Episode 298: How To Sell the Way You Buy with David Priemer, Cerebral Selling

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

While a vice president at Salesforce, David Premer had an epiphany during one of the company's high-pressure selling periods. The very sales tactics they were using were not working on him. Yes, the numbers still showed results, but through brute force rather than elegance and efficiency. David also discovered that his teams, they were spending far more time on leads that did not convert to sales than on those that did. His company and his entire profession was acting with more than enough effort and hustle, but without enough awareness and empathy. They were not selling the way people buy, which is how he came up with his book, Sell the Way You Buy. And it's far more than just putting yourself in your customer's shoes. More on that in a minute and a way for you to get a copy of David's book. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Chief Content Officer at Commonsku. Hey, have you heard about our newsletter called The Backpack? The Backpack is an email newsletter that we send to you on the first and third Friday of each month. It features trends in merch, top articles and podcast episodes, and global news impacting merch life. It's a great resource for your team. It's encouraging, inspiring, fun, and informative. You can see an example of an issue and subscribe at commonscue.com/backpack. Now back to our guest. David Premer has had 20 years leading top high-performing sales teams, including his tenure with Salesforce, where he was not only the vice president of commercial sales, he was the creator of the Sales Leadership Academy program. He's often referred to as the sales professor. Today we talk about cerebral selling, emotional intelligence, the salesperson's role, and a whole lot more. And we have a little surprise for you. For this week's episode, Ronnie Wright and the team at The Book Company have generously offered to send David's book, Sell the Way You Buy to the first 25 people to respond to this podcast episode. So if you're interested in David's book, email roni@thebookco.com, that's roni@thebookco.com, and let her know you love David's book. And the folks at the book company will get it sent right to you. Thank you, Roni, and the entire team at the book company for your generosity and support. Today's episode is brought to you by Commonskeeper, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more, visit commonsku.com. Now here's my chat with David Premer. David, great to have you here.

Yeah, Bobby, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me.

You bet. Sell the Way You Buy is the title of your book and a phrase you use often. What's the most obvious way we buy that should make an impact on the way we sell?

Yeah, well, so it's funny, people always ask me, they're like, what does sell the way you buy mean? And I said, like, it means a couple things. Number one is it's this idea of, like, the golden rule. As salespeople, sometimes we use tactics with our customers would just never work on us if we were on the buying side, right? But the second, and kind of to your point, the most important part of it is to be really curious about, like, the pathways and mechanisms by which humans make purchasing decisions, because often these pathways are like hidden and unconscious to us, and they are all emotional and feeling-based. So the idea of selling the way you buy is to kind of get into like the science behind how people make purchasing decisions so that we can align our sales motions.

Speaking of that, you called your company Cerebral Selling, which I love. And one of the first comments into— funny, it's— yeah, it seems like a juxtaposition or a contrast, right? But one of the first comments in your book, and a strong premise, is quote, "As it turns out, human beings make decisions based on one thing: feelings." Now I have to end quote, but I have to admit I was surprised and delighted to find the juxtaposition between cerebral and feeling. Is there a dichotomy in selling? Rational buying versus emotional buying?

It's all emotional buying. Like even the idea of like buying rationally. It's funny, I remember seeing an interview with the CEO of Costco and he said, you know, you go into a Costco and it looks like crap. There's like, you know, there's like pallets and shit all over the place. And he's like, do you know how much money it costs to make it look that rustic? You know? So when you walk into a Costco, you think, oh, like I'm getting a good deal because I'm being sensible and I'm buying in bulk and everything's just on these big pallets and shelves and stuff like that. But really like that, even that logical decision is an emotional decision, you know, that, that you're making. So it's all emotion at the end of the day.

I couldn't agree more. I love asking the C-suite, particularly finance folks, like your last purchase, home or car, was it emotional or was it, was it rational? And if it's a car and they go the, uh, sporty route, that's an emotion. And if it's a car, they go the safety route, that's an emotion too. So you're exactly right. I love that. Um, in your book, you cite the 2018 Salesforce report that listed the 10 top skills of a good salesperson. At the bottom of the list was demonstrating ROI. That stunned me. I thought I would find it at least in the top 5. How do we make sense of that?

