THE SURPRISING WAY THIS REP HAS WON HUGE DEALS IN B2B SALES

Well, psychology seems to be the most common degree that salespeople get. The least common, I think, is physics. And we've got somebody who studied physics today. And we're going to talk about how that played into his sales approach. Now, you would think it's a mismatch, but you can apply it because sales, You need those 2 things that drive that will. But you need this kind of other motive, the desire to solve the puzzle, to solve a problem, to figure out a mystery, to solve the sale. And we think of it as just closing the sale, but we really have to Understand how can it get done. And too often, reps exclusively ask and hope the client knows. And this is a rookie mistake. And it's a mistake that perpetuates because our managers tell us to do it. Just ask them how their purchasing process works. And the person's never worked with their purchasing process. It's our job to lead, to guide. To kind of hold their hand through the deal-making process. So we have to know that. We have to already understand how companies buy administratively, politically, economically. And let's get into it. I think you're really going to enjoy this interview. Make sure you're checking out our friends over at Covideo. Video email is crushing it. If you want to find a fast, fun, easy way to stay engaged with your clients through that decision-making process and guide it and lead it and show them how to get it done, you can use visuals. Video is— it's now. It's the time. You read text emails all day. It really doesn't engage you. But you get a video, yeah, well, what's he up to? What's Brian got to say now? You can express so much more than just the text words. It can be your facial expression. It can be images. It can be their website, your website, their LinkedIn profile, your LinkedIn profile, something that you want to show to talk with them about. Check it out. Also, if you're in the courses, make sure you're staying up with the office hours. They're all gold. They're all evergreen, meaning that they're not time dependent. So the one that I did yesterday will still hopefully add tremendous value 5, 10 years from now because it's all about starting conversations and getting meetings and winning the complex sale. Check out the video in the show notes.

Here we go. Hey, Chris, thanks for joining us today. As a way of getting started, give us a little background on yourself.

Well, I taught elite close-quarters combat for 25 years. And when I got to be too old to do that, which was in my mid to late 40s, I had to retool myself. And from that point forward, I decided to get into sales and I did that for about 6 years and did very well utilizing a lot of the same mindset tactics that I taught with close quarters combat and I achieved a very high level of success in a very short amount of time and now I teach sales as part of one of my services through the mindset training that I do as a motivational speaker.

Yeah.

And why sales after close combat? Why didn't— was it one of the only options, or was it something you always thought you would be good at?

Or—

A great question. Uh, there's 3 reasons I chose sales. Um, one, I knew that if I became very good at it, um, I would always have job security. I, I believe that if you're good at selling, uh, you're always gonna— you're never gonna have a hard time finding a job.

Yep.

And the second reason was autonomy. I had always heard that if you were really good and hit your numbers, that you could earn the right to have some independence. And I was used to 25 years of having a lot of independence, traveling the world and teaching combatives, and I wanted that autonomy back. And then third, I was used to making good money, and I didn't want any ceilings put on me. I wanted to be able to give myself a raise Just by performing better.

And what did you learn as far as what makes a great salesperson? Because it sounds a little different than combat in some ways.

Well, mindset! You know, when I taught close quarters combat, I taught law enforcement, military, special forces, and federal agencies, and about 30% of what I taught was mindset, 70% being the physical aspect. And I took those same mindsets and I've carried them over to sales. And I mean, look, sales is the ability to influence the decisions, the actions of other people toward whatever is best, most beneficial for them, right? The mindsets that we have to use and leverage consistently throughout a sales cycle are very similar to that in combatives. I mean, for example, you got to know you've won before you've stepped into the room.

And how do you know that in sales though?

Well, confidence that comes through being very good at what you do. Yeah, it's, it's an earned confidence.

And you feel that's effective?

Or—

I love the mindset thing, but can you give us some more examples maybe to help us?

Well, customers, especially with what I sold, um, what I sold was additive manufacturing technology that you You know, was a very— it could go anywhere from $50,000 for a system up to $4 million for a system. A very long buy cycle.

