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Welcome back to the Advanced Selling Podcast.
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Brian Neal, Bill Kasky with you.
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We are here every, every week, usually on a Monday, and we are the longest running sales training podcast, podcast history.
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There it is.
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There it is.
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There it is.
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There it is.
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We are delighted that you re here.
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We love the fact that you email us.
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You can email us at listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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We also love the fact that you re a member of the LinkedIn group and that you communicate with us there.
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We ve got a poll that we did that I want to share some of the results with.
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So generally, we just love you.
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That s all.
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Yeah.
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We love our listeners.
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And it s great that we keep getting new.
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I got some notes this week.
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I think I m sure a lot of times people hit us up directly on LinkedIn individually.
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But people saying, I just found you.
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I love the fact that people are still, after 16 years, just finding us.
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So tell everybody about us.
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I heard something.
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This is arrogant to think.
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Oh, it s not.
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I was listening to a guy who was on a big podcast.
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Doesn t matter what it is.
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It was a big podcast.
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He was a guest.
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And he was a sales guy.
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And he has a product that is a social media product for businesses.
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It s not just for salespeople.
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I can t remember his name, to be honest with you.
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But he said, I was, the host said, how d you come up with this idea?
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He goes, well, I was listening to a podcast one day.
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And I am convinced, because of what he said and how he said it, I know it was one of our podcasts.
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No kidding.
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I just know it.
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And I m going to reach out to him and say, hey, by the way.
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I should.
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Yeah.
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Well, maybe he can come on, because he was a good guest.
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But is that arrogant?
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I mean, is that?
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No.
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To me, it s like.
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I remember the episode, because he started talking about the exact thing that we talked about.
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There you go.
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Yeah.
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And he was in sales at the time, so it would have made sense.
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Yeah, flattering.
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I love it.
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No, we ll take it.
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We re going to talk about the poll here in a minute.
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But before we do, as you know, listeners know we love music here.
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And I know at one point, we pulled out a unique solo element of songs.
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I think we looked up some Marimba.
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solos and songs.
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And there s a song, Moonlight, or was it by?
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Moonlight by Starbuck.
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By Starbuck, yeah.
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And so I was listening to another song and realized, are there any good trombone solos?
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That was a marimba solo.
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And I thought, are there any good, well, I found two just in my Spotify, just listen, that you probably never even thought about that I think are good trombone solos.
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The first one you ll know when I play it.
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The second one was very, very unique trombone solo.
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So here s the first one.
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You ll hear this.
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I ll get this all cranked up here, playing this on my phone.
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So it sounds a little tingy.
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You know this song, don t you?
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Oh, yeah.
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And there s a little nice trombone solo.
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That is a good one.
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Right here.
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Here we go.
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That s great.
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There is also a trombone solo, believe it or not, in a Disco Donna Summer song.
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I m Coming Out.
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There s a trombone solo in the song.
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Which I never ever realized because it s kind of at the end sometimes.
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Yeah, I can t remember.
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So if we have any former trombone soloists, this one.
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There s a trombone solo later in the song, isn t there?
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So there s a lot of trombone in that song.
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So if anyone else knows some famous trombone solos, we d love to hear them.
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Fact checker Doug, if you could look up, fact checker Doug, be kind to find us a top 10 trombone solos in a modern music era.
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We d love to hear it.
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I had a, I had a funny day.
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I m coaching this lady from England and she s a, she s a PI.
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I think she s a listener.
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I don t know.
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Yeah.
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And uh, she s a young hip, wonderful, beautiful, just kind of has the whole package and is really good at what she does.
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And,
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And so sometimes when I m on a coaching call, I ll play some music as they come in through the board, the audio board here.
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And I was playing Styx.
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I don t know whether it was Lady or you know, you know Styx.
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And I said, I thought we d start today with a little Styx.
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She goes, who?
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I said, Styx.
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I said, have you not heard of that song?
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She goes, no, never heard of Styx before.
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Because sometimes I ll say something to a person from Australia or UK, hey, have you ever heard of Coca-Cola?
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They re like, well, of course we ve heard of Coca-Cola.
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I d do the same thing.
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But musical, maybe bands just don t transfer as well.
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I don t think they do.
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I don t think they do.
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I ve had the same thing.
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And I do always ask, Eric Kersey, like, have you guys heard of McDonald s?
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I ve heard of McDonald s.
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Yeah.
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If it s too obvious.
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All right.
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So you want to get to the poll?
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Yeah.
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Poll time.
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Pollster.
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Hot polls on LinkedIn.
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Polls are hot.
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They are hot.
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And we talked about this here in the last episode.
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And so we thought we d try it.
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We got, I don t know, 40-some, 50-some responses.
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And here was the question, what is the number one thing that you are working on in the next six months?
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The number one skill that you feel like you need to get really a lot better at?
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And there were four choices, branding,
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personal branding, being more inspired about my business, controlling the sales process better, or generating more leads.
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And I will give you the number four answer, the one that nobody wanted to improve on, and it s your and my favorite topic, is your personal brand.
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I don t know what to think about that.
