The Salesman.com Podcast

On this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Brant Pinvidic explains how to structure the first 3 minutes of your sales presentation so you can say less and get more from your sales pitch. Brant has over 20 years of experience in creating, and directing TV shows and movies. In this time Brant has developed some of the most advanced pitch and presentation techniques that he now teaches to people from all walks of life. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Brant Pinvidic Pitch Presentation Expert Resources: Brantpinvidic.com Brant on LinkedIn Book: The 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More from Any Pitch or Presentation Transcript Will Barron: Hi, my name is Will, and welcome to today's episode of The Salesman Podcast. On today's show, we're looking at how you can say less and get more from your sales pitches. Today's guest is Brant Pinvidic and Brant has spent over 20 years in creating, directing TV shows and movies.   Will Barron: In his time, Brant has spent, he has developed some of the most advanced pitch and presentation techniques. And now teaches this to people in all walks of life. His book, Three Minute Rule, Say Less and Get More From Any Sales Pitch Presentation. We'll link that in the show notes. It's available on Amazon and everywhere else. And with that, Brant, welcome to the show.   Brant Pinvidic: Here I am. Here I am. That's a great intro. I should bring you with me on the road.   Will Barron: I don't know about that. My intros are somewhat sloppy, but we try and do this as live as possible with the audience now. It's just a [inaudible 00:00:44].   Brant Pinvidic: I like it.   Will Barron: Right.   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah.   Will Barron: Good man. All right. Well, let's jump into it. Let me give you a bit of a scenario here. As we get into this idea, which is totally in line, you may be familiar with this, you may not be. Totally in line with what we do over at Salesman.org, which is our branding is making selling simple. So I think we're going to be on the same wavelength for a lot of this stuff, right?   You Only Have 7 Seconds To Grab Your Prospects Attention During a Sales Outreach · [01:03]    Will Barron: But let's say Sam the salesperson, he has now earned the sales presentation. He's done his cold calls. He's done his call emails. He's in the room, so to speak. So the prospect is even just like a little bit interested in hearing what they've got to say, because they wouldn't share their time with them otherwise.   Will Barron: With that said, Brant, how long does Sam have to really grab the attention of the person in the room that he's presenting to? Is this like two seconds? Seven seconds? Or have we got a little bit longer to really grab the attention of the prospect?   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah, listen, I would say in a fun soundbite is to say you have 10 seconds to get the attention. But if someone's giving you an opportunity, getting their attention isn't important as getting them the information. If you're advertising it in your marketing and that kind of stuff, the cold calls, you have very little bit to get their attention. But that's a whole other world.   “The science says that people will say and come up with a yes or a no in their mind incredibly quickly, within 10 seconds of meeting you.” – Brant Pinvidic · [02:07]    Brant Pinvidic: The world that I really deal with is that you have an opportunity to present your business product or service to somebody and you want them to say yes. That is the goal. And the truth is the science of it is that people will say and come up with a yes and no in their mind incredibly quickly. Within 10 seconds, they'll usually start with a yes or no.   Brant Pinvidic: And then if they've said, “No, I don't think this is right for me.” Then your job is to try to overcome that, which is a very unpleasant place to be. So really the science behind what the three minute rule does for you, is it helps you to elongate that process so that they're not saying yes or no in their mind, until at least you get in the valuable information.   Brant Pinvidic: And if you do it right, and if you do it perfectly, and you lead people with proper storytelling, you could extend that to three minutes. Where now they've got all the valuable information, so now they're starting to think, I like this. I want to do this. Or maybe it's not right for them, whichever. What you don't want to do is have people thinking like, nah, this isn't going to work. I don't like this person. I don't believe what he's saying, which is the most common. And then trying to win them over, which is the hard thing to do.   Brant Pinvidic: And anybody listening now will know that someone's come to pitch or present or ask you to do anything, and just think about how you've got that yes or no in your mind right away. And they'll ramble on and it's like, yeah, no, it's still a no. And that is the core. And there's science behind, it's called approach motivation on why people are driven to engage with things.   Brant Pinvidic: And it's a level of storytelling and leading your audience piece by piece that in Hollywood, we sort of perfected that. It's why you'll sit and watch an hour and a half or two hour movie, because the story is told in segments that lead you to the next segment. And in a sales process, it's the same thing. And that's, I think where people struggle the most.   Will Barron: Yeah. I think people struggle in the fact that they will perhaps understand this idea of the hero's journey or these different archetypes of stories. Everyone's seen Lord of the Rings. We could break that down into this story archetype and these step by step processes.   Your Prospects Don’t want to Know About Your Company · [03:58]    Will Barron: But then when they come to a presentation, the first thing they do is go, oh, well, our business is this size and we serve these customers. And you can see the people in the audience, essentially the prospects, just metaphorically slapping their hands on the forehead because they don't need to know any of that. They don't care about any of that stuff.   Brant Pinvidic: No.   Will Barron: So how do you-   Brant Pinvidic: I'll give you a great example of that.   Will Barron: Sure.   Brant Pinvidic: Is it was an investment opportunity that came around. My partner thinks it's a great idea. He sent me their webinar and I already had my chequebook out. I was going to write a check. I mean, it's a simple business, a car washer thing. I'm in.   Brant Pinvidic: But the people doing the webinar and the presentation got on board and they spent the first nine minutes telling me who they were. Let me do our introductions and he did his for a couple of minutes. And then he passed it to his partner. He did his. Telling me where they live, where they went to school, what they did, their family. And it's just like, you guys want to make a personal connection with me and make me feel like … And I haven't written it yet. I haven't gone in, all because of that.   Brant Pinvidic: Because then for the next, and I sort of watched the next 15 or 18 minutes, but I was off doing other things and I wasn't really paying attention. And my brain was like, I kind of don't like these guys. Not even overtly. I just was kind of like, eh. I don't even know why am I interested in this? And I just phased out. And so I didn't jump on it.   Will Barron: For sure. I feel like it's almost a sign of someone, and not in respect to this deal that you're talking about there because obviously I have no idea about them personally. But when I see salespeople do it before they come through our training, or before they listen to shows like this, episodes like this, it's almost a sign of being an amateur versus a pro.   How to Use Storytelling to Keep Your Prospect’s Attention · [05:46]    Will Barron: Because you only have to do that five, six, seven times before then you start to see the room. And surely, most people have enough emotional intelligence to go, okay, this isn't working. I need a better strategy. So with that said, Brant, how do we story tell and keep attention? Is there a structure? Is there a framework? How do we go about doing this?   “What I teach in the book is called the WHAC Method. And it stands for what is it? H is how does it work? A is are you sure? And C is can you do it? And those are the four tenets of any proper story or any pitch or presentation.” – Brant Pinvidic · [05:53]    Brant Pinvidic: So what I teach in the book really detailed, is called the WHAC Method. And it stands for what is it? H is how does it work? A is are you sure? And C is can you do it? And those are the four tenets of any proper story or any pitch or presentation.   Brant Pinvidic: The very first thing is what is it? People want to talk, like you said, they want to talk about the size of the market. They want to talk about their background. They want to talk about their history. They want to talk about the problem that people are facing. And it's like, that is not where people want to be. Your mind naturally gravitates to what is this? And if you've ever had somebody droning on about something and you've said to yourself, “Could you just stop, stop, stop? Just tell me what this is? Tell me how this works?” And that's the structure.   Brant Pinvidic: So it's what is it? Which is literally, what do you do? We are an electric vehicle company that makes controllers that make your electric vehicle company go faster, whatever it is. It's what is it? I got to know what we're doing.   Brant Pinvidic: And then how does it work is literally what is the process? You're an app that connects social media influencers together to sell products. It's like, okay, well, how does it do that? Oh, it's based on this function. You have to have a million followers. What are the structures? How does it actually work?   Brant Pinvidic: After that, after I, as the audience understand those two things, now I'm open to validating it. Now I'm open to seeing that it's real. And that's, are you sure? Does this make sense? Is there a market? Have you done this before? Do you have the patents? What is the, are you sure? How do you get your audience to believe that this is possible?   Brant Pinvidic: And then, and only after I believe and buy into those three pieces, then I care about you. Who are you? Can you actually do it? When is it available? When will the technology be ready? Have you ever done this kind of thing? Do you have a full-time job? Will this be your part-time job? Any of the actual physical elements about you and your company.   Brant Pinvidic: And the WHAC Method ironically is almost a percentage of value. Half the job is what is it? If I'm looking at this carwash investment and I don't really think car washes are a good investment, nothing else matters. If I like car washes, I think this is a good idea, I'm halfway there.   Brant Pinvidic: And then it's like, okay, how does it work? Well, we are buying 13 different car washes. We're going to rebrand them, spruce them up, raise the prices. And here's how we're going to do it. You're like, okay, I actually like that process. Now I'm 80% of the way there. Okay.   Brant Pinvidic: And if car washers are increasing and the market's good and it always flows cash flow, which is what they would do in their are you sure section. If they, at the very end of it go, the only problem is we've never run a car wash before. I wouldn't be like, oh, that's it. I'm done. I'm out. Oh, sorry. I can't do it. My brain goes, well, we can hire management. It's not that difficult. Depending on how much I liked it, I'd be like, oh, don't worry about it. You'll figure it out.   “The less you say, the simpler you make your presentation, the more desirable it will be, and the more drawn people are to you.” – Brant Pinvidic · [09:18]    Brant Pinvidic: So that's literally, maybe 5% of it if all the other pieces sink. And that structure is very hard for people to grasp because they want to tell all of the information at once. They think the more they say, the more information they give, the better they're doing. And what I teach is it's the exact opposite. The less you say, the simpler you make your presentation, the more desirable it will be. And the more drawn people are to you. It's just, that's the way it is now.   The Things You Should Focus Most On At The Beginning of a Presentation · [09:31]    Will Barron: Why? And this might be a mindset thing or a psychological thing. Why do you think people are drawn to throwing up the goal, aspirations, thoughts, opinions, the strategy, all this stuff? When it doesn't really matter at the beginning of a presentation, why? Because I want to do it as well. Why do we all want-   Brant Pinvidic: Yes, of course.   Will Barron: To do this?   Brant Pinvidic: There's two main reasons. And this is one of those things that in my seminars, a lot of times I used to have this as a small piece. And now I actually will almost take a full day to go through this because it's so painful for people. Is that the two main reasons that you do this is you understand value better than anybody. You have perfect understanding is what I call it. Perfect understanding.   Brant Pinvidic: And the other one is confidence. Okay? The two pieces of it are perfect understanding means you have lived with your idea at every level. Every nuance makes sense. It's like when you watch your favourite movie. You see every directorial turn, every breath by the actress. Every twist and turn and scene is absolutely perfect. Because it's your favourite movie, you've seen it 15 times. Now you're seeing all the elements.   Brant Pinvidic: Someone who watches it the first time, watches it as a total movie, summarises why they like it. And it gets bigger and bigger and bigger and more nuanced as they go. So what happens is you genuinely believe the value of the retail reselling of your product later on to opening up the other market. You see that as clear as day, it is perfectly obvious to you.   Brant Pinvidic: And so you have all of this value based in all of these things that nobody can understand yet, because you didn't understand it instantly. It took you time to get to the place where now you know it so well. Now that you know it so well, it all has value. But you have to go back to the beginning to be like, hey, I need to give you the foundation of understanding of the conceptual elements. Then I have to build you the process of building value in this business. Then you could start to see the other tentacles that join it and the future and all of the other things.   Brant Pinvidic: And so for you, it's very hard to know what are the foundational pieces of value if you don't take a step back and put it in this WHAC format. That's really what you need to do is to get back to the basics. And even though it feels like, oh my God, this is so important, and I'm not saying it right away.   Brant Pinvidic: It's like, I have to say, I promise you will get to say all the important things. But the first three minutes is not the place for all of those things. Your meeting could last an hour, but only with a person who's engaged and you got to bring them there.   “People ask me to train their salespeople to be more confident. I can't do that. You can't teach someone confidence. You can teach someone how to fake confidence. That's not what I do. True, actual confidence comes from the value you believe you are providing to others.” – Brant Pinvidic · [12:19]    Brant Pinvidic: And then point two this is this confidence level, is that people ask me to train their sales forces to be more confident. I'm like, I can't do that. You can't teach someone confidence. You can teach someone how to fake confidence. That's not what I do. True, actual confidence comes from the value you believe you are providing to others. That's it.   Brant Pinvidic: If you were having a wedding and I was going to cater your wedding, and I was trying to get the job as the caterer. And my chef that was going to show up and be at your wedding in person was Gordon Ramsey. How would I present that to you? Would I need tonnes of words? Or maybe I say four words. “I have Gordon Ramsey.” That's what confidence is. Because I got Gordon Ramsey to cook at your wedding. You use less words. I'm not explaining, well, he's a Michelin three star chef and he's been on … I don't do any of that.   Will Barron: Sure.   “The more words you use, the less confident you appear.” – Brant Pinvidic · [13:13]   Brant Pinvidic: So if you picture a graph, which is what I'll do in my things, the more words you use, the less confident you appear. Because if I needed to have my brother-in-law, who just got out of jail, who's never really cooked before, but has really pressured me to get him a job. And I wanted him to be the chef. How many words am I going to need to try to convince you and your bride that he should be to your chef? I would just [inaudible 00:13:32], right?   Brant Pinvidic: And that's where people get the thing, is that you undermine your confidence, because you appear to be that you don't value the end product. And you don't believe in the value you're providing. And if you had an investment that was really going to make somebody 20% by the end of the year, and you really believed it, you wouldn't go sell them it.   Brant Pinvidic: You tell them the very basics. It's this, this, and this. And this is what it is. And it's just like, that's how people who are really confident, that's how they speak. That's how they act. That's how they present because they don't need to sell.   The Reason Why Most Salespeople Focus on Features and Benefits Instead of Delivering Value During a Sales Presentation · [14:10]    Will Barron: How much, Brant, do you think this initial, wanting to just throw up information at the beginning of any sales pitch, that you kind of align then with the individual knowing so much about the market, the space, the opportunity, the product, whatever is it they're selling?   Will Barron: How much of that is actually that they, in your experience with the different trainings and that, that you do, how much of it is that they are truly just so entwined in that space and they know so much. And they forget that people aren't as clued up as them. Or how much of it is that versus how much of it is that they've actually diluted themselves? And they're just talking absolute nonsense and saying one thing, which digs a bit of a hole, which they've got to solve another thing. And you go further down a rabbit hole [inaudible 00:14:54].   Brant Pinvidic: It's almost never that. Most people are not diluted about it. They really believe in their product, business, or service. That is most people do. But the problem is that they're so excited about it and they're so passionate and they want you to see it the way they do.   “Your goal of any presentation is to translate information from your knowledge to their understanding.” – Brant Pinvidic · [15:20]    Brant Pinvidic: And I actually talk to people about, what do you think your goal is when you're making a sales presentation? Like it's to get them to write a check and buy it? It's like, okay, that's the ultimate finished product. But really your goal of any presentation is to translate information from your knowledge to their understanding. If you can take what you know and get it so they understand it, they will have to be interested because you are interested. That's why you're doing it. If they understood it the same way you did, you'd have won that.   Brant Pinvidic: So the goal is that translation step from, I know it and I want you to understand it. And when you mix the passion and the excitement, and particularly with I deal with a lot of biotech and scientific stuff. Doctors and those scientists have a lot of trouble explaining to people, the simplicity of their immunotherapy cancer drug. And what the business of that is because they want to talk about the breakthroughs.   Brant Pinvidic: And so they get so passionate that again, they're throwing up all this information, but to them it sounds totally normal and natural, like of course. And so most of it is that. Unfortunately what comes across in our world today, because we have been poisoned by the years of click baits and click funnels and over promising marketing and the elevator sales pitch, that our natural instinct is to distrust people.   Brant Pinvidic: I'd say it to these guys all the time. If your new drug cured cancer, do you think everybody would believe it? If you said, “Oh my God, we just finished our trial. I have a new drug. It cures cancer.” Would you be like, oh my God, let me get my chequebook out and give you money. Or you'd be like, yeah, whatever.   Brant Pinvidic: And I've had that with companies that have these huge grand claims. And it's like, you can't say it like that because no one will believe you. You used to be able to do that. If we could get in a time machine and go back to the 70s and 80s, you could make big claims. Would you like to lose weight and eat anything you want? And you're like, yes, I would. Okay, let me follow your thing.   Brant Pinvidic: You could lean into somebody at an elevator pitch. You'd be like, excuse me, sir. I have an investment idea that could make you 10 times your money by the end of the year. Would that interest you? Oh, yes, it would. Tell me more. That doesn't exist. Somebody in the elevator leans in and says, “I have an investment idea that'll make you 10 times your money by the end of the year, are you interested?”   Brant Pinvidic: You'd be like, get away from me. That's the last person you are going to give money to. What if he actually had an investment like that? You know what I mean? So by saying it that way, by presenting it that way, by overdoing it, he's ruined his chances. And I see that a lot.   Brant Pinvidic: And sometimes for me it's to my benefit because a lot of times I'll participate in the process of growing a company and it's like, wait, you're turning people off. You're making people doubt your technology because of the way you say it. How about we restructure it? Then people will actually look at the data and believe you. So that's the most common thing I see, is they want to bombard people with information and they don't realise it subconsciously and sometimes overtly, lowers their value.   Will Barron: Yeah. So my background's selling medical devices and at the time I was selling them all the camera systems, endoscopic camera systems I was selling in the operating rooms, were switching from 720P to 10ATP. What you're describing here is bringing this up, this really vivid memory in my mind.   Here’s How to Become More Influential During a Sales Presentation · [18:39]   Will Barron: I went out with a more senior sales rep and he said one line. I was like, right, I'm stealing that and I'm using that every single time. And he was speaking to a surgeon who had glasses on, the surgeon was like mid 60s getting on a bit, but still crushing it and really important. One of the best colorectal surgeons in Europe. And he goes, “Yeah, it's the difference between having either dirty glasses or a crappy prescription. And having brand new glasses and having them clean.”   Will Barron: And the surgeon was like, “Oh, I'll try that.” He came in. It was exactly what he said, but literally that was the difference. And then it was the conversation on the back end of, oh well, do you think this will help you make less mistakes? Do you think this is less likely, less litigation go on the back of this?   Will Barron: And it was just that, just that one phrase got the ball rolling with this surgeon that had no interest in new technology. It's not like me, because I used to love talking about it all, and the connections and wiring it all up and going and selling and training everyone on it. I would talk for days about all the nonsense behind it.   Will Barron: This studio we've got here for this podcast, I love talking about all this kind of stuff. But you try and go into that kind of conversation with a technology adverse surgeon who doesn't want it. Just wants to do colorectal surgery, not have any issues, wants to go home. And again, that metaphor absolutely changed it for me when I first picked it up.   Will Barron: And as you were talking, Brant, that story kept kind of coming back to the forefront of my mind. So is that kind of what we're looking at here? Of how to narrow all the scope of our complex products down into, is it fair to say a soundbite? Is that a fair way of saying it?   Brant Pinvidic: It's not a soundbite because soundbites make people uncomfortable. Because they know. Again, it's like, if you look like you're trying, if you look like you spent all this time to orchestrate your pitch, people are repulsed by that. We're very sensitive. We have an oversensitive, hypersensitive audience basically.   Brant Pinvidic: And so what you want to do is when you're looking for the quote/unquote soundbite, I actually would go back and be like, what is the simplest way you can explain what it is? What's the simplest way so that people get it right away? So that their next question is like, okay, and how does it do this? What happens next?   Brant Pinvidic: There's something called and then storytelling. And a friend of mine, the late great Stephen J. Cannell, wrote The A Team and all these. He coined that sort of style where it was like, this happens and then this happens, and then this happens. And there's no nuance to his stories. They're very straightforward.   Brant Pinvidic: And if you've watched Law and Order, or CSI, or any of these procedural shows, it's like, it's the same show every single week. Why? Because that storytelling is so compelling. A little piece of this leads you to this, leads you to that, leads you to this. And it's like, movies are all the same way because that structure works.   Brant Pinvidic: And so what's the very basic way you can explain what it is you do? Why it's valuable? Why someone might want it? And why you're the person to do it? And if you can lay that out clearly they go click, I got that. Now I got questions. Now I have things to talk about. Now I want to know more. Now the next phases of what you're doing have relevance.   Brant Pinvidic: Now that your surgeon understands, it's like, oh, I'm going to get a clearer picture. That'll help me see the glasses. They get that. Now they can talk about the ability to perform surgeries faster. Now they can talk about the ability to make sure they don't make as many mistakes. Now they can talk about the ability of sharing pictures with medical students.   Brant Pinvidic: All those things that may have been true, he would not even hear that until he understood exactly what was the technology, or the system, or what it was going to be there. And so when you simplify it, it changes everything. It's an exponential return. Every word that you delete gets you 10 points on the scale. I wish I had a better analogy, but that's literally what it's exponential return.   The Information Pyramid: The First Step to Saying Less and Simplifying Your Sales Presentation · [22:35]    Will Barron: Because it's one thing to say all this. But there's copywriter making millions a year who go about doing some of this, and simplifying things, and making things more tangible so they sink in our brains. For someone like me, Brant, a knuckle dragging salesperson. Maybe they don't have a big marketing team behind them to help with some of this. They're going to have to do it on their own.   Will Barron: They've got a complex product. They're selling it. And it takes multiple meetings to get the deal done. The deal sizes are large. How does a knuckle dragging sale person like me start to implement this? Do we get our pitch, put it in a Microsoft Word document and just start deleting lines until we get to something? Is there a structure and a process?   Brant Pinvidic: No.   Will Barron: To simplifying things?   Brant Pinvidic: Yes. And in the book, I walk people through the exact process because that's really what the book is. It is a step by step guide. If you're going to start from scratch with the pitch, here's how you do it. And it's actually the opposite of what you're thinking.   Brant Pinvidic: I go back to the total from square one. And I talk about what's called the information pyramid, which is the fewer words, a little bit of information, and you build more words, more information. And so I have people try to do my this meets that exercise, a great one. It's a great exercise. This meets that, which is, can you describe your business in 10 words, 15 words total? It's this meets that.   Brant Pinvidic: It's kind of like you might say a movie is, Dirty Dancing is Footloose, but at a resort. You have a this meets that. I use an example if I'm pitching a TV show. Very complex, huge, massive TV show. And I might pitch it as it's The Amazing Race for the smartest people in the world.   Brant Pinvidic: So now you've got 12 words. And even though anybody in the audience doesn't produce television or doesn't know that, I bet if you just took a second, you'd kind of be surprised how much information you now have in 15 words. You know it's Amazing Race. If you've seen that show, you know that there's people racing around solving problems, trying to get from one point to the other.   Brant Pinvidic: For the smartest people in the world, it means, yeah, it'll be people in the amazing race, they're like goofy reality show contestants. So I guess if you had really smart people, you'd probably have bigger challenges and more complex things to go over. It's like, that's pretty well what the show is.   Brant Pinvidic: We're going to take MIT graduates and people who work at Boeing and put them in the hardest, biggest challenges in the history of television to see if they can use all their smarts to cross. It's like, oh, I actually kind of knew a lot of that from 15 words.   Brant Pinvidic: And so you start with that little bit, and then I'll give my client a little bit more words to work with. And then you start to realise which ones are important. In the book, I talk about the Twitter thing. What if you had to tweet out your business? What if your pitch was a tweet, one tweet, 145 characters? Not the big new one they have, but the original, what would you say? You'd be surprised. Like, okay, now I can only use so much.   The Bullet Point System For a Perfect Sales Presentation · [25:31]   Brant Pinvidic: And then once you get a little bit of that fundamental understanding I go through what's called the bullet point system. Where you take basically a Sharpie and some Post-Its and you write out bullet points of everything of value. Write them on bullet points and you get them on a big wall. And now you can start to see, now I'll start to take those bullet points. One or two words.   Brant Pinvidic: I'm a podcast. I teach sales, that kind of thing. And you start to realise like, okay, which one tells you what it is? Which one is talking about what I am? And you can actually start to see it take shape. And then the exercise that really helps is you realise that what you want to say, that doesn't fit. And you're like, oh, damn, I really want to say this. And that's how you know that you're adding things that shouldn't be there.   Will Barron: Well obviously we recommend the book at the end of the show. We'll add it in the show notes.   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah.   Will Barron: So clearly, that's the next step if you're enjoying this episode so far. But-   Brant Pinvidic: Exactly.   How to Transition From the Attention-Grab Into The Actual Presentation · [26:27]    Will Barron: How do we end this three minute period? As in we give like the 140 character pitch. We add the bullet points. We fleshed it out a little bit. We can see the eyes of our prospects in the room brighten up, and we can see that the prop's getting ready to ask us some questions. That their brains, the gears are starting to turn. So we're onto something here.   Will Barron: How do we then transition it into, whether it's a Q and A, whether it's a more formal presentation, whatever it is after that. Once we grab people's attention and their imagination and now says, “Well, how do we transition from this is me. This is the WHAC kind of method …” into then whatever comes afterwards?   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah. And I've had many clients that their three minutes is a minute and 42 seconds because it's simple enough. Or the rest of the business is complicated enough that you're not going to condense it. So let's just get the main pieces and then we'll get into it later.   Brant Pinvidic: And so the three minutes is kind of like the maximum to get all these points in. And so I'll do investor presentations with clients that are 20 minutes long, but the first two minutes, three minutes has all the core elements. And the transition from that into the next phase is called the information and the engagement phase. And that's the way we do. That's the way we make decisions as human beings. We conceptualise, we contextualise, and then we actualize. And we go through those three steps.   Brant Pinvidic: Doesn't matter if the decision is, what shirt do I want to wear for dinner tonight? Or should I invade the Ukraine? Those are the same exact decision process. I conceptualise, I contextualise, and then I actualize.   Brant Pinvidic: So when you're looking at your three minutes, you're basically going through the concept and the context, and then the next phase is the engagement. How do I do it? How do I actualize this? And that's where the longer conversations, and the more details, and getting into the minutia of the numbers, and the history of things.   Brant Pinvidic: And so that three minutes is, here's the concept. Here's what this thing is and how it works. So now you understand that. Here's the context as it relates to you. Here's the reason why it's true. Here's the reason why it's interesting. Here's how I can validate it. Here's how I can tell you it's actually going to happen.   Brant Pinvidic: Once you get the context set, now it becomes actualization. How do we deliver it? What's the implementation strategy? I have questions about your numbers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. That transition is metaphorically, now I'll take some questions. Now let's talk about what do you think? It's the pause.   Brant Pinvidic: I train people to, like, you don't need to say anything after that, because your audience is going to be like, what about this? Or I was thinking this, or how about that? Or if it isn't question time, then it's metaphorically you saying, “Okay, I know you have questions. Here are the top five questions I know you're going to have. Let me get into those.”   Brant Pinvidic: And that's a lot of times when we all build an investor presentation. It's like, okay, I've given you all the details. Here are the obvious questions. What's our burn rate? What's our track? How are we going to deal with the patent? Those things you know that people are going to want to know, but only if they have the core. And if the core is valuable to them, they'll actually put weight on those things. They'll be interested to pay attention.   Brant Pinvidic: That's why you watch a movie. And Andy Dufresne ends up in Shawshank Prison and you're like, okay, he didn't commit the murder, and it's in a really bad prison. Now I got to see what happens. If we start that movie with Andy Dufresne escapes from the worst prison in America, let me tell you why. You'd be like, yeah, whatever.   Brant Pinvidic: But we build it to you. We give you all the details. Now you want to see the story play out. If I tell you up front that he escaped from a really bad prison, you're like, okay, great. Why? When? Oh, is that really that bad of a prison? Or oh, did it … Everything falls apart. Hope I didn't spoil that movie for anybody but he escapes.   Will Barron: I was just about to say it's a spoiler alert from like 20 years ago.   Brant Pinvidic: Spoiler alert.   Will Barron: Whenever it was we, I covered, we did it in history class in high school. That's how long ago I watched it. But with that-   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah, exactly.   How to Implement the Three Minute Rule in an Email · [30:56]   Will Barron: With that, Brant, so I love this. And just to reiterate, because I thought you go down the route of you do the three minute presentation, you get them, they're all wide eyed, everyone's loving it. And then I instinctively would just shut up and then kind of invite the questions.   Will Barron: But I also love this, the second layer that you added on top of that. Of here's five things that you're probably thinking right now. And to do that in the sale context, you get to handle objections before they come up. So you can stay more in control of the objection handling process.   Will Barron: You also, if you do correctly and you've got the right background, the right understanding of the market, the right understanding of the people that you're in front of, you get to position yourself as someone who really understands the person or people that you're pitching to. Which is instantly can add credibility, a layer of rapport and anything else to it as well. So I really enjoyed that.   Will Barron: I've got one final thing to ask you, Brant. And that is, can this structure be used in other, I guess media, other than just a presentation? As in, can this be used in an email? Or like a mini slide deck? Or things like that?   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah. People ask that all the time. And by the way, it is 100% for email, for brochures, for handouts. It's just more important. It's more crucial to simplify it because now you're asking people that aren't in a conference room that have to stare at you. They have to be there for five minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes. They're going to have to listen to you because they've entered the room.   Brant Pinvidic: On a phone call, you've got them on the phone. So they're going to be sitting there. On an email, they don't have to read it. On a brochure, they don't have to read it. On a handout, they don't have to read it. So it's like, okay, now what? It's got to be even more succinct because you can't expect them to keep reading and go to all those points. On your 19th sentence is where your absolute core is.   Brant Pinvidic: It has to be literally we do this, it's this and this. Love to talk to you further kind of thing. And when I'm going back, like I always say to my clients like, okay, we have to get to the point where you go in your mind. It's this proverbial thing. It's like, if you don't get it after this, we should just end this. I got to go.   Brant Pinvidic: The idea is, it's like, I've given you the basics. If you're not like I want to talk more, I don't get it. I got to move on. That's the feeling you should have when you get in your presentation. Where it's like, okay, clearly you're going to want to hear more. And if you don't, I'm out of here. And so in an email or any sort of thing, you need to put it on there where it's like, okay, you got the basics. If you're not into a software solution for your point of sale thing, then we don't have anything to talk about.   Will Barron: Yep.   Brant Pinvidic: And so you have to get yourself in a mind where it's like, I've laid out the simplest version of this. There's not a lot of interpretation to be done. If this doesn't fit something that you think of, then I'm moving on. And that's like you're in a conference room and you give this pitch. It's kind of like, you're feeling like, so if anybody's not interested after hearing that we should just end this meeting right now.   Brant Pinvidic: That's got to be the mentality. Where it's like, I just laid out the key points. Everything from here is not going to sway you. You might write a bigger check, but if your brain is like, no, I don't think so, we're done.   Brant Pinvidic: And that's hard for people because they're used to fighting from the second it starts. Fighting for attention. How many times have you pitched somebody and they ask a question and you're like, oh, I'm getting to that in a minute. Just hold on. Yeah. I'll explain that. It's like, guess what? You're out of order. You have given them information in an order that leads them into a different conclusion and asked this question.   Brant Pinvidic: And when I'm done and when you read the book, you will never have, I guarantee you'll never have that happen again. No one ever will stop you and be like, wait, what about this? Because that just doesn't exist anymore. Those pieces are laid out. At the end they'll be like, okay, I have a new question because it's based on something you've said.   