THE SECRET TO CREATIVE SELLING IN B2B SALES AND SELLING

We talk a lot about creativity in sales, and some people think, well, give me an example of that, Brian. Well, I'm going to do that for you today. Today we got a great guest, and creativity is an understatement. And I think what's unique about this interview is this is, at least for me, one of the last places I would find— I thought I would find creativity. But I did. And what you'll get out of this is an idea, an example, but don't take it as a script. Now, this is what people, certainly on LinkedIn, always ask. Oh, is it this or is it that? And then they think they know it. What we want to do is take an example and say, well, how could I apply The concept of that, not the exact example. And this is where people get off on the wrong path. They try and copy somebody per the exact steps, and if it doesn't work, they blame the situation instead of trying to find what would work. In their particular case. To do that, you have to understand the psychology of the prospect. And that, you know, it's a little work. It is. But today, I think people think prospecting is one of two things: spamming somebody with your little love letter, also known as email, or maybe do something on LinkedIn. Do the pitch and pounce or the connect and pounce, uh, the bitch slap or pitch slap, or what do they call it? Or it's cold calling. It's dialing somebody up and giving your verbal commercial. Now, there's infinite number of ways of starting a conversation with a stranger, and too many of us think that there's only 2 or 3 ways. There's infinite number of ways. And if you want more examples, Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting would be a good place for that. But I'll sum that up at the end of this interview. I think what you're going to get out of this is both his excitement, his creativity, and his understanding of his market, of what his clients want. What they care about. And here's the hint: it's not what he's selling. It's that connection. Because it all starts with the connection. Because without the connection, also known as rapport, relationship, trust, all those ingredients, the message, the value proposition, the insight isn't Valuable. Does no one cares? Let's get into this interview. I'll sum it up at the end, but this is one you want to save and listen to over and over again. And if you really want to become great at doing this, go to b2brevenue.com right now. We'll see you soon.

Here we go.

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

Hey, Brian, thanks so much for having me. It's an honor to be here. I love the content that you have been sharing now for quite a while. I know that you've helped a lot of folks, so it's a pleasure to be here with you. So quick story on me is I've been in sales now for a little over 20 years, kind of fell into it, graduated from college, got my business degree, and then it's like, now what? What do you do? You know, you've been living in this fantasy world. Of working part-time jobs and getting a degree. I got a business degree and came out and said, what am I going to do with it? And I went to a job fair and a company called Nextel Communications, you may remember those push-to-talk walkie-talkies, they took a chance on me. I had a great sales trainer. His name was Skip Johnson. He ended up going on to be the national sales trainer for Nextel. So my first sales manager, I was very, very fortunate to learn SPIN training and he He would take a phone book, Brian, and pick it up and he would say, here's a wad of money and I'm gonna just blindly point at a name and a number and I'm gonna call them up and I'm gonna get a meeting. And he could do it and he was very good at that stuff. So I learned a lot from him, um, did that for a year and then was recruited to work for Time Warner Cable, did telecom sales for Roadrunner Business Class back in the day. Then, uh, Comcast, uh, went to work for them for about 6 months through acquisition of our system that I worked at in Memphis where I'm from originally, Memphis, Tennessee. And then I did an IT consulting gig for about 2 and a half years where I got a phone call one day from the CIO of FedEx. He had retired from helping FedEx become the logistics company that they are today. He was one of the original people there and he wanted to do IT managed services for small business. He asked me if I would help build a sales team and I was in a place where I was looking for a change. I wanted that entrepreneurial bug and be a part of a startup. I'd worked for the big companies. And did that for 2 and a half years. We became one of the top-selling companies for managed services in the United States. I actually had John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, was in my office and I was just this young, never led anything in my life, you know, salesperson who was kind of thrust into sales leadership role, fish out of water, as they say, imposter syndrome. I lived it. I knew what that was. But we were successful because at the end of the day, I learned how to really care for people, understand their problems, illuminate them. and then align it to a solution. And then I found what has now become— and I've been here for 15 years with Comcast Business. They called me up and said, hey, would you move to Nashville? We are launching our fiber business, fiber services to business, and we want you to do that. And I was really big into that for Time Warner Cable for a number of years. So it was kind of a natural fit. Got to move to Nashville, Tennessee, and I've been here ever since. And part of that evolution at Comcast has been from selling fiber, getting it off the ground, more of a, you know, local area business focus to regional to national to now what we consider strategic national and soon global as we've expanded. So I've been on quite a journey from knocking doors and picking up phone books and smiling and dialing to all the way up to the highest level of stack and serving some of the biggest Fortune 100 companies, you know, on the planet. So that's, that's kind of my story and journey in a sales career.

