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In this episode of the Advanced Selling Podcast, I impress Bill with my French translation skills.
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I also feel like a guest on my own podcast.
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And we bring you a philosophical topic about when attributes become deficits.
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Welcome back to the Advanced Selling Podcast, the longest running sales training podcast that we know of, at least.
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I m Bill Kasky.
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I m Brian Meele.
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Welcome back to the show, Brian.
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Oh, did I leave?
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Well, I m here now.
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I always like it when I listen to a fair amount of talk radio when I m in the car.
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And I always like it when a caller calls in and the person will say, hey, you know, talking to Brian in Poughkeepsie, New York.
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And Brian says, well, thanks for having me on the show today.
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It s like, we didn t really have you on the show.
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You actually called in.
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Like, hey, will someone call that guy in Poughkeepsie, New York and get him over here?
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We did.
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Exactly.
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Our producer called, arranged.
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I m glad we were able to talk to you today, Brian and Poughkeepsie.
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Truly funny.
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So if you are interested, I know we say this a lot, and we don t want it to be like a broken record, but we do have a lot of VPs of sales and sales leaders who call us and ask us questions about coming in to do a training or to do a one-day event or two-day event.
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And so we ve done several of those this year.
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We will do many more this fall.
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So if you have a fall training, don t wait too late because our schedule books up.
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But if you have something coming up this September, October, November,
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and you want to talk to us about coming out and doing a full-day program or a half-day program, send us an email to listener at advancedsellingpodcast.com with come see us in the subject line.
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We ll come visit.
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We will.
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OK, shall we?
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Yeah, topic today is a little bit
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It s philosophical, maybe?
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Yeah, when we plan topics, usually we will take something that happened to one of us.
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Brian has his cadre of clients.
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I ve got mine.
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Cadre is like a group.
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Yeah, thank you.
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How do you spell it?
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Can I guess?
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Yeah.
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Is it C-O-U-D-R-E?
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C-O-U-D-R-E?
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No, I think it s C-A-D-R-E.
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C-A-D-R-E?
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Yeah.
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Is what I spelled something bad?
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I thought it was corduroy, yeah.
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Is it?
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I m just looking.
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Cadre.
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I didn t know where you were going with that, but I don t, yeah.
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I think it s cadre.
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Now we can t continue until we find it.
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Oh, you know what it is?
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What?
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It s French.
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It means to sew.
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Well, perfect.
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That s exactly what you wrote.
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Yeah.
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OK, we re going to sew a group of clients together.
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And so what will happen is he ll have something that hits him that he thinks is a good topic, or I, me.
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And so the point is that we usually get these topics that way.
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Yes.
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But this one is something that happened to me here a couple of weeks ago when we started talking about it, and we got into a little bit deeper discussion about this notion that I m about to share with you.
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And so it didn t really come from a client, although it may have started that way.
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And the client that I have, the situation was, they re in a very long selling cycle.
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Their selling cycle should be three to six months, would you say?
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Maybe a year.
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Maybe a year.
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But they ve been going at this one prospect for years.
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Yeah.
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And multiples of years.
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And nothing has happened.
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And there s no sign on the horizon that anything s going to happen.
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No.
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And so I told the person who had just shared with me that this is a multi-multi-year selling cycle with this prospect.
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I said, why are you putting yourself through this?
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Why are you still pursuing it?
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Well, I know the reason he said.
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He said, well, I ve got a lot of time invested now, a lot of sunk cost, as we say in the CPA world.
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And so sometimes we have so much sunk effort and sunk cost into something that it s hard for us to abort it, because we re so invested in it.
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And so I told Brian this, and he says, you know, that s great.
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A lot of times you have clients that ask you, how persistent should I be?
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Why don t you tell them that, and where you ended up here with this inflection point.
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Yeah, that s good.
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So Bill s pointing to the whiteboard that we drew on earlier.
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Now I feel like I m the guest.
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That s good.
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So why don t you talk about that if you could, Brian.
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Thanks, Bill.
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Thanks for having me on.
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That s a callback.
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Good.
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We know what that is.
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Oh, it s funny.
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So when I m teaching, when we teach, Bill and I teach a methodology for closing a file.
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When a deal stalls out, and we re moving forward, and we get stuck, we have this whole process.
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We teach them what to do and what to say.
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And what, as you were talking pre-show, is that there s this process where if I do something too long or too much, it moves from becoming an attribute to a deficit.
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And everyone always wants to know exactly what to do, how often, how soon, that sort of stuff.
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And these general things that go behind that, things like we re going to talk about persistence here,
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is if you draw like a, what would you call that?
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Like an arcing curve, like goes up and then peaks in the middle and then starts to go down.
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And if you think about as it s going up, persistence is an attribute going up to a point.