Will Barron: Good. I love this. It reminds me of something similar that we do. I won't go into it, I've talked about on the podcast in the past. But we use a similar structure. But perhaps even more overtly in the way that we set up sales calls. To the point of, hey, if this isn't for you, I'll tell you this isn't for you. And we can both get rock and rolling, and perhaps we can follow up later on.   Why Sales Should Not Be a Fight to the Death Kind of Thing · [35:20]   Will Barron: There's almost a feedback loop, which you alluded to there. And as soon as, when we're training sales reps, as soon as they understand that. That they're going into a conversation, it's not a fight to the death. If it isn't right for the prospect, if they're not qualified, if you can't feel like you can help them. Or they just don't get what you do, even though it's very succinct.   Will Barron: And so they've obviously just got other things on the amount of priorities. And maybe they'll come back to you in the future. Sales people then go, oh, I don't need to be panicking about this. I don't need to be stressed about this. And as long as the pipeline at the top is full enough, all the rest of it just starts to work and happen for them.   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah. And I think that the sales industry has gone down this road of I'm trying to convince you. I'm trying to sell you. I'm trying to convince you. And the truth is nobody's going to let you convince them. No one's going to let you sell them. If they feel you're selling them, they're going to resist. It's just, that's the world we live in. So accept it.   Brant Pinvidic: And what I train a little bit more is like, you're not trying to convince somebody. It's like, if I could get them to understand this, my closing rate goes up. You watch enough Instagram or TikTok, and you see all these idiot sales professionals that are doing these little videos trying to tell you how to close this and handle objections.   Brant Pinvidic: And it's like, oh my God. You're just asking people to walk into a minefield of rejection because people are sensitive to it. We used to tell salespeople to use your client's name. Jeff, Bob, do you think? How about this, Bob? It's like, could you imagine if someone did that to you today?   Will Barron: It's gross, right?   Brant Pinvidic: Could you imagine how your response would be? You'd be just like, oh, this guy. And that is still a lot of the sales process, is people doing things that are as ineffectual as that. And asking those leading questions like if we came to deal terms today, is there any reason why you wouldn't move forward?   Brant Pinvidic: Is like, I know what you want to get out of that. And it's a great idea, but everybody's now ready for that phrase. Everybody's looking for that what do we have to do to get you in this car today? As soon as you say that, your credibility just starts to drain. And then it's like, oh, will you say anything to make this sale? Because that means anything you've said, I now have to question.   “I've had really good luck with training sales organisations to come into the process of, if I can make you understand this, you'll be interested. If you understand it and you're not interested, it's not right for you.” – Brant Pinvidic · [37:48]    Brant Pinvidic: And that is the danger of this. And I've had really good luck with training sales organisations to come into the process of, if I can make you understand this, you'll be interested. If you understand it and you're not interested, it's not right for you. But under no circumstances will I leave here without you understanding fully the value that this represents. I don't need to convince you. Because your audience is smarter than you about what's valuable to them. End of story.   Will Barron: It's gross.   Brant Pinvidic: And so you trying to-   Will Barron: The way I frame this up-   Brant Pinvidic: Talk to them just doesn't work.   Will Barron: Brant, is the podcast started off. This is like six years ago now, or this is episode 740, something like that. Because I was doing okay, medical device sales, earning decent money, but I wasn't the top of the leaderboard. So I'll reiterate the story because people, the OG listeners will know this, but we've had a bit of a growth spurt recently.   Will Barron: So I came home one day in Leeds, in me little terraced house. And I sat there. I was like, right, how do I get better at sales? And it was a bunch of dudes and women from the 90s with shoulder pads in their jackets. Going, “Hey, here's five ways to close a sale.” Here's three ways to essentially manipulate someone into staying on the phone for you for like 10 minutes longer.   Will Barron: And I sat there and I was like, right, if I tried. And the best and I did it verbatim and I was great at it. If I did any of this bullshit with the surgeons that I was selling to, they'd be like right, dickhead, out of there.   Brant Pinvidic: Out you go.   Will Barron: You'd never get back in. You're gone. You never get in the operating room again. The surgeons would have a lot of power. They wouldn't always necessarily have the budget, you'd be dealing with the CFO in that situation. And I'm sure they'd be the same way. But you just instantly lose access.   Will Barron: You can't say all this weird crap to someone, and this goes into what you're teaching here, Brant. You can't give them a list of features and benefits either when they've got their hands in a patient and they're trying to achieve something. And you're there to demo a product that makes this easier, simpler, more effective, less risk of litigation, whatever it is, on the back of it. You need to be able to, as I said, this is like the difference between having dirty glasses and clean glasses, whatever it is.   Will Barron: And this whole podcast started off on the back of it. There was no good, multi-billion dollar a year industry, the sales training industry, there was no good content. And so it came on the back of me interviewing experts in the field like yourself, Brant, to try and pull this information back into sales training.   Salespeople Need to Forget About Old School Sales Techniques and Embrace What Works in the Modern Age · [40:12]   Will Barron: So I totally hear what you're saying when you talk about these old school sales techniques. It didn't work on surgeons then, now it just doesn't work on Joe Blogs when he picks up the phone. He's just going to, go, okay.   Brant Pinvidic: And those are the obvious ones. This is the problem, is that most people know the obvious ones as a salesman. But what they really underestimate is the ones that you still think people don't pick up on. It's like, no, you have no idea how hypersensitive the audience is.   Brant Pinvidic: And I'll give you example. I did a lot of work with Harley Davidson on their sales process. And as I'm in the dealership, it's like they've trained their sales people to be like, here's the features and the idea of the Harley. And it's like, wait. They had so much trouble with, is that the customers were coming into the showroom with more knowledge about the models, and the years, and when this option was available, and how often it is, and the features. They actually knew more about the features and the benefit of a Harley Davidson than the sales people did.   Brant Pinvidic: So the sales people are trying to compete for knowledge. And it's like, that is not why someone is walking into the showroom. They want to sit in it, they want to see it, and they want to know how they can get it. And it's like when the entire sales force started to train in a different mentality, a different mindset, which is like, somebody walks in, kind of wants this anyways. Your job is to facilitate how they can put it in their driveway. And that's it.   Brant Pinvidic: You don't need to convince them that it's better than this other motorcycle. If you think that's your job, you have missed the boat. Obviously the sales have done very well over the last little bit. I'll take credit for it, pandemic aside. But the truth is it was a matter of that entire level of confidence coming to a different thing. Where it's like, I don't need to tell you all the details.   Brant Pinvidic: If you ask how many horsepower it has versus the night version, okay, I'll tell you. But I don't need to come in with that guns blazing being like, here's what it is. It doesn't make any sense. And they found just like, not only, I mean lots of things, but besides the speed of transactions.   Brant Pinvidic: How fast they were able to move to people through because it's like, okay, you come in there, you want to look at, can I get it? How much is it? What's the financing? When is it in? Can I get it customised? Like those are the real things people are after. Not like this would look so great in your driveway. Wouldn't your friends be impressed if you drove? You know what I mean? You don't want to drive a Honda, a Gold Wing, come on. None of that. None of that.   Will Barron: I've got-   Brant Pinvidic: If you think a salesman can convince you that your car is better than the … And that's the same thing in the car industry. Do you think someone's, a salesman is going to convince you that the Audi is better than the BMW? Or vice versa? That's not the way the world works now. Right? It's like-   Will’s Experience With a Salesperson Using Cringy Sales Strategies From the 90s · [42:54]    Will Barron: I went into BMW. I've told this tale in the podcast before, but this just iterates the point. We'll wrap up with this. I'm conscious of time. I went to BMW with me Mrs. She had a BMW previously. I owned a expensive, fast BMW at the time. Went in, we just wanted to test drive it. We were going to test like a VW and an Audi, whatever it was as well.   Will Barron: And then it was probably going to happen. The deal was probably going to happen. Went and test drove it. The salesperson was using all these close ended questions and weird selling questions from like the 90s. You know if the test drive goes well, you're going to make a purchase today. All over and over and over. And I can see it all a mile away.   Will Barron: Me Mrs. Is a doctor. So she was kicking me under the table at one point, because I was laughing at how gross it was. And she was like, “Now, give him a chance,” kind of thing. We knew the price because we'd been online, done the configurator, and we knew the monthly amount that it was going to cost. The guy wouldn't tell us the price.   Will Barron: We told him the budget and clearly the budget must have been close to the price, or a bit lower. So he kept going up there. “Right, let me speak to me boss. I'm going to come back it.” And he'd come back in and be like, “I spoke with me boss, can you do a deal today? If you can do a deal today, then we'll get it down to your budget.”   Will Barron: So I was like, well, yeah, but what's the price? And he would not tell us the price. This went on for maybe like 45 minutes until me Mrs. then just walked off. It was embarrassing.   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah. Isn't that crazy?   Will Barron: It was insane. All he had to do was just tell us the price. And then if it's 100 quid either way, who cares? He probably would've just went for it. But he was so driven. And obviously he was being coached by someone else in the room that he kept popping in and out of.   Brant Pinvidic: Yes. Oh my God.   Will Barron: The sales manager extraordinaire who was in there. The sales manager was only there for one day for whatever reason as well. So it had to be done today. It was absolutely gross. And we ended up getting a totally different car. Went to the next dealership, bought the next car in an instant like that. Just because this dude was just so backwards.   Will Barron: And it was because we knew the price, we knew what we wanted. We knew even the horsepower and all that kind of stuff because it was a smart car kind of thing. I'd sussed all that out. We just needed the price from him. Couldn't get the price and so he lost the deal.   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah. And all he needed to do was take a step back.   Will Barron: Yep.   Brant Pinvidic: And understand what is he actually there to do? He's actually there to convey some information to you. One is, how scarce are these cars? How many do we have on the lot? Is this a time to get a good deal? Will this car be available? The things that could actually influence your buying decision.   Brant Pinvidic: And I always say them is like, what is the truth? If you have lots of cars on the lot and you're hoping to get a sale, then you can explain to them that it's like this is the process. And so you can explain like, hey, it is a good time to get a good deal. Okay. That's going to make me want to buy more because it's a good time to get a deal. We have a lot of cars on the lot.   Brant Pinvidic: If you're trying to play into like, can I emotionally get you into this thing? People buy off emotion. It's like, that's not really true anymore. People actually are scared to buy in emotion now. More than ever before. If you get them emotional about things, they actually recoil a little bit and be like, oh God, am I making a decision? Am I making a mistake here? And that's the same thing as a car dealer. You don't want to be part of that at all.   Will Barron: I didn't even want a deal, Brant. I just wanted-   Brant Pinvidic: I know.   Will Barron: They could have sold us a car by going, “Hey, we'll drop a car off at your house. You can go do a test drive. We'll pick you up in an hour and we'll email you the paperwork.” They would've done a deal. That's how crazy it was.   Parting Thoughts · [46:29]    Will Barron: Right. Well, without rant over, mate, I appreciate you. I appreciate your insights. Tell us more about the book, where we can find it? And then more about the training and everything else that you are up to as well.   Brant Pinvidic: Yeah. So the book's The Three Minute Rule. You can go to Three Minute Rule.com or my website, Brant Pinvidic.com. There's all that kind of information in there. Book will help you do all that stuff.   Brant Pinvidic: And then yeah, I like to do lots of stuff in lots of companies and happy to talk to people about what they're doing. I love, we've got this little movement of this, say less to get more. And as it grows, it's really exciting. Because it's one of those things where people are just like, oh my God. People get it now. People understand what I'm saying. And everything comes from that, from an understanding. It's very exciting. I'm really happy that it's gone so well.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. Well, we'll link to the book, everything you're up to, your website, everything else in the show notes of this episode, over at Salesman.org.   Will Barron: With that, Brant, I enjoy your energy, mate. Your charisma, that comes across amazingly. I enjoy the kind of structure you've given us for these three minute beginning of pitches and the transitions and all of that as well. I appreciate that. And with that, I want to thank you again for joining us on The Salesman Podcast.   Brant Pinvidic: Awesome. Thanks, man.  

On this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Andy Paul explains why you should stop trying to trick your prospects and why you should focus on winning more sales. Andy is the host of the “Sales Enablement with Andy Paul” podcast and author of “Sell Without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms”. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Andy Paul Sales Enablement Expert Resources: Andy on LinkedIn Book: Sell Without Selling Out  Andypaul.com Transcript Will Barron: Hi, my name is Will, and welcome to today's episode of the Salesman Podcast. On today's show we'll look at why you need to stop persuading if you want to win more sales. And today's guest is Andy Paul. Andy is the host of the Sales Enablement With Andy Paul podcast, and author of Sell Without Selling Out, A Guide To Success On Your Own Terms. And with that, Andy, welcome back again to the show.   Andy Paul: Will, thank you for having me.   Will Barron: You're more than welcome, sir. I'm glad to have you back on. We just had a nice tune wag before we click record. Tonnes of value in that conversation…   Andy Paul: We did. We did.   Stop Persuading Prospects · [00:30]   Will Barron: … so I appreciate that mate. But, let's get into the topic. Let's not diddy daddle too much. Let me ask you this mate, we're going to talk about how not persuading prospects, this is going to seem a bit backwards to the audience until it kind of pans out. We're going to talk about how not persuading prospects is going to win us more deals. But, isn't the whole point of working in sales, being a salesperson, to persuade a prospect, to make a purchasing decision, so that we get some nice commission checks in our back pocket at the end of the quarter?   “I don't believe that our job fundamentally as the sales people is to persuade someone to purchase our product. I think that our job as sellers is to listen to our buyers, to understand what are the most important things to them, both in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they want to achieve, and then help them get that. And I think that when you have that mindset and that perspective, what your job is, you use a different set of actions to get to the end result.” – Andy Paul · [01:07]    Andy Paul: Well, we certainly want the commission checks. The question is how do we get there? Right? So yeah, no, I don't believe that our job fundamentally as the sales people is to persuade someone to purchase our product. I think that our job as sellers is to listen to our buyers, to understand what are the most important things to them, both in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they want to achieve, and then help them get that. And I think that when you have that mindset and that perspective, what your job is, you use a different set of actions to get to the end result.   Why Salespeople Stubbornly Continue Trying to Persuade Prospects · [01:40]    Will Barron: And that makes total sense, right? Everyone who's listening to the show right now, Andy, have just gone, “Yeah, of course.” But why is that common sense, but it doesn't get implemented? It doesn't happen for a lot of sales people that way.   Andy Paul: Well, I think a couple things. One is, I think people come into the profession with this idea of how they have to act to be a salesperson, which they picked up through maybe people that they know that are in sales, but certainly through popular culture, and so on. The way sales people are persuaded, or excuse me, portrayed for ages. But then most importantly, it's really how sellers are socialised and educated about what their jobs are. And in most cases they are told, “This is your job. Your job is go and persuade someone to buy your product.” And it's like, all right, well, you can push. But, the alternative is, maybe I can exhibit some leadership and inspire the buyer and influence the choices and trade offs the buyer makes, and achieve the same result perhaps with greater predictability and in less time.   Will Barron: So, the audience will know this by now, we do this show as live as we possibly can. I'm choking, choking on air, literally as I-   Andy Paul: You're choked up by what I just told you. Yes, I know.   Will Barron: It upsets me. It upset to me Andy. So, excuse me. With that mate, with that, we'll try and cut this out after the show, of course.   Andy Paul: That's fine.   The Root Cause of Pushy Sales Behaviours · [03:12]    Will Barron: Oh man. Okay. So with that, who is to blame? Are we blaming individual sales people here for not having agency over their own kind of profession, over their own career, over their own actions? Is this media and Hollywood. Obviously there's a stereotype of the used car sales person out there that we can perhaps lean into as well. The Wolf Of Wall Street, these kind of shows and films. Or, is it sales management? Or, is it the customer who's accepted this behaviour for long enough that it's then becoming ingrained as the correct way to do things? If we have to blame someone, who are we going to blame?   Andy Paul: If we had to blame someone, yeah. It's not the individual salesperson. If anything, it starts at management, right? Is increasingly we see managers, when I said increasingly, is use this great technology that's available for sales. And instead of using it to sort of fundamentally reset how we engage with our buyers, what it's typically in the hands of most managers being used to reinforce these previously bad behaviours that existed in sales, these pushy salesy behaviours. In fact, perhaps using the technology to amplifying those behaviours. And so I think it starts, blame maybe too strong a word because this is part of a tradition that's going on for a long time. But, we haven't used the tools available to us to, so I said, sort of fundamentally rethink and reset the relationship we have with buyers.   How to Rethink The Way You Sale From Less Persuading to More Leading · [04:45]    Will Barron: So the salesperson's listening to this now, they're driving along, their rocking and rolling. They're excited about you being on the show, Andy. They're going, “Okay, that makes sense. But I already do a discovery call and I already I listen to some of Andy's podcasts and some of Will's podcasts. I already ask some, what I consider decent questions. But, I still find that the buyer has like status quo. There's confirmation biases of decisions they made in the past. There are other elements that like hold them steadfast in this position where I know that if they leverage our product, they buy into what we offer, we can help them.” How does that salesperson who's listening right now, who perhaps, I think you've used and I'm mirroring your wording here carefully, Andy, they are persuading buyers having done discovery to get the deal, to get them over the line. How do they need to rethink the process and perhaps do less persuading and more leading? What practically does that look like?   Andy Paul: Well, what practically looks like for discovery is, in hands of most sellers, the way they're trained is, okay, you've got a playbook for discovery. You've got these questions we typically ask to this persona within this ICP. You should expect to get this type of answer. Based on receiving this type of answer, this is how you respond. And what happens then is discovery turns out being like a survey taking, right? I collect some amount of information, but I don't understand a thing, right? I know this information, but I don't understand why it's important to the buyer. And this is the big gap that exists in discovery oftentimes is, I sort of know what they sort of think, but I don't really understand why. I don't understand what's most important to them in terms of the challenges they're trying to face.   Andy Paul: I haven't helped them think more deeply and broadly about that challenge with the questions I'm asking because I was just gathering information. Rather than using questions as a way to help the buyer think differently about the problems they're trying to achieve or the problems they're trying to solve and the outcomes they can achieve. So, there's a gap between knowing something and understanding it is a big difference, and it requires going deeper with the question. So in my book I lay out in a chapter on curiosity is layout six question types that if you use them in combination is you will surface eventually what is most important to the buyer. And then when you that information, when you know what's most important to the buyer, then you can say, “Okay, now I can work with the buyer because we know what the target is. We know what the real target is. I can work with the buyer now to try to influence the choices and trade offs they make about how to achieve their desired outcomes.”   The Process of Getting The Buyer to Understand What You’re Selling Instead of Trying to Persuade Them · [07:20]    Will Barron: So is it a case of getting the buyer to understand where they are, and you go through this process as well, right? Allowing the buyer to then, or enabling the buyer, helping them with your industry expertise. Clearly you've probably sold this product more times than the buyer has bought it. Get them to visualise, understand where they could be. And then is our job then to enable the buyer to see how they get from one place to another? As opposed to have a stick behind the back of the head, whacking them to get from the start line, to the end line.   “If you're doing a persuasion based sales approach, you’re pushing the buyer. And I think sales is really a leadership role. What you're trying to do is you're trying to help the buyer understand what's most important to them. But then you're going to inspire them to go on this journey with you to co-create what this vision of success will look like when the buyer invests and uses your products and your services. Because, really when the buyers make a purchase decision, what are they buying? They're not buying the product. They're buying the vision of what that product can do for them and the outcomes they can achieve.” – Andy Paul · [07:52]    Andy Paul: Yeah. Right. I mean, so just fundamentally you can even break down even further and say, “Look,” if you're doing a persuasion based sales approach, it's pushing, right? You're pushing, pushing, pushing the buyer. And I think sales is really a leadership role, right? What you're trying to do is, you're trying to help the buyer understand what's most important to them. But then you're going to inspire them to go on this journey with you to co-create what this vision of success will look like when the buyer invests and uses your products and your services. Because, really when the buyers make can purchase decision, what are they buying? They're not buying the product. They're buying the vision of what that product can do for them and the outcomes they can achieve. And I think that's more fundamentally a leadership aspect than a push, push, push aspect.   Will Barron: So, let's see if we can go practical with this. So I know when I'm selling our Selling Made Simple academy training programme, right? I do what we're describing here and I'll start one place and I'll say, “Well, the training's going to allow us do this. It's going to free up your time. It's going to do this. It's going to do that.” And then I'll allow the prospect to, and I call them a prospect loosely, because usually they're fans of the show already. There's a bit of relationship already there. So, perhaps a few steps ahead of what the audience might be with their potential customers.   The Importance of Trust and Credibility When Trying to Win More Sales · [09:43]    Will Barron: But then we get to the point of, “Well, what do you actually want to achieve? Forget your sales target. Let's go beyond that and let's see where you need to be in five, 10 years, what you need to earn to get to that point.” And then you see their start to open it wide and you can then go, “Well, okay, well our training maybe can help with this or maybe it can't help with this.” And we go down the kind of giving the solution to the problem, right? And again, I'm conscious I'm coming from a perspective of the audience. By the time I get on a call with them, whether it's a sales leader, the VP of sales, to sell our training product, they already know everything about it. They already know all about me. There's a layer of trust rapport there. So, with that said, Andy, what do we do if we're selling something like office furniture or accounting software, or something like this where there's perhaps, and maybe you can help me with this, but instantly I'm struggling to come up with some grand vision for the cheap office furniture that I'm selling. You know what I mean? Versus what I just described of a transformation, which is going to change both your career, but perhaps your personal life as well.   Andy Paul: Not every price, you had that vision on the first call, right? So, there's a process. You have to build this connection with the buyer as a human being. You have to build a level of credibility and trust, which you talked about. You've built through your podcast with your audience and the people you're talking to, is what they've done is said, “Look, okay, we've built that connection.” So I talk about four pillars of selling in, in my book, connection, curiosity, understanding, generosity. You've built that connection, that trust. So now what the buyer says, “Look, I'm going to open the door to your influence Will, right? I have this trust in you. I'm going to enable you to come in and sort of stick your nose into our business to really learn what is most important to us. What are the outcomes we're trying to achieve.”   “If you go in from a position of trust, you're going to be able to go much deeper and get deeper and better insights into what the buyer's trying to achieve than you would without trust.” – Andy Paul · [11:21]    Andy Paul: And as you know, I mean, when you talk to sellers, two people can ask the same question and get two dramatically different answers, based on the connection and the trust that they've built up with that buyer. So that's why starting with that human connection is so important, leads into your curiosity. We use our curiosity to explore the things that are unfamiliar to us. Well, again, if you go in from a position of trust, you're going to be able to go much deeper and get deep and better insights into what the buyer's trying to achieve than you would without them.   Why You? How to Create a Seamless Buying Experience That Gets the Buyer To Choose Your Product or Service · [11:32]    Will Barron: How much of the practical skill of doing this, Andy, comes from building trust, building rapport, having the buyer going into the conversation with them seeing you as someone who can often value as opposed to a pesky salesperson who's just trying to suck money from their pocket, right? How much of this comes up from framing the conversation? How much of it is enabled by framing the conversation up as, this is a consultative call, as opposed to a, I don't know, maybe you wouldn't do this on a cold call. You'd use your cold call to set up a meeting, right? But, how much of this comes from the perception of the buyer of you versus what you are able to do on the call itself?   “Let's take your training products, great training product. But, the fact is there's what, a million sales trainers out there? And when the buyer is talking to you and they're valuing products saying, “Well, the products are basically all the same. So what's the difference?” Well, the difference is how I'm experiencing Will versus experiencing John or experiencing Bill, who's also trying to sell to us. And that's where the difference is really made, is how the buyer experiences you in this process.” – Andy Paul · [13:01]    Andy Paul: Almost all of it, right? And so I write about my book is, there's a question that all buyers ask of you as seller, excuse me, I call that the why you question, right? Why should I invest my time in you? Why should I invest my intention in you? Why should I trust you? And that's something that they answer through how they experience you, right? It's a question they're not really verbalising, but they're just being asked nonetheless. And so it starts with really small things, right? What's the first impression you create with a buyer? And are you being intentional about trying to create a positive first impression? Right? Because at the end of the day, every interaction that we have with a buyer, is part of their buying experience with us. And we know on a day, the age that we operate in today, let's take your training products, great training products. But, the fact is there's what, a million sales trainers out there? And when the buyer is talking to you and they're valuing products saying, “Well, the products are basically all the same. So what's the difference?”   “When you have the opportunity to interact with the buyer, it doesn't matter in what form that takes, whether it's an email or a voice call, Zoom call, in person meeting, the buyer has invested their time and attention in you. You have to enable them to earn a return on that time and attention. And that just doesn't happen by coming in and sort of trying to flog your product. It happens by sort of being in this process together with the buyer, right? Really understanding what's important to them. Being focused on how can I help you achieve what's most important to you? And then you become the differentiator, not the product or the company.” – Andy Paul · [13:35]   Andy Paul: Well, the difference is how I'm experiencing Will versus experiencing John or experiencing Bill, who's also in trying to sell to us. And that's where the difference is really made, is how the buyer experiences you in this process. So, what it means is that when you have the opportunity to interact with the buyer, doesn't matter in what form that takes, whether it's an email or a voice call, Zoom call, in person meeting, the buyer has invested their time and attention in you. You have to enable them to earn a return on that time and attention. And that just doesn't happen by coming in and sort of trying flog your product. It happens by sort of being in this process together with the buyer, right? Really understanding what's important to them. Being focused on how can I help you achieve what's most important to you? And then you become the differentiator, not the product or the company.   Why You Need to Become a Leader in Sales Instead of Trying to Spam the Marketplace · [14:21]    Will Barron: I think you alluded to this, you've mentioned technology a few times in the show so far Andy. This is an important question, but it's going to have an obvious answer. How does this translate into the world that we're living in right now in modern B2B sales, where seemingly most salespeople just want to sit behind spammy, automated, semi personalised cold emails, and just flog the whole marketplace, hoping that they find the right person, at the right place, with the right pain, at the right time, who will maybe get on a call with them? How does what we're talking about here, the strategy of leading through the sale and adding value each step, and you being the experience differentiates versus the competition, how does that translate into this world of just spamming crap at people and praying that someone responds?   Andy Paul: Well, you're going to trigger me here. It requires a culture change, right? There are many, many industries right now where the win rate on their most qualified opportunities is acceptable, considered acceptable if it's like a 20%. Meaning you're winning one out of five of your most qualified opportunities. Yeah. I mean, a lot of companies are playing the game just as you described. They're getting really good at, we're going to put a tonne of opportunities through our demand gen and lead gen and to the top of the funnel. And if we're just moderately effective at selling, we'll close, yeah, 20% of our qualified opportunities. And that will be enough to enable us to grow. But, that parties not going to last forever. At some point, you, as an organisation, you as an individual, need to learn how to sell. Because, Hey, we're in the midst of 14 years of uninterrupted economic growth. But Hey, we know things can go off the rails pretty quickly.   Andy Paul: I mean, look at the unfortunate situation in Europe, in Eastern Europe. I mean, who knows what that leads to? We fall into a recession or something. Yeah. Those ways aren't going to work as consistently and as reliably. You're going to have to learn how to win a higher fraction of the opportunities, meaning that you're going to really pay attention to how you sell. And unfortunately, many cases it's not. And so there are small companies and midsize companies have taken the wrong lesson from some of the successes of the companies that have grown using these methods, thinking that's that method that's enabled the company to grow, that sales method. When actually it's the product being in the right place at the right time.   Will Barron: Now, respectfully, I'm trying to do this politely, but you'll understand. You have been through and been in the game for a lot longer than what I have, right?   Andy Paul: Yes.   The Changes to Expect in Sales Incase of a Recession · [17:00]    Will Barron: So, you were working through the 2008 recession and there's been ups and downs since then and prior to that, right? Because obviously, what's going on in Ukraine, what's going on elsewhere in the world, we're due just a massive recession or like a nose dive, just load of crap are getting thrown at our plate in the not distant future. It's inevitable at this point. How does sales change in that period? And is it the people, when the person's really get, and we've just come through COVID and all this other stuff as well. So, that's perhaps a taste of some of what's to come. But, how does sales change in that kind of environment? Does the spam work then, or does it just go down to zero at that point? And then it's down to salespeople who actually are capable of selling, capable of leading, capable of guiding someone through a sales process and adding value every step of the way? Which side do we want to be on when the shit hits the fan, Andy?   “You can't really help somebody get to that position of understanding what's the shortest time to the value of your solution if you don't really understand what would have the most value for them.” – Andy Paul · [18:58]    Andy Paul: Yeah, well, not the former. It's more the latter, right? Because, there's going to be more people chasing fewer dollars at that point, right? So this idea of differentiation through how you sell becomes more crucial. And your ability to ensure that every time you interact with a buyer, that you're helping them make progress toward making the decision, hugely important. Because, and I said, you become the differentiator. And you're saying, “Gosh, when I'm working with you, when I understand what's really most important to you, then I can help you sort of work through this problem.” Which is, we see when things are tough and this came through at sort of the beginning of COVID, is yes, some decisions were deferred. But, the ones that went forward were the ones that had the shortest time to value for the purchaser. And you can't really help somebody get to that position of understanding, what's the shortest time to value with your solution, if you don't really understand what would have the most value for them.   The 80/20 Rule in Sales · [19:10]    Will Barron: What's the 80 20 of getting to this point? Because it seems like what we need is the ability to ask great questions. We also need industry expertise. We need to understand the industries that our customers are selling into, or the market that they're servicing. But, this is stuff that maybe takes five years, 10 years, of head down sales experience, right? To nail some of this. Whether it's the contacts within the space and all this kind of stuff and building-   Andy Paul: Well, some.   Will Barron: So, whats-   Andy Paul: Some. I mean, I would argue that, I mean, fresh out of school, I knew nothing about business and the customers, my customer's businesses and so on. Yet, I had some success right out of the gate. And what it came down to for me was this ability to ask questions, right? And to make sure that continue to ask questions, so I made sure I really understood the buyer and their concerns and what they were trying to achieve. And I just got better as I added industry expertise to it and had more experience in selling. But I would say if you start with the basics, as I talk about in my book, anybody can have these conversations, regardless of the level of expertise they have.   Will Barron: So the ability to ask questions is perhaps from a timeframe perspective is the 20% that can give us 80% of the results?   Andy Paul: Yes.   Will Barron: Because that's what we want to ramp up to.   Andy Paul: What you're driving at. Yep.   The Only Framework You Need to Ask Better Questions · [20:42]    Will Barron: So with that said, then, and I realise this is kind of going against the whole premise of this show. Is there a framework to asking questions? Is there a structure, not necessarily a script? But, other than just being curious, which, when I was selling medical devices I was insanely curious. I loved talking to surgeons about this insane equipment that I was passionate about selling. I know it sounds ridiculous to anyone who does not really understand that space, but it was such a cool environment to be in. A cool product. I'm a massive tech nerd, right? I love chatting about all the different, even how things were cabled up, right? It was insane. I loved all that kind of stuff. So I was insanely curious. So, with curiosity, hope we can hopefully tick that box.   