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In this episode of The Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill shares his pet peeves about weather people.
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I share some intimate secrets about my family tree.
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And we offer insight on the role we play in causing deals to stall out.
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Welcome back to The Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast created exclusively for you to get your create your own self good sales success.
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It s Monday morning.
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I m Brian Neal.
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Create your own good self.
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And that, too.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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We re here.
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I m Bill Kasky.
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Hi, Bill.
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Good to see you.
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Good to see you.
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It is Monday morning, and we re here.
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And I didn t have any coffee.
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No caffeine today.
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So maybe my brain s a little slow.
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My mouth s a little slow.
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But we are here to give you some wonderful, wonderful tools and tips this week.
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We are on the road again.
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If you would like, we are actually going to be releasing a tool that you can fill out a form, if you will, that will allow you to request
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Bill and myself, or both, to come visit your sales meeting, your national sales conference.
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Just got done speaking at one last week.
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We just have a lot of fun.
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We just do.
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They re just great.
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We just have a great time.
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We take pictures.
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We laugh.
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We give away money.
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I gave away like $100 cash.
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Did you really?
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Yeah.
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People ask good questions.
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I always pay them money for that.
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People love that stuff.
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And this is a good time of year, too, because we know that most sales meetings happen either in the fourth quarter or January, early February.
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So this is a time to plan if you re interested in bringing one of us in.
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Shoot us an email at listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com to get the ball rolling.
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That s really, really good.
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You know one thing that bugs me, Brian?
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I reluctantly watch the weather.
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And the weather always bothers me because it seems like it s much ado about nothing.
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Now I know when a hurricane comes, obviously we re all eyes and ears on the weather, but there are three things the weather person does that just annoy the yellow one out of me.
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First off, they use words that we would never use.
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For example, why is it that weather people, instead of saying, you know, the showers ought to start about noon, you know what they say?
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The showers?
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The showers ought to start about noontime.
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Noontime.
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Well now, do you ever, when someone says what time you want to meet, you ever say noontime?
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I don t.
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I think noontime.
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No.
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Never.
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But weather forecasters, and I don t know if they re trying to get one more syllable in because their time is running short.
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The second thing they do is, and you ve heard this I m sure, instead of saying roads or highways or streets, we say roadways.
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Roadways.
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And do you ever use the word roadway when you re talking to somebody?
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Which roadway are you taking over to Evansville?
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Kids, quiet down, because the roadway is kind of treacherous today.
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Dad needs to concentrate.
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No.
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And the third thing they do that bugs me, and it s heading into that time in the fall, is they start to tell you what to wear.
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So it s going to be a low of 60 degrees tonight, so you might take a light jacket with you.
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Just a light jacket, just in case.
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Oh my gosh.
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How do you know?
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Kind of a corduroy.
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Maybe that vest you have.
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Maybe a good denim would go well with those pants, Bill.
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I am a weather geek.
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I love weather actually.
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You know, they do the kind of, what would you be if you could, you know, I would be a weather person.
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I would be an honor.
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I love that.
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And did you know that this is kind of a little thing?
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This is for our friends in Indianapolis.
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You could probably find this person.
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You know who Angela Buckman is?
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She s a really great forecaster.
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She s one of those people.
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She s a great forecaster.
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She s a great reader of the forecast.
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Okay.
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She never, ever, ever mums us, us.
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She never, ever stutters, ever.
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Kind of like Joel Osteen.
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You know that guy?
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Joel Osteen, the preacher?
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Google Joel Osteen stuttering and see if you can find that he, the guy s never, ever stuttered in his life or said um or ah or lost his train of thought.
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I wonder how those people do that.
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That s kind of interesting.
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Yeah, I don t know.
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Yeah, that s that is an art though.
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It is an art.
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Yeah, I stutter.
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Obviously.
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I can t even say the opening right?
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OK, topic.
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All right.
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Let s dig in.
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The topic today is, you know, Brian, you and I are working together on an account here in Indianapolis.
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And we love doing that, because a lot of times you will be working with the team, and I ll be sitting in the back, and I can see some things happening and vice versa.
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And so we re really blessed to have this really awesome client that we just started working with here about a month ago.
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And they re all podcast listeners, for the most part, I think.
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And one of the things that happened last week, we did a dissect the deal thing that we do.
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And Brian, you led the event.
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And the event is everybody in the room takes a deal that they re working on that has stalled in some way.
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And what they do is they go through.
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We give them a tool to fill out.
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And they go through the tool publicly and say, here s where we are.
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Here s what s happened.
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Here s who I m talking to.
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Here s what their problems are, et cetera.
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And we had some awakenings as we did this together.
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And the person who was in the barrel, who had the prospect, was really forthcoming.
