Acting the Part with Sarah Brazier

Every company has breakdowns in their revenue process. Sure thing. Deals slip into next quarter, competitors creep in and swipe deals away at the last minute, and deals getting single threaded that don't get to power. These are just a few examples of revenue leak, but there are a ton more and they're preventing your team from reaching their sales targets. That's why I'm such a big fan of Clary's Revenue platform is the only tool that actually helps leaders take control of their revenue and thrive through any market conditions. Especially when things get tough. You can't afford to miss a single detail, but you also can't be leading by gut. Clary combines the science and the art of sales and sales leadership. So go to clary.com if you want to answer the most important question in your business. Are you going to meet, beat or Miss on revenue? Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head on over to patreon.com InsideSalesExCexcellence now with that, grab a notepad, get ready and let's dive into the good stuff. What up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the live Better Sell Better podcast. This is your host Kevin Dorsey, AKA kd. And today we're going to talk about the dreaded S word in sales scripts. Because you know, scripts make me sound robotic and scripts don't work and scripts this and script that. But I could not disagree more because every song, every movie, every show has a script. It's the actors and the performer's job to make it come alive, to breathe life into it, to bring personality and emotion and make it jump off the paper. And that is why I'm so pumped to have Sarah Brazier on the show today. Because what most people may not know outside of being an absolute rock star ae a world class salesperson, an influencer, a thought leader and just an all around badass. She also is a national debate and speech champion, former actress and teacher winning at state and national levels. And basically she knows how to make anything come alive. She knows there's a science behind this, a technique behind this on how to take written word and make it Come to life to make people feel something. Because if you can't make them feel, you won't close the deal. Welcome to the show, Sarah Brazier. Let's do this.

Oh, my gosh. That was the most fantastic intro anyone's ever done. I'm so excited to be here.

I'm told it's the only reason why people show up anymore to the show is just to get their intro and then they walk, you know, so I'll take it as a compliment. I'll do this. But how are we living today? We ready for this?

I'm so ready. I'm excited. This is going to be good. We've been. We chat all the time offline now. People finally can pull back the. The curtain and find out what we chat about.

And that's, you know, so people know. And that's also what's fun, too, is, like, this is the stuff we talk about, y'.

All.

Like, we nerd out on this stuff after hours, too. So we're gonna get right into. That's why people like the show is none of the fluff, none of the backstories and that nonsense. Let's talk about sales and acting, because I believe there are such strong corre and crossovers between the two. So let's open up with what should all salespeople learn from actors and great speakers?

How to control their words to help control their audience. The best actors, they have a presence, especially on stage, and they can read the room. And they can read the room. Really? Really. And they can make the micro adjustments that you need to make in any given performance to keep the audience on track with the story, to keep them invested. That, I think, is the thing that sales people need to learn from a great actor.

And so let's go a little bit further there. So this is just the first curious question. Like, as an actor, actress, have you, like, on stage or on camera, changed the role in a way based off what you were reading from the audience? So, like, one night it was one way, but then another night, you're feeling a different vibe and change certain elements. Like, have you gone that far before?

Yes and no. So it. It depends on the show, and it depends on. On the kind of the rules around what you're doing. So there are always micro adjustments you can make. It depends on what direction you're going to go to take that micro adjustment. And you are performing on stage with usually a bunch of other actors. So you don't want to do anything that's going to throw them off. But you also want to, want to make sure that. And you want to make sure that the story continues in the direction that you and the rest of the cast and the director have agreed upon. Sort of like akin to sales. If your VP of sales or your CRO rolls out new go to market messaging, you're going to try to follow that messaging as best you can and you'll make some tweaks, but you won't go, you won't go in some super crazy direction unless you're really that kind of lone wolf. So, so you're doing that because you're, because you're performing as a team. There's this, there's a team environment, but then sometimes you know the. If you're doing a comedy and you're doing a bit and the bit's not landing anymore, that's when, that's when you'll, you'll change your tactic. That's when you'll go, okay, well, maybe I'm pushing too hard. I need to pull back. Or maybe I'm not pushing hard enough. I need, I need to change this. So there are micro adjustments that you're making. But yes, I've definitely, depending on what the audience is giving me, I've made the changes in my delivery or the changes in what I'm doing on stage based off what other actors are feeding me and what the audience is giving me.