Well, let's dig into it. What makes a great rep at Comcast Business? I got to imagine it's not a cakewalk.

It's not. That's a great question. I think the biggest opportunity for people to succeed is learning how to handle complex situations and processes that aren't exactly perfect, right? Every big company that I've ever known or partnered with, everyone has challenges, right? There's a lot of moving parts. And especially when you've got a hypergrowth company, I think Comcast has had double-digit growth for years in our business services group. With that comes a lot of new products and services and teams that you have to navigate. So I think a great rep understands first and foremost how to pull the right levers, how to build alliances and relationships within the business so that you can then turn that into being a value-added, highly responsive, you know, person for your clients that you serve. I think where people struggle is learning how to operate within the machine. And then, you know, if they do figure that out, and they do, many do, we have a lot of great sellers that do very well and stay here a long time. But that is first and foremost is learning the process. And then secondly, you've just got to have a culture of care. And I think that's one of the things that Comcast Business has done very well is from the ground up. You think about it, the cable business at large, historically, cable companies and phone companies were not someplace that people would love to line up to turn their boxes in. And, you know, it was like going to the DMV back in the day and you'd wait and And wait, of course, they've improved greatly in their customer experience. If you've ever been to an Xfinity store, for example, you know, huge improvement. It's like an Apple Store almost. When you walk in, it's very quick, very frictionless. So that cultural mindset of care really starts with the human experience and then working your way backwards. And that's one of the reasons I've enjoyed being here for so long is that— and I tell new folks that come into the company, hey, listen, if you don't like the way a process is or you think it could be better, They'll listen and they're always trying to improve it. And I think that's, you know, a testament to the fact that they do really care about their people and their, you know, their clients that they serve to try to overcome that stigma of the cable companies from back in the day.

But how does that transfer in the business-to-business side? Because it's clearly viewed as a commodity. I know it isn't. You know it isn't. Sure, but they want it to be viewed as a commodity, don't they? Because they're using something already, right?

Yeah, they are. And I think that's really where, like, for me personally and others who have followed this model of leveraging our ecosystem, one of the cool things that separates Comcast from the me-tos of the world, the AT&Ts, the Verizons, is the fact that we not only are delivering connectivity and video services and the things you would expect that a lot of folks can also do. When we come to the table, we actually bring the bigger story of our ecosystem of NBCUniversal and all the companies in our portfolio that we manage, own, operate, or invested in. We have a very strong venture capital arm. A lot of folks don't realize that, but we have accelerator programs, we have incubators. NBC has a sports tech group where we have thousands of businesses a year will apply, and then we cut it down to 50 to go through panel interviews. And then from that, it goes to a cohort of 10, and those 10 get mentorship. They get, you know, connections through all of the things that we own, the assets, the media companies, you name it. And then after a year through the program, we may turn around and invest in them and make them part of our family of companies and then leverage them when we're responding to RFPs. We'll say, yeah, we can do the internet and the network, but also let's think about your reimagining your guest experience. Let's reimagine You know, what are you putting on your digital, you know, menu boards? What are you putting on your digital displays? Well, we own a little thing called the Minions, the, you know, Illumination Studios, the great content that you see on the big screen. How about we bring that to, in my case, a restaurant, for example, as you want to delight and surprise your guests, entertain them? We learned a lot through the pandemic. If you take a company like Sonic Drive-In, they were purpose-built for a pandemic, right? You have the bays, They have the cars that pull into the stalls. You know, a company like that would be perfect to have digital menu boards and then content pushed across it. So I'm doing the network plus media assets that I bring to them.

I see.