Will Barron: If you're in a crappy job selling to crappy people and a crappy product, you need to perhaps change what you're doing, if possible, right? That will a lot of boxes automatically. But, are there any structure to asking questions or any questions that we should be asking? Is there any kind of framework to be able to enable us to ask better questions, especially if we are perhaps not at the point where we can do this kind of unconsciously competently at the moment?   Andy Paul: Right. Yeah. So again, hard not to flog my book necessarily, but yes. In my book, I write about six sort of core question types that sellers can ask and should ask. And the thing is, to reach a level of mastery, it's how you combine the questions to help you get to where you want to go. But, examples of questions are, and one of my favourite for this are I call impact questions. And so the impact questions are causing the buyer to think about what the impact of making a change would be, or the impact of not making change. But, to quantify what that impact is in one regard or another. And it's really useful. You use these impact questions sort of in layered forms, right? What's the impact on the organisation of making a change, impact on your team, impact on you personally.   Andy Paul: But, when you get people thinking about, “Wow, what would this mean for me, right? What will the impact be? How do I quantify what that be,” whether it's time spent or time invested or dollars or whatever. I start thinking more deeply about what it is they're trying to solve from a challenge standpoint and what they potentially can achieve. One example I talk about in the book, another I talk about in the book are insight questions. We always, not always, but you hear people talk about, Hey, insight led selling is we have to be prepared with commercial insights to tell our buyers. True. But, I think more importantly than telling insights is conveying insights through the questions you ask. And so where the buyers sort of arrives at that insight by themselves.   “An insight question is the type of question you'd ask a buyer where you're going to ask them something about their business that they should reasonably be expected to know, but possibly don't.” – Andy Paul · [23:25]    Andy Paul: So an insight question is the type of question you'd ask a buyer where it's, you're going to ask them something about their business that they should reasonably be expected you to know, but possibly don't, right? So, it's something that's going to cause buyer sort of sit up and think, “Oh, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought of that before.” The fact that you asked that question, in their mind they're going, “Clearly, they've got some industry expertise to come up with this, because this is an insight into my business.” And then a little bit of fear missing out because they know this from the people they're working with, the companies they're working with, what am I missing? So it's just an example, two of the six question types that you can actually, as you get into the book and you read them you think about, okay, how can I pair these up now to sort of say, “Okay, this will become sort of a standard questioning routine I use maybe to open the door to a little deeper insight into what's most important to the buyer.”   Practical Example of an Insight Question · [24:20]    Will Barron: What would be an example, I'm kind of putting you on the spot, but I know you can handle it. What would be an example of one of these questions for selling B2B sales training? Or you can use a different kind of niche you like. But, what would be an example of a couple of these questions in that kind of context?   Andy Paul: Well, I would start with an impact question, right? Or we could even start with an insight question. I mean, for example, in my consulting business, in the past, a question I used with CEOs was, “All right, so tell me, how many hours of selling time does it take you on average to move a prospect from initial point of contact to a close?” And the response was generally crickets. Now, the problem with that is this is one of the most core questions you should know the answer to as a CEO, as a sales leader, because this really dictates how productive your sellers are being. How many dollars of revenue are they generating per hour of actual selling time? And this dictates what your productive capacity as an organisation is. How can you really forecast unless you know this? But more importantly is it gives you information about how effective your sellers are in front of the buyer.   Andy Paul: So, if you're selling sales training, this becomes pretty important because then you say, “Okay,” you want to look at that data and say, “Okay, well, how does John differ from Jennifer in the dollars of revenue they generate per hour selling time?” You now suddenly have some information about again, how effective they are in those moments that matter with the prospects, and what you might need to do to change and to train them up. Could be you'll learn some of that through listening to their calls or whatever. But that's just one sort of question that gives you some, it's a conversation trigger. It's a discovery trigger with the buyer. Because, if they don't know the answer, they are certainly curious to find out what the answer is.   How to Come Up With Insightful Questions For Your Buyer · [26:19]    Will Barron: Love it. Absolutely love it. Okay. With that said then, how do we come up with some of these questions? Right? Because it seems like this isn't something that we're doing on the fly. We're not coming up with this magic in the moment. These are somewhat thought out beforehand, and maybe we need to test some of this as well when we're looking for prospects to have crickets, to have bright eyes on the Zoom call, and go, “Hmm, great question.” And start kind of stumbling in their words, getting back to us. Is this a case of getting the sales team together, brainstorming ideas, leveraging different people's experience? Is there a process that we can go through to write these kind of questions? How do we go about formulating a series of these questions so that hopefully the audience can start using some of this today?   “Insight questions require that you really understand what your buyers are doing with your product and service.” – Andy Paul · [27:03]    Andy Paul: Right. So insight questions require that you really understand what your buyers are doing with your product and service. So whether this working with your success team, working with marketing team, with case studies. And you start with the premise, which in my experience over decades has proven out almost a hundred percent of the time is, the buyer has found a use case for your product or service that they didn't anticipate when they were looking at it. And from that use case, they're extracting value from your product and service that they hadn't anticipated. And you want to find, through conversations with your buyers, your customers, what those are. So whether that's your sales team, your success team, marketing team, it really requires you to be in touch with your existing customers and make sure you're asking these questions of them and really exploring. Because, this then is the source of insight, right? It's not that, “Hey, 60% of our buyers get this value from using our product.” It's like, sure, you sort of expect that. But, where are the unexpected sources of value that they're generating, unexpected use cases? Find those out. And then those become the substance that you use to create these insight questions.   Will Barron: So would that be-   Andy Paul: They exist. They exist. You find with, I mean, I've found for decades, won't say how many decades, in selling to who from the largest corporations in the world to small business, is there's always one thing in there. There's always one thing that was unexpected, that was surprise, that again, generated or helped generate a return on that investment that they hadn't anticipated.   Why Your Buyer Needs to Understand the Value They’re Getting From You · [28:53]   Will Barron: So would we be asking questions to a good customer, get them on the phone going, “What did you think you were buying the product for? And then why are you continuing to use the product moving forward?” And then I guess we can, if we did this across sales team, we could document this into industry. And then when speak to a certain person in that industry, we can perhaps refer back to the documentation. We frame it in a question, but it's almost like a case study of value as well, right?   Andy Paul: Almost. But then you want to have them quantify the value they've received from it, right? I mean, one of the key things in qualifying buyers, make sure that you have a firmly and finely qualified prospect, is you need them to do their internal math and work to say, “Look, if we think we're going to get 10% market share increase, or we're going to save X amount in cost savings or generate additional sales,” until the buyer does the internal work, and internal business case to justify and say, “Look, yeah, we quantified what the value should be of making this change. We know what it means in Euros or dollars or whatever.” Well, now you're doing it on the other side of the equation. Now they've put it to use. Yeah, let's quantify. What is this value that you actually received? And so it's starting with those questions. You talked about then digging deeper and saying, “Yeah, we need to reduce this to dollars.”   Will Barron: Should every conversation-   Andy Paul: When you do that, you'll find the sources. I'm sorry.   Get Your Sales Qualification to Yield Better Results · [30:26]    Will Barron: Should every conversation be like this? Or is it fine occasionally to go, “Okay, well, it seems like you need our product. Here's our product.” And the deal is done. And obviously it happens rarely, but it does happen. Is there a reason, is there value in going these few steps deeper, no matter how easy the sales process is going through? Or is this reserved… Go on.   “In the B2B world, a high fraction of qualified opportunities end up in no decision. The buyer simply decides to do nothing. And in my experience, most of those turn out because the buyer hadn't taken that final step of doing their internal justification for the investment based on a quantification of the value they're going to receive from doing it. So if you can't get the buyer to a point where they actually say, “Oh yeah, this is going to mean an extra $200,000 to the bottom line,” you run the risk of ending up in a no decision. So even if the deal looks easy, get the buyer to quantify the value they expect to receive from it. Absent that, you run a real risk of being a no decision.” – Andy Paul · [30:54]    Andy Paul: Well, because in the B2B world, a high fraction of qualified opportunities end up in no decision. Buyer decides to do nothing. And, my experience has been, and my belief is that most of those turn out because the buyer hadn't taken that final step of doing their internal justification for the investment based on the value, a quantification of the value they're going to receive from doing it. So they might as well just stay where they are. So you can't get the buyer to a point where they actually say, “Oh yeah, this is going to mean an extra $200,000 to the bottom line.” You run the risk of ending up in a no decision. So even if the deal looks easy, yeah, get the buyer to quantify the value they expect to receive from it. Absent that, you run a real risk of being a no decision.   How to Create a Summary of What The Buyer Should Expect from Your Product or Service · [31:40]    Will Barron: Amazing. Final question for you Andy, that is, I assume we do, but how do we document some of this? Because if this happened in conversations and you get people super excited and their loving the conversation with Andy Paul, he's really opened our eyes. There's this unique value in this opportunity that they didn't see beforehand and you've communicated effectively and that they're loving it. But then a week later they've forgotten about it, right? Or a month later when they've got Bill, they champion the account on board and then they've got to get signed off from the CFOs pushing back. And maybe they are not as able to communicate what you've described as what you are in the call with them directly and the CFO doesn't want to meet with you. How do we, and again, I'm assuming this is part of the process.   Andy Paul: Yeah, sure.   Will Barron: How do we document some of this so that it can be kind of shared within the account, or it can be communicated on our behalf, by our champions?   Andy Paul: I'm a big believer in summarising what you think you've learned and sending it to the buyer. So to confirm, first of all, I'm a big believer in confirming it in person, first of all. And I take it a step further in the book because yeah, it's fairly common sales training. Use your reflection questions, reflect back to the buyer what it is you thought you learned. Get them to confirm it. Sure. That's great. But there's usually a missing step when you're doing this in person, which is, “Hey, this is what I think, Mr. Prospect, this is what I think I heard. Did I get that right?” “Yeah. You got that right.” And then you say, “Okay, so what are we missing?”   Andy Paul: And when you put in that, what are we missing, after you've confirmed everything, again, it's another opportunity that causes the buyer to stop and think, “Yeah, what are we missing?” Right” and an opportunity to open the door to further discovery. You do that, again, you summarise it again, but make sure you send it back to the buyer in writing in an email, somehow you memorialise this and then make sure that you've got the note in your CRM system as well, so that you can track it. And so part of what you're doing is continually sort of refreshing the memory of the people you're dealing with, because what happens as soon as you stop talking with the buyer? They forget about you. And that's natural, right?   Andy Paul: I mean, it's funny. I read these studies where people, research analysts, decry, “Oh gosh. During a buying process, the buyer only spends 17% of their time with sellers.” It's like, sure, that's fine. I mean, that's probably high. I mean, they've got real jobs to do that don't involve talking to you about buying a product or service. So you need to think about the fact that, how do you keep their knowledge about what's going on sort of up to date and current. And yeah, you're going to do a bunch of that through written communications, or you summarise your communications. You remind them of it and refresh them and say, “Okay, now we're ready to go to the next stage. This is what happened before.”   Pausing, Probing, and Extending: The Art of Great Questioning · [34:47]   Will Barron: Final, final question here. I know that the last one was the final question, but you've done it a few times in the podcast, Andy, when you've given examples. How important is it for sales people, right? To be able to ask a question and then just shut up and take that little bit of stress and pressure with the buyers that perhaps they're struggling to come up with an answer. I said you've used it a couple times in your examples, because this is something I see really lacking in sales people when we're training them, right? The ability to just go just stoic faced and just sit there. And if you're on a phone call, you just mute your call, right? And run around the room and kind of get the stress out. But if you're on a Zoom call, you've got to sit there and wait for the prospect to respond. How important is that for a skill to implement everything that we talked about today?   Andy Paul: It is important. And I talk about it in the book. And this idea that they can't shut up and listen is driven by the fact that they want to respond, right? When they're listening, they're not listening to understand. They're listening to respond. And so this is the thing, the habit that needs to be broken. Is because yeah, if you're already formulating your response to the buyer while they're giving you the information, you're not really capturing the nuance of what they're trying to tell you.   Andy Paul: So, what I recommend my book is just a simple pause between hearing and listening to what the buyer has said and before I respond. And what I talk about is sort of Americanism is like, when we play touch American football is we talk about giving something a one Mississippi, that's a count, right? Giving something a pause before you take an action. So when the buyer finishes speaking, say to yourself, “One Mississippi,” say it silently. You don't have to say it out loud. But, you're giving yourself that space to process what they just told you before you respond. And that's really important. So building this beat, or maybe two beats, depending how long it takes you to say one Mississippi. And then you get a chance to absorb what they've said, process it, and then formulate an appropriate follow on, either question or a response of some sort.   Parting Thoughts · [37:00]   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. I appreciate that, Andy. Well, with that mate, tell us where we can find more about the book, the title, where we can find out more about the man, the legend, Andy Paul, himself as well.   Andy Paul: Here's the book, Sell Without Selling Out, back on the full screen. Is available at Amazon or wherever you buy books. And shipping in the UK on the 22nd of March, I believe. And available most places now, unfortunately proverbial supply chain issues, getting the book to the UK. They can follow me on LinkedIn. I have a very active presence there. You can listen to my podcast Sales Enablement With Andy Paul. And finally come to my website andypaul.com.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. Well, I'll link to all that in the show notes of this episode over at salesman.org. And with that, Andy, it's a pleasure as always. I appreciate your time and your insights on this-   Andy Paul: Well, thank you.   Will Barron: Thank you for joining us on the Salesman Podcast.   Andy Paul: Thank you. It's been a lot of fun as always.    

On this episode of the Salesman Podcast, Andrew Bolton explains what a copywriter is and how the art of copywriting can make you a much better seller. Andrew has been a copywriter for 12 years. He’s worked with some big brands and plenty of tiny ones too. He teaches copywriting on the Creative Advertising & Creative Writing courses at the University of Lincoln and is the author of bestselling book ‘Copywriting Is: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter’. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Andrew Bolton Experienced Copywriter Resources Andrew’s LinkedIn Book: Copywriting Is…: 30-or-so thoughts on thinking like a copywriter Book: On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction Book: Read Me: 10 Lessons for Writing Great Copy Book: A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters Transcript Will Barron: Hi, my name is Will, and welcome to today's episode of the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we're looking at how you can sell like a copywriter. Today's guest is Andrew Boulton. Andrew's been a copywriter for 12 years. He's worked with some big brands and plenty of tiny ones as well. He teaches copywriting on the creative advertising and creative writing courses at the University of Lincoln. And he is the author of the best selling book, Copywriting Is…: 30-or-So Thoughts on Thinking Like a Copywriter. With that, Andrew, welcome to the show.   Andrew Boulton: Hello, thanks for having me.   Will Barron: I'm glad to have you on mate. Copywriting is something that is top of mind for me at the moment as sales people move from, I guess, 20 years ago before I was in sales. I imagine you could knock on doors, you could pick up the phone, you could… The gift of the gab and a bit of a silver tongue probably open up quite a few doors, whereas the world we live in now, whether you are emailing, texting, creating content, whatever it is to get attention in the marketplace, clearly copywriting fit into all of this.   What is Copywriting and How Can We Use It To Improve Our Sales Processes? · [01:05]   Will Barron: So with that said, though, I think there's going to be at least a few members of the audience, Andrew, that are unfamiliar with the term. Can you tell us just to get us started what copywriting is, if there's a definition of this, and then I guess what the goal of copywriting is for a salesperson, someone who needs to generate meetings and get deals done.   Andrew Boulton: Yeah, of course. I think there's probably going to be more than a few people who aren't necessarily immediately familiar or very familiar with the term. And you mentioned at the start, I teach on a creative advertising course and a creative writing course, people who are very much young people who are primed to kind of go into those careers where copywriting is a very big part of kind of the industry and very few of those students know what copywriting is.   “Copywriting is simply using words to drive action.” – Andrew Boulton · [02:10]    Andrew Boulton: So sadly, I think it's one of those things that sort of slips under the radar. I think in essence, if you ask me to kind of summarise what it is, it's the business of kind of communicating about your brand, communicating about your product, ultimately trying to persuade your audience to do the thing you want them to do. It is kind of using words to drive action.   Andrew Boulton: So regardless of what your business is or what your brand is or how you think or what you think kind of the big drivers and the big sort of pullers are within those organisations, words, and copy and your messaging and how you present yourselves and how you kind of communicate, what makes you good and sort of worthwhile comes down to copywriting. Whether you're currently using a copywriter or not, copywriting is kind of one of those big pillars that props up the effectiveness of how your business speaks to the people that you want to turn into customers and keep as customers.   The Art and Science of Copywriting · [02:50]   Will Barron: For sure. Okay. So when we talk about persuading in sales, there is this constant battle. And I'm flipping on this. I go from one side to another. I've got a background in science, I've got a degree in chemistry, I'm a public scientist. So if there is data, if there's science, if there's a way to systemify things, I'm all in.   Will Barron: But persuasion a lot of the time is leaning into people's emotions. There are many uncontrollables when we're going about persuading or influencing or lodging a prospect one way or the other. So with that said, is copywriting… Again, this is cliched in sales, but I don't know if it translates to copywriting. Is copywriting a science? Is it an art? Is it somewhere down the middle? Can it be measured? How do we know… I guess what I'm asking is, is it an art, is it a science? Then can we measure the effectiveness of copywriting?   Andrew Boulton: I suppose in the same way you ask the question about sort of sales in general, yeah, it's a combination of those things and it becomes a very sort of dangerous and self defeating business if you feel compelled to kind of pigeon hole into one thing. So if I copywrite purely based on sort of science and data and what the spreadsheet tells me is likely to persuade people, you end up with something that probably lacks a lot of the kind of the heart and the human voice, that all good kind of messaging and communication requires.   Andrew Boulton: Equally if I sat down and wrote a poem because I'm feeling it especially somehow artistic and creative, it might be very a beautiful writing, but it's very unlikely to do the thing I needed to do. So I think if you are looking for sort of the answer to that, it's kind of one thing propped on another. And usually in the process of copywriting, you probably start with some harder evidence or somewhat kind of concrete data to lean upon, even if it's nothing more spectacular than a relatively detailed view of who your customer is and what sort of motivates them.   Andrew Boulton: But then I suppose it is still very much a kind of creative job, even if your starting point is based on insight and based on human truth, you then have to do something with that that makes it something people are going to want to read and want to notice and feel like they recognise and appreciate the voice. Because that's the only way you're ever going to kind of land that message.   “I could have all the data and the evidence, the facts and the science I like, if I don't sort of come up with a voice and a method of communicating that data such that people are going to care about watching or listening or kind of engaging with, then all of that has kind of been a waste.” – Andrew Boulton · [04:45]   Andrew Boulton: I could have all the data and the evidence and sort of facts and the science I like. If I don't sort of come up with a voice and a method of communicating that that people are going to care about watching or listening or kind of engaging with, then all of that has kind of been a waste. I think when we talk to the students about copywriting and persuasion in particular, you try and train them that you can't just be expected to kind of pull these answers out of your own head.   Andrew Boulton: If you take on this sort of first person perspective and just think about what would or would not persuade or engage you, then you are giving yourself a very limited frame of reference. And I think we try and introduce them as much as possible to some of the big thinkers in terms of sort of behavioural science. Richard Shotton and Choice Factory is a huge part of what we do, is training people to be creative advertisers.   Andrew Boulton: Thaler and sort of the whole nudge theory with stuff we introduced, what Rory Sutherland is saying and Alchemy is a particularly important book for sort of the way we teach it. So I think it's one I've given you a really long and unhelpful answer that says I don't know. I think it absolutely has to be both, but what I do know for certain is if you try and do one or the other of art or science, it's very likely that either attempt would fail.   The First Step to Writing Perfect Copy · [06:05]    Will Barron: Sure. So what is the… I think you might mentioned it then in your answer Andrew. But what is the starting point for all of this? Is it coming up with our ideal bio persona? Is this something that we need to document? Is this something we need to do by interviews, customer interviews, and find out who those individuals are rather than making assumptions about who they are? And then we, I don't know, do we visualise them as we're typing away writing copy of what they would want to receive in their inbox? What do we need to do before I guess we start putting the metaphorical pen to paper.   Andrew Boulton: I think it's one of those things where I'm always really reluctant to kind of ascribe a process or any kind of universal process. Because what works for one creative or what works for one salesperson is going to be really, really different for another. It is about what produces the best results and the sort of most comfortable experience or most rewarding experience I suppose for you.   Andrew Boulton: I think yeah, of course, you sort of need to know something about your target, your prospect, your consumer. Whatever language you use within your organisation, it all boils down to fact it's a person. It's a person who lives a real life, has got real sort of challenges, real needs, real motivations and we have to start understanding them. So I'm certainly not against sort of data and I certainly recognise the value of what data can do. But that data often needs translating into something that is real and human.   Andrew Boulton: And I've certainly worked on briefs where there's been sort of a fantastic volume of kind of insight and data, but no real attempt to make it as something that I could translate into a real person living a real life. So again, I suppose it feeds back into the art and science question again, isn't it? There is no point in sort of putting a huge amount into the science of this understanding and this portrait you create of consumer if you don't then go back it up with some real life interaction and some real experience of who these people are and what their lives are, and ask them to have an honest conversation with you.   Andrew Boulton: I mean, like a lot of your listeners, I've sat in on sort of consumer testing sessions and I've seen a bunch of people, sat around a table, being asked questions. And the same bunch of people I've sort of chatted to either before or after the session and found them very ordinary, very sort of typical, real people speaking in the way real people do and you put them around this table and they behave completely different.   “The first step before writing anything is about going into the natural environment for your customer and your audience, just observing it and being part of it and sort of experiencing it as much as possible. I think that is as valuable, if not more valuable than all the stuff you can do with your spreadsheets and your data and your modelling.” – Andrew Boulton · [08:40]   Andrew Boulton: And it becomes less a representation of kind of real human beings living real human lives and more about you are a subject in a study and you are going to kind of behave as if your answers or your responses are somehow being evaluated, which I suppose they are. So I think something about going into the natural environment for your customer and your audience, just observing it and being part of it and sort of experiencing it as much as possible in the way they do.   Andrew Boulton: I think that is as valuable, if not more valuable than all the stuff you can do with your sort of spreadsheets and your data and your modelling. But I think as a copywriter and anyone who's trying to kind of reach and persuade an audience, you will be really foolish to sort of turn your back on anything out of principle. I think you've got to sort of try it and see what kind of results it produces.   Andrew Boulton: I suppose the other part of your question is, can you measure it? Can you measure the effectiveness of persuasion? Well, on one very basic level, yes, of course you can. If you put certain copy into a certain ad in a certain place, and we sell 10 lawn mowers instead of two lawn mowers, I suppose on a really sort of basic level, you can attribute that to the effectiveness of persuasion and sort the whole sort AB testing model we see on a lot of digital advertising where it's simply a matter of the arrangement of words, this arrangement of words that performs that arrangement of words.   Andrew Boulton: And sometimes we never particularly understand why arrangement A outperforms arrangement B. But again, I think you've got to be really wary in terms of performance of just basing it on the numbers, on the spreadsheet, on what's that column doing. That can only be a part of the story. And it goes back to conversation, it goes back to kind of understanding who your audience are, not on a theoretical or an empirical level, but on a real human level.   Andrew Boulton: And that's when you start to learn the conversations they have, the conversations they want to have and what they want from you. This mistake that so many brands make go out and just start talking straight away about how great you are and what you do and how you do all these things better than everyone and you never kind of stop to consider, “Well, what is it that our audience actually kind of cares about? What do they want from us?”   Copywriting is the Perfect Alignment and Arrangement of Words · [10:35]   Will Barron: I love this. And tell me if this is something that you commonly say. You came out with it almost flippantly, but I think it's amazing. You called copy an arrangement of words. Am I, who's a beginner in this, trying to over complicate this whole conversation? And should we think about it more as an arrangement of words to drive an action, as opposed to art, science, data and everything else that I'm trying to tie into the conversation?   “The word story and storytelling has been badly battered by the world of marketing. It's been misused and has almost been ridiculed slightly because of the very sort of pretentious, very over elaborate ways people have used it. But fundamentally, that's what you are trying to do. You're trying to kind of create these narratives because human beings deal in stories. We engage with stories, we sort of frame our own lives in stories and we tell ourselves stories in order to live. All of these things are really, really true.” – Andrew Boulton · [11:47]    Andrew Boulton: Yeah, and you're absolutely, and I think that's like anything in this business, like anything in sort of sales or marketing or advertising, it's so easy and it's so tempting to kind of over complicate stuff, which are of fundamental sort of human conditions. And the word story and storytelling has been sort badly battered by the world of marketing.   Andrew Boulton: It's been misused and has been almost kind of ridiculed slightly because of the sort of the very sort of pretentious, very over elaborate ways people have used it. But fundamentally, that's what you are trying to do. You're trying to kind of create these narratives, human beings deal in stories. We engage with stories, we sort of frame our own lives and stories that Joan Didion quote about, we tell ourselves stories in order to live. All of these things are really, really true.   Andrew Boulton: And if you can strip away a lot of the bollocks, apologies with that language, but if you can strip away a lot of that kind of unnecessarily fluff that these things get packaged in and get back that fundamental sort of human truth about it, it is the arrangement of words, it's the right words in the right order. And it does sound flippant, and I know it does and I have to caveat this when I say it to the students.   Andrew Boulton: But if you can focus on doing that one thing brilliantly, even at the expense of all the other things that come with being a copywriter and working in this industry, you will do well. You will produce good stuff and you will create good work and you will drive good results because that's the heart of it and there's a lot of stuff around it which you can let go of.   Why Humans Crave Succinct and Easy to Read Copy · [12:42]    Will Barron: So if the vehicle is an arrangement of words, and the action we're trying to drive is to sort to do something to persuade them, to whether it's, I guess, traditional copywriting, which is whether it's direct response, or kind of via advertisements as we know them as opposed to what we're talking about here, perhaps, which is more a sales person sending an email and getting a call booked on the back of it. If it's an arrangement of words to drive an action, what are the fundamental human conditions that underpin all this? Is it as simple as humans want to move away from pain, a move towards pleasure, or can it be narrowed down even more than that?   Andrew Boulton: I think without getting into sort of very, very broad sort of big concept stuff, it all boils down to needs. So this is like an industry sort of propped up on needs, an industry sort of defined by and existing entirely because of it. Sort of consumerist society, sort of capitalism growth of advertising, sort of back in the 20th century, anyone has ever watched an episode of Mad Men. It is all about need.   Andrew Boulton: It's all about this kind of desire to sort of tap into this kind of growing need amongst consumers and to satisfy it. And as kind of competition grew to satisfy those needs, and it became more about sort of multiple choices in any particular category. It was all about kind of proving that you are the best response to that need. But it still boils down to initially it's got to be a recognition that people need stuff.   “If a salesperson is opening an email with a paragraph all about how brilliant they are and how great they are at sales and how wonderful their product is and all these wonderful things that we like to talk about, it's going to be really hard to ignore it because you're talking about you and you're talking about your stuff. And as humans we've got a finite capacity for things we are willing to give our attention to and engage with. And if you don't capture me in that first sentence by explaining to me or demonstrating to me that you are here to satisfy a need of mine, or you are here to resolve a problem of mine, you are here to do something that is going to make my life better or easier in some sort of small or big way then your thing is really easy for me to cast aside.” – Andrew Boulton · [14:17]   Andrew Boulton: And we talked about a salesperson sending out an email hoping to generate a lead. But I think I mentioned this earlier. If that salesperson is opening that email with a paragraph all about how brilliant they are and how great they are at sales and how wonderful their product is and all the things that we like to talk about when we're kind of existing within the bubble and we're kind of sort of wrapped up with the insular nature of what it is we do, which everyone, everyone in this business is guilty of at some point or another.   Andrew Boulton: If you open your email with that, it's going to be really hard to ignore it because you're talking about you and you're talking about your stuff. And we've got finite capacity for things we are willing to give our attention to and kind of engage with. And if you don't sort of capture me in that first sentence by explaining to me or demonstrating to me that you are here to satisfy a need of mine, or you are here to resolve a problem of mine, you are here to do something that is going to make my life better or easier in some sort of small or big way then your thing is really easy for me to cast aside.   Andrew Boulton: So again, I think we could easily over complicate this. And we can either easily kind of attach sort of models and methods to it, however credible are our kind of extra layers of complexity on something that should be as simple as you need a thing, I can provide that thing and I'm going to let you know that I could provide that thing.   How to Understand Your Prospect’s Needs Using One Email · [15:36]    Will Barron: Egos aside because I think I'm pretty good at sales, right? I do all the copywriting on our training and our product and all that kind of stuff on the marketing material. And we're a seven figure company and it should mean a few freelancers. So objectively I'm probably okay at it, obviously no expert. I've never done any formal training copywriting.   Will Barron: But I think I've read a few books, read your book, I think I know a few things about it. But taking my ego out of it, is it physically possible for an individual salesperson like me, perhaps I'm selling to the enterprise, I'm trying to book a meeting with a chief marketing officer or a CRO or someone like that. Is it possible for an individual in one email to elicit a need out of a prospect and book a meeting?   Will Barron: And what I mean by that is it feasibly possible to do that in a few lines or do you need the prospect to already be aware of the need, to be wanting to solve the need and then we're just getting in front of them at the right place at the right time and that's the momentum that allows us to book a call? Can sales people do this on their own, or do sales people need to lean into the multimillion billion dollar marketing industry or marketing department in their own organisation that's trying to do a lot of this behind the scenes?   “If you have a tool or a function or a capacity that allows you to make sure you're only sending your email to people who we know are more likely to be receptive to the thing that we're trying to sell them, why wouldn't you do it? It'd be sort of crazy not to want to speak to those people.” – Andrew Boulton · [17:10]    Andrew Boulton: Of course. I think if you have a sort of a tool or a function or a capacity that allows you to make sure you're only sending your email to people who we know are more likely to be receptive to the thing that we're trying to sort of sell them, why wouldn't you do it? It'd be sort of crazy not to want to speak to those people.   