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Welcome, everybody, to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest-running sales training podcast in the history of podcasts.
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My name is Brian Neal.
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My name is Bill Kasky.
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Reporting to you live from the bunker.
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It looks like I m in a bunker.
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I just went for a walk.
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Yeah, you re a little scruffed up today, Bill.
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It s like mug shotty.
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It s a little mug shotty.
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Just a little bit.
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I have my Bob Evans hat.
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You know how you have something in life that you purchase for a very low dollar amount that just
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last forever.
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It fits.
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Yeah.
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I bought this hat.
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I was at an event, uh, and I had to be outside for like eight hours and it was pouring rain.
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I had no hat and I was having breakfast at Bob Evans.
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They had these hats for sale for nine 99 in Baltimore, Maryland.
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I bought this hat, uh, 14 years ago.
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Wow.
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And it is just fantastic.
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So I went for a walk and then, uh, came home.
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So yeah, I look a little rough right now.
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That s what I say to myself around the edges.
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We like rough.
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Raw, I think, let s call it raw.
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Raw is good.
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And then, yeah, then I move studios.
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not in my main studio, at home, and had a little trouble with my Rodecaster this morning.
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That s one of the recording devices that Bill and I, in our 17 and a half years, have earned the right to use good equipment in the field.
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It s been the death of me lately to get this thing to turn on.
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It s been rough, Bill.
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The Rodecaster, for those that aren t familiar, is a digital audio board, we ll call it, that you can plug microphones, your phone, you can throw music into it.
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It s really a good,
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low cost, and it s very low cost compared to other digital boards.
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And I think the quality is reflective of that.
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I mean, it s okay, it s good, but it s not a $5,000 digital audio board, nor do we need one.
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But there are some things that go wrong occasionally.
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And you had some problems this morning
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And it reminded me of, I was, I get notified sometimes when there s a clubhouse room that they think I might like, and I m not on clubhouse at all.
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I mean, I just, I don t spend any time on it.
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Clubhouse being the audio room app that people can go in.
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That s correct.
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Yeah.
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Clubhouse, the audio room.
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And it was, it got a lot of fire and it was, you know, pretty wild there for a while, but yeah.
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For some reason, the only room I get invited to is a Rodecaster room.
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Apparently, I attended one once and was fond of it, and it detected my fondness.
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I was on the other night because I was trying to figure out a way to pump music through the Rodecaster onto Zoom calls.
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Okay, if you re on a zoom call and you re waiting for people to show up nice to have music Yeah, and so I brought that up, but the problem was I had to sit through a question from a dude It was a 20 minute answer and it was so in the weeds and yet and yet I enjoyed it It was so in the weeds.
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It s like well, it was your reverb Well is the scale is the scale personator back?
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Three or is it still up to two?
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So now I m looking at mine like, oh, I got problems here.
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It kind of reminded me of, we went to see a Fleetwood Mac cover band this weekend.
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rumors out of Atlanta, and that was really good.
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I m not a huge Philly Wood Mac fan, but I like their music, but these guys were really good.
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One of their members, Jimmy, this was his last night.
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He d been with this cover band, or tribute band, I guess it s called, for 10 years or 8 years, and he decided to leave.
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And so there was a lot of tears and a lot of cheering for Jimmy.
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I told you on the way in, I said, I didn t know who Jimmy was now.
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I m so sad.
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He s going to miss Jimmy.
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I mean, I didn t know existed two hours ago.
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Oh, we re going to miss Jimmy.
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We ll get back bill.
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I m just going to go to limit.
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I m going to dedicate this episode to Jimmy Hollywood, Mac river, Jimmy, this, this episode advanced.
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Don t do this to me, Brian.
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I m, I m choking up here right now.
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I love that word.
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Oh, that s funny.
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All right.
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Topic.
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Let s get to work here.
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We intentionally didn t, Bill s like, Do you want to tell me the topic?
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I m like, I don t.
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Here s what I want to talk about, Bill.
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So at the end of, so the first quarter has ended.
