THE #1 THING TO CHANGE NOW TO MAXIMIZE YOUR INCOME IN B2B SALES

Hey, before we get into the interview, I want to make sure you're aware of our other podcasts, the Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers show, which is a very quick, under 5 minutes in most cases, sometimes just a few minutes where I answer your questions. You can just send me any question to my LinkedIn profile, Brian G. Burns, and I'll put it in the queue to answer. Also, the Sales Leadership Show. If you're looking to get into sales leadership or you want to hear from the world's best sales leaders, that's where I interview them. Check it out, the Sales Leadership Show. Also at b2brevenue.com, you can learn all about all the courses. Links are in the show notes below, as well as our link to our partners over at brevitypitch.com, the fastest, easiest way to become great at sales and practice.

Before it's showtime. Here we go.

Yep.

Now, a lot of people use the analogy between sales and dating. Do, do you think there's a lot of corollaries, correlations there?

Well, uh, shameless plug for me, I have been back on the dating scene recently, so I guess I've been think— I've been thinking about it more often lately because I'm always kind consumed in sales and then now that too. But it is in a funny way. I think there are a lot of parallels and similarities for sure. I mean, in a variety of ways, but I think early on in dating or sales, you should be looking for some of those red flags or green flags of like, hey, is this really going to work out or is this worth my time? So you're thinking through all these things on both sides and the sooner you can figure out some of those things, the better, because otherwise You're going to be wasting your time. You might be wasting the customer's time, or you just get led down a track and then you never get any deals closed or commissioned. So I think it is a funny parallel, but there's a lot of truth to it. But I think ultimately it's how do you look at those red flags, green flags early on in your deals, early on in these opportunities to make sure you're not wasting your time and you're focused on the deals that are more likely to close.

Yeah, well, let's take the, the most, the closest one, like trying to get a meeting, right? Trying to get a date, right? You're trying to get what, 30-minute coffee, whatever, drink. Simple enough, right? Is it a numbers game?

It's probably not the right mindset. Yeah, yeah, probably, probably not.

Probably not. Right?

Because Do you want to just have coffee with anyone?

No, no.

You probably don't want to have coffee with just anyone.

Yeah.

And it's not the money. So why don't— but in sales, people act like they want to have coffee with anyone because if they're in their database of possible dates, they're qualified. Okay, a little bit different. Now, would you just send a pitch to your date? Hi, I'm Dustin. I'm 34 years old, graduated Georgia Tech, entrepreneur. I found a couple of things you might be interested in me. First, I drive a Toyota. Would you do that?

It was sounding good there for a minute, but then you started—

You were probably recording that. You're like, Burns is on to something here.

Yeah, yeah. I need to start using that and just and Send it out to thousands of people, like, like, like the email machines.

Young eligible women in the Atlanta area.

Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. You wouldn't do that. You would hopefully spend more time on the front end of what, what you're really looking for. You know, in sales, you got the ideal customer profile, but not just aimlessly looking for meetings or dates left and right, but because of a variety of reasons. First off, that's hard to do. It's not very effective and the chances of those being successful are probably gonna be pretty low. But if you, you know, spend more time thinking about your ideal customer profile or, and/or companion, whatever that may be, that, that makes it much easier to narrow it down so that you're not wasting time, not spinning your wheels and you're focused on what's most likely to be a good fit for you.

Yeah. Well, let's, let's go old school before dating apps. What, let's say there's a young lady at the gym or the market or your neighborhood. How do you ask her out?

Man, before dating apps, it's hard these days because they've been around for 10 years. But yes, well, first off, you're not gonna go up and just pitch yourself like, hey, I'm Dustin. Hey, I'm Dustin. I'm entrepreneur. All this different, all the stuff you're saying, although that did sound good. You know, maybe I should use that at some point.

But anyways, what's your value proposition, Dustin?

No. Yeah, you would try to, you know, break the ice a little bit, maybe give a compliment, maybe something mutual that you're at the same grocery store, Trader Joe's, whatever it may be. And then you start talking about mutual interests or something very easy, casual, compliment, that type of thing is most likely on the spot. That's what I would do.

Yeah.

Yeah.

My best line, and this worked well over 80% of the time because it was indirect. I'd go up and I go, hey, my friends tasked me with recruiting some beautiful young women for this party tonight. I know you're not interested, but I thought I'd run it by you, see if you were free. About 80% of the time. All right.

I wrote that one down. That's, that's good for me. I like that.

