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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill and I do a spousal linguistics audit that leads me to my favorite quote from the movie, The Jerk.
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Bill drops some 90s hip hop 411 on us, and we ask the question, what are you looking for in a good prospect?
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Welcome, everybody, to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest-running sales training podcast in podcast history.
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My name is Brian Neal.
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And I m Bill Kasky.
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We are here every week for your listening enjoyment.
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If you have not been to the website, we have a lot of new listeners always.
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We re always cycling through new listeners.
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They show up at Brian s house every Saturday morning.
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They say, hey.
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I m a new listener.
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What should I do?
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Go to advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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There is a place there for new listeners where you can get some of our top episodes over the last few years.
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And we love the fact so much that you re a fan of Advanced Selling Podcast and a loyal listener.
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We also know you have a deep commitment to up your game.
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So we invite you to become an ASP Insider.
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You ve heard a lot about that over the last few months.
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It s a group coaching program that meets monthly.
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where we coach you on relevant topics that ll help you grow your business and your income.
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Tuition, $47 a month, or you can join for the year and save even more.
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Go to advancedsellingpodcast.com slash insider for details and a video there where Brian and I walk through exactly why we re doing this and what s in this for you.
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You want access, you get access at The Insider.
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That s where we do it live.
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It s live access.
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Live access.
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To Brian Neal and Bill Kask.
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Bill Kask, it s what we do.
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It s what we do.
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So my wife, who s very, very smart, very, very good at what she does, says funny things sometimes, and not even intending to.
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Uh-oh.
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But I catch them all.
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Does she listen to this?
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I tend to catch them all.
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Does she listen to the podcast?
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Yes, and she s actually right over the,
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So she said, we were talking to my cousin, we went home from my family reunion, and my cousin and his wife live in Las Vegas, and they had come home for a bit of time.
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And I said, do you know how long Alex and Itziah, that s their names, do you know how long Alex and Itziah are staying?
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At your house?
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In Evansville, no, at their parents  house.
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Do you know how long they re staying?
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She goes, I think they re gonna stay a day and a week.
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And I m like, okay, did you mean like a week and a day past?
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She s like, well, it s the same thing.
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And I m like, I ve never heard anyone say, how long are you staying somewhere?
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I think they re gonna stay two days and a week.
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I think they re gonna stay 10 days.
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I d probably lop all that stuff together.
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That s just me.
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But she plowed right through it.
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So I m like, I wonder if you ve ever heard anybody say, if you re saying like, well, I think they re gonna stay a week and then add a day on, or I think they re gonna stay for 10 days or something like that.
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Or if there was something about that first day,
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Exactly.
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It was really special.
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Set it apart from the other set.
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For my fans of Steve Martin, you ll remember the scene where he s laying in bed with his girlfriend, Bernadette Peters, and he s saying that, yes, the jerk.
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It s a phenomenal scene where he says, the first day seemed like a normal day, but the second day seemed like two days, and the third day seemed like a day, but the fourth day felt like five days.
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You have to Google the scene where
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He is in bed with Bernadette Peters from The Jerk, and he says my favorite tongue twister.
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I ve never been relaxed enough to say this.
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I slit the sheet, the sheet I slit, and on the slitted sheet I sit.
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The question though on that interaction between you and Stephanie is not so much what we said and what she said, it s more what prompted you to actually call her on it.
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That s a very, that s probably a better point.
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That s a better question.
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It was just an interesting way to say something, which I thought is actually kind of clever.
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We were down at Red River Gorge down in Kentucky.
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It s a state parks beautiful place really nice and and they have this that s called the via ferrata where you climb on the outside of the cliffs and they ve got rebar and they ve got ropes and carabiners and you re all set up and I didn t do it, but my my daughters and wife and everybody did but a couple of us and And Jane was my wife was talking about it later that night.
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She said yeah, they have Ray bar that comes out of the
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And I didn t say anything.
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I didn t say anything.
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She does listen too, so she ll hear this.
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I didn t say anything, and then she said it.
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And there s always that question of, well, we re amongst friends here, but I wouldn t want you to be out at a construction site and say Raybar.
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So I said what what was that and then somebody else somebody else said rebar.
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Oh, we re getting trouble.
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She said rebars Oh be careful.
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Did you call that earlier?
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It was Ray bar.
