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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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I m Bill Kasky.
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Excuse me while I pop myself down, Bill.
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A little hot.
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A little hot, yeah.
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A little hot, not in the looks way, but in the audio way.
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No, not in the looks way, for sure.
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Voice for Podcasting.
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Hey, we re here every week for your listening enjoyment.
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If you re new, welcome to the show.
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If you re a veteran listener, tell your friends.
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We ve had several of you do that, which we re very thankful for.
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We re going to continue to grow our tribe and get like-minded people all communicating through the podcast, LinkedIn group and everything else.
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And if you ve not checked out our insider program, if you want to be an actual coachee, live coachee, our insider program meets the first Friday of every month.
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Go to our website, advancedsellingpodcast.com.
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Check out the insider for a very, very high return investment.
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You will be personally coached by me and Bill the first Friday of every month.
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Yeah, the last session, it was really good.
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We had people bring their biggest issue, their biggest problem, their biggest sales situation, circumstance where they were frustrated or just didn t know how to handle it.
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And not only was there good advice from you and I, which we kind of come to expect, but there s also great advice from other people in the group.
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And we break up into groups of three or four, and it s remarkable how almost every problem you have in sales, and I don t even know if you consider it a problem, everything that goes on that you would like to change, everybody else has the same issue.
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Everybody.
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It s just universal.
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And if you can be around people who, you know, even if it s a 24 year old brand new salesperson who s figured out a way to crack the code on something, you might be 50 and you say, well, hell, I can learn from that person.
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So it s really a learning
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environment that we ve created here that I think will really help you.
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So check it out, advancedsellingpodcast.com slash insider.
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So Bill, I was in a major mass merchandise type store with a big red logo.
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If you know which one I m talking about there, right?
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Okay.
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And I wonder if this ever happened to you.
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This is a guy, girl thing.
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This is not like a good, bad or whatever, but it s a thing.
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So this young man was walking through, I was with my wife and we were in the feminine hygiene section, if you know what that is.
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Are you with me?
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And this poor kid, he s probably 24, whatever, is clearly stressed about this process because he has been sent on an errand by his female companion to get some feminine hygiene products.
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And I feel like you just kind of see the stress in the kid s face.
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So finally, he stops this young worker, this young target worker, female, says, excuse me, ma am, I m sorry to bother you.
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My girlfriend sent me out to get these.
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Are these okay?
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The girlfriend said, the little target girl, she was like,
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Yeah, those are perfect.
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Those have worked great.
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He goes, Okay, I m sorry.
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I just, I didn t know which ones yet.
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Are these okay?
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And I just thought, and my question is, have you been there?
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Most men have been sent on the quest for feminine hygiene products.
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And it s a very complicated buying system.
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It s a matrix and it s difficult to understand if you don t, if you re, if you don t or not a product.
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And I feel bad for the, it s a thing for women that they have to do and not, you know, good or bad or whatever, but.
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There s lots of choices.
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Lots of choices.
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Difficult.
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It s kind of like, I ve noticed that with toothpaste lately, when you look for toothpaste, there s tartar control, there s color control, there s white control.
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And it s like, what happened to the good old days when we had crust?
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Crust.
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Right.
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It s true.
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So I felt bad for this kid.
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And for any men who ve been on that Aaron, that s good.
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And for our female listeners and our women, and that s a thing we, uh, uh, respect that, uh, buying process.
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It s a very difficult one.
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I used to sell that stuff when I worked at Procter and Gamble.
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I appreciate the ginger, the ginger way you, you launched that story.
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Yes.
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Yeah.
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That was,
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It didn t trigger anybody didn t trigger me.
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I hope not.
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Well, I m just I felt for this kid, you know, because you know, it is a stressful and you want to take care of the woman that sent you and you want to, you know, get her what she needs and that sort of thing.
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Okay, next topic.
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Well, I raised this issue in our pre
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episode meeting that lasts usually about 37 seconds.
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And that is the idea of change.
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And we ve addressed this topic before.
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But when Brian and I go into an organization, or if you ve invited us in to do as podcast listeners to do some work, there s always the presenting problem, like we want more sales, we want higher close rates, we want our people to prospect, but whatever the presenting problem is,
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And then there s the solution.
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And the solution typically has a couple of components to it.
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It s got a mechanical component, like maybe they re just not saying the right things.
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Maybe their sales process is off.
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Maybe how they generate leads is just not, it s not the way leads are generated today.
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So there s external stuff, but there s also the internal stuff, which is, do I even believe in my product?
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Do I even believe in myself?
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Do I believe that I could take my business from $150,000 income a year to $400,000?
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And all those beliefs are deeply ingrained beliefs.
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I always say that, Brian, you played golf back in the day when we used to play golf once a year together.