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He did a great job in pointing out everything.
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We never really got to why it was stalled.
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And so what we thought we d do today is not necessarily look at that deal, because that deal is kind of irrelevant.
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It s more about, what do we as sales professionals do that cause deals to stall?
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Because just like we do things to cause deals to close, we also do things to cause deals not to close.
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Yeah, and I think this is, as far as topics go, things that we hear all the time and the
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Dozens of years we ve been doing this.
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This one comes up all the time, but it s always there.
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They get deals, they re rolling down the path, and they re great.
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And what we tend to do is look externally for the solution.
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We say, well, go do this, go say that, that sort of thing.
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And so today s podcast is about looking internally and saying, what am I doing?
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What am I saying that s causing this thing to stall out?
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Hopefully from that, you can do the opposite.
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I ve got a guy that tells me to act opposite.
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So this is an act opposite thing.
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So if you re doing this thing that we re going to talk about that s causing the deal to stall, stop doing that, do something else.
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Shall we?
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All right.
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Do you want me to go?
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Yeah, well, you instantly came up in the pre-show.
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We re prepping, as you people know.
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We prep on the spot.
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And we start talking about this topic, and 20 seconds later, Bill goes, I got five, I got six.
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I couldn t even think of one yet.
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So yeah, please.
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Here s one.
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I don t know whether we are good listeners.
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So I will say, number one, don t listen.
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I don t think we listened very well.
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I think we stopped talking long enough to allow the prospect to talk and to share.
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But I m not sure we do a good job of hearing what they re saying and taking it down a notch and down a notch and down a notch to where we get to understanding.
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So the thing there is I think there s a difference between just not talking and really understanding what their plight is and their circumstance.
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And if that s not on the table and part of the discussion, then I think it becomes easy for them to stall out and say, you know what, it s $200,000 for this.
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You know what, I think I m going to wait.
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Feels like they will give us the same energy that we give them.
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So if we re sort of surface tapping along.
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Tapping along, not curious.
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Yeah, they ll kind of do this surfacey thing to us, really good.
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This might be a first cousin to that.
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Can I say that, my first cousin?
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They don t continue to understand.
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Kind of like what you said, we don t continue to understand.
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The first cousins marry in Indiana.
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Oh, I got a lot of friends from college who would tell you that that s probably how I came about in the world, but that s another podcast.
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That s a fraternity topic.
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It s a fraternity topic for sure, yeah.
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We used to say aunt, mom, uncle, dad, yep.
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They don t continue to understand the root cause, the root cause.
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And this is go back.
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So Bill s really good advice about listening.
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And then this, to me, is about the depth of motivation with someone.
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And it s more about the depth than anything else.
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It s not about what the motivation is.
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It s the depth of it.
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Because people won t change or take another path unless at their core they see this great opportunity for life to be better.
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And as salespeople, I think we don t go deep enough in that to understand the root cause, and therefore we never get to it.
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And sometimes that may not be there also.
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And so understanding at a depth can also lead us to a place where we might shut the deal down earlier ourselves.
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Because we say, the person just isn t, they re just sort of, you know, touch, let s say, kicking
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tires, that sort of thing.
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So this is a root cause of the problem?
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Yeah, of the motivation to do anything at all.
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Or the root motivation.
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The root motivation may be a way to say that, sure.
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Because the cause of the problem could be whatever it is, but it s the motivation to fix it at its root.
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Exactly.
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I like that.
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Here is one, I just put no ROE, no rules of engagement.
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And rules of engagement, obviously, is a military concept and term that talks about when you can fire on the enemy when you can, what the circumstances and conditions are on the battlefield, and how that governs your actions.
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And I don t think
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that we have really good rules of engagement as a sales profession.
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I think we chase lots of things that aren t going to happen, as is evidenced by the closing rate being so low across industries.
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So I guess the question is, well, what should the ROE be for you?
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And you re going to have to figure that out.
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But a lot of times, I think we get down the pike with somebody, with a prospect.
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And we re trying to make something fit that doesn t fit.
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And it s because we didn t have any rules of engagement, we should have been out a long time ago.
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Yes, yes, yes.
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That s really, really good.
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And I would concur.
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The other ancillary note to that is you have to know your own rules of engagement before you can say them to somebody else and believe them.
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Oh, absolutely.
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And I think some people don t even know them.
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And if they do have them, they don t believe them.
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So delve deep into yourself on that one.
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Yeah, I think that we do.
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It s almost every podcast we do, you could probably come up with one rule of engagement.
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Now, we ve done 500, so you probably wouldn t have 500.
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But go back and listen to the last ones, or just take a notepad out.
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And from this point forward, like we ve already talked about,
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Root cause.