So that's the differentiation point, is not just straight commoditized network broadband, but what do we want to do with it? The application layer. We have an IoT business. That's a hot topic right now with sensors and monitoring and removing the human element where you have labor challenges, workforce challenges, rising You know, labor costs, food costs. How do we automate things to repurpose our employees? Not to get rid of them, but maybe we repurpose them to be more guest-facing and customer-focused as opposed to the monotonous tasks that they might have been walking around with a clipboard doing, which nobody likes to do. So those are the things we bring to bear.

And where's all this passion come from?

Love for people first and foremost. I think it's in our DNA. It really is.

I mean, you personally.

Yeah, me personally, I mean, I was in sports growing up. I was always kind of in a leadership role. I pitched and played baseball. And, you know, when you're the pitcher, you're kind of thrust into the spotlight. It's on you. You know, not to say that the pitcher carries the team, but if a pitcher's having a great game, you can carry the team. So I think a lot of that I learned from sports. I also learned about like my work ethic. You know, my mom and dad, blue-collar workers. Mom was a secretary at a warehouse at a logistics center. My dad was a welder, you know, and retired from the gas company. Didn't grow up with a lot of money or anything like that. I have an older brother. Hand-me-downs were quite common. But I'm thankful for that. I grew up in a really great home with a loving environment. And my dad would say, you know, whatever you're going to do, do it to your best. Just give your best. And, and then he also would say, don't end up in a ditch like me. And that would ring out in my mind as I would have those hard days when you don't want to get up and you're like, Don't let, you know, don't be in a ditch. And that would ring out in my mind. That's where my work ethic and drive comes from. But the passion, it genuinely comes from a desire to make a difference in people's lives. I look at things like when I serve restaurants, what we do for Comcast Business in my group is we focus on delivering network connectivity and managed services to the restaurant industry. So the biggest QSRs out there, you think of them, you're driving down the street, they're probably our client. We have 13 of the top 15 largest QSRs in the country that are managed by us. When I walk into the door of a restaurant operator, I'm thinking, you're feeding communities, you're employing people, you're a fabric of what we do in life. Think about your growing up, Brian. Did you have a special moment at a restaurant? Maybe an engagement, maybe you celebrated a birthday somewhere.

Sure.

Maybe you went there after a baseball game and everybody rode in the pickup truck. They used to do that. You know, they don't do that stuff anymore. You drive in the pickup truck to the McDonald's or the Pizza Hut or whatever was around, and you'd celebrate the big win.

Sure.

There's emotional connection in that industry. But I could really, if I want to try hard, I can think about and say the same thing for healthcare, the birth of a baby, you know, the loss of a spouse or a loved one, you know. So I look through the world through the lens of every life has a story, you know. And so you never know when you're walking down the airplane aisle, that person sitting there, they may look perfect on the appearances out front, But you don't know what they're battling on the inside. And a great company I've learned a ton from over the years, they're a longtime client of ours, is Chick-fil-A. Chick-fil-A infected me personally with their culture of care. I don't know if you know their mission statement, Brian, but it's not to have the world's greatest chicken sandwich. That's not their mission statement. Chick-fil-A's mission statement is to be the world's most caring company. And everything they do starts with that. And so from why their drive-thru is wrapped around the building out to the street, They're never, you know, open on Sunday. They're never 24/7, but yet they do 3 to 4 times the most revenue of any of their competitors out there on a per-location basis. It's culture. It's culture of care. So working with them for many, many years now and other great brands out there, they're not the only one that has that mindset, but Chick-fil-A has really, I think, put a real structure around how they do it. A lot of people talk about care. It's really hard to execute without the right processes and the hiring. You've got to hire folks that share in that belief system. So my passion comes from that. I just, I just love taking care of the clients and making a difference.

And how do they react to it?