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And then at some point it starts to flip downward and becomes a deficit and you get too persistent.
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Either you either annoy people or you waste time or things like that.
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And so we want to talk about today is that model applied to things that we ve been taught and selling are oftentimes good can become bad.
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bad overtime.
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So the question is, there s things like persistence that might fit into this category.
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Yeah, persistence is one.
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There might be something around enthusiasm, because we ve always taught that, we ve always heard, we haven t taught it, but we ve heard it, that you need to be enthusiastic and passionate about what you do.
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And I think that that also has a limit to where you can be too enthusiastic.
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And then you even mentioned earlier curiosity.
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And asking questions is really good until they become annoying.
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Exactly.
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Exactly.
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And so as you re listening to Bill and I talk today, this is a philosophical exercise.
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So we talked about giving people some principles around these things.
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So we have some limits to these.
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So the first, to me, kind of principled endorsement of this
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is to think about what we just said and consider that that might be the case, that perhaps persistent runs its course and starts to turn downward for me.
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To me, that s a principle.
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And so I know in my own world, business, everything else, that persistence is good.
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And at some point, it s either costing me or it s costing them or both.
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So it could be costing me because I m spending too much time chasing something that I really shouldn t chase, or it could be costing them because I m annoying them, or it could be costing both of us that same thing.
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So I philosophically believe that, that persistence has a shelf life.
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It gets to a point, a shelf life of goodness, of being good and useful.
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Until it becomes badness.
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Yes, until it becomes a deficit.
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So then what we re looking for here is what is that point?
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That s really the,
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essence of the argument is when does persistence help you and at what point is, and are there things that trigger that feeling?
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So is there something the customer does or doesn t do, like not call you back?
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If you ve made seven calls on the customer and left voicemails and they have yet to get back with you, that s probably an indicator you ve gone too far.
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You re over the edge.
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I have an example of this, of a deal that I just found out that I didn t get.
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I am raising my hand.
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In fact, you might ve gotten this deal because I think you were in there too.
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Did you just get a new deal?
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Maybe neither of us got it.
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Anyway.
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I think I know who it is.
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You know who it is?
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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I just got a ding letter.
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So from the, and you can talk to my significant other who will validate this, after I left my first initial meeting,
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I had as many things in the minus column as I did in the plus column about this prospective client.
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Go ahead.
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Yes.
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This is good, because I ll tell you what I felt, too.
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And we have not talked about this.
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No, we have not.
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So we got to be careful, too, because I think we have a couple people who are listeners.
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That s OK.
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I mean, this is real.
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This is the way things work.
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And then the follow up was kind of,
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took a little while, just wasn t engaged, a little bit of fee stuff, and just all these things they weren t.
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My other clients, I m just rolling with.
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I mean, rolling, and we re just in.
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And you are, too.
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And the one we share, we re rolling.
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And I just kept telling her, my significant other, I said, there s some things about that.
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And I kept justifying it in my mind about the things that were.
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interesting to me, some culture, some people I worked with.
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I know a person you worked with there.
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So that was all like, oh, man.
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But I thought, man, at some point, it cost me because I had too much energy wrapped up in that.
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And we ve got to play air traffic control because we ve got limited time.
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And I kind of had a slot aside.
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Like, OK, if they say yes, I can t really go out and find a replacement for that just yet.
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So now it s free.
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You know what I mean?
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So it just went on too long.
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Yeah, I think I know who it is.
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I had one meeting with them, and it was apparent to me that I was not their guy.
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And I thought you might be.
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I know they were talking to a couple other people.
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They didn t tell me they were talking to you, but I figured they were, because it s a small community.
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But I called them back and said, it just doesn t feel right.
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Nothing good happened.
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in the meeting.
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It just felt like I was one of the many people that they brought in.
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You might have felt that way.
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And so I backed out after one meeting.
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I didn t even get to the proposal stage.
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But the lesson here is to know I was at my point.
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You know, three weeks ago, like you said, how do you find the point?
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I knew, and I lost objectivity in it, because I justified by these other shiny things like tech, startup, all that jazz.
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Like, ooh, yeah, fun.
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Cool place.
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Cool place, great culture, all that.
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I m like, OK, that makes up for these other kind of warning track signs that I had.
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And I really should have said that.
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So let s say this.
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I m sorry to interrupt, but I just thought of something.
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Is that if you re having to talk yourself into something, that s probably an inflection point.
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Guilty.
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If you re starting to negotiate with yourself, well, you know, they weren t very vocal in the meeting, but man, they got cool tables.
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Their conference tables are awesome.
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Totally.
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Then you know that you are selling yourself on why you should continue, and that should be a trigger warning.
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Absolutely.
