WHAT THE BEST DO EVERYDAY AND WORST OVERLOOK

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

I believe so. I think most people that get in sales are pretty competitive. They want to improve. They want to get to that top destination. But I feel like it's it's hard to master something like sales. It's really a Lifelong destination. I don't know if you ever really reach it, but if you don't, if you stop trying at some point and you don't try to get better, improve your craft, I feel like you get left behind and you might be in trouble. But I mean, ultimately, if you want to make more money, make the most money, which is why a lot of people get in sales, you do need to master your craft in some form or fashion.

But why is that hard? It should be like simple, isn't it?

It's all about relationships and Hitting the K to press a button, right? Yeah.

And I, and I saw that, that guy on LinkedIn who said something about it. This is my 15 steps to sales success. Oh, he isn't in sales.

Wow.

I think it's hard because people don't even know what it is. A lot of people think it's service or a personality type, or you're born with it. Or it's luck. So how are you supposed to master that?

Sales gets written off as just this, uh, it's a business unit that, oh yeah, just go in sales, you'll be fine, you'll figure it out, just, just, just go out there, work hard, and, and you'll make it happen. And maybe at some point that was the case. I, I never experienced that myself, but it's, it is a true profession. You can make C-suite type money. And if you have that potential, why, why not treat it like a real profession and every other area, uh, engineering, marketing, et cetera, they have certifications they have to do every year. They have all this upskilling that they, they can't even do their job if they don't do that type of stuff. So, uh, sales for some reason just gets thrown out there and then there's all these misconceptions about it to your point where they think everyone thinks it's easy that you can just press the button or you can convince people. And there's maybe trend, trend. Yeah. There's transactional sales that are maybe a little bit. easier at times or, you know, one-stop shop type things. But everything we're talking about, it's more complex and it's not, it's not easy. It's actually counterintuitive, as you, as you would put it. And it's the opposite of how humans behave in a lot of cases.

Yeah. And your game's football. Imagine if every football game was completely different. There was no patterns, there was no referee, and it was a free-for-all. It's no longer football, right? It's recess. And I think that's what people treat sales like— recess. It's playing and hoping something— hope you win. And like recess, you can just tell yourself you won. But both people tell themselves they've won. The difference about sales is if you lose, You can tell yourself you won, but it doesn't matter. You didn't get paid. And this is why money is so critical in sales, because in marketing they always win because they can't tell if they lost. They still get paid the same. So there's got to be some type of structure to it, because when you learn football, you didn't just go play the game, you learned the rules. Right? You learn the patterns, the plays, and there's a structure to it and a referee to call the BS on it. And who calls the BS in sales? Typically the customer. They don't buy. But that, that can be a false positive or not. So it becomes even harder to learn. You know, the, the Skinner box that— I don't know if you took psychology in college— they, they learned the wrong thing. They anticipated, became superstitious, they hallucinated. And all of a sudden, people deal with those hallucinations. Oh, it's the economy. Oh, you know, that they're going to go with the competitor. All this other stuff that clogs our brain. with noise. So I think it's— that's what makes it hard to learn. So you have to come up with some construct, some belief system that you believe in, and understand that you could execute really well and still not win.

Since you have to be your own referee and you have to be accountable with yourself. But I mean, if you look at people that— I mean, you can make some serious money in sales depending on the industry, let's say. $500K, right? That's a ton of money to pretty much anybody out there. And maybe you get lucky one year, maybe you came into a great situation, the company's on fire and things are just coming in, but highly unlikely that you're going to keep replicating that year after year after year if you don't treat it like what you're talking about and actually understand who you're selling to, why they're buying, where things go off the rails. all that different stuff. So I think to, to really sustain that success over a long period of time, you, you have to be doing what we're talking about. And, and it comes down to like what— whatever your process is. I mean, in, in some form or fashion, you have to be able to speak intelligently, to understand that it is a game in a lot of ways. So you have to play offense, defense, special teams. You have to make adjustments at halftime, every quarter. Otherwise, you're never going to—

It's a living game. It's changing. It's changing while you're playing.