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She just left me exactly Okay, and she should you know what I meant?
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Yeah, that s always what I get.
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You know what I meant.
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I m like I did It s just interesting way to say it.
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I think it s cute.
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That s what I always say to get myself out of trouble I think it s cute.
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I say things like Ray bar if Stephanie would have been writing the Gettysburg Address
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That would work.
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Four score in seven years.
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Yeah, so.
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A day, four score.
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Seven years and four groups of 20.
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Seven years and four score.
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I m waiting for her to pop her head over.
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She s going to pop up.
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Yeah, it s an audio show, babe.
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You can pop up and give us the bird.
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Fire it, say 320 at me.
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That s allowed.
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All right.
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There we go.
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Topic time.
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Yeah, topic today.
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I thought about this as I was driving over to the studio and thinking about, you know, you have a coaching and consulting business.
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We both have our own businesses.
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And then we also do a lot together, both on the podcast and for some speaking engagements that we used to do back when that was cool.
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And I thought it would be interesting for listeners to hear our approach because if you re a VP of sales and probably 30% of our audience for sales managers CEOs Presidents and then 70% of our audience b2b salespeople I thought it would be interesting to talk about how you approach a company and some of the things that you want to know when you go in and
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and what you look at and what you notice and observe.
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Love it.
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And then I ll do the same thing, because I do think that we look for different things.
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I m sure we do, just because we re different human beings.
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We re unique.
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I think there s a lot of common themes.
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So why don t you start by telling our listeners, when a company calls you and says, hey, I might want to use you for training, what kinds of things do you want to know, do you look for, et cetera?
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Yeah.
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When I step back from this as we started prepping for the topic seven minutes ago.
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One minute and six.
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For the listeners, yeah.
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So as you re listening to this, I think it s good for you to think about.
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So Bill and I are going to talk about ours.
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I think it s as important for you just to think about it as it is to take what we re talking about and go, oh, I m going to look for that, too.
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So as you re listening to this, you can steal from me and Bill, for sure.
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Is that right?
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From Bill and me.
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Yeah, that s right.
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From me.
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From me.
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But you also, just the process of thinking through, what are we really looking for?
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Because I think what most people, unfortunately, hopefully not a lot of our podcast listeners here, but most people are looking for a deal.
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And that right there is that so when you say, what am I looking, listening for?
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I think that my first answer is, what am I not looking or listening for?
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And what I m not listening for is a deal.
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I m not listening for things like, oh, they need help that I do or, oh, they ve got a lot of money to spend or anything like that.
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That s my first thing is what I don t listen for.
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is defined like that.
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So I m not listening for budget.
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I m not listening for commitment to sales coaching, first and foremost, is the first thing that I m not at all even interested in learning about.
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So they may say to you, we ve used a trainer for the last seven years, and we ve used several people.
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You don t really care about that.
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I m the same way.
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I m the same way.
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Yeah, just very agnostic to it.
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No.
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Because I think that the normal traditional thing as well, if they ve used a trainer, then it means they spend money on trainers.
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And I feel like, yeah, maybe they ve had such terrible experiences that they don t want to spend money on a trainer.
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Yes, yes, yes, yes.
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So that s my first answer, a little counterintuitive, is what am I not looking for?
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And I m not looking for a lot of the traditional things.
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I m not looking for budget for training.
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I m not looking for, we ve decided this is an RFP.
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We re going to hire a training company for a year-long engagement.
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I m not listening for those mechanical things that most people go, oh, good, well, good, well, good.
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That s just not how I m
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Going into it.
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I ve got some others that I am listening for that.
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I ll say in a second So you know about you Yeah, I like the what am I what am I not looking for?
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I didn t think about it in that context
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Because there s a lot of things in life you re not looking for.
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And then they show up.
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What was that?
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That s a different list.
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I was not looking for having a mask in every different room and every different crevasse in my car to make sure that I met all the necessary requirements.
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In the spirit of linguistics.
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Yeah, I think the first thing I look at is, what s the general culture?
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And it s hard to determine that when you re talking to a CEO or VP of sales.
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But you can kind of tell.
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You can pick up on just the kind of vibe you get from people.
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Are they curious people?
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Are they questioners?
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Are they loud talkers?
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Are they people who you feel like are open to new?
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Because some of the things that we teach are counterintuitive.
