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Hi friends. Welcome to the win rate podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. Now that was Richard Harris. And Richard is one of my guests on this episode of the win rate podcast. Richard is the founder of the Harris Consulting Group, and he's the author of a brand new book that we're going to be talking about today.
His book's title is the seller's journey, your guidebook to closing more deals with neat selling. And yeah, neat's not a call for you to be more tidy on your selling. It's an acronym need. Economic impact, access to authority and timeline. Now, my other guest today for this lively discussion about the role of sellers as agents of change, and also the absolute importance of the human dynamic between sellers and buyer are Ian Koniak.
Ian is the founder and CEO of Untap Your Sales Potential, and also joining us as Neeraj Kapoor. Neeraj is the founder of Everyone Works in Sales. Sales trainer and a LinkedIn trainer. Now, one listener note before we jump into today's discussion, I want to remind you to subscribe to my newsletter, my weekly newsletter.
Join the more than 60, 000 sellers and sales leaders who subscribe to receive win rate Wednesday. Now, each week on Wednesday, you'll receive one actionable tip to accelerate your win rates and a lot of other great sales advice as well. You can subscribe by visiting my LinkedIn profile or visiting my website, andypaul.
com. Okay. Are you ready? Let's jump into the discussion.
Okay, friends, that's it for this episode of the win rate podcast. First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen. I'm so grateful for your support of the show. If you're enjoying this new podcast, if you could leave a quick rating or review for us on Apple podcast or Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, greatly appreciated.
Also, if you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast, the win rate podcast with Andy Paul. Again, on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And I want to thank my guests today, Richard Harris, Ian Kapoor for sharing their insights with us today. Again, thank you so much for investing your time with me today.
Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the win rate podcast with gosh, just an all star cast of panelists today. We've got our guest of honor, Richard Harris Niraj Kapoor and Ian Koniak. So maybe before we jump into it, we'll start with you, Ian, just 30 seconds on you and what you do.
I am founder and CEO of an organization called Untap Your Sales Potential, and we provide coaching, community, and courses for tech sales AEs to perform their very best in sales and in life.
Excellent. Niraj.
Hi everybody. I'm Niraj. I spent 23 years in Corporate London in sales and the last six years with my own sales training and LinkedIn training business. And it's really only the last six years I really learned what sales is because until you coach and write books, you really don't quite get it. And it's my purpose and it's something I'm constantly grateful that I can do every day.
Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you and Richard Harris.
I am Richard Harris. I am my mom and dad's favorite son since I'm the only son. It depends on the day, but I have a sales training and go to market strategy organization where we teach reps how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask and when to ask them. And while doing it similar to Ian, yeah.
By keeping humanity involved and the same with Niraj. I know they both focus on that too, that none of us want people to be robots or sound scripted in their endeavors.
Yeah. Well, I'm me as well in my book, so we are all, I'm all matched here. What are we going to, what are we going to,
of your last
What are we going to argue about?
I don't know. What?
out. I
of the last one. That's right. That's exactly what. Andy's about.
Okay. Well, we're going to talk about Richard's book today. This is sort of the focus of conversation. So Richard's published his first book, an excellent book titled the seller's journey, your guide to closing more deals with NEAT, N E A T, NEAT selling NEAT's an acronym. It doesn't mean showing up neat, press shirts and so on.
So we're going to get into NEAT a little bit later, but just quickly tell us what the acronym stands for, Richard.
Yeah, it stands for need, the economic impact of that need, access to authority, getting access to the authority people, and of course timeline.
So what was the motivation for writing the book? We were just, before we started recording, we were talking about, we're given Ian encouragement to write his book. What was your motivation for writing this book?
I think a lot of us in the space write for validation and to feed our own egos. However, we also come up with imposter syndrome about not writing it. I should have written this a long time ago. Behind all of that though, is this desire to always help people. I'm one of those people who will always say yes To anyone who needs some advice, some suggestions, whether it's interviewing, resume, sales skills, whatever.
I think all of us do that. We're all pretty social on, on social media and we'll always try to help others. And I think this was a place for me to put a lot of that advice in place. And yeah, selfishly, hopefully get a few clients out of it. And, if I sell enough, as Niraj said, I might get to buy a latte a week.