That's awesome because, like, it's that attention to detail that it gets me super fired up is that you keep using the word micro. Micro. And like, funny enough, I was talking about with my team in a training this morning is that it's the micro things that the best do better than everybody else, you gotta do the fundamentals first, but then it's the micro. Right? So you said earlier about like reading the room. How do you read a room? Like, how can a salesperson read their prospect a little bit better to know what sort of micro adjustments they need to make?

I was actually thinking about this because I was listening to an audible a couple years ago. My dad's in sales. I have his Audible account. He's been in sales for my whole life. And I was thinking about the things that people do that tell you that give you the sensation and you kind of know how they're feeling intuitively. And I was thinking about that. Well, this Audible book goes into the details of when we are having an emotional reaction to something or that fight, light, whatever reaction, our body starts to do things. Before we know what's going on, before we know we'll express Fear before we register. We're afraid we'll express anxiety physically before we know we're anxious. We'll express intrigue or desire before we even register conscientiously. I find that person attractive or I find that interesting. And the book that I was listening to is written. It's not Chris Voss, but it's another CIA negotiator who has been able to get a confession out of all but one person of all the people that he ever interrogated. And it's all about reading the cues, the physical cues of the individual that he's interrogating and using that to direct his questions. So is someone hiding something or are they not? Is someone uncomfortable or are they comfortable? And there's all these little tells that people give, like in poker, that you can start to sense. So you can get that on, like, the individual level. Both. If you're doing a show in a black box theater, really small, maybe 15, 30 people in the audience, but then collectively, you've got this herd thing happening in larger rooms where everybody sort of gets on. If you can. If you can hook the audience, everyone gets on the same emotional field. And you can feel it. You can. You can feel and hear the reactions, whether it's the gasp or the laugh or the discomfort and the movement in the audience when something. Something creepy is going on. You can feel. You can feel them push and pull out of that. If you get out of your own head and stop thinking about, how am I delivering this line, and do they like me? And all the. All the insecurities. If you can. If you can push that out of your brain and be in the moment with the other performers on the stage. It's like you're here where I'm looking at you and you're the actor and I'm feeling you. But there's. It's like. Like standing next to a bonfire, and you can feel the heat on the side of your face. Even though I'm engaged in the conversation here, I can still feel the heat, and the audience is that heat. And that's how you read a room as an actor. It's like, what. What temperature is it? And there's this kind of emotional warmth that's going on. And once you lock into that, then you can start taking it a level further, figuring out, how can I turn up and down the heat? How can I control the thermostat of my audience's emotions?

I love it. I love it. So now we're getting into the good stuff here, right? So it's like so say, okay, you're getting ready. How do you get into mode? Right? Like, how do you know, like, who you are as a person, who I believe you are, versus the stage presence, Right? Like you're about to get into character. So let me rephrase the question. How do you get into character? Right? You know, curtains down, take that last few breaths. Like, how do you get into the character that you're about to portray for everybody? Like, are there cues? Are there reminders? Like, how do you get into that?

You just did it while we were talking. When you said, how do you get into character? You made the physical shift into an actor getting into character. You had an idea and you physically became it. And that is what I do as an actor is I'm thinking about, there's like a whole process that I go through. Someone hands me a script and I read it and I sort of start in tuning what are the emotional things that are happening? What are the shifts? Then you sit down and you work with the other actors and you work with the director, and you figure out what is the objective? What is the super objective of what is the scene supposed to accomplish? In the same way a sales meeting is, what is the super objective of this sales meeting? What are we trying to accomplish? What is the end goal? The. And we both want to get to a next step, but we have to determine if that next step is. Everyone can agree upon it and could be, you know, we have another meeting with more stakeholders or we, you know, decide on talking about pricing in our next conversation. Whatever it is, you know, that going in as the actor, this is the super objective of the scene. And then there are all of these smaller things that have to be accomplished throughout the scene in order to achieve the super objective. So if it's a discovery call, I have all of these things that I have to achieve before I reach the super objective, which is to get a next step on the calendar. So I need to set my upfront contract. I need to answer certain qualification questions. Then I need to run certain discovery. I need to quantify economic impact. I need to figure out if this is something someone's interested in solving. Is it something they're solving today? How all of the Sandler pain funnel. You do the same thing as an actor where you're going through all of these steps that you have to get to achieve the super objective. And in that whole process of the steps that are taken, everybody has a motive. I have a motivation as Karen, the middle aged, bossy woman, and you have a motivation as well, and sometimes those things are conflict, and sometimes the things that we want are different, and sometimes the outcome we want is different, and then we clash here. So I think about all that we all talk about. What are these power dynamics that are happening in the scene and that informs part of the character? And then I ask myself, well, now I know what's supposed to happen. Now I know the story. How do I tell that with my body? Who is this person with their body? What have they experienced? I start thinking about when I, you know, if this person is a very stressed out, anxious human being that has all of these negative thoughts about themselves, but is trying to hide that. How did. How have I expressed how I experienced that in my life and how I expressed that physically? And then I create the body of the character so that when I walk on stage, I can. I can go into the physical state, which then elicits the emotional sensation, which then gets me in the headspace to walk on stage and deliver. Right. Does that make sense?

