Sales Gravy: Jeb Blount

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Anthony Iannarino recap some of the many lessons and takeaways from the OutBound Conference. In particular, they dive into two mindsets – Scarcity and Abundance – and how these mindsets can either make you a winner or inhibit your long-term success.

What does emotional intelligence have to do with sales leadership? According to Colleen Stanley, who is the author of the hit new book Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership, a high EQ matters a lot. In fact, it is the real secret to building a high-performance sales team. On this Sales Gravy podcast episode, Jeb Blount, the author of Sales EQ, and Colleen use stories of failure, successes, and personal experiences to illustrate why EQ is so important and how to apply it as a sales leader. Download your FREE leaders guide to Sales Incentive Programs from Blueboard HERE

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Michelle Rockwood teach you how to avoid coming across as pushy and desperate and instead compel people to lean into you by leveraging the choice based closing method. It’s all about selling without selling. Before you jump on your next virtual sales call, download our FREE Video Sales Call Checklist

On this episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Cherilynn Castleman, author of What’s in the C.A.R.D.S., discuss sales team diversity, why women are better at sales than men, the power of empathy, and key things you need to know about selling in a post-pandemic world. You’ll love this conversation and you’ll especially want to pay attention to Cherilynn’s 4Fs! Before you jump on your next virtual sales call, download our FREE Video Sales Call Checklist

OUCH! The internal sale was more challenging than closing the actual deal! A brutal truth about B2B sales is that the internal sale (the sale after the sale) is often more challenging than the external sale (getting your prospect to sign the deal). Many sales professionals struggle with the internal sale because they don’t understand how to get past those organizational hurdles. On this powerful episode of the Sales Gravy Podcast, Jeb Blount and Victor Antonio take you step-by-step through the behavioral and mindset shifts you must make in order to master the internal sale. You’ll learn immediate techniques and tactics for getting your deals embraced and approved by your organization. TEXT JEB: We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

If you are tired of being tired, you’ll love this Sales Gravy Podcast episode. Jeb Blount and Rachel Pitts (Women Your Mother Warned You About) offer tips for staying fit. For sales professionals, to out wit and out perform your competitors, you need to be physically fit because mental energy is limited by your physical energy. Jeb and Rachel focus on the golden triangle of fitness: Sleep, Nutrition, and Motion We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT.

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Sales EQ) and Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) discuss the power of mapping and uncovering sales process pivot points. You will learn how these pivot points help bend win probability in your favor and offer important clues for when it may be time to walk away from a deal. Listen to Part One – Selling Without Selling Listen to Part Two – Intentional Empathy Listen to Part Three – Sales is a Process

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Sales EQ) and Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) discuss why sales is a process. You will learn about pre-call planning, the science of selling and why winging it on sales calls is wickedly stupid. Listen to Part One – Selling Without Selling Listen to Part Two – Intentional Empathy