Yeah, you're never gonna win these enterprise deals if you're not doing that and writing stuff down, documenting it and anticipating things that are gonna happen. So once I started looking at it like that, especially when I, when I was doing med device and it was so complicated, it still wasn't easy by any means. And there's still a lot of painful moments and you can't win every game, you can't win every deal, but it, at least you understand why maybe something happened and it's more in your control. versus blaming the economy or this and that. I mean, that, that's the easy thing. That, that's like our gut instinct because we don't want to own up to us making a mistake. But the problem with that is that you keep making the same mistakes over and over again. So, uh, once I started writing it down, getting out of my head, documenting it, whatever that, that system is, it, it, it became— I felt like a new person from a sales ability. Like, I was just at a different level because not many people, unfortunately, not many people are doing that, or they have some basic checklists or whatever that they were taught, but that's not really sales. That's just an inbound intake form. And, uh, you know, it just puts you at a different level when you document this. I don't know why so few people do that, but I don't, I don't see how you can be successful if you don't.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you ever saw those 4 stages of learning diagram where it starts off with You're unconsciously incompetent. You don't even know you're bad at it or not good at it. And then you become consciously incompetent. That's where you like read a book and you go, oh, I should have been doing this, not that. But then when you try it, it doesn't feel organic, does it?

At all.

Especially, you know, because you start off. You go with your instincts. Customer asks for a quote, you send it. Obviously. Oh, wait a sec. Why aren't they calling me back? Why aren't they buying? Oh, now I'm starting to understand. So next time I've gotta find out what's behind that. Once they get the quote, what are they gonna do with it? Who has to approve it? Why now? Are they gonna buy now or 2 years from now? What's our brain thinking? Then buy it now. It's going to be in Friday. Because that's what you want, not what they want. And you talk about the product. Why? You know it. You like it. It's the best out there. So you stick with it. And when people lose a deal, what do they say? Oh, we're the better product. Okay, that's part of the game, but not the only part of the game. Look at the market leaders. Do they really have the best product?

Not usually.

Yeah. So what we have to understand is we, we're going through that process, and knowledge is part of it. That gets us to consciously incompetent. So we know we have to change. Then we have to try it. But if we try it on live people, we tend to go back to our instincts, right? When you get caught off balance, it's fight or flight. So you do what the other person wants because you just want to not upset the apple cart, and you think you'll get reciprocation back. Maybe you will, maybe you won't.

I mean, you have to practice for sure in some ways, because I think a lot of salespeople, especially once they've been doing it for a long time, they, they think they know everything and that they don't have to do the basic stuff. And it's actually the basic stuff that they're usually messing up. And it doesn't matter how many times you've had a meeting or close deals, you still should be doing the same thing to prepare. Maybe not for every single one, but for the ones that are more important, and, and some type of system to get you there. I mean, so I, I use a just an easy one-page Word document anytime I have a meeting, and it just has these, these areas. It has, you know, what are my goals? What are the top few questions I want to ask? What are the potential objections? And they all end up being somewhat similar. It depends on where you're at in the stage, but I, I have that next to me. I don't read from it. It's not like a script that I'm just like robotic reading from it, but I use it. So if I get caught off guard, if I forget something, if, if I need to glance at it, I, I have it there. It's like to, to help me get through that conversation. And, and it makes my life so much easier because now, now preparation, I don't have to reinvent the wheel every time. I got the same thing I can use every time, and it makes me more consistent. And I still am myself, right? I'm not staring at that the whole time. I just use it to guide me. But a lot of people think you can just show up, right? And to a certain extent, there's probably certain parts that you can get away with that. But once it gets started further down that deal cycle, if you just wing it, don't have a plan, show up just because you got a good personality or whatever the case, that's usually where you forget stuff like, oh, hey, I didn't— man, I didn't even get the next meeting. So at the end of the call, I forgot to get that and now I'm chasing them down for 2 weeks to actually get them on the calendar. Like the small stuff like that happens. But I, I think we just have had success in the past. We think that's beneath us to even document that type of stuff. And then we end up losing deals or we lose momentum in some form or fashion.

Right. We were optimistic. We naturally wanted to go our way. So we're not thinking about how it could go off the rails. But that's the default in a complex sale. If you ever watch the car salespeople, I mean, a car sale is relatively simple to a business-to-business sale, isn't it?

It is. It's still, yeah, it's still bigger dollar amount, but it's definitely simple compared to B2B for sure.

