THE SECRET TO WINNING THE GAME OF SALES IN B2B ENTERPRISE

Today, we're going to be talking about the game of sales. And I use the term game or the metaphor of a game as a way of being able to condense the complexity of the complex B2B sale into something that we can understand. To be able to break it down into areas, to understand Be able to comprehend it. And you're probably thinking, well, I do that already. Well, the company's game plan or model of the game is really designed for order-taking, where you have a discovery call, a presentation, a demo, a proof of concept of some kind, a proposal, negotiate and close. That is not the game. That is what the company wished the game was, what the order process is, because that doesn't work when you're trying to create an order, trying to get into a new account, to compete against a difficult competitor, to beat against no decision. Now, in sales, we tend to make things either overly simplified with the CRM game, the way we view it, or we make it too complex where we involve psychology and human dynamics and social engineering and all this other stuff. And when you make it too complex, people tend to give up or get lost in the weeds. If you make it too simple, we're not seeing what's really going on in the deal. And to become a student of the game, you have to understand the game you're playing, the customer's game and yours. And to win it, you have to become a student of the game. Otherwise, you're reacting to what the client wants or what your competitor is doing. You need to block them out. You need to be prepared. You need to have forethought. to play that game, much like any game. And when I say game, it could be a board game, a sports game, whatever performance-oriented game you've ever played. The reason to do this is to be able to comprehend it, to see it, to pattern match it against previous games that you've played. And once you become better and better at it, you can go deeper and deeper into it. And become that student of the game. And then you start to realize, hey, Brian was right. This is a performance thing. It's not just a knowledge thing. So let's get into it. I'm going to be talking with Dustin. You've heard him. I usually put these episodes out in the middle of the week, but this one really stuck out. And I think it articulates a lot of the things I've been talking about in past interviews. And I just want to go deeper. To kind of share this with you so that you can have a model of this. Because everyone's looking for the secret of sales. The secret of sales is it's totally counterintuitive. And that's why it's so hard to learn. It's hard to learn because it doesn't feel natural. Good selling doesn't feel natural. If we follow our intuition, that feels natural. But not as effective and usually disastrous, meaning that it feels like a deal and then it stalls because you're not seeing the game. You're thinking and processing it. And people get stuck with this being an intelligence thing. It's not. It's not hard to learn what the game is. It's hard to execute and play and win at the game. Because it's totally counterintuitive. And why is something counterintuitive so hard to learn? Because it doesn't feel natural. You go, no, no, I know how to do this better. I do it this way. Because it's organic. It's the wing it. It's going with your intuition. But that is usually disastrous because we fall right into the commodity trap, the sales rep trap, With the we don't need it now trap, the no decision trap. All of those things are the natural thing to happen in a deal. Look at your forecast. Look at the company's forecast. Yeah, the repeat deals and the inbound stuff closes really predictably, but the new stuff, the marginal deals, they always slip.

This is why.

Let's get into this. And if you really want to become good at the game of sales, The talking and the listening part and asking questions is critical, but how do you practice that? Brevity Pitch has solved that. It gives you a live interactive way of doing it 24/7 whenever you feel like doing it and without any supervision or judgment other than the AI's. And that's what's beautiful. Now they can give you a score on pretty much Every response you give and a hint about how it could be a little better. So imagine having a 24/7 sales coach for pennies on the dollar. People always, always are expensive. No, compared to losing deals, it's not expensive at all. And a lot of people push back on the technology or this or that, but you're not doing it today.

Yeah.

You can role-play with a friend. You can talk in the mirror, but it's nothing compared to this. This is like having a 24/7 sales coach whenever you're ready. Check it out at brevitypitch.com. Bring your manager because unless you're willing to pay yourself, let's get the sales process start off right with them. Here we go with the interview. I'll sum it up at the end.

So you're a sports guy. Any analogies to sales for you?