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And one of the things that I like to do with all of my clients, and whether it doesn t matter if they re in a leadership peer group, or they re a salesperson, or if they re brand new with us,
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or they ve been with us for 20 years, I always pull the audience in my first meeting with them after the first quarter ends, and I ask them to give me their just as close as they can, however they track it, their numeric performance score based on their goal.
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What I try to do is just get a gauge for how the ether is in the marketplace, because both you and I work with clients in all sorts of markets.
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We re all over the board.
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So it actually gives us a really cool little snapshot of what the economy is like.
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and we have leading indicator clients like in manufacturing.
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I do that.
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Back of the napkin math has told me that about 70 percent of companies have hit their goal or just missed.
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Most of them had just missed.
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They re in that 90, 80 percent, just below.
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Then a small sliver have gone ahead and then another small sliver have completely tanked.
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That s the, that s not what this is about regardless of those.
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And those numbers, I m like, you know what?
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Not okay.
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Like everyone s like, okay.
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There, in my opinion, though, after those numbers, though, even though they re okay, there seems to be a funk in the air.
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There s an, I am sensing a general energetic funk in the business air in the sales world.
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And I wanted to see one, if you re observing that, and two, if you re a listener here and you re feeling the funk.
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what to do about it.
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And I m feeling it in a couple different ways, and I want to turn it over to you.
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So the ways I m feeling it, I m feeling it with the leadership teams starting to apply pressure and stress both to themselves and to their teams in non-constructive ways.
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They re starting to freak out, lose their minds a little bit, behave in ways that are not constructive, not aspirational, undue pressure, lacking objectivity, things like that.
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That s the leadership version I m seeing.
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I m seeing the sales teams start to create massive excuses, lose objectivity, almost
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get real defensive on deals and things like that.
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I m seeing that more than I ve seen that in the last two years.
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And it s not a good energy.
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So that s the topic I wanted to bring to you today is the funk in the sales ether.
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The funk in the ether.
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Funk in the ether.
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That s the title.
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Dedicated to Jimmy.
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The funk in the ether.
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Dedicated to Jimmy.
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Oh, that s the topic.
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Grand Funk Railroad tribute band is coming.
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So I ll make sure maybe Jimmy, maybe he s, he s jumped course.
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He s probably, he s a big, that s another pet peeve of mine.
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What s that?
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Well, it s, it s a tangent.
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Okay.
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Let s do it next time.
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We ll do it next time.
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Remind me, will you?
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Yeah.
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Okay.
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Go ahead.
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Yeah.
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You know, um,
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I have felt it for a while.
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I have felt that our clients feel it for a while.
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I wasn t sure whether it was just start a new year and the goals would go up.
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This is an election year.
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I think there s a lot of stress and a lot of like, what s going to happen?
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There s wars and there s all sorts of stuff, but the locus of control to me still has to get back to we humans, we individuals.
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We can t even control market demand.
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We can control our behavior in the market to create demand, but we can t control market demand.
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I think you re right.
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I ve noticed that some of my LinkedIn lives, I get questions like, what s your view of the economy?
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And I can tell it comes from a place of uncertainty and what s going to happen.
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I do think we re in for a correction.
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I just don t see how you can continue to have prices go up.
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And I know the inflation s come down, but it came down because everything was up.
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25%.
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I don t see how you can pump that much money into the market.
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and money supply and not have inflation.
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And I can t see how that inflation doesn t have impact long-term.
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I don t see how it can t.
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I just had that conversation with the CEO who s got a little, not a little, got a lot of his business as an engineering firm in the automotive space and just got hit pretty hard with some, you know, they re kind of consumer demand driven, had some bad news
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on the interest rate front.
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Inflation took an unpredicted turn.
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It kind of stops things.
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And here comes the trickle of an order s tail off and freak out mode.
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So
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I think for, for our listeners, what I wanted to talk about was, you know, like sort of what advice for them or what that handled.
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And I think I m, um, really stumped speech and on a bit, and you said it, this, the human thing you ve got to cloud, or you ve got to get out of this cloud of any of this stuff.
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And you ve got to put earmuffs on.
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And I think people can be overly susceptible to all this news and this stuff, no control over whatsoever.
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And there s two versions of it.
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One is the victim mentality that I think some people, they go, well, Bill, you know, Brian, there s nothing I can do.