Yeah, they come to you. You don't have to go to them. So there's obvious some curiosity and interest. And the first thing is to find out, are they just curious or are they interested? Now, there's people who made a career out of teaching people how to sell a car, which is—

Oh yeah, I see that on Instagram and Facebook all the time.

Right, which is basically an hour, hour and a half long sales process. Now imagine if you're selling to a company where there's multiple people who have conflicting interests but don't divulge them. A little bit more complicated, isn't it?

Right.

And everybody gets comfortable with, I know the car, I know every detail about the car, and the car's the best. The only problem is someone else sells the same car down the street.

And then the other thing that happened, I think I've heard you talk about this before, is people take those tactics from the car sale, which, okay, hey, that for the car sale, those things probably work great. And those people that made a career on that, like they, that's all they specialize in was that particular situation. But then people take that or whatever that transactional sale is, and then they use that in the complex sale and then people just lump it all together. And I don't know when that happened or where that gets confused, but Definitely people that are not in the profession think it's all the same, but a lot of these tactics, tactics got switched over from the transactional to the complex. And I feel like that made everything confusing and it made, it made it harder to sell because now the, the, the customer gets bombarded with all this crap and then they don't even want to talk to salespeople, which makes our job 3 times as hard as what it used to be.

Yeah. And I think a lot of reps get comfortable because they can do that first call well. Okay, but do they have a next meeting? Hope so. I'll check. They told me to call them in 2 weeks. That's the next meeting. No, no, that's the, that's the action item. That's not the next meeting because they're not going to take that call. Here's the, here's the reveal. They're not going to take that call. Why? Because now they have to do something. Up until then, it was all, you know, entertainment, education. And you did a great job on that first call, but did you build a sale, or did you just do a good job presenting the product? I had this manager, he had the same gig every time. He loved to give the first presentation on the first call. And as soon as then he would like leave. And if the deal didn't go perfectly to purchasing, he goes, Brian, they loved the presentation. And I'd be like, Mark, that's— who cares? There's a lot more to selling than the presentation. Because he wanted to think it's the presentation. That's him. And of course, he's not dealing with the rest of it because that's hard. That's a little messy. It's very fraught. Do deals die in the first call?

Very rarely.

Do they ever say, get out of here, this isn't a match at all, you're wasting our time?

I wish they would tell me that more often so I don't go chase the wrong deals.

That's never happened to me.

I know, unfortunately.

Even if it's a great— even if it's a terrible match, they want to learn about it. They're smiling and nodding, and they don't have to work. They get an hour off to hear about some new technology. That's a win for them, not for us who got up at 4 in the morning to fly there believing that they had some interest in this, had a problem that we solve.

Is that because they either, they're not the business owner, right? So they don't have as much skin in the game potentially, so they can do whatever they want with their time, or because they don't want to be, you know, deliver bad news and like tell someone like, oh, I'm not interested. I think a lot of people just don't necessarily want to. It's an uncomfortable thing in some form or fashion. So do you think that's why it happens that no one pushes back? Because I would actually prefer people to tell me straight up like, look, man, this is not gonna be the right time. Maybe next year. Like, yeah, it's just not gonna happen. I mean, and, and, but then when people tell you that, I think salespeople actually, they get more competitive and they're like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna convince this person. I'm gonna switch them over. I don't care what they said. I'm gonna make it happen. And like the manager probably eggs them on too. That's like what happens every time.

Yeah. Because they think if they were interested enough to sit down with you, they must have the problem that you solve. Or they might have it someday, or they may have it and it might be number 32 on their list. And after they get done with number 31, they'll give you a call back. But that never happens. For years.

Yeah.

And if you want to learn something, what do you do? You— do you have any hobbies?

Yeah, I like to work out a lot, like to read, like to play pickleball. Been picking up pickleball lately. That's the trendy one.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, pickleball. So I need to, but I, you know, you can't just show up and just wing it because I think it's a fun game. But if you're, a lot of people take it seriously too. I mean, it's like taking over the world. So you have to, you know, I gotta go get the right paddle and the balls. You have to find these pickleball courts. You have to, you have to, uh, block off the times because they're booked like 3 weeks out. There's, there's a lot of stuff you got to do to prepare. You can't just show up to the courts. You'll be— it's not going to happen.