Yeah, well, it was— so the, the survey, they asked, what are the things that have an extreme or substantial impact on your ability to convert customers. Okay. And the ROI was at the bottom. And this is really interesting because it's— even though I wrote the book, you know, now it's 3 and a half years ago. I mean, I wrote it 4 years ago, it's been out 3 and a half years. What you're seeing now, especially in the tech industry, is that, you know, used to be people, you know, had money, they would buy things like, okay, I'm not really doing the calculation in my head. And nowadays, you know, people are being a lot more scrutinous in terms of where they spend their budget. And so salespeople are getting really focused about how they put together these ROI analyses and, you know, how the payback is going to be. But I have clients that have, let's say, software products that save their company's money or make them money. They run these pilots, they bring the company a bucket of cash, and they say, here, Bobby, like, we made this for you. And the customers still don't buy. And so that reinforces this idea that it's a lot more emotional than maybe what we thought. And, you know, the Economy is now, you know, bringing to light some of the challenges that kind of always existed. But, you know, again, the idea is like, why is ROI, you know, number 10? Is that's not how people buy. And it's funny. I'll give you an example of these kind of ROI analysis because every salespeople, every salespeople can often relate to this. So let's say you're talking to a customer and you kind of put a price on the table and now you kind of have to justify that price. So you say, I'm going to put together a business case. For you. You know, typically our customers see a return of A, B, and C, but I'm going to use some of the numbers that you've given me. I'm going to make some assumptions that you buy into, and I'm going to, you know, present this ROI. And before I present it to Bobby, I look at the thing and I'm like, okay, even with the numbers Bobby gave me, this is going to be like a pretty fast payback. I don't, I don't think Bobby's going to believe that this thing is going to pay for itself in 3 months. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to make some of the numbers even more conservative. I'm going to change some of the numbers so that payback feels a lot. And I just stop right there. Like, what the hell are you doing? Okay, now all you're doing is you're changing the numbers to make that return on investment one thing which is believable, because it doesn't matter what the ROI is. The only thing that matters is whether the customer believes that what I said is going to happen is going to happen. And belief is not an objective statistic. It's a subjective feeling. And so at the end of the day, like, why is ROI number 10? ROI is not enough. It's just simply not enough. That the feelings, the experience, all that kind of stuff that comes before it is, is, is more critical. And you know what number 1 on that list was?

Listen, I do, I do, but I want to give a dramatic pause.

Yes. Yes. So you, so you were successful. You're right. It's like, it's listening. And, you know, I've written about this, like, why is listening so important? It's because it creates that experience for the customer. People like to be listened to. People like to share their opinions, you know. And then if I, of course, if I listen, I can synthesize what you said back to you and create a much better buying experience and message that's aligned. So that's why listening is number 1, ROI number 10.

I want to talk about listening in just a second, but I had one more question about ROI. You, you spent some time talking about the distinction between value and ROI. Can you unpack that just briefly?

Oh yeah. So in, in the book, and this is the simplest diagram that there is, imagine ROI is like this circle, like that's the, you know, that's what, that's what ROI is. Value is a bigger circle that gobbles up and encompasses ROI. It's like our value is the sun and, you know, Earth is ROI. And the idea is if I have a good return on investment, then that adds a degree of feeling to you, like, oh, I'm being smart, I'm buying something that's going to, you know, have this kind of, you know, return and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, when you think about why people buy things, there's this old saying in the, in the tech industry: no one got fired for buying IBM. IBM, right? So what does that mean? Does that mean IBM has the best solution? Like, no, it just means that IBM is the solution that I'm not going to get fired for, which I value my job You know, so when you think about why people buy, for example, I spent 5 years at Salesforce. Why do people buy Salesforce? Is it the best software in the world? Like, I don't know, maybe, maybe not, you know, but it's ranked number 1. So when I buy Salesforce and I pay more for it than any other solution, comparable solution on the market, right? I am buying the feeling of buying like that number 1. So again, like that, that feeling of value transcends the ROI as a part of it. But when I buy things, I'm always buying those feelings and feelings of value. People value all sorts of different things. And so that's what, that's what we need to sell. But that's why it's— there's two different things.