So.
No, that's it. You can do it.
it depends what size you're ordering, but yeah.
Right.
so you write earlier in the book that the sellers are meant to be agents of change yet are resistant to change themselves. So let's start that as sort of a first question. Why do you think that's the case?
Well, I think, the traditional salesperson, certainly of my generation grew up with, we were like, you gotta be the former athlete. You gotta be super competitive. You gotta know what you're doing. Certainly the Gen Xers, I think are a little bit of this too, where it was, You just got to go figure it out and go do it.
So therefore getting feedback wasn't always easy and we didn't have the resource to go get that feedback or to help ourselves. And nobody wanted to go buy a fricking book at that point. So today, please go buy a book. But, yeah,
to tapes in my car when I was out making calls, back, Earl Nightingale and people like that.
yeah. We'll have to explain what a cassette tape is. I actually, true story. I had to explain,
Yeah.
I actually last week had to explain to my teenage son, what a cigarette lighter was in the car. Cause he didn't know that's what that little hole was for. He just thought it was a power source.
So anyway, so, so I think we're all trying to be experts at these things and we all think we know it all. But. We don't want to accept criticism and feedback. Well, and again, I think that's a little bit generational. I think, as the millennials have come along, they grew up with the Internet more natively.
Gen Z has grown up even more native to technology. And so the access to information has been a whole lot easier. Not to mention the parenting style has changed since when I was a kid that to now where there's constant feedback. So people are used to constant feedback a little bit more now. So I think some of it is generational and psychological.
The other is nobody wants to admit they're wrong in
before, before you go on, though is what you're saying is you think younger generations of sellers are more open to change because they're more
I think so. In my in the, in, and I'd be curious to what, to all of you think. I think so because they've learned, they've been naturally taught to learn that way. To learn in that approach of how do I figure this out? Who can I go get help from? How do I do this as opposed to those of us who were shut the fuck up, go figure it out yourself.
You think?
think that in general, depending on how long you've been in sales, A lot of us did grow up in a hard knocks, cut your teeth culture of sales. I started selling copiers going door to door, for example, in Koreatown. And, that worked and it was activity yields pipeline yields results. And, in terms of change is hard.
And if you. Are ingrained in your belief system is ingrained to think that something works. You keep doing it. And until people actually realize what you're what got you here is not what's going to get you there, then they're not going to be as receptive to change. It's humans and human nature. You do what you're comfortable doing what you believe works for you and.
People have to get pretty uncomfortable to be in a place where they're ready to change. Tony Robbins has a great quote on this. He says, change occurs when the pain of staying the same is greater than the effort of changing. And I think it just applies in general to salespeople as well, or any perfect profession for that matter.
Well,
But it seems like before we jump to you, it seems like that one of the issues that we're seeing, and I certainly, I see it with some of the, it's not meant to be a discussion about, different generations of sales, but is that in sales in general, these days, certainly compared to when I started, it's much more prescriptive, right? We didn't have playbooks when I got started. We figured it out. We have figured a process. We've got coach, it's more, it's, I see sellers hesitant to color outside the lines,
That's a problem.
but that's part of change though. Right. We talk about, they're open to change, but at the same time, and this is enforced by management.
So I'm not putting the finger at sellers is this fear of saying, I got to stick with the playbook. I don't color outside the lines. I'm going to be criticized for that. Even though it doesn't feel like that's what I think would be best for me.
I think that's the same thing that we all felt going, like, we all sort of grew up by we, I mean, Gen X, like, I think there's a better way to do this, but I'm going to get my wrist slapped if I do it that way. And it's now Gen X and, a lot who are in charge. So they're the ones. Sort of slapping the wrist, but this is also why I like working with Millennials and Gen Z's, because they've all told us to, get the, get out of here.
I am going to go live a lifestyle. I am going to go take my vacation time. I can't tell you how many times I quit a job where I had six or eight weeks vacation. Because I never wanted to take the vacation. Then I was like, Oh, sweet. I'm going to get this fat extra paycheck because of it. Like it's just generationally different and we're in charge.
