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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, Bill shares a new technique for ridding your heart of calcium deposits, Fact Checker Doug makes a cameo appearance without even being here, and we take a good hard look at one of our favorite topics, the P word, process.
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Welcome back to the Advanced Selling Podcast, episode number one of 2020.
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We are the longest running, arguably the largest sales training podcast in the world.
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My name is Bill Kask.
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I m Brian Neal.
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Welcome, Brian, to 2020.
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Thanks.
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We ve been thinking about 2020.
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For a long time.
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How many times have people been talking about, uh, you know, seeing clearly everything s coming into focus.
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Yeah.
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Johnny Nash.
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Boom.
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Good.
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Good.
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You know, you know what song I heard today that had me, had me tapping my foot in the car is freak out.
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Oh, by LaChic.
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By, by Chic.
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Are you sure?
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It s Le Freak.
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By Sheik.
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Oh, it s Le Freak by Sheik, not Freak by Le Sheik.
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I think it s Le Freak by Sheik.
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Hey, you know who I talked to over the holidays?
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Good roller skating song.
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Do I want to know?
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I talked to F. C. D. Fat Chuck and Doug.
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Oh, you did?
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Oh, really?
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Yeah.
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Oh, good.
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He sent me a note about Leo Serre.
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Remember, we talked about Leo Serre, I Think I Can Dance.
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And he sent me a note, and I got back with him and said, thanks, we ll use it.
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And then he sent, I got a reply that had his phone number on it.
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Oh, perfect.
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I thought, well, maybe he wants me to call him.
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Why not?
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So he didn t.
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He s like, what are you calling me for?
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He did not want me to call him.
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And so I called him.
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He goes, hey, Bill Caskey.
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I said, yeah, did you want me to call you?
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He goes, no, my email always does that.
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Just leaves a phone number.
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So he was very appreciative.
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And we had a nice chat.
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Hey, Doug.
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So anyway.
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All right, so here s a story to bring us in.
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You want to get right into it, or do we want to talk about it?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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Story s good.
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I mean, it s story s good, especially a story that s health-related.
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Well, this story is related to our topic.
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And our topic today is, how buttoned up is your sales process, and are you paying attention to the details of it?
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And so.
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I went to, it s a little bit of a stretch maybe.
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I went to get a heart scan.
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And I ve been, I m on a pretty much of a health kick.
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I m really focused on fitness and health and muscle building and cardio.
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And so I ve been getting some tests run just to make sure I m good to bump it up a little bit.
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And so somebody said, you ought to get a heart scan.
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$49 heart scan.
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Have you ever had one?
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Well, I do the treadmill stress test, which I think is after the heart scan.
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Right.
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I think.
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I think it s better.
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The heart scan is just a quick picture.
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Yeah, just a quick look.
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Look-see, little look-see into your ticker.
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So I had it done and went to Riverview Hospital up in Noblesville.
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Great people.
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They were very nice.
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Of course, they re all podcast listeners.
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Of course.
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All the cardiologists that they love.
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They re salespeople at heart.
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So we got done.
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She goes, go out and sit in the chair there, and I ll bring your results back.
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I said, OK, good.
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So she brought the results back, and she goes, you want to sit down there?
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I said, oh.
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She said, now, all of the results are not perfectly accurate.
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We have a radiologist that looks at this thing a couple of days after this, and then we will send this to your doctor.
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She said, who is your doctor?
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I don t really have a doctor, but I just made up somebody.
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So she says, you have a tremendous calcium buildup.
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You re a 320 on this 1,000 point scale.
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I guess you people in the medical profession would know more.
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But the point is that they give you the range, like 0 to 400 is x, 400 to 700 is x, 700 to 1,000 is you re almost dead.
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And so I was at the very low end of the high range.
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So which means I was nervous.
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Of course.
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I mean, and then she shows where all the blockages or all the calcium is.
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And I said, OK, well, what does all this mean?
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I mean, I see the data here, but what does it mean?
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She goes, well, you need to go rest.
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No, she said, you need to talk to your doctor.
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He or she will give you what to do next.
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OK.
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OK.
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So I was nervous.
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And so the rest of the day, I drink coffee and milk.
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And so I thought, calcium, I better stop drinking milk.