So powerful. It's for our organization, so powerful because brand and community is such a big part of what we do. And that's part of the reason that, you know, all about that. But one more question I had that's specific to this audience. So we— and you talked about this in your book— we're in an industry with a dizzying number of product options, literally in excess of a million products. How does the paradox of choice fit into the selling equation? I know I just asked you a really big question, but you talk about this a lot, and I think that's one of our unique problems in our business.

So one of the things that I often talk a lot about is to break out of that sea of sameness, because yeah, there's a million different solutions, and everyone's always thinking as a customer, well, why should I go with Why should I go with you? Like, even we were talking earlier in my kind of promotional instance where I needed to get some t-shirts made up and some hoodies and some pens for my business. I could go anywhere. I should, you know, like Vistaprint seems easy enough. I, you know, I got my hoodies made over here. Like, it doesn't matter to me. Everyone has the same shirt, the same pen, or what— like, what's the difference, right? So one of the things I talk about, especially nowadays, is differentiating yourselves by really focusing on the, the problem in a much more differentiated way. So like, as an example, you could argue I'm stuck in the sea of sameness. I sell sales training, keynotes, leadership coaching. Like, there's a million people that do what I do. So why would you decide to work with me? Certainly when you read the book and you say, okay, well, David has a different approach or take on this kind of thing, that makes sense. But, you know, oftentimes, let's say when I'm talking to like a sales leader and I say, like, do you ever listen to your sales reps' phone calls, like especially the young, enthusiastic ones, you know, because oftentimes in sales you have these young, enthusiastic sales reps that are calling on more senior-level buyers because we tell them to call high, whose job they've never done. Like I say, almost it's like my kids when they're about to hit me up for something that they think I'm already going to say no to. That's the way your reps sound on the phone, and it's very off-putting to the customer. It doesn't matter. Like you could arm them with the best pitch and the right words. And they sound scared. And I know this because when I used to run small business sales for Salesforce, I had tons of young, enthusiastic sales reps who struggled to make that connection. And so you see what I'm doing here, like, this is all true what I'm just telling you, but now I'm getting into like a problem in a very— hopefully you find unique and differentiated way. And I'm seeing something that maybe not a lot of other people in my position are talking about or saying.. And now you think, oh yeah, maybe this guy's onto something because he kind of tapped into a bit of like an unknown, unspoken problem that like he sees stuff in our business, right? And so when we think about breaking out of the sea of sameness, I'm a big fan of trying to be prescriptive when it comes to— you talk about like the paradox of choice, right? It's like, okay, like here's— if you have a sales team that looks like this, if you sell these kinds of products, like here are the top 3 plays you need to be running now. And it can't be the same thing that everyone else is saying. Otherwise, you just, you just sound like everyone else. So that prescriptive differentiated approach is the key.

So having opinion, and let's stay on this sales roles or salespeople for a second, because you've managed thousands of salespeople, you've managed lots of organizations. In, in your book, you said prescriptive sellers sell with conviction. They provide clear, insightful recommendations to their customers, and in many ways are able to create intoxicating certainty around the buying process. A client of ours once told me— she is a very distinguished, seasoned vet who is, who is working with a bunch of salespeople all over in terms of range and experience— and she once told me that the most common problem she saw with salespeople was a lack of confidence. And is that part of what you're meaning, is not knowing enough, not having that confidence to bring force when you say prescriptive selling?