We know there's a better way, but we don't even want to change. So it's not that millennials and Gen Z's may not want to change. It's that they may want to, we won't let them. Or we think we're smarter than them, which is the same problem that we've already had all along.
Yeah.
I agree with you on the prescriptive piece too.
I'm going to shut up because I know Niraj wants to jump in.
Yeah. We brought them all the way from Belfast. They might as well talk. Yes.
Well, when I started off, it was working in London, in Soho, in the magazine sector. I was like most people you're given half a day's training, a script. And you're on the phone and I wish I had a mentor, but I didn't. I wish I was self aware enough to get a coach. Nobody told me to read a book and I just wish I had that learning because at the beginning of my career, I succeeded only through brutal long hours.
And by genuinely caring. Those are the only two skills I had. And one of the things I love about Richard's book, I wish I had this book 30 years ago. And one of the things you talk about Richard was asking questions. Nobody taught me to ask questions apart from who do you compete with? Which back then, in all fairness, you could ask because there
Or what's your budget?
because there was no budget.
There was no internet back then. You couldn't check. And one of the things you talked about, I've got pages and pages of notes here. That's how good this book is. What would better look like to you? What happened recently to make you want to investigate this? And you ask so many great questions, which challenge people and it's good in sales to change and it's good in sales to challenge people.
And it's really important in sales to challenge yourself as well.
Yeah. I mean, I think that's, yeah, I look at competition and sales. We get into sales for, cause we are competitive to some degree. Right. But there's really, there's two levels of competition. One is you're competing with competitors, obviously, but every day you're competing with yourself. Is competing with the urge, maybe not to make that extra call or not to do the thing you'd not to do, or not to read the book or, not to grow in the way, invest in yourself in the way you should.
And so, yeah, you have to be an effective competitor in both dimensions.
I love that you share competing with yourself because I've been doing a lot more polling and surveys of my clients and where they're really struggling to, make sure the content is helping them and it's an internal battle every single day and there's two things I'm hearing one is I feel overwhelmed and I'm not sure what to do.
I'm working hard, but I'm not sure if I'm working on the right things. The second thing, which was very interesting to hear was that. I don't feel equipped or confident to prospect to executives or prospect to people. Cause I, feel like I don't have anything to share. I don't know enough, or it's this lack of confidence to go out and actually, have a conversation.
And it's incredible because we have so many playbooks and so much training and so much, content more than ever, that it's kind of overwhelmed and paralyzed people in a sense.
talk about this all the time with people too. And I don't know, one of my questions is, what do you want your team to get better at? Right. And they'll list, discovery and all, I'll dig into each one of those. I'll go super deep, but I'll say, well. Do you also want to improve the courage and confidence they have in these skills?
And every one of them says, yes. Like I asked this question became so important for me that I actually have it in my notes. Like when I, I've got a, I've got a template for taking notes with every call that I actually make sure to ask that because I think that's a big piece to what. And I think the other thing that all four of us talk about bringing the humanity in is we need to recognize some of the emotional challenges people have to change, not just the fact that there's this resistance to change, right?
Like we need to try and meet them in their own headspace.
Well, but let's talk about this confidence thing. Cause this is a big thing for me and it's. Yeah, I agree. There's a shocking lack of confidence among sellers. yet it seems to me that, and it operates on several levels, but on a supposed basic level, It seems like this is an issue we could address really quickly in sales.
And we don't though, and I'll just give an example. One is, look at the way we onboard people. We say, okay, onboarding, typically 90 days, maybe half that, maybe six weeks, put you through a program. You're going to be at full product, quote unquote, full productivity at the end of this period.
Half day for me and Niraj back in the
then. And then, yeah, we throw them out into the walls, right. Which, some of that's fine. It's throwing people into the walls, but we don't make an effort to make sure that people succeed. Right. I mean, I managed sales teams, always to make sure people, when they started, they experienced success because once you experience success, what do you want to do?
