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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, we officially bring the little finger into the mainstream, I get my feelings hurt getting handshake shaded after a speech, and we riff on the future of selling skills.
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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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Bill Kasky.
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We are here every week.
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Those of you who have already signed up, good for you.
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Those of you who haven t, you have to go to the website and check out the Dealwork Studio.
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The Dealwork Studio.
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You ve heard our little mini release, I think last week that went out.
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And you ve got sales teams, you ve got sales individuals who want to get a team together.
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There s nothing better to do, in our opinion, than real live deal work.
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Bill and I are offering that now as a way to do that.
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Get a direct, interactive, live, real deal coaching session.
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Go to the Dealwork Studio on the podcast, advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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Stephanie, Neil, my better half, will contact you and talk to you about the details of that.
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And we ll look forward to talking to you soon.
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We ve got limited slots for that, so we re close to done.
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You know what I would do if I were a sales leader of a company or a president of a company and I had a sales force of, say, 15, 20, 25 people?
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I would do that every month.
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Now, I know we re not doing it.
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We re just making it available through the end of the year.
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But I would call us and say, look, we re going to do one, and if we like it,
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We want you to do this every month for an hour throughout 2020.
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You would be shocked at the progress you can make in an hour a month.
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Working on real deals, there s no doubt.
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And what s great is you pay for it along the way, because it s not modular training.
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So the deal you work on, they don t all close, obviously.
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That s not the deal.
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It s not pixie dust.
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And some will.
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And then either way, you ll learn the processes.
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It s cheap.
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Cheap, cheap, cheap.
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It s super cheap.
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Anyway, so before we get into that,
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to get to our topic.
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I ve seen this happen a bunch.
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I ve never had it happen to me, and it happened.
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I was giving a keynote speech, good energy, just felt great.
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Boom, people coming up afterwards and talking to people.
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And sometimes you get done with a keynote speech, and there s a small gathering gets around.
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Everyone s like, I want to talk to you, pictures, and all this jazz.
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So got done with his speech, and this guy was like, hey, great job.
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And I thought he was coming for a handshake.
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And so I went out to the handshake, but he was actually turning away from me.
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And so I went full on to handshake him, and he totally turned his back and walked away.
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So I m standing with my hand out to shake his hand.
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and everybody saw it and you just get you to get shunned.
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You get you know you get you get what do they call that do it on purpose, not at all on purpose, but it s just that awkward and then what do you do?
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Then you kind of scratch your head you re like and you give him the peace sign.
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I gave him the peace sign didn t give him a little finger.
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That s what I would I m like hey I m like handshake on yeah see okay see you then I kind of like awkwardly went from handshake you know posture to okay dude yeah I ll see I wasn t going to shake hands either man.
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I was just like saying like knuckles goodbye or
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You could have gone after him.
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I should have.
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Whoa, whoa, whoa.
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Come here.
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But I ve seen people get shaded like that multiple times.
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And you see that in sporting events where guys, you feel so rejected in the moment.
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You re like, oh, man.
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And then people see it.
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Then it s funny.
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I thought it was funny.
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That s good.
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So first time ever.
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Try really hard not to shade people.
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There is that awkwardness, too, these days between the fist bump knuckles and the handshake and the hug.
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All blended together.
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It s really awkward.
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So hugging these days is very, very... I m not a fan anymore.
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Just in the environment we re in, I just think we ve got to be careful with that a little bit.
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I agree.
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Plus, if it s after a speech and somebody comes up, I m not sure a hug is the right thing.
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But yeah, the fist bump or even the handshake, because a lot of people don t want to shake your hand because of germs.
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No, exactly.
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Great.
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It s bad.
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If they ve seen you, well, never mind.
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On the plane last night, coming home from my game, there was a woman, which I get people, they wipe down basically the entire seat with the sanitary thing.
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So this, God bless her, this woman wipes down the whole thing.
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She got a little kid with her, an older kid, like kids like three or four, and older kids like 12, with a bigger family too, but she wipes everything, she wipes it all down, like totally clean.
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About 20 minutes into the flight, her one little kid pukes all over everything.
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All over everything.
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The poor kid.
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I felt bad, but it was kind of interesting.
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But it wasn t a germ that caused him to puke.
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So she s probably, cha-ching, that was not me.
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Hopefully there s no rotovirus on the airline.
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Isn t it true, though, that if we are cleaning everything for our children, doesn t it then have an impact on building up immunities to things?
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I mean, do we really want to swab everything down?
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Yeah, yep.
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Just don t get me started on that one.
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OK.
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Another old man topic.
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Another old man.
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I mean, seriously, what s the point?
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You need an old man sign.
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I do.
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Like I have a sign here.
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OK, topic.
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Yeah, so this topic came to me here.
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And these topics come to me as I sit around and give people the little fingers they walk by.
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And it s the whole idea of, in five years, will today s selling skills, the skills you currently have, and exercise and execute and work on every day, will they be as relevant in five years as they are today?