So, so two things. So when we talk about prescriptive selling, what we mean is like, I My job as the seller is to make the job easy for you as the buyer by saying, here's the problems I typically see, here's how you can solve them. You know, like, I'm, I'm conveying that sense of confidence. So that's what I mean by, uh, being prescriptive, like when it comes to next steps or how to evaluate vendors. Like, I want to help you with that because I know you probably don't buy the thing that you're buying from me every day. When it comes to confidence, that's different because what happens is in a lot of organizations, we have— we hire salespeople And then we give them like, here's the deck, here's the pitch, here's the whatever. And the stuff that we're giving them sucks. And, you know, it's, it's like it's low conviction, low power. It's very product-focused. It's very us-centric. Yeah. And what happens is they have this like little crisis going on in their head saying like, I feel a little gross doing this. Like, this feels like kind of a generic kind of sales pitch. So I'm going to try to go out and do it. But I feel like a little gross. And so they're not able to execute that tactic with conviction. If we started a company together and we said, here's what we're going to do, we're going to cure cancer in children and we have this amazing product, like you would be able to call with super high conviction because you believe so deeply in the value of that product. Yeah, but for most of us, we just sell like regular stuff. Like in all, we all do. Like I do as well. We sell regular stuff. So it becomes difficult for us to manifest confidence in a regular thing when the plays that are being put in our hands are old school and generic and things we don't believe in.

Right.

Let's talk a little bit more about the sales role because you said something I really appreciated, and that is sales is an emotionally charged role. What did you mean by that?

Like selling, like as a salesperson?

Salesperson. Yeah. Salespeople.

That's—

that was a very supportive comment. You can tell you've worked with a lot of salespeople, but you were in another interview and you talked about being such an emotionally charged role. We don't typically attribute salespeople with emotion, and I think that's a very bad misnomer.

Oh yeah, well, it's funny, I was, I was talking about this very thing with a client the other day because they said, you know, look, it's been, it's been a tough go, you know, at our company. It's been a tough quarter, you know, the economy's tough. Like, what, what advice do you have, you know, when I'm now getting on the phone with Bobby and we're talking about, you know, how am I going to sell him stuff, and I kind of feel a little bit defeated? Like, what, you know, what should I do? And I thought this was really great because the reality is You just like, you just have to shake it off because, and here's the thing, when I, let's say I give a talk or I'm on this podcast and I, after we get off the podcast, I'm like, oh shoot, you know what I should have said when Bobby asked me this question? I should have said this instead. No one knows that except for me, right? So now I'm emotionally compromised and encumbered by the fact that I thought that I should have said something different. Meanwhile, Bobby doesn't know. So I told a story about how when again at my companies, sometimes it's the new salespeople who are unencumbered by history and knowledge. Interesting. Who, who do the best. And I learned this from my kids. My kids are older now, but like when they were little, you know, little kids ask you for things that you're like, of course not. Like, why would you even like a handful of chocolate chips before bedtime? That's ridiculous. And I, so I wrote this article, it was called Be a Better Negotiator by Forgetting Everything You Know. And it's specifically related to this concept that I found that my, my kids are great negotiators and kids are in general great negotiators because of course they're relentless, but they don't know what a good deal is. So they're like unencumbered by knowledge, you know, versus an experienced sales rep who knows that typically when I sell this product and service to these kinds of companies, I end up giving like a 20% discount. And I'm encumbered by that knowledge. Meanwhile, when I speak to Bobby, he doesn't know about any of that, right? So if I just act as though like 5% is the deal of the week, then why would he not believe that? And so what I found was I had these new sales reps who were actually being able to pull higher numbers, get fewer discounts than the experienced reps because they didn't know any different. They just acted as though like 5% was the deal of the week, right? So I say, you know, 100%, like Sales is like an emotionally charged profession. There's highs, there's lows. You're going to lose more than you're going to win, right? But there's rewards. This is why we pay people who do sales really well a lot of money and not like high school students, minimum wage to do this really hard job, because we need to weather that emotional journey. But, you know, oftentimes like the best thing is you got to just, you got to shake it off and just go into the next call., you know, in a completely fresh mindset.