Yeah. No, I love it. And so then let's take it one step further than to sales. How do you do that before a demo like this? I'm actually a two point hard question how you do it. But is there a certain state that you try to get into before a demo? Like, who are you trying to become right before Zoom goes on and now you're pitching a vp, a CRO. Like, what character are you trying to become in that moment?

I think the character is the same human. Just like when I walk into the office or I get in front of the computer to do my work, that is the character of Sarah, the salesperson. And then when the laptop shuts at the end of the day, it takes a little bit of time to get out of character. And then I go into, who is Sarah in the rest of my life? Kind of like when you do a show and you have to have an accent, you. The recommendation is you stay in that dialect or that accent the whole time. You never switch out. You don't go back and forth from being British and then American and the British and American, you just stick with it. So you're backstage talking to everybody with a corny British accent.

Real quick, can you do a British accent? Is this possible to something you can flip into badly?

Yeah.

All right, we'll save it for the end. We're gonna make people listen to the end to get the last send off as we switch it. So, okay, so you talked about the physical presence and, like, getting into that. That mode, right? To get into. To Sales, which I think is great. So now let's talk about how it comes across in the demo. Right. Because I got opened up with this idea. You know, if you ask most salespeople how they feel about scripts, right. It's always this like, ah, no, scripts sound robotic. Right. And I always have to remind, it's like scripts don't sound anything. A script is just written down. Like you sound robotic. Right. And something that I don't think most people appreciate is how much effort, time and practice goes in when you see these actors and actresses, like they didn't just get it that morning and then just flip into it. Like they really worked at it. So like how, I guess, or what are the steps you take to make a script come alive? Right. So you just, you know, you signed up for production, you're playing this character, here's your script. Now what, like, what are the steps you go through to like make it come alive the way that it needs to?

Yeah, I mean it's, it's a process. It's a math process of do it iterate, do it again, iterate. Do it again iterate, do it again iterate. So like when I did speech and debate, speech and debate is this. It's basically the stuff that I did was competitive acting. So it's like dramatic interpretation or program of oral interpretation or prose or poetry. You play all these different kinds of characters. You have a 10 minute long script and you perform it from the season starts in September and it ends in April and you perform it all year long. And that means you're repeating the same thing over and over and over and over again. But it's not boring because you're finding new, you're discovering the layer. There's so many layers within a line and you just keep peeling back the human in the words. So if you look at someone like Meryl Streep, what she does is she scores her script. She literally sits there and says the line a bajillion different ways and thinks about what is it that she's trying to convey? What word will she emphasize? How will she emphasize it? What's the tempo, the pace, the tonality, the pitch, the volume? How can I combine these things? The duration? Where are my beats? Where are my pauses? What am I going to do? And she scores the whole thing in the same way that you would take crazy notes in your history book if you were into history in high school, which just all. If you look at it, it looks like this kind of crazy chicken scratch layered over her scripts. And you Just perfect the way the line needs to come out, to make it sound human and real, and most importantly, to get across whatever is that tiny micro objective in that line. What am I trying to accomplish by saying this? Because if the writer wrote that, they wrote it for a reason. There's no. There are no superfluous. Superfluous words in a script. Someone edited that out, so it means something. So you have to figure out what it means and then make it mean it.

