How Do You Make Sales Calls Fun: I Love Marketing Live Series with Joe Polish and Dean Jackson - I Love Marketing Episode #474

having to sell something that you don't really like, which a lot of people in sales positions hate, but you know, they're doing it solely for money. You gotta either believe in it or find the value and the virtue in what it is you're selling and the benefit and the pain it removes from the person that you're offering it to. If not, it's gonna be grunt work. It's gonna be arduous.

I'm Dean Jackson. He's Joe Polish. And this This is the I Love Marketing Podcast.

Welcome to I Love Marketing. This has been one of the longest running podcasts over at Apple. Dean and Joe Polish have been dispensing marketing so long that I wasn't able to, to remember their 10-year anniversary because it, it just snuck up on us so recently. So we'll probably do something for 20. One of the things that Joe Polish did that I thought was really interesting, it's a thing we're studying deeply, is in this world of AI and in this world of we don't really know where the content's coming from. You know, I don't know if you know this, but there are thousands of AI podcasts being published every day on Apple right now. And, and, and, and they're terrible. But unfortunately the noise, uh, prevents us from figuring out what's good. So one of the things Joe suggested, let's try this experiment and let's go deep into recording these things live. And, um, as a guy who grew up, I, I went to school, UC Santa Barbara. Um, I, I, I saw Johnny Carson, kids ask your parents, um, way before that was cool. And, um, I'll tell you what you see live is not what you see presented. And so by giving everyone the opportunity to come live, you get to see an entirely different show. You'll get to see all this stuff behind the scenes, but we've We've got a very specific question today. Dean and Joe Polish have built their careers on easy, lucrative, and fun. So today we're gonna talk about fun. What marketing question answered by these two today would bring the most fun to your business? Uh, not necessarily the most money, not necessarily, although that helps too, not necessarily the most efficiency, that helps too. But what would bring the most fun to your business? And if you give us a question of something that would bring the most fun to your business, we'll go down, we'll take these questions one off and go from there. Let's start with fun. The marketing question answered by these two. What marketing question answered by these two would make the most fun for your business? Anna David wants to know how to make sales calls fun.

Our friend Dan Sullivan has this great line, which this isn't really a marketing thing. It's more the question of who do you want to be a hero to? So if you're making sales calls, and you're doing it to people that you really care about and you want to genuinely help them, not someone you're just trying to make money, it's in the same way you put more time, attention, money, effort, and energy towards things that you actually genuinely care about. So I think that's one way to do it. I mean, the other is just put a big picture of Dean Jackson smiling next to wherever these sales calls are happening from. It could be if you're doing it on your phone, it could be some sort of like, you know, little picture there or something. But that may cheer you up. If you want to be miserable, you put a picture of me next to the thing and just stare and just associate the person that you dislike the most with me, and then that will make it a more difficult sort of thing. But that's actually a joke. But that could work. You never know. So, Dean, like, the other thing too is things become more fun when you actually have methodology that you have tested and you know for the most part it works and that you're, you know, you're keeping your, your focus on that. And the one way to 100% make sure that sales calls are not fun is sell something you don't believe in. Because if you're selling something that you don't believe in or doesn't work, I think all of us in our careers, like I remember selling vacuum cleaners door to door early on and newspaper subscriptions where I would get rejected. I mean, this is like door to door selling. Not just calling someone on the phone and having to sell something that you don't really like, which a lot of people in sales positions hate, but you know, they're doing it solely for money. You gotta either believe in it or find the value and the virtue in what it is you're selling and the benefit and the pain it removes from the person that you're offering it to. If not, It's gonna be grunt work. It's gonna be arduous. So what are your thoughts, Dean?

Well, so many things. So first of all, I remember when you and I first talked about our door-to-door newspaper subscription sale experience, that your approach was, you know, just cuteness and I'm trying to win a trip to Disney World.

Right.

And, you know, we joked and, I did that same thing. We're selling coupon books door to door. And I figured out that in the coupon book was an actual coupon for a free Whopper, like no purchase necessary. It was a free Whopper included, right? So the books were there and I would just, I would present the opportunity for people to buy the book. And then I would show them, you know, on page 3, there's a thing for a free Whopper. And that would make the rest of the book free and I would give them the chance to buy 3. I would always say we could only buy 3 books, right? But there was a little strategy that I learned from Joe Polish Polish before I even knew him called what's in it for them. That when you start thinking about these calls, not as sales calls, anything that you do that makes it feel like a step in a process is going to be met with resistance and they're going to play their role of the resistant pursued. And what your goal, the best thing you can do is if you can make the sales call just seem like a spontaneous, I can help you call. And sometimes if you lay up things ahead of time, you can if you just say to people, hey, can you chat? Instead of like book a time on my calendar for a strategy session or a whatever it is, sometimes it's better to just text people and say, hey, I can help you with that. Can you chat? And then first of all, get them to engage in the possibility of chatting. And if you can do it quickly and spontaneously, Even better. I think that's how you make them fun is make it seem like it's unexpected and delightful that, oh, he just wants to talk to me. That's a fantastic move right there.