Definitely not, not too big of a sports guy. I love sports. I didn't play professionally or anything, but I, I definitely been following sports and playing sports my whole life and still try to stay active. But I think there definitely is a lot of parallels to sales. I mean, I don't think there's anything else out there where you can kind of publicly Either achieve something or fail and not achieve something, and everyone kind of knows where you stand, whether it be sports or in sales. If you're you're hitting your number, hitting your quota, so there's probably not much else like it when you when you try to compare other professions to sales. But I feel like sports is probably the closest parallel in a lot of ways, and there's a lot of good things from that. But then there's also a lot of pressure. And other things that can kind of drag people down. So I think there's a lot of parallels. And ultimately, I think sales is sort of that pressure cooker environment, which sports tends to be the same. And either it's going to create really positive things like diamonds, or, you know, people can crumble sometimes with all that pressure. So it's interesting conversation for sure.

Yeah, I think I've always tried to come up with a metaphor for what sales is so that you can confine it to something you can understand. Because if you talk to 1,000 people or 100 people, you know, what's your sale like? You get a platitude, or it's all about relationships, it's all about this or that. And it's like, that's kind of true, but it's not inclusive because you could go and be great at relationships and lose a lot of deals. And that's okay, great. They might tell you you lost as opposed to not telling you and ghosting you. I'm not sure that's much better. But, and I, I try and use analogies like a game when I teach the complex sale because too many people just have it like the CRM sales process. Discovery call, present, demo. Propose, negotiate, close. And where does it always die? Yeah, somewhere after propose.

Right.

It's all easy until then. And I think athletes do well in sales because they've been playing games their whole life. They get the metaphor and they understand They have to take feedback. People who haven't ever been in a performance role don't get it because they have the knowledge mindset. I can take the sales test and pass, but there's no passing in sales. You either win or you lose, and the commission on lose is zero. And I think a lot of people forget that. And what I'm seeing today is first start with what are your winnable deals? And this is where the sports metaphor kind of falls down because why would I play a game that I can't win? Good question. Why are you playing a game you can't win? And we're playing what? 10, 20 games concurrently, right? We've got all these deals. They're in all different stages. We are responding. It's like, you know, the guys who play the chess where they have like 10 games going at once, going game to game to game. That's kind of what sales is like, except for it's more complex than chess.

It's true. And I mean, you think about trying to beat those, the best teams in football or whatever sport. I mean, you're not going to beat the Alabamas, the New England Patriots back in the day. I mean, all these elite teams, you're not going to beat them just by doing one simple thing. It's going to take months of game planning. You got to think about what you're doing on offense, what you're doing on defense, special teams. You have to anticipate what that other team is going to do. And then even at halftime or whatever part of the game, you have to change your strategy and pivot because you're, you know, different things happening and you're kind of being proactive versus reactive. So it's, it's really hard to be successful at, at a high level. And it's the same thing with these complex deals. If you're selling something more enterprise, takes months or years to close, like 7 figures plus type opportunities. I mean, it's— there's a lot of strategy behind that. And I think that's where the sports thing and people that come from there, they, they understand that because they're in a season for a full year. They don't get a lot of rewards until later down the road, and they have to practice and prepare and all this different stuff and, and, and be pretty strategic Especially if they played high-level sports. And I think you have to do that too if you're in, in these complex sales environments. So a lot of strategy behind it. I think that's why people tend to be successful too. And then also you mentioned feedback. Most people really struggle taking feedback, but in sports, I mean, you, you play a game and then you have, you watch the tape the next day or the next week and you get beat up in front of everybody about things you did wrong or did right. And you know, that's not very comfortable, but I think they're they're kind of used to taking that feedback. And then if you can have that mentality in sales, constantly trying to improve, self-starter, get better, take feedback from your coaches and mentors that you respect. I mean, that's the only way you're going to keep getting better in sales. But most people kind of run away from the mistakes they made or having to admit that they were wrong or did something not consistent. But If, if you've played sports before, you're kind of used to that. So you, you, you probably embrace it more than, than a normal person. So I, I think strategy and feedback is definitely a huge one that can make you successful for sure.

Yeah, because there's a lot of things about it that are different than sports. With sports, there's a playing field, typically football, baseball, basketball. There's a court and there's rules and there's a, a referee, somebody who's independent between the 2 teams. In sales, we don't have that, which can be both good and bad. If you're creative, you can— okay, why everyone like— you often hear, oh, procurement told me not to talk to anyone. 9 out of 10 reps will obey that. I, I— okay, I don't work for you. I don't care what you tell me to do.