You want to maintain a level of success and we don't structure the way people are. This is just one example, but we don't structure the way that we bring people into the profession to give them this basic sense of confidence that they can succeed at this task. It's become more just of a weeding out process as opposed to, survival of the quote unquote fittest as opposed to, yeah, how do we ensure that we help people succeed?
I give an example, I've given this on the show a couple of times, but. Is, the Chicago public school district, which is, historically considered a troubled public school district, high dropout rates is the implement this program on several years ago, they called freshmen on target. The whole idea was they knew that if you could get freshmen to perform at a certain level. But the odds of them staying through the four years go up dramatically. If they graduate from high school, their lifelong income potentials, higher, all these, beneficial knock on effects and they focused it right began to give these kids confidence that they could handle the environment that they were in,
Everything starts with your mindset, everything.
that.
We don't do that in sales. Go ahead.
Sorry. No, I was saying that everything starts with mindset. The first session I do with anybody I work with after I've discovered the challenges are going through, what needs they have. It's never sales and it's never LinkedIn. It's vision boards, it's routines, it's habits, it's confidence. Because if you can't get that right, there's nothing I teach you that's going to make much difference.
And a lot of young people they have all access to all the information they need. But the problem is they're overwhelmed with the information they receive. And so they don't understand things like when I talk about habits and confidence, the first thing I'll say is, okay, in the morning, when you wake up.
I want you to spend the first 10 minutes not looking at your mobile and they freak out and at lunchtime for the first 10 minutes, I don't want you to look at your mobile. I want you to go for a walk or talk to somebody and you can just see their heads about to explode. They just can't, they can't wrap their heads around it.
And the ones that do, it's a game changer for them. And they go on to excel once they, of course, learn and have a desire to learn and take action, but everything starts with mindset and with confidence because when you get that right, the learning process isn't easy, but it's easier. Yeah.
Give you a few examples one of my clients For me, it's about what you're subtracting, right? We're living in a very dopamine driven, very immediate gratification driven culture and anything we want literally is at our fingertips. And for anyone who follows me, they know my story of overcoming addiction and, a lot of what I talk about.
So this is near and dear to my heart, but. One of my clients I'll just give you an example. We had our first session similar in our eyes. We're thinking, well, what are you doing? That's preventing you from succeeding. What are, let's take an inventory and figure out the things that aren't serving you in terms of being the best version of yourself.
And we found out he was playing a lot of video games, right? I mean, people want to play video games. That's fine. Let them do it. But he was doing it. In between calls, for example. And when we added it up, it came out to like 10 or 20 hours, right? And it was an escape. It was an escape. It was a feel good thing.
And I said, there's only one thing I want you to do right now between now and our next session. He said, what's that? I said, I want you to put that video game console in your trunk. I want you to drive it to a friend or your parents or someone and get rid of it. And then he had to sit with himself. And when those feelings arose, they go into distraction or go somewhere else.
He didn't have that outlet to go to. And so I call this addition by subtraction. But when you cut off things that don't serve you and you make some really hard changes, the confidence builds, right? And you could take away something that you've been wanting to remove for a while, or you can add something that you've wanted to do.
Simply taking a walk for 10 minutes a day or going stretching 10 minutes or doing a meditation or something that requires you to build discipline. When you keep your word to yourself, you build confidence. And when you do that over consistent. Consistent periods of time that confidence transcends and extends to your work, work life and things don't feel so hard.
So I do think it starts with the personal things that you're making commitments and honoring your commitments is how you build confidence.
Okay. Like that Richard?
Will you hold on, I want Ian, will you repeat that quote though, when you keep your word to yourself, what was that?
When you keep your word to yourself consistently over time, that's how you build confidence, keeping your word to yourself, doing what you tell yourself you're going to do, and then you tell yourself, hey, I'm going to prospect. Well, I need to keep my word. So I'm going to prospect. So you start on the personal side with things that are easier for people to grasp that they want to do.
And they see, I can do this. And I think the accountability helps having people like you and Raj and coaching or accountability partners. I mean, again, it all comes comes down to believing you can do something and actually doing it versus saying it and then not doing it. And then you have no confidence because you can't even keep your own word to yourself.