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I don t either.
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I don t know what to think about that.
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And it was, like, really low, wasn t it?
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Didn t you tell me?
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It s, like, 3%?
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It was 3%.
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It was, like, far below.
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Actually, basically 1 and 1 half people.
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Oh, man, I don t know, people, listeners, come on, come on.
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That s a long term play, but boy, you got to do it.
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Gats to do it.
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Gats to do it.
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I don t know what it is.
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Yeah, I don t know if if we re shy.
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It s more than just us talking about.
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I hear it all over.
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So it s not just Bill and Brian, but I know.
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I don t know.
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I m close to giving up on it, because I feel like, well, if nobody wants it, why are you wasting your breath with it?
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But I ve seen it work, and I ve seen it make a huge difference, and I know you have too.
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Huge, huge, huge.
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So important.
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So important.
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I think it s going to get more important, because people are getting more used to finding things and seeing things about us before they ever meet us.
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And that s where they find it.
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And so what does your brand say about you and us and it and them?
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So we ll figure it out.
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OK, so the other three, do you want to take a guess at what the number one?
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I do.
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Desire?
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Because I think I know.
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I think the number one skill that people want to improve upon is lead generation.
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That s right.
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41% said lead generation.
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And I think sometimes we don t think of lead generation as a skill, but it really is a master skill that has a lot of other little mini skills within it.
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Yeah.
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So usually we think of skills as the, you know, asking the right question and closing skills and probing skills and things like that.
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We don t think of lead, but lead generation to me is a cluster of skills that all together can make a huge difference in your success.
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And I wonder on this is funny or interesting.
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Here s the interesting thing about that score for me is
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We ve both been doing this a minute, you know, been in sales, been doing sales coaching.
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It s always been an issue.
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Always.
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It s never gone away.
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This whole lead generation leadership s always wanted it better.
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More people want it better.
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More makes me scratch my head and think, are we making any progress here?
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Are we seriously?
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I m like, is this just like a perpetual problem that we have?
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Just like, you know, just, um, you know, kind of like politicians just always fight and don t get along.
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It s just part of the nature of what we do.
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Or have we made progress and we re just continuing to try to improve upon that progress?
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I don t know the answer to that, but that s where my head goes.
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That s a great question.
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Yeah, because any poll that I ve done in my side of the business over the last 10 years, lead generation or opportunities or whatever, however you want to call it, comes at the top or near the top.
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So this is not something that s going away.
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I think what s happened is that it used to be we might have sent out 5,000 faxes and got 1% back.
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Now, we don t do that anymore.
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So there s a whole other level of technology that we need to understand when it comes to lead gen.
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People are less accessible.
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less accessible now.
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Your prospects, they don t answer the phone.
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There is no phone.
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I mean, I think the world has shifted to where what used to work in lead gen doesn t work so well anymore.
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So again, it kind of raises to the top of what we do.
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Absolutely.
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Absolutely.
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So the second one, do you want to talk a little bit about each one of these?
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What was number two?
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Number two was,
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managing the process better, controlling the sales process.
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And that s, that was pretty close.
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Those two was like 40, 40, 41 was number one, 30%.
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That one I love.
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And I see a, um, I definitely see a need for improvement there, um, across the board.
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This, this is a, and this to me is a big shift in selling in general, where in the past, when we were relationship oriented, uh, we really defaulted to the other person in the spirit of relationship.
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So we, we didn t want friction in a relationship.
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So instead of me saying, bill, here s what we re going to do.
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And I m the salesperson, I would say, bill, what would you like to do next?
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Trying to be like, you know, accommodating and things like that.
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And that has gotten us in a lot of trouble doing that.
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It s created this distance between us and the buyers and gotten away from us controlling the process.
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And really, if the process is valuable, we shouldn t control it.
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It should be, it s not even control of process.
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It s like command, it s command demand.
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Like this is what you have to do.
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In other words, if I wanted to,
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If I wanted to lose 10 pounds around my midriff, and I m going to a trainer or a dietician, they re not going to say, well, how would you like to do this?
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Well, I d love to keep eating french fries and steak.
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They re going to know, here s what you re going to do.
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For three days, they re going to prescribe the process.
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See that?
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And it s valuable.
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That s a great, I was just talking to a guy that I work with a little bit.
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I m a client of his.
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And he was telling me about a trainer up in Carmel, which is a suburb of Indianapolis.
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And he works with high potential athletes.
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So football players and tennis players who have college ability and skills.
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And he works with them, getting them in shape and really works on the whole body.
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And I ve heard of this gentleman who knows him saying, if you miss one practice in the first month, you re out.
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He gives you your money back, and you re out because he only wants committed people.
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And I thought, you know, we should probably have him on the podcast.
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That would be kind of interesting because he s
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He s energetic, I ve seen a couple of his videos.
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The point there is that how tolerable is he?
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Not very.
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Not very, right.
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How tolerable should we be if the sales process gets off track because the customer says, oh no, I want you to send a proposal now before you talk to anybody.
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If we say yes and it s off track, who do we have to blame?
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Ourselves.