I'm going to do what I want to do to win the deal.

Now, most reps, and I've had managers, they told you not to talk to them. I go, well, they're not a decision maker, right? They told— they were told to kind of protect everybody because not everybody wants to talk to salespeople, or they want to have it be this little Boy Scout approach. And I'll tell you, am I going to win in the Boy Scout approach? Probably not. So why not either walk away Or come up with a strategy to win the game. And if there's no rules, but there's kind of laws, you can't lie, you can't cheat, all of those things. I think everyone accepts that, but they obey the going steady people. You know, champion or coach says, no, just talk to me. The single-threaded problem. And you have people with 30 years' experience obeying that instead of, why are they telling me that? Are they going to get this deal done on their own? Do they have any clue? Or maybe there's something behind that. So there's a lot of things that are analogous to sports, but it's much more of an unstructured game and undocumented. And having dealt with hundreds of companies, nobody understands the game they're playing. They know their product, they know their space, and they know how to service an inbound client and compete. They got that. I get it. Okay, then you ask, how much business is coming inbound? The answer is always not enough. Some variation of not enough. So, okay, we gotta play a different game then, don't we? Because no matter how good you are at that game, you're not gonna win the game. And the game is your income. And we do have a time. Every game has time element to it, right? No, no game— unless baseball. I think baseball can go on forever if they do it right.

I think for sure. I think they cut back some rules to minimize how long the games were, but definitely. Yep.

Yeah. So we have typically a year-long comp plan. We've got a territory. You go to first principles. We have existing accounts, we've got inbound. Okay, we don't control those things, but what we do control is our time, our skills, who we decide to work with. The thing about sales I don't think people understand is we get to pick the games that we play. We're not forced to play a game because a lot of us are working on games that aren't winnable, where they're already wired for somebody. It's a renewal. Someone's trying to get a competitive price. Somebody's trying to get an education. Somebody's looking for a new job and won't tell you. There's all these hidden agendas. And it's up to us to determine how truthful that is, how accurate it is. So it has this layer of complexity that most people ignore because it's work. So that— what do they do? They go to service, reactive. I'll do what they tell me to do. And since they don't know what they're doing either, what's the likelihood of 2 people Who don't know what they're doing accomplishing something?

Not very high. Not very high. Not very high.

And then we wonder why things go to no decision. They're lost. I used to call it, you know, 2 blind people, or I had a headhunter friend who used to call it 2 virgins trying to have sex. They both want to do it. They know it feels good, But no one has any experience and they don't know if they're doing it right.

So that's a great, that's, that's a great analogy. It's, it's so true. It's so true. And you're, you're right. There's a lot of things that aren't as similar with sports because sports tends to be very structured. There's rules, you have a process, you, you kind of know where you need to be most of the time because you have to, have to be there. You have A lot of teamwork and teammate stuff, but most of the time with, with what we're talking about, it's more commission focused. You're out on an island by yourself and you have a lot of time that you have to kind of figure out. And if you don't prioritize the right way, I mean, it's salespeople waste so much time focused on opportunities that are probably never going to close no matter how good you are or whatever you're doing. To your point, there's already hidden agendas and they're going to do that. So you can waste so much time in sales. It's it's mind-boggling, especially if you're more commission-focused. And there's also a lot of pressure too. It's I mean one thing that is similar is there's constant pressure. Some people enjoy that; they they thrive in that. But it can be it can wear you out over the years too. So I mean it's probably I don't know what you think, but sales is kind of tough to be sustainable for decades or a long period of time because you're just constantly you got to start all over again every year. What have you done for me lately? People forget about what you did last year pretty quickly, or last month, and you have to start all over again. And then, and, and then another difference compared to sports is usually if you perform really well, if you're an individual contributor, you're going to keep getting paid more and have more perks and accolades and all this stuff. You get a little bit of that in sales because if you're on commission, you kind of control your own destiny, but it's not— but you're not going to get like a bump in your base and all this different stuff. So. Um, there's a, it's, it's never-ending pressure, which can kind of catch up to you at some point, or maybe you want to get into leadership because you're just tired of, of that grind. But I feel like it's hard to sustain it for a long period of time because of all that pressure. And because you get, you don't get a promotion, you have to just keep doing the commission life, which can be exhausting, I think, for a lot of people.