On this Sales Gravy Podcast episode Jeb Blount (Sales EQ) and Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) discuss intentional empathy discuss and it is a meta-skill in complex sales. Empathy is the key to stepping into your buyer’s shoes, understanding their situation, and building relationships. Yet, the best salespeople are naturally less empathetic and more self-centered. Therefore, to be more effective at closing complex sales, they must focus on and leverage intentional empathy. Listen to Part One – Selling Without Selling Listen to Part Three – Sales is a Process Becoming Other-Focused Jeb: The statistics and scientific data tell us that salespeople who are more self-centered over time, have a tendency to do better than people who are more empathetic. Now there’s a reason for that. That exists in sales, and even as a business owner, you need to be a little bit self-centered because you have to put all your effort into your business. How do we, as naturally self-centered people, shift into becoming other-focused? Really Get To Know Your Prospect Diane: If you believe that being interested in other people is how you’re going to get to a goal, and that goal is to have really great business with people and companies you really like and can really help, you naturally want to do whatever it takes to make that happen. Long-term, that’s going to be what’s best for your business and best for you. So then if you say, “The only way I’m going to know whether this is a relationship I should enter into is by learning about them. So I just have to make that happen.” Your focus has to be on discovery, investigation, archeology, whatever you want to call it, so that I can learn as much about them— not just about the problem they’re having that I could solve— but about them, how they work, their philosophies, their values, etc. Those things are all part of being in a business relationship. The more I know, the more I’m going to be able to identify how I can help them. And then I can shine because I’m going to be able to point it out to them. I’m really able to say, “This is what I heard, this is how we can help.” It’s hard to have objections when I really heard what you said and I’m matching everything that you told me. Then we’re both walking down the same road. I think it comes down to really understanding what you want and the way to get there is by knowing as much as you possibly can about your prospect. The Best Objection In Sales Jeb: Yesterday, I was doing a training with a group of veteran salespeople and we were talking about objections. And one of the things I said to them is, “The best objection that you get is the one that never shows up.” And it doesn’t show up because you did all the work up front and you got to know them. As you got to know them, either the objections got on the table or the objections just went away and it’s often when you go, “Hello, wanna buy?” you know, that’s when the objections go up. So I think what you said about making sure that you’re doing all of that homework is really important. You’re doing sales archeology and understanding them and as you pull all of that information in, you’re matching your recommendations to what they see as both their success criteria and their evaluation criteria for doing business with you. And when you match it up, there’s no objection. It just makes sense to do business together for both of you. Build Trust And Show Up As A Professional Diane: If it doesn’t match up, it doesn’t match up. So you say, “Listen, I’m not the best resource for you. Let me point you towards somebody who is.” And there’s no weird conversation, but this is also why the salesperson has to ask a lot of questions and questions that are uncomfortable like the budget question or the decision-making question. There are ways of asking those questions so that you just continue to build trust and show up as a professional. You show up as someone who really knows what they’re doing and really understands that you need that information in order to be able to accurately propose a solution with that person or not. The Shift From Outcome-Focused to Other-Focused Selling Jeb: I made a statement earlier that salespeople who overperform have a tendency to be lower on the empathy scale, so they’re more self-centered. And what you’re saying is that we need to be more other-focused. When I say self-centered, I mean outcome-focused. So when I’m in a meeting, I’m always thinking about the outcome. What’s the next step? What am I getting to? What am I closing for? And that’s one of the reasons why people who are more self-centered and less other-focused have a tendency to do better over time. They’re much more likely to advance the sale through the process. People who are high empathy and really other-focused when it comes down to asking for the next step, they’re thinking, “Oh my God, I don’t want to be too pushy.” So they end up with a lot of “call me maybe’s” and you know, “I’ll get with you next week,” and things like that. A Customer For Now or A Customer For Life? One of the problems is that people who are more self-centric or lower on the empathy scale, work great in transactional sales. So if I need to sell you something and it’s a one-call close, probably the best attribute you can have is no empathy, close the deal. But when you’re talking about building long-term relationships, when you’re talking about complex sales and spending a lot of money, and serving your customers over time, you can’t live in that world. All you’re focused on is getting as much out of your customer in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of emotional investment, and it just doesn’t work. So you have to start getting intentional about being-other focused. In other words, before you walk into a conversation with a customer, you have to tell your brain to stop, listen, pay attention, get out of your own head. Remember The Benefits The way that I do that is I remind myself of the benefits. As you said, if I really listen, if I’m really doing that sales archeology, it helps me focus on what I really want. Do I want to close the sale really quickly and burn the customer relationship? Or do I want a customer for life? Do I want to turn a small sale into something big? I made a sale in 2012, then that company spent more than $3 million with my company. It was a tiny sale back then. Focusing on that long-term relationship has paid off over and over for us.