So I think that's where a lot of it stems from. I,
is, because I know all three of these gentlemen personally, we say this not as something you should do. We say this because we've had to do it ourselves. I've talked about mental health and depression. I know Ian's talked about addiction.
I know Niraj has had some challenges. I know Andy has, like it's so, so just know that as you're, if you're listening to this is coming from the heart from us, not like you should go do this. I don't want to shoot on people. Because I think that's a really important first step. Like I think you've somewhere in the book, I even said, look, if you think this is going to be easy.
Forget it. And I put my email address in the book and I'll send you a refund. I'll then mow your money back if you think it's terrible. So it's that willingness and desire. That was the one thing is I think there's a generation of willingness and desire. And I think it was Niraj, you were saying there were so overwhelmed or even you Ian on this dopamine world of they're just so overwhelmed with so much information.
They want to be better, but they don't know what to put down in order to pick up
And which thing to pick up. And I think we've all had that challenge, but it's, it's a different generation. So
No, that's a good way of putting it. I like that. What to put down to pick up. I mean, that's encapsulates it very well. I, in the New York Times this morning I read story, I didn't get a chance to read the entire story, but it was about a boarding school in, massachusetts and they ban smartphones.
And so when you show up first day of the year, you turn over your smartphone and they give you like this old fashioned phone that basically makes phone calls and you can text the old fashioned way, but you know, H is three presses of the key for H and so
Flip phones.
Yeah. Basically a flip phone. And they start watching and that, the level of focus that we're getting from the students.
Increased quite a bit, right? The amount of attention the instructors are getting in it. And there's been a lot of lots of written, even the last couple of months. So somebody wrote a book about like, I think they called it fracking the attention economy, right? As is, everything's set up to grab our attention in the world, not, regardless of what generation we're in and it's had an impact.
Agreed.
I think, yeah, wise words here from a lot of it, but yeah, how do you, what things steps you take to, in order to build confidence, you have to be able to focus on something, which means it has to be able to capture your attention for an extended period of time, which means I love what you said, Richard, is you got to put something down or pick something up.
Yeah. Yeah. That's actually a quote from my buddy, Scott least, but what I do by the way, too, and I don't know if Niraj And Ian, how you do it when I'm doing in person training, it's laptop closed. I even run a contest at people put their phone up at the front of the desk of the room.
I have a handout that's got fill in the blanks so that they can, follow along to your point. Like
absolutely.
to get their attention. Cause I know everybody, myself included would sit there on a laptop during training and I'd half pay attention.
Yep. Yeah. I do the same thing with laptops. So this one seminar I gave a number of years ago to this company is, I could see too many people were on their phones. There's like a hundred sellers. They're all, inside salespeople. And so I said, well, okay. Yeah. People put on your phones, please. Let's, I'm going to take a poll.
And I said, okay. So how many of you have your phones on your desk when you're making calls? And almost all of them raise their hands. I was like, okay, how many of you look at your phone? If you go, a notification while you're on a call with a buyer, almost again, almost a hundred percent raise their hands. It's just like, right. It's like, okay,
Yeah.
this is the problem writ large. It's the, I call, weapons of mass distraction is what a phone
like. You feel it too. I mean, I felt it a few times on this call. Right? It's like you feel the urge to open a tab to pick up your phone. I've had to take extreme measures to make sure that my ADHD is not dominating. And I think again, there's some medical and there's some people that just, it's their brain.
It's the pleasure center that's being hit over and over again. But it's that awareness. It's that awareness of that need for stimulation starts there and just recognizing it when you take away the things when you remove them, then that's where you have to sit with yourself. And I really do think it's that simple of getting rid of your phone.
My wife the other day. We have lunch every day together from 12 to 1. And at nighttime we have two young kids and we're cooking, we're with them, maybe we'll play a game, maybe we'll watch a show, but I was on my phone giving him a bath and she said, put your phone down, Ian, because we had to hurry up the bath and I'm like, honey.
Honey, I'm just on here for a minute. I missed two calls. I want to check it. It's like, you said you weren't going to do this because for a whole month, I put the phone away from six till 10 at night. And now she thinks that's a permanent thing. So it's like, this is how you train your brain.