Right. Because think of any cerebral game. Chess, checkers, card games. Can you play it all day, every day? You know, maybe on vacation you do a half a day in a rainy afternoon and it's fun because it's social.

Mm-hmm.

But we're playing this game every day, all day, and it can affect you if you're not managing your emotions well. So what, what do most people do? They get numb and only turn it on at the end of the quarter when they have to, when the desperation— they buy into the service model, you know, going through the routines, doing their KPIs, because supposedly it comes out the other end as revenue. But then when it doesn't, at the end of the quarter, they have to really sell and do something. But then what does everybody do first 2 weeks of the quarter? Probably the biggest vacation weeks for sales ever. You never see anybody.

Is that telling you that they're managing things well?

Doubtful. Doubtful.

Right. You know, because certainly in the physical sports, there's an offseason, right? You get, you know, everyone goes down to Florida for the winter and practices there. You know, the double sessions don't start for, what, a month before the season starts? You know, they don't sit around and read football books during the offseason, right? No, they're doing whatever they want to do. And in sales, you know, we call it a job, but it's— it really has to be a passion for people to be good at it because anyone can show up and do what they're told. And if you have the do what you're told mentality, it's totally dependent on things you don't control, which is not a good place to be. Hopefully you got into sales because you're money motivated at some level. Otherwise, just go into marketing, go into customer success. Much better lifestyle. One-third the income, but a better lifestyle. The people in sales, you, you're playing, you know, these 10, 20 games concurrently, and are you gonna win? You know, so I'm talking to people, it's like, and it's not a popular topic. It's like, if it's unwinnable, why are you playing? Right? If you're, you know, in the peewee league, you don't go, you know, calling up the Patriots and you say, hey, you wanna have a game? No, you're going to lose. And do you really need to go through the exercise to determine that? Or are you going to play the games that you can win? Because you only get paid if you win. All the athletes get paid if they win or lose. They get a salary, right? You know, they're not going to make as much next year and their market value doesn't go up, but they still get paid. And I think in sales, you really got to be a student of the game, studying the game, because although every deal is slightly different, there are patterns. And if you don't think about these patterns, document these patterns, study these patterns, you're just going to react thinking that this is a little snowflake. It's unique, it's different. And when I hear that, I go, it's not closing.

It is not.

It's not closing because it doesn't look like a closable deal. You know, a closable deal looks like, oh, they appreciate what you do, there's a need, someone cares about it, the executives are aware of it, they want to take action. You know, a deal that doesn't close, oh, you got one person who loves it, Who's telling you not to talk to anyone else? Okay, is that gonna close? Well, what do people do? I hope it does. It should. He says it will, and it stays on the forecast, and then you put birthday candles on it every year. And I remember sitting through QBRs, and I was like, you know, just for sheer entertainment value. Right? Because I could tell what was bullshit and what was not. And you could just see the people trying to cover their butt to keep one more quarter without getting canned or putting on a plan, or just naive. You know, they've got a friend of a friend at a company that's willing to meet with us and they put it up for $1 million. I go, okay, that's a deal in your world. You know, I remember I was on the board of this service company and one of the salespeople put up this half a million dollar deal for the next quarter and they hadn't met with anyone yet. I go, why don't you make it $100 million? It's just, I'm like, that person has no clue what they're doing. So you gotta understand the game you're playing, the players on the other side. the game board and how it works. And when things go outside that typical pattern, you gotta ask yourself, is that a good sign or a bad sign? It's usually a bad sign.