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And if we went out and played golf, or if you went out with a pro and played golf, and on the third hole, the pro says, Brian, you re not holding your clubs right.
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I mean, you re not even, your grip is totally wrong.
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You wouldn t fight it.
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You wouldn t fight him and say, what are you talking about?
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I ve been doing this for 27 years.
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I m a scrap.
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You d say, hell, I don t know how to hold the damn clubs.
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I figured it would be wrong, yeah.
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But if I came to you when you re 50 years old and said, hey, the way you ve been selling, it s not right.
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You re not thinking about this in the right way.
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I think we get a lot of resistance.
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And so my question to kind of boil it down is, how much work should we be doing on the inside part, the internal, the mindset part of selling versus just the mechanical and external?
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And when your client says, when you have a client who it s obvious that some of the people are not thinking about it right,
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What do you do?
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How do you broach the subject and say, look, you got four people here, Mr. VP of sales, that they re not, they re never going to get this because they re thinking in an old way.
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Yeah.
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It s really, really good topic.
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And I think even in the pre-show too, Bill, you had mentioned the idea that sometimes we go into a client, which this happens not sometimes, all the time, and there s a group of people, salespeople, maybe the team s five, 10, 20, 40, 50, whatever it is, and inevitably, a few of them really latch on to what we re talking about and look to take whatever they re doing to a different place.
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And there s a lot of people that just don t.
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And the thing that I ve always struggled with is how do I handle that?
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So me as a sales coach, and then for those of you listening who are sales leaders, you as a sales leader, what do you do with that?
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Is it a mandatory come along my way or the highway?
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I tend to err to everyone is invited, everyone s invited.
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And if you re coming to sit at the table, then you re in, and I m going to work my tail off to try to help you and coach you.
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And if you choose to self-select out, then you choose to self-select out and let you roll.
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I don t know that that s right.
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Like you said, if you, there s some, like, here s a thing I struggle with.
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When you hear someone, let s say when you hear someone who s trained in a different methodology, and they are clearly entrenched in that methodology, and because of our years of working with this, we know which methodology that is, we can, you can pick them out real quick, like, oh, you re spin trained, or you re Sandler trained, it s real easy.
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And we have our opinions about that.
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Is it my job to help that person see things a different way?
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Like you said, through the thinking column, through the headset sort of thing, or do I just let them be?
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Because what I hear in there, it s like nails on a chalkboard.
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Like if they go down a manipulative path, which they do, I m like, dude, listen, it sounds manipulative to me.
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I owe it to them to tell them that.
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Where I struggle with is, do I say- How far do you go?
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And do I say, here s the thing I get hung up in the question you ask is, is there thinking wrong?
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Is there thinking wrong?
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And where I m thinking in my own mind here, is there such thing as right and wrong in this subject?
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Is there a wrong way to think about selling?
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Well, if someone,
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If someone comes to you and says, Brian, I really want to grow my business and my income.
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Let s just say it s an individual.
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I know we don t do a ton of individual coaching, but somebody says that, and they say, well, I use this system, this framework, selling framework, and you look at it and say,
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Well, you re not going to get there doing that.
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That s just not going to get you there.
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And then they say, well, I m not going to give up that.
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Then you have a decision.
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Well, do you really want to grow your business?
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Or are you tied to this framework so much that you say, well, I want to grow my business, but I can t get rid of this framework.
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I can t get rid of this thinking.
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I think then it s incumbent upon the trainer to say, look, you ain t going to get there.
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And so now I invite you, like I like your idea, now I invite you to think about sales in a totally different way.
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Let me share with you how you should be thinking about it.
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You decide.
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If you don t want to do it, I m not going to show up at your house and try to get you to think differently.
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So I do think there s responsibility for the trainer to introduce the thinking, but also a lot more responsibility for the participant to say, OK, I m in.
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I can get there.
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See, that s good.
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That s that s a so this is a good if you re a listener, because we have salespeople that listen, we have sales leaders that listen.
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This is both sides.
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I love what you just said, Bill, about both sides have a responsibility here.
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Now, this is a part that I think is it s wrong if you don t think you ve got responsibility in this process.
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I think a lot of times, salespeople will go, I don t I don t need to be open.
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And I think you have a responsibility to be open.
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I really do.
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To consider new things.
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You have a responsibility to do that.
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I think not considering new things is wrong.
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I do think that s wrong.
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Buying into everything is not right or wrong.
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You don t have to buy into everything, but you need to consider it.
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And like you said, you have a duty and a responsibility to examine your side of it to go, how is what I m doing here working and not working?
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And then the sales leader, for those of you who are sales leaders listening, you have a duty also to create the space that allows your sales team to lean in or lean out.