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There s nothing I can do.
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I mean, I mean, the people aren t buying.
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There s nothing I can do.
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And, and I just, I, I wonder when people say that, like if they hear, if I played the tape, like I recorded them saying that, played it back, like, do they like look at that in themselves and go, yeah, that s it.
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You ve done everything.
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You ve done everything you can imagine and nothing moves in you.
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You ve done, you ve thrown all against the wall.
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Yeah.
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Is that the advice you d give to your kid?
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Yeah, when your kid comes, you know, it s like data, you know, I ve done, there s nothing I can do.
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I know, son, go crawl in bed and suck your thumb.
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I know there s nothing you can do.
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Jimmy, Jimmy, you know, he tried to put my slide into the list and they wouldn t let him.
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There s nothing.
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Yeah.
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They put a happy face on it.
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He was going to go spend time with his family.
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Yeah.
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Right.
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Uh-huh.
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Oh, sure.
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I love this episode.
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Anyway.
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Yeah, I agree, Brian.
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I think that good times or bad or unknown, I think we just have to keep getting back to what is our behavior.
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I wrote a thing down here that I wrote down the other day, and I forgot to use it, and you prompted me.
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Old thinking does not lead to new results.
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Old thinking leads to old results.
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If you re happy with the old results, then keep thinking old.
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keep thinking in that old way that we used to think of in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, where we were, I mean, if you want to think really old, go start faxing people.
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See how that works for you.
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You can make cold calls.
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That s an old, antiquated method of prospecting.
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It s not that it doesn t work.
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It s that I don t want to put all my eggs in that basket.
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So if you re looking at the results and you re not getting the results you want, recognize that somebody across town
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Somebody across town and you know the metaphor of across town some other competitor is doing the things we re talking about doing and they re going to eat your lunch Yeah, i m, sorry.
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I mean, I hate to say that because I love our listeners And a lot of you listeners are eating someone else s lunch.
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Yes to keep the metaphor alive.
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Thank you.
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Um
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but someone else across town is shooting video every day.
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They re running panel discussions with prospects and customers and other vendors.
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They re partnering up with other strategic minded people who are calling on your client that are non, they re complimentary but not competitive.
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They re doing all those things and you re sitting back, and again, I m not talking about any person because someone s gonna take offense to this.
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You re sitting back and saying, man, we just gotta make more fricking cold calls.
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I m sorry.
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It s just not a way to scale your business.
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You just can t do it.
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And then we say the market s not right.
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No, we weren t right six months ago.
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We stopped doing the things we needed to do.
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And now the market s not right.
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It has nothing to do with the market.
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Thank you.
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And that s what s happened.
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What has happened is we haven t done things in the past, and now we re seeing that.
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And then we re saying, there s nothing I can do.
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There s nothing I can do.
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It s because of what you did is why you feel like there s nothing.
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And so now you can decide you can continue.
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to do the same thing, keep having this happen.
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Or you can say, you know what, this little wake up call here, you know what I mean?
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Uh, so that s one thing is this sort of victim mentality.
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Then there s another element though, that I think this is where you and I can really be helpful is some people don t know that they re a little bit stuck.
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They re open to that, but they re like, I don t know what to do, you know, like, but I m very open and they will do things if you tell them what to do.
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And that s where I think, you know, hiring a good coach or listening to a good podcast like the Advancing Link Podcast can be helpful.
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And this is where you start to take inventory of some of the things that you and I ve talked on the podcast a lot about that aren t, I mean, you know, like I use a simple example like you re doing.
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So someone says, there s nothing I could do.
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I go, when s the last time you did a LinkedIn Live?
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They go, uh, never.
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I mean, it s instant.
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It s instant.
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Yeah.
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And, and I hate doing this.
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I, and I, I do it and I, I try not to be smart.
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There s a balance between being like snarky, but I do this.
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I do it in front of them.
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I go, well, have you ever done this?
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And I ll open my laptop in front of my clients.
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I ll go, who are you trying to get to?
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I ll give that.
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They have them give me their customer.
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And I use my LinkedIn to go.
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I did it in class the other day.