It's so true. And I was just trying to think of ways of why this happens. I think first off, people just want to feel busy. So whether they do it intentionally or not, when they feel busy, they feel like they're Moving in the right direction. But just because some of the stuff you mentioned, it, it could be bad signs, but then they keep— are busy, they're doing meetings, whatever it may be. They feel like they're progressing and maybe they're just naive to that and they don't really understand, or they just feel like they have to be busy. And when they're in meetings, it feels like they're productive. So there, there's some, some things there for sure. And then I think there's also pressure once they put it in the pipeline, whether they did it intentionally or not, their managers see that and then they start following up. So then even though they know they maybe can't win it, they have pressure to kind of keep pursuing it and then they do stuff that they wouldn't normally do and that creates a whole thing as well. And then sometimes they just could be really, I guess we all kind of have that go-getter mentality. So even though, you know, probably inside that you can't win that deal, you still think like, well, I still got to give it a go because I'm in sales and I'm competitive. And I have to try to see this through, but it's just gonna be painful. So maybe every once in a while there could be lessons to that. Like if you're early on in a startup that doesn't have a lot of existing customers and you wanna kind of see how the process goes, but no one's actually thinking like that. They're just going through it blindly trying to figure that out. So there's, there's a lot of different angles of why that happens, but it's pretty, pretty interesting. And I mean, the other thing that comes up is when you're in sales, you're always in the spotlight too. So it's, it's like people can see when things are going well and when things are going bad. And you can have that kind of fake pipeline to cover you up for a little bit. But eventually, I mean, even if you're not accountable to yourself in sales, you're going to have to be accountable at some point because if you don't hit the number, you don't close the deal, nothing really matters and you don't really have other people to blame. Your manager's not going to They're only going to cover for you for so, so long depending on the situation. So you really kind of do have that ultimate accountability. If you don't perform, like, you're not going to get paid, and then you're probably going to lose your job at some point, which is the harsh truth. And you have to kind of know what you're getting into. And, and that's why this stuff you're talking about is you, you want to be accountable with yourself and not lie to yourself so you're not doing all this stuff. But people, it's uncomfortable. It's against kind of how Our brains are wired. So it's just such an interesting dynamic. There's a lot of regularity you have to do, but people don't think about it that way. They're just reacting to your point.

Yeah. If you looked at anyone's pipeline, it's probably full of people that are willing to talk with them. Not that they want to talk with them or they have to— willing. Maybe it's because of their delightful personality. Or the rep's a delightful personality, but that's only an ingredient of a sale. And no one likes to lose, but there's billions of deals out there that you're losing and you don't even know it. How could that be? The world revolves around me, doesn't it? Look at all your competitors. You can pretty much tell how much revenue they have by the number of employees they have. You can reverse engineer. You lost all those deals, or your company did. Maybe you didn't even hear about them. Maybe they were wired for them. But if we happen to talk with someone once and they don't buy from us, we think we lost the deal. Well, was it really a deal? Were you really even considered? You know, Apple loses more deals than it wins. Android's, I think, still the biggest— the biggest smartphone, right?

Mm-hmm.

Okay, well, how much is Android worth? What is Android? I don't— who owns it? Oh, it's Google. Yeah, but it's free and Samsung makes it. And it's like, Apple's okay. They're okay losing half the business.

Yeah, I think their market cap's still doing pretty good.

Yeah, $3 trillion. I'll, I'll, I'll settle for it. So I think there's the ego part of it. There's the emotional, there's a cognitive bias. Once you start investing your time in something, you're less and less likely to recognize it as a dumb decision.

So true. You don't want to let go and you're already like, well, I already put the time in, so I can't give up now.

Yeah. And then there's happy years where you're like, you see only what you want to see and you don't see what you don't want to see. You're not asking yourself the hard questions. And then, then you have to ask this question: whose game am I playing? Am I playing my game or am I playing the prospect's game? And why aren't they cooperating the way that the deals that close look like? Why is this person saying nice things about me but not helping me? Maybe they want to get rid of me. And most people don't even recognize this after the end of the quarter comes and the deal is nowhere. Some managers don't even believe it. They don't want to give it up either because then it's a big hole in their pipeline. But time is a zero-sum game.

You can't get another minute.

So your energy goes away. And what we're doing a lot of times is just playing someone else's game instead of ours. And I think reps need to take ownership, take and play the games that you feel you can win, not the ones just that come to you. Because how many times do you hear about the request for information? Oh, it's, it's a perfect match for us, but they won't let us talk to the people behind it. We have to deal with procurement. And it's like, do you really think you're going to win that?

Well, it's so big.