Andrew Boulton: But I suppose there are also sort of times… Sorry, computer problems. There are sort of times where you're casting your net a bit wider and you don't always have the sort of specific group of leads ready to go. I suppose the other big sort of factor in all of this, and it's true for sales, true for marketing, true for advertising, is there's also a degree of chance, there's also a degree of sort of fortune about it.   Andrew Boulton: And you might send your email, your perfectly crafted, beautiful email to the perfectly chosen lead and it just so happens at that particular moment, they are distracted, irritated or kind of thinking about something else and that chance goes by and everything was right. The message was right, the sort of target was right, the means of context in them was right. Just the moment, the sort of sheer circumstance of it meant that that thing didn't come off.   Andrew Boulton: Equally, you could send your message to someone who is a very unlikely prospect and it just so happens in that second, they thought about the thing that you do, or they realised that they needed what you do and it comes together that way. And what a lot of people in the industry don't want to acknowledge or spend too much time acknowledging is there's a huge amount of just chance, pure blind luck that goes into this as well.   Andrew Boulton: That's not to say that you shouldn't always try and do things in the best way and try and do things in a way that's most likely to result in success. But if any of us ever start to think that we are sort of omnipotent and sort of in complete control of this process, that is probably sort of the signal that you need to go and do something else.   The Number One Factor That Determines The Success of Your Copy · [18:57]    Will Barron: With that said then, how much of the success of copywriting, and we'll continue on this route of a salesperson building an email cadence where they're going to perhaps send maximum of 10 emails over the course of three months so that they're maximising the chances of being in the right place when there's a trigger event or in the account or the prospect literally finds 10 minutes for a call or whatever it is.   Will Barron: And we'll assume that each of the emails are going on what you've shared so far, Andrew, that each of the emails are not based on… Always they're based on the arrangement of words is how we can help the individual, what they're going to get out of just jumping on a quick consulting call with us. So we're pointing this in as much of a favourable light as we possibly can.   Will Barron: How much of the… What percentage of the effectiveness comes from the words on the page at that point versus just a number of impressions? Or I guess a better way of wording that is how important is just the number of impressions of a similar message that we can help someone over and over and over again, whether it's via us and our sales outreach, or marketing getting involved in doing a campaign for that account, how much of the effect of copywriting comes from just impression, impression, impression versus the words on the page?   Andrew Boulton: I think the whole sort modern marketing industry is built towards this idea of kind of a cumulative wearing down if I was going to be cynical about it where we're going to say the thing, we're going to say the thing that we do and the thing we sell and the thing we you to engage with, and we're going to say it everywhere and sort of whole sort of retargeting on websites.   Andrew Boulton: You're not allowed to look at something on the internet once. If you've looked at a jumper on a website once, that jumper will haunt you for the rest of your days. So it is one of those other size, isn't it? Where there's someone somewhere far clever than me has obviously identified that there is value in kind of hitting people from lots of different angles and kind of putting this thing on their radar in all the different places they are most likely to be.   Andrew Boulton: And I can't say I have any complaint about that. I don't particularly feel any affection for it but I see why it exists. Again, I feel like I keep giving the same answer to every question, which is really unhelpful, but it boils down to a much kind of simpler truth than that. And it is still got to be about a quality message. It's still got to be about a compelling story.   Andrew Boulton: It's still got to be about the right way words in the right order ideally at the right time and to the right prospect. But it's driven by language, it's driven by kind of communication. And if you have got a really clever system to ensure that the perfect message is landing at people's doorstep, in all the sort of various places that we want to kind of reach them and if we've got a magical formula that says that you need sort of someone to see your message three or four times before it sinks in, fine. I'll take your word for that because I don't know any better.   Andrew Boulton: But you still cannot convince me that any of this means anything if you are not getting those words right, getting those messages right. And I think people sometimes don't work with a copywriter for a lot of reasons. It could be the finance of it, it could be that they don't sort of see the value in it or they don't realise what a writer can contribute. And a lot of what I hear is anyone can write. I can write, why would I pay someone to come and do it for me?   Andrew Boulton: I think if you think that, and there's no judgement attached to this, but what I would urge you to do is find a few pounds in your budget and just get a copywriter to come and spend a couple of hours with you and do one project. Just do one very, very sort of tiny thing for you and just watch them. Watch how they do it, watch how they approach it and watch what they come up with.   Andrew Boulton: And I think you will honestly see a remarkable difference. And in terms of the words they put on the page, it's not going to be sort of dramatically different from where you would've ended up. But the detail of it, the consideration of it, the reasoning that goes behind every sort of word and why that word is chosen and why that word is adjacent to this word and why this forms that sentence, and it's a craft.   Andrew Boulton: I suppose we talked about sort of science and art, didn't we? Well, maybe the appropriate word is craft. And like any craft, it sort of takes time and skill, and it is accumulated over years and years of sort of practise. But I think if you've never sort of experienced that and you've never really thought about what a difference a professional copywriter could make to the sort of quality and the effectiveness of your messaging, go and find a good copywriter and let them show you what they can do. Because I don't think you'd go back, I don't think you'd fail to be convinced by that.   Will Barron: For sure. And just to add a layer to that, head over to salesman.org. So I said I did all the copywriting on the website, but we've hired two copywriters. One of them just sucked, but the second fellow, Tim, he's done all of our emails in our sales cadence. So if you sign up for our free sales assessment, you can get a series of emails.   Will Barron: A lot of them are, I guess 99% of them are value based giving you insights based on your assessment results and a few of them will push you to the training product based on the back of the results of what we can help you with. And it's interesting because there's some… what you would see straight through, right? But I almost see a little bit of black magic of, I will go in some of these emails and be like, “Well, I would change that. That's not really my voice, I'm going to change it slightly.”   Will Barron: I change a few words and then it reads like absolute crap. And I don't know what's changed, I don't know what flow has been altered. But Tim who's wrote the emails, I think he's wrote like 60 of them for us now, they go out of the course of a few months after, again people sign up for this sales code assessment. There's just this like… I can't describe it, almost like there's a story being told, there's emotions being pulled and it's almost like a beat to the email, a bam bam badam dada.   Writing Good Copy is a Craft Every Salesperson Should Master · [24:54]    Will Barron: And as you're reading through it, you want to get to that next drop of the beat and it drags you into them. And as I said, I've tried to experiment of… Tim's from Europe, obviously I'm from the UK so there's a few phrases and words that I was like while I might say this, he might say that. So I tried to change them. And then one sentence change in the whole of the email and it falls apart. That to me is insane, to you, Andrew is probably obvious, right?   “Everything a good copywriter will do for you, every word on the page is there for a reason. And what you are paying for is that attention to detail, that sort of precision.” – Andrew Boulton · [25:49]    Andrew Boulton: I think, well… And I mean, first of all, it sounds like hire Tim is the message here, hire Tim. I think I would be being slightly mischievous if I said to you that copywriting is this sort of house of cards, where if the layman lays one of the sort of dirty fingers on it, then it's all going to fall pieces. But it goes back to what I said. Everything you got a good copywriter will do for you, every word on the page is there for a reason.   Andrew Boulton: And what you are paying for is that attention to detail, that sort of precision. That's what I talk about when I mean sort of craft. So I've seen it happen many times where you write something that you feel is kind of perfectly calibrated, it sounds really sort of [inaudible 00:26:07] for me to say that, but this sort perfect calibrated sort piece of copy, and you give it to someone and they feel like they need to change this world or change this sentence or move this thing to the top and this thing to the middle, and it's like a game of chess unravelling.   Andrew Boulton: It takes probably three moves to bring the whole thing down, whole thing crumbling down and then you can't repair it. It's you go back to the beginning and see what you can do. So it isn't, it's nothing magical or mystical about it. It's this very sort of precise approach and this precise understanding of language. And I think you said the word sort of rhythm when you were talking about Tim, hire Tim, everyone. But you said the word rhythm, and that's a big sort of invisible part of copywriting.   Andrew Boulton: And I think people say, “Well, copywriting, I will assess the words and the sentences and the paragraphs are on this page in front of me and that's all I'm looking for.” Well, no, you're looking for sort of the tone, the rhythm of it. The rhythm is trying to sort of replicate the way that human beings speak to each other, a conversation. If you had a conversation with a colleague or a friend or even a stranger, the rhythm of that conversation would be very, very different.   Andrew Boulton: And if I ask you to write down that conversation on paper and what a copywriter does, it writes almost for the ear. Even though it's going on to the page and it's never intended to be kind of read out loud, we write it in a way that when it's translated in somebody's brain, into kind of almost like this audible message, then that rhythm is there. It feels comfortable, it feels engaging.   Andrew Boulton: We know what kind of rhythms, even if we can't articulate it, we know what kind of rhythms we would listen to. We know what kind of rhythms are really sort of monotonous. There's a very famous experiment by writer Gary Provost and it's called, here's a five word sentence. And he shows you how monotonous it is when you write a paragraph where every sentence is five words long, and it becomes droning and it becomes dry and it becomes mechanical. So I think this is what you're paying your copywriter for. It's not even just what you're looking at, it's all the other considerations that kind of go beyond that.   Andrew Analyses the Copy Over at Salesman.org · [28:20]    Will Barron: You can say no to this and me and the audience won't hold you against it, right? Do you want to pull up one of our pages and just go… Perhaps the first few lines on there and see if you would… And feel free to hand me my ass here and make me like a fool on the show, right? Is that something you do? Because I think that might be valuable for the audience to get [crosstalk 00:28:23].   Andrew Boulton: I will do it with a massive caveat. I'm probably not going to say anything very useful and insightful.   Will Barron: Yep. Well, I'm sure you will. Because I'm feeling embarrassed before you've even opened it. If you want to go to salesman.org and click the academy link at the top of the page, do you want to… We're doing the… And for the audience, anyone who's listening to this show, as opposed to watching it, we're doing this kind of in real time. So you can forgive Andrew and I if… And I was bad prepared, Andrew, I would've got it over to you ahead of time.   Andrew Boulton: Okay. Well academy, yeah. Okay. So the one that says a simple system to find and close more outbound sales in the next 30 days.   Will Barron: Correct. Any thoughts on that as kind of the upper third of the page?   Andrew Boulton: Okay. Well, hang on a sec, let me have a look. Even if you… Okay, right. So first of all, I like the dog. I like the little dog, he's nice. A simple system to finally close more outbound sales in the next 30 days. Now, there probably isn't anything particularly exciting about that, but there's real clarity there.   Will Barron: Sure.   Andrew Boulton: You are talking about, here's the thing that we're going to give you. We're going to sort of equip you with this very specific skill and also you're giving people a sort of timeframe. So it's a very sort of typically sort of sales driven message, but there's a directness to it, there's a sort of transparency to it. So I have no problem with that. Sounds really mean, and this is a very, very sort of small thing.   Andrew Boulton: I don't like the case, I don't like sort of the title case, upper case letter on every single thing, but that is a purely subjective thing, but change that for me please. What I do like, if we move down to sort of this next grey bar, an effective four week sales training and one-to-one, one-on-one sorry, mentoring programme that shows you how to find more leads, close more deals step by step.   “There's this thing in copywriting which I always say to people: you can't afford to waste a word. Every word must be serving a purpose, every word must be kind of driving you forward in that journey.” – Andrew Boulton · [30:37]    Andrew Boulton: I think what you've got here, and I don't know if this is your writing or this is Tim or whoever's responsible to this, there's this thing in copywriting which I always say to people you can't afford to waste a word. So you are dealing often in very sort of small sentences, small paragraphs, just compact messaging basically. And because of that and because of the attention spans of the kind of the people you are trying to engage and trying to communicate with, you cannot afford to waste a word.   Andrew Boulton: Every word must be serving a purpose, every word must be kind of driving you forward in that journey. And what I would say about that at a glance is I feel like that's a pretty tight sentence. I think it says very sort of clearly what it is you want to do. I think that the thing I enjoy is the four ticks. So even if you hate working sales, if you don't feel motivated, even if you don't have a sales process and even if you feel overwhelmed.   Andrew Boulton: So I think this is this thing here where you're starting to kind of demonstrate an understanding of the resistance, so the understanding of the kind of the reasons why people might not want to do this, or might not like sales in general or might feel that this is a big challenge. And one of the biggest things, I suppose you can kind of convey in any kind of message like this where you're looking to drive a relationship or drive a transaction is you need to demonstrate an empathy.   Andrew Boulton: You need to demonstrate, we understand what you need, but we also understand what you don't need and what you don't want and what motivates you and what doesn't motivate you. And I think that honesty, it sounds… Brands always talk about their honesty and it makes me wince a little bit because that should be the very bare minimum that you are prepared to give me.   Andrew Boulton: But even so, I think this direct human honesty that says, “We know you might hate this. We know you might be afraid of this. We know you might feel like this is a massive pain in the ass. But even if those things are true, this is the thing for you, this is the thing that's going to make it better.” The implication here is that the pain is going to go away. We're going to make it less scary or irritating.   Andrew Boulton: And I think what you end up with then is a message that is not really about a course or a sales programme or anything, even especially professional, it's a message that resonates on a very human level. It's about you've got a problem or you've got an anxiety or you've got a particular distaste for something and we are going to give you something that doesn't sort of trigger any of those things, but is going to actually really help you and you're going to find rewarding.   Andrew Boulton: So on a totally sort of off the cuff assessment of your sort of top five inches of website, there's a lot of really effective stuff in there. I think the sort of the tightness of the copy, the sort of the efficiency of the word choice and that very sort of early recognition that we kind of understand your worries or frustrations or fears around this thing. I think you end up with something that feels very clear and very honest, which is two very sort of positive characteristics to kind communicate.   The Difference Between a Good Writer and a Professional Copywriter · [33:04]    Will Barron: I think you… So I wrote this and I think you've nailed it, absolutely nailed what I struggle with copywriting. And this goes for this page. And if anyone who's interested, go to salesman.org/salesdeskpage, and you'll see. And I'll link this in the show notes as well over at salesman.org in the show notes, this episode.   Will Barron: But you nailed what I struggle with, which is I can be very analytical. I feel like I can cut words out of sentences and make them nice and tight. What I really struggle with is adding a layer of emotion, adding a bit of story to it, adding… And I guess this is the scale, right? I'm very good at… No, I'm not very good.   Will Barron: I feel like I can physically do the logical side of things, you should jump on a call with us because we do this, we solve this problem, you're going to have this benefit at the other end of it, does it make sense to jump a call? But then when I see someone who knows what they're doing with copywriting, again, there's just this little bit of elegance to it and there's a little bit of, it's not human, it's like personality that's driven in. Is that the bit that separates the hacks like me versus the pros like yourself?   Andrew Boulton: Well, I think it's a really sort of risky business and it's a very sort of common thing where people equate a sort of a human personality with emotion. And I think the industry is probably fairly guilty of kind of overestimating or overusing sort of emotion. There's absolutely a place for kind of emotional response in sales and marketing and advertising.   Andrew Boulton: Emotion is one of the sort of key drivers of what sort of persuades us, of what drives our sort of memory are willing to kind of act and participate in things as we're seeing at the moment this week with sort of some really impactful campaigns around sort of supporting the people of Ukraine. It's using emotion as a way to drive very direct, very specific action, and it's doing it really effectively.   Andrew Boulton: But there's not really a place for every single sort of sales and marketing message for an emotional thing. Some things are largely kind of functional or let's say they are kind of functional emotions rather than sort of pure emotions. And what we are offering here on this particular page, it's all about functional benefits. It's all about we're going to make your life easier in these ways, we're going to make you better with your job in these ways.   Andrew Boulton: And the implication there is you become better with your job, you become more successful. You might improve your mental health, you might improve your sort of family life as a result of that. All of that is the kind of the unsaid stuff. But the direct thing we are talking about is a very, very sort of functional, practical benefit. And you know what? There's nothing wrong with that. There's no harm in that.   Andrew Boulton: You want to try and express that in a human way and you want to try and express it in the way that real people would speak to each other, but there's nothing wrong with saying our benefit is simply this thing. It's not about filling up your heart with joy. It's not about playing on any sort of finer feelings than that. It's just about saying here's a great thing that we think you'll find useful, that we think will make a difference to your life in sort of some small but important way. And that's okay.   Andrew Boulton: And I think a lot of the time you see brands who have either been told or believe for themselves that everything has to have this emotion in it. And I think that's when you start to get into the most insincere and inappropriate kind of brand messaging you see where they are trying to kind of give themselves a bigger and more significant role in our lives, than they really weren't.   Andrew Boulton: So if you are a kind of fizzy drink, there is only so far you can go in terms of kind of bringing me any real and sort of meaningful joy in my life. And I think unless you as a brand are aware of those limitations, you are going to cross that line and make yourself look rather silly and make me feel like I don't really want to drink this fizzy drink that has such a high opinion of itself.   Emotional Copywriting and Why It’s So Effective · [36:54]    Will Barron: For sure. I won't put brands in your mouth. But as you say that for me, I sometimes see Coca-Cola adverts, McDonald's adverts and they make me cringe that why are all these beautiful people doing all these things and having all this fun and it revolves around a drink? But then the flip side of that is I see a Red Bull advert, or I see Red Bull certainly inserted into the downhill mountain bike and I was watching this morning and I guess is wider branding as opposed to just copywriting.   Will Barron: But Red Bull's terrible for you, don't drink it. Everyone listening to this, it's absolutely terrible for you. But it's a cool drink. And if I was good to drink a drink like that, I would be drinking Red Bull rather than Cola Energy or whatever kind of they point out because it makes me feel different to the cheesy adverts that are clearly massively successful.   Andrew Boulton: Yeah, of course.   Will Barron: Because what's a bigger brand than Coca-Cola and McDonald's? Right? But they obviously don't resonate with me specifically. And just on that, the point of the emotion, I think that was really useful for me, selfishly, and hopefully this is useful for the audience as well. Because I, and I feel you just subtlely told me off there for wanting to add perhaps more emotion and things to this page.   Will Barron: And I think sometimes I see some competitors in our space, Andrew, who are like, where I talk about simple systems are going to remove overwhelm, we're going to give you a sales process, we're going to… It's all logical. We're going to help you out each way. You're going to make more money at the end of it by the basis of having process in place, right? We make sales simple, that's what we do.   Will Barron: Versus I see some competitors that are indirect competitors because they're probably attracting a different type of buyer in the sales training space, but their marketing is, “Hey, we're going to make you another 200 grand this year. We're going to do this. We're going to do that.” And it's almost a bit sleazy, it's a bit weird. And so I appreciate what you're saying then of the… Because at a certain point, you add so much emotion that it becomes scamlike, it becomes weird.   Will Barron: If you're saying it's going to do all these incredible things, when it is just a series of calls and trainings that you kind of… There's a weird, I don't know what you might… There might be a word to describe it in copywriting but I feel like it gives me a weird gut feeling that someone isn't quite right here when you get too far beyond the logical.   Andrew Boulton: I think it's one of the words that you can't go more than a few steps in some of our business without hearing there's authenticity. And there are probably sort of two different approaches to that or sort of two different philosophies around that. One is that authenticity is integral to what you do. And it shouldn't be something we have to kind of define or create or kind of integrate into this business, it should just exist.   Andrew Boulton: And we are real people, we understand our customers are real people. Here are some things we stand for legitimately because we believe in them, here is what we feel our kind of products or services can do and why they exist. And it's never discussed in any meaningful way because it goes without saying that it's a part of why we exist and everything we do.   Andrew Boulton: And I think there's another side where authenticity becomes almost like a brand value. It becomes this kind of this artificial creation. It becomes as created as a logo or packaging design, this sense of authenticity that you've had to kind of manufacture. But why I think it matters and why I think sort of as an industry we're obsessed about it so much is because it's probably sort of the biggest single influencing factor in sort of why we sort of choose to give our money to a brand or we don't.   Andrew Boulton: And not on any sort of complex or probably sort of a trackable level, it's just that human beings especially in this generation, I think have an inbuilt detector for what feels real, feels like it's coming from like a human voice, if not a human person and what feels like bullshit. And I think I see a huge amount.   Andrew Boulton: I think one of the sort of the biggest, if not the biggest growth in sort of advertising marketing messages that I've seen over the last few years is for crypto, like crypto bro stuff. And I know I'm not being dismissive of anyone who sort of understands sort of crypto and invests in it and does well out of it. Good for you, fill your boots. It's way beyond my comprehension.   Andrew Boulton: But I look at the adverts for it and sort of it's got a certain tone to it, it's got a sort of an aggression, it's a bit of a cliche but it's got a sort of this kind of over the top masculinity to it where it's like, “Dude, you could be earning a million pounds in your pants before lunch time.”   Andrew Boulton: And I think most people would look at that and go, this feels gross, this feels, your word, sleazy and I don't believe it. This feels like a scam. This feels like the language of scams, but you know what? Do you know why there are so many ads that behave in that way, so many ads that use that kind of tone, that language, those constructs? Because there is an audience and a significant audience who it works on.   Andrew Boulton: And never in my life have I ever heard one of my friends be able to recite a famous kind of advertising slogan or a headline from an advert, never ever once. And they all know what I do, and they know what I work and they know what I teach and they're just not engaged in that world and they can't really sort of tell me anything beyond sort of the tango man sort of slapping that guy in the face back in late '80s.   “If there is an audience out there and you know that your audience responds to a certain thing, even if that thing feels horrible and sort of inappropriate, there are brands and there are businesses who will capitalise on that. But we use that kind of thing and they know they're excluding the majority of people, but they don't care about the majority of people. They care very specifically about this kind of target market they are likely to persuade and they know this is the way to do it. ” – Andrew Boulton · [42:21]    Andrew Boulton: But I had a mate who said, “Oh, that I saw this ad for crypto and it said this.” And he could quote me the exact headline from this ad or this kind of marketing message. So do you know what? If there is an audience out there and you know that your audience responds to a certain thing, even if that thing feels horrible and sort of inappropriate, there are brands and there are businesses who will capitalise on that.   Andrew Boulton: But we use that kind of thing and they know they're excluding the majority of people, but they don't care about the majority of people. They care very specifically about this kind of target market they are likely to persuade and they know this is the way to do it. So authenticity is massively important as a general rule. But like all the sort of the best general rules in this business, there will be many significant occasions where it goes out the window.   Will Barron: I mean, there's two things here that I'll just add. Again, not putting words in your mouth, Andrew. One with crypto, a fool and their money are easily parted, right? So if people are targeting a specific type of person, a specific age, probably blokes who are 18 to 25 kind of thing, they're doing that for a reason.   Will Barron: And obviously we've both been somewhat flippant here, but there's massive sophistication behind what they're doing in the messaging and the AB testing of it all and the millions of impressions that they're running through to suss this out. But also if you were trying to build a long term business that's going to survive changes whether crypto's here or it isn't in 20 years time, maybe you take a different approach, right?   Will Barron: Maybe there's some short term kind of push for some of this that influences whether people are happy to be burned, whether people are happy to feel gross, whether people understand whether it's a gamble or they should think is an assessment, they think it's an investment. So all that ties in too, I guess. I'm conscious of time because I really enjoy this conversation, mate. I'm genuinely really enjoying it.   The One Thing You Should Never Do When Writing Copy · [44:07]    Will Barron: So I've got one final question. And we've talked quite high level about this, and if you can give us a real practical answer, I think this would be really valuable for the audience. So with regards to copywriting, again, from the perspective of a B2B salesperson, they might be creating small micro bits of content to add value to the potential customers.   Will Barron: They might be writing sales emails. They might be, I don't know, maybe doing a little bit of marketing on the side, whatever they're doing. But in that kind of context, Andrew, what is one thing that the audience should never do ever, ever, not even if they think about it, even if they think it might work, what is the one thing that they should never implement within the world of arranging words on a page?   Andrew Boulton: So I think there's lots of things I'm tempted to answer to this, but I think in the spirit of the question, I will choose one. And I think the biggest temptation you'll get, whether you are a copywriter or not. If you are writing something for a website, for an email, for a sales message, whatever it might be, the biggest temptation is to sit down and to write it and sort of take your time and to think about the words and arrange it all out and get it into sort of a perfect place and pour your sort of heart and soul and sort of energy into it all and then feeling so sort of pleased and proud of yourself and your creation, just assume that's it and that's the end of the process and you can sort of stick it up into the place that it wants to be and it can go out into the world.   Andrew Boulton: The value of copywriting and the value of sort of the processes and systems set up to make copywriting work is that it requires input. And it requires you to be able to sell your copy into somebody else. It's the frustrating part of the job and it's often the sort of the thing that kind of leaves copywriters sort of sad and broken. But it also helps ensure that the message is doing its job.   “If you've written something, even if you have no client, even if you are the client, find someone to go and read it to. And I mean, very specifically, read it out loud to. Let them look at it on paper, but first, you are going to read it out loud to them, and that's the perfect way to sort of detect sort of if you've got the rhythm right, if you've got the sort of tone of a human voice right, if this sounds like something that would sound pleasantly in your brain like we've discussed. And that person can be connected to what you're doing. It can be a potential customer, it can be someone within your team, but you just need that kind of external view on it.” – Andrew Boulton · [46:00]    Andrew Boulton: So if you've written something, even if you have no client, even if you are the client, find someone to go and read it to. And I mean, very specifically, read it out loud to. Let them look at it on paper, but first, you are going to read it out loud to them, and that's the perfect way to sort of detect sort of if you've got the rhythm right, if you've got the sort of tone of a human voice right, if this sounds like something that would sound pleasantly in your brain like we've discussed.   Andrew Boulton: And that person can be connected to what you're doing. It can be a potential customer, it can be someone within your team, but you just need that kind of external view on it. Now, what they say to you, what they suggest doing, you don't have to change everything that they suggest changing, but you almost need to see it through another person's eyes and get their thoughts. And that's when you start to kind of really evaluate it.   Andrew Boulton: But because we are in this very sort of fast moving content world, the temptation is always write and publish in the same breath. And that is where mistakes are made. And a lot of the time, those mistakes will be very sort of low consequence and it will just mean you've got a piece of clunky content out there and it's not going to cost you anything. But there is always the chance that it could make a difference. And a poorly written email could be the end of a potential lead for one reason or another.   “However tempting it is to kind of write and publish, I think, write, pause, review it yourself, and then go find someone just to kind of get their thoughts and get them to listen to it, get them to read it, get them to understand what it is you're trying to achieve. And listen to what they have to say.” – Andrew Boulton · [47:15]    Andrew Boulton: So however tempting it is to kind of write and publish, I think, write, pause, review it yourself, and then go find someone just to kind of get their thoughts and get them to kind of listen to it, get them to read it, get them to kind of understand what it is you're trying to achieve. And listen to what they have to say.   Andrew Boulton: There's no prizes for kind of doing it all by yourself in copywriting, you don't get any rewards if every single word on there is yours and yours alone. Take a bit of help, take advice and take other people's opinions and I think it will make you a better writer and a better communicator of your ideas.   On Writing Well · [47:51]    Will Barron: That makes total sense. We've just done two hours ago, a whole podcast, Andrew, on how to edit content, how to rewrite emails. So I'm so glad that you've said that. I think it was On Writing Well, was a book that I found that was valuable for helping me write less crappy content. And the main thing I took away from that was just delete anything that didn't need to be there. If that sentence doesn't add any value, just get rid of it. And that changed… Again, I'm very average of all this, I'm not saying I'm very good at it. But that took me from real shit to average in one fell swoop.   Andrew Boulton: And I think it's a really good point. I think find a good book on copywriting. My book is more about the thoughts and life of a copywriter but there's some excellent books which I would consider to be almost kind of guide books, like handbooks to how to be better at it.   Andrew Boulton: And the first one that springs to mind is a book like Gyles Lingwood who I know is a lovely guy, he's written a fantastic book called Read Me. I would also add Dan Nelken. He's written a book, A Self-Help Guide for Copywriters, which is amazing. It's honestly one of the sort of the best books on the subject I've read. But that's just two out of many.   Andrew Boulton: A book called Junior by Thomas Kemeny is excellent. I could give you a huge long list but I think start with those ones. And if this is something you are interested in getting better, then these people are great teachers of the simple sort of the craft of kind of how to just produce better messaging, sort of better copy, better sentences, more persuasive ways to kind of say what you're trying to say.   Parting Thoughts · [47:53]   Will Barron: Very good. I will, if it's cool with you, I'll drop you an email after the show. I'll get a list of books that you recommend for our audience, your students and we'll put them in the show notes of this episode over at saleman.org. But Andrew, tell us more about your sir, tell us where we can find out more about you as well.   Andrew Boulton: Oh, thank very much. So I wrote a book called Copywriting Is…: 30-or-So Thoughts on Thinking Like a Copywriter. It was an idea that was sort of swimming around in my brain for years and years and years and I finally got the chance to do it. I forced myself to do it. And it was a very long and a sort of painful process. But I'm very sort of pleased with where we got to.   Andrew Boulton: It's published by a wonderful publisher called Gasp Books. Giles Edwards is my publisher, he runs sort of Gasp Books and he runs the Gasp Agency. He's horrible idiot, but he's also a lovely man. And so that's that in the world. And we sort of released it with just feeling very sort of satisfied that we managed to kind of get this thing created and produced.   Andrew Boulton: And we were staggered and startled and all of those other things to find out we became a bestseller. We were the bestselling advertising book on Amazon alongside a list of some authors who I absolutely love and some books I absolutely love. So it was an incredible thing. So it's gone far better than I thought we ever imagined it would and it's still selling.   Andrew Boulton: So if you are interested, like I said, it's not a guide book, it's not a textbook in copywriting, but gives you an idea of what the copywriting life is all about if you are interested. So there's that. At the same time, Giles and I, Giles Edwards and I also wrote a book, a children's book. And we tell people it is the world's first ever children's book about copywriting. We think that's true. No one's sort of sued us yet so we think that's the truth.   Andrew Boulton: And it's called Adele Writes An Ad. Both of these books available from unfortunately, Amazon, but also sort of any good bookshop in the UK. And we're very, very proud of that and we are hopefully the aim of that is just to try and persuade more young people to kind of follow the copywriting path. And the only other thing I sort of have left the plug on.   Andrew Boulton: I'm speaking at the copywriting conference, the ProCopywriters Copywriting Conference in October in Brighton. It's the best copywriting conference in the world. In my opinion, ProCopywriters do some incredible work for the industry. So I'll be there speaking live rambling away. If you are interested, you are around, you'll be able to find tickets on the ProCopywriters site.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. Well, I'll link to all of that in the show notes to this episode over at salesman.org. And with that, Andrew, I appreciate your insights, the conversation. I appreciate me throwing the website in your face mid interview and you going through that. I appreciate that, mate. And I want to thank you again for joining us on the Salesman Podcast.   Andrew Boulton: Absolute pleasure. Really good to talk to you.  