So I think it's interesting. A customer, when you can delight and surprise someone, you're, you're changing perceptions one experience at a time. you're either reinforcing the perception that you're a big cable company, and cable companies for years didn't have the best reputation. So when you're— you always have that in the back of my mind, like they're thinking about, am I going to live up to what they expect or am I going to change their mind? Am I going to build a new brand perception? I don't know if you've seen my Quick Bite Crew content. Dave Bozyn, who's my engineer at Comcast, he and I started the Quick Bite Crew to get out from under the brand of Comcast, which sounds crazy. But our brand is so strong that we thought if we're going to go out and market that we care to restaurants and we care about, you know, this hospitality space, how do we do it without people going, oh, it's just another Comcast sales pitch? So we said, let's talk about everything but Comcast. So you'll notice we never say Comcast in any of our content. And it turned out to be the greatest blessing in disguise because now, because we're talking about the industry, we're talking about what's current, what's fresh, what's innovative, what's exciting. We get requests from restaurants that say, hey, can you feature this sandwich? And We're not influencers. I mean, I'm shooting this stuff on an iPhone. I don't have a fancy camera rig or lighting system. It's just authenticity. We're spotlighting them. I love to tell cool stories, especially around restaurants and their foundations. A lot of folks don't realize that these companies have these nonprofits that are associated to their brands that are doing some really cool stuff in their communities, you know? And so we love to get behind that. Comcast is a huge supporter of community impact work. Which is another thing that makes me passionate about. I kind of tell people this, Brian. I say the, the nonprofit work that I do in the community impact work is really my real job. The selling of the networks is kind of enables me to, to do that, you know. So it's kind of like walking in 2 worlds, but it gives me passion, purpose, energy, drive, and, and just, you know, inspire brands. They have a phenomenal foundation led by Stuart Brown. They talk about turning Not saying when I grow up, but, or they would say if I grow up, they say when I grow up. And he would hear kids say, well, if I grow up or if I get the opportunity, we got to turn those ifs into wins. That's huge to make a life change difference.

Have you ever gotten any pushback from management of, hey, forget this silly stuff and get to get your KPIs up?

Right, right. So it's interesting. There's a great book I'm sure you've heard of called The Go-Giver.

Yep.

And Go-Giver is all about giving yourself away, making a difference freely without any expectation of something in return. And the world has a way of bringing it back to you. And I know some may call it karma. I tend to believe it's more faith-driven. I believe God blesses those activities when you genuinely want to make a difference. But, you know, I do both. And you have to be smart about your work. You have to have a great team. I have amazing support. Around me from leadership, our contracts teams, our engineers, our architects, my sales support team, my project managers. It truly takes a village. And I tell them this— I'll speak on our quarterly business review calls with our customers, and our teams will all be gathered around that support them, and we talk about the cool community impact work. And I'll say that, y'all, we may all be here focused on delivering networks, but because of the work you're doing— and yes, it can be hard and challenging at times, and getting those circuits in those hard-to-reach places, and The technician didn't do it the right way the first time, and we got to send them back out. We're all pulling our hair out from time to time. It happens. Life happens. But because we're all here around this table doing these great things and doing the hard stuff, look at the lives over here we're having an impact. Look at the children's hospitals that we were able to do a video gaming, you know, event where kids could, you know, play and have a great time or watch a movie that they couldn't go to the theater to see. And they get to see it before it's released in the theater. Illumination will give us content sometimes, they'll let us play in a movie theater like that. To me, inspires people. And they remember, you know what, there's more than just this network stuff we're dealing with. And when— so when you see the world through that view, that lens, it gives you that purpose and that passion. So I hope that kind of brought us full circle about what drives me.

Yeah, I mean, that we certainly got that part. Now, how do you Let's say you're going after a new restaurant that's not a Comcast customer. They're, for all you know, they're very happy with whoever they're using.

Sure.

How do you get that conversation going with them?

Sure. I mean, I think—

who is it on their side?

Yeah. So I'll give you a great example. I use creative outreach. I use LinkedIn heavily and I love to tell stories, right? I'm building a brand. Perception of care. You can't tell. No kidding, right? This guy can talk. So, so I'll give you a great example. There's a large sandwich shop. Let's just leave it at that.

It doesn't matter what we're doing.