But what would happen if you went up and gave your value proposition?

It's not gonna go well, most likely.

Why not?

They don't know you. They don't trust you. They don't like you at this point.

And—

And who's it about?

Yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. So even though your accomplishments are long and wide, It's still about you, right? It's not about her. What does she want to talk about?

Herself, most likely.

Yes, yes, yes, she does. Yep. Counterintuitive, isn't it?

It is, it is. It's tough. Everybody loves to talk about themselves. So if you know that Especially in dating or sales. Why are we not getting other people to talk more versus us? It's not about, not about us. It's about them.

Yeah.

And let's say you gave your value proposition and she said, I'm, I'm sorry, I've, I've gotta go home. My phone's ringing. How would you interpret that?

Uh, it depends the mindset of the, the person doing that, but I would, Take it as she's not interested and she's moving on, or she made up an excuse completely that was a complete fake lie because she was trying to get away, most likely. Yeah.

But is it not interested or just— you don't know.

Bad timing. Could be bad timing. You know, you have no idea. Maybe she had a bad day.

Timing. It's timing, right? You didn't get the right time, so you gotta do it again.

Ah, there you go. Yeah, just wait, wait a couple more days.

A couple more days and try it again, maybe, and bring up something you did in high school. You were on the track team, right? You came in third one time. See, we all think it's about enticing as opposed to conversing. What's very similar between sales and dating is you got to get people talking. You don't know if she's single. You don't know anything about her other than her physical appearance. You're attracted, which is fine. We all start somewhere. But in which case are you more likely to get a date when you're just talking to her about her dog or her new shoes or new sneakers or the weather, the park, the crazy driver that just went by? Or yourself?

Definitely the latter. Shoes, dog. That's, that's gonna be way better than talking about myself for sure.

Yeah.

Something you both have in common. And why don't people do that?

I guess we're taught that, well, we just naturally human behavior. We want to talk about ourselves and we, we're self, we know the talk. Self, self. Yeah, we're self-centered, probably a little. narcissism depending on the situation. And you just want to talk about yourself and you, you, you think you're, you don't have as much self-awareness about stuff too. Like you think you, others, you think others see you the same way you see yourself, but that's just not the reality. You're, you're assuming, you're assuming that. And very few can probably get away with that in sales or dating by just talking about themselves unless if you're a celebrity or something to that effect. Otherwise, you know, make it about them. Like, put some thought into it. Like, what, what, what do you think they care about? What, you know, what shoes, what dog, are they going to the, the dog park up, up the street? They have a cool thing in Atlanta where you can get drinks. It's called Fetch and it's a dog park where people go and you can have drinks and then the dogs run around. Yeah, there you go.

So there's a sales process. Yeah.

Yeah. There it's all, I'm starting to map it out in my head now. Starting to map it out. Yeah.

Right.

And I remember guys saying, oh, if I could just meet her, like that would change their life. That it's a lot like in sales. If I just get the meeting with Mr. Big Cheese, I get a deal. No, that's just the meeting. Doesn't mean that they're going to buy anything. Doesn't mean you're going to get married. So there's a process there, right? And the dating process is you've got to kind of keep a cadence, right? You got to call, text, what, communicate, and you got to see each other. And this all signals things and means something, even though there might not be any conscious meaning to it. Same in sales. If you don't get the next date on the current date, what happens? You have to go get the next thing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're gonna lose, you're gonna lose some momentum for sure. Yeah.

And meetings, right? And like, why do people get ghosted?

Because they're following up too much and they're, they don't have the next meeting set up when they're on the meeting. That's one of the big, definitely in sales. It's like, that's like the classic thing is you're not, if it's worth your time, If you don't set up that follow-up meeting while you're there, then you're just gonna spend days or weeks chasing them down. And then that person may or may not have been interested. And if they're not interested, then you're pretty much done.

Yeah. And we also have the hallucination problem like we have with ChatGPT. If ChatGPT can't find the answer, it makes it up. Okay. Called a hallucination. In, in life, if we don't know what the answer is, Sometimes instead of wondering, we just make it up. Oh, maybe she's on vacation, or maybe she's in a hospital or in the Alps. We make it up. And remember that movie, He's Really Not That Into You?

Mm-hmm.