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But you have to watch.
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I think it s a real slippery slope to say that someone has to believe a certain way.
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That s where I really struggle.
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Even if I, with all my heart and conviction, believe that s how they should believe, that s really hard for me to do, personally.
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Yeah, I agree.
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And I think a lot of it gets back to something that Gary Vaynerchuk talks about a lot is self-awareness.
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And your, one of your mentors, Dan Sullivan also talks about, you know, do we ever really stop to think about how we re thinking?
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And I find, and I think you do too, because we ve talked about it, that the highest achievers, I ve got a friend of mine, a client who s in Canada and lives in Toronto, one of the,
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one of the sharpest people I ve ever trained and coached.
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And when he comes to me with an issue, he never buys into old thinking.
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He s like, you know what?
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I ve been doing it this way for 37 years, but I m open.
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How else can we do this?
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How else can we look at this perspective?
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I find that higher achievers are less tied to what s right, to their prior conditioning,
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than someone who s been in business four or five years, and they think they have all the answers.
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And you know who you are.
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I mean, yes, I was probably that way when I was 28.
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So I can relate.
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But yeah, don t you think that the highest achievers, the people who have earned the most who are most fulfilled are so willing to abandon their prior thinking?
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not all, but a lot are.
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And I think that s what makes them successful.
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Completely.
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You think, and I think in other performance, so one of my football life, I get to see it, you know, you watch any NFL football game in 2020 and then watch an NFL football game from 2010, you re going to see a dramatically different game because everyone in that group, they re the highest performers on the earth at what they do.
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All they do is innovate and find new ways and they keep trying to improve.
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There s not one person s like, yeah, this is what we do.
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30 years doing this.
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Yeah.
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Even the coaches that have been around and the players that have been around forever, they constantly tweak and modify their game constantly.
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Yeah.
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You see it in music.
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It s an interesting thing.
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I was thinking about, you know, you get bands.
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I was thinking about Simon Garfunkel.
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uh old band from the 60s and their 70s right and then you you say okay how come some bands write this brilliant music you know for this time period and then it just stops i think one of the reasons is because they choose not to innovate into into the modern era of music and adapt and sometimes they don t want to they re like it s not their deal but there are artists that do you know that continue to reinvent themselves over and over each time uh
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each time the thing moves on, like T. Swift, like Taylor Swift, right?
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Yeah, no, she has.
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She s reinvented herself a couple times.
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Exactly.
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And so maybe that s the lesson from all this is don t go trying to change
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Don t go trying to change me.
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Don t go try to change things.
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Just say, have I reinvented myself?
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Have I innovated much in the last eight to 10 years?
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And if you re doing the same thing you were doing then, other than Zoom, maybe you re making more Zoom calls.
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But if that s the only innovation, that s probably not good enough.
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It s probably not good enough.
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So are you innovating your thinking about sales, about business, about how you generate leads?
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I think that s the biggest thing that we can do in sales today is innovate.
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our lead generation flow or lead.
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And if we re still, you know, showing up at the Denny s trying to generate a meeting and I think that s a misguided, but so maybe that s just the answer is let s take a good hard look at how we are innovating or whether we have innovated our sales process and become aware of that.
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And then you decide for yourself, willing to live with that.
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I m trying to think how many deals I ve closed over two moons over my hammy.
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Yeah.
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It wasn t a 3 a.m.
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Typically I was at Denny s.
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Yeah.
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And Bloomington on college Avenue at about two 30 with all my buddies in college.
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I was, I was that way up here with Perkins.
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Exactly.
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Of course.
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And,
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That s a really good topic and so I think everyone should take this what they re hearing today and reflect personally individually and based on your role if you re a manager how this shows up for you if you re a salesperson.
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I think where I m landing is it is wrong to not be open to consider doing something new and committing to innovation.
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I think that is wrong and you don t have to give up of your core self
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No, no.
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But I do think that is the fear.
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I do too.
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I do too.
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Well, I identify that my identity is all wrapped around me using a certain framework.
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That s just who I am.
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Well, that s not who you are.
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That s what defines you, what sales methodology you use.
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Come on.
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Yeah, exactly.
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There s a lot more things that define you more clearly than that.
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But there is a fear of letting go of something that s worked in hopes of getting something that works even better.
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So there is resistance.
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Love it.
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If you have not connected with us on LinkedIn, make sure you go to AdvancedSellingPodcast.com slash LinkedIn.
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That ll take you directly to the group where you can join 12,500 of your closest friends and be a part of our LinkedIn group, which we d love to have you.
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And also, as Brian said earlier, check out our insider program, AdvancedSellingPodcast.com slash insider.
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I think you ll like what you see there.
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Love it.
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See ya.
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Bye.