Learn how to craft a compelling elevator pitch that effectively communicates the value of your product or service. Explore the power of storytelling in sales pitches and how it resonates with prospects. Discover the key elements of a compelling elevator pitch, including addressing pain, success barriers, and emotions. Understand the importance of a clear call to action and how it can prompt specific actions. Gain insights into the power of a strong elevator pitch and valuable tools for sales professionals.

Questions asked: Should I join a company as an inbound SDR? They say I can make it to AE within 6 months if I hit my quota of 5 meetings booked a week. How do I get over being nervous on cold calls? I come across as anxious and I think that is being passed onto the person who I'm calling. I'm using the same script as everyone else but not getting good results. I need to decide between a series of prospecting tools I've been trialing. I know you've promoted Lusha and Uplead but I also trialed Seamless and Apollo. In your experience which one is more worth it? Looking to get 100+ leads a day. I've an interview coming up and I've been told there will be questions about time management. How do I answer these questions? I want to join Selling Made Simple Academy. Why do I have to book a call? Can I not just sign up? Have you/your team tried using video calls in cold emails? Do they help improve response rate like they claim? What was the biggest sales commission deal that you got? Thanks for all the content! I'm starting a new sales job tomorrow. Any tips?    

Kim Arnold is a communication consultant, author and helps organisations avoid the wasted time and effort associated with poor communication. Her bestselling book, ‘Email Attraction’ has been featured in Forbes, the Financial Times and on BBC Radio.  In this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Kim shares insights into how the top salespeople get their emails opened, read, and answered. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Kim Arnold Communications Expert Resources: Kim’s LinkedIn Kimarnold.co.uk Book: Email Attraction: Get What You Want Every Time You Hit Send Book: On Writing Well Transcript Will Barron: Hi. My name is Will, and welcome to today's episode of the Salesman Podcast.   Will Barron: On today's episode, we'll look at how you can get your sales emails opened, read, and answered. And today's guest is Kim Arnold. Kim is a communications consultant, author, and helps organisations avoid the wasted time and associated effort with poor communication.   Will Barron: Her bestselling book, Email Attraction, has been featured in Forbes, Financial Times, on BBC Radio, a bunch of other places as well. And with that, Kim, welcome to the show.   Kim Arnold: Thanks so much, Will. Great to be here.   Will Barron: I'm glad to have you on. Okay. This is clearly an important topic for the modern B2B sale professional. Maybe 20 years, they could have got away with just having a gift of the gab, silver tongue, just calling people and breaking through, but clearly, email is incredibly important right now. It's typically the first step into getting a conversation going with a potential customer.   Whose Fault is it When a Salesperson Doesn’t Get an Email Response? · [01:50]     Will Barron: So, with that said, let's set up the rest of the conversation here, whose fault is it, Kim, whose fault is it, right, when a salesperson, Sam, the salesperson, sends an email and gets no response? Is it the buyer's fault for just being too busy for ignoring Sam for being rude, or is it maybe Sam's fault for sending an email that just sucked and didn't elicit a response in the first place?   Kim Arnold: Well, sorry, Sam, I'm afraid, it's your fault. It really is. Yeah, we are busy. We are overwhelmed at the moment. Our inboxes are groaning, and what we do is filter. We look through our inboxes and we look and we see what is going to give me the quickest value in my inbox. And we start there. Or what's the most urgent, what's going to get me promoted, what's going to win me more business, what's going to make my day brighter. And if he doesn't tick any of those boxes, then, I'm afraid it's gone.   Kim Arnold: And actually, I was talking to a sales guy at a conference recently I was speaking at, and he said exactly what you've just outlined. He said, we're so good in person, we're charming. We're great at networking, we're brilliant in meetings, but these days, we can't even get clients on the phone, let alone, try and get them face to face. So you're having to do everything through email.   Kim Arnold: And he was just saying, I can't communicate any of my personality, my charisma, my charm, all of stuff that works for me in person. I can't get it down on an email, and that is a big problem.   Will Barron: So, I'm doing a bunch of work. A lot of our content goes on YouTube, and I'm working with a consultant in the YouTube space, a big YouTuber, to help us with our content. And he keeps telling me that I'm not riding this line of click bait close enough in titles, in thumbnails, in begin of introductions. And so… And I'll come back to email in a second, but it seems like the people, when people get into the content, they really enjoy it.   Email Subject Lines and Why They’re the Key to Getting Your Emails Read · [03:02]    Will Barron: But getting that initial click through rate is something that we struggle with, and we need to work on. How do sales people beat the scanning of a prospect's email when they get up in the morning or at lunchtime, how do they beat that filter where the prospect's probably just, at this point in 2022, we call this deleting emails without even reading them? How do they break through that filter without leaning into a clickbaity subject line? Or is that what we need to do at this point?   Kim Arnold: That's a really good question. Actually, a friend of mine showed me her phone the other day, I was looking at something, and she had 35,000 unread emails. And her strategy, she said, was just filtering at the subject line and they send it in the subject line. I mean, it filled with me with horror because I like to read all my emails, even if I don't reply to them. But that is what more and more people are doing at the moment, is filtering by the subject line.   Kim Arnold: But as you say, there's a really delicate balance. We get turned off by click bait. So, one strategy to think about is where are those points of connection? And all too often with sales emails, we might write something like introduction to blah, blah, blah, whatever our company name is, or introduction to a service or a meeting request or something that just is very me, me, me.   “An email should be a conversation with a pause. It isn't a monologue. It's about starting a conversation. So, we need to find points of connection that we can use in our email subject line that are about them and not us, and that can make all the difference.” – Kim Arnold · [04:21]    Kim Arnold: So, what we are trying to do in an email should be a conversation with a pause. That's what we're trying to do. This isn't a monologue. This isn't about, you know, warfare going out there and firing out these emails. It's about starting a conversation. So, trying to find points of connection that we can use in our email subject line that are about them and not us can make all the difference.   The HEC Hamburger Technique: The Basic Structure of a Good Sales Email · [04:43]    Will Barron: What does that look like practically? Because in our training programme, we teach a certain way of doing emails. I don't want to dwell on that too much because I want to pull from you in this conversation in this podcast, Kim, but we teach basically what you described of if there's a connection that we can refer to, if we've been referred directly or indirectly, we're going to mention that, we're going to keep it conversational.   Will Barron: We're going to elicit some kind of reaction, and then, almost open a loop, and then, ask, we're going to call to action to close loop on a call. Is there any structure to doing that other than what I outlined, or is there a basic structure of what a good sales email looks like? Or is it completely dependent on the prospect, the industry, and who we're trying to get in front of?   Kim Arnold: So, there's a framework that I use in my book, it's called the HEC Hamburger Technique, and it's a really simple one. It's a three steps technique, and you can use it for writing any email, whether it's a sales email or just something to your colleagues. And HEC is H-E-C, and it stands for hook, explanation, and call to action.   Kim Arnold: And the reason why I call it hamburger is it's like the three parts of a burger, right? The bun at the top's got to look appealing. That's the start of your email. You got to entice someone to want to open it. The explanation, the E of HEC, that's your burger, that's your meet the main point. And then, the C is your call to action. And that's the bottom bun and without that, you can't really pick up the whole thing and take a bite.   Kim Arnold: So you need all three things to really make a difference. And it's very similar to what you described, but what I would encourage people is to make sure that you make the most of that first line of your email. Because what do we do? Most of the time, we write something like I hope you're well, or maybe this sort of posh version, I trust this email find you well, if we're trying to be very formal and proper, and it's a big deal that we're trying to get.   “We have three seconds to get someone's attention with an email, three seconds. And yet, we waste it with a sort of generic platitude.” – Kim Arnold · [06:51]    Kim Arnold: And this is like the most valuable real estate in our email, we have three seconds to get someone's attention with an email, three seconds, three, two, one, it's not long at all. And yet, we waste it with a sort of generic platitude. And it doesn't mean that it's always disingenuous, but it can often sound disingenuous. It sounds like a cut and paste job.   Kim Arnold: And that's the thing that we want to avoid with our sales emails. So, the hook has got to be personal. So, reference something that you know about them. Do your digging, look on LinkedIn. Do you have a connection in common? Have you been introduced? What have they been up to recently? Have they written something interesting? Have they said something interesting? Has the business done something interesting? Do a bit of homework, no cut and paste jobs.   “The explanation part of your email needs to be short and sweet. In fact, between 50 and a hundred words has been proven to be best for sales email, and that is so much less than you think. It's like three short paragraphs, that's it. So get to the point. Why are you writing? We don't need to know when your business was founded. We don't need to know how many offices you have. We don't need to know that you're the leading provider of software solutions. We don't need to know any of that. We just need to figure out what it is that's in it for the reader to keep reading and take action.” Kim Arnold · [07:32]    Kim Arnold: So then, the explanation needs to be short and sweet. So, the overall size of your email between 50 and a hundred words has been proven to be best for sales email, and that is so much less than you think. It's like three short paragraphs, that's it. So get to the point. What is it, why are you writing? We don't need to know when your business was founded. We don't need to know how many offices you have. We don't need to know that you're the leading provider of software solutions. We don't need to know any of that. We just need to figure it out what it is that's in it for them, for the reader, to keep reading and to meet with you, if that's what you want.   Kim Arnold: And then, your call to action at the end is got to be direct. So, not let me know if this is of interest, let me know if you'd like to discuss. It's too vague and it's too wishy washy. So, I would always advise a very strong call to action. I'm sure this is what you teach as well, Will. It's about making the next step clear and easy for the other person. So, do you have 15 minutes in your diary on Tuesday next week for a quick phone call? So, making it quick, easy. They only have to look at their diary once. They're not reaching around for dates, or you might give them two or three options. So, it's as simple and as easy as possible for them to take that next step.   Kim Arnold: So H-E-C, hook, explanation and call to action.   Will Barron: Love it. Extremely similar to what we teach, slightly different in, I guess, some of the terminology, but very similar, right? Our kind of call to action is typically, does it make sense to jump on a call to, and then, do whatever, closes the loop that we touched on earlier on. Amazing.   Will Barron: Okay. So how much of this, Kim, because it's one thing for us to say this right? Me and you sat here on this podcast, tens of thousands of salespeople listening, but it's another when you go, okay, I'm listening to this show on the way to work, I'm going to sit down, I'm going to write an email using Kim's methodology here. And then, you sit in front of the computer, and you go, I could still go a million different ways. And 999,000 of those are terrible ways to write the email, even with that amazing framework.   Critical Factors That Determine the Success of a Sales Email · [09:10]    Will Barron: So, with that said, how much of the success of these emails comes from, I guess, the scientific method of making a hypothesis, testing it in the marketplace, and then, refining it after the fact? Are we likely to write like these killer email straight off the bat, or is this a process of refining our skill as a, I guess, a copywriter over time?   Kim Arnold: It definitely takes time, and we need to measure the right things. So we need to measure quality over quantity with email. And I work with a lot of sales teams all over the world, and one of the biggest problems tends to be that they judge themselves on their outbounds and not necessarily what comes back. So it's like, great. I've sent 30 emails this morning to this big list, and boom, boom, boom, boom, and I've just got them out. Woo, great. Let go for lunch. And then, they don't really measure what happens next.   Kim Arnold: So, my advice is always to focus on quality over quantity. Write five really great emails that might have taken you twice as long, but they're thoughtful. They're engaging, they're conversational, you've done your homework. You've edited them. You've cut them down, so they're not waffly. You've gone back in there with a big pair of scissors, and you've chopped out the definitelys and the just, and the like, and the really, all these words that you don't need. You've tightened it up. You've made it really punchy.   “I think we need to share best practises in teams. Unfortunately, that often doesn't happen. Someone's writing really killer emails that work while the rest of the team are struggling. I encourage sales teams and all sorts of teams to share their best practise. Share what works, brainstorm why you think something did work or what's fallen flat. Give each other advice to really share those best practises.” – Kim Arnold · [11:26]    Kim Arnold: So, that really is the key is to just keep iterating. This does take time. And it's also really helpful, I think, to share best practise in teams. Often, that doesn't happen. Someone's writing really killer emails that work while the rest of the team are struggling. So, I encourage sales teams, and I work with market teams, all sorts of teams, but share your best practise. Share what works, brainstorm why you think something did work or what's fallen flat. Give each other advice to really share those best practises.   Why Proofreading and Editing Your Emails is Your Ticket to Sending Better Sales Emails · [12:06]    Will Barron: So, this is something that we've never really touched on on the show before, I think it's incredibly important. And I think I got my angle on this from, I think, the book's called On Writing Well, which I'll link, share through this episode for anyone who wants to check it out. And I'll butcher the quote, but essentially, I'm sure it was this book. It talks about this idea of if the sentence doesn't need to be there, just delete it. Just get rid of, it's gone.   Will Barron: Can you tell us any other kind of angles or reiterate at that point even on the importance of editing emails? Not just spelling… So I'm a terrible speller, so I have to lean on other people to check my emails if it's an important one, or quote a proposals and stuff like that. But beyond spelling and grammar, how important is it to edit our emails before they go out? And do you have any other steps in the editing process other than just deleting things that maybe don't need to be there?   “Easy reading is hard writing. The longer it takes you to write an email, generally, the easier it is going to be for someone else to read. So, you need to take time to edit before you hit send.” – Kim Arnold · [12:47]   Kim Arnold: Absolutely. Well, easy reading is hard writing. So, the longer it takes you, generally, the easier it is going to be for someone else to read. So, we need to take time before we hit send. Ideally, let it marinade, let it simmer. It's like a good stew. Okay? With writing, it's always best to come back to it.   Kim Arnold: So, if you can write emails today before you send them, go back to them, have a look at them, does this really resonate? Am I hitting the point? So that's the first tip. Ditching the filler words is really important. We tend to use a lot of qualifying words, particularly women, I would say, in business, oh, if you wouldn't mind, perhaps, if you could, that would be great. Very sort of quite hesitant language. Would you mind if, so ditching all of that, becoming a bit more assertive, direct.   “Every bit of filler, every additional word is almost like a barrier to getting a prospect to read your emails. Unfortunately, we often underestimate visual overwhelm. If our email is too long, someone can’t just open and read through it all.” – Kim Arnold · [13:58]    Kim Arnold: And absolutely just asking yourself, is this vital to my point? Is this going to make the difference between them saying, yes, I'd love to book in that call with you and not. Because every bit of filler, every additional word is almost like a barrier to getting them to read it. You know, often, we underestimate visual overwhelm. If our email is too long, someone can just open it. We've all had this experience. I'm sure you have, Will, you open up an email and you just go, ooh, I can't even face reading this because it looks like a wall of words.   Kim Arnold: So, we need to think about how does this look, have I got lots of nice white space? Are my paragraph short? Does it look enticing? It's like those Michelin-starred chefs who make our meals look so beautiful and they twees on the micro herbs to make it look beautiful. They know that we eat with our eyes as well as with our mouths. And it's same with email. We judge on looks before we've even read a word.   Kim Arnold: So, all of these things contribute to people reading our emails. There's one caveat here, is that we don't want to strip out all personality and brevity. So, we want clarity and we still want warmth, and we want charm, we personality. We want to show that we're a real human being. So, don't strip out so much that you become robotic, and it's very dry.   Will Barron: I'm going to ask you in a second about humour, using images, GIFs, that kind of thing, because that was a real trend, I guess, a couple of years ago, and I think it's dying off a little bit now. Thank the Lord for that, Kim. And a good example here, if everyone's listening, of the difference between somebody who uses filler words and use qualifying words, as well as the other term you used there, Kim, was the difference between me and you.   Will Barron: I use all kinds of filler words when I'm talking on these episodes, all kind of qualifying words, I speak too fast. I need to add more pauses. If you just listen, sales nation, as I speak directly to the audience and bypass you, Kim, which is a weird thing for me to do, and I've never done this on the podcast before, right?   The Dos and Don'ts of Using Informal Language in Your Sales Emails · [15:56]    Will Barron: But sales nation, as you listen to this, if you listen to how Kim speaks, Kim sounds intelligent, conversational, yet, there's gaps, there's wide space. Versus if you listen to how I speak, I'm just throwing it down on the page, right? Is that a fair example, Kim, of how our email should look? The difference between perhaps how I speak on this show as… To be fair, I'm managing it, asking questions and monitoring things as well. Right? Is that a fair way to look at it of how you speak very professional… Not necessarily professionally, but eloquently, versus how I'm just like, just throwing things out on the page.   Kim Arnold: Well, thanks for the compliment. First of all, Will, that's a nice analogy, but I think it does go to my other point. You know, we don't want to strip out all of our charm. Sometimes, a little bit of informality… We'll talk about humour in a minute, getting that personality across, sometimes, that's more important than perfect grammar and being incredibly precise.   Kim Arnold: And actually, with email, we tend to err on the side of formality. I was speaking to a lot of sales people, and in fact, every everyone who writes email tends to sort of put on their jacket a little bit more like I did for this podcast, and we sort of turn into a slightly posher, more formal version of ourselves. So, in person, we might say, hi, how are you? But on email is I trust this email finds you well, or here's the report, here with, please find attached the information report. And we get quite stuffy and stiff. So, I think personality trumps being precise. So, it's a delicate balance. More than anything, we want a connection.   “Personality trumps being precise. But it's a delicate balance. More than anything, we want a connection. So, let's not be too stiff or too formal. Writing like we speak, in general, is a really good piece of advice.” – Kim Arnold · [17:40]    Kim Arnold: So, let's not be too stiff, too formal, writing like we speak in general is a really good piece of advice. It stops us using words like utilise and leverage that just a really clunky and businessy and ugh, we'd never say them. So, it's a balance, I would say. We don't want to be too prim and proper, but we also need to be careful that we don't ramble.   The Psychology of Using GIFs and Memes in Your Sales Emails · [18:25]    Will Barron: Sure. Okay. Is the line here, then, for being more personable in emails, not sending GIFs of cats, having a party or something stupid that kind of emphasises the point that we are selling whatever, party product or whatever it is, is it safe to say that if we're selling in the B2B environment, not that's not appropriate, but it's probably not going to enhance your chances of getting an executive, a CFO on the phone?   Kim Arnold: I would agree. Yes. Then, more than anything, it feels generic, unless if it was something that was really targeted to the specific person that you were writing to, really, really relevant to them, you know they had a really great sense of humour, you could directly relate it to something that you'd heard them say at a conference, for example, maybe, then, it might be acceptable, but GIFs tend to be quite polarising. And most people don't like them, most people see them as a gimmick.   Kim Arnold: It's the same with very clickbaity subject lines, as we started talking about in the beginning. Points of connection are one thing, but if we get an email from a stranger with a very clickbaity headline, then, a subject line like, Kim, you won't believe this, and then, you open it and it's that crushing disappointment. It's just a sales people… You know, sales email from someone you never met. No, we actually want to keep the energy levels up. We want to intrigue people, but not disappoint them. You know, there's no point with this sort of bait and switch.   Kim Arnold: A subject line has got to hold attention, has got to get your attention, and the email's got to hold the attention. So, we can't be too gimmicky. Humour, on the other hand, in general, I think can be used to really good effect, particularly in follow up emails.   Will Barron: I've got a… Hopefully… You might enjoy this as well, kim, a good example of humour and a GIF is the only GIF that's ever been said to me that warranted a call. It was on a podcast I did years and years and years ago, different studio, different set. Someone had clipped this point in the podcast where I pretended I was just joking with the guest, but I pretended to walk out. I just stood up, walked off, my headphones were attached to the table and all the cable, so that got all dragged off. And it was just a funny moment… Like a funny throwaway moment in a podcast episode.   Will Barron: It was, obviously, a listener of the show who remembered that, they clipped that clip as a GIF, put it at the end of an email that they sent me, and I can't remember the call to action, but it was something along the lines of, when we get on the call, this is the response that you're going to have. You're just going to walk to my office and buy the product. It was something along those lines. It actually made me laugh. It was super appropriate in that…   Will Barron: I don't want to name the brand because I think I actually went with a different brand. It was a transcription company. I think they were trying to get me to pay for transcripts for all the podcast episodes, and they didn't win the business, but they got on a few calls with me on the back of it. So, it was a super appropriate and linked with the podcast as well. So, I really enjoyed that, and I thought that was funny as well.   Ways to Integrate Humour in Your Sales Emails · [21:40]    Will Barron: But how do we know when… scenes as humour is subjective in general, you are going to have a different sense of humour, Kim, to what I have. I'm going to say something that you're going to go that's just stupid, that's not even funny. And perhaps vice versa. How do we implement this over email? And there's even less social cues and more chances of it to blow up in our faces. Is that just a risk that comes with this, and is that risk worth it?   Kim Arnold: I would recommend using humour when you have some kind of established relationship with someone already. So, humour works really well in follow up emails. For example, if you sent a proposal over, and you get nothing, and you send a chaser email, you get nothing. So, what do you do now? And sometimes, using humour in those instances works brilliantly, because it removes all of the guilt. Because generally, that person, they either got the… A few things might happen. They've got your proposal and they haven't read it. They've got the proposal, they've read it, but they still need to get opinion from other people. They got your proposal. They think it's a little rubbish, and they're feeling awkward about getting back to you.   Kim Arnold: You know, so it's probably one of those things, or they might have an answer for you, but they've been too busy and you're not a priority. And so, what we tend to do is send emails, a follow-up email saying, “Have you had a chance to look at the proposal yet? If we haven't been a good salesperson already, got that follow up meeting in the diary, of course. But we send these sort of chases and we are just making that person go, oh gosh, yeah, I haven't done it. I haven't done it. I need to do that. Or add it to my list, add it to my list.   Kim Arnold: But humour can be really great. I know someone who sent some great emails entitled, “Did you slip and fall in the shower?” You know, are you… She referenced a… Because this chat was older, a episode from, I think it was Dallas, these sort of '80s American soap opera where one of the characters emerged from the shower having had amnesia. So she said, “You like Bobby Ewing from Dallas? Have you had an amnesia episode and forgotten all about me?” And that worked a treat for her because it was her personality as well.   Kim Arnold: So, I think we need to think about who it is that we're speaking to. You know, if they got a sense of humour, if they're super buttoned up and formal, then, it's probably not the best approach. But if you can have a laugh with them, you've had that relationship, and if it's your personality as well, if you like the joke, if they associate you with being a fun person, then, let them feel that, you know, “Did you get buried under a pile of invoices?” You know, so many different things that you can just have a joke with, because it removes the guilt.   Kim Arnold: And generally, you'll get quite a funny response. Even if it's not the one that you want, or you're hoping for, sometimes, it will, at least, get a “I'm so sorry. I haven't got back to you.”   Will Barron: We don't need to dive into this in too much detail, because this could be a topic, a show in its own right. But I found there's a element of cultural difference here of I find that people in the UK are way more accepting of a bit of dry humour, especially if I'm doing outbound sales, selling our train product to the enterprise, a lot of people I reach out to even know who I am because the team listens to the show, or they will Google me or click a link in the email signature. And so, they'll have a rough idea who I am, how we do things, before they reply to emails.   Will Barron: And I find these follow up emails I get to send to these individuals… I hope this word translates across the Atlantic and elsewhere in Europe and that, but I can use a little bit more banter than what I would perhaps do with an American audience or European audience. So, I guess some of this is knowing the person the best you can, having a good hypothesis on the person you're out reaching to, because if I was selling to the CFO of a bank, I probably would not be trying to have banter with them in that engagement.   Metrics to Look Out For When Gauging the Success of Your Sales Emails · [25:50]    Will Barron: And that leads me to… I've got two things I want to kind of wrap up the show with, Kim first off, let's say the audience, they go and experiment with this, Sam, the salesperson sends a bunch of emails. He's tracking open rates. He's tracking click through rates. He's tracking calls, booked on his emails and all this, obviously, gets a little bit more complicated when it's not just one email, but perhaps, it's a cadence of else, because maybe nobody replies to the first one. But by email three, you've given them some insights, or you've shared content, or you've now ground them down, warmed them down with your personality and humour that they're willing to give you a go.   Will Barron: So, with that all said, and I understand, down to this question is it depends and it's complicated. But how do we know if the emails that we're writing are successful? Because we want to test this, right? We want to progress. We want to implement what we talked about in today's show. How do we know if the emails that we send yesterday are better or worse than the ones that we're going to send today?   Kim Arnold: So, yes, as you say, there's not as simple answer as that, but I think it's where you start to have a conversation with the recipient. So, this isn't about necessarily just getting that meeting. It's the one where you might trade emails. They might come back to you. They might say, “Oh, that's really interesting. I want more,” it's the engagement that we need to track, as well as the meetings. Because quite often, we can be quite binary, you know, did that email get a meeting? Yes or no?   Kim Arnold: Well, sometimes, sales cycles can take weeks, months, years even. Some of the best clients that I've had, that my clients have had, they can sit on your email list, of marketing email list for two or three years before they're ready to buy. And sometimes, it's the same, you know, you have a relationship with the salesperson. You're not ready to buy now, but they're giving you that time of day to stay in touch.   Kim Arnold: It's obviously about, you need to look at what it is that you want whether it's booking in demos or meetings or what that sort of end goal is. But it is also about how many conversations are you having, where is that taking you to, where are the introductions, who do those people have in their networks as well. It is about treating email very much as a conversation, not as a monologue. This isn't about warfare. We're not firing out these emails. I'm really opposed to the sort of aggressive language of sales, because I think it sets us up really wrongly, targeting, attacking, firing out. All of these things get us off on the wrong foot.   Kim Arnold: This is about engagement. This is about conversations. This is about a sense of connection with people. And if we get all of those things right, we don't even have to sell, do we? We lay all the great groundwork, and then, it all becomes easier after that.   Will Barron: Yep. And I think to emphasise that point, Kim, the opposite of what you just described of leaning into engagement and leaning into conversations is what a lot of sales people are doing over the past five years where, essentially marketing tools have become sales tools where you can customise a name, a paragraph, a company, and send an email to a list of 10,000 people, and you burn a lot of the prospects in your industry, depending on what you're selling, who you're selling it to.   Will Barron: I might not be too bad in this instance selling sales training to directors and VPs of sales, because there's, obviously, hundreds, or at least, tens of thousands, if not, hundreds of thousands of them in kind of the English be world. But if I'm back in medical devices and I'm selling camera systems to urologists, gynaecologist, general surgeons, clinical surgeons in Yorkshire, there's like 15, and they all speak, and if they all get the same crappy email from me demanding a call because we've got a new product that I need to shove down their throats, they're just going to all ignore me, and immediately going to be, via NHS hospital email filters, three or four of them mark me a spam.   Will Barron: And I'm not even getting into their inbox in the first instance. That affects then the company's domain, and we can go on and on down that kind of root to that, was kind of marketing, but now, has become more and more sales, as again, these tools trickle down to us trigger happy sales people on the back end of it.   Should Salespeople Always Be Sending Out Personalized Emails? · [30:20]    Will Barron: So, if you've got engagement at one end, measuring that, you've got just spam in the marketplace at the other. And I guess spraying and praying. Is there a middle around, Kim, or should we always, always be leaning to that idea of personalised emails to the right people at the right time with a product that we think can help them solve a… I'm answering my own question as I say this, I know I am. But is that the… for a B2B salesperson who's doing, say, deal sizes of 10, 50, a hundred thousand dollars plus, is that the only emails that they should be sending at this point?   “In sales, you’re trying to establish a relationship and you can't do that with generic emails.” – Kim Arnold · [31:23]    Kim Arnold: I think there is a… Marketing needs to be that one to many function. I think you need both, ideally. Sales should be super personalised… You know, with these big deal sizes, it's worth it. It's worth putting that bit of extra effort into personalised things. And then, marketing can provide the sort of, you know, the newsletter or the updates, all of those things, but you're to establish a relationship and you can't do that with generic emails.   Kim Arnold: I remember when I used to work in house, I was a global head of comms for a fintech business. And there was one vendor who used to write to me once a month, and his hook was that he would… It was a bit insulting to me actually, but that he would take me out for a certain type of food. And this has clearly worked for him. So, in the winter… In December it would be, “Hey Kim, are you free for a coffee and some mince pies?” And then, around pancake day, it would be, “Hey Kim, are you free for a coffee and a pancake?” And literally, every month… And it became a running joke in my department, what is this guy going to serve up next? It's donuts, it's this, it's Easter hot cross buns, all this kind of stuff.   Kim Arnold: And as you say, you can burn through lists. You can burn through goodwill so easily. Most of our prospect lists are really not that large, and we think that we are saving time and saving effort by doing the spray and pray, and we're just chucking it all at the wall and seeing what sticks. But we're not, we're wasting huge amounts of time.   Kim Arnold: One brilliantly thought out, personalised, clever email can make all the difference, and can be worth every single minutes of that two hours that you spent crafting it. So yes, less is more.   Will Barron: Did that person win any business from you?   Kim Arnold: No. But I took the donuts.   Will Barron: Well, because the reason I asked that is, this is where metrics can be deceiving, right? Of you probably opened every one of those emails, that person's getting a ping on the dashboard.   Kim Arnold: Yes.   “Just because a prospect is opening an email doesn't necessarily mean that they care about what you're saying.” – Will Barron · [33:45]    Will Barron: Every time it gets opened, it's like Kim's loving these emails. These are super effective. Send more of these out. He's getting this whole team to double down on these food-based emails, as we record it, it's pancake day to day, so I'm sure that would've been the… It's probably top of mind for you. I'm having pancakes after this, Kim. So, I'll be appreciating any pancake emails that come my way. That's what I wanted to wrap the show on, Kim. I think that's really valuable of just because one's opening an email doesn't necessarily mean that they care about what you're saying.   Will Barron: And then, very quickly, that email ends up in spam and you go from hero to zero in two seconds. Which is why I love the piece on engagement, conversations. And obviously, we've got to qualify our prospects as well, right? Because it might be the right product, it might be the right company, it might not be the right time. In which case, you can send an email follow up six months from now when everything falls into place, and you're more likely to win the deal than if you hammer that individual over the next six months with weekly, daily, hourly spammy emails, texts and calls, and then, you've lost the deal before the opportunity for it has even arrived.   Parting Thoughts · [34:23]    Will Barron: So with that, Kim, tell us about the book, tell us more where we can find out about you, and then, anything else you want to share with the audience as well.   Kim Arnold: Thank you so much. So, my book is Email Attraction. You can find it on Amazon. So, it's got all of my tips around subject lines, how to structure your emails, how to write really great follow up emails. And it's not just for sales, it's for all people who write business emails. So, you can apply it to all sorts of different emails that you write.   Kim Arnold: I also run email engagement, which is a in-company programme that will allow you to train all of your staff whether sales people, marketing, HR, all across the board, how to write emails that engage and inspire and get people to jump into action. So, that's an in-company programme as well that I roll out with organisations too.   Kim Arnold: You can find me at kimarnold.co.uk with all the information, and you can email me at kim@kimarnold.co.uk if you need any of my help on writing engaging emails.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. I'll link to all that in the show in the episode over at salesman.org. And with that, Kim, I want to thank you for your time, your expertise on this. I'll just plug this, right? It's actually difficult to have questions just now because we're so aligned of everything that we're saying, right? And everything that we teach aligns with what you teach. I don't want to rehash things that we've covered in the past.   Will Barron: So, you did a great job with some the, I guess, curve ball questions I've thrown at you. So with that, Kim, it shows that you're an expert. It truly does. I appreciate you. I appreciate your time and energy, and appreciate you coming on the Salesman Podcast.   Kim Arnold: Thank you so much. It's been great. I really enjoyed it. (music)

