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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill gives me a music trivia test that includes humming, we imitate our favorite purple prehistoric 90s children s character, and we go across the pond for a cerebral listener question.
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Welcome back to another episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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We re here every week, every Monday morning, to bring you a little bit of wisdom, a little bit of joy, and a little bit of humor.
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A little bit of humor.
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I m Bill Kasky.
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I m Brian Neal.
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We d love to have you invite us out to a gig.
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If you have something coming up, a retreat, a sales meeting, anything like that, we d love to talk to you.
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We do that almost all the time, so make sure you
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send us an email to listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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Also, you can go to advancedsellingpodcast.com, click on the products link, and there s a couple products here.
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One s called All In.
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We ve had it out for a couple years now.
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We keep, people still love that thing.
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And it s about three hours of audio of Brian and I taking you through the entire selling philosophy.
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So make sure you go do that.
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Brian, I ve got a music trivia.
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I love music trivia.
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You know this about me.
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I know you do.
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And I heard this song the other day.
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I ve asked about probably four or five people if they ve ever heard it.
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But the problem is that I m humming it.
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So it s unlikely, given my, you have an advantage because you re actually hearing the song.
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OK.
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So I m going to play.
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So I m assuming nobody get it right.
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Nobody gets it right.
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OK, good.
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But that s really funny.
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But again, that s humming.
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When people say, hey, you know the song?
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And every person will go, uh-uh.
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Nope, I don t.
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No, you don t.
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I ll do the whole thing for you.
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You don t know that?
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Nope.
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It s like that game Pictionary where you re trying to draw something for somebody to guess.
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And once it s done, you can see what it is because you draw it, they can t, and you just keep pointing at it.
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One of the best scenes ever when Harry met Sally.
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Baby fish mouth, baby fish mouth!
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I was like, baby fish mouth?
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No.
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So here is the song.
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Play a few seconds and see what you think.
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Is it in Austin Powers?
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It s the guy in Austin Powers.
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Probably.
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I think it s been in a lot of movies.
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It s not Neil Sedaka.
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It s the guy who s like him, right?
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Oh, it is.
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Oh, my gosh.
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He was a stud back in the early 70s.
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Right.
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So it s not Johnny Rivers.
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It s Wayne Newton.
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I m close.
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I m around that, though, right?
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I m all around the genre.
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This guy was a ladies  man.
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This guy was a ladies  man.
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Am I close?
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You haven t said anything for a while.
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Can you let it play a little longer?
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Oh my gosh, it s not Wayne Newton.
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It s, I m all around it, aren t I?
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It s Tom Jones.
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Yeah, boom, baby.
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So how were you humming it?
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Did you see?
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No, no, no, no, no, no.
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I just popped in my head.
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No, no, no, no, no.
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I m just kidding.
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Yeah, I heard it.
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And then it s a great song.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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You sure there wasn t a humming issue?
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Because a lot of people love that song.
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But I even said the words, it s not unusual to be loved by anyone.
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Oh, I would have gotten that for sure.
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Yeah.
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So I went on.
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But anyway, you got it.
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Took a while.
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Took longer than we had a lot of time for.
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So we re going to have to skip part of the podcast now.
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I had to move all around it.
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OK, here is another audio.
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This is from Mark from UK.
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He has a question, and we re going to answer it.
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Hi Brian and Bill, it s Mark here from the UK.
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I d just like to say I like your show, I ve been listening to you for a couple of years and picked up a lot of tips from you.
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I ve got a question for you, I wonder if you might be able to help.
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I work for a large Japanese company in the UK.
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And my responsibilities are to sell our electronic document management and archiving solutions.
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The thing that I have never managed to get around is the customer s perception that a document management system is a nice-to-have rather than an essential business tool.
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And I wonder if you can help try and give me some advice on how I can get around that sort of perception more than objection.
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All right, Mark from UK.
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Awesome question.
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Thank you.
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Really good question.
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We both really like the idea of perception versus objection.
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I think when we turn everything into an objection, we end up wanting to do battle, kind of like I did at the cigar store last week.
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Oh, yeah.
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That was great.
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That was good.
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That was a really good story.
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But this is a great question.
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So Brian and I have thought through this a little bit.
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We both meditated.
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We went out and worked out.
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We did.
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And had your voice playing in our ear for about an hour.
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Smoked a cigar and kicked a guy s butt.
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We didn t do that at the cigar store.
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We got into a fight, a little fight.
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No, we didn t do that.
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So Brian, what s your first thought?