And so how long would you say. And also, you're a professional, so this might be different, but how long would you say it took you to get good at a script? Right. So, you know, whatever it's going to be for that season, you know, how long did it take to get good at it? And then how often were you practicing it? Or by the end, are you not practicing anymore, you're just really performing it because you have it down?

No, I practice it all the time. I'm practicing. I'm practicing all the way up until nationals, I'm practicing. I used to before around in speech and debate, I would go into the bathroom and I'd lock myself in the handicap stall because it was big. And I would whisper my performance to myself, and I'd do all the physical things just for 10 minutes, like, super fast. In the bathroom, they'd be like, okay, I know what I'm doing now. And then I go, you know, go. So the practice never ends. You're constantly iterating and then getting good. The challenge is that. And I think you experience this as a salesperson. The challenge is that your competition's getting good, too. It's not like they're sitting on their laurels. So you get some feedback and you implement it. And then you go out and turns out the guy who was not very good last week, suddenly he's had an epiphany and he's good now. So. Oh, dang. It's kind of like when the competitor that's just never been good in any of your deals suddenly shows up, and everyone's like, no, you need to check out what they're doing. I think it's really compelling. And you're like, what do they do? They hire new head of product. I'm so confused.

I love it. Like, and this is where. And I hound on salespeople all the time. And why I love the correlation, you know, with actors is like, the amount of practice that you all do to get good at your craft. Whereas most salespeople wake up, roll out of bed, and go, yeah, I'LL do a demo today. I'm going to do this demo with no intention, with no focus on the attention to details. They're not aware of the micro things and they're not actually trying to convey something. I want to pull back to something that you mentioned. Right. Is like, let's pull it back to sales here. What are some things that salespeople should be trying to convey in that demo? Or, you know, I can't remember how you phrase it. You're talking about like Meryl, what she's trying to accomplish or like, you know, what the end goal of that line, which I think is. I love the little thing. She's thinking about a line. Most reps are thinking about a demo. Like, they're thinking about the whole demo. So if we think about like, what should a rep be trying to convey they in a sales presentation?

So I think that you have to go back to what's my motivation and what's my objective? My motivation is to convince you that my product is worth exploring more in this demo or it's worth purchasing, it's worth making a investment in. So how do I prove that? And my objective is for you to eventually pull out your wallet and hand me some. Some cash money. So those are the things that I want in order to achieve you giving me money. I need to convince you. How do I convince you? Well, that's where you go back to the discovery call. And we actually just ran a training on this at Gong. Thinking about what are the various use cases and pain points that a customer can have? How can we boil that down to really precisely a specific challenge frame that challenge frame the problem of that, convince them and get their buy in that this is really worth investing in and solving. And then everything you show in the demo has to support something that was discussed in the discovery call. It has to support a pain point. There's no point in showing something that is not relevant to their use case. And if there is more and they have five use cases, but you only have 45 minutes, why don't you take the number one problem that they have and say we agree that all five of these are really important, but this number one is the most important. Okay, awesome. Well, if it's all right with you, I'd like to just spend time focusing just on this number one pain point. And if this feels relevant, we want to explore the other four use cases. We can do that in a later call. But do you think it'd be a good use of time if we just took a deep Dive on how we help companies with this first pain point. Great, Fantastic. Then you can go into framing the problem of your demo and then into the actual product demo. I think framing the problem is really important before you even show them anything. And then it's all about storytelling instead of feature functionality. So how can you get them to imagine themselves in your shoes? And that's like another piece of just really good, really good performers are. I, as the actor, you know, I've never been. I, I have no idea what it's like to be Juliet, right, In Romeo and Juliet. I've never been 13, fallen in love with a guy, married him the next day, and then killed myself at the end of the week.

I'm glad to hear that, by the way. I'm glad you can't quite resonate with that, but yes, continue.