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So they re just looking for the traditional, I ve got to get my people to go out and close more sales.
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And they just got a hammer on the phone and they got to get out and spend more time now if I hear that Then I feel like that culture may not fit us.
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Yes, so I m kind of looking for culture a second thing.
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I m looking for is Working big to small hmm and the working big to small thing I think our society can take a page out of that whole idea of prioritization and saying okay if we re going to work on this problem
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Growing your business.
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Let s just say what are the biggest things that get in the way not What does your email sig line say?
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I don t want to start there because that s a that s a small thing But what what are the big things like what is your messaging?
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Um,
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What do people say when they go out to your market or when they re on the phone or on a virtual or Zoom call?
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What is the position of a company just in terms of the problem solving and the aspiration achieving?
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What are those big things?
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Because I always feel like if we can tweak the big things, you can get big results based on the tweaking versus trying to overhaul things.
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That s really, really great.
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Really great.
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Big to small.
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Yeah, because some people lead with a small, don t they?
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Is it Biggie Small?
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Wasn t that a rapper?
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Biggie Smalls, yeah.
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Look at Bill bring it.
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Hey, look at that.
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He was a white dude, wasn t he?
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Biggie.
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Biggie, Biggie, Biggie.
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Did he die?
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Can t you see Biggie was murdered?
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Yeah, Biggie was murdered.
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There s a whole deal about that.
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Let s see, I said I had openness, so I m going to scratch that because you just said that, just openness in general.
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I also wrote down here, know thyself.
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And I am looking for people who are very clear on who they are, and who their company is, and who their sales team is, both good and bad.
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So what I m not looking for is someone who says, their sales team sucks.
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They have no strategy.
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No one knows.
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I m not looking for that.
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I m looking for someone to say, we are really dialed in at this.
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We ve got behavior down.
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We ve got this aspect of selling down.
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We are really great at the end of the sales process.
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We re really strong at getting things closed.
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Where we struggle is this.
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I love people to delineate that.
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That really, really helps me know that the people I m getting into know themselves.
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And I think that s good for anything that you sell.
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That people just have a, they know who they are.
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Self-aware.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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That s a really, really important thing for me, and I m always looking for that.
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Knowing thyself.
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Do they know themselves?
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That s really interesting because I did a promotion on my email list here a few weeks ago where I told people they could send in a survey filled out and I would give them a five-minute audio coaching just a five-minute audio of me looking at their survey and making some suggestions great and what I found was that some people
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Filled out almost nothing about because one of the questions was what s your biggest frustration or where do you feel like you fall short?
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Yeah, and the people who ve who went deep into that you can just tell they re really self-aware Yes, some people literally said I don t think I have any shortcomings.
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I don t I don t have any front
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Everything s going well, and I always feel like, well, why the hell did you send in the survey then?
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What do you need?
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What possible?
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In fact, I even sent one back to a guy who said, you ve not given me enough.
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It literally filled like three lines.
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And then he apologized and sent back something that was really well done.
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So sometimes I think people just get in that spirit.
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But the point is that if you can t be self-aware enough to say, this is where I struggle, this is my frustration, it becomes hard for guys like Brian or me or anybody to show up and help you.
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For sure.
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So I just commented on yours.
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One of the other things that I look at is, let s suppose that you go into a company and you find out that the closing conversion rate is 15%.
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Out of 100 deals, they get 15.
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You and I know that there are contributing factors to why that number is so low.
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Some people may say, well, 15%?
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Shit, the company I used to be at was 7%, so this is a doubling.
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But we know that there are contributing factors.
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And I think sometimes, kind of to your last point, if you re not aware enough to step back and say, why are we only closing 15%?
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What are some factors?
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Are we not getting to the right person?
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Are we not having the right conversation?
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Are we not good at telling people what s going to happen if they buy?
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I think contributing factors enter into the picture a lot.
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And I don t think generally people who are so close to their business can see what those contributing factors are.
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It s really, really great.
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So that s a deeper dive.
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So they ve got some assessment of what s causing whatever problem.
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What s causing the problem.
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Because a lot of people just say, I ve got this problem.
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Help me.
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And then you re spending that time where you re saying, you d rather listen for someone to be a little further down the path there, right?
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Yeah.
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To say, here s what our problem is.
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Here s what we think is causing it.