Yeah, so that's similar to tennis. And I used to play tennis, and trying to find another person to play tennis with isn't easy all the time, depending on schedules, interest, skill level. So you play against the wall. That's how you get better. Or you just tell yourself you're good. One has an immediate— and it looks simple too, doesn't it? Pickleball looks pretty simple.

It does, but it's, it's actually a hell of a workout. It's way more than you would think, for sure.

Yeah, this is a lot of unnatural movements, hand-eye coordination. And if it looks simple, why isn't it simple? Everything looks simple, doesn't it? I mean, remember being a kid and watching some karate movie with Bruce Lee or kung fu or whoever? What'd you do after the show? Go, you know, kick the shit out of your neighbor, right?

Yeah, yeah. Or your brother or sister or something.

Yeah. But it doesn't work that way, right? You lift your leg up and it doesn't look very graceful and you fall over. And like, what do all those shows have on the bottom? Do not try this at home. But that's kind of like sales, right? Because it looks simple. It's just talking and listening and answering questions and sending proposals. And people don't realize that it's hard until the end of the month, the quarter, the year. And then what do they do? I did everything. The number of calls I've gotten, Brian, I did everything perfectly. I don't know what that means. I did everything perfectly. Then what happened? I don't know. Tell me. I don't know what you did wrong. I don't know if it was a match. Did they buy anything? I don't know. Are they talking to you?

No.

Well, you did one thing wrong. And, and you don't want to beat up on salespeople, but if you want to become great at anything, pickleball or sales, you got to understand the game. You know, what are the rules? How does it work? And then you break it down into micro skills. And something like pickleball is very containable. There's a court, there's rules, There's action. You hit the ball over the net, they hit it back. And as you get better, you want to hit it so as hard as possible for them to hit it back, right? That's the objective. Takes a while, takes lots of repetitions, but you want to get it to unconsciously competent. You can't be cognitively thinking, here comes the ball. My arm goes back. I want to hit it over in that corner, so I have to put a twist on it. You can't do that, right? Because the ball's already passed you. No, you got to be like kung fu, right? It's got to be second nature. It's got to be part of your DNA. Unconsciously competent.

Yeah. Otherwise, you start overthinking it too much. You miss stuff. You hit the net. You Aren't, aren't doing, you gotta make it natural. And that's the hard part is you do have to prepare, you have to perform, but you also need to be yourself and be natural in sales as well. And that's another mistake that people make is they see a movie or they see, you know, you talking how you do your stuff or whatever it is, and they try to replicate other people, which you want to pick up good things from other people, but you want to make it, make it your own as well. So that, that natural side, if you're not authentic in some form or fashion, then people are probably not going to buy from you. Very much, especially if it's a complex sale. So it's like you have to practice, you have to perform, you have to be accountable with yourself, but don't be a robot. You have to, which I think a lot of people are robots now. They're just going demo, demo, demo, demo. Don't even know who the person they're talking to is, barely what their name is. They see it on the Zoom. That's about it. And it's the same thing over and over again. And maybe some sales are quicker and that you can do that more, but I think being natural. You have to make it be natural. That's not just going to happen in your first 6 months selling or even your first couple of years. It's probably going to take you years. Or, you know, what is that rule, the 10,000-hour rule of like really trying to master your craft? I mean, that's true, but it's not just going through the motions. You need to do what you're talking about where you understand the process, you understand here are the stages, here's You know, green flags, red flags, like where have I lost deals in the past? Where have things gone well? You know, learning from the best people at your company. I mean, that's— there's not, there's not a playbook for this. Like you have to, you know, there are some things you can do, but you have to really take initiative because your company most likely is going to give you the basic stuff. The training is going to be all about the products most likely and not about actually closing deals. And then they, they're just probably going to throw you out there at some point. You have to perform. So you have to take ownership to make it happen.

Yeah, it's on you whether you like it or not. And you can tell yourself a story to make it feel better. But is that moving you down the court or is it moving you backwards? You know, it feels good to tell yourself you're good at pickleball, builds up the confidence.

Okay.