Yeah, but I do know what it's like to have that first, you know, butterflies in your stomach. Like overwhelming middle school crush. Like fawning over someone and feeling resentful and mad at my parents is totally the situation Juliet's in. And I know I can take myself on that journey with her. So I can use my imagination and my sense of empathy to identify and start to build the character. You can do the same thing with your prospect. I can understand. I've never run a sales team, I've never been a vice president of sales, but I can imagine what it's like to have a bunch of people reporting up to you who you don't really have a ton of control over what they're doing. And you can only offer support to them, but you can't, you can't get, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make a drink. And then on top of that, have pressure from a board of directors and a CEO and the CFO and all of these people whose eyes are on you and you're getting pressed from both sides. I can imagine that kind of challenge and I can imagine those things and then I can go, okay, cool, so what would make, what would, what would, what would poke a hole in the, in the, you know, blow up mattress and kind of ease out some of that tightness? You know, how can I, how can I help that person feel less pain, less stressed, less those things and what would resonate with them? And if I can think about it from their perspective, then I can start to tell a story that they will then feel catharsis. Right? They'll start, they'll start to believe it. They can imagine themselves as the character that they're seeing on stage, but really good actors. Do you go, you identify with that person? I'm feeling it. I've been on that journey. Like when you cry at the end of Harry Potter, you're not Harry Potter. But.

So now on that, because I want to get into storytelling and crafting and experience next. But say you were to switch industries, how would, like, what would your steps be to kind of get into the head of the person you're now trying to sell to? Right. So you've been selling at Gong for a bit, but if you want to do a new industry, how would you like? You were able to describe my world very well, right. As a VP of sales, say you moved into something new. What steps would you take to get into the head of the prospect that you're now selling to so you can craft that story?

Well, hopefully whoever takes me on has a good marketing team, a good product marketing team that's got all of the use cases mapped out and understands the buyer Personas. And I could go to that. I could go and look, you know, at that information, just get a sense, just get a general sense for who the buyer is. And then from there I think you can. I would do something like at Gong, what I did is I just listened to a bunch of calls with VPs of sales and people who bought our product because we had a database of past conversations. It's actually part of our SDR training is on a weekly basis, we would go listen to a call that happened earlier that week with one of our account executives, and we would look at it from the perspective of what is this VP of Sale sales saying? What is he experiencing? Why do you think he said that? And we weren't looking at it from the AES perspective as how is he breaking this down? We were looking at it from what's the voice of our customer? And then how can we take this information and use it in our outreach? And that, that was, that was massive for developing my business acumen and that. I think that would be like the number one spot where I would go to is if it's, you know, it's, you know, when someone's playing a serial killer, they'll. They'll go interview real serial killers in prison or they'll read their biography. And, you know, if you, or you're playing a bird watcher, then you go read, why. Why do people get obsessed with watching birds? You go read about them and interview them and use your imagination and think, if I were in that person's shoes, why would I Do that. What would happen to me? What is this person's backstory? You know, you just start. Start. You start opening your mind up to being somebody else. Once you can do that, you can go, oh, yeah, I imagine how that's gotta be really tough.

Love it. I'm so glad you got to that point because, like, part of, I think of being a great actor or a performer is being able to put yourself into someone else's shoes, right? Because as the actor, you have to. You are being someone that you are not. But then that does carry over into sales, because if you can embody who they are and kind of feel that struggle and feel that pain and feel those ups and downs, it makes you a better performer and conveyor of what you're trying to accomplish in that meeting. So now, I love this. This is fun. I love this stuff. Good.

Okay. Well, the thing is, Katie, is that, you know, we're all human. We've all experienced the same emotions. I read in one of an acting book, like, at the age of 16 or the age of 18, you've experienced every emotion you're ever going to feel. You've experienced it in one capacity or another. You haven't experienced that specific situation, but you have experienced that emotion. Therefore, you should be able to play any emotion in whatever situation is thrown at you on stage. And I think it is the same thing with being empathetic in selling and understanding that a person has pains is, no, I have not. You know, if I'm selling to a cfo, I have not had to balance the books for a board of directors to prove that we are viable to IPO in two years and made those kind of choices. But I can empathize with that pressure. I can't empathize with the amount of work it takes. I definitely have had experiences where the numbers didn't add up. The data, you know, the data wasn't clean. Feeling frustrated, like, what is the actual answer here? So I could go, okay, then maybe I can help sell some software to the CFO that will help them make their spreadsheets easier to work with.