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There s a lot here, yeah.
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And I m kind of going to go, I think we talked about this a little bit, is to acknowledge that perception is really important, I think.
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One question before that, though, Mark, is that in your head or their head?
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And one of the things that happens with things, these perceptions and things that we hear a lot from customers, is sometimes we begin to buy into them and believe them.
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I agree.
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And we let the market dictate what we believe.
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I agree.
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And I m wondering if that s happening with you, Mark.
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If you ve got to maybe do a little soul searching there and dig into your own head and say, what stories are you telling yourself based on what you ve heard from the group?
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And if you re starting to buy into that it s a nice to have versus a need to have or have to have, then you re probably dead on arrival.
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So my first bit of coaching would be take a good, hard look at your own thoughts about that and see if it s affecting how you re showing up.
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My guess is it probably is, and it s probably hard for you to see that.
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That s my first bit of observation.
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I think that s good.
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And this kind of goes along with that, but that I ve got a client in the digital marketing space.
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And when they go in and start working with a company to help them with their branding and messaging and all that,
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They spend probably 30 to 40 hours with interviews, with the CEO, with the technical people, the sales people, with customers.
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And they record everything.
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And then they transcribe everything.
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And then they pour through the results.
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And they come up with these key concepts, key themes, key words.
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And what they re really doing is studying the company.
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and then creating messaging around what they find.
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Most companies will not do that.
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They don t spend that kind of time.
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And so Mark, my question to you is, have you done a thorough analysis of what, not just the superficial issues are, need to have versus nice to have, but have you dug really deep into each of the benefits that a customer would derive having used you?
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What are the misconceptions?
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How have people changed the misconceptions?
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Dig really, really deep.
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I would even suggest you interview people who have been doing it for a few years.
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Sometimes when you interview them, it helps them too, because now we re on the same team.
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We re trying to figure out how to message better.
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So I would suggest you do some research inside your own company and get very clear.
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And you know, you ve heard a lot of time, Brian, where people say, well, I just want the one minute version.
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Just give me the one minute.
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But you have to study the 20 hour version to get to the one minute version.
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So be your own marketing agency here, Mark, and say, look, how would I message something?
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If this company brought me in to help us with messaging, how would I approach it?
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And go interview those people and study it, write about it, talk to clients who love it.
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And I bet you you ll come up with some themes.
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That s a great idea.
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Because that s where it all is.
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Because there are people, I m assuming you have a customer, at least one, I m assuming, right?
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Probably more than that.
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And that s where the answers are, isn t it?
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That s really good.
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We can just stop right here.
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Are we done?
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Anything else you want to talk about?
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And what we do is we take the company brochure, and we read it, and we say, well, that s a good point.
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We highlight it and say, OK, I ll go with that.
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And really, the value of what we do is so much deeper, usually, than just the superficial.
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It s really good.
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So I m taking a little personal inventory of my life as we sit here and talk about this, not in a philosophical way, but in a mechanical way.
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And I m thinking of this device I m holding, which is an iPhone 7.
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And I m looking at this Apple.
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This is a MacBook Pro thing right here.
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It s a very, very nice computer.
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I m thinking of my car sitting out in the parking lot that I absolutely love.
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I m thinking about my Beats headphones that I like to listen to because I have a deep bass.
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I m thinking about all these things that make me really, really happy, and none of them are a have to have.
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None of them are have-to-haves.
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The vast majority of stuff I have and that I own that I buy are not have-to-haves.
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They re nice-to-haves.
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Most of them are nice-to-haves, right?
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I believe it was Maslow who taught us his little hierarchy of needs.
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And it s pretty straightforward.
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And iPhones and document management systems and things like that are not on it.
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Yet we sell a lot of document management systems and a lot of iPhones.
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So I would challenge your idea that that s a problem, because most things
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are not have-to-haves.
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I agree.
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And Bill said this earlier on the pre-show.
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Most things are nice-to-haves.
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And so why not?
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So like, well, it s more of a nice-to-have versus a have-to-have.
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Like, yeah, so is just about everything in your office.
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Look around.
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You tell me in this office what s a have-to-have.
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And they re going to make up some stuff like, well, I have to have my computer.
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I ll say, why do you have to have that one?
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I ll say, well, that s what the one that gave me.
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I wouldn t say it in that voice, but I would not know that.
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That s my, uh, that s your stupid person.
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No, that s ignorant.
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I was going to say, that s my bill.
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I said to bill and bill goes, well, I don t need to have it.
