Should have done it a year earlier. But that's me. And most people, they like to learn about new things, but the change part really becomes hard and we have to work around that. So ask yourself, do you want to master sales or do you want to be a service clerk? 'Cause believe me, A-players are never unemployed. I see service clerks, it's a very expensive job to basically be reacting to stuff. So go to b2brevenue.com, check out the courses. Thanks for listening. If you see my stuff fly by on LinkedIn, give it a little like, a little comment, a little share. I'd be greatly appreciative of that. We'll see you next time. Thank you.