You know, it's so good. I want everyone that's listening right now, I want you to rewind 30 seconds and listen to the emotions that she listed. She didn't talk about a product. She didn't drop a feature. She said, pressure, fear, frustration, anxiety, ease. Those are the emotions that the individual. Right. The person you're selling to has. And she leans into that. That was phenomenal. Well done. It's almost like you've done this before. Crazy, right? So then, now let's talk, you know, crafting a good story, right? Of like, okay, all right. I'm starting to get the idea of the buyer. All right, I'm in. I'm in the mode now. How can we start making demos? Present, like, not presentations, wrong word. Performances, right? Because call man, I sit through demos. I am a VP of sales. I get targeted all the time, and I sit through demos, and I sit there. It's like, oh, my God, this is just awful. Like, I'm so bored. Like, I'm not getting anything out of this. How can we start making demos? Performances, right? They pull people in, they're interesting. We convey emotion. Like, open it up here. This is now the juiciest part. How can we do that?

So I think the first thing comes to editing your script. In speech and debate, you have 10 minutes for performance, and you can have as many words as you want or as few words as you want. And inevitably, what happens as you progress through the season is you tell the same story, but you cut out words in your script because you can tell the same story with less words, more emphasis, more pauses, more. I call it chewing on the word. But you can do all of these things vocally and physically and emotionally through building up. It's like music. Through building, musically building up this performance. So that's the first thing is what are you going to say? And how can you say it in as little words as possible and give as much breathing room to the story as you can? Because your audience needs to digest, and that means superfluous pieces of functionality or features. They can figure that out. But you got to let them sit in the car, right? You've got to let them feel the leather. You don't need to tell them that these are leather seats and it was made with this certain cowl that only grows on a mountain in Japan and blah, blah. Like, just let them feel it. And if they have a question about the leather, then you can tell them the story about the Japanese cow, and then you can serve them wagyu. So I think that's. That's part of it is let them sit in the space, let them feel it. And how do you do that? With as little words as possible. And then it's the storytelling. It's how do you. How do you tell a story with your voice? And how do you tell it with your face and with your body? And even though we're selling over zoom, you can still do that. And to me, that's, you know, Physical recall is. What does joy feel like in my body? How can I bring joy to my voice? Well, joy is an inhale that has a soft pause and then a soft sigh that comes out of it. And it's the corners of your mouth pulling up and your ears pull back, and there is a relaxed sensation as you exhale, and that's joy. And if I'm telling you the end, if I'm bow tying this, and this is the thing that's going to relieve all of that stress and get rid of the frustration, and it's going to solve your challenge. That's joy. So I tell it with joy, and it's playing the different notes. I really, truly think that acting, performance, all of it, it is musical. It is so musical. The more you think about that and you sit in it and you absorb it and get it into your body, the more you can just play with it when you're actually doing it on.

Stage, on zoom, it's so good. And it actually took me a second. This is going to be one I hope people go back and listen to, because there's things that you talk about and there's things that you also do. The power of the pause. You pause well and you let things hang and you don't rush through it to make the point. So much so that if we listen to the beginning of this. I think I was jumping in too fast in places because I didn't realize you had intentional pauses as you spoke through things. And now, like, you pause, you let things hang, and then you keep going and going through it. And I think salespeople mastering that pause. Right. Letting people hang on what just got said and let it sink in for a second is. Is phenomenal. And also, too, you're super descriptive with your language, even when, whether you're trying or not. Y' all go back and listen to her wagyu beef cow story. She could have just said, you know, you don't have to tell them where the cow is. But no, it's. You don't have to tell them that the cow was brown. How now? Brown cow on the side of a mountain in Japan with the grassy field like that. Descriptive language. What that does, too, is it shuts off the logical part of the brain. The more descriptive you can be with the language, it lights up different parts and gets people into a better mood and. And mode. So. Oh, man. Okay, I got. I got one more that I really want to touch on before we start to wrap up here. Right. Did you ever do any type of, like, Improv type work in like your speech or debate work, like really kind.