Women make it up when they sit around. Why isn't he calling? Maybe he's on vacation. Maybe he's in the Alps. And the guy goes, maybe he's not that into you. So the hallucination gets blown up. And in sales, we have the hallucination, right? Oh, I'm sure they're— the committee, the buying committee is meeting Thursday at 3 and they're going to decide this. And then Mr. Big Cheese must be on vacation. We don't know what's going on. So we fill it in. The problem with filling it in is we're not looking at the real answer.

It's a, it's an ego hit if you have to admit that, that, hey, the deal isn't going to go through and it's because you made a mistake. Or same thing on the dating. Yeah. You know, no one wants to take accountability. You want to blame the other person. And in both scenarios, that it was something they did, something the company did, not something Dustin or Brian did. You know, that would be because you don't want to have that painful conversation with yourself. You don't want to admit it to yourself. But the sooner you could do that, the better. And then I think there's also So on both sides of it, you want things to work out. So you maybe keep chasing stuff or going after things where you probably know, hey, it's not likely to succeed or it's not going to work out, that deal or that relationship. But then you keep chasing it. And that's some of that's just probably natural human behavior. But there's a lot of things that happen that should tell you not to do that. But then people just naturally keep chasing because they think, oh, you know, I've had success before, I've closed deals before, I should chase this, or, you know, relationship, whatever it may be. So I think there's also this— people like that excitement or that chase, even though it's not realistic probably to get to the finish line or have something, you know, a deal come through. And, uh, that's the ego probably that gets in the way. And then not being accountable with yourself and admitting to where you need to get better, where you made a mistake, probably.

Yeah. And they're both relationships. One's romantic, one's business. Now let's go to qualification. I don't know if you've ever been hard qualified on a date or not.

Oh, you can, you can get that sense for sure. They're asking you a lot of questions.

And how does it feel? How's it feel?

It feels like you're being interrogated. It doesn't feel good.

Does it feel like a date or does it feel like a job interview?

Definitely job interview.

Right. Okay, now take it into business. If you do the same thing, you hard qualify. Does it feel like fun, or does it feel like a transaction?

Transaction.

Right. Yep. Okay, they're both kind of doomed to fail, so why do we do it? You know, it's one thing on the dating apps asking kids Where you live, what you do, but interactively, you know, you're having dinner, right? You know, do you bring your W-2? But you feel like you should sometimes, don't you?

It's depending on which part of town you live in. Yes, for sure. Right. That's, that'd be a bold move though.

Yeah. And then it's like, where do you live when they want to Zillow your house or your condo or whatever?

Right?

It's, uh, dequalifying, right? And but there's a clean way to do it too. How long you lived here? How long of a drive was it? Was there traffic? You can find the same things out without being as direct. But today we're almost taught to be direct in sales. Because it's a numbers game. Yeah.

What's your decision-making process?

Yeah. Imagine asking, they look at you like, what?

Yeah.

What's your decision-making criteria?

There you go.

There you go.

That's an easier one. Both of them feel like a transaction when you ask it that way, right? What's your med pick on a girl for a relationship?

Yeah, you can't go straight into that. You have to be conversational, to your point. Ask open-ended questions to get people talking. You know, what's your story? That's a great one for either way. And people just all of a sudden, they just go off on a tangent for 20 minutes about everything, probably a million things you were going to ask them anyway. So you got to ask these open-ended questions and actually think about, you know, what you're going to ask beforehand and Not wing it as much and not have a— I guess you don't want to be too prepared. You don't want to be robotic with a million questions, but just have a little bit of personality in there and more open-ended. And yeah, there's a lot of things you definitely wouldn't do that. But I think it's sales right now. It feels like an interrogation. So people have this anxiety just to get on sales calls because they know they're going to get grilled or they're going to go straight to a demo. And they don't, they have, they have, they have no idea what it is, nor do they care. They're just, they just want to, they may be open to a conversation. They may be open to express some of their pain points of where they're struggling, but you have to ask it the right way. You can't be direct. And then they certainly don't want to hear about your company, the company's history, a demo right away when they didn't agree to it or really want to do it. But that's what everyone's doing. And, and part of that's Probably because what they're getting told to do and they're not, they think that's the right way to go about it. And at times that can work if the company's crushing it, but very rarely does that work anymore from what I've seen. But, uh, we're taught to do it this way. So then people just start, you know, pounding and it does become a numbers game. But the problem is the numbers game usually doesn't work. So doing more of it just defeats the purpose and you're going to waste time and be burned out.

And what does everybody say about the best type of dating? It's organic, right? It's natural.

Mm-hmm.