Yep.

And a very competitive landscape. And I can tell you that, you know, the majority of people that are out there doing it, I mean, they have to have a lot of opportunities to close one deal. And that one deal that they do close can take, you know, up to 18 months. And by changing my mindset, like for example, as soon as you get into this industry, everyone says, hey, just so you know, these big deals, they take about a year and a half. Okay, they tell you that. So don't go chasing the big deals. Those are— that's whale hunting. You got to stay over here with some of the smaller stuff. That's the bread and butter. Well, that's a mindset. If I adopt that, I have the mindset now that it's going to take me a year and a half to close these big deals. Well, I refused to adopt that mindset. I said, no, the amount of time it's going to take has to do with me and the job that I do in influencing and moving these timelines, moving these budgetary restraints by adding more value to whatever the value was determined that created those timelines and budgets. Those can be moved as well. And so I got to where I was closing these big deals in 30 to 90 days, not a year and a half, but because I chose my own mindset.

Right. But the comp— your customer didn't. And, you know, some of those things take time. They're there for a reason. And it's not just because there isn't more value. I mean, There's always emergencies and priorities, but there's also— there's skills. Just because you believe that it should only take 90 days, that's you, but you're not buying.

Well, yeah, but when, when I say that as a sales professional, my job is to influence others, doesn't that include influencing your mindset toward this purchase?

I get that part.

But what did the—

how did you get the customer to move? Because we're usually dealing with the person who needs us, but they have no money, very little political power, and almost zero understanding of the administrative process.

Yeah, I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't talk to someone about a, you know, a million-dollar deal if I hadn't already determined that they have the money. If they don't have the money, you know, that's not a qualified sales opportunity.

The company has the money, the person doesn't, right?

Right. Yeah. So, you know, so when you're talking to someone and they tell you, you say, what is your timeline, budget, and need? And they say, well, the timeline is, you know, by March of next year, the budget is $1 million. And the need is we're going to 3D print these fuel nozzles for rocket engines. Okay. Well, is that person giving you those parameters because they set those parameters, or are they just repeating parameters that someone else has told them? And if in most cases someone has already told the person you're talking to, we'll buy Q1 of next year, this is how much money we will spend, and this is what we're going to use it on. Well, those values have been set by someone other— in a lot of instances, someone other than who you're talking to. So, and, and what created those values? Well, what created those values is the person has a predetermined idea of what value that solution is going to bring to our business unit. So by getting access to that person who created the values, not the person who has the ability to stay within those values and issue a purchase order, but actually talking one level or 2 levels deeper to the person that set those values. Well, if I can increase the value that you had set on this solution, then we can move the timeline up and we can make the budget bigger.

Okay, and so your approach was more to work on the bigger deals, or Did you work exclusively on the bigger deals?

Well, my approach was that every deal had the potential to be a big deal. And so, I had a nice steady diet of small, medium, and large. But believe me, if I'm talking to you and your budget's $50,000, I'm not convinced it's $50,000 yet. I want to make sure that that $50,000 is accurate based on the problems that we're going to solve. And so I'm always just making sure that, that you and your team is in alignment with what the value-add of these solutions really are going to bring to the table. Because if you, if you think this is the value and I don't challenge that thinking or that mindset, well, then $50,000 is what it is. So I'm always challenging mindset.

And in what other areas other than what the rep believes, or when you teach reps, what do you see them not doing right most often?

Well, I think what I see a lot of is that we, as sales professionals, we adopt mindsets that are industry standards. And as a result, in a lot of cases, we're slowing down the sales opportunity. We're the one creating the bottlenecks. And I'll give you an example. Um, one of the things that you hear a lot in this industry is people buy from who they trust. Well, it is true that people buy from who they trust, but people don't only buy from who they trust. Building trust takes a long time. And if I believe that in order to get you to do business with me on, let's just say, a million-dollar deal, that I have to first earn your trust Well, I'm going— I'm now going to create a bottleneck. Um, it may be subconsciously, but I am creating that bottleneck. And because the truth is, people buy from people they don't trust. Well, I shouldn't say they don't trust, but it's very important that you don't lose trust. Okay, that's very important.