Of thinking on your toes in speech and debate? Not so much. There's, there's some, there's some things. But the most, the most improv I ever got was I was doing a competition for shows in San Francisco. It's this audience judge theater competition where playwrights submit scripts and then they compete head to head in this big competition. It's awesome. And I was hosting that. And so I'd go out and I'd improv all of, all of the warm up, the warm up, the audience stuff. And it was like always another host and I and we'd come up with a bit and then we take that bit and try to warm up the audience. And you never know because sometimes like, you know, is it the, is it the matinee or is it the late night crowd who already have had like five beers in a while, walking in a little bit too tipsy into the theater and you're like, okay, how, how are we going to get these people to go? Like, what's going to happen? So, yeah, so I've done, I've done a little bit of improv, but I wouldn't call myself an improv expert.

So then with this, and this will be the last question we wrap before we get into the final two. It's like, how can reps think a little bit quicker on their toes? Right? In order to be strong at improv, you have to be very quick, right? You have to read the situation, respond, right? But even the story you're telling earlier, if it's being on stage and reading your fellow actors and feeding and reading the crowd, you have to be able to quickly think on your toes. Like any tactics or tips or techniques on, like, how to get a little bit quicker on your toes as a salesperson?

Well, a lot of the sales tactics that we talk about, like mirroring, for example, that exists in improv. You don't know what to say. Just mirror that person. And also the idea of yes. And so if there's an objection, yeah, that does sound like it could be challenging. And here's a question, can you tell me more about that before you even go into your answer? So you can buy yourself time, but improv people just don't wake up one day being super great at improvising. It is practice. And there are a bunch of rules and there's a formula to being good at improv. It's not just yes and go for it. There's a rule about who's the weird character. How many weird characters can you have in a scene? How do you build a performance together? When do you tap out? When do you tap in? When do you switch? And the more you spend reading about and learning about improv, you realize that it's. It's musical too. It's like listening to jazz. There are rules in jazz. It's not just like, all these musicians came together and said, 1, 2, 5, go. So. So the first thing I would suggest to any salesperson is just practice, and it's okay to fail. And the best. The best artists, improv musicians, anybody has. Has. You know, they want to fail so that they can learn, so that they can build. So I would say that that's where I'd go. If you're trying to implement improv or being comfortable and get comfortable, being uncomfortable.

The party, have some fun, be. Be nerdy, be weird, be goofy. Like, have some emotion in all of this. Right? Like. Because it does come across. And actually for acting, especially over zoom, I don't want to give the answer, but hopefully. Know what I'm asking for here? At what level? Like, how should you feel about the emotion you're trying to portray? Right. Like. Because I think sometimes we think we're conveying something, but it's not actually coming across. Like how. I guess how hard you have to emphasize the emotion or the Persona that you're trying to have conveyed. Does that make sense? I'm not sure if I'm asking the question the right way.

It does. Well, I think the number one thing is that you don't have to be depressed to play a depressed person. You don't have to be angry to play angry. You have to create the concept. You have to create the vision. You have to show the person the cues of physically, what does the feeling look like? And the emotion will follow because if you can build it physically, your emotion will follow. But, like, the idea. You know, the idea, like Heath Ledger spending all this time trying to. Trying to live the life of a crazy person to play the Joker. That's like, actually, most. Most acting coaches will say that's a really bad idea. You don't need to do that. That's. That. That doesn't make sense because that's not acting. Like acting is. We're stepping into the imaginary world. So for me, what that looks like is if I'm thinking about how do I portray excitement or, you know, concern or empathy, what does that look like? And I think a lot about my face because, you know, for example, my life after. After SCR series. That video, the first time we shot something, I thought that I was conveying that I was really perky and fun and excited. I thought, I thought that that's what I was doing. I looked at it and I said, oh my gosh, I'm not smiling. I forgot to smile the whole time. So every time I've gone back and shot those, I like just don't stop and really like it hurt my cheeks. But I look so much more approachable and so much more perky because I actually conscientiously making a choice to smile throughout that entire presentation. So it's. I would go back and if you record your, your meetings with prospects, I would look and I would look at your physical tells. You can just put it on mute and say, what do I think? What do I think I'm telling my audience right now without listening to the words, just, what do I think is happening with me on screen? Is that what I want? No. Okay, great, let's change that.