I just heard someone refer to this as the second arrow. The first, like, the first, first arrow you get is the thing you got hurt. It was the rejection or whatever. But then we tend to nurse the second arrow, which is, oh, I did it again. You know, it was that kind of experience, that experienced seasoned vet. That's so true. Let me ask one more thing about listening because I think this is so potent. In your book, you cite the 2018 Salesforce report, as I mentioned, and next you cite the Gong.io study, which revealed that top-performing sales reps spend only 46% of their time on customer calls speaking compared to the bottom 20% who speak 72% of the time. And you list 6 helpful listening tips in your book. What's been most helpful to you to cultivate this listening lifestyle as a rep and a professional?

Well, so, you know, the first thing when it comes to behavior modification is just being conscious of the behavior in general. So that's why tools like Gong, and there's others like that, that can kind of listen to your calls and say, all right, how much were you talking versus someone else? You know, they can even plot out like a picture, like a graph of your call. And it's not just how much you're talking, but when you see, okay, there was this big chunk where I was on a monologue for 16 minutes, like maybe it was a 1-hour call, but then I spent 16 minutes on this monologue. So part of it is just the pattern recognition, like, oh my gosh, yeah, I'm, I'm speaking a lot. And for many years I would have like a little sticky note underneath my monitor that just said, like, listen, like a lot of reps have that, you know, just like a little device that helps remind them. So these tools and devices are super helpful. The other part is to go into these conversations prepared to say, okay, if I don't come out— so one of the exercises I talk about in the book is thinking about, okay, what would have to happen on this discovery call such that if I didn't achieve these objectives, the call would be a failure, right? So I call this like the hashtag fail exercise, but the idea is to think about what you want the end result of the call to be. So if you have a list of things that you want to get out of that conversation, by being mindful of that list as you kind of work through the conversation, it will automatically put you kind of in this default mode of like listening because you, you need to extract these insights in order to make sure the call was valuable. So just a couple simple examples of how you can be a better listener.

I love that. Have you been able to— this is— we have I have a couple more questions in our last time, last minutes here together. But if you've been able to codify what makes a good salesperson in 2 or 3 simple points, and I know I'm asking you to unpack what you wrote a whole book about, but what is it to you? I mean, you've hired and recruited lots of salespeople. What do you think is the one or number one or number two trait?

So I'm encumbered by my own knowledge because those traits significantly differ based on the type and stage of company that you're at. However, if you were to ask me, I did write this post about the 3 top 3 personality traits or skills that high-growth reps need to have, and I call them like the 3 C's. They're like creativity. So like it's never going to be as easy as you think to sell something. And if you're just thinking very linearly, then you're going to get stuck. Coachability, because you need to be able to kind of learn and you need to be able to have people, you know, kind of give you feedback and insights to kind of help you grow. And you need to be open to those things. So creativity, coachability. Now I'm like, I'm like forgetting what this, what the last one is. But like those two at the very least are really important as I try to find the last one.

Yeah, no, no, I totally understand. I get it. I actually sent, for those that know me, they know I sent David like 100 questions. So I'm getting him to go like go all over the place.

You got it. I got it. Conviction. That we just talked about it.

Thank you. Conviction. For our industry, I would add there's a fourth C, which is curiosity, because of, because we sell such a wide variety of things. But thank you for that. It's very helpful. Last few questions are about you, David. You have a chemical engineering background.