I can't say no to it. Okay. So we got to go through 6 months of this. And then when are you going to accept that it's not really made for you? And everyone's like, wow, everyone has that positive mindset. You could be positive, but be positive about how do I utilize my time and my energy to maximize my income? The first is focus on the winnable. You don't have to walk away from the unwinnable. But you don't have to invest your time and your energy into it either. You know, every time I had a, a great rep, he used to just— he wouldn't even respond to these RFIs. He'd go, you want it? And then all of a sudden nobody wanted it, right? Everybody thought, oh, why? They're blaming him though. Well, it's a ton of work and the likelihood of winning is sub-1%. As opposed to spending your day finding deals that you can start where your win rate is 60%, 70%, 80%. True.

But you have to think about this stuff and actually plan, plan ahead and prioritize, which is not an easy thing for salespeople to do because they just want to be busy. But I remember one year when I was doing medical device, I'd worked on, I think, roughly about 30 deals. Closed about half of them, which wasn't terrible, but I was like, man, how much time was I spending on those other deals? Just running around doing prep, driving to these hospitals, whatever it may be. It's a lot of time and effort after that. And then the following year, I pretty much cut that in half and was working on half the amount of deals, and I closed closer to 80%. But it felt uncomfortable because I didn't have as many things in the pipeline, but they were more strategic. And I kind of knew going deeper with less was gonna be more effective. But it's, it's hard to wrap your head around that because it feels like there's less opportunities.

It is.

It is, but it actually paid off. But it, I don't think most people are, are thinking like that, but it's always the top reps you see anywhere I've been. They go really deep, they find those strategic opportunities, and then it's like this snowball effect and You know, over the years it just keeps building and building and they keep being successful, but they never have a million deals going on. It's usually like several very strategic big ones and then, and then boom, they make it happen. And people are always wondering how they do it, but it's usually because they're kind of being effective and efficient with their time.

Yeah, it's about focus and you should look around your company. Are the top reps the grinders where they're focusing on touching as many things as possible? Or are they focus-oriented and ignore or deprioritize the less likely ones to win? Because it does feel good to have a big pipeline. And when you hear a rep talk about their pipeline, who cares? Right? It's like, do you get paid on it? No. It costs you money because now you have to report on it. You have to update everybody. And let me tell you one law of sales: anything goes wrong, it's the rep's fault. That's how management looks at it. It's not the product, it's not the prospect, it's not the forecasting methodology, it's the rep's fault. They dropped the ball somehow. So every deal you put into the pipeline, you got to ask yourself, what pressure am I going to take for this? And being able to manage internally, because that is a big use of time too. And when it starts to slip and shrink, it's your fault. I've never found a company where they understood that or cared, because who's the easiest person to blame?

Sales rep.

Yeah. Yep.

Yeah, there's nowhere to hide. I mean, that's sort of going back to the beginning. There's, there's nowhere to hide. So you have to really pick and choose your battles of what you put in the pipeline so that you're not wasting that internal energy as well and having to do that. I've definitely made that mistake many times and it's not fun because then you have this big 7-figure deal in there. Everyone sounds great and then you don't close it and then you're not the hero anymore. And then you have to explain all this stuff. So it's a nightmare, but it's definitely a performance, but you got to manage your pipeline the right way too.

See, this is why reading sales books may be helpful, but it's not enough. Because no matter what we do, we kind of hear what we want to hear, that confirmation bias, and we disregard the rest or rationalize the rest. And that, that rationalization, that explanation that we give ourselves to make ourselves feel better, That's the opposite of learning because now you believe something that's false as true. It's denial, and it feels good, but it doesn't move you forward. In yesterday's office hours, I was talking about this with the Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting group, and I was trying to explain Because learning the course is not hard. The hard part is that it's all counterintuitive. All good selling is counterintuitive. Listening's counterintuitive. Not pouncing, not responding, not pointing out some feature in your product. All of these things are counterintuitive. Our instincts, our gut is telling us To do it.

Why?

Because we want something. We want that outcome. Of course we do. But the more you want that outcome and you express it, the more the customer pushes away. Everyone says, oh, time kills all deals. Yeah, by rushing it.