I remember college parties, parties shortly after college, beach houses. You know, you're meeting people, you're just naturally bumping into people. Now, if you ask qualification questions, it's not wrong to want to know that information. It's smart to want to know that information. But there's more organic, natural ways of getting it than directly. And I think people get that in dating. They don't get it in business because they're thinking like an employee. They're thinking like a clerk. They're thinking like a transaction. And if it doesn't work, this Another number. Boom, boom, boom.

And a lot of this stuff you can get pretty easily too. I mean, you got LinkedIn, you have all the social media. I mean, you can find out so much, uh, these days. I mean, within reason, don't go overboard, obviously, but you can find so much out before you even meet people, whether it's dating or a prospect. You got mutual friends, mutual connections on social media. I mean, it's, it's endless on that. So you can do a lot of pre-qualifying before you even Uh, accept some of these meetings or, or dates for sure. But yeah, you have to— it is a good point. Uh, people do hopefully realize that on the dating side, that you can't just go in and grill them like we were talking about. But then in business, we're just doing that left and right like it's normal. And then we're just going through the motions, being robotic and not showing personality, not actually having a conversation, making it about them. It's always about us and our company and our product. So it's, it's interesting how that's gone off the rails and that people don't think for themselves more and actually try to have, you know, build relationships with people. It's a little cliché saying it's all about the relationships, but you, you gotta make it about them early on and, and build some type of rapport. You don't need to be the life of the party. That will help you get meetings, but it's not gonna help you close deals. But you need to actually show that you care or you have some commonality. Or something that's empathetic to put yourself in their shoes.

Right. You've got to— the strength of the relationship is in direct proportion to them wanting to talk to you versus having to talk to you. A prospect has to talk to you when they have questions, support issues, pricing questions, need a proposal. That's have to. If they don't want to, that's the only time they will talk to you. If you have a relationship, they want to talk to you. You bring value to them—information, ideas, help. So they want to talk to you. If you have a champion, you have to support them. And people say relationship that to them it means likability. They like me. But will they call you back? Do they like you enough to call you back? No, I'm not sure they like you that much. That's the relationship. And it's the same in dating, you know. Does she want to talk to you when something great happens or something crappy happens? Does she want to talk? Are you the first person she wants to share Or one of the people she wants to share it with.

It's true. Yeah, it's, it's how, how often you're communicating. Are you getting— is it, are you— is it taking hours or days between communications? That's usually okay. Something's probably not, not going the right, right direction.

Just about Saturday night's dinner, or is it—

Yeah. Are they introducing you to their friends? Same thing as in business. Like if, if you have one champion, And they won't introduce you to anybody else, it's probably okay. That's gonna be a red flag. Same thing. Oh, why is— why has she never introduced me to any of her friends? So at some point you, you start seeing these tendencies and they are very relatable. And there's gotta be— yeah, there's gotta be like momentum. You have to keep having momentum. You know, you're, you're talking, you're meeting, you have a cadence in some form or fashion. You're going— you're learning more about that person or the organization. You're meeting other people that are part of that same, same crew. So buying committee. Yeah. Well, yeah, you probably do have to win over the friends. You're gonna have to win over friends and family, right?

Yeah.

You're gonna have to win over the friends and family if you keep going down that path. So it's, it's true. That is the committee and the relationship, very similar to closing deals. So it's, it's funny.

And you can move too fast. You can move too slow.

Yeah, too fast seems to happen. Well, definitely on the business side, too fast happens a lot. People skip steps, they get excited, they, they don't do the test, they don't do the pilot, they just go straight to trying to get that big deal, and it usually backfires. Dating, probably the same thing, I would say.

Of course.

People try to go too fast, especially depending on what— where you're at in your, your life. But yeah, you skip over stuff, you go too fast, you're in that honeymoon phase, and then boom, it comes crashing down at some point, most likely, if you go too quick.

Yeah. And if you don't pay attention to this and you don't build this skill, because it's a soft skill, it takes practice and it's counterintuitive. And I, I heard a great analogy. If you're going to rely on your intuition, you got to have good intuition. So what's your intuitive eating? Is that good intuition? It might be, but most people, it's something sweet, something available, something yummy, right? And what do we do? What's our intuition when we're in front of somebody? Is it prefrontal cortex thinking or is it intuition?

Talk about ourselves. Yeah.