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And it s funny how we only do this in the deals we lose, right?
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If I would have gotten the deal that I got, I m like, hey, I just got a deal.
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Here s what s great about it.
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Yeah, here s how good I am.
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Because I was still kind of in my fog.
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You know what I mean?
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Yeah.
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Because I hadn t done anything.
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Now, you took action on it, which is good, where you didn t let it go too far, which I didn t do.
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I just knew that I was smart.
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It was a good move.
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So what is another?
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Warning that we re close to the inflection point.
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So you re negotiating yourselves.
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You ve lost objectivity.
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You re justifying those sorts of things.
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Whenever you have angst with the process,
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So let s use this case again.
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Phone call, oh, no, I haven t got a chance to do that yet.
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OK, when can we set another date?
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Yeah.
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Oh, sorry, I did something else came up.
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I m a very decisive type person with stuff like that.
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I m like, look, let s just make a deal or don t.
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Let s go.
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And so I was getting angsty about that.
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That s a warning track sign.
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I don t know if that s the same thing.
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I think it s different.
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Because there are parts of the process that aren t going smoothly on my side, and they re bothering me.
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So anxiety that you feel.
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Yeah, it s not just typical.
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I always feel like I ve got clients who I ve started talking with in, say, March.
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And by the 1st of May, it s a done deal.
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It flows smoothly.
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Things are working.
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When I say I m going to call back, I call back.
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When they say they re going to get something back to me, they get some.
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And things just sort of become organic.
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And when they don t, that s when we say, well, can I send them an article?
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Or what about I send them a podcast?
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Or what if I send them a nice gift with the Advanced Selling Podcast framed
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Or a laptop sticker.
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Or a laptop sticker.
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I mean, wow.
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That might do it, actually.
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Note to self.
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So whenever you re, again, the process feels like it s a little off track, and you find yourself trying to kind of hold it all together, all those balls in the air, that might be another trigger.
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Absolutely.
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Even past the angst and anxiety, I have clients, I have one in particular, and occasionally they ll listen, actually.
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A great client.
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They do really good work with what we teach.
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They get mad at their clients.
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They call them, hey, you know what?
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To them, to their face?
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Not to their face, but behind closed doors.
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Oh, that jerk.
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He never calls you.
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I hate that.
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I m like, OK, hang on, team.
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These are the people that we serve, and they pay us money to help them.
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So let s not put that kind of karma out for them.
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Yeah.
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That would be a trigger point.
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If I m cursing my prospects behind closed doors because of whatever.
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He didn t tell me that.
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Well, now I got to go up the ladder and go talk to his boss.
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And he didn t say that.
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If I m mad at him, that s a sign that maybe I m being too persistent or something like that.
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And I think we re going to run into that when we do our thing here today and that idea of,
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they re not calling me back or somehow the process is stalled, what s wrong with them?
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We start to attribute the problem and the blame on them.
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It s like, whoa, wait a minute.
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What if there s nobody to blame?
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Let s just say that it ended or it s stagnant and it s stagnant.
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Why would you have to attach judgment to it?
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Which kind of brought us back to the first podcast we did last week.
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So that s good.
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Those are three or four indicators.
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Yeah, and again, I think if you re listening, what we want you to do here is buy into the philosophy that there s a point.
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What did you call it?
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The inflection point where this attribute or positive thing you ve been taught or you believed in can become a negative deficit for you if too much energy directed the wrong way, that sort of thing.
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Yeah.
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And I think a lot of it gets back to that perception of, well, I m this far in.
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Exactly.
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I ve invested 100 hours in this prospect.
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I m certainly not going to let it go now.
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Oh, so what are you going to do?
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Invest another 50?
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Yes.
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Instead of investing 50, what s the next person to show that?
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Going to go down swinging.
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Screw it.
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Yeah.
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All right.
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Good stuff.
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We ve been mentoring and training sales professionals for years, Brian and I have, of course, and one of the most important elements to success is aligning yourself with a company that develops its employees, values customers, as we just talked about, and has a portfolio of products that can compete with anyone.
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That s why we recommend our advanced selling podcast listeners have CenturyLink at the top of their list when they look for a new opportunity for a career change.
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With the recent acquisition of Level 3, they ve become a world leader in the areas of cloud security and managed services.
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If you re a top performer looking for a fresh start this year, visit CenturyLink, that s C-E-N-T-U-R-Y-L-I-N-K dot com slash advanced selling and join the talent community.
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Once you join that community, a member of their team will reach out to connect and see if a career there is right for you.
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That s it for today s podcast, Brian.
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Always a pleasure.
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Thanks for having me, Bill.
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No problem.
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Glad to have you.
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Bye.
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I ll have you back some other time.
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See ya.