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I sent two texts to my friends to get my client a meeting in front of them.
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I m like, I don t even work here.
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You guys, I love you.
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I m getting you guys meetings.
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It s like, you know, because then they did, oh, that won t work.
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And well, you ve got, and here comes all these.
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Yeah.
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Well, yeah, well, you ve got I m like, yeah, because I do what I m teaching you.
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It s like, oh, yeah.
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Anyway.
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Yeah.
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But that gets back into old thinking.
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The old thinking is I ll just you know, I ve got this master list here.
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I ll make cold calls.
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And your new thinking is, well, there s there s another way around the dam.
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The customer has this moat around them.
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Just imagine the moat.
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And if we keep going up to the to the moat and trying to swim across, we can t.
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But you re taking a helicopter and you re you re you re kind of.
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Yeah.
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trying to figure out how to get the gate opener and swim across.
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So I m not familiar, all that familiar with moats, as you can probably tell, but I assume it s a.
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castles.
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You probably have never seen the game of Fortnite, have you?
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No, I haven t.
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But I ve heard of it.
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So here s the way I think you have to think about it.
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If you just imagine a circle, which is the universe of prospects.
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And let s say out of 100 people in your market, there are 20 prospects from in the last two years.
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Now, the same 100 people, there might be 12 prospects.
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So the prospect base has dropped 40%.
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But they re still out there.
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And are there more people trying to generate business from those 12?
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Yeah, your competitors know.
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But maybe they don t.
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Maybe they ve gone into hiding as well.
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You don t know that.
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You know, Brian, you and I have been through a couple of slowdowns.
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It s great for our business.
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It s great.
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I mean, I m almost like I don t want to see it from my clients.
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It s good times for us because people start to slow down.
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It s not people aren t buying, it s about fewer might be and so you ve got to be in those people s ears, in front of them.
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and in front of all your prospects, because it will come back.
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And when it comes back, you want to be ready.
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But yeah, I think you re right.
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Individual responsibility.
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That s the lesson to me.
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You take individual responsibility for the behaviors that are new thinking, new behaviors that you ve not done in the past to stay ahead of this.
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And I promise you, listeners, if you do what Bill and I are talking about over time, you just never, I m not saying it s easy.
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You just don t have to worry about stuff.
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You re always staying ahead of it.
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And it doesn t mean you never have dips.
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It just means you dip in a different place and to a different level.
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Um, cause you ve got this stuff built up.
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I mean, even the, I had a question like, well, well, what about, you know, on, but let s, let s do LinkedIn.
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Cause you re very active on LinkedIn.
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I m very active on LinkedIn.
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And so we re on the older side of the demographic.
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So the older group would go, well, you know, I m in my fifties or sixties.
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I m like, yeah, look at Bill Caskey.
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He s in the sixties.
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Brian Nielsen is mid fifties.
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We got tens of thousands of followers.
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on LinkedIn.
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Bill s live every day on LinkedIn.
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And then someone goes, well, what about the younger people?
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And I m like, well, you know this guy pulled this kid up that s five years out of college, has 25,000 followers on LinkedIn, five years out of college.
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There s no excuse.
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Those are just excuses.
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Those are deflections of I m not willing to do it.
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Why don t you just tell me that?
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Just tell me that I refuse at my age, with my experience, I refuse to do it for some reason.
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You don t have to tell me the reason, but I refuse to do it.
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And then we re good.
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Then we re good.
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Because now I m not going to keep harping with you.
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I ll go find somebody else to harp with.
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Because it is so much easier to say, I ve done all I can do.
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There s nothing more I can do.
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It s just the market, man.
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It s all I can do.
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All right, good job today.
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If you have not checked out the advanced selling podcast insider Go to that go to advancedsellingpodcast.com and there s a link there to insider We re doing the next one here in a couple weeks.
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And also if you have not purchased the book called 12 bold moves Nice
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12boldmoves.com.
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We took a look at all the things that we did on the Insider Program last year, assembled them into a book report, and I think you ll find it good.
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It s 40 pages, it s easy reading, and there s 12 moves that I think will move the needle, so that s that.
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All right, see you next time.
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Cheers, Jimmy.
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Bye.