How does that affect the way you think? Well, it's funny. After many years, I wrote a blog post just recently, actually. It's called 6 Critical Sales Skills I Learned from Being a Research Scientist. Yeah, and I 100% use all of those tactics in my normal everyday life. Like, the things I talk about are things like explaining complex things simply, because what I learned is, being a research scientist, it doesn't matter how much stuff you know, you always tend to sometimes overestimate your audience's level of familiarity with what you're talking about. And so being able to distill something down and explain it simply— someone asked me the other day, I was doing a session on how I built my business, and someone asked me a question that completely caught me off guard, which is, how do you become such a good writer? And it caught me off guard because I'm like, I'm not a good writer. Like, I, I had bad grades in, in English and stuff in school. I was not a good writer. And then I remembered, yeah, I've written like a book and I've written a ton of stuff. So the, the idea though is— comes back to this explaining complex things simply. If I understand something at a foundational, fundamental level, that makes it easy to explain it in simple terms. So that was it. Taking good notes, number, you know, like scientists take good notes. Having conviction, being really detail-oriented is super important. Being curious, scientists are very curious. And then kind of as we've been talking about here, favoring evidence over hunches. So one of the things even I do in my practice, even though I have tons of conviction, is I say like, I don't want you to just do what I'm telling you because I told you to do it. Like, I want you to truly believe that it's going to work because I proved to you using research and studies and data that like this tactic is way better than anything that you're using already.

Yeah, yeah. Something else you wrote about that I think would be so insightful for us and encouraging, a part of your personal journey is you were diagnosed at 36 with cancer. You wrote about it on your blog and you wrote about mindset. There was a study in there. Can you share what you learned from that experience as we close here? Um, What did you learn and how does it relate to your work that you're doing now?

Yeah, well, you know, it relates to my work in a couple of ways. You know, we talk about things like certainty, you know, human beings. And it's funny because I talk about the cancer journey and I actually learned quite a lot about sales, as I say, from the cancer journey. You know, human beings crave certainty. If you get diagnosed with something or you're waiting for an X-ray or blood test or whatever, your mind starts to race with all the things that, like, even you go on a date and the person doesn't call you back the next day, you're like, what could this be, right? Human beings hate uncertainty because our brains are prediction machines that are designed to keep us safe, right? So, you know, I say that as it relates to selling, the more we can create certainty in the mind of our buyers, the more successful we'll be at selling. And that was like one of the big lessons learned. But to your point about mindset, you know, the study that I talk about in this particular post is a study, and this is kind of like, how do I say this, I wish these studies were a lot more definitive. But like, for example, when you're diagnosed with cancer, a lot of things go through your mind. Everything from like, oh, I'm gonna crush this, like, I'm gonna, you know, F cancer, I'm gonna beat it, to like, oh my gosh, I'm gonna die, you know, and then, and everything in between. And what they find is that the better the mindset that you're in, the, the better your prognosis is going to be. And when I was going through my diagnosis, I reached out to a bunch of different kinds of healthcare practitioners just to, you know, try to give myself an edge. Yeah. And I remember visiting this Chinese medicine doctor and, and I still remember to this day I said, you know, what's the secret? And he said, the number one thing, happiness. He says, when you're happy, your body is strong and it can fight. You know, when you're unhappy, and we see this a lot when people who are, let's say they're depressed, you know, their vitals go down, their metabolism goes down. Even though like health-wise, you know, physically they might otherwise be okay. And so that mindset as it relates to health, cancer, selling, the mindset you bring to your calls, to your customer interactions is extremely powerful. Both, and by the way, I'm not saying like false bravado and like tons of conviction, even simple things like being able to, for example, allow your customers to say no. Like not bringing that confirmation bias that you're gonna for sure buy something from me. If I'm calm, I call this— this is horrible, but I do talk about this in my training. I call this like the Ricky Bobby principle from Talladega Nights. It's like when he's driving with the Cougar in the car and like, if you're calm, that magnificent beast will be calm too. And so, so I think about the, the mindset that we bring. If we're calm, if we're chill, if we bring high conviction, if our customers see us as people who are valuable, knowledgeable, but not forcing them to do anything, then the chances of them buying something from us are very high, right?

So that mindset's really important. What a beautiful way to end our chat, David. Thank you for spending this time with us. I love it. I've enjoyed my time with you. Thank you for the work. We'll link to the book, and I think we'll be talking again soon, my friend.

I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure, Bobby.

Thanks for having me. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of SKUcast. Be sure to keep up with our latest content by subscribing to SKUcast on iTunes or to our blog at community.commsku.com. Until next time, friends, thanks so much for listening.

Mm-hmm.