Yeah, you can—

procrastinating it ruins it too. But if you rush it, you ruin it. Always be closing. Well, yeah, you know, always get a next step. Yeah, but see, all of the— or a lot of the sales literature out there, first of all, wasn't written by anyone who's ever sold, including the people who call themselves the king of sales. Do the background check on these people. They've never sold. You know, it's hard to admit it or hard to really accept it, but this is the world we live in. And when you look at business-to-business literature and expertise, are they working for a big brand? Because anyone can take an order. That is not hard. There's a little bit of skill to it. Yeah, because things can go wrong. And there's better ways of doing it, but it's not that hard. Going out and building a deal, or taking a tiny deal and turning it into a big deal, or taking a deal that should or would take 6, 9 months and condensing it to 3 months— that's a skill. It's a different game. It's something that is valuable because we get paid more and sooner. And that's why we're in sales. We're not in sales to help people. If you want to help people, join the Peace Corps. Why don't people join the Peace Corps? Because it doesn't pay well. So really decide what you're doing here and quit lying to yourself, because that is the opposite of learning. We all live in what we perceive the world to be. And how accurate we perceive the world, the more effective we're going to be. To do that, we have to be open-minded and have some level of confidence to do it. And how do you learn something counterintuitive? Unless you have a coach, somebody who can show you what works, what doesn't, and why— because the why is critical. to really accepting it. And this was an epiphany for me when I became a manager for the first time. Because I'd see other reps, but I really didn't engage or involve myself because I was busy with my own territory, my own deals. When you manage, all of a sudden you start to see how other salespeople think. And they're all Following their gut, their instincts. They wing it. But your instincts are completely wrong about sales because it's counterintuitive. If it was intuitive, we'd all be good at sales. But since it's counterintuitive, it takes somebody to first realize there's a better way or effective way of doing it and then try it And it's not going to feel natural. It's not. I'll tell you right now, it's not going to feel natural. So you got to push through that. I use the parallel parking analogy a lot because everyone has struggled with parallel parking at one time in their life. The intuitive way is pull straight in and back up. Why wouldn't that work? It looks and feels Organic and natural. Try it. Or you probably have tried it because you pull in and you back up and you're 3 feet from the curb with your car hanging out in the, in the lane and it's going to get hit. So you go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, and you're still not near the curb. But then when somebody shows you, you got to pull up parallel to the car in front of you and then back in and pull forward. Why is that counterintuitive? Because Well, it just doesn't seem logical. But when you learn how to do it, it takes about 5 or 10 times, but then it feels natural. Hopefully, if you're good with mirrors and spatial distance, which not everybody is. But it doesn't— you can stick with the old way, but it doesn't really affect— or just skip it. And that's what a lot of people do in sales.

They skip it.

They'll look for a parking space where they can just pull straight in. My point here is, if you want to become great at sales, you got to break through that counterintuitive wall to get to the other side. Because I bet a lot of you listen to the podcast and are saying, I know that, I'm doing that. And that's what probably 90% of you are thinking. Okay, but you're not getting the result. Now that's kind of denial and confirmation bias and a little bit of ego. Okay, that's all right. Or they think, I gotta read a book. Number one question I get on LinkedIn, what book would you recommend? And it's like, yeah, it's, it's not in a book. And you don't learn how to golf in a book or swim by reading a book or riding a bike by Reading a book.

Why?

Because it's not that much knowledge. It's a lot of counterintuitive stuff and a little bit of practice and a little bit of risk and pushing through that fear and discomfort to get there. And you have to believe that that is true, even though it doesn't feel Like it's true.

That's hard.

And you think it's hard to learn? Try teaching it. Because when you teach it, people smile and nod and they say they're doing it. That's why I always ask, please give me an example so we're talking about the same thing. And when I see the example, I go, well, is this what I described? Yeah, yeah, it's exactly what you described. And if I got this, I would love it. You're a salesperson. You're not the recipient. You're thinking like a salesperson. You're not thinking like a client. Thinking like a client is counterintuitive. How do I think like someone else? It's empathy and compassion. But to have empathy and compassion, you have to have some level of confidence. And too many salespeople have too much confidence to protect themselves. I get it. It's hard, but it's worth it. It's worth digging in. It's worth being a little bit vulnerable, saying, you know, I'm going to feel uncomfortable for a while, and I, I gotta trust. And that's really— as a sales coach, I got to build that trust with you. And I think I, I'm trying to do that by demonstrating it through Interviews, stories, examples, little videos.