So many sales reps today underutilize the power of the well-run discovery call. With the right discovery call framework, you can qualify your leads, gather invaluable intel, and position yourself as a trustworthy authority—all in a single phone call. Today I’m showing you how to structure your discovery calls so you can reap all these benefits and more. Trust me, you won’t want to miss this proven 8-step framework. Because it’s going to save you tons of time and make your sales job infinitely easier. The Perfect Discovery Call How many times have you spent hours, days, or even weeks of hard work with a potential buyer, only to find out they were never a fit for your product in the first place? Don’t worry, you aren’t alone. As much as 67% of lost sales are the result of sales reps not properly qualifying their leads. And more than a third of reps just like you say qualifying and prospecting were the biggest challenges of their roles. In fact, I brought up this problem in particular in a recent interview. “If you are sick of being rejected, if you're sick of people ghosting you, if you're sick of people not replying to your messages, improve your qualification at the top of the sales process, and you'll eliminate a lot of that at the far end of it.” Will Barron, SS #019 Qualification matters. When you do it right, you’re saving yourself tons of headaches, hassles, and lost time down the road. And the discovery call is without a doubt the best opportunity to qualify leads. Over the years, I’ve developed an 8-point framework for running strategic discovery calls with my potential clients. And that’s exactly what I’m sharing with you today. Plus, I’m covering very specific questions along the way that you should ask prospects that cover each issue without scaring them off. Ready to go? Let’s get into it. To get the most value out of your discovery call as possible, you’re going to qualify potential leads according to eight issues throughout the meeting. The first issue is… 1) Are They In Pain?  Are they in pain? Is their issue actually a problem? And most importantly, is the buyer in “pain” because of that problem? The buyers you want to work with are feeling the hurt from their problem. And as a result, they’re going to be highly motivated to find the right solution, which is exactly what you want. Questions you can ask that get to the heart of this issue include… “You booked this call with me today, what led to getting this call booked in?” And… “What’s stopping you from solving this issue yourself?” 2) What Is Their Timeline?  Not all problem and solution timelines are going to line up. One of your primary concerns when qualifying prospects is what their timeline is for when they need their problem solved. Are they thinking today? This quarter? Or in the next few years? The right answer for your industry will depend entirely on your unique business and solution. But in general, you should only be working with buyers that are interested in solving the problem sooner rather than later. To determine their timeline, ask a question like… “When do you want to solve this pain?” Straightforward, right? This question doesn’t mince words. And as a result, the answer gives you a clear, no-bullshit timeline that the buyer is hoping to solve their problem. 3) Can I Fix This Problem? Time for an honesty check ladies and gentlemen. There’s no perfect product or service for everyone. And saying otherwise is just playing into the public’s idea of sales reps being con men. Instead, it’s your job to think of yourself as someone who offers value. So don’t waste time with buyers that’ll be dissatisfied with what your product can offer. Two questions in particular to ask yourself, not the buyer, are… “Do I have the solution for this buyer’s problem?” Be honest here. Does your solution actually solve the buyer’s problem? Or is it more of a bandaid? Also… “Do they really need this solution?” Is there a better solution they can implement on their own? Is yours really necessary? If not and the sale goes through, the buyer will likely resent you once they find out they could have easily solved the problem themselves. And that means negative reviews, zero loyalty, and no earned referrals. 4) Is The Solution Worth The Trouble? There are downsides to any new solution. Buyers need to change vendors, hire new staff, train on novel systems, or fight for a change to the budget. The question is, is the value your solution provides worth that discomfort? How much will they have to change to accommodate it? And when all is said and done, will they look back on the investment as a good purchase or one that ate up too many resources? Going through this calculation upfront is a must during the qualification of sales leads. Questions to ask here include… “How would things be different if we solved this for you?” “What is your motivation to make this happen?” “If we took your business from $X to $Y, how would that change things?” 5) Do They Accept Your Process? Be sure your buyer is willing to adapt to your process before working with you. Check to see if they’re willing to stop working with current vendors, put in the necessary time for training, and whatever other “musts” need to be done to get maximum value from your solution. Buyers who won’t adapt to your processes (or who require too much work on your end) should be turned away. A clear question to ask here is… “When your organization has done similar projects in the past, what paperwork process needed to happen?” This question gives you a clearer idea of what lies ahead should the buyer be a reasonable fit. How much work will they have to put in to overhaul their system? How much work will you have to put into training and getting their team up to speed? 6) Can They Afford It?  Can they even afford your solution? Now, you want to be careful with this one because people get a bit weird about money. So don’t jump right into finances. Instead, lead up to budgetary questions. Handle the subject professionally and use direct communication. Think of it as just another aspect of the qualification process. Questions to ask here include… “How are projects like this funded?” “Is a project like this in this year’s budget?” “What financial scope do you have to solve this issue?” 7) Who Is The Champion Here? Who is the champion here? The final decision maker? More often than not, your buyer’s decision is going to be influenced by other individuals in the business. It could be heads of other departments, higher-ups in the C-suite, or even influential team members below them. That’s why it’s important to figure out who these other individuals (or “champions”) are before you decide the buyer’s a fit. Doing so clues you into whether your prospect is the final decision maker and if there’s someone else you should be talking to instead. An important question to ask here is… “Who is the person that people look up to within your department on projects like this?” This subtler approach is bound to help you uncover any hidden decision-makers that may influence the passing of the deal. 8) Will They Commit? The last thing you want is for a high-quality lead to run off after you’ve put in all the work to qualify them. That’s why it’s up to you to get your buyer’s verbal commitment on the call. Otherwise, they’re liable to walk away after days or even weeks of your hard work. So when you’ve determined that a buyer is a solid lead, don’t hang up the phone before asking this discovery call question. “You’re a good fit to work with us. If we can solve X, will you commit to Y?” This time-tested formula has it all—validation, a hint of flattery, results anchoring. By asking this question, you’re tying your solution to a specific result. And equally importantly, you’re influencing the buyer to commit to that solution, provided you can achieve the results you promise. If the buyer looks like a good fit based on all these issues, the only thing left to do now is nail down the specifics and sign the papers. Summary That about wraps this framework up! Discovery calls are an invaluable tool for qualifying prospects, gathering more intel, and positioning yourself as an indisputable authority. All it takes is assessing prospects on these eight issues… Are They In Pain? What Is Their Timeline? Can I Fix This Problem? Is The Solution Worth The Trouble? Do They Accept Your Process? Can They Afford It? Who Is The Champion Here? Will They Commit? If you’ve evaluated potential buyers on each of these issues during your discovery call, you’ll waste less time with prospects, have more time to spend closing good deals, and be well on your way to earning more with less stress. And who in their right mind wouldn’t love that?

Len Herstein is a Keynote Speaker, Author, Marketing Strategist and a Reserve Sheriff's Deputy. In this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Len taps into his brand marketing and law enforcement experience to reveal the most dangerous threat to your sales success. He also shares strategies to help you achieve, cherish, and protect success in both life and business You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Business Strategy Expert Resources: Len’s LinkedIn  Lenherstein.com Book: Be Vigilant!: Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance, and Safeguard Success. Your Business and Relationships Depend on It. Transcript  Will Barron: Hi, my name is Will, and welcome to today's episode of the Salesman Podcast. On today's episode, we're looking at the most dangerous threat to your sales success, and today's guest is Len Herstein. Len's 30 plus years in business, brand marketing and law enforcement led to his book, Be Vigilant!, where he provides a roadmap for individuals to stop complacency, improve performance, and safeguard the success that they've worked so hard to achieve. We want to touch on all this in today's episode. And with that, Len, welcome to the show.   Len Herstein: Thanks, Will. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.   The Most Dangerous Threat to Highly Successful Salespeople · [00:50]    Will Barron: You are more than welcome, sir. We were just talking football before we clicked record. Don't say who you support, mate, because you might get a load of hate after this episode, and maybe a few polite emails on the back of that as well, but I appreciate you, mate. So with that said, I know the answer to this question because we've done a bit of prep for the interview, but the audience probably don't, and I'm in so much agreement with you here. I think this is a really exciting topic. With that said, Len, what is the most dangerous threat, not just to salespeople, but to perhaps highly successful salespeople?   “Success is not the end goal, keeping it is.” – Len Herstein · [01:38]    Len Herstein: Yeah. The thing that I think is one of the most dangerous threats is complacency, is the idea that as we get more successful, we develop an overconfidence, a self-satisfaction, even potentially a smugness that makes us unaware of potential threats. And when we become unaware of potential threats, when we fail to see the warning signs, when we fail to see the things that we're doing that make us vulnerable, that is when our success becomes at risk. What I always tell people is success is not the end goal, keeping it is.   Understanding the Risk of Complacency in Sales · [01:43]   Will Barron: And is this something that all successful fo people fall into, or is this a trap that can be averted? Do we have to learn this lesson via the school of hard knocks or is keynote speaking, the events that you do, reading the book, and the coaching that you do, is that capable of getting us through this?   Len Herstein: Yeah, so that's exactly… The book is set up to give a us strategies that we can employ today that will help us identify complacency and fight it. And so one of the things, when we talk about complacency, that people get confused about is kind of what complacency is, first of all. And I think a lot of people would equate it with laziness. And really complacency is not laziness, it's what I talked about, is that unawareness of threats because of our overconfidence.   Len Herstein: And then the next step is people start worrying well, what's the opposite of complacency, isn't it like paranoia? Because that doesn't sound fun. I don't want to be paranoid. But the actual answer is that the opposite and the antidote to complacency is vigilance. And the difference is that paranoia is based in fear and vigilance is based in awareness. And so this is what the book is. And when I go talk to people and when I consult with people, it's all about helping them develop the strategies that enable them to become more aware, to become more intentional, to become more in a moment so that they don't get caught by surprise due to their complacency.   Complacency and Why It’s a Threat to All Types of Salespeople · [03:14]   Will Barron: Is this just for, obviously our audience are mainly salespeople, there's entrepreneurs, marketers [inaudible 00:03:14] of people listen to the show, but we'll focus on the B2B salesperson. Is this only for successful salespeople or can salespeople who are, if you're consuming this podcast and this content you're probably, even if you, even just be blunt, even if you suck, you're probably on the path to success at some point, right? Because the average salesperson who's just never going to do anything in their career is not going to tune into content like this, so we can make that assumption. But is this just, is complacency just something that successful people fall into, or is it like an inverse of this where you can suck at sales and be complacent in how much you suck and you're just managing to hold on, does the same process that we're going to talk about still apply to those individuals?   Len Herstein: Yeah. So complacency applies to everybody. What I do say though, is that you're less likely to find complacency in a bootstrapping startup that's maxing out their credit cards and working out of their parents' garage than you are with someone who's experienced success. But success is a sliding scale. I mean, success is not just this one pinnacle. We have successes along the way. And as we build those successes, whatever we enjoy that success in, we become vulnerable to complacency. This is applicable to everybody, no matter where they are in their game, no matter where they are in their business, no matter where they are in their life, because it also applies to your personal life, as much as your professional life. Complacency kills businesses, it kills brands, it kills teams, it kills relationships, both professional and personal.   Tell-tale Signs You Might be Complacent · [04:50]    Will Barron: So how do we know if we're in a position of being complacent and we need to up our levels of vigilance? We'll get practical about this as well of how we implement some of this. But how do we know if this is… Because some of this is self-reflection right of, I guess it's almost a paradox, because if you knew that you were being complacent, you would probably not be complacent. Right?   Len Herstein: Right.   Will Barron: So how do we, other than someone stumbling into a show like this, how do we kind of implement this as perhaps a practise that we've got to check in with ourselves over time?   “The first question is, do you feel successful in any way, shape or form with your relationships, business, sales teams, with whatever you’re doing? And if the answer is yes, then more than likely you should get a little bit more introspective and understand that there's probably complacency somewhere.” – Len Herstein · [06:05]    Len Herstein: Yeah. So there there's lots of warning signs, and in the book we go through, each strategy is kind of built around something that you're not doing or potentially not doing. The reality is you need to take a step back and kind of first question is, have I experienced some success? Do I feel successful in some element of my life, whether it be at home or at work? And the reality is based on our human nature. If you have experience of some success, if you can say that you are successful in some way, shape or form, it is most likely a good assumption that you have complacency somewhere because it is a natural state of being for us. We want to feel comfortable. We don't want to be questioning things all the time. So the first question is, do I feel successful in any way, shape or form with my relationships, with my business, with my sales teams, with whatever I'm doing? And if the answer is yes, then more than likely you should get a little bit more introspective and understand that there's probably complacency somewhere.   Len Herstein: But some red flags that you can definitely look for right away. Number one is who do you think your competition is? So if you have settled in on, here's my one or two major competitors, everything I do all my plan, I'm going to talk about this from a sales perspective, all my planning, all my scenarios, all my pricing and my offerings and my features and my benefits are all built around my competition with these one or two major competitors that I know really well. That is a sign that perhaps you're losing sight of what else is out there. I call that the road runner effect. People of a certain age are familiar with the Road Runner cartoon with the road runner and Wiley Coyote. And Wiley coyote is always trying to get the road runner and is a 100 percent focused on that road runner.   “If you're so focused on one or two or three competitors and you feel really confident there, that's a good sign that you might be complacent.” – Len Herstein · [07:48]    Len Herstein: The reality is that all the dangers in all of the, and all of the downsides that come across Wiley Coyote are never due to the road runner. They're always due to something else that Wiley Coyote didn't see. And that's the problem that we fall into. We get into this thing where we get so comfortable. If we're Coke, our competition is Pepsi. If we're Microsoft, our competition is Apple. If we're a solar company, our competition is the other solar company down the street, and we lose sight of Tesla coming in and changing the game for solar, or Red Bull coming in and changing the game for soft drinks, or whatever it is. If you're so focused on one or two or three competitors and you feel really confident there, that's a good sign that you might be complacent. So that's number one.   Len Herstein: A second one that's really easy to do is your to articulate your why. So this is something that gets back to kind of our purpose. This comes from my law enforcement background. All of this comes from my law enforcement background. These are things that I learned when I got into law enforcement that I was able to apply back to business and life. But this thing about being able to articulate your why gets to power and power dynamics. And a lot of times when we gain power, when we're successful, that allows us to be complacent because we're not getting pushback from people because we hold the power in relationship. And so if our why, if we're really being honest for ourselves as to what we're doing, is because we can or because we said so, those are really good signs that we're being complacent, because those whys should be rooted in our customers and our vendors and our partners and our employees. They shouldn't be because we can.   Will Barron: Is there any value… Because as you were saying that, Len, I'm getting this, and maybe I've probably been there myself in the past, right, I'm getting this vision of, I'm just going to paint a picture, and so whether this is sexist or whatever, I don't know. But it's me as a masculine fellow, well, so a masculine fella riding around in my red BMW, seeing customers, knowing that I'm the one with the right product for them, they sell medical devices, they've got to buy it from me because they want to work with that brand and there's only always another competitor. No one else can really get in that space, obviously because medical devices costs so much to develop and there's so much lead time from product to it being implemented in the marketplace.   Will Barron: So I'm this dude 23 year old dude, hair slicked back, driving around in his red BMW, seeing these surgeons, they have to buy from me. Overconfident to a point of I'm not faking it till I make it anymore, I'm now just coming across like a bit of a dick sometimes. And my why is because I want to buy a bigger, faster, more red stupid car. Right?   Len Herstein: Right.   The Difference Between Complacency and Being Comfortable · [10:10]    Will Barron: I feel like there'll be a bunch of the audience who, whether they acknowledge that or not, will be fitting into that kind of broad demographic of young salesperson making lots of money. How, other than some of them are driving around in a red BMW right now, listening to the show and they're going, oh crap, that's me, how else can they be introspective on this? And really, how can we hit them over the head in this episode, Len, and let them know that is you. Is there any other characteristics that we need to look out for?   Len Herstein: Yeah. What you want to understand is why… So getting to this articulating the why, it gets to your purpose, and your purpose has to be something beyond just making money. You have to have a purpose in this world, whether it's… and you can define your world as big or as small as you want, but you have to really understand your purpose. And you have to understand the fact that when you hold power, the way that you wield that power has implications short term and long term. You might be in a position, like you're saying, you're selling this medical device. There's no other medical device out there, they have to buy from you. That is a position where you hold a lot of power. The way you treat people in that short term will affect what happens in the long term.   Len Herstein: So you have to get this more macro view as to what's going on because the reality is that can work for a while, but eventually there's another solution that's going to come around. There's another… They're going to figure out a way, whether someone comes in to compete with you or your customers figure out a way to do without you, they're going to figure it out before long. And then all of a sudden you're going to turn and all of a sudden your customers are gone and you're going to be like, wow, they were unloyal. I can't believe they jumped. Well, the reality is that you sowed those seeds a long time ago.   “Ask yourself, are people working with me because they want to, are people buying from me because they want to, because I add value to their lives that they can't do without, or are they working with me because they have to? And if it's because they have to, and you’re taking advantage of that, that's going to come back and haunt you.” Len Herstein · [11:52]    Len Herstein: So it really requires taking this kind of macro view in terms of what's going on. And really, really being honest with yourself as to, are people working with me because they want to, are people buying for me because they want to, because I add value to their lives that they can't do without, or are they working with me because they have to? And if it's because they have to, and I'm taking advantage of that, that's going to come back and haunt you.   Will Barron: Sure. Okay. So I think that's super clear. I really appreciate that, Len. So that being said, it's not going to be all the audience who are going to be… who are, I was going to say feeling, but you're not really feeling this, you're being it, you're proactively being complacent. Right? There's going to be a good chunk of the audience who are in that state though.   Len Herstein: Mm-hmm (affirmative).   How to Stop Being Complacent and Start Being Vigilant · [12:27]    Will Barron: What's the next step for them? Is this something where they've got to sit down and is this an strategy? Is this an exercise in their mindsets? Is this finding the why? Is this strategic or is this kind of mindset based, the idea of being complacent?   Len Herstein: Yes, it is. It is all the above. First and foremost is strategic. Right? And it's mindset based. It's really understanding this is, it's kind of like being having a substance abuse problem, right? I mean, the first thing you have to do is admit that you have a problem. And that's part of the problem with complacency. Like you said upfront, is that we don't understand that we have that problem because we're not thinking that way. If we were, we wouldn't be complacent. So number one is just building that awareness that this exists, complacency is always in the background and we have to constantly figure out ways to fight it. But what we can do is we can institutionalise it within our lives, within our business, within our home life so that this doesn't become a chore. All these strategies are based in building awareness so that we understand what's going on.   Len Herstein: There's 10 things in the book, you can start with any which one of them, it doesn't matter. You can choose which ones make sense to you. One of the things that I think is the easiest thing that people can do right off the bat, and it's actually a really good signal that you're being complacent, is think about what you do after projects or missions or events are over. And one of the things that I talk about is the importance of debriefing. And you had talked about before this, that we're going to debrief afterwards. I love it. Because the thing that happens is most people, if you ask them if they do debriefs today, they would say yes, but the reality is they do the them when things go wrong and they do it mostly to find out who's to blame and how to figure out how do we not let this happen again.   Len Herstein: And if you're being truly honest with yourself, when you're experiencing success with your customers, how often are you actually debriefing things, as opposed to like patting each other on the back and going out for drinks and celebrating successes, which is important, it's important to celebrate success. But when we don't question things because we've had success, that's when we become complacent. And so it's really important to start debriefing things, whether they go right or wrong. There's eight ways that I talk about in the book, in that chapter, as to how to do successful debriefs. One of them is do them regardless of the outcome of the event. So whether it's positive, negative, debrief. Talk about what went right. Talk about what went right by accident. Talk about where you might have had success only because your competition did worse than you or because you got lucky.   “Once you start resting on your laurels, once you start feeling comfortable in your success and stop questioning things, that's where you miss all those micro failures that turn into macro failures.” – Len Herstein · [15:36]    Len Herstein: There are always ways… We were talking sports, there are people in sports, here in American football, we would talk about Peyton Manning or Tom Brady in terms of these are people who, regardless of the level of success they have, they're the first one in a room watching films the next day, trying to figure out where could we have done better. Right? Where do we… Because once you start resting on your laurels, once you start feeling comfortable in your success and stop questioning things, that's where you miss all those micro failures that turn into macro failures. So your question was where can we start? You can start with mindset, you can start with strategies, you can start with whatever you want to start with. The real step is becoming aware that this is an issue and making a decision that we're going to do things in our life, both professionally and personally, to help address it.   What’s Your Definition of Success and Do You Really Need to Pursue More of It? · [16:29]    Will Barron: What if we are, we're a salesperson, so we're not an entrepreneur. We don't have the whole… we inadvertently have the company on our back, right? We're we are bringing in the [crosstalk 00:16:12] right. But we are not… our quota is based on sales activity as opposed to customer service or anything like that. And so let's say we've hit our quota the past three or four years in a row. We're having a decent year this year. Is pushing for a feeling of being comfortable or even just being a little bit complacent in the role because we know we've had success in the past, is that always unhealthy or do we always need to be striving for more and more revenue and bigger bonuses and more targets? Because I know this kind of, hopefully this is an interesting question of, is it unhealthy to always be pushing for more, and is a little bit of complacency okay in certain situations or is complacency like, is it binary, is it always a bad idea?   “Everybody's definition of success is different, and you don't always have to be striving for more, but it's important to understand what success is to you so that you can protect it once you gain it.” – Len Herstein · [17:44]    Len Herstein: Yeah. So what I don't want to do is I don't want to convey the idea that it's not okay to feel comfortable. That's not what this is about. So it's not about… Complacency, fighting complacency doesn't mean that we always have to be uncomfortable. And the other key point is that success is how we define it. Some people's success is like, I need to be CEO of the company or I need to be a billionaire or I need to be whatever. Other people's success is, I want to have a good paycheck and I want to enjoy my family and I want to see my kids grow up and go to school functions and all that stuff. So everybody's definition of success is different, and you don't always have to be striving for more, but it's important to understand what success is to you so that you can protect it once you gain it. Right?   Len Herstein: And so that's a problem. Maybe success for you is earning enough money so that you can go to the pub with your mates and take care of your family. And that's totally cool, there's nothing wrong with that. But the reality is that once you get too comfortable in that, you might take… maybe success for you is your relationships, but if you start taking those relationships for granted, if you stop paying attention to the health of those relationships, if you stop asking questions of your spouse or your partner or whatever, to stay in the moment to understand what's going on, both good and bad, you run the risk of jeopardising that success that you've set up for yourself. So it's all about different levels. It's all about self-awareness. It's all about intentionality and understanding where you are. And it could be any level, whatever level you're at, understanding what success is to you and how do I protect it.   Will Barron: Len, that is so smart, mate. I really appreciate that answer because I don't think sales people, and I never did this, stop to think about what they actually want. Now, obviously we're in a role, we've got to hit a quota or at least give, in a decent company, at least give a real good account of yourself and a good effort to get close to it. You're not going to get sacked if you hit quota for three years and then you miss it, but you're close to the next, right? Because obviously the market changes, the product changes, the customer changes. We go through a global pandemic. Who knows what else is going on in the world, right?   Len Herstein: Yeah.   Will Barron: So I think that's fair enough to say, but there's so… the people I speak with and coach with our training programme, there's so few salespeople who come into the programme who know what they actually want other than this robotic must hit quota. I think what you just said is really valuable to them.   How to Protect Your Success in This Highly Competitive Sales Environment · [19:40]    Will Barron: And then it leads onto this idea, which I really want to double down on, this idea of protecting your success. Because sales is a zero sum game, right? There's someone else that out there trying to poach your customers, there's only… If there's a deal going to happen, that it's likely most industries, they're only going to buy one product or service at that moment in time, and maybe you've got a chance later on, but again, someone else is out trying to eat your lunch, aren't they? So how do we, say that we're having success, how do we go about complacency and avoiding it from the perspective of there's someone out there? It's not like other spaces where you might be your own downfall. There's someone proactively trying to take your customers from you. How do we mitigate those kind of risks?   Len Herstein: Yeah. So, it's a great point. And it all comes together, and this is also in everything that I wrote about in this book. Real briefly, I spent 25 years in business before I ever got involved in law enforcement. I decided I wanted to become a volunteer. I went through a full academy and field training. I became a reserve peace officer, Sheriff's deputy, where I do everything a Sheriff's deputy does, but I do it for free. And I did it because I wanted to give back. But I started learning things that surprised me, that I was able to bring back to business and to life. And that's where this book came from. Be Vigilant. It's all based in things that I learned and this idea that complacency kills.   