I love. I think I'm going to get the book wrong, but I think it was Talking with Strangers from Mal Gladwell. He said, like, our facial expressions are so universal that you can watch an episode of Friends with the sound off on almost any continent and people will know what's happening in the scene because of how they use their facial expressions and their body emotions. Like, you can tell, okay, one of them is mad at the other one because this happened. And like that idea of almost like overacting to make sure it actually comes across because you said it right, you felt like you were, you felt it. But unless you're truly intentional about it, it may not have actually come across the way that you thought it would. Funny story, I have like this working with KD doc that I built right of like what it's like to work with me. And one of the things I have in there is explaining my facial expressions because I am a furrowed brow thinker, which can make me look like I'm angry, but really I'm just thinking, thinking. And I actually have to explain that to people. It's like, look, if you're talking and I'm like this, it's not because I'm doubting what you're saying, it's because I'm thinking and I'm listening. But like your face, this, this zoom environment, I've learned a lot about my face by the way. Like, man, like I really wear it. You really know what I'm thinking or feeling on my face. And now I can see my face all the time. So I got two last questions for you. Sarah, this has been amazing. It's exactly what I was hoping this was going to to be. So I got two final questions for you. So the first one, right, so we've been riffing on this for almost 40 minutes now, right? If there were three key takeaways that you wanted people to take from this conversation around acting and sales, what would those three things be?

Number one, Less words often can do more work. Number two, before you join the meeting, walk through the emotional state of your prospect and what you think they're trying to get out of this conversation so that you can tell a story they'll identify with. And number three, it is not just the words you say, but how you say them. So practice the delivery to tell the story the way you think it should be told.

I love it. I hope people got that word practice, because it's so important. It just. You can't do any of this without practice. So. All right, and last question, Sarah, the name of the podcast is Live Better, Sell Better, right? I have this weird idea that if we took better care of ourselves, if we got more out of life outside of sales, that our sales would actually improve as well. What would your live better advice be for people listening in terms of, you know, living energy, fulfillment, joy, like how to get more out of life, what would that parting advice be?

I'll tell you what I've done to help myself live better, and then you can decide if. If it'll help help you live better. Because I'm not a big fan of telling people to do stuff because it might not jive with them. I think you do. You, number one, you do. You cherry pick the things that will actually work for you as a human. So the first thing that I've done is delete social media from my phone as much as possible. And that has been very helpful because now if I'm reading something on my phone, it's probably the news or Wikipedia. I read a lot of random stuff on Wikipedia.

I believe it. I believe it.

So delete. Delete social media from your phone to when the laptop is shut, at the end of the day, it's done. And that means, for me, that means sometimes I hit a wall where if I did this fresh, I could get it done five times faster than if I forced myself to do it now. So I'll shut the laptop and go to bed and wake up early and get it done. I've been doing that since I was in college. It's like, I can't get this homework done now there's too much or even practicing speech. I would wake up at 4 in the morning and practice the speech at 4 in the morning versus trying to force myself to do it when I'm exhausted. And then I think the last thing is if you can make the weekends your own. So I don't want to think about work. I don't want to do work I don't want. That's not, that's not what my weekend time is for. It's to be with my family or to be with whomever. It's to make sure I get at least a couple workouts in. I think that being obsessed with your job to be excellent is good in that you want to be excellent, but then you have to hit pause and do other things. Because a life is more than what we do between nine and five. It's what we do in the hours after and the hours before and when we're retired and before we have this job. And it's so much more than just the job itself. So give yourself space to not work and not think about work.

I love it. You got, you. You gotta unplug in order to actually plug back in. And of course, just do you, girl. Just do you. Just do you. Just, just, just do you. So, Sarah, where can people get more of you? Because I'm not done. We gotta do a part two of this because there's still more things that I know we can cover here. So you'll be back, but where can people get more? Where can they follow? Where can they find you all the things?

I think the best place to find me is on LinkedIn. It's. I think it's like Splash. Sarah J. Brazier. Maybe it's S.J. brazier. I don't even know what my thing is. Just look me up on LinkedIn. My name is Sarah Brazier. I work at a company called Gong. I post on LinkedIn often. There's probably dozens of podcasts, if you search my name, that talk about tactics around prospecting, that talk about tactics around prospecting, and probably tactics around prospecting. This is the only one where we're talking about theater in depth and how.

Use the word prospecting until 49 minutes. That's what I'm talking about. So thank you so much, Sarah. This was great. It was very enlightening. I know people get a ton of value from it. I appreciate you. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Hell yeah.