Yep. Yep. You've probably, you've probably been there a few times in your life. No one in our team, we had another account team that was trying to get in there in front of the CIO. No one could do it. He would not take their calls, emails. They tried every which way from Sunday to do it. I did a little research, found out that he loves Irish rugby. And I went on to an app that lets you basically, it's called Cameo. It lets you pay and write a script and all this. I found an Irish rugby star and I wrote the script for him and I said, hey, you know, mention this, mention that. These are things that, you know, and then say, I would love for you to win championships with Comcast if you would give your friend Brian here a chance. And oh, by the way, if you happen to be, you know, in Ireland, Stop by, we'll have a pint, we'll chat about, you know, some stories, etc. I then cut it down on my mobile phone. I use a little app called Splice. It's what I shoot all my videos with and edit with. Very simple. And cut the video down to under 2 minutes because on LinkedIn you have to have that direct message under 2 minutes. Made a video, sent it over to the CIO. He responded within 10 minutes, said, this is amazing. Most creative thing ever. You get an hour. That one hour we get in front of him, do you think I, you know, came on the call and was like, let me tell you all about Comcast, how great we are, look what we do? Nope. I just went in there and started talking about the challenges in the industry, challenges that I know every CIO that I partner with is thinking about. And I think that's the thing that a lot of sales folks miss is that you've got to live in their shoes before I can go, tell me about your goals and tell me about your business and tell me about your strategy. You haven't earned the right to understand that stuff. You have to be the one to put the elephant in the room to say, I know this, this, this, this, this, and these things that you're dealing with. And you don't say that they're dealing with, you just say our experience shows our CIOs that we provide service to are challenged with, and then you lay it out and then you show depth. You don't just give them the high level, you give them a little bit of deeper understanding that you know what you're talking about. You live and breathe. And what we found in doing that, and I've got several other stories like that, Brian, I could tell you of hard-to-reach executives nobody else could get a meeting with. And through some creative outreach, it took us to the place that, you know, we wanted to get. But even when you're in the meeting, you still— we never talked about Comcast. We just talked about their world. And by the end of the meeting, this person was asking us for more time. And then we had like, hey, would you come back and meet with our senior executives? I want to get the whole C-suite together. Went back for a half-day session in this one case with another brand that serves sandwiches. Half a day, still didn't talk about Comcast, talked about the industry, talked about insights. They said, wow, Comcast, I've never viewed y'all as a technology-forward company. I just thought of you as the cable company. You know, I'm here to sell you a circuit. And then said, and they actually said, we put you on the level of like an Amazon or an Apple, you know. And then at the end of it, the CIO looks at us and says, well, what's this gonna cost for us to partner with you? And I said, You told us not to mention anything about Comcast. Like, we haven't even gotten into the needs yet of what we can do to serve you. So we've had a lot of deep dive conversations, of course, contracts and everything. But the point is, you have to have patience. And I know it's hard for— it depends on the level, right? Door-to-door knocker, you got to get the transactional. Where I'm at, the long game, you definitely got to play the long game.

Because you can imagine that that CIO doesn't get to talk to as many restaurant CIOs as you do.

That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah. And there, sometimes you'll have some that are more out there and out front. Phil Crawford, who's the Chief Technology Officer of CKE, he's a great friend of mine. CKE owns Carl's Jr. and Hardee's restaurants. Phil Crawford is just a thought leader. He's out front. You know, a lot of folks admire him, respect him, but he makes the time. He doesn't have to do this. He's got a ton on his plate. But he cares about the industry enough to get out front. There's a few others like Phil that are in the industry. But you're right, a lot of them don't collaborate. So they tend to work in vacuums, it feels.

Right. And they, you know, they're curious about what other restaurants are doing, what the issues are, what's coming down the pike.

Right. That's right. That's right. Yeah. And they want you. Yeah, absolutely. And we share insights. Now, again, being careful not to divulge, you know, things under NDA and specific things that are proprietary. But there is a general theme that, that is woven through all restaurants for sure. Yeah.

And how did you come to this conclusion? Most reps certainly in, they get that meeting, the meeting that they worked hard for, they did a lot of creativity. You're excited. How'd you hold your tongue in that meeting?

Oh man. So that's just learned from trial and error, you know? falling down on my face in the past. And, you know, some of that's just come from maturity and learning things the hard way. And wow.