This Sales Gravy Podcast episode is part one of Jeb Blount’s (Virtual Selling) conversation with Diane Helbig (Succeed Without Selling) about why for business owners, entrepreneurs, and sales professionals success in selling and business growth really isn’t about “selling.” Instead, when you focus on solving problems, that’s when the real magic happens. Listen to Part Two – Intentional Empathy Listen to Part Three – Sales is a Process We want to hear from you. Let us know what you think about this episode – we love your comments and questions. Just send Jeb a text message at 1-706-397-4599 or CLICK HERE TO TEXT. Ps. You can access Sales Gravy University Here Why Did You Choose To Write This Book? Diane: The book is called Succeed Without Selling: The More You Think About Selling The Less You’ll Sell. I decided to write it because so many salespeople and small business owners are, in my estimation, behaving badly because they are so focused on selling that they’re not getting what they want. They’re not getting the results that they want and it’s frustrating. And so I thought, this is what I teach when I do sales training. What if I could put it into a book and just tell them everything about sales mindset? You know, what happens when you do this, but what happens when you do that, with scripts and, and templates in the back of the book. If I can just give them everything, hopefully, a bell will go off in their head and they’ll start doing things differently and achieve better results. So Why Does Being Successful in Sales Have Nothing To Do With Selling? Diane: When salespeople are selling, they are thinking about themselves. They’re thinking about the fact that they have to hit quota, that they have to get revenue, that they have to do all of these things. Their mindset is, “I need to convince you that you need what I have to sell. I have to be eloquent enough and say the right things. I have to be persuasive.” They do it at networking events, they do it when they’re in a sales meeting, they do it all the time. And the truth is that when salespeople behave that way, they don’t get the sale because they’re not listening. They’re not matching what they have to what that person needs. They’re not hearing what the situation is. So that’s why I say that it’s not about selling. It’s about solving, right? It’s about connecting and making sure that it’s a good fit because that’s how you get long-term business relationships that serve your business for decades. Sales Is Not About Selling, It’s About Solving Jeb: I totally agree with you. Not that long ago, I was doing training out in Oregon and one of the people in my class was an ex CIA agent. I was teaching some concepts out of Sales EQ around human influence frameworks. And he grabbed me and said, “What’s the difference between what you’re teaching and what we were doing as CIA agents? Essentially, when we were bringing people in, we were using the same frameworks you’re teaching to get people to turn over information or rat out someone else. And I said, “The human brain works the way the human brain works.” For example, if you listen to someone, it makes them like you more. It’s just how we operate. And if they like you more and you listen to them, they’re more likely to give you something because you made them feel good. I mean, that’s just basic influence frameworks, but what you said is exactly how I explained it to him. I said, “In your line of work, you were using these influence frameworks to manipulate people into giving you what you wanted. And in my line of work, I help people, and I solve problems.” “I’m Not The Right Fit For You” Jeb: The very last thing I want to do is sell someone something, or do something for someone that they don’t want or don’t need. And that doesn’t mean that I couldn’t because I’m pretty good at influencing people and persuading people. I could certainly do that. I could go out and sell things to people that they didn’t need, but I never do that. It’s a normal thing for me and my business to turn customers away and say, “We’re the wrong fit for you. You should not do this because you’re going to spend money with me and you’re not going to get the outcome that you desire.” And I’ve always led with that. And I believe that people know there’s sincerity in that. What’s so funny about it is when you tell them, “I’m the wrong fit for you,” they start trying to figure out how you can be a fit for them. Diane: That is so true! Exactly. I had someone say to me, once I said, “Listen, I’m not the right resource for you.” She said, “Well, I sure hope you are because I trust you.” And I said, “Well, then you’re going to have to trust me when I tell you I am not the right resource for you.” It’s exactly what you say. And those people will refer you to people because you’re honest. People Gravitate Towards Salespeople Who Don’t Sell Jeb: Exactly right. You’re honest. There’s a local place where I live called C&C Tire, we only take our cars there because we trust Tommy and he’s honest. If he can’t fix it, he won’t say, “Yeah I can fix it.” And then you spend money with him. He’ll say this isn’t going to happen here, let me get you someone that can do that. Or if you come in and say, “I need this fixed. Cause I think this is the problem.” He’ll say, “Nah, it’s a $2 part. You don’t have this problem.” And he’s always been that way. If you look at his business, there are people waiting in line to get him to work on their cars because he’s not trying to sell you something that you don’t need. Diane: And because we are so used to mechanics selling us things we don’t need that, he’s a gem, right? So the salespeople who don’t sell are the ones that people gravitate toward because they know they’re going to be told the truth. It’s a total integrity thing. And I’ll add something to what you were talking about, which is when you convince somebody they need what you have, it’s a really bad relationship. And neither of you like it. So why would you do it? You’re going to end up spending time with someone that it’s just difficult all the time. The Gangrene of Business Relationships Jeb: If I sell you something that you don’t need and you realize that I did that, then you resent me. Maybe you’re a small business. I’ve been in this position before where I needed a sale or I needed to get a deal done. I would lower my price, or add on services in order to convince someone that I could help to do business with me. But down the road, as my business grew, I started resenting that customer because I felt like they were taking advantage of me. Resentment leads to contempt, which is the gangrene of business relationships. It will rot them out at the core until there’s a point where you cannot save the relationship. There won’t be any referrals, you don’t like each other, and it almost always ends badly. So when your focus is on solving rather than selling, you only solve problems you can solve. You solve the problems you can solve at a price point that allows you to provide the service that the person is expecting you to deliver down the road, post-sale.