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Now you re getting into a dialogue with them, either validating that, yeah, you think that s right, or maybe there s something else.
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That s where I think you bring the gift is the counter.
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What they think is a problem isn t really the problem.
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That s correct.
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That s correct.
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And so when you go in and you say, well, tell me what happens right before the proposal?
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Well, right before the proposal, Brian, I tell them how wonderful we are.
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And I tell them that this proposal is going to blow their socks off.
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It s just going to be awesome.
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You re going to be so excited.
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And you think to yourself, oh, I m starting to see the picture here.
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I m starting to see what happens.
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And so I don t necessarily even care what they think the contributing factors are.
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We need to know it based on inquiry and observation.
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That s really good.
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My last one here, I wrote down and I thought about, I m like, do I look for this or do I not?
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So I don t know that I look for it.
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I appreciate it when I hear it.
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And I wrote down the words reasonable resistance, reasonable resistance.
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So as I m talking to a CEO or a chief revenue officer or a VP of sales,
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I love when they re asking questions or, and I don t need a, I m not one that looks for like a pushback, like I m not like a verbal judo kind of guy, but I do want them to be thoughtful.
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I love thoughtful questions in general.
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Like, I don t know, that s a really good question.
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I like that coming back versus a, hey, what s the program?
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Oh, it s awesome.
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We hear great things.
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Let s do it.
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When there s no resistance at all, I m kind of like, all right, are they,
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That just feels like it s too easy sometimes.
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I m like, that s a really good question.
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There are certain things I would expect people to ask.
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Kind of like one of the things that I always wonder, and I have a different answer than I used to for, but people, and it s amazing how often I don t get it.
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is if we pay you money to come in and coach our sales team, how will we measure the return on the money that we pay you?
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How will we measure you and your effectiveness?
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Because there s an easy scoreboard thing.
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They re saying they don t ask that sometimes.
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They don t ask that, yeah.
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But then there s the skill of the people that gets better.
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How do you measure the skill of the people?
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There s a way to do that that s real tedious.
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There s an anecdotal way to do it.
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There s general observation.
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And then there s the scoreboard of the sales results.
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And so that s a question that I get less than I thought I would see that.
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And I m like, if I, if I were buying what I do, I d ask that every time.
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Yeah.
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And so then the question is, well, why don t, like, I don t think to ask that.
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I know that we ve talked about, okay, Brian, you re getting ready to spend a lot of money with me.
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How are you going to measure me?
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That might be a question that we ask them, but it seems like it would make more sense if they ask us.
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And the numbers get pretty thick.
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So it s not like they re just, you know, spending,
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You know what we should do our next episode on, then, is the whole idea of measurement.
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Because everybody wants to measure investments in everything.
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And there is a way to measure the investment in training, or coaching, or insider, or whatever you re going to invest in.
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And if you re not familiar with how to do it, then you will just say, well, there s no way to measure.
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There s no way.
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SPEAKER_01
It s beautiful.
1
SPEAKER_00
I love when you think of our next topic before we re done with this one.
1
SPEAKER_00
And then when we re done, we just go.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s beautiful.
1
SPEAKER_00
It just makes it more efficient that way.
1
SPEAKER_02
What else?
1
SPEAKER_02
That s all I got.
1
SPEAKER_02
That s all you got?
1
SPEAKER_02
I think it s good, yeah.
1
SPEAKER_02
I like it.
1
SPEAKER_02
I had two, but I stole one of yours there.
1
SPEAKER_02
No, no, it s why I stole one of yours.
1
SPEAKER_02
Open this.
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so I think the question is, and if you are in our LinkedIn group, Tribe, then comment on this episode there, because we ll be putting it up on LinkedIn.
1
SPEAKER_01
And we d like to hear from you.
1
SPEAKER_01
What are some of the things that you do when you first go in?
1
SPEAKER_01
What do you observe?
1
SPEAKER_01
Where are you aware of your prospect?
1
SPEAKER_01
And I think we can all learn from this.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s not just about training in this case, although ours was.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s more about, like you said earlier, how do you approach prospects and what s on your heart or on your mind as you go through this process?
1
SPEAKER_01
For sure.
1
SPEAKER_02
I like it.
1
SPEAKER_00
All right.
1
SPEAKER_00
See you next time.
1
SPEAKER_00
Bye.
1
SPEAKER_01
Bye.