Yeah.

But, but we don't have to earn trust. Uh, what we have to earn is confidence, and that's completely different. And if I can prove to you that I am competent, that I'm competent in doing my job and delivering you the best solution, that I can do very quickly. But if I think that I have to earn your trust, that's going to take a long time, and I could be slowing down my own deals. And just as an example, um, you know, how many people have, you know, purchased a house, which is probably for most people the most expensive investment they're going to make in their lifetime? How many times do we buy a house based on the recommendation of a realtor who we never knew before buying that home. And it was a referral that someone just gave us. Here, here, I know a realtor, call this person. And the next thing you know, you know, they're sitting in the closing with us on the biggest purchase of our life. We buy from people, we buy new cars, we walk into a dealership, whoever's next in queue to take the next customer, we end up buying a car within a few hours. We make large purchasing decisions all the time without the element of trust being present. So trust is not a requirement. And if we believe it is, we will slow down our own sales cycles. That's a mindset.

Well, I don't think many reps go through— have a trust-building stage. And a lot of times when we're selling something that's more conceptual, a house, we don't—

we have to use a realtor.

We don't want to use a realtor, right? We can go To the open house, see it on our own purpose. And the same thing with a car. The salesperson's in the way, not helping.

Right.

And we go lowest price, not best service. But in a lot of enterprise stuff, when your whatever looks a lot like my whatever, and you're saying the same thing as me, Aren't they going to believe? I mean, belief is based off of trust. With no trust, whatever you say is noise. It's not words. It's not meaning.

Yeah. So, so if I were to tell you my differentiators on my solution without knowing a lot about your buying motives, my differentiators are going to sound a lot like my competitors.

Identical.

Yeah, you know, yeah, faster speeds, you know, lower cost, better throughput, all of this stuff. And so this is why it's very important that we never state our differentiators regardless of what we're selling until we first fully understand the customer's buying motives. What problems are they trying to solve? What are their desired outcomes? And then when we know that, we repeat those needs, those motives back to the customer shrouded in our differentiators. So we may be saying the same thing, but we're saying it now sandwiched around all of the things that matter most to them, and that's a completely different message. So it's not what we're saying, it's, it's how we're saying it.

Yeah.

And what process do you see reps going through as far as like real epiphanies? Is it all mindset in your mind, or is it Some skill set or ability to understand the problems?

Well, then according to the Harvard School of Business, they, they state that the number one predictor for a sales professional's success over the life of their career is emotional intelligence. And there's a lot of studies out there about this. And I mean, they put it higher than work ethic. And emotional intelligence is broken into the 5 key pillars. That's self-awareness, Self-regulation, self-motivation, social skills, and the 5th being the most important to us themselves, which is empathy.

Right.

So you have to have, you have to have a well-developed emotional intelligence or emotional quotient. You have to. But the good news, unlike emotional intelligence, um, uh, I mean, uh, unlike IQ, which pretty much stabilizes in your early adult years. There's not a lot you can do to increase your IQ. But with emotional intelligence, there are a lot of things you can do. If you're, if you're weak in one of those or 2 of those 5 pillars, there's a lot of self-development things you can do to improve upon it, therefore improving your sales success.

Do you have an example, like with empathy, which I 100% agree with?

Yeah, so, so empathy, um, you, you may say, you may, you may think, man, I really understand, I really understand where that customer's coming from, I'm like walking a mile in their shoes right now. But if you don't communicate that empathy back to the customer in a way that they know you understand, do you really have empathy?

No.

No, you don't. I mean, it's, it's like the father who loved their child, you know, for their whole entire life, you know, they love their child But they never told their child, I love you. You know, that's kind of empathy that's not communicated effectively. It doesn't exist.