But, you know, most—

99% of the comments are people explaining why they already do this. And I'm like— and then I look at the company they work at. If you're already doing it, you wouldn't be at that company. You'd be at a better company. You'd be making a lot more money. So telling yourself that story, if you're not making the money you want, Or having the success you want, you're your own worst enemy. Sorry, I had to say it. Because you're holding yourself back, you're feeling good in the moment, sacrificing how you want to feel in the future. I think you probably, anytime you've tried to teach somebody something you know, let's say you're a musician and you play the guitar. Or the piano. Doesn't every person who looks at a piano or guitar think that they can pick it up and boom, they're, they're a musician, right? And then they try it and they're like, oh, this isn't natural. It's not intuitive. Oh, I got to do this with my hands and my other hand and my foot. This feels awkward. What do they do? They give up.

Why?

It doesn't feel organic. It doesn't feel intuitive. Sorry, but if you really want to learn how to play that instrument, you'll suffer through that awkward feeling. You'll take the time to build the reps. You'll keep in mind what the outcome that you want. And you'll stick with it. Very few people do that. That's why when you hear people always talking about will, it's the will to push through that discomfort feeling. It's not intelligence. Everyone thinks it's intelligence, knowledge.

It's not.

It's pushing through that discomfort because it doesn't take a high IQ to get through this. It takes high openness, high emotional intelligence, but that's kind of a platitude. It really just— when you see that person, I'm sure you've seen that person that is willing to take it. Now, I'll give you another example. I was a pitcher in Little League, and My coach was saying, well, the way you're throwing, you're going to burn your arm out in the first inning. And he showed me a different way of throwing. And I was a fastball pitcher. So, fastball pitchers— and he was right. He goes, you're not using your body the right way. You're using your arm to do 98% of the work. You've got to use your body to use 80% of the work. And he showed me how to do it. Didn't feel natural. It didn't work for a long time, but by the end of the season, I threw a no-hitter, and it was probably the pinnacle of my childhood. My point was, it was totally counterintuitive. I never would have picked it up on my own unless that coach stuck with me, pushed me through it. Because he always asked me this question, you want to win or you want to be right? I go, I want to win. Because back then, probably not acceptable today, when you're a pitcher, you're the center of the attention during the game. And people were not polite. They're name-calling. They're yelling. They're trying to get me my focus. Uh, off of the pitch. And all I did was I saw that catcher's mitt and I saw the center of it, and I go, I'm going to make that guy's hand hurt. I'm going to make him throw his glove off.

I'm throwing so fast.

And if I tried to do it my way, I'd make it 2 or 3 innings and then my shoulder would hurt and they'd have to pull me out. I wanted to go all 9 innings. I had to use my legs and my whole body to get that type of momentum. Do you want to win or do you want to feel comfortable?

It's up to you.

It's your body. It's your income. If you really want to become great at it, you got to understand what works, what the game looks like. And that's what Start the Conversation, Get the Meetings About, That's what Closing the Complex Sale's about. You're probably not going to learn this at your company. It's in no book. And you have to do it. You have to break through that counterintuitive part. It takes a little time. And it's a little hard because you're on your own. You really need somebody— Your manager should be doing it, but they don't know. Because they're still looking at their dashboard. They still think it's at some stage in the CRM. That has nothing to do with anything. You can type in anything you want into the CRM. What matters is where it is with the customer. And prevention— prevention is counterintuitive. Reaction is intuitive. Prevention Requires forethought and planning. Reaction, it's too late. Go to b2brevenue.com, check it out, and ask yourself this question: Do you want to be comfortable or do you want to be rich?

I'd rather be rich.

Money makes you very comfortable. We'll see you next time. Check out Sales Questions, Brutally Honest Answers. Check out brevitypitch.com. I also have a show for sales leaders. The Sales Leadership Show. Check it out. We'll see you next time.