Nothing wrong with that, but you still have to do the play pickleball to get good at it, right? You have to stretch, you have to anticipate, watch other people play it. After the game's over, what did I do wrong? Did I smack it? Was I trying to get it, hit it so perfectly that I missed it, or I hit it into the net. Because in the pickleball, your instincts are, I just want to get it over the net and in bounds, right?

Yeah.

And you want to get it over the net, in bounds, but hard, fast, so it's harder to hit back. Then you want to get it over the net and into the corner where it's nearly impossible to hit back. But you don't go through those stages. Sometimes you just whack it, right? And you just— and I go, a lot of people now, knowing that does you a little bit of good, like 2%. You have to get the muscles and the mind and the eyes and the timing all together. Then all of a sudden pickleball isn't this simple little game anymore. The same is true with sales. What hap— what goes wrong most of the time in sales? We're talking about ourselves, how great our product is, and then we get really good by telling it how much better it is than the competition. And then we try and close, or we hear something that sounds like a buying signal and we go with it. We ask them what's their decision-making process, who's the decision maker, and it's them. I'm dealing with a decision maker.

Of course.

But then we find out, yeah, that person's not a user. That person's not involved in this decision from an economic standpoint.

For sure. And then if to use the pickleball thing, I mean, it's one thing if I just go play against a buddy just having fun. But then you go to these tournaments or you go to these bigger courts and there's like 40 courts and all these people that look like they've been playing for a decade or something, like they invented pickleball. And you start stepping up who you're playing against and then you realize, oh, I thought I was pretty good, but actually maybe there's a lot of people that are way ahead of me. And the same thing with sales, depending on what you're selling, or you go from mid-market to enterprise, or you keep stepping up your game or you change industries and then you're like, oh, now we're in the big leagues. So I think there's also that side of it too. You know, how are you progressing in your career? Do you wanna make that C-suite money? And if you wanna make the C-suite money, most likely it's gonna be the hardest sales environments where you have to find the new logos, you have to find the new business, you have to build interest. You, it's a startup environment that's very cutthroat. I mean, that usually some of those situations are where you can perhaps make the most money, but it's also way harder than If you work for a Fortune 100 company and you're just upselling and servicing. So I think you also have to understand, you know, what type of competition do you want? Maybe you want the easier competition. That's fine. That, that's totally good. But if you wanna make serious money, you're probably gonna have to really step up your game and keep improving and, and really go significantly deeper into all the stuff we're talking about. Because I don't think you can make that type of money and do those things if you, if you don't treat it like that.

Yeah, and think about— because most reps have the mindset, I want to learn enough just to get the deal. And that seems like a reasonable mindset in the short term, but in the long term, where do you end up? Now contrast that with applying that to pickleball. I want to learn just enough to play, or just enough to beat, uh, Corey.

Right.

Then I'm happy. Okay, then you beat your friend, but then you find somebody next, the next person who kicks your butt. It doesn't scale. You either— it's your profession. Why not master it? Why not have a mastery mindset instead of a minimalist mindset of learn just enough to close this deal? What's the trick when they told me or they won't call me back? That's all I get is like, what's— how do I get them to do something that I messed up? Those are the questions I get. And then you find out, oh, it's a prevention profession. Oh, what do I do after I hit it out of bounds? You lost the point. Accept it. Learn from it. Don't try and wail on it next time. Even bigger deals, more deals, faster deals. That's what it's all about. Sign up today. Put the excuses away. Excuses feel good, but they're expensive. Excuse—you know what the excuses are costing you? Tens, fifty, maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars a year in lost income.

Really?

Yeah. The difference between where you are today— let's say you're making $150,000, decent, decent income, but you know there's other people in your industry making $300,000, $400,000, $500,000. Well, how are you going to do that? You all think it's just about getting a better job, a better territory, a better manager. They can help. Go do that. Then what happens? It's still you There with those leads, trying to close those deals. And do you have the game? Few people do. Everyone thinks they do. Why not prove it? The market tells you what you're worth. Accept it. Now become better. And the way to become better is to improve every day. Really Make a daily routine of learning and developing because it's not at the knowledge level. You have to become unconsciously competent at these skills, which takes time, repetition, and emotion. And I show you how to do it, how I did it, how I've taught hundreds of people to do it. But you have to want to because I can't Force you. A lot of people wish I could. So do I, but I can't. So sign up today. We'll see you next time.