Because, yeah, understanding is the other half of communication.

That's right.

So not only that you do understand, that you make the other person feel that you understand.

Yeah, I'm going to summarize back to you. I'm going to say, you know what, thank you for sharing that with me. Thank you for your transparency. I definitely understand where you're coming from. I've heard this many times before, and I can assure you this is something that's going to be addressed in this discovery phase. That's empathy. People want to buy from people who understand their buying motives.

Any others that—

I mean, do you take people through kind of an EQ skill set development? Because I think it is important. I think too many people read the book and check the box.

I've got EQ.

Yeah, yeah. So, so what I do as far as, um, emotional quotient or emotional intelligence is I give examples of what each one would look like in a sales environment. And then I say, look, here's what I want you to do. I want you to score yourself on a 1 to 10 on each of these 5 pillars, 10 being I think I'm perfect at it and 1 being I really need some help here. And just be honest with yourself. And then we— so we kind of go through that. It takes about 10 or 15 minutes of showing broad examples of each of those pillars. And then I say, all right, now we're only going to focus on the one you gave the lowest score to because that's your blind spot. That's the one that's probably costing you the majority of your deals, kind of the Pareto's rule of 80/20, right? Probably 80% of your deals are being lost from 20% of your, your EI or EQ, you know, being off. And so which one is your lowest? And, you know, self-regulation, Well, what do you mean by that? Well, I mean, I'm in a board meeting and I'm, you know, and I know I shouldn't say this, but I'm going to say it anyway. And I know I shouldn't. And the words are falling out of my mouth and now I just blew the deal. All right. So that's self-regulation or self-awareness. I'm in a meeting doing a presentation and I'm rambling and everyone is just on their phone. No one's paying attention to me, but I don't notice that because of low self-awareness. So, and I keep going and I lose the room. So the point is, don't, don't think you need to work on all 5. Just find the one that's killing the majority of your deals and work on that one.

And are they good at recognizing that? Or I got to believe with the law enforcement background, because I've interviewed a lot of police officers who've become salespeople, because they're trained to read the person from a traffic stop to, you know, a break-in or whatever. It's like, what is the assessment here? Where's my risk? And, and trying to stay cool.

Yeah, so I'll tell you, so like with— now this is just a broad generality that I'm going to throw out there, but so law enforcement officers and former military, okay, typically would be very high, would score very high in self-awareness and self-regulation, but they would typically score very low in empathy and And social skills. You know, I said, get in the car! You know, hey, thank you, officer! This person was— stand aside! You know, so we're— so there's going to be some strengths but there's going to be some trade-offs.

Yeah!

Because they're not trained to be highly empathetic, you know, and they're not trained to have a high level of social skill, a lot of dialogue. They're trained to get in there binary, zeros and ones. But they're going to be very high in self-awareness and self-regulation. But what we need is we need to take our weakest pillar and build on that. And when that gets up, I mean, that's the one that's sabotaging our deals.

And do you have exercises for that, like for self-regulation? Like salespeople, you know, they, they can't listen, they talk too fast, they talk about themselves.

Yeah, and that's going to be self-awareness too. So self-regulation and self-awareness go hand in hand there. And yes, I do have drills for that. So if it's a, you know, self-regulation issue to where you're basically doing and saying things that you shouldn't be, then, you know, I would recommend that you kind of put yourself in timeout. You know, like if there's something you're about to say, wait 60 seconds. And at the end of 60 seconds, does this still need to be said? And just that one thing, it's amazing, you know, how much that'll stop.

I know some reps who manually use the mute button as their self-regulation switch.

Yeah, that's great. I love that.

Because it requires you to, you know, engage your physical body to talk instead of just your mind and your mouth.

