5 Words and Concepts

0:03 Thank you for joining us on the Winning It Selling podcast. I'm Bill Helke, up with Reach Developing Systems, and with me is Professor Scott Plum of the Minnesota Sales Institute. Words represent our thoughts and intentions. Expectations and obligations are expressed through words. With the career in sales, words are the currency of commerce, and the better we communicate, the more successful we are in selling. Let's start defining some expectations as Bill and I discuss five words and concepts and other memorable musings on Episode 632 of the Winning It Selling podcast.

0:35 Well, before we delve into this subject, Scott, we're going to finish a book. We're going to finish up more sales, less time by Jill Conrad. By the way, we don't want to have less sales more time. So I've been meaning to say that sometimes. Yeah, I've been sometimes, sometimes for all of you out there, we've all had those days less sales more time. But let's work on more sales. My hands. I had time to even screw up more sales than I have today.

1:18 So Chapter 32, create an upward spiral, kind of an attitude section here. I like Scott that she's moving away from the time management, time management, time management, back into sales. It really rejuvenated me. I've talked about this before. I get sick of books about 150 pages into them. And I'm done with them. And a lot of books I don't finish. And I'm glad I finished this one because she got kind of got rejuvenated here a little bit.

1:47 So creating upwards word spiral. You're not meeting your sales goals, quit pointing to outside issues. It's you. Look at yourself. What can you do? So I like her five, five suggestions here on what we should do. Number one, get curious. You and I have talked about this before, but curiosity is the key to good sales. Really is. It's curiosity and interest. Our goal of sales people is create curiosity and interest. And then get smarter.

2:14 I think a lot of people never read. They don't listen. They don't do things. Now we're talking to the preaching of the choir here. You guys are trying to get smarter by learning out there. But it's amazing. The number of people I've talked and said, I finished reading in high school and I read nothing. I'm not reading nothing ever again. So good for you. I hope that works out for you. You can see if you can see us on video Scott's got two full shelves of books.

2:39 I've got full shelves of books and bobbleheads, but we have a lot of books that we read. And that's the way to get smarter. Now listen to people smarter than you. I think Andrew Carnegie said I was successful because I surrounded myself with people who were smarter than me. Doris Carn's Goodwin. Is that how we should? Yeah, you're right. She wrote the, what was it? Committee of equals? What was her book? The rival of.

3:09 The name of rivals. Yeah. Anyway, what it was was Abraham Lincoln. His cabinet was made up of people who didn't like him and disagreed with him and he wanted to get the best ideas. We've certainly gone away from that in politics. So surround yourself with people smarter than you and learn from them. Number three, experiment. Try something new. But man, we get so stuck in the way we've always done things and energy. You get energy from trying something new.

3:38 You get scared once in a while. You get fearful. You try something new. Yeah, that's his experience. I look at the word experiment that I see experience. There's got to be a Latin foundation with that word because both of them are talking about action and trying something different. And the more experience you have, the more lessons you learn. That's supposed to be true. I know some people that have 40 years experience of something, but it's the same week over and over and over again.

4:07 It's a repetition. Oh, that a rut. Yeah. Number five. Number four is get feedback. And I like this because what she's advising is triage your sales calls. Don't just go and do, as you say, the same mistakes over and over again. When something doesn't work, sit down and think it through and maybe talk to somebody. Here's what I did. What would you have done differently in this situation? Maybe there's nothing you could have done differently.

4:38 Maybe there's nothing you could have done differently. Maybe they don't have a different idea. But sometimes they'll say, well, did you ask this question up front? Did you set yourself up for success or were you surprised by the objection that you got or whatever that suggestion? Right. Right. I was like to ask sometimes I'm doing a presentation when I kind of get a blank look on the people's face. I go, how am I doing?

4:59 And a good, good. And it just reminds me sometimes of watching people watch a movie. If you watch people watch a movie, they're just kind of in a cadence. There's a certain amount of interest and just they're not taking any notes. And I'm like, how am I doing? Good. Good. Keep going. Yeah. Well, I think too, you know, when you, if you find yourself in that situation a lot, perhaps you should have more questions involved in your, in your process because you're, we're talking too much.