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And I go through all this process, and I stop eating meat, and I stop eating sugar, and thinking two days is going to help this thing.
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And then I went to a part, oh, by the way, one thing, she goes, yeah, you might try meditating.
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She said that?
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Yeah.
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Oh, good.
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On the way out the door, she goes, maybe a doctor will have something for you.
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Maybe try meditating.
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I m like, is this a prescription?
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Break the calcium up?
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Does that really do that?
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Break the calcium up?
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With an audio sound?
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Anyway, so I saw a friend of mine, Doug Seeger, who s a cardiologist at a party Saturday night after this happened on Thursday.
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Good place to get heart.
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Yes, he was three sheets to the wind.
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I said, tell me about this.
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He goes, let me tell you about Heart Scans.
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He said, they are a marketing ploy to get you to buy further stress tests, all the stuff.
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It s not that you shouldn t pay attention to it, but he says, I can t tell you how many times patients come in and they re nervous because their scan shows up calcium, and they come in and there s nothing wrong.
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He says, there s no baseline on it.
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It s just a number out of nowhere.
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He said, here s an interesting fact.
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I ve got 10 cardiologists in my department.
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Never has one of them ever done a heart scan.
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Oh.
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Which tells you something about the reliability of itself.
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Anyway, so I thought the process of revealing the numbers to me was very lax.
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It was not buttoned up.
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And it caused me to get nervous.
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And there s no reason for it to be.
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And so we re talking about process today and buttoning up the process a little bit.
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But you ve had the stress test.
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I ve had the stress test.
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And so I think that s the end all, other than getting shot up with dye and stuff and getting a CT scan.
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That s the next best thing.
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Because I talked to my doctor.
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He goes, you don t need a heart scan if you do a stress test.
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Stress test is way more accurate.
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Way more accurate.
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Yeah.
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And that process is really cool.
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I don t know if my heart can handle the stress test.
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If you re doing a stress test, it s a much calmer thing.
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You should do a stress test.
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It s actually, it ll make you relax.
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Because it comes back with a percentage of likelihood that you re going to have a heart attack.
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Right.
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After looking at your, watching your heart go up and down on a treadmill.
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And it s really, really great.
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It always makes me feel good that I do it.
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OK.
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I will.
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Yeah.
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I ve never had any heart problems or any out of breath, but all of a sudden now every time I walk upstairs, I get a little long winded.
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Wheezy!
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Wheezy, I m going to see you, right?
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I got the big one!
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The big one from Sanford and Son, right?
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Hey, it s the new year, and if you are coming back to a calendar that looks a little bit sparse, and you d like to have some more meetings booked, you need to listen to what I m saying.
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You re not alone.
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The number one problem salespeople have is booking prospect meetings.
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And if you don t get the front end working, then you know that the back end won t work.
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It s one of those things that gnaws at us all the time.
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We re always asking ourselves, how do I book more first appointments?
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Well, if you re in that boat, you should know about Chronologic, the world s first calendar monetization engine.
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Chronologic takes leads from any channel and converts them into meetings for you.
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Chronologic literally, literally books out your calendar so you can maximize your meetings, your pipeline, and ultimately your compensation.
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You can use their technology for yourself, or if you d like to learn more, book a demo with them and you ll see how it works at chronologic.ai.
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That s chronologic with a K, K-R-O-N-O-L-O-G-I-C.ai.
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So process-wise, this started this weekend.
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I worked the football game yesterday.
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We were talking about processes.
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And I realized when anything goes wrong in the football field, it s almost always because we didn t follow little bits of a process.
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One little thing got wrong.
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And it made me also think about flying.
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And those of you who may have ever been on a plane flying across the country during the game, you were thinking, no, this is actually the day before the game.
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that you ll see the pilots sometimes, especially when you re flying on a regional airline, the pilots will meet each other right before they get on the plane.
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So the first officers and the captain sometimes are assigned to fly this plane and they have never met before.
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And maybe they re newer, younger in their careers.
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But what they do is they all have the same process that they follow.
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So that allows them to hop into a jet and fly a bunch of people safely midway, halfway across the country without having a problem, an accident, that sort of thing.
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They deal with checklists.
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They use the same framework, the same language.
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So I m thinking, OK, so it happens on football.
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It happens with flying airplanes.
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Shouldn t it also happen in selling?