You know, by the way, knowing that you're gonna do sales also means that you're gonna get rejected. You're gonna have, part of doing sales is to attract who you want to attract and repel who you want to repel. And that doesn't mean offend them. You know, you're not purposely going out, even though some people actually I think get kick out of rejecting people at times. What it is is going into an experience of you're either winning or you're learning, right? And you're going to understand other people's frame of reference. And when you become a student of human behavior, because really what marketing is is applied psychology. Marketing is the quickest path to the sale. Selling is what you do when you're on the phone or face-to-face with somebody. Marketing is what you do to get them on on the phone or face-to-face with you properly positioned. So, by the time you're talking to them, they're pre-interested, pre-motivated, pre-qualified, and predisposed to do business with you. And everyone that has followed us for any period of time has heard me say that many times. And part of the making selling fun to Anna's point is what can you do in advance? Our friend Robert Cialdini where you can listen to or watch on YouTube or our interviews with him on I Love Marketing, what is presuasion. What do you do in advance of— see, the influence moment where you're actually going to make the sale, present live, it's how well have you set it up, how well have you positioned yourself. So part of making sales fun, you know, selling— marketing done well makes selling easy and in some cases unnecessary. So, so part of it is, uh, making it a game, designing a game that you can win a lot of the times, but also knowing that you don't want everyone to say yes. What you're trying to do is you're fishing for right-fit clients. Has anyone here ever gone fishing, really fishing, and you caught a really small fish and you threw the fish back in because you're like, like, "This is not the right fish. I don't want to eat this fish. It's too small. I don't want to kill the fish." As weird as this is going to sound, you're fishing and you're trying to find the right bait for the right fit client. And it's sort of the deal. And the ones that don't— all the women on the line could attest to some person that asked them out on a date or some fish they needed to throw back out because it wasn't the right one, right? Well, it's It's no different. That's what marketing is. So selling is seduction and it— and you're romancing the client and you're going to see who you want to spend time with and if they want to spend time with you. So part of it is turn it into a game that is enjoyable. And the reason some people aren't very good at it is they just haven't taken enough time to learn how to get mastery at it. And what's also great is The people that need this the most are not the ones that would ever listen to a podcast called I Love Marketing. You know, they're the ones that just hate selling. They hate marketing. They think it sucks. And there's plenty of reasons to hate selling and hate marketing if you encounter it with people that are unethical, exaggerating bullshit artists that don't care about you, that are selling you crap. I mean, like the marketing world, the self-help world has done as much damage and harm as it has done good because there's so many unscrupulous people that utilize selling and influence in unethical ways. That's why I'm such a big fan of Robert Cialdini. For years we've talked about the ethical use of influence, and if you've ever been a victim of the unethical use of, of influence, you know how, how bad that feels and what danger that could be. And so people are already skeptical. Every single person here, the number one question in your mind when you, when you're going to buy something from anyone is, who can I trust? And so your job as a business owner and marketer is to establish trust and rapport. And rapport is trust with comfort. And so, uh, to go back to what Dean said, um, thank you for the acknowledgement on the what's in it for them that, you know, the title of my whole book is like, that's how you approach people. What's in it for them? And what's not in it for them is to feel taken advantage of, that someone doesn't care, that all you, all they want is to sell something from you. They don't really, they're not really concerned with what you're looking for. They're just concerned with what they're looking for. And when you concern yourself with what they are looking for, they understand you. Again, people don't buy from you because they understand what you do. People buy from you because they feel understood. People love to be sold. They hate to be pressured. And so how you present things is in a way to where they don't feel pressured.

And what they want. A great little story to amplify this. We had a lady in my email master's program. She had a 2-year-old And she, you know, this is all about trying to get, you want to get somebody to do something that you want them to do. That's when you're taking this sales, like it's built into the way that you're communicating about it, right? Is that you're trying to get somebody on a call so you can make a sale. Well, she had a 2-year-old and she was having a hard time getting him to take a bath. And every night she would go, James, it's time for your bath. It's bath time, James. And he would be resistant because he's playing with his toys. He's happy doing his things. She decided one night that she would take a more cheese, less whiskers approach to it. And she went in and said with enthusiasm, James, do you want to go splash in the tub? And he goes running for the bathroom, taking his clothes off to jump in the tub to play with the toys. Now, that sounds far more exciting than bath time, but it's the same, what I call mechanical outcome. The mechanical outcome that she wanted is James in the tub. And on a sales situation, the mechanical outcome that you want is you want to be on the phone with somebody that could potentially be a good collaboration for you to help get a result. That they really want. So what would be the context of a phone call that they would want to get? How could you just, that's why saying, hey, can you chat is a great thing rather than let's book a strategy session. Yep.

That's what I'm trying to say.

That is what you're trying to say.

All right. You, You've been listening to the I Love Marketing podcast. We took a batch of questions from I Love Marketing live event and, uh, distributed them as individual podcast episodes. And so we're having a lot of fun with that.

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