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So the rule of engagement is, if I don t hear the root cause of the motivation or the root problem, then I can t continue.
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So that would be an ROE.
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That s great.
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That s a good one right there.
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This kind of goes along.
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It s the spirit of the second cousin now.
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Let s do the second cousin challenge.
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Yeah, I like second cousins better here in Indiana.
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Don t ever say that again.
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Kentucky first cousins.
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Don t ever say that again.
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We don t define the process and the timeline up front.
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And this is getting real tactical.
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And so what I wrote down here, so for some language, you might say, hey, if we re still in the deciding mode here six weeks from today, we re probably past the point.
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It s probably time to say it s just not right.
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You can start to define those timelines for people up front.
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We don t do this with specificity.
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And I want you to start to do it with specificity now if you re not doing that already.
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Specificity rolled off your tongue.
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Did you like that?
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Did you have do you sneak a cup of coffee in there?
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I did not no no suck down a little bit.
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That s about it And when three hours later came back, I did my morning exercises you said something though
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Mr. Neal that I thought was interesting and that is I just did a little piece on this and this the idea of how we turn our nose down to tactics and you even said this is getting real tactical, but I always say that
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It s all tactical.
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Well, our strategy is to go call all of our clients and see if they want this product.
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But if you don t know how to pick up the phone, dial, and have a conversation with them, which is very tactical, and yet we always talk about strategy.
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I even use the term.
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Sometimes people even add an H to strategy.
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Strategy.
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You ever notice that?
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Yes, or an ER, strategery.
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Nod to Texas.
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So tactics are, and it s what we re giving you here, we re giving you tactics, but the tactics are designed to get you out of the way so that someone can buy.
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So I don t know what s more valuable is high arching strategy or tactics you can use tomorrow.
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I vote for tomorrow s tactics.
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Well, I had no finding the compelling reason or root cause, so we got that one.
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I m not sure that we do a good job of really thinking through the entire process with a client.
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So for example.
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Let s say you have a prospect who s a VP of sales at a medical practice or whatever.
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And so you re looking to sell them something.
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And you have met with the VP of operations, and you ve had a meeting with them.
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And it seems to be good, but it s now stalled out.
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I think you have to look at the entire organization and pull focus a little bit and say, OK, what does this organization look like?
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There s a CEO.
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So I don t think we think through that.
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I think we get fixated on one person.
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And our whole, I mean, I don t think we think through that.
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I think we get fixated on one person.
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whole person is about selling to them.
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And I think they re buying in the context of the organization.
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So it d be best if we understood that, too.
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I think I got the same one.
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I think my third one is the same thing.
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And I just put it, I said, we don t look around.
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We don t look around.
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We don t look around to see who else is around, who else might be impacted by this, who else might be impacted by not just whether we do this, but also by whether we don t do this.
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So does life get crappy in your example bill for the billing and coding people in the practice that sit up front and do that?
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Is their life miserable because my software solution isn t being implemented because the CFO thinks it s too expensive, right?
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I look around the room and I figure out who s where and who s impacting that sort of thing.
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The decision maker, I m not a fan of that word, the decision maker is the key to get in the room.
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And once you re in the room, you ve got to look around.
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Think of it that way as a way to get in.
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So what about if we said pain has tentacles?
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The problem that one person has reaches out into the organization, and like you said, it affects the billing person, it affects patient care, affects the nurses, affects the docs.
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So the idea that we re going to go in and sell one person, and they are then going to go sell all these other people without our help is a bit, it s a big ask.
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So I like the idea of looking around, and I love that, it s good.
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What else you got?
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I m done.
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I m done, too.
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I have no vetting, but I think we ve covered that.
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No ROE, no thinking through.
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I love your idea of process and timeline.
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Sometimes I think we get down into the process, and we get stuck.
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And I had this happen with one of our clients the other day, where the customer didn t know what to do next.
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And so if they don t know what to do next, how can we expect them to do the right thing?
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And so how do you keep that process in front of them?
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That s really good.
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Yeah.
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OK, that does it for today s episode.
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If you haven t already done so, go to our website.
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Check out our products page, advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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We ve got some wonderful things and tools to use.
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Holiday season is snaking up on us, Bill.
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It s almost Halloween, isn t it?
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Great little gift for you to buy for your favorite Christmas person on there.
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We ll get there.
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Just wait.
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The Christmas tunes are coming.
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And again, we re on the road.
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Send us a note for now.
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A note, listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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If you d like to talk to us about booking for 2018 for sales meetings, national sales meetings, sales retreats, anything like that, we d love to talk about that.
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That s all.
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Love to see you.
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All right.
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See you next time.
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Bye.
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Bye.