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Shouldn t we take a really hard look at our processes and ask ourselves, do I have a process?
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Is it as good as it can be?
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Do I follow it?
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Why, why not?
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And all those sorts of things.
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So think about this as a thought-provoking episode for you to sit back and go, man, yeah, what is my process?
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And does it work?
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And how could it be better?
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And that sort of stuff.
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So process is the topic of the day.
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That s a great topic.
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I think so too.
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Yeah, I ve always wondered.
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I had a friend of mine who was a pilot for American, and he flew jumbo big 777s to China, Beijing, and India.
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And I was asking him once about the process.
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And he says, you know, it s the same every time.
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We could fly three different routes.
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Of course, you re not flying to Beijing, you re not doing three a day.
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But no matter how many you re flying, you re doing the same checklist, same process all the time.
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All the time.
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The language is the same, your definition for,
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or a wing is not different than my definition of whatever.
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It s just all very, very buttoned up.
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Yes, extremely.
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And so the question is, as you posed it, is what about in sales?
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And so maybe we take a walk through the sales process and talk about some
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observations that we have that we ve seen that might help the listener get a little more buttoned up about theirs.
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Yes.
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And I would say for there are a couple of different elements here, because I also believe there are processes within the process.
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We were watching a, now these are, I watch, you ever watch these shows on air disasters?
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I actually like those shows.
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I do.
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I like them too.
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And when you watch them, and what most people don t know, and we,
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I was talking to my wife about this, because we were watching a show together.
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And she s like, what are they?
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I said, they actually have a checklist for when stuff goes wrong.
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So if the engine flames out, there s a checklist for that.
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If the oxygen drops and a depressurization happens, there s a checklist.
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There s a checklist for things within the general flying process.
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And so as you re listening to this, I want you to think about that.
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Your company will likely have a sales process, and you may also have your own process within the company s sales process.
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The main thing is that you re able to document that, number one, and you re able to repeat it.
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You can share it with someone.
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You know exactly where you re going, either broadly with your company s process or within your own for yourself.
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So if I said, we ve got a listener gig we re going to go up to Chicago to do for a podcast listening group who we like a lot.
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One of the things we re going to talk to them about is, how do I territory manage?
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Well, probably, I m guessing, the reason we re doing that is because you got 15, 25 people doing it totally differently.
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And so how can we structure that and button that up a little bit better?
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I think it s a really, really good thing for you to examine for yourself.
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I think that s probably typical, though.
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If you have a sales team, if you re a VP of sales listing, and you ve got 20, 30, 50 people, management team, I bet
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that s probably a pretty systemic issue, which is everybody s got their own thing, their own way of doing things.
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You could have a sales process.
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But if I watched you go through it and Travis and me, you could see three very different characterizations of it, too.
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So I like the idea.
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Tim Ferriss wrote a book called The Four-Hour Workweek.
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Do you remember that?
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Absolutely.
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A few years ago.
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One of the things that he stressed in there, he said, if you re going to work less and achieve more, you ve got to delegate.
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If you re going to delegate, you ve got to document.
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And until things are documented, your process, the sub-processes, like you talk about, Brian, until they re documented, it becomes hard to see where the problem is.
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You forget.
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If you don t have a checklist in front of you, and I m guilty of this, sometimes I ll wing first calls, but I know when I have a checklist, when I prepare and go in and have a conversation with somebody, if I ve got an agenda or checklist, whatever you want to call it, things always go better.
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Always go better.
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They always do.
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And I m the same boat.
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I mean, for the most part, I m pretty diligent with those processes.
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And then occasionally, you get sloppy, or you get relaxed because you built some rapport with someone, and you sort of come off script.
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And it doesn t work.
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I just had a gig that I got a no for, so I like the fact that I got a decision.
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As I re-examine, I go backwards.
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I got a little too comfy with these people, too chummy with them.
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And I said, yeah, we re going through.
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And I knew I was talking.
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I knew there was an owner of the company I wasn t talking to.
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I knew I was exposed.
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If I was following the process, though, when I got to the process, which is one of my sections, I would have said, I need to go have a meeting with that guy.
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And that s it.
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And I didn t do that.
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I let it go a little too far without that.
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I would say 90% of the time that I lose a deal or don t get one I probably should get, it s because I ve come off the process.