What we're interested in sports. I'm sure she'd love to hear your opinion of the Braves, but but that's what we know, and we're passionate about it. So it pops in our brain, right? Mm-hmm. You know, probably Vanderpump Rules isn't on top of your mind, but it might be on hers.

Yeah, I mix it up sometimes.

You start bringing up Jacks and.

Brittany, and that's a good idea. Gandalf, I'll have to use that one too.

Gandalf, you got some stuff right there, right? But that's it's small talk, but it's talk. And if small talk's okay, if you move on to relationship talk or business talk, depending on the context. But they've got to enjoy spending time with you.

Another good one is for both sides is if you start, if it's, if it's difficult to deal with that account or difficult to deal with that person, if there's, there's, you know, these challenges, it just seems like you're, you're working harder. Uh, like you sometimes, I know for companies, right? If you maybe you really want that deal and you need that deal for the company or whatever the situation is, but you can just tell by how you're working with them that, man, they're gonna be a pain in the ass. This whole thing. But you're— you need that deal, you need that commission, the company's got pressure on you, it's the end of the quarter, and you still go through with that. And but, you know, you can just see that, that trajectory and that pain that's going to happen with those people. And maybe, maybe it is worth it because of whatever, whatever the strategy is, but a lot of times you're going to pay for that later, and it's, it's going to exhaust you and stress you out and all that. And I think it's the same thing with dating too, is like sometimes they're— it's like maybe harder than it should be, But then you, you keep going down that path and then, then you get there 6 months later and you're like, oh crap, you know, that type of thing.

Yeah. We've all been backburnered before, right? Nobody likes to deliver bad news. And maybe they enjoy your company and maybe you're friend-zoned, but they're not gonna tell you you're friend-zoned, but their actions tell you, but you don't want to see them. That's very analogous to sales, right? They don't say no, which we interpret as a maybe. It's no until it's yes. So we hold on to it and we usually date above our weight. Well, we'd like to, right? Everybody does. Yeah. And we get what we think of buying signals when they're just being polite. But if you want to date above your weight, you better be good, right? Because you can keep the conversation going, and you see guys doing it all the time, right? So you know it's possible. It's possible in sales too, but you have to have some judgment and patience and realism also.

Definitely, definitely some realism. You got to be confident for sure, but you got to balance that with the realism. And that's a really hard thing to do in sales. Definitely probably hard to do in dating as well. And that deliver the bad news thing, that is so true because that's why ghosting happens on both sides. Of course, because people, people, yeah, that's where ghosting was invented because people don't, people, people don't want to say no, or they don't want to be uncomfortable. They don't want to hurt people's feelings. They don't want to— it's just, it gives you anxiety to even get on the phone and have that conversation and deliver bad news. Some people are better at it than others, but most of your customers, first off, they don't— they have no obligation to tell you anything because they have their own job. They have their own stuff going on. So it's not— they don't have to do anything.

Mm-hmm.

But we expect that they would just tell us one way or the other. But that's just not how it goes. And people don't want to hurt your feelings. So then they don't do that. And then same thing on dating. Like sometimes you'll just, especially with all the dating app stuff, like it's just a lot of ghosting goes on and now it's, it's almost a standard. It's, it's normal. Ghosting is just normal. Yeah.

There you go.

And, but that's probably good in some situations, but how do If you look through people's pipeline, how much of it is people who have been just been backburnered? Not just the sale, but just the idea. But you need that cold, hard realism. And I think these analogies are helpful because we've all done it. We've all dated. So we've got firsthand experience. And the analogies are pretty strong.

Even bigger deals, more deals, faster deals. That's what it's all about. Sign up today. Put the excuses away. Yeah, excuses feel good, but they're expensive. Excuse—you know what the excuses are costing you? Tens, fifty, maybe couple hundred thousand dollars a year. And lost income.

Really?

Yeah. The difference between where you are today. Let's say you're making $150,000. Decent, decent income. But you know, there's other people in your industry making $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. Well, how are you going to do that? You all think it's just about getting a better job, a better territory, a better manager. They can help. Go do that. Then what happens?

It's still you there with those leads trying to close those deals.

And do you have the game? Few people do. Everyone thinks they do. Why not prove it? The market tells you what you're worth. Accept it. Now become better. And the way to become better is to improve every day. Really make a daily routine of learning and developing because it's not at the knowledge level.

You have to become unconsciously competent at these skills, which takes time, repetition, and emotion. And I show you how to do it, how I did it, how I've taught hundreds of people to do it.

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