Len Herstein: One of the things that is directly translatable from that is this idea that as we become complacent, and we become more vulnerable, we send signals out to our competition. People are watching. Right? You were talking about it. People are always looking to eat our lunch, right, and take our lunch from us. And the reality is, one of the things that we learn in the academy is looking buttoned up, right, keeping your shoes shined, keeping your uniform looking good, all those things. And that's not because of pomp and circumstance or anything like that. The reality is that there's data out there that says that criminals are out there looking and they will react to you based on the image that you present to them. And if you look vulnerable, they will try to exploit that vulnerability. But if you look buttoned up, they are likely to fight, they're less likely to run, they're less likely to do all the things that get people hurt or get me hurt or whatever it is.   “When you have people out there that are looking to take business from you, when they look at you, do they see easy pickings or do they see someone who's buttoned up and is prepared to protect what they have? If they see that you are prepared to protect what you have, they're more likely to go try and take someone else's lunch.” – Len Herstein · [21:55]    Len Herstein: It's the same thing in business. When you have people out there that are looking to take, when they look at you, do they see easy pickings or do they see someone who's buttoned up and is prepared to protect what they have? And if they see that you are prepared to protect what you have, they're more likely to go try and take someone else's lunch. So the first thing is making sure that as you build that awareness, as you start fighting that complacency, as you build defences against those vulnerabilities, you will automatically invite less competition because you are unattractive as a competitor.   Len Herstein: There are many more people, I don't know what it's like in the UK, but here we have a lot of what we call vehicle trespassers, people breaking into people's cars. It used to be that this was a real complicated thing or they would try and jimmy locks or break windows. Now they just walk down the street and try door handles until they find one that's open because there's enough people that leave their doors open that the thieves don't have to work that hard. And you know what? If you're a salesperson, be the one who locks your door and let them move on to the next one who is letting themselves become more vulnerable.   Will Barron: So I guess that practically two things come to mind. One, being known as an expert in your industry. Even if, for me, medical devices, you get attack… I'm not becoming an expert in all keyhole or endoscopic surgery, but perhaps I'm becoming an expert in my specific product, in a specific place, whether that is, hopefully, speaking events, industry conferences, being a go-to person to answer questions on your product, but other people's products in the space itself. That seems like the medium to long term goal with some of this. Because if I was competing… If I was competing for a sales training contract against me now, I'd be slightly panicked because our programme is established, but it's so different from everyone else out there that if someone was to Google me and what we were up to, I would probably go for and go and attack one of these kind of traditionally held sales training accounts instead of what we do. So maybe that's an example.   Len Herstein: Absolutely.   Will Barron: Just because we are differentiated and we're so entrenched. So that's, I'm an expert and public in the space, I guess was the point. So becoming known as an expert in your space is a medium to long term goal. But it seems like a short term goal then is just if you can physically be in the accounts regularly. Like when I was in medical device sales, I'd always pop into, Bradford is a local hospital to us here, every Friday I'd be in there from like two o'clock till five o'clock, I would just be sat in the… there's a bunch of… some of the world's top colorectal surgeons work at one particular theatre, I'd just be sat in the staff room with the surgeons, just chilling, hanging, doing emails, just physically be there. And I've saw competitors come to the door, and a lot of times it was just so awkward that I was there, that the surgeons would tell them to go away, come back another time. Right?   Len Herstein: Yeah.   The Benefits of Having Regular, Insightful Debriefs with Your Buyers · [24:48]    Will Barron: So being physically in an account is value, but then even less so, or even easier than that, what you mentioned earlier on doing debriefs, maybe we check in with our customers every quarter. We see if there's any issues ahead of time and we try and deal with them and stay in touch so that when a competitor rings up one of our accounts and they go, hey, well, when's the last time you spoke to will with sales trading over at whatever company, the buyer goes, well, last week he was doing some more training and he was doing this or doing that. Again, that's got to put competitors off, right?   Len Herstein: Yeah, no. That's so smart. That's exactly what happens. And that's one of the biggest vulnerabilities for salespeople, is because we're always trying to get new business. Right? And so as we get more successful and we start putting more attention towards new business, who suffers? Potentially our existing business. And just like you said, what's the first thing, if you're trying to steal someone's business from them, especially in your industry or medical sales, whatever sales you're doing, if you're trying to steal someone's business and you get a meeting with that customer, the first thing you're going to ask them is, hey, how much attention are you getting from your current sales person? How much are they really investing themselves in your success? How much of a partner are they?   “The more that you make your buyers feel like a true partner, the more that you make them understand that it's not just about a sale to you, it's about their success and making sure that they are successful, that's how you fight complacency.” – Len Herstein · [26:18]    Len Herstein: And that's the question that you're going to ask, right? Because when people get successful, they start taking what they have for granted. They spend less time with their existing customers. The customers may not even understand it until someone in comes in and starts raising that thing, and then they're like, you know what? It has been a while since Will's come to visit me, he's starting to take me for granted. The more that you're there, the more that you make them feel like a true partner, the more that you make them understand that it's not just about a sale to you, it's about their success and making sure that they are successful, they're successful, you're successful and the sales will come, that's how you fight that complacency.   Fighting Complacency in Life and Personal Relationships · [26:44]   Will Barron: For sure. Okay. We'll wrap up with this line. And I say that this might be a four hour conversation in it's own right. But how does this translate outside of business? Because it seems like, anecdotally, a lot of my friends, well, the few of my friends who have been in long term relationships and it's fell apart, it's because they were both complacent, didn't work on the relationship, didn't work on themselves, both got fat and disgusting and then hated each other, and then it fell apart violently, right?   Len Herstein: Yeah.   Will Barron: So it seems like relationships with spouses, partners, whatever it is, whoever it is, this applies to that as well. But how else does this idea of complacency relate to out of work activities, relationships, and even hobbies or whatever it is?   Len Herstein: Yeah, it applies 100 percent outside or especially to our relationships, whether they're our friends or our spouses or our partners or our kids, we have a tendency to start taking that for granted. They're always there, they're there at the house. And so we we stop asking questions. We start focusing only on problems, right? We don't debrief things that go well, our conversations become always about pain points as opposed to successes. And so our relationship takes a hit because everything that we start associating with that other person is negative. The only time that we actually talk and have meaningful conversations is when stuff's going bad. Right?   Len Herstein: We might lose sight of the threats. One of the things I talk about in the book is this idea of threat awareness, of understanding where those threats can come from. How in tune are you with your children's lives in terms of where those threats are coming from? Social media, bullying, substance abuse, whatever it is, are you just focused on the fact that they have good grades and they say hi to you in the morning, is that enough? Or are you really questioning what's going on in their lives so that you're remaining in touch with them? Because the more success they have, the more that they seem to be successful on the surface, the more you're likely to kind of pull back and say, hey, what's working is working. And that's where you start missing those kind of micro failures.   Len Herstein: One of the things that happens in romantic relationships a lot of times is you have an erosion of trust. And this is something that happens in business, it happens in government, law enforcement, you have this erosion of trust. And so if you step back and you start seeing that in your relationship, you have lost the benefit of the doubt. This is something I'm talking about is when you lose that benefit of the doubt. When you are really… When you have a lot of trust in someone and something happens, the first place you might go to, if whatever happened was negative, is that person didn't mean it that way, that wasn't what they meant to do, they are good people at heart, they trust me, they value me.   Len Herstein: When you lose that benefit of the doubt, everything, it could be like, hey, good morning. What'd you mean by that? What are you trying to say? Good morning, huh? When you start reacting that way, or when your people in your life start reacting, you've had that erosion of trust. That erosion of trust comes from neglect of that relationship, which is a sign of complacency.   Will Barron: For sure. So now I'm really focused on with my misses at the moment is celebrating more wins. Because she's a doctor, she's having tremendous success in her career. Our business is growing. And it seems like it's, I don't do it instinctively. I will get on to the next milestone and the next milestone and keep on the way. And then you look back, we've been running sales into org in the [inaudible 00:30:09] academy now for like seven years. And I look back at all the milestones and I've not celebrated maybe like three out of the hundreds that we've been through of customer milestones and revenue milestones and product development milestones, all these kind of things, podcast download numbers and milestones. So this is when I'm consciously being aware of.   Practical Structure of an Effective Debrief · [30:34]    Will Barron: But I've got one final question for you, Len, and that is, is there a structure? It seems like debriefing is incredibly important here, whether it's with your customer, whether it's with your partner, whether it's with your kids, scheduling that into, hey, we did something, debrief afterwards or even just quarterly debrief, whatever it is. It seems like we almost want to do like a SWOT analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. Is there any, or do you recommend any structure to a debrief or any questions that we should ask within a debrief that can drive kind of tremendous value?   Len Herstein: Yeah, absolutely. And so, in a professional setting, there's very specific things that I recommend people do as it relates to debrief. And like I said, there's eight in the book. There's there's do it regardless of outcome, positive or negative, make sure you leave titles and stature at the door so that everybody has a say, make sure that they're regularly scheduled so everybody knows they're going to happen so that they pay more attention. Like I said, there's eight things that you can do that will help structure those debriefs. The thing to be careful of at home is it's not fun to say we're going to schedule a debrief. It doesn't need… That's the terminology you don't have to use.   Len Herstein: A debrief at home could be as simple as a family dinner that we always have. And when we sit down to a family dinner or family breakfast or a walk that we go along on the weekends, just to talk, just to catch up to just say, hey, I saw… Hey daughter. I have two daughters. I saw you got an A on that test, tell me about that. How'd that happen? What went right? Did you change your studying? Did you do something? What went right? Do you think maybe like there was things that went wrong that you could have done better?   Len Herstein: These conversations, they can be scheduled without making them like… it's not like you have to create a conference room in the house and sit down and have a PowerPoint presentation. It could be whatever it is, just making sure that you have something built into your life. Hey, every morning I'm going to have breakfast with the family, or two times a week we're going to have whatever you can do. I mean, it's not always possible, but figuring in those touch points that are specifically built around talking about things that went right and not just the things that went wrong.   Parting thoughts · [33:23]   Will Barron: For sure. The reason I asked you about the outside of work thing as well is just to emphasise the points that we tend to think of our business and sales relationships as one entity and then our friends and family as another, but if you doing a good job and you're adding a lot of value and you're supporting people and you're debriefing and you're improving consist consistently, a lot of it's very similar. If you're just a terrible person, you're probably a terrible person at home as well as a terrible person to your customers. Right? So I think a lot of this translates. And so I think that was important to bring it up. And we'll wrap up with that, Len. With that, mate, tell us a bit more about the book, where we can find it. And then tell us about the keynotes and the speeches and that that you're doing as well.   Len Herstein: Yeah, absolutely. So the book is called Be Vigilant!: Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance and Safeguard Success. I've got green screen so you won't be able to see it, but it's available on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or Apple Books, wherever you buy your books or eBooks. You can get more information at Len Herstein, L-E-N H-E-R-S-T-E-I-N.com or bevigilantbook.com. Or you can just look me up on LinkedIn and I'm always happy to connect.   Len Herstein: And one of the… You mentioned the speaking and the consulting. I mean, the whole reason I wrote this book is to help spread this message, looking to get in front of as many organisations or teams or associations as possible. We spend a lot of time in meetings and conferences and stuff, talking about the nitty gritty, the tactics to achieve success. We don't spend a lot of time talking about how to keep that success. And so that's kind of the role I'm looking to play these days, is to come in and work with teams and organisations or companies or associations to help them understand how do we protect that success we've worked so hard to achieved.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. I'll link to all that in the show notes to this episode over at salesman.org. And with that, Len, I appreciate your insights, mate. I appreciate you bringing this to us on the podcast. I say this straight up, I appreciate your ability to translate this from business to home as well. I think that's incredibly valuable for the audience. And with that one, thank you for joining us again on the Salesman Podcast.   Len Herstein: Thanks, Will, I really appreciate it. I had a great time. Thanks.

Do you want to be rich someday? Of course you do. Who doesn’t? But if you’re in sales, you’re in a particularly great position to grow your wealth—if you play your cards right, that is. More on that in a few minutes. In this post, I’m revealing the 3 best habits of rich people. Habits that you can learn for yourself. And habits that will put you well on your way to true financial freedom. Rich habits One of the hardest pills to swallow about success is that it isn’t quick. Striking it rich betting on the newest cryptocurrency? Winning the lotto? These cases are rare. And the majority of the wealthy built their fortunes over time. Lots of time. The difference between those who become rich and those who don’t is how they spend that time. Because in reality, that’s the only thing anyone has real control over. Now, we’d like to think we’re in control of what we do each day. And think about it—don’t you feel that way? Like you’re in the driver’s seat? But in fact, we’re actually slaves to one thing that rules us all… our habits. Our habits control how we spend our days. They dictate our feelings. Our motivations. Our productivity. Do we work towards building a brighter future? Or do we put off tasks and give in to that warm call of the couch instead? Over time, these daily accomplishments (controlled by our habits) build on each other to determine our future. Indy 500 and Formula 1 Legend Derek Daly said it best when he told me, “You will not decide your future. You'll decide your habits. And your habits will then in turn, decide your future. Are your habits aligned with your own personal goals or stretch goals?” But there’s a problem here. We tend to forget what we’ve done in the past. So we end up not tying that past effort to the present, to what we’re achieving today. Think of it like this: The solution to this problem is identifying the right habits and implementing them NOW so you can reap the rewards LATER. And that’s exactly what we’re doing today. Alright, alright. Enough background. Let’s get into the real meat and talk about the 3 best habits of rich people you need to copy. Habit #1: Track Your Progress People don’t stumble into becoming a success. They aim for it. So in order for you to achieve that same kind of success, you need to… A) Set Goals Set goals. What exactly do you want to achieve? Is it to climb the corporate ladder? Accumulate enough wealth to retire early? Or just get some extra dough to send your kids to college? Try to make each goal SMART: Specific Measurable Actionable Relevant Time-Based The more exact you can make your goals, the easier it’ll be for you to work your way towards them. B) Determine Milestones What are the steps you need to take to achieve each goal? And what do you need to accomplish in order to take each step? If for example your goal is to make $1 million in commissions this year, you can break that goal down into quarterly, monthly, weekly, and even daily targets. How many deals do you have to close each quarter to stay on track?? How many cold emails and calls do you have to make each week to hit those monthly goals? When you break your larger goals down into smaller, daily tasks, you can tell in an instant if you are running behind or ahead of the game. So set those larger goals, break them down into milestones and smaller tasks, and then track your progress towards completing each. Habit #2: Pay Your Future Self First For this one, it helps to think of yourself as two distinct people. There’s present you—that’s the you watching this video here right now. And then there’s future you—that’s the you in a day, a month, a year, a decade. What you want to do is take a fixed percentage of your monthly income and invest it towards your future self. I don’t care if it was a great month. And I don’t care if it was a terrible month. What matters here is you’re paying forward your hard-earned dough so that future you’s life will be just a little bit easier. Now, I’m not talking about buying that car. Or taking that vacation. Because really, that’s investing in present you. And once you spend that cash, it instantly becomes dead money. But when you invest in your future you, it’s living money. Money that pays out dividends. And money that earns a return, getting you closer to real financial freedom. Some examples of what you can do to pay your future self include: Investing in the Stock Market Maxing Out Your 401(k) Contribution Saving for a New House Taking a Sales Skills Workshop Habit #3: Continuous Self-Improvement Continuous and relentless self-improvement. Nobody, and I mean nobody, starts off from square one with all the skills they need to make millions. It just doesn’t happen. Instead, you’ve got to consistently expand your skillset. You’ve got to improve the skills you already have today. And you have to become better than you ever thought you could be. Now, I teased this a bit before but in sales, we’re particularly lucky because the improvements we need to make the big bucks are easier than with other industries. Want to climb the corporate ladder? Buckle up for decades of daily learning before you make your millions. Starting a business? Settle in for year after year of pain, financial insecurity, and, oh yeah, a very real risk of complete failure. But to win in sales, all you have to be able to do is: Understand Your Market Get in Front of Buyers Explain the Value Cultivate the Right Mindset That’s it! Now, if you’d like to learn more about these four steps, we’ve actually cover that in another video coming up in the next few days. Be sure to subscribe so you won’t miss it! Sales is easily the smallest segment of commerce, but it holds the greatest rewards. So if you can tap into the low-input and high-output nature of the industry by improving your sales skills every day, you’ll tap into the quickest way to get rich without taking huge risks. Summary Getting rich isn’t a fantasy. It certainly isn’t easy. But by cultivating the right habits… Tracking Your Progress Paying Your Future Self Continuously Improving Your Skills And best of all, once these habits take hold, your success is no longer a matter of “if”. Instead, it’s a matter of “when”.  

Fred Copestake is the Founder of Brindis and author of ‘Selling Through Partnering Skills' & ‘Hybrid Selling'. In today’s episode of The Salesman Podcast, Fred shares strategies around how you can smash your sales quota and unleash your full potential by becoming a hybrid seller. You'll learn: Sponsored by: Free SalesCode assessment Learn your strengths and weaknesses in an instant. Taken by over 10,000+ of your competitors. Don't get left behind. Take the free assessment Featured on this episode: Host - Will Barron Founder of Salesman.org Guest - Fred Copestake Hybrid Selling Expert Resources: Fred’s LinkedIn The Sales Today Podcast Book: Hybrid Selling: How salespeople can use a complete approach to drive opportunities in the new world of sales Rocky – AI Mindset & Self-Improvement digital coach in your pocket. Transcript Will Barron: Hi. My name is Will, and welcome to today's episode of the salesman podcast. On today's show we're going to look into how to become a hybrid salesperson. And today's guest is the man Fred Copestake. Fred is the founder of Brindis Sales Training and author of the Hybrid Selling book and Selling Through Partnering Skills. And we're going to talk about both these on today's episode. With that, Fred, welcome to the show.   Fred Copestake: Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me. Real pleasure.   What is Hybrid Selling? · [00:35]    Will Barron: You're more than welcome. I'm glad to have you on, mate. Okay. I can feel you've got a strong energy. I can feel you're excited mate, to be on the show, so hopefully we can continue this with some questions from my side. But with that, I'm going to give you a terrible question. It's a lazy question, but I think it's a good starting point to set up the rest of the show. You probably answered this question a million times before. And so I feel bad for throwing it at you, but what the heck is hybrid selling? Someone who's unfamiliar with that term, there's tens of thousands people listen to this. What is hybrid selling Fred?   Fred Copestake: Well, my usual lazy answer is what do you think it is? But actually, no, let's go with that if you don't mind. If you could give me what you think it is without going into too much thought, then we can take it from there.   Will Barron: Well, I'm not assuming because I know what it is because I've read the book. But coming from an assumptive standpoint I would say it's selling both old ways of phones and emails, and the new ways of leveraging Zoom, leveraging the newer buyer journey where the buyer is focused on consumer content, engaging with salespeople like [inaudible 00:01:32] on the process. It's focusing on a new exchange of value where the buyer has access to information where they didn't have it in the past, and they perhaps want salespeople to help them out with different things. How does that fit?   Fred Copestake: Yeah. No, very good. Very good sir, yes. You clearly have read it. No. No. A lot of people will tend to say is, “Oh. It's when we've got to do stuff using different techniques,” or, “We've got to do stuff like using video and sending video and this kind of stuff,” so working virtually. And my answer will tend to be well you, “Well, that's virtual selling then isn't it? That's already got a name. That is a thing.” So for me, it's something slightly different where hybrid's about a mix. And so it's a mix of approaches, it's a mixture of things that we need to do to make sure that we are bang up to date and we're going to do things that make a difference for the customer. And come seeing a lot of good stuff that's gone on before, and some of those newer things to deal with the way that people are thinking, because people are thinking differently as well now. So it's a blend. It's a mixed approach.   Hybrid Selling 101: The Things Today’s Buyer Expects From the Modern-Day Salesperson · [02:28]    Will Barron: How are people thinking differently from the perspective of we're hopefully on the far end of this global pandemic, there's other things going on in the world which we won't talk about this second because, well, by the time the show goes out who knows what's happened in that area of the world. So we'll miss that but it's post pandemic. What the buyers want different from salespeople, how do salespeople need to engage differently with buyers? And how do we get more deals done use this hybrid approach?   Fred Copestake: Okay. So I mean first thing, I wrote book one because there's a bunch of challenges that salespeople have got that we need to deal with. And we were chatting about this before we came on live, weren't we, where we've got to deal with busy, busy, busy, oldie-worldy, and muddled mindset. And that's what salespeople have got to cope with now. So busy, busy, busy, they're running around, they're doing lots of different stuff. They've been very, very active, well blah, blah, blah. But not actually getting anything done because it's ineffective.   Fred Copestake: Oldie-worldy is using old fashioned stuff that doesn't work anymore. It's winding people up because it is that kind of archaic. And then the model mindset is that, actually, are we supposed to be consultative here or are we supposed to be transactional? Because the company says that we're consultative: we deal with problems, we deal with solutions. But then they push us to sell a load of stuff at the end of the week, the end of the month.   Fred Copestake: So I mean, that's actually how I wrote book one to deal with those issues. That's by being more collaborative. But yeah, as soon as I launched that the pandemic came along. And you could see that what happened is that the speed of change also caused us a whole load of other issues, so that's what Hybrid Selling and the book is all about. That's why I wrote it so fast, was to help people with these new challenges which, again, broadly break down into customer challenges, climate challenges and change yourself challenges.   Changes in Sales Techniques and How to Cope in the Hybrid Selling Environment · [04:12]    Will Barron: Sure. Sure. So I think it'd be valuable to touch on these in a little bit more detail, because I think we could do a whole episode on being busy, doing things an old way that perhaps doesn't get the response that we expect from customers. And then just frankly, lying about being consultants and just trying to shove pictures down people's throat at the end of the day, because salespeople have targets. They have quotas. They get sacked if they don't hit them over months, quarters, years. And so it's one thing for management and marketing to say one thing, it's another thing to be put in a position where your livelihood's on the line. So is it cool with you if we run through these in I guess-   “If we think about customer changes, stuff that's happened very recently, I talk about ABC, so customers are more Advanced, they're more Biased, but they're also more Confused.” Fred Copestake · [04:55]    Fred Copestake: Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, I am a fan of the podcasts. I listen to them and I know that you do a really good job in trying to help people address that stuff and get this as modern and as up to date as possible. So yeah, if we go through each of these, if we think about customer changes, stuff that's happened very, very recently. I talk about ABC, so customers are more advanced, they're more biassed, but they're also more confused. So by advanced, again, we know that customers are now further down the buying cycle. They're trying to self-diagnose. They're doing a lot of their own thing. They don't want to speak to sellers. They're trying to do everything on their own. And we've got to deal with that. That is going on. That's real. That's what the research is showing. When I say customers are more biassed, by this I'd probably mean that they're more biassed to what they like and what they know, or even that they're more demanding if you like. They are B2C consumers as well, aren't they?   Fred Copestake: So people expect far more. And I'm not sure that we always can deliver on that. So again, we've got to really understand then their problem and be able to deal with that. So it's all about them, really. They're in the driving seat. They're in this really strong position. But equally, they are also more confused at the same time because, I mean, I talk about we're in this VUCA world, aren't we? Where volatility and certainty, complexity, ambiguity, this is all going on. So yes, they know what they like. They like what they know. They're doing their own thing. But actually, oh God, [inaudible 00:06:01] what's going on anyway.   Fred Copestake: So that's the first set of challenges, these customer challenges that we need to be dealing with in which a hybrid setting approach can help us with. It's teed up to do that.   Value Selling: The Anatomy of the Modern Salesperson · [06:16]    Will Barron: Can we turn this to our own advantage? If customers are confused, it seems that they're in a position where if we can help them become less confused they're going to listen to us. Then if they're going to have a bias towards buying for vendors that they know and like, if we can solve their confusion, then clearly they're going to know and like us. And perhaps they're in a position where we can subtly influence them, nudge them towards an appropriate buying decision. Is this an opportunity as opposed to a threat of the old way of selling things? Should we frame this up as this is an exciting time? If you can be clear with your value proposition, help buyers, and then guide them through the steps of the process that they're stuck with, that the deals are more likely to come with you, and that this is actually an opportunity, again, as opposed to the threat of just being able to spam emails all day and make quota kind of five years ago.   Fred Copestake: Big time. It's a huge opportunity because if people aren't doing that, that's why we're not going meetings. That's why customers don't want to speak to people and they're trying to do it themselves. But as soon as you can come in and say, “Look, I can be your guide. I can lead you. I can help you.” You are setting yourself apart. This is what the hybrid salesperson can do. They're adding value in that way.   Fred Copestake: I mean even to VUCA, I came across this model of VUCA prime where you kind of fight VUCA with VUCA. It's brilliant. So if customers are suffering volatility, we help them by establishing the vision that they need, understanding what it is that they're trying to deal with. If they've got a problem with uncertainty, we can help with understanding. We can share information. We can ask them good questions. We can provoke them. We can prompt them. We can get them thinking better.   Fred Copestake: If they're suffering with complexity, well then we can help with clarity. We can set out the stages. We can talk to them about, “This is how typically things are bought in your world,” if you are not doing it that often. Or even if you are, let's make sure you're doing it as best we possibly can. And if they're suffering with ambiguity then we'll talk about being more agile. We'll give them options to be able to respond to stuff faster and get in front of their own get.   “Forget your products, forget your services, stop talking about that bloody stuff because people will always say they’re not interested. They're not interested at that time, but become interested later once you've helped them get their head around stuff.” – Fred Copestake · [08:22]    Fred Copestake: So for me, that's where a modern salesperson can add huge value. That's the opportunity for them. It's how you are helping people to think, what you are doing as part of the process yourself. Forget your products, forget your services, stop talking about that bloody stuff because people say we're not interested. They're not interested at that time, but become interested later once you've helped them get their head around stuff. It's a huge opportunity for salespeople acting professionally and bringing their full game to bring that value. Yeah?   Will Barron: I want to ask you some examples of questions and things in a second that we can make this real practical for the audience. But Fred, I feel like if I was listening to the show right now I'd be like, “That makes total sense. That's the place I want to be,” because we do this with our own selling to the enterprise of our training programme. I jump on calls, and by the end of the call if the prospect and potential customer isn't super narrow minded in what they want, whether it's our training programme, a different training programme, I've pointed them on one way or the other. They know where they are, where they want to be. What's stopping them. The status is quo. How are we going to get them from one side to the other? If they've not done that, it's been just a terrible call from my perspective. As well as pulling the discovery, and the qualification, and everything that I need to make sure that the deal can go ahead.   Will Barron: I try to make sure that they get a tonne of value. And often I get email responses back of, “Hey, you're not a good fit for us right now. The budget isn't right,” whatever it is, “but we will use you in two years,” because you've really helped clarify and added a tonne of value in that one call which is great for our longer sales cycles. It's not going to be great for some salespeople listening to this who have short sales cycles.   The Collaborative Selling Approach: How to Set Yourself Up as an Authority Figure Even If You’re Just Starting Out · [09:50]    Will Barron: So with all that said, and I want to get into that in a second because that has true value in its own. How to do this on a call, questions we should ask. Before that though, Fred, how do we set ourselves up so that we're in a position to be able to have these kind of conversations? Because when a sales leader jumps on a call with me they know that I am a little bit of a knuckle dragging salesperson, but I have done quite a lot of podcast interviews, have spoken to thousands of sales reps over the years and done consulting a one-on-one train with them. We have built a half decent, at this point, training programme so they know I'm not a complete numpty.   