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Everybody has one of those, don t they?
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What s that dinosaur?
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We have to ask Travis, because he grew up with that stuff.
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Who s that purple dinosaur you watched when you were a kid?
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Barney.
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That s right.
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See, Bill and I are too old for that, even my kids.
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So Barney, that s my Barney.
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Well, hello, Bill.
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You look awfully pretty today.
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Yes, everybody s got a Barney voice, don t they?
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Did I ever tell you about the... We sent a picture of my daughter Kara when she was like five years old into whoever does Barney, and they send back a video.
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Oh, yeah.
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I think I told you about that maybe.
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And they have the picture of the child superimposed in different places, like Barney s flying through the air, and you look back, and here s Kara in a...
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And every time Kara saw that, I think to this day, she just cried.
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She just cried.
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She hated it.
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Oh, she hated it.
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She hated it.
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She would cry and Barney, and they would put their name in like, hello there, Kara.
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Hey, girl.
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That was Barney.
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I ll see if I can pull that up.
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It would be a good one.
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Yeah.
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Well, I guess once you go through the process of really understanding your value, I think you have to figure out a way to educate your customer, not from educating from a sales standpoint, but just being a resource.
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And educating, whether it s webinars, whether it s articles, whether it s video, whether it s maybe interviewing people.
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who were like them, who thought it was just a luxury, but came to believe that it was really something vital to their business.
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So I think education is always the key to misperception.
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And, you know, Brian, in our business, training, coaching, there s misperceptions, misconceptions about it.
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And so we ve got to blast through some of those before we get to the real issues.
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So I think education is a key for you, Mark.
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I would also add that your sale is more of an aspirational sale versus a problem-solving sale.
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We talk a lot about solving problems here.
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When I hear, though, that this is a nice-to-have versus a have-to-have, that leads me to an aspirational.
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So what that means is, OK, here s what life is like now, and it s OK.
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I don t have any real issue with it.
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But here s what life could be like if I had this document management system that Mark sells.
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And I really have to demonstrate what that feels like to the person that I m talking to so they can feel it with me.
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Because if they can t feel it, they re not going to buy it.
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And if you go on this problem route, they re kind of like, well, that to me is the translation of I don t really have a problem, so I don t need what you re doing.
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But life could be so much better if you let it be, that sort of thing.
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Yeah, I think you re right, because I may not have any known pain or problem with what I have.
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So it s going to be when you come in and start saying, well, what are your biggest problems when it comes to document imaging?
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I might say, I don t know.
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We re pretty good there.
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Yeah, we re fine.
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What else you got?
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Yeah, exactly.
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Here s one that kind of fits in with all of these, but it s this idea, I am reading a book right now called The Art of Explaining.
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And in this book, this author talks about, his name is Leela Fever, he talks about how difficult it is for us to explain things.
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You ve probably been to a workshop where maybe it s a two-hour thing or a speech and you go in and you watch it and at the end you re like, what was that all about?
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I didn t understand where she was going or where he started.
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There was no context built.
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He talks a lot about context in the book.
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But one thing you might do is, in the book, he talks about A to Z. And the A to Z reference is people are starting at A, where they are totally uneducated and oblivious.
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Z are people like you and your technical people who understand it all.
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The problem is that if you re a Z trying to communicate with an A, you re screwed.
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You are.
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Because you cannot dumb it down enough.
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And that s a terrible way to say it.
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In fact, he does not use that in the book.
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Sure he doesn t, Bill.
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You can t.
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Sorry.
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It s too easy.
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But you might be talking to people at the halfway through, at the end.
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They understand a little bit of it, but not much.
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And you ve got to be conscious of how you explain things to people in ways they can grasp and understand.
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That s really good.
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Really good.
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Mark, last bit for me.
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Think of yourself as a guide down Bill s path.
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When you re thinking about your role in this, your role is not to prove, like Bill said, objections invite like a fight.
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Your role is not to prove that your solution is better and all that stuff.
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Your role is to guide them down this path.
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And some people may go quickly, some medium, some slow.
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It s OK.
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You just continually guide them down the path to what life could be like, and they will go with you at their own pace.
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Good.
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If you have something soon coming up that you d like to have Brian and I come out and participate in with you, a speech, an event, a training, a coaching session, make sure you email us at listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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And we re going to have lots of questions like Mark had today, either voice questions or written questions.
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So make sure you get those to us at listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com as well.
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And we ll catch you next time for the latest episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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Talk next time.
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See you.