As you start removing these things and you build that awareness of those needs for the stimulation. I think it's everyone. It's not just the Gen Z or, millennial, all of us. And,
Yeah, I mean, I,
very real,
yeah, I'm, yeah, my wife and I go walking a lot together in the morning or something and we're out for a walk and I'm talking to her and I look over and says, well, where'd she go? And she stopped and she's answering a text. I'm like, Oh, come on. This could wait till we finish.
Right. I mean, what's to your point, what's happened between six and 10 or what's happening on this hour. I actually had somebody sort of storm out of a training class. I was doing once where I was making this point and I said, leave your phone in your car. If you're going to, they were making calls in person.
So, so leave your phone in your car during the call. Can't do that. My child might call. I said, well, I understand, but how long are your average call? Well, it's, 20 or 30 minutes. Okay. So you can't be off at your phone for 30 minutes. No. So if your child called her in the middle of that call with the client, you would get up and leave. I mean, just as a routine call, you'd get up and leave to answer the, I mean, it was, it got very heated, but it was like, I'm attached to this. I can't be without it for even 30 seconds.
I'm going to take a combination here of what Ian and Richard have said. So Ian was quoting Tony Robbins earlier. There's a wonderful quote called success leaves clues. And in Richard's book, he does an amazing job in neat selling of asking great questions. And the question people should be asking in sales, anybody in sales, but especially young people, is what does successful people do?
One thing successful people do is they have tremendous focus. Right now my email is off. My phone is on airplane mode. I have one browser open and it's talking to you. Okay. Because that's what matters. And you will get more done. I read this in Robert Greene's mastery book recently. You'll get more done in two hours of focus than you will in eight hours of distracted day.
More than two hours than eight hours, which I find incredible. And maybe this is an age thing, but age of 51, which is the age I currently am. My time is so precious. I don't like wasting it. I don't have the capability anymore at my age of working 15 hours a day. And I don't want to work 15 hours a day, even though I love what I do.
I live on purpose. I do not want to work 15 hours a day. I want to work 10 hours a day and do amazing work in those 10 hours. So have a browser open, have an email open, have your phone off when you talk to people because that's what successful people do. And the smartest thing you can do before work is not look at your phone for the first hour and over lunch, turn it off for 10 to 15 minutes.
You will thank me and your life will be so much better.
Well, you raised something really interesting. I wanted to sort of delve into it because Richard brings this up in the book. And it's a word that you don't see often in sales books. I'm a huge believer in, and Richard, you talk about a sales philosophy and I think it's really important for people to have personally, have their own personal sales philosophy.
And maybe I look at a little bit different than you do, Richard, you talk about as a philosophy, as a commitment to growth. But I think what's missing for so many sellers is a commitment to principles, right? Why do I sell the way I do? Why do I behave the way I do? What am I trying to accomplish?
What are the, what are my values, that I'm trying to live up to when I sell. And I, given a quote here, I know one of my favorite quotes is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who's encouraged people to read. But he said, his quote was, the person who grasps principles can select sex, can successfully select their own methods.
The person who tries methods, ignoring principles is sure to have trouble. And I think that's, to me, that's always described what we see so often in sales is, we train people methods, but we don't at a human level, which we've talked about for say, look. You, I can't give this philosophy to you.
You need to have a philosophy in terms of, for all of us here, we talk with the importance of us for the human first approach to selling. That's our philosophy, right? Part of our philosophy. How do we instill or help instill into individual sellers? The sense of having, and we call it a mindset, but I like the word philosophy better is this, have a philosophy about how you sell, why you sell and why you sell the way you do.
I really like where you're going with this. Like, I think it's really important and it's actually making me think about making some adjustments even to my into my training. Because I think that goes back to the humanity piece that goes back to the very beginning. It goes back to, well, why are we so resistant to change?
Well, let's identify where we are presently. And if you ask people. What do they like about sales or, or what's in their, in, in their, what's on their checklist? They always say things like, well, I want to sell a product or a company I believe in. I want a company that's going to support me in my own endeavors.
I want, a leader who's going to help and coach me, right? And all those things