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I got lax.
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I got sloppy.
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Maybe it s because I had extra rapport.
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Maybe it s because I felt time constrained, or I just felt in a needy place, and I felt like, well, he wants the quote, so I better send the quote.
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And that s the wrong thing.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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So I think a good thing to do, kind of step one of this thing, is it needs to be written down.
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That s the first thing.
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I think you need to be able to say it and articulate what it is.
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I love the idea of also, it needs to be written down in a way that you can send it to somebody else, and they can understand it.
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That s another thing people miss sometimes, is they try to internalize their own lingo and jargon into a process, and people don t give a crap about that.
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They re just like, what are you talking about?
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Just put it in simple form so other people can go, yeah, I can follow along with that.
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How many times have you, well, I was somewhere the other day, and I asked somebody, well, tell me about your business.
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And it was like seven minutes of all over the place, stream of consciousness chasing little white rabbits through the forest.
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I mean, I had no, I literally had no idea after seven minutes what they did.
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And it s because we are not buttoned up about how we explain our business, how we explain our value.
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I wrote down here, as you were talking, that let s say your process has five components to it.
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Maybe first step is a discovery, second step is an economic step, third step is whatever.
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You ve got four or five steps.
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Underneath each one of those, you probably have a series of sub-bullet points or sub-checklists.
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So the decision process, we want to know, are we talking to the CEO, if that s who you talk to, a VP of sales, merchandising?
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What are the people that you need to have involved?
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And so this could be, and it could be a fairly significant document, but so what?
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If you want to close 90% of your deals or even 70%, you ve got to have some kind of structure.
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See, I love that.
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And people, the listeners can t see this.
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Bill s kind of sketched out.
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He s very visually sketched out.
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In pen, I might say.
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Normally, he s with pencil.
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This is in pen, so he can t do anything with this, but we don t want to change it.
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But you have these big, oh, never mind.
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I just happen to have a number two universal pencil in his pocket.
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How many of you carry a number two pencil, not a mechanical one, not the click, click one like you got now a legitimate old school.
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You think it s less than 80%?
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That s a great question.
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Doug Drozen, fact checker.
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Doug, get on that with you.
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What s the percentage of Americans that use a number two pencil without... It s an elite group.
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It is a very smart group.
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But he s sketching this out.
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So this is what it should look like.
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It almost looks like a, what do you call this?
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Like a pictogram.
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What are those things called?
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Those little pictures of things?
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Icon, iconogram, iconoclastic.
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No, that s from the PNG days.
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It is.
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It s kind of like a planogram, though.
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It is a little bit, right?
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Top shelf.
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So you ve got a big process at the top, little processes below.
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And you think about the things we ve compared this to.
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So you think about flying an airplane.
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A captain and a first officer don t meet and get in the cockpit and say, hey, don t worry about checking the engines today.
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We re good.
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They don t do that.
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They go right down the list.
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Engine checks, boom, on, power, boom, boom, boom.
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OK, now ailerons, check.
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Rudder, check.
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Everything s checked.
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So if you do that, it s really hard to screw anything up.
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It is hard.
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And when a pilot s doing a checklist, when something s wrong, they stop.
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They re like, we can t fly.
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We can t go on.
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Yeah.
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I had a flight two weeks ago.
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The guy s like, we have a computer glitch error that s coming up.
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We don t think it s a problem, but it needs to be reset.
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We can t reset it, so we re going to have to delay.
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And the flight was delayed an hour.
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They stopped flying because there was a glitch in the process.
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That s awesome.
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Isn t that great?
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So let s talk about maybe three or four things that should be a part of the checklist as a sales professional, B2B seller.
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What are a handful of things?
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SPEAKER_00
Maybe you give a couple, and I ll give a couple of things that just have to be checked off before you advance.
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Yes.
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SPEAKER_01
And you re talking about the actual what the components would be?
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, like discovery, like something like that, like what s inside the discovery process that you say, you can t go any further until you find this out?
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Yeah.
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So one thing that would be in the discovery checklist would be reasonable economic motive.
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What s the economic motive meaning?
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I ve got an issue or a problem, and am I able to delineate how much that problem is costing me?
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Or how much opportunity costs I ve got not going the other direction?
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Not just, like in our world, it wouldn t be, we just want our salespeople to be skilled better.