If I had to kind of pinpoint what I thought the most crucial elements to a successful sales career would be, obviously EI would be at the top, just, just because of all the research that supports that. Work ethic would be at the top. And then I think another one that would be very high, extremely high, is passion. Passion is not like charisma or energy or enthusiasm. Those things can be faked. Your passion, I mean, that comes from the soul. You can't fake that. When someone is truly passionate about what they're selling, they're going to be successful. I literally, uh, was trying to close a very large deal, and, uh, and, and while I was talking about why they needed to go with me, I remember the buyer looking at me kind of laughing and While I was talking, and he waited for me to finish, and he said, he said, I'm gonna buy from you and I'm gonna tell you why. He said, I don't know if everything you just told me is true. I don't know. He goes, but I know you believe it's true, and that's enough. If you don't have passion, get it. And if you can't get it, go sell something else.

Now, well, let's dig into that because passion's a very, I think, overused word. What I heard from you was passionate about what you're selling.

It's not what you're selling that produces passion, it's why you're selling it.

Okay. And why were you selling that product?

Well, I mean, it solves impossible problems. There's problems that traditional manufacturing cannot solve and it will never be able to solve. And I mean, there's a lot of limitations. Most of the things that we see around us that have been manufactured A lot of them were manufactured that way because of design limitations. But what happens if there are no design limitations? Like, there is no such thing as a complex geometry. If you can draw it in 3D CAD, you can 3D print it. Well, well, then I would have designed it much differently. And so we're making things lighter and smaller and more aerodynamic and more fuel efficient because we have removed the constraints of, yeah, I can injection mold it, but how do I get it out of the mold? Right? Or I can put it on a CNC, or I can put it on a mill, but I can only do 70% of it, and then I have to do something else for the other part.

I get the passion now.

Yeah, I mean, there's nothing— there's— if you can think of it, and if you can draw it in CAD, or have someone draw it in CAD, it can be 3D printed. That solves a lot of problems.

And—

but a lot of us, a lot of people sell things that they're not passionate about. How do you develop that?

Well, you have the power to do 2 things. All right, anyone who has cognitive reasoning, they have this superpower to do 2 things. One is we can choose our perspective regardless of circumstances. All right, and that's the blink of an eye is how fast you can change your perspective. And the second one is we can let things go in the blink of an eye. So if someone has lost their passion or never had their passion, Um, that's— that you can change your perspective. You can decide to love what you do and why you do it.

You can.

Um, but what we have oftentimes in sales is, in a sales career, especially when it's strategic selling, not transactional selling as much, there's a lot of ways we can get offended. All right, we can have a key account taken from us and now it's a house account. We can have our territory divided up into half and the other half given to a new employee. We can, you know, think we're going to earn, you know, X amount of dollars on a commission, and we get our commission check and it's half of what we thought was promised to us. There's always going to be lots of opportunities to get hurt. Okay. And this is the number one reason salespeople lose their passion. There's just something there in the background between them The ground worker. A manager. And what happens is that steals our passion. And so if it's something that's happened to you, let it go. Make the decision and let it go. Not for their benefit, for your own benefit. And you can get your passion back very quickly and you can move on down the road. Uh, perspective, man, how fast is that? I mean, so our dishwasher was broke, uh, that we were waiting on a part. But bottom line is it would wash the dishes but it wouldn't drain the water. So here's my wife a few days ago on her, you know, hands and knees ladling water, dirty dishwashing water. One way to do it. Yeah, into a bowl, you know, so she could run the next cycle. And her attitude immediately said, man, how long before that part gets here? You know, it was on backorder. It had been several weeks. She was, how long before that part gets here? This— I hate doing this. And then she stopped herself. She recognized the attitude. She stopped herself. She said, but you know what? This is a whole lot easier than washing these dishes by hand. That's a perspective change. And so if you, if you've never had passion for what you're selling, you can choose to be passionate about it. I mean, here's the thing about perspective, but not a lot of people understand. It doesn't necessarily have to be founded in 100% truth or reality. It's your perspective that you choose. And if you say, you know what, this widget that I thought was okay, you know, I'm kind of seeing it from a different perspective now. I think it's fabulous. You can do that. So to answer your question, how do you get that passion? One is letting things go, and 2 is choosing a better perspective.