Will Barron: And I'm sure it's the same with you. Customers get on the phone with you and they're like, “Fred I've consumed your content, podcast, books. I'm basically on board. I'm ready to rock and roll. I just need you to solve a few questions or solve a few answers. Give a few answers to a few questions, solve a few problems.” But for the average salesperson listening to this who's selling some random piece of software that hopefully is really valuable and really great for their audience and their prospects. They're starting from a deficit, I feel, versus what me and you are. How do they get in a position where they have, essentially, the authority and the respect from the buyer to be able to ask these questions and have this adult conversation, because it's very difficult to go from cold call to the consultative conversation that you just outlined then.   Fred Copestake: Sure. I mean I think for me, this starts with a mindset.   Will Barron: Sure.   Fred Copestake: This starts with what are you actually trying to do here and who are you trying to do it for? “Oh, I'm trying to do it for me to hit my sales targets. Happy days.” That'll come through. That'll seep through the American guys. I'm sure you've interviewed some of the guys who talk about having commission breath, and just people don't want to speak to you if you're like that. So for me that's a definition.   Fred Copestake: But one, I do talk about a collaborative selling approach. We've got to think like that. So that does bring in the old consultative sales techniques, it brings in added value sales techniques, it thinks about how you can be bang up to date by sharing lots of information using a bunch of different media. But you are trying to collaborate with people, so you've got to make that really clear that it is them who is the most important thing. This is why we're doing this stuff. And so we need to start thinking about them almost like as a partner. And then that is a word that's thrown around willy nilly. It's usually for the person who's going to try and dominate the partnership, I often find. But if you're genuinely thinking, “What do partners do? How do partners operate? How do they think? What does that relationship look like?” That changes the way you go about doing your stuff. It changes the questions you ask. It changes why you're asking them. It changes why people are going to want to answer. It changes what you do as a result of it.   Fred Copestake: So generally think about trying to co-create, trying to collaborate, trying to do stuff like that. That is what will just turbocharge the calls rather than, “Oh, I've got a little checklist here that I've got to get through to see if it's worthwhile working with you. Are you the person I really want to talk to or somebody else? And now can I talk about all my things?” Because nobody's interested in that, and now that's why they're pushing us away. That's why people don't want to speak to us. You're going into that collaborative mindset, that is going to start to set you apart.   Practical Ways to Practice Collaborative Selling · [12:53]    Will Barron: Are there any practical ways that we can demonstrate this on, this is an obvious one, maybe we don't call it a qualifying call that we're trying to book with a prospect. We call it a free consulting session. I don't know, whatever it is. The mindset is spot on, love it. We can come back to that in a second, perhaps. But is there any way to verbally communicate what we're trying to achieve with the buyer whether it's via emails, cold calls, cadences, [crosstalk 00:13:18] outreach, whatever it is. How do we very literally tell the buyer that we are different to all of the other people who are spamming their inboxes.   Fred Copestake: [inaudible 00:13:27] we could call it what you want.   Will Barron: Sure. Yeah.   Fred Copestake: Finish what you do as a result of it. But yeah, I know how important it is to title something to give that indication. But this stuff will come out from the very first moment. And you're talking there about the outreach and about why should I have a meeting with you? Why should I have a meeting with you? Because I want to talk to you about my wonderful training programme that's got lots and lots of things. It's got a little robot you can talk to. It's got excellent videos. It's got me talking. It's like, “Okay whatever.”   Fred Copestake: But if you are talking about, “Look, this is what I understand about you. This is what I understand about your world. These are the challenges that are happening, and that there is a way to deal with this that we can probably help you with.” So have some thoughts around these areas, and then let's start to talk about it having already consumed some stuff. You are already way further down the line of what it is that you're trying to do. So you've got to be demonstrating the understanding of people, of their world, of what they're trying to achieve to earn the right for that call, if you like.   Will Barron: Yep. Sure.   Fred Copestake: To just walk in and, “But I'll do that in the call.” No, not good enough. You won't, or certainly with me you won't as a customer because I'm too busy for that. I'm not going to take a chance on have a call because something good might come out of it. No. I don't want to take that risk. Show me this is going to be good because we're going to get stuff out of it, because I've seen what you were doing already and even where you approached it. That's what I want to be doing.   How to Remove Friction in Your Sales Processes by Practicing Consultative Selling · [14:42]    Will Barron: So is it fair to say then, and tell me if this is completely off base, your cold outreach email could be an hypothesis about the buyer. You've looked into the company, you've compared it with your best customers, you've compared it with people who have failed in the marketplace, whatever reason. We have a problem that you can solve.   Will Barron: And you perhaps lead with, Hey, you are similar to this. We've worked with them in the past on these three things. This is what they had issue with. Here's a piece of content, here's a case study or whatever on how we solved it. Would it make sense to jump on a quick call, to see if you had these issues and if we can solve it for you. Is that the kind of outreach that then leads to these kind of consultative call? I keep trying to pull back on calling it a sales call because it's more a conversation, right?   Fred Copestake: It's still a sales call. Yeah. That's what modern fashion salespeople do. So yeah, its like that but shorter.   Will Barron: Sure.   “I probably wouldn't be down with, “Have a little look at this,” because now you're making the customer have to do something. If you've called out the challenges, if you called out the things that will prove that you do know what you're talking about, that should be enough just to get the ball rolling.” – Fred Copestake · [15:45]    Fred Copestake: I know. And we know we've got to try to make something short as possible. So yeah, it is sort of saying in your world this is probably the stuff that's going on. Bang, bang, bang. Yeah. We have dealt with people like this. I probably wouldn't even be down with, “Have a little look at this,” because now again, you're making the customer have to do something. If you've called out the challenges, if you called out the things that they will recognise as that you do know what you're talking about, that should be enough just to get the ball rolling, if you like.   Will Barron: Sure. [crosstalk 00:16:04]-   Fred Copestake: But as soon as it's coming, me, me, me, we, we, we, I, I, I… It's like, “Good for you. [crosstalk 00:16:08]-   Will Barron: I had a good pitch from my way the other week, Fred. It was a copywriter. So we are launching, I won't talk about it too much because it's going to go off in every podcast I do. So I don't want to plug it too much, but we're launching a free version of our sales code assessment. Relaunching it, because two people tried to take it originally, it crashed, And so we've had to re-engineer it so it can handle the kind of traffic they're thrown at it. So with that said, someone tried to take it, couldn't get through it, page crashed.   Will Barron: And so they emailed me going, “Hey, it seems like you're having tonnes of success here with this specific thing.” So obviously they've got my attention because they obviously care about what we're doing. And he was like, “Hey, I'm a copywriter. I would love to help you write some follow up emails for the sales code assessment. And I'll take the ideas out of your brain. I'll put them in copy that people will click on, and I'll save you hundreds of hours worth of faffing about to do so.” And he won a bunch of business, like two or three grand worth of copyright business out of me just from that one cold email.   Will Barron: And I think he was actually surprised how, because I just said, “send me an invoice,” and immediately just I was like, “If you could send me that email, you can write emails from me that will work as well.” And I think he was slightly shocked at how quick I just paid him. But that was an email that got my attention, obviously wasn't spam because it was so specific to me. It made me go, “Ah. That's what I need. I've not got time for all this copywriting and stuff. But I do want my thoughts and ideas to be the lead of all this.” And he's going to suck it out with me, do the legwork, and provide me with a great copy.   Will Barron: And I said that was a cold email from some dude I never heard of. Got paid a few hours later. And the work was done a few hours after that. And I was like, “That was a great cold email.”   Personalized Versus Relevant Sales Emails · [17:44]   Fred Copestake: But that's a brilliant example because, again, done the homework. Has looked at what you are doing, your world. Has made that so relevant to you. And I think people get confused only between personalised and relevant. It's, “Hey Will, I looked at your link to your profile and you went to the same university as me and you like dogs.” And, “Yeah. But I talk to my mates in the pub about that. So I don't need to pay someone to talk to about that.” Yeah. But they're saying, “This is what's happened. This is what you are doing. It's bang up to date.” And you're thinking, “You must be watching me carefully because I literally only just announced that.” So you've taken the opportunity, responded to it, it is all about me. So yeah, come on, let's carry on the conversation because I don't feel as though I'm going to be wasting my time here. [crosstalk 00:18:27] example.   When You Earn the Right to Sell to a Prospect, You Put Yourself In a Better Position to Get the Business · [18:27]     Will Barron: I feel like what we're saying is not common sense, but it is somewhat obvious. If you pitch yourself as the buyer, all this makes top sense. As a salesperson we're so indoctrinated. And media and society has their own thoughts and opinions about salespeople as the stereotype, which probably floods into our industry as well. Is it fair to say that if we put ourselves in the buyer's position, a lot of what we're describing right now would be more obvious and clear to us?   Fred Copestake: Yeah I mean, in some ways it is obvious when you get it, I suppose. So it's a bit harsh to call it that. But yeah, again, salespeople perceive it as, “Oh you've got to go and you've got to have the gift for the gab. And you've got to sell ice to Eskimos and talk the hind legs off a donkey,” and all this kind of thing. As opposed to it's no you've got to be really good at understanding other people to be able to put yourself in their shoes, to talk about the thing that they find most interesting, which is themselves, to then work out, “Well, actually we can work together on this to make you a better version of yourself. To do what you are trying to do better, quicker, more effectively, whatever.”   Fred Copestake: And by demonstrating that that's how you are and that's what your approach to sales is early on. Then again, yeah, like I say, that's why people want to speak to you because you are a more collaborative person because you're going to be using, like I said, risk of repeating consultative sales skills. You'll work out what's going on there. Where are they now? Where do they want to be? You'll think then, “Okay, I can solve that pain.” And you never use that word with the customer. Please never ever use that word with the customer. But you can solve those issues, those challenges, those concerns, and add more into it. At the same time, let's build some value into what we're doing because we're spending time together, there's other things that I can do. I can lead the discussion. We can start to go down this route. I can introduce other people. We can do all of these things, but yeah, we've got to earn the right early on and demonstrate that` that's how we go about stuff, otherwise hidden gems because we'll never have those conversations.   Will Barron: So obviously I agree with you, which is a problem. Right? Because these episodes are more-   Fred Copestake: I know. Boring isn't it?   Will Barron: … exciting when I'm debating people or I'm going back and forth. Obviously clearly-   Fred Copestake: [crosstalk 00:20:33] in a minute.   Stop Doing These Things If You Want More Time For Productive Sales Activities · [20:33]    Will Barron: So I'll try and play the devil's advocate a little bit here, Fred. And I feel like if someone's listening, they're driving along in the car now. They're just off to the office. They're off to see a customer wherever it is. They're going. This sounds fantastic. I've not got time to do any of this crap. I'm so busy. All I can do each morning is click send on this email cadence that's going to spam 500 people with a kind of customised, personalised email. And I know that I can scrape up 1% or 2% of those suckers and they'll jump on a call. And then everything can fall into place, right? A lot of people will be thinking, “Once I get the right person at the right time with the right product and the right need on the phone, then I can have the consultative conversation.”   Will Barron: So if we're going to go for this approach which is high touch and hopefully higher conversion rate. So we end up doing more revenue on the back of it via less outreach, via less annoyance to the market. We want to reach out to people who are the right people, at the right place, at the right time. Perhaps we can trigger events, and things can be engineered somewhat with pricing or whatever it is. But with that in mind, how do we start to free up time on the other side of things? You mentioned this at the top of the show. How do we become less busy and less productive? Is there anything in the hybrid selling world that we should stop doing to free up time to do the activities that we know generate results?   Fred Copestake: Right. If somebody picks up a copy of the book, if I had known a copy of the book, we'll put a link to the scorecard in that I've developed, which people can answer questions to see how close they are to what I believe is the modern selling model and way of operating moving forward. And if they don't do that, well, the good news is they'll have plenty of time to do whatever they want because they will be at a risk of becoming irrelevant. And the issue that I've got and why I love coming on things like this so I can talk about it, is that we can be little bit like that metaphorical frog in the water that's warming up. It's getting warmer and warm and warmer. The frog doesn't know and so it doesn't know to jump out, but it'll end up boiling itself. And that's what's going on.   Fred Copestake: So you can sort of carry on doing what you've always done. You're getting this limited and less and less success. And that is what's going to create the busyness. And so hopefully what I can do, and also fellow trainers who do think like this, is saying, “Just stop and give yourselves a moment. And think about how are you doing it because it isn't going to be something that's going to future proof you.” You'll get away with it for a bit, but ultimately it will not be effective. It just won't work full-stop. But you'll not really notice it, and potentially until it's too late. And that sounds quite, I don't know, doom and gloom. But equally it is massive opportunity because if you get ahead of the game and you start doing this stuff, make yourself time to do all of the things that, I believe, are involved in hybrid selling, you will be a better operator for longer, basically.   This is The Modern Selling Model. Are You Practicing It? · [23:37]    Will Barron: How do we know, and this maybe the most ridiculous question I've ever asked, how do we know if we're the frog, Fred? How do we know if we're that frog?   Fred Copestake: That's the point. You don't. I mean, apart from somebody comes along and they say, “Here. Have my assessment for free. Just look at that, pick up the recommendations off the back of it and go and do something about it,” because a lot of the things, a lot of the hybrid selling model I talk about, it's not brand new. “God. Here's a lesson in how not to sell stuff on our sales podcast.” But what I'm saying is that here are some of the things that are recognised as being good selling that you might well be doing. We'll make sure you carry on doing it and you make it part and parcel of daily activity.   Fred Copestake: There might be things that you don't recognise but which actually have been around for a bit. And there are some things that you'd say, “Ah, they are a little bit newer and I need to get my head around from those new techniques.” And what I'm trying to do is I've tried to set it out as cleanly as possible, as simply as possible. To say, “Look. Consider these things and get these into the way that you operate because otherwise your performance isn't going to be good enough.”   Will Barron: Okay. So therefore, I will link to the scorecard below this episode on YouTube. And then in the [inaudible 00:24:44] over at salesman.org. I will also do the scorecard myself and I'll put my score on the show notes to see how I perform. And if I'm just a massive hypocrite doing these shows with yourself, Fred, then I'm just a nonsense salesperson myself, which could be the case. It could be. I could be the frog.   Fred Copestake: It could well be. No, it'd be really interesting. Thank you. Thank you for offering to me the frog in this live dissection. Oh, this is getting a bit weird. No, but what might well come across, without being a mind reader or anything, is that I do know that stuff. I was aware of it. I've used it in the past. “Hey, we're out of medical wrap.” We used to do that stuff and I've kind of forgot it in this role. But I should be bringing it in because I mean, if people want the simple takeaway for this it's that the analogy that I use, it's like playing a drum. And that if your performances, you've got a little drum and you're tapping it away with a single drum stick, that performance might just about have been good enough. As we go forward because of the speed of change, and it's to do with the speed of change, it will not be enough.   Fred Copestake: And what we need to do as salespeople is assemble ourselves this full drum kit. We've got all these different bits that we can play and that we hit as and when it's the right time to do that. So we become a more accomplished and a kind of a fuller operator in what we do. And most people will probably, if they're truly honest with themselves, step back and go, “You know what? Yeah. My drum kit isn't big enough.” I need to start building up, now, literally for the here and now. But also certainly moving forward if I want to have a career in this I need to be bringing that thing up.   Will Barron: Sure. Something that I'm doing this year which I've never done before, and it seems absolutely ludicrous, is quarterly reviews. So I've got one coming up in a few weeks from now. And I think salespeople should be doing this as well. I'm taking three days off: no content production, no customer calls, no one-on-one mentoring, or anything. And I'm just going to look through the numbers I'm going to see what's working, what isn't, what content is, what isn't. And we get tonnes and tonnes of customer feedback because so many people go through the training programme of what people want, what people don't want. And how ludicrous is that. I've never. I've just been so busy that I've never done that before routinely.   Why You as an Individual Sales Rep Need to Start Reviewing Your Weekly/Monthly/Quarterly Sales Activities · [26:50]    Will Barron: At the end of every year we do a big poll, like 5,000, 6,000 people giving those responses. And that kind of goes into a big database, and numbers get spat out of that, and thoughts and opinions that we can improve upon. But yeah, quarterly report is something I never did when I was in a sales role, other than maybe we had a quarterly sales meeting so I needed to do some kind of presentation for that. But really deep diving into the CRM, into the email marketing that we're doing and everything like that, is my mission this year so I can avoid becoming the frog.   Fred Copestake: Yeah. And that hopefully, and by the sounds of it, will involve a lot of review of yourself. And that's again another drum that I said I beat, which is that salespeople have got to take time for themselves. They've got to give themselves time to stop and think. And then as we get under pressure and as the world speeds up and we're trying to do all this stuff, that busy, busy, busy goes into a bit of a vicious circle because we don't just stop and go, “Hang on a minute. What am I doing? Is it making a difference here? Am I doing the right stuff? How can I get better at the things that I need to do? Am I concentrating on the wrong area?” And we just feel kind of guilty giving ourselves that time. So I strongly advise salespeople to just give themselves some thinking space, some reflection time, because that is an investment. Think of it as an investment. That's how I'd make a recommendation on that. I mean, I do that every day.   Will Barron: Yep. How [crosstalk 00:28:17]-   Fred Copestake: I do that every day. And people go…   How to Review Your Individual Selling Activities · [28:16]    Will Barron: Was it a process?   Fred Copestake: I talk to a robot. Yes Fred, we'll cut this bit out. No seriously, I talk to a robot. I use this app called Rocky AI, Rocky.ai. It's an artificial intelligent chat bot. But rather than you ask the artificial intelligence something and it gives you an answer like, “Hey Siri, what's the capital of,” Rocky asks you questions so you've got to answer these things. So first thing in the morning, grab the phone. And I know people say, “Oh, that's the worst thing you can do.” Yeah. But first thing I do is put Rocky on. So in the morning he's asking me about, I have it turned on at the moment onto clarity and purpose. It's asking what's driving you today. Why are you doing this thing? How are you going to do this? It's five minutes, but it's the questions that it asks like any good coach would, that makes me think.   Fred Copestake: And again, you type these things in and it's using the AI. It's using machine learning to then ask a question based on the response you give. And then suggesting little nuggets to read. It's an amazing little programme. It's so cool.   Will Barron: I love that.   Fred Copestake: And yeah, no, it is good. And then in the evening, again while Mrs. Is watching EastEnders, whatever. It's like, “Okay bang. Rocky on. 7:00. Blah, blah, blah,” another five minutes answering questions. What have you done in the day? Reflecting, and of course the question triggering questions. Salespeople shouldn't need explaining why questions are such a good thing. That's what Rocky does. He's brilliant. And again, I personalise him a bit too much, I think. But no, it's a nice big kit.   Will Barron: Well, about 85% of the audience are going, “What in the hell is EastEnders?” So that's an inside joke for, it was Brit, right? Well, I do something similar but less tech focused and a little bit more old school of I just read a book every morning. And I'll read books that are provocative books that are on coaching, or whatever I'm trying to learn at the moment. And I just take great pleasure in making a… I want the dog. The dog is just laying next to me. I'll stroke him. I'll have a coffee, a strong coffee. And I'll just sit and read. Me misses gets up, say, an hour later than what I do each morning. And that process of just having someone else's thought in my brain, it's almost like a meditative thing. And I get loads of ideas. And I'll be thinking that, “Oh, I've come out of ideas.” It's similar to being in the shower, right?   Fred Copestake: Yeah.   Will Barron: Where you focus on one thing, or you're not focusing on anything, you're subconscious is spitting up all these things that has been focusing on during the night, and it's been working on while you've been asleep. And I'll have the notepad next to me and I'll write down all kinds of stuff, 80% of it nonsense. But then it's the 10% of, “Hey, you were a bit rude in the car the other day when that person drove in front of you.” What does that mean? Or this book is talking about… I'm reading two books on minimalism at the moment and I'm trying to implement that into our business as we touched on before we clicked record, Fred, of how to simplify things. A whole training process, and methodologies, selling made simple. So how can I put that even further into the world whilst also driving expensive cars and having a nice big house and stuff, so there's obviously a bit of balance there with some of this.   The Minimalism Mindset in Sales · [31:14]    Will Barron: And it's something that, in fact, just this morning, I got this quote I was like, “That is genius. That is really powerful.” I'll share it with you now. You tell me what you think, Fred. I don't know how this relates to sales, but I'm going to butcher the quote slightly but it was on the lines of, “Minimalism is removing everything that doesn't help you become the person you want to become.” So I guess if we put that into the sales perspective, we can probably get rid of a lot of crappy cold outreach that doesn't help us. We can probably start doing a lot more referrals and things like that proactively help people you've already helped. You can stop, which I think you might be on board of as well of, because you've been mentioned a few times go back to things that have worked in the past and leverage them as opposed to try and reinvent things, or use this new sales tool, or use this, this AI robot that's going to spit out all these things.   Will Barron: And in my experience, none of it is ever that valuable, the sales tech stack, other than the obvious tools that we need. And it's if we think about sales like that of who you want to become that quota crushing salesperson, well you've got to become the person who can do the work and then you've got to choose the right work to do and just scrap everything else. Right?   Fred Copestake: Yeah. No. I think all of those. And I take it another angle as well is think about it from a customer perspective. I mean again, that's how we should be thinking as salespeople. So it's minimalism. Less really is more, often, because when you say, “Well, I'm not really sure what to sell this person. So if I just keep telling them stuff, I just keep talking, I just keep giving them more things, more features, more benefits, more stuff, more whatever, more stories, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. They'll be able to pick out something that's good for them.”   Fred Copestake: Well, that's lazy. And that's why the customers are saying, “I don't want to talk to this person anymore. They're not making my life any easier.” But by having that real focus as to I want to speak to you because I reckon that these are some of the things that will be challenges for you because they are challenges to other people in your world. And I've even done a bit of research to see that, actually, I can know that's what you're going through. Let's have a chat about it. This then is the response for you. This is what you need to do. Less is more. I mean, what a brilliant sales approach rather than just chuck everything at it and hope that something sticks.   How to Guide Buyers Towards Purchasing Decisions · [33:20]   Will Barron: You can almost reframe it as, within reason, do what the customer wants and then just scrap all the other crap that you're doing. And as long as you don't take it too literally, but that's your mindset, you're going to be on the right track there, right?   Fred Copestake: Yeah. Yeah. And then this isn't about being subservient to customers by the way. Yeah. So as I talk a lot about leading customers, and again, I use that word because well it forms an acronym evolve which is in the book. But it deliberately gets people's back up a little bit. It's like, “What? You are saying salespeople should lead customers?” So yeah, absolutely I am. Not up the garden path. Not in an '80s kind of manipulative way where we're trying to get them to do stuff they don't really want to do. And we're using all these and trickery things. It's leading them in something that they are struggling with, they don't know how to do. So maybe the word guide would be better. But yeah, we're doing that sort of stuff. But it's doing this stuff that is absolutely relevant to that.   Fred Copestake: A word I keep going back to, whenever I'm thinking about hybrid selling and I'm thinking about helping people be moderate, helping people balanced out. I keep going back to relevance. Is what you're doing relevant to the customer, to you, whatever? And so, yeah, that's why I try to do. And I mean, that's why I did write the book so quickly because I thought, “These change have happened, they weren't foreseen, they probably changes which were going to happen anyway it's just they happened so fast. Let's get people ahead the game and get them doing stuff that's just going to help them.”   Will Barron: Yep. I remember I've talked about this on this show before, we can wrap up with this, these tales about the books of when I was in medical device sales I had actual arguments with sales management, a regional sales director, what was his titled?The national sales director of I was not allowed to give our customers catalogues. I was not allowed to leave product catalogues with surgeons so they could look through. And there was no pricing or anything in these catalogues. Heaven forbid email over pricing of multiple products rather than sending them a quote. And even to log in online, this last company I worked for had incredible content. They worked with some of the world's top leading colorectal surgeons, urologists, gynaecologists in, I wouldn't name the company. I know they did that. But in their own operating theatres, using all their equipment. And the surgeons were more than happy to promote and talk about the procedures and how they were innovating in their space.   Will Barron: You had to get a log in to jump into this crappy '90s portal where nothing worked. It definitely didn't work on your phone. It was so backwards when if you, and they've done it now, if you dump those videos on YouTube they'd have tens of thousands of views which doesn't seem like much. But these are tens of thousands of high level surgeons, maybe there's only 50,000 of these individual surgeons in the world. You have a massive percentage of them learning how to do these procedures from your content so of course they're going to go with your product or service.   The Hybrid Selling Environment is Here. You Either Get Onboard Now or Get Left Behind · [36:15]    Will Barron: Now I had so many battles trying to communicate this. So I feel like what we're describing here, regardless of the pandemic, regardless of whatever else, just with the way that the internet has evolved, the way that business consumer sales has evolved, I think this was always going to happen and perhaps we've just been slapped in the face of it a bit quicker.   Fred Copestake: It's a bit quicker. And just the use of the technology, the using video, the virtual, all this kind of stuff, sending video. Again, some people are saying, “Oh. I'm not going to do that.” Okay. Well don't do that now, then. You're missing a treat because there are people that are. And I was talking on a sales training last week. I said, “Look, in two years time this will just be the absolute norm. It's what we will be training for. Just the way to do stuff.” Now you can be slightly ahead of the game. So yeah, probably going slightly off track. But no, you're right, it's again, I'll go back to the value the salesperson brings is in the conversation, or it's in the way that they can structure the whole sale so that they're guiding the right people through the right things that they're trying to do. They're stimulate in the right thinking. They're getting the right conversations going. They're showing the right things at the right time or confirming to people who've already done their own diagnosis stuff that, yes, what you saw there is correct.   Fred Copestake: That's where the salesperson has value. It's not with, “I've got this information. And if you're nice I might show you some.” But we've got all that information from you, your competitors, everyone else. And the fact that I've been in medical sales. I've been at university for seven years to learn about it and practised it for another 20. So yeah, I can live without you, thanks mate.   Parting Thoughts · [37:58]    Will Barron: My experience is the buyer comes to you just asking for your pricing and your withholding anyway. They're probably just justifying the fact that they've worked with someone else, or they're putting out a tender or something anyway. So at that point, if you're only engaging you've probably lost the deal already. With that, Fred, we'll wrap on that, mate. Tell us about the books. Tells us a little bit more about the scorecard that will be linked below this video or in the show notes as well. And anything else you want to share, mate?   Fred Copestake: Yeah. Well, I'd say the book I wrote pretty quickly because book one came out and then everything changed. But actually it's not. But one's still very relevant. But Hybrid Selling, there's three parts to it. Part one, there's a story. So we've got two little sales guys, Harry and Larry. They're probably good mates for your Sam actually, to be fair. So yeah, Harry and Larry, and what they do is they've got to go through some changes. Clearly they've got to work out how to get through some quite difficult times. I wrote it like that because I wanted people to identify with where they might be. I mean, I know that storytelling is really effective. Basically they invent the evolve model. And so in part two, I had to go through the evolve model which are the six main elements that I believe make up that big drum set thing I was talking about.   Fred Copestake: So we talk about the essentials of selling, so the big foundations, the basics, the stuff that we've got to do to make sure we are good at sales. I talk about virtual selling. So yeah, we talked about it, working on video, sending video, social selling, I had that put in to that mix for I needed to put it somewhere. And think about some of the AI tools. To our opportunity management, so again it's thinking about what information do we have? How do we use that? How do we map out what the actions are going to be as a result? How do we take that stuff forward?   Fred Copestake: And talk about leading, as we've just been saying. How can you guide people? How can you align to their process if they know what it is? How can you help the design process if they don't? Talk about value selling, again, this stuff's been around a long time but I sometimes wonder do people do it well? We seem to have this thing at the moment where people turn up and go, “I'm going to tell you where your value is.” It's, well really, value selling is helping somebody to understand what the value could be and how we can work on that together. Talk about how you expand the sales, so it's account management stuff, customer success management stuff, because we should be selling results and outcomes.   Fred Copestake: So that packs the bottle up in that nice section as well. Okay, so what are you going to do about it? You'll appreciate it as involved in training that information is good, but it's all about implementation. So it's how can I help people to take this stuff and start to do stuff with it? So some extra analysis tools in there so they can start to understand themselves, broadly like the scorecard that we'll put the link to. But it's all about getting, my mantra is, good people doing good things in a good way. That's how I want to try and help the world of sales, if you like.   Will Barron: Amazing stuff. Well, I appreciate you Fred. I appreciate you're the first person to come on the show and mention EastEnders. You're the first person over, I say this all time, to say Willy nilly. I don't think that translates elsewhere in the world so I appreciate that, mate. I appreciate you.We'll like to the box, the scorecard, and that AI tool that you mentioned it earlier on in this episode over at salesman.org. And with that Fred, I want to thank you again for joining us on the salesman podcast.   Fred Copestake: My pleasure. Thank you.