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It s real easy to say, and I saw Anthony Iorino, is that his name?
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I think so.
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Wrote a blog the other day that talks about,
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the value of face-to-face relationships.
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And in it, he talked about how that s never going to go away.
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And I probably agree with him that there is something that happens face-to-face when you re sitting down and having lunch or coffee or whatever with somebody, or even on a digital call, a web call.
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that doesn t happen if it s just a phone call or an email.
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So I totally agree.
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But the question is, five years from now, what are the skills going to look like?
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And will selling skills be obsolete?
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The traditional finding the problem, understanding the economics, is that going to be obsolete?
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Will AI take over that?
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And I m interested in that because I figure I have about 10 to 15 years in this business, and I kind of want to know what s happening or what s coming.
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I love the forward thinkingness.
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I m not sure I got an answer here.
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That kind of blended something I ve been looking into.
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I ve realized that my, so we ve got baby boomers, Gen Xers, Millennials, and now the next one is called Gen Z. And that s what my kids are in.
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My kids are all right in the middle of Gen Z. And we re starting to look at the differences in the way that they buy, and then they re going to be workers, and then they re going to be consumers.
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And everyone s looking into that.
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Some interesting things in the research that I ve done so far, because they re not just like native digital, their whole lives are on their phones.
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Their whole lives and their interactions.
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They actually prefer, in a business selling sense, Bill just hit his microphone.
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A true radio guy makes the face Bill just made when he hits his microphone.
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Like, I just made a big mistake.
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I m so sorry.
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I don t think it was heard, though.
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All our cushion shock mounting.
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Travis is set up on our microphones.
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Never hit the microphone.
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The Gen Zs, they actually prefer buying things live and in person than they do buying them online, because they re online all the time.
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They want the interaction.
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They want the tactile feel.
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And I polled the audience.
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I had two of my kids with me and then two of my friends  kids, who were all high school kids.
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They all couldn t agree more.
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They re like, we hate buying stuff online.
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We love to go and see it, feel it, and touch it.
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And with that as part of the next human experience, which I think, so I believe what Anthony is saying, what you re saying, that that won t go away with this next generation.
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What I do think will change, this is my opinion, is what those selling skills are.
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My way I m thinking about this is that I wrote down, all selling skills become commoditized over time.
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So the idea of asking for the order,
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or always be closing from the 80s is now commoditized, meaning it s run its course.
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Even some things that Bill and I, as we transition into the next thing, the idea of pain finding.
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It s old.
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It s tired.
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It s been around for a long time.
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So what s the next level of that?
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So I think each of the skills themselves become commoditized over time.
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And the new skills will layer on top of them outside of that.
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And so I think discovery in the future will be done automatically.
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AI will do discovery.
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I do.
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I think the discovery that, as we talk about now, we still need to do this, ask questions, understand, da, da, da.
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I think over time, AI, artificial intelligence, will take care of the discovery process.
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So by the time the human gets there,
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There s already, it s almost like a doctor walks in and sees a chart.
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And if you go to a doctor and you get sent to a specialist, the specialist has lots of stuff already done for them by the primary care physician.
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So when they get there, they re already down the road.
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They re already thinking about the deal.
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They say, OK, they presented with these symptoms.
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They ve got this history.
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And that specialist doctor starts to put it in their specialist brain.
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I think we re all going to become specialists.
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We re going to have to, if you use that kind of physician analysis.
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which is going to take just a different set of skills than what we have now.
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Well, I disagree with you there, in a healthy, friendly way.
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Oh, we re good.
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No, we like this.
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No, I see what you re saying.
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Bill, can you hear this?
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Can you hear this?
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I see what you re saying.
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You want me to turn it up for you?
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Turn it up a little bit, yeah.
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Pot that thing up.
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Little finger.
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Go ahead.
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Turn it up.
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That joke never gets old, does it?
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Can you hear this?
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Well, it is for the listeners.
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Already very visual show today.
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Yeah, I to me this
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So I go back to, is it possible for a person to self-diagnose and self-prescribe?
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Because in those areas where it is, like when you go on Amazon to buy toilet paper for the year or the month or whatever, or whatever it is you buy, you don t need a whole lot of self-discovery and diagnosis.
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You know you need toilet paper, you know you need double ply, blah, blah, blah.
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But I think in B2B sales, it s a little bit different.
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So the question is, is can your customers
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do an adequate job of self-diagnosis.
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Because that s kind of what you re talking about, is the discovery process will be automated in some way.
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And I say, maybe in certain industries.
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But other industries, I don t think people have a prayer of self-diagnosing without you, our listener, professional salesperson there, to help them through that process.
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So it s probably a both and.
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It s not an either or.
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And these AI things are kind of scary.
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As we ve seen, a couple of them demonstrated for us on even current sales tools, is they can get really smart and intuitive.