Because you started this call knowing how to get all the Comcast resources together.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that took some time to learn that. And I got to imagine every rep who learned that wants to share that with the world, but nobody cares.

Right. You have to fight the urge, like, but, but I can help you. Like, I know And even now, here's the thing, Brian, like the thing that breaks my heart the most, and this is where I tend to try to do a lot of introspective things to sharpen my sword and figure out how to do it a better way. When I know that not only, like if you stack my network up to another, then the rest of the folks that would bid on an RFP, sure, there's a lot that can say, yeah, we do the same thing. It's now it's a price discussion. Who can save me money kind of thing? What really breaks my heart is when I don't feel like I've adequately demonstrated how the ecosystem, like, hey, now that we're partners, I can bring all these other cool things to bear that would drive your brand loyalty and guest experience and help you ring the register and sell more chicken and do these things. And when they just go on price and they just say, you know, I'm gonna go with the cheapest guy, I'm like, man, but you'd be perfect for like— and that's the stuff that sometimes IT folks, especially not all, but some are just, they just care about the widget. They just care about the circuit.

Right.

What's it cost? They don't care about the marketing stuff. And what I'm finding is a trend. The companies that are doing the best out there have a very close alignment between marketing and IT, the 2 worlds, because marketing's thinking about the guest experience. They're thinking about what happens when they're pulling in the parking lot. Why would they pull into my drive-through as opposed to the one next door? How am I creating that personalization, brand engagement, loyalty, delight and surprise opportunities? If you're just the IT person like this and you just look at on spreadsheets, hey, this is this cost and this is that cost, you're missing the boat, right? So—

Well, that's it. And I think a great salesperson communicates the possible.

Yes.

Not just how it works and what it does.

You're exactly right. It's funny you say that, Brian, because Comcast Business tagline right now for marketing is called Powering Possibilities. Right. And that really was birthed out of something that myself, Mark Siri, and a gentleman named Michael Plakaitis, we developed a program of ecosystem activation. It's now called EcoConnect. We actually have a formalized name for it. It's a programmatic way so that it would scale beyond, you know, Brian Klinger doing it. I knew the right people. And so now we're programmatically bringing forward our ecosystem to our customers.

Because think about how much time they're gonna give you Just to talk about bandwidth and network capacity.

That's right. That's right.

That's a 5-minute conversation.

Yeah, it's boring.

But when you see the possibility of the entertainment, right, pushing that to the endpoint.

That's right. That's right.

Then you get people's engage the vision.

That's exactly right. Yeah. And then when you tie in the purpose behind, hey, not only can we serve you in your restaurants, but What about the community impact work that your foundation is doing? And we can align our work there. And then you get into artificial intelligence and mobile apps and all the brain trust that we bring and the media entertainment assets, the technology assets that I don't sell, Brian. I don't have a quota for that stuff.

Yeah.

I make no money recommending all these other things. Like there's a company that we have an investment holding in called Let's Chat. It is so cool. I'll send you a link after this on the side. They translate. They have a patent on this language translation technology. So let's say you spoke French and I'm speaking English. We could have a real-time conversation right now and it translates with each other. I hear you in English, you hear me in French, and like back and forth. They do that thing for mobile apps as well, where a Chick-fil-A, let's say, app has pulled up. My device language setting is to Spanish. It automatically pulls up in Spanish. I don't make money on that. I know it's not in my quota. But I know it's part of our family of investment holdings and that we can add value to how they serve their guests to be more inclusive, to have more diversity in their client base. Why would I not do that if it helps them grow? I win on the back end as they add more stores, and that's where my money gets made, is as they grow, I sell my network. Right.

Hey, I really enjoyed this conversation. Where can people go to connect and follow you?

Sure, if they just go onto LinkedIn, look me up, Brian Klinger. I'm out there happy to connect with anybody. It's great.