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We want there to be some economic upside to it if we can find that at all.
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Because that helps us recognize whether or not the investment in our work is worth it.
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for them.
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That would be a thing.
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Good.
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I have assessment.
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Now assessment doesn t necessarily mean a paid assessment, but you ve got to have some kind of a process that you take people through in order to find out what are the problems, what are you trying to accomplish, what s your ideal outcome, what are the economics of this, if you don t get it done, what s the economics if you do.
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SPEAKER_00
So I ll probably go back up from where you are and just some kind of an assessment, some kind of survey or audit or whatever you want to call it.
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And maybe it s just something you have for yourself.
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It s just a page that you keep to keep you on track when you re asking these questions.
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Kind of like a heart scan.
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Kind of like a heart scan, maybe you should just meditate a little more, sir.
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Breaks up that calcium in 48 hours.
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I m going to start meditating, break up the calcium, break up the calcium, break up the calcium.
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Here s something that I think needs to be under the process section.
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So one of my headings is process.
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And there is who all is going to be involved in the whole project, everyone from the person who s going to sign the contract, the person who s going to support the program internally, and who the people are within it.
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Because I ve got those three.
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In our world, those three constituents can make or break a deal, right?
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So in the deal I lost, VP of sales brings me in.
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I met all
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the salespeople I didn t meet the CEO.
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That s where my process failed.
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SPEAKER_00
If I would have been following my checklist right, met all three, still might have gotten to the same conclusion, but I wouldn t have gone as far as I did without it, if that makes sense.
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SPEAKER_00
Because they end up getting a proposal from me, which they shouldn t have if I m following their process right.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s good.
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SPEAKER_01
One other thing I have here is somewhere during the near the end of the process, I wouldn t say this is a first call, but it might be, and that is
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Have you been able to cast the vision of what it looks like to work with you?
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That s really good.
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So let s say that you are typically in a 90-day selling cycle.
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Maybe it s three or four calls.
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Everybody s different.
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But let s just, for the sake of argument, say that s it.
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I d say on the second or third call, you would say, look, in the event we work together, I know we re not there yet.
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In the event we work together, let me share with you what it looks like to be a client of mine.
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SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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And you just lay out, step one, after the deal is signed or the engagement letter is signed, here s what we do.
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We have a meeting of four of us.
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We go to Sullivan s, and we have dinner and smoke cigars, and we drink a lot, and we talk about the issues.
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And second thing is I come back after that meeting, and I deliver an articulation of the elements, and we project manage the thing.
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SPEAKER_01
Whatever the process is, it s nice to be able to tell the person somewhere, here s what it looks like to work with me.
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That, to me, is part of the process.
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SPEAKER_00
That s great.
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SPEAKER_00
I love that.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, nobody does that.
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SPEAKER_00
People just don t talk about moving on.
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Here s what it s like to be a client.
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It s so easy because you re not saying, hey, we re getting ready to close here.
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You re just saying, in the event, we work together.
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This is what it s like.
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SPEAKER_00
It s great.
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I love doing that.
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SPEAKER_00
That s great.
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SPEAKER_00
Last thing I ll say in the timeline, or in the process, I just gave it away.
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SPEAKER_00
In the process, I would also think about putting a timeline.
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SPEAKER_00
We re onboarding a new employee this week.
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SPEAKER_00
And we even changed this.
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SPEAKER_00
We first put down like first 30 days, 45, 60.
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SPEAKER_00
I m like, you know, let s put dates on that.
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SPEAKER_00
Let s just be a little more, even more precise with it.
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SPEAKER_00
So instead of saying 45 days, we re going to say February 16th or February 19th.
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That just really helps people say, OK, I see an end here.
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And this thing s going to come to a conclusion at some point.
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SPEAKER_00
I love the day-based language of that.
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Hey, if you have some kind of an event coming up, sales meeting, strategy meeting, customer conference of some kind, you d like Brian or I or both of us to come out and talk.
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We ve got one in Chicago coming up here in a couple of weeks, and we re looking forward to visiting the good people up in Chicago.
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Send us an email to listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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In the subject line, just write, come see us.
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Somebody will be back in touch with you promptly.
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And we ll talk about your event and what is required to bring us in.
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Yep.
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See you next time.
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Bye.
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Bye.