And how, how much time do you spend every day working on your mindset, or how much time Do you recommend?

Um, I'm never not working on my mindset.

I'm—

I have a certain mindset of, uh, for example, you know, one of my mindsets is I will— I choose to remain optimist, optimistic. All right, I'm an optimist. I want to remain optimistic. Um, and, and so let's just look at the 4 attitudes. So we'll start down here with the worst. We've got pessimism. All right, and then we've got a little different is a realist. All right, so I'm a pessimist, I'm a realist, I'm an optimist, and then over here on the other end of the spectrum, we've got an idealist. All right, I don't want to be an idealist. I don't want to be someone who walks outside in the pouring rain and says, no, it's not going to rain today. Okay, I don't want to be a pessimist, right, to where, um, it's clear and sunny and I look up and say, it's going to rain, I know it. I want to be somewhere in the middle there, in optimism is a wonderful place to be. So, by always choosing a mindset of optimism, always, I'm working on my mindset. By recognizing negative, just negative energy, negative vibes in an environment. If I walk into an environment, for example, let's just say I walk into an environment and there's a horror movie, right? A gruesome horror movie playing on the big screen. I'm going to turn around and walk out. I'm— because my environment affects my mindset. So I'm sensitive to these things to where I'm, I'm always vigilant. Positive environment. Uh, you know, for example, how much news do I allow myself to watch, right? I'm— I give myself 5 minutes. 5 minutes, dig in, find out what— get the highlights, and then get out. All right, so I'm always working on my mindset.

And when you're interviewing a rep, how important is it? Let's say their mindset is, say, a 5 out of 10, but their skill set's a 9 out of 10.

I'm fine with a 5 out of 10 as long as they come across as being teachable.

And have you ever found successful reps who are pessimists?

No, not, not successfully. Not, not Um, not year after year. No, not repeatable.

I, I—

look, I've seen, I've seen, um, people with the wrong mindset who've had— who've made a good play, who've had a good game, who even may have had a good year, but they haven't had a good career.

And do you look at this mindset in aggregate, or is it these, these bullets?

Well, I— so my book that's coming out, um, here in about 60 days. It's called 50 Pivotal Mindsets. And what I've done in this book is I've broken mindset into 10 categories, okay? And there's 5 mindset chapters per category, so 50 total. But I've, I've grouped them like this: fear and intuition, okay, that's a mindset category. Attitude and perspective, that's a category. Letting go and moving on. That's a category. Relationships and boundaries. That's a mindset category. So I've really broken it up into a lot of smaller bite-sized pieces, but I believe they're all important. Mental fitness and wellbeing.

Yeah. Cool. Hey, Chris, I really appreciate your time today. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more about your work?

Thank you. motivationalpros.com.

I hope what you're learning from this series of interviews with great salespeople is that there's a lot of ways to skin the cat. We tend to think in stereotypes of salespeople being the talkative, life of the party, gregarious, optimistic, infinitely positive person. And I had this kind of a little bit of a debate with another interviewer who focuses on mindset. And I go, I asked, do you feel that a pessimistic salesperson can't be successful in sales? And he felt not long-term. Now, maybe we should have defined pessimistic, you know, more completely, give a character for it so that we were talking about the same thing. Because I did a poll on LinkedIn with the same question. And it was about 50/50, but leaned a little bit more towards no, that a pessimistic person can't be successful in sales. Now, I think it's contextual, like everything. Certainly in prospecting, cold outreach, being pessimistic may not help you. If you don't think anything will work, then why do anything? Because you're not bought into it emotionally.

Right.