So there was both a lot of enthusiasm in his voice, in his style, in his approach, and that creativity. And that creativity is really getting outside of the spam and the robocalls And finding a way of connecting with the other person and what they care about. And in the course, we just had an office hours yesterday. And if you're in the course, please listen to it. Because when people make that mind shift, that mindset shift to how the client thinks instead of how I think as a salesperson, the results are just phenomenal. It's 10 to 100x the ability to get into new accounts and start conversations with strangers. And I think a lot of people pick one person within the account. I got to talk to them, the CEO, the CIO, the CISO, whoever it is. And if they can't get that person, then I'm going to move on. No, there's lots of people in the company to talk to. And once you become part of the tribe, It all becomes so much easier. And guess how you don't become part of the tribe? Pitching, talking about you. They don't care. You have to connect with them, talk about what they care about enough to the point where they ask you about you. And that's a skill. It's a talent. It's an ability. It's not a script. There are steps to it and there are instructions, but it's not like what you learn in school. You gotta like learn it, apply it, see how other people do it. And this is why I structured the course the way I did. A lot of people would just put a bunch of recorded instructions and examples and you're on your own. And clearly that doesn't work because people need to talk it through. People need to go on a journey with you. People need to start slow and build up. People need to come into the course and leave and come back and develop this skill. Think about any interpersonal skill that you have, your ability to have a conversation with a loved one. To use questions to get people to focus on what you want them to focus on. These are talents and skills. It's not just knowledge. And I think today everyone's trying to copy the best of the worst. And the best of the worst are these people who happen to work at a big brand company and they're doing well. But is it because of them? Sure, there's some of that. But a B-player could be really good at a great company, and I've seen them throughout my whole career. They would hire managers and reps from the premier companies, and these people were doing fantastic, but then they'd come to a startup and they didn't know what to do because they didn't have leads, they didn't have accounts. They had to go do that themselves, and that's a talent and a skill that They have not developed. And they look around, they go, where's my accounts? Where's my leads? I need orders to take. But there's no orders out there. You have to go create them. And I think if you're listening to a sales podcast, you want that talent. You want that skill. Because here's the secret. That's where the money is. Taking an order.

Eh.

It's not much of a talent. Pretty much anyone could do it, and anyone does do it. So develop this skill of getting into new accounts, because once you're there, then you can close the deal. Then you can have the opportunity to build a career. Anyone can send spam. Honestly, you know, anyone can read a script on a cold call. And I think it needs a little bit more creativity than that because I think they've been done to death. And I had a great one-on-one this week where a CEO, you know, an entrepreneur was talking to me and he goes, you know, Brian, I spent hours working on my value proposition and I don't think anyone cares. And I looked at him, I go, do you really think anyone cares? Have you ever cared about anyone's value proposition? Run around the house going, honey, look at this call to action. Look how much they know me. I gotta take a meeting with these people. Ah, probably not. So why do it? But yet, if somebody showed interest in you, genuine interest, not fake interest to bait and switch you into interest in you, but Genuine, honest, sincere interest in you. It's rare, very rare. And that's why you need to learn how to do it and do it well and do it at scale, because we want to sell a lot. Thanks for listening. Check out the other show, Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers. Uh, have you seen the YouTube channel? Just search Brutal Truth or Brian Burns on YouTube and you'll find it. All the videos are there. A lot of people ask for the older episodes. You can search in there, find them, fast forward to the parts that you like best. And if you enjoy an episode of the podcast, just save it to your phone. Make sure it's there when you need it. iTunes and Libsyn and only allow so many out there. So you want to make sure you have it there to develop yourself. And if you really want to become great at sales, spend a little bit of time, go to b2brevenue.com, check out the courses. There's 2 major ones. Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting is basically— I teach you how to do what you've learned in this interview but at scale, meaning that you could do 20, 30, 40, 50 of these a day without getting tired or bored or rejected. And because it works off the psychology of strangers— how do you become known, liked, and trusted with a stranger? The other major course is Closing the Complex Sale, and this is what nobody else teaches because frankly nobody else really knows it In the depth that I have done it my whole career, being a student of this game. Not saying I'm the best at it, I'm just saying I understand it better. There's a lot of people better at it with charisma or relationships with the client or certain skills, but we all have to develop them. But you have to understand the game you're playing. Too many of us are out on the playing field Like it's recess. It's not recess. Sales has a flow to it, a structure, and if you don't learn that, you're probably playing the wrong game. We'll see you next time. Thanks for listening. Tell a friend about the show.