5:25 So, you're absolutely right. Number five on chapter 32 is challenge yourself. Don't, again, don't just keep going with customers that are comfortable to you. She's going to talk a little later about getting bigger clients. And I think sometimes we get ourselves in a comfort zone of client size and we don't realize that we could actually handle a larger client. And I, and I don't want to get into my whole talk on that, but, but challenge yourself, try something new.

5:49 Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Great points. Great chapter. 33 make decisions simpler, not for you. Make them simpler for your customers. Make it easier for them to say, yes, sometimes I think we overcome. Plicate things so our customers can't say yes. And she says, make the dis buying decision as a team. Adds even more complexity and confusion. CB, which is the company I think that did challenge or sale. Mm hmm. But many change initiatives are abandoned only 37% of the way into the process.

6:24 And we find this with training, don't we? Right. We find as we work with companies, one of the things that Scott and I are really working hard at is the after training. What's going to happen after training? Because the adoption is often slow and frustrating. And the sales leadership will often abandon the program because they don't know what to do next. And their expectations are we did training just do something different.

6:51 And people are reluctant. They're scared and they're busy and sometimes they're arrogant and they don't want to make change and sometimes they know it all. And so making a change, whatever that change is, you have to work at it. And I think John Maxwell talks about the fact that leadership has been involved with the change for two months as they've made the decisions to make the change. And then we dump it all on the staff and we don't give them two months to adapt.

7:20 Right. It's changed immediately. Yeah. And it happens a lot when you have field reps. Think about people working from home. You don't get to see them every single day. You don't get to walk by their desk or their cube or their office and ask them, what's going on? What are you working on today? What challenges are you having? What do you need help on? Right. And so we need to help our customers not just make the decision, but then follow through and adopt the decision.

7:43 Whatever that is. Right. Here's the four steps she has to helping us decision easier. Outline the road map. And that's something I think Scott and I have done. We found to be very successful. Here's the three steps. You need a sales strategy. You need to decide on what the training is and conduct it. And then you need to have follow through in that training. So whatever that roadmap is for you, how are you going to get your prospect to really enjoy the value?

8:12 That you're bringing to them. Maybe a machine needs to be re-adapted for your product versus the OEM product they were using before. So I think that's a good idea. Number two, talk about the tough stuff. Let them know there's going to be a bottleneck. There's going to be a challenge. This isn't going to be easy. People realize this. And if you try to hide it, they get suspicious of you. But if you're willing to talk about the tough decision, I think people open up and they say, yeah, I realize that.

8:44 How can you help us through this? So it can make your sale better. Start smarter. And I think this is, go back and find the 12 questions that Scott asks in making a sale. I think that's a great way to start your sale smarter is to know what your objections that might come and find out about them early on. And then number four, create tools, create processes so you can repeat things over and over again and you're not trying to make it up each time.

9:13 And you can guide your customer through the decision making process. I love these four parts. I mean, it represents a lot about how we work with customers. We've got a sale strategy. We do an assessment. We come upon a training outline. We deliver a training program. We have timelines on everything that we need to get done. And when one starts to get delayed, it starts to impact other projects that we have. I think about sometimes we're running like an air traffic controller where we have to get certain flights coming in at certain paces.

9:43 And if, if they don't, then we've got a DV eight and we got to change the route on some aircraft coming in, but keeping that deadline. And I'm really building off of that outline of the roadmap. When you have that roadmap and you have deadlines and your client agrees the deadlines. The urgency is created that everybody is attentive and meeting those deadlines that creates value because we're following through on the promises that we've made.

10:07 Well, we've seen many sales where it's between the sales person dropping off on whoever's supposed to be in delivery is a bad handoff. And they don't understand everything that's going on and too many sales people want to drop out of the picture and go on to the next piece of the puzzle. They've got to realize how integral it is for them to make that sale really happen. They can't just drop it in the laps of somebody who doesn't know what's going on.