So that's one view of pessimism. Another would be forecasting. Now, at forecasting, you want to be a little pessimistic. You want to test what people are saying, how long things will take, how much are they willing to risk and buy, and how fast it can happen. All of a sudden, being optimistic may work against us. Happy years, that's optimistic. And I think what we really want, you know, everyone says, well, I'm realistic. Everyone thinks they're realistic. Everyone thinks their view of the world is the most accurate. And it probably is for them and what they want. But I think what we need is flexibility in our perception, control over our optimism, our pessimism, our positiveness, are skepticism. Now, one person even commented on the poll, do you know a single successful pessimist? And I go, I know a lot. Andy Grove, the founder of Intel, wrote a book called Only the Paranoid Survive. And I had a manager who kind of held that book under his arm. Because he was cautious. Now, is that a different word for pessimism? You could hold the PO in front of him and he'd be going, okay, let's see if we can get it booked. It was just conditioning, and part of it is useful. And I think everything has 2 sides. The positive and the negative. There you go, Brian. But we need to be able to manipulate this contextually in sales. And to be positive when we need to be positive, when we're prospecting, when we're going in to meet a client for the first time, we kind of— people tend to lean on the person who's most energetic, most excited. Typically, you don't want to be a rain cloud going into a meeting, but nor do you want to be over the top. It is kind of self- regulation and part of emotional intelligence. So I would just think about that because too often what we're hearing is salespeople have to be this or that. I think it has to be flexible and to be able to control it, not be a slave to it. Because There are times you need to be pessimistic and test where things are, to be cautious. Because if you're not at least somewhat paranoid, especially when you work in the complex sale, the default is that it does not happen. So the exception is that it happens. And it usually comes in smaller, slower, and if at all. So, in that case, you've got to be prepared. And to be prepared, you have to be a little paranoid. Like, what can go wrong? Anybody who's done business travel knows you have to prepare because you have to pack. You have to get to the airport early. You have to get through security. You have to find your gate. You have to, you know, make sure You're on flights that are more likely to be on time than not. All of this stuff, and that the complex sale is nothing but a journey. And each journey, it's a journey, is all about preparation, because once you've started the journey, you can't restart. It's too expensive. Winning the complex sale is a game changer for this. What I do is I condense 30 years of complex selling into 1 year of course material. Now, can you consume it all? If you, if you really want to become good, if you really want to become great at this profession that you have chosen, there's no college courses on it. There's nobody in college who knows this, who's done it. That's why this is such a great opportunity. And this isn't something that, you know, 4 fired SDRs produced, you know, copying everyone's book and blog over the last 20 years. This is field experience, and you get to hear one-on-ones from other reps. You get unlimited one-on-ones, office hours. Everything's recorded and put back into the course, so you never lose anything. You get to consume it at your time and at your pace. While you're walking, while you're riding your bike, well, while you want to study the thing that you do for a living and become good at it because your company doesn't give it to you. Your manager doesn't know this stuff. Your VP doesn't know this stuff. Believe me, I talk to them all day, every day. 1 out of 10 has a clue about this stuff. It's not that they're dumb. They're smart, hardworking people, but they work on the— They don't work on the marginal deals. They work on the deals that are closing, that are bigger, that, you know, they want their names on. They don't work on the deals that are most likely going to slip. We make our dollars on the marginal deals, the deals that we're processing. They're going to happen whether you're there or a mailbox is there. We want the deals that we can influence, make bigger, Make them faster. Make them come in and have control over them. So check out the course, Winning the Complex Sale. The video link is in the show notes. We'll see you next time. Tell a friend about the show. Here's some excerpts from a one-on-one that I did with one of the students in Start the Conversation, Get the Meeting course. Now, this person really embraced the course after a while. It took a couple of one-on-ones for him to try each step. He kind of fought it, tried to make it work within his current model. And that really didn't have this type of success. And then after he started, he started to get meetings. He started to get conversations. He started to get All the things that I was telling him about, and he started to get excited about it. He started to see the results that I tell you about, where his week was full of meetings. Now, I'll let you hear this out. I deleted out kind of the specifics of the steps and the tools and the approach, but they're all in the course. If you're already in it, Please listen to the full one-on-ones. When you hear the success that people are having, it's not just the steps. It's the matching of the steps with the appropriate actions and pacing. And then you get people asking to talk with you, which is the goal, which is the fun. So let's listen to it and I'll sum it up at the end and give you kind of an idea and recommendation if you want to take advantage of it.