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No one.
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No one.
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Yeah.
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And is their process valuable to them?
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Probably not.
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Probably not.
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No.
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They miss a lot by managing their own process because they don t get to see as many people maybe and engage as much.
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They try to keep sellers at arm s length.
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It s a bad, bad deal.
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So step number one here is I think you have to obviously have one.
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And I m also amazed at how many companies I go into and they don t have one.
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I just saw a statistic the other day.
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In fact, I m writing an article for LinkedIn that
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82% of CEOs, there was 3,000 CEOs studied in the last six months.
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82% or some high percent said, we either have no sales process or a poor sales process.
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Wow.
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It s like, really?
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82%?
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That s like 8 out of 10 companies have either none or poor to average sales process.
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Wow.
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Wow.
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And you probably have seen that when you go into a company before you work.
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You say, hey, show me your sales process.
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Well, you know, it s around here somewhere.
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I don t know.
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Gosh, I tell you, we re going through a process.
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I mean, I don t know if I mentioned it to you, but it s called EOS, Entrepreneurial Operating System.
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And boy, have we learned a lot about process from them.
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And they just have it dialed in.
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And we are literally just copying what it says to do in the book.
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It s our sales process and the naming steps and pictures.
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And it s just, once you have it, you re like, why didn t we do this before?
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And we had it written out.
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We ve got it written out, but it s written out.
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You see it, visualize it, and you re right, no one, and the trick is, I read a great article on LinkedIn about, it had to do with finding an interview, finding if someone has grit.
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And what this person said on LinkedIn, he said, you know, people will always say they do, but you can proof point it in an interview.
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And he took it, he goes, here s an example.
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So I would say, Bill, tell me a, if you re a salesperson, I m interviewing you, tell me a company that you re prospecting right now.
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And you go, Oh, I m prospecting Eli Lilly.
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I go, great.
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Get your phone or your computer with you.
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You will.
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Yeah.
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Can you pull up the last email you sent to them?
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Curious to see it.
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And it s like, I was like, wow, but you know what?
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You ll know, won t you?
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You ll see it.
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And it s like, well, it s been, I mean, it was April.
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I mean, I m so, you know, I m kind of easing or the guy pulls it up and is like, yeah, here s eight of them.
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And you re like, okay, this dude s getting after it.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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So that percent of people do you think would be in the former versus the latter?
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Oh, the April versus 98% which is this guy s point.
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He s like, yeah, you got to find the real deal.
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And so I go back to process to quit.
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The test question is, you have a process.
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Sure we do.
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Cool.
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Can you share your screen and show it to me real quick?
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Well, I mean, we don t, and here we go, it s backpedal, right?
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And I love the test for the, I ve been saying this a lot, this little, I ve called it just what I said, this share screen test.
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The share screen test is if, do you have a business plan?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Can you share screen and show it to me?
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you should be able to, within less than three minutes, a document like that.
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I ll pull it up here real quick.
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Here it is.
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You know, and no one has it.
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No one has it.
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No one has it.
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That s good.
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Business plan, marketing plan, unless they re in your personal branding process, sales process, lead general, you know, just, you know, marketing process.
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I mean,
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Yeah, there s a lot of things that we give a lot of voice to, but they don t happen.
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So sales process, step number one is just create one.
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And make it, like you said, Brian, make it something that s, don t just put it into a Google Sheet, create something that has some panache, has some richness to it.
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So that s step number one.
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I think, I think of the 30% of the people, probably 90% of the 30, it could be fixed if they just had one.
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Yeah, totally.
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Absolutely.
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For sure.
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Okay.
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Next one is a personal inspiration.
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27%.
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Okay.
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That was good.
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I like that.
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Do you think that s going, uh, you know, up or backwards, you know, like are people after backwards and people are less interested in personal inspo.
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Oh, less interested in personal.
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Personal inspiration has taken a shot over the last two years.
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And I think you see it just with a number of people who just say, I m not going back to the office.
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I refuse to go to work.
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I m going to sit here and eat fudge all day.
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It doesn t sound bad, actually.
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Fudge.
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So Brian, why don t we take the last one, which is this inspiration topic.
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Why don t we devote a whole episode to that?
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Maybe we call it quits for today.
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You ve got three.
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We ve talked about lead gen.
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We talked about sales process.
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Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
And let s talk about inspiration next episode.
1
SPEAKER_00
I think we can get into some little bit more detail there.
1
SPEAKER_00
I love it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So we re going to talk about inspiration on the next one.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s a good idea.
1
SPEAKER_01
Let s do that.
1
SPEAKER_01
I want to do that.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s the third one.
1
SPEAKER_01
Or did I just give it away?
1
SPEAKER_01
No, no, no.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_01
I screwed that up.
1
SPEAKER_00
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
1
SPEAKER_00
Exactly.
1
SPEAKER_01
My next year, I would totally was in my little podcast, the note thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
Okay.
1
SPEAKER_00
All right.
1
SPEAKER_00
I ll see you next time.
1
SPEAKER_01
Bye.
1
SPEAKER_01
Bye.