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And so then what I think, this gets like futuristic thinking, is I think the AI programming over time, this kind of machine learning concept,
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can learn to do that as well or as good as a human can, which is real scary to think about.
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But I think that s the case.
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Not in my lifetime.
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You don t think so?
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Interesting.
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I think it will.
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Now, the other part I think that s going to be this skill that the human s going to have to bring that I don t think a computer can is empathy and understanding and compassion.
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That s the part that I don t know.
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And I m sure some AI genius can say, I can show you that.
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I can program this robot to come over and say,
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Bill, are you sad?
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You OK?
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I m OK.
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If it s all machine kind of interaction takes place in a machine, and I don t care if it s a bot emailing, chatting back and forth, or anything like that, the human s ability to feel emotion, understand emotion, compassion, empathy,
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cannot be conveyed through a machine.
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So that s where I think skill-wise, the skills that are going to be learned are things like that.
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Understanding, empathy, compassion, caring, connecting with the human, that is the part that in no way, shape, or form will ever be able to be repeated, in my opinion.
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I m going to reel us back in from five to 10 years out, back to some things that I have realized that I m not good at, and I find that
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I could be, but I m not.
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Gary Vaynerchuk and a lot of others talk about the game of attention.
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So how do you become found?
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If you re a business-to-business organization, B2B salesperson, how do you not live in obscurity where nobody even knows who the hell you are?
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How do you become found?
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The way you become found is one of two ways.
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You either create ads, paid ads online, or billboards, or direct mail, or organic.
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So where you re on LinkedIn, you re shooting videos, you re doing Facebook stuff, you re doing a podcast like we do.
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So the question is, is what skills does the professional salesperson need to acquire that helps them get attention in the market so they can even start dialogue with people?
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There s no doubt that s not going away anytime soon.
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That s not going away.
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In fact, it s just getting going.
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I mean, how many salespeople do we know that have a podcast?
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Not very many.
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Not very many, but you should.
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Everybody should.
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Yeah.
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Everybody should.
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I mean, oh my gosh.
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Anybody.
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This equipment, too, that we buy, I mean, what did we pay?
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$1,500 for this equipment?
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And then we got really, really high end equipment.
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You don t need this fancy of a setup.
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$1,500.
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Compared to some, it s not high end.
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But it s good.
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We re OK.
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But the point is, you re right, Brian, is you need to have a podcast.
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If you re a company, and let s say you re an owner of a company listening, get a podcast.
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Now, not everybody in your company needs to have a podcast.
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Maybe you have one for your company, and three or four different people take turns as being the host.
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But that s an example.
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Another example that I.
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that I keep asking about and everybody seems to just look at me bewildered like YouTube.
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What are you doing on YouTube with either organic search or ads?
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And I was telling Travis the other day, my YouTube channel has grown by 400 people in the last three months.
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I have no freaking clue how we did it.
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We re not adding content.
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People are just finding it.
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And that is something that we need to get serious about.
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Because if we added 400 or 500 people without doing anything, could we add 5,000 people by being a little bit more intentional about it?
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And we ve got to look at YouTube.
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We all do it, I think, and say, can we target our prospect on YouTube?
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And the answer is yes, because Google s the search engine, and Google knows everything about us before we know about us.
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So the search, the potential is there.
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to get the attention of the right person at the right time, when they re in the right frame of mind, when they re looking for something that you do.
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But yet, we fail to understand it because we would rather knock on doors or make a cold call on somebody instead of showing up when they re looking for something and being that person.
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That article I talked about earlier on the difference between Gen Z and millennials, Gen Z prefers watching YouTube over Netflix or any other
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I do, too.
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Yeah.
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I can sit for hours and watch YouTube.
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They do.
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They watch YouTube all the time versus Netflix or network TV and that sort of thing.
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That s a good point.
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OK.
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Hey, if you haven t done so already, you can go check out our Dealwork Studio.
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We re filling up fast.
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Go to the website advancesellingpodcast.com.
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You ll see a button up there on the right-hand side.
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I think it s the right-hand side.
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Is it?
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Left-hand.
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Left-hand side.
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Left-hand side.
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You ll see it at the top.
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And it says Dealwork Studio.
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Click on that if you want us to do a Dealwork session live
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with your sales team.
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If you re a salesperson, bring it to your sales manager.
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I m telling you, you will love it.
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You will love it.
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You will love it.
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We re limited because at the end of the year, our calendars are kind of slammed.
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We might do it next year.
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We might not.
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We ll see.
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But for now, try to get on the schedule if you can.
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Just shoot a note.
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We ll get that started.
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And we re also booking for the first quarter, first half of 2020.
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for sales meetings.
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We know a lot of you have awards trips, sales meetings, January, February, March.
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You can always send us an email.
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Listen to advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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Or even better, you can go to the website.
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And there s a little place for come see us.
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The very top, it says come see us.
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Come see us.
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Click there.
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Fill out a form.
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We ll start that process for you.
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That s it.
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See you next time.
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Bye.
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Bye.