And it's crazy. This week, this week, I'm full of meetings. I was like, what's happening? And like, I— what I did was I baked in like, I just— I'm very generic. And people are like, oh, like, like, tell me more about you.

Immediately.

I have like 3, 4 meetings. Like I already had 2 of this. And, and based on the, on the, on the parameters that you suggested for me, like, oh, go after these bigger companies, X amount of employees. So then by the time I'm talking to them, I already know that, okay, they, they typically have budget. I mean, assuming LinkedIn is correct with the employee size, some of it was, it was off, but it's like, okay, there's still like a deal. It can, it can still happen. And, um, but yeah, I was like, whoa, this is— I like, I limited to like 30 connections a day. So then that way it's not like, it doesn't go crazy. 'Cause I remember one of the reps, they're doing about 30 a day. Uh, like I said, like this week, like 4 or 5 meetings and, and, and, and they're good meetings, you know, and it's just conversations. Like you say, it's not about like pitching, but it's about working them up to that point where it's like, okay. Yeah, we do need to advertise.

So after teaching this for quite a while, here's the steps that you should take. Take the course once, quickly through it. Find both one-on-ones and office hours that speak to the persona that you want to talk with, whether it be the CEO, the CMO, CRO, developer, marketer, whoever it is that you want to talk to. Because we break it down in gory detail. We break down the persona and what they care about. And then try each step. Try it with your friends. Try it with your coworkers and start to see the results. Now, most people will fight me on it. They'll spend the first month, 2 months, uh, trying to make the system fit into their pitchy email and cold calls. And it works a little better. But it works a whole lot better when you apply it because each step and each pause in between each step has been designed over time to be very effective. And then when you start to see the results, all of a sudden people are replying, people are asking you, people are wanting to talk with you, want to understand what you do. It's almost turning cold outbound into warm Inbound. Now, are they in market? No, no, they're not. But they're a little curious. And it's up to us. And I show you in the course, how do you build off of that? Instead of us telling everybody how great we are and hoping they can understand why they need us. And instead of them arguing about why they don't need us. Because until you have active pain, Everyone's in denial. Think about going to the doctor. Okay, you kind of know you need an operation, but you're like, can I get a prescription? And the doctor's like, he has to ease you, or she has to ease you into the process. Well, let's take an x-ray. Let's see what we're working with here. Oh, can I— how about just a shot? Can I just get a shot till the next time I come in? Then he flips the x-ray up on the light and he points to something. He goes, That's what we're dealing with. That doesn't heal on its own. You have to have surgery for that. He has to build up to that. Until we build up that latent pain into active pain and properly diagnose it and get people to think about what happens if they don't have that operation, they're going to avoid it at all costs. That's why the cold pitch doesn't work. You're just igniting the denial. You're not igniting interest or curiosity. It's just denial. So check out the course, start the conversation, get the meeting. It's all at b2brevenue.com. There's an overview video in the show notes, on my YouTube channel, and on my LinkedIn profile, pretty much everywhere I am. As well as the website b2brevenue.com. Check it out if this is what you need. You know, this student, zero sales experience, but really, you know, just gobbled up this. And the people who gobble it up the fastest and the best are people who try it and get success. It has nothing to do with knowledge. It's like learning how to do a sit-up. Doesn't give you a 6-pack. You have to do the sit-ups. They're not fun at first, but then you get used to them and you start to like appreciating them. And then you start to get the connection between how you look and what you do. And so you start doing the things that make you look better. This is what we have. It's not just knowledge. It is applying it, taking feedback, polishing it up, and applying the system to your clients.