10:33 They don't know what promises were made. They don't understand the roadmap. And so there's a conflict there and we've seen many sales fall down because there's a conflict between what the customer expected to have happened based on the sales person's promises and what the delivery team is actually able to. There's no sense of ownership on the handoff. Why would the other person want to carry out what other people have talked about and committed it? They didn't commit to it.

10:59 So there's no ownership in it. And that's where we need to bring in as many people as possible earlier on in the decision. I think we talked about that last week. All right. Chapter 34, get bigger clients. The smaller the company you sell to, the more picky and price sensitive they are. Boy, that is really true. I love consultants, individual entrepreneurs, but they don't want to pay for stuff. They go to the free meetings. They listen to podcasts that don't charge them anything.

11:30 Quite often they don't have the money to do something. Whereas you go to a larger company that's doing money and they're doing sales in the millions or billions. They're not looking to pinch every dime. And so what you need to do is look for those companies where if you make that sale, man, that could make your whole year. And the funny thing is Scott, I think it takes just as much time to sell a small piece of business as it does a huge piece of business.

11:59 Very true. And when did we first hear that? Was it 35, 40 years ago? We're still now we're like, hey, maybe they're right. Yeah, that's right. Well, I think we're stuck. We get stuck in our own glass ceilings. Yeah, we have these ceilings. You talk about it with money. Oh, I'll make 150,000 this year. Maybe I can imagine 160. But I can't bring in that big sale that'll make me half a million. Right. Yeah. I don't know how to do that. Well, you know how to do it. If you know how to sell to the company that's doing 100 million a year, you can sell to the company's doing 500 million a year.

12:38 It's the same process. Maybe there's more people involved. There's more moving parts. But once it's all done, it's going to be worth a lot more than five little companies. And take a lot less time. Right. Right. Chapter 35, wrapping it up. So she's got some ideas just as we wrap it up. Take control of your time and your life. Kiss crazy, busy goodbye. But her words of wisdom that she ends with, I want to finish with that. Number one, start small. Don't try to change everything in your life. This is what we've, you know, go out and get better one skill at a time.

13:14 Well, that's starting small. Don't try to change everything in your process. Find one thing you want to do better and work on that one thing. Number two, be a good experimenter. We talked about that earlier. Try something different, but identify it and write down what you're doing. A good scientist tracks what they're doing. How I raised myself from failure to success. He changed his selling process because he started tracking one of my favorite sales books, by the way. Right. Right. And he started tracking.

13:48 And he found that, that his best customers were sold by the third appointment. So he quit having appointments four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Yeah. Look that time and put it into finding new people that could make a decision. We had a clogged up sales funnel is what he had. Yep. Number three, take good care of yourself. Get enough sleep. Spend time with good quality people. Number four, play with change. Find things. Don't be afraid to make a change in what you're doing, whether it's your time management or the way you're selling.

14:22 Look for ways to be more efficient and then engage others, get other people involved in your life. Spend time around a higher quality of people. Sometimes I hate to say it's got what we have to reject. Maybe even some family members to bring in this down and hurting us on a mental stage to spend time with higher producers, higher quality people. You know, if you spend time with people who make more money, your imagination on what you can make starts to go up. Oh, so true. So true.

14:52 I think if you're the smartest room, smartest person in the room, you need to go to another room. Find people that are smarter than you and find people that are willing to challenge you. Now, look at the challenges as being compassionate, challenging, and know that the other person wants the best for you. And they believe that you've got the potential to do more and to believe in the believe in you more than you believe in yourself, which is why we don't exercise our own potential.

15:17 I'm insulted when somebody says, you know, you've got potential, Scott. And it's like, Oh, what do you see in me that I don't have enough confidence in me to be able to do? And that's good. It's good to have potential, but unrealized potential is a waste. Well, and unapplied potential is a waste. Two, if we don't apply the gifts that other people see in us, are we really growing? No, I mean, we're around safe people that want us to grow, take risks in a safe environment, become better by challenging us.

15:46 And we need to have good people challenging us without feeling offended. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Super. So that is the end of more sales less time by Joe Conrad. Hope you've enjoyed it. Next week, not next week. In two weeks, our new book will be new sales simplified by Mike Weinberg. We love Mike Weinberg stuff. We're trying to get him back on the show. He's very busy. And so we're hoping early next year we'll be able to get him back on the show.

16:13 But new sales simplified is our next book. So before we go on to our topic for today, let's listen to a sales tip from Anthony. Enjoy and learn from the sales tip from Anthony by Anthony Enorino, a highly respected international speaker, best-selling author, entrepreneur and sales leader. Okay. It's Anthony Enorino, and I want to talk to sales leaders, sales managers, people that are having a team that they have to take care of.

16:41 And I want to make sure that you understand something. I know that you want coverage in your pipeline and you might want four times or six times or eight times or a hundred times. I don't know what it is, but you're so focused on that. You're missing the point of what we do here. The most important thing for you to do as a sales leader, as a sales manager, is to increase the effectiveness of your sales force every single person.

17:10 And if you would do that work and you would figure out how to make them effective, you would not need so much coverage in your pipeline. And what you're doing is you're telling your team, I value these opportunities that we have very little chance of winning more than I value helping you win those deals. And that is the wrong thing for us to do. So this is really, really important that you understand this. If you need four times, six times, whatever the number is on your pipeline, what that means is your win rates are too low.

17:45 Now, you can get as many opportunities as you want. You might have a hundred opportunities in your pipeline. But if you can't convert them because your team isn't effective enough to convert them, then what you should do is say our first priority right now is to increase the effectiveness of everybody on our team. And then once you have the effectiveness going up, and let's say you're over 50%, you can start adding additional opportunities because your team now is able to go and win those.

18:19 So one of the things that you have to understand, if you are trying to scale up something that doesn't work, then what you should do is scale up something that does work. So what you need to do is give your team the best modern methodology that you can possibly find and then do everything you can in your power to make sure that they have very high win rates, I would say over 50%. So do good work, teach your team how to be effective and increase your win rate, see me at thesalesblog.com or come out and say hello, add LinkedIn. See you soon.

19:03 He's talking about pipeline coverage. We just talked about how much has to be in your pipeline. And if your pipeline is full of crap, it has to be bigger. If your pipeline is full of good stuff, you don't need to have so much in your pipeline, if it's actually going to close. So how can you increase your win rates so you don't have old dead stuff in your pipeline. Yeah, so true. There is there's no step in the sales process called stall.

19:28 Yeah, that was Christy. So. Our topic for today is words I've got five words and concepts bill and like I said on the introduction that you know words communicate our thoughts and intentions. And how we approach a customer and, and how we use words within that conversation is really going to determine the effectiveness of that conversation so the first word is the word because I think as a sales person when somebody buys that's up my mother's answer to every time I asked her why I should do something. Is there a song? Why should I do that? She said because and that was because because because what movie was that from because from the Wizard of Oz Wizard of Oz is a wonderful thing she does.

20:12 Yes. Yes. But we're off to see the wizard. Yeah. Scott is not the wizard. He's the professor. So we're off to see that. So the word because what is there because if if we're advertising in a publication because we we are advertising in a publication because what is there because because what you want, you know, more familiarity, you have a capacity to fill more tables. You know, want to advertise certain times of the day where you're slow or you got certain nights that you're slow. What is there because when somebody is going to buy something as a sales person.

20:49 What is there because and they're because is their motivation. It's their reason. I might call that their why. They're why. Yeah. And sometimes that gets a little beat up and sometimes, you know, often I say, you know, be careful that sentences begin with why or just saying why because that's an emotional question and you can cause a prospect become defensive because they're defending their why. Yeah. If you create, you know, you're advertising on a publication because because because because it's more concrete than a why or is the why might be more emotional or because I want to save the world sort of thing.

21:27 Whereas, whereas really it's like I want to make some money. Right. That could be their motivation. Yeah. Yeah. I saw a Saturday night live skip skip many years ago and somebody wanted to jump in line to make copies and and they said, you know, what gives you the right to jump in line? Well, because I need to make these copies because my boss is in a meeting with one of our largest clients and they need four copies of this. It won't take long.

21:49 I need to jump in line because I need to make this. It's understandable when you use because in a sense of negotiation, it has more credibility to your reason because you have an intention behind it. I think it also adds a reason to a request which translates into a modem, a motive is when you're you need this because and then you're giving them the reason on why you're asking for them to do it. And also it can also disclose some of our intentions. I'm doing this because I really want you to be able to get better at this.

22:23 And if I promote you now, you're going to get into a situation where you're not going to have developed all the skills and it's going to be embarrassing. And I want you to develop this skill before you end up getting promoted or we put you in a different territory or adjust your your role. So it really discloses your intention so that you're protecting that other person. So the word because think about the word because contemplate on it and think about how you can use it advantageously in a conversation.

22:50 Well, I like that you talk about motivation and intentions. One of the things that we found as we're dissecting people's discovery process is they don't get into motivations. They only get into facts and figures. How much do you need? How soon does it need to be done? What do you want it to look like? And let's use we've worked with some landscaping companies. Let's talk about landscaping. What do you want it to look like? Well, I want to look like this. The next question is why? Right. Who's going to see it? Why do you want it to look like that? What image do you want to project to the neighborhood or to to other businesses around you?

23:25 What are you trying to protect? And so, so we need to get to the why because the why the motivation, the intention in our questioning is going to be the emotional reason that can close the deal. Everybody they talk to will be able to do the facts. They'll be able to build it. They'll be able to make it. They'll be able to produce it. And it's going to work because they wouldn't stay in business if they couldn't do those things.

23:53 Right. But if you're going to get the deal over someone else who can do the same thing or something close to what you can, you need to get them into the motivational intention process process of this so that they can say, when you're sitting in this new landscape, how do you want to feel? I want it to be cool in the summer and I want to be able to barbecue out here. I want my kids to be playing and enjoying it. I want to have the neighbors come up.

24:21 Now they're thinking about motivation and they're more likely to buy because they're enjoying the money they spent, rather than just thinking about the amount of money they have to spend. Right. Because can be used when somebody a prospect has a statement. If the prospect says, I need more tie downs on this trailer, you can respond with because, and then they're going to tell you, you know, because of this, this is the reason why we need more tie downs on this trailer.

24:50 So it can really give more information just with one word word because next word is options. I've talked a little bit about this on the show, but you know, why not include three quotes in one proposal and increase the chances of a winning proposal. One option is an ultimatum. I mean, you're just giving them an ultimatum too often we work with the government agencies or big agencies where they go out and get three quotes.

25:16 Okay. Sometimes they say different companies sometimes just say three quotes. What if you could do three quotes within one proposal and you're giving the option of the prospect to choose which option they find most valuable and that lets the prospect be in control. And, and looking at options sometimes we're so tempted to think that we're leaning towards the competition. It's not always the competition. And you might want to ask a question besides working with us. What other options are you considering? And sometimes competition is not an option. Maybe they're going to do it themselves or maybe they're going to do nothing.

25:55 But really think about different options that people want to submit or consider when it comes to making a decision. Right. Quite often if it's like we talked about landscaping or some other project within the house, I'm thinking, is this cost effective enough that I don't have to do this? I really don't want to do this myself. Right. But is the cost so high that I might as well do it myself even though I know I won't do as good a job as a professional would do. So as you say, you know, doing it myself or doing nothing at all, I can just, I can leave this the whole project too expensive.

26:31 So I'm not going to do it. But I do, I do like the good better best. That's three options are good friend Terry Wu says, you know, people almost always pick the middle one. That's, you know, it's like, I don't know. And they get paralysis a little bit. And if you only give them one, the answer is yes or no. Right. By giving them at least two, it's, you know, which one do I want to choose? And if I've given them three neurosciences, that's the best choosing for somebody because then they can, if they're, if they're very much into their ego or I have to have the best, they'll choose the best.

27:10 I care which one they choose. I'm going to get a deal anyway. And that's really what I'm looking for to close the deal. And by choosing, then they pick, they're showing you what's most important to them. What are they opting out of? Second to options is creating ranges. If you wanted to create a range, it's going to be between 20 and 30,000. And then you've got a list of different 12 items that would affect that range of $10,000. And then you let the prospect kind of pick the options that they want.

27:42 And, and you're at a point in the proposal that, you know, you can work with them on many different options and be fair and they want to be fair. And what is the goal? The goal is to make a sale. Let's find a way for them to pick the options that they want to make a sale and everybody's happy. Yeah, I think that range, I like to use that range. I call it ball parking. And I use it usually on an early call because they want to know kind of what the price range is.

28:08 I probably ask them the budget question, which sometimes gives me a little bit of an idea of what their range is. But then within, if they, even if they don't, I have an idea within, you know, $7,000 to $10,000 of kind of what something's going to cost. You know, they've given me enough information, at least ballpark it. So I do think that is kind of an option early on too. You know, I can do this for as you said, $20,000, $30,000. What are you looking at? And that can help me get their budget out too.

28:38 Right. Finding out the next one, what do they value? So, right? Yeah, value is the set is the third word is how is value defined? I was like, use a formula cost minus price equals value. What sales people don't do enough of is really uncovering the cost consequences and risk of inaction because that's an option. Sometimes people do nothing. And if we do a good enough job on cost consequences and risk, creating that, that dollar amount as high as possible or that uncertainty as high as possible, minus the price, this is what they pay to eliminate that uncertainty and give them the peace of mind.

29:20 That's the value that they receive. And we as salesperson sometimes do not do a good enough job of two things. One is really uncovering all the cost consequences and risk of inaction. And two is painting the future, the value, the benefit that the prospect will receive when they become a customer or client. We don't do that because we didn't find out their motivations. We only found out the facts. So it goes back to what you talked about the because if we don't find out the because we can't sell value because we don't know what it is.

29:56 What do we do? We show them all the values. Here's the eight things we're really good at. Right. Right. I talked about this. We talked about it in the last show. We show them eight values, three of which are important to them. Now they're thinking we're too expensive because there's five values in there I don't care about. And you didn't explain to me why I should care about them. And now I'm confused and a confused customer says, I'll think about it. I'll think about it.

30:22 Because you've made them think you've made them have to think I have to consider it now because instead of just talking about the three things I value. I think the other mistake because of salespeople makes God in this value is I tell you about everything I value. Right. I didn't ask you about your value. So all I can tell you about is what I think it's a great idea to buy this car or do this landscaping or get your house fixed.

30:45 And you may not care the same way I do. And we make the mistake of thinking our customers are thinking the same thing we're thinking. And they don't. Yeah, they pay by for their reasons not ours. I assure you, you can you can challenge that statement any way you want people buy for their reasons not yours. In most cases. Another thing to think about is is ranking the value propositions of value. So when we give options, we're also ranking value propositions as to what they would get.

31:15 And the prospects are also ranking value propositions. If they're going outside of our quote or our proposal looking at other options with other companies, they're ranking the value proposition. So really uncover and discover how do you define value. And here's the question that I love salespeople to think of. And this is a bold statement to ever ask, but what does the prospect experience in the absence of the value your solution provides.

31:48 So if they did not buy from you today, what would happen tomorrow. Insurance is probably a good example of this, but what does the prospect experience in the absence of the value your solution provides. That's what they're purchasing. And there's different motivations. There's business reasons. There's personal reasons to be able to make those decisions piece of mind personal increased revenue or profit business. But really think about that and ask questions around that question.

32:20 I think also we can find out and I've talked about this. Do they value what we value? We value high quality and precise work and long term relationships. And somebody wants a cheap job, hit it quick and get out of here. I just have to make this look good for this year because I'm selling the house or whatever. They might never be our customer. Now we can try to talk to them about the value of doing good work. But if that doesn't resonate with them and they're just thinking price price price price price price price.

32:57 And we're not the lowest price pack up your things and get the hell out of there. Because if you get them as a customer, oh my gosh, what a pain they're going to be. Because they don't value any of those. They don't value quality. They don't value hard work. If they don't value a relationship, then, and those are what what stand out as your value proposition. What are you doing there? What? What? Put banging your head against that door because it's not going to open for you. Right. Right. So they're going to want your quality at their price. Right.

33:32 The fourth word is priorities. I've heard this and I've really been contemplating on this word a lot lately. I was in a networking meeting a couple weeks ago with with other sales trainers and enablers and consultants and I was talking with one and they were talking about, you know, you really got to drill down on the pain. You got to really peel the back the pain on you and I'm like, you know, that's true. I don't disagree with you. And there have been some very effective salespeople that do a wonderful job of getting the pain uncovered by the prospect. But then it gets pushed up the ladder one level or two levels and then all of a sudden they go, well, you're right. We don't disagree with you.

34:10 But this is not a priority right now. We've got 23 things ahead of this and they're more important than than what you're proposing right now. And, and what the prospect is really saying to the sales person is we're just going to look at it. And we're just going to let it burn. We're just going to let the building burn a little longer. And eventually we're going to treat it as a priority. And then eventually you're going to get to the top of the list. But right now it's not going to happen.

34:36 So when we get in the situation, we need to be able to constantly be in touch with our prospect to be able to make that pain a priority. And, and when you do that, then it becomes more of a must work with us then then to wait and see, you know, if it's becomes a higher priority later on. But priorities are so important. It's how we trade our time is our priorities. How we make all of our decisions is based on our priorities. You start adding values and priorities. Now you're really going to find out how people are motivated. What's most important.

35:13 When I when you talk about priorities, I think about the urgent non urgent important non urgent non important for quadrant. If you haven't seen that before, I think that's a time management matrix. It might be called. Anyway, in sales, we live in quadrant two, which is important, not urgent. If I've got them, if I'm a manufacturer and I use this widget and it's working and you have a better widget. That would work better. What you have to say to me is important, but it's not urgent. My current widget is working. Okay. My current wiring harness is working. Okay. So you can provide me with one that's going to be packaged in such a way that'll be easier to put in.

35:57 Okay, that's a good idea. But my manufacturing isn't falling down. Now, if my current wiring harness guy says I'm not making them no more. Now it's become urgent. But our job in sales, if we live in that quadrant to important, not urgent, is to create it as a priority. We are job is to move it up that priority list. Why making them feeling the pain as you talked about the pain and the absence of value. Right. Right. So you're not increasing the value to create enough urgency to cause this to happen. So realize that your job in sales is to not just show them.

36:39 How this is of that good value, but that if they don't do something now, they're going to be losing money. It's going to be bad in the long run and create that sense of urgency for them. Yeah. If this is an objection for salespeople and they they've experienced it before because they're very effective in drilling down the pain is to ask the prospect. Suppose we get into a conversation. We recognize that there's a good value. We come upon the decision of how much we're going to invest in this.

37:06 What happens if we do a great job in that area, but it's not a priority. What do we do next together? You as a salesperson and your prospect because your prospect has to sell it up to make it a priority within the company in some cases. Right. So you're bringing that objection to the forefront in one of the first conversations with your prospects. Suppose we do a good job of really uncovering needs, opportunities, price, budget, timeline, etc.

37:31 How do we make it a priority and work with your prospect to be that advocate with them and for them to be the advocate for you on how to make it a priority and they're going to be able to give you insider information within the company that you don't know as a salesperson because sometimes you don't have a question as to ask, but that advocate in the company is going to be able to work with you to become making a priority so that they say yes.

37:53 Well, and you can have your advocate. Let's say that's Larry. Larry feels the pain, but his boss, Mary, she doesn't feel the same amount of pain. So now you're going to peel back that pain on you again. Right. Yes. Yes. You might have to peel back that. So if you're dealing with the committee, if you're, first of all, you're making a mistake. They only worked with Larry. You didn't bring Mary and Stephen to the conversation earlier because you didn't ask the question. In addition to you, who else has to sign off on this decision. But in any event, you're going to need to peel back that onion for everybody.

38:30 Right. Yeah. All people involved. They buy for different reasons. The last one, number five is expectations. The only way that you can disappoint someone does not meet their expectations. And sometimes we go into conversations. We go into relationships and we really don't know what the expectations are. We don't know what the role is that we play. We don't know what the boundaries are that we have to respect. And I, when I sold real estate, this was one of the questions that I asked when we first started listing the property and getting it on the market and getting into that conversation is what are your expectations of me between now and closing.

39:10 What are your expectations of me between now and the implementation of the system or the software or the process. What, what are your expectations of me during this time? This is really important when you're selling a service because when you sell a service, you sell a promise that comes out of Harry Beck with books selling the invisible. And so often salespeople, we are salespeople. We do not clearly understand the expectations when we get into engagements. Why? Cause we don't ask.

39:41 And when we ask the question and we get the expectations, we're getting the value that they understand and they see in working with us. When they're not telling you something that is one of your strengths or something that you're proud of that you want to share with them, you can ask them a question. So how important is this when it comes to making a decision? How important is this when we're working together? Is that not important or is it important? So you're really identifying stuff that they did not take into consideration during the engagement that you have.

40:16 When you ask that question when you're selling real estate, can you imagine all things that go into a real estate transaction that the seller and the buyer have no idea what's going on because they never encountered it. The salesperson, the realtor encountered it hopefully many, many times so they know how to deal with it and prevent it from happening. Yeah, I think it's important to think about those expectations and it's too bad that so many salespeople just want to drop this off. We talked about dropping it off on delivery.

40:42 Right. It's that time between delivery and when they've signed the deal that these expectations are going to have to be dealt with. And again, as a salesperson, we've seen a lot of sales fall off at that time because the salesperson moved on, delivery didn't take it over. And now there's this big goal there where the customer is feeling unsure of the decision they made. I don't want to have to sell that over and over again, but just knowing that you're around and knowing that you're there to answer questions and keeping in touch with that person during that challenging middle time before delivery happens can hold that sale instead of losing it.

41:28 And I bet many of our people in our audience, many of our listeners have had that happen. They've had the sale. Well, we changed our mind. Somebody came in. I don't know if they offered them a better deal or they got scared off, but because of that, that not understanding that value that you talked about before, not understanding their priorities, we dropped the ball in that that crucial time between the signing of the contract and the implementation.

41:57 And that's it. There are other priorities that came up that were more important than implementing what we just committed to. Oh man, the whole shops on fire. I've had training people get fired from the company. Training programs get canceled because whoever was doing the taxes didn't pay the taxes and all we don't have the money. Boom. No one. I had one. I was teaching presentation skills to a company and we were two days away from doing it and the president called me, who was making the decision.

42:32 And he said, Bill, we have to change the timing. Nobody on the executive team can make it. I said, Paul, you tell them they have to make it. This is already in their calendar. We've known about it for three weeks. Make it. Well, out of the 12 people that were supposed to be there, 11 made it. Wow. Good point. And I said, they were just lying to them. They didn't want to do it. They were afraid to do presentation training. They were afraid to do it.

43:01 And the one person who was the most objecting to it, she said to me later, and she became the president of the company eventually, she said, I didn't want to do it. It was the best decision I made. Wow. And that was what happens with training is that is that sometimes they were afraid of it. Right. Yeah. You mentioned that a few weeks ago, I'm going to quit this company because I don't want to be challenged. Right. We don't know what goes on between that closing and sometimes that implementation and we can lose a sale there if we're not following through.

43:32 Yeah. Yeah. So I'll repeat the five words. It's because options value priorities and expectations. All right. Thanks, Scott. That's a, that was a great subject. Thank you. Thank you. We got a variety of different areas, which was fun. Our golden nugget today is from Harvey McKay, the great Harvey McKay right here in Minneapolis, St. Paul. To me, job titles don't matter. Everyone is in sales. It's the only way we stay in business. And I think that you got to remember that.

44:04 It's not just sales jobs. Delivery. Everybody's job is to sell that customer. Yeah. Yeah. Great advice. Great advice. So everything that we talked about is at winning at selling.com for more information on our show notes. This is episode 632. Next week, no book club because we're going to have a guest. But the week after, new sales simplified by Mike Weinberg. So grab your copy, you got time to do it. And our guest is Paul Botts talking about building a culture of healthy accountability. Please subscribe, share the podcast with your colleagues. This is episode 632. Go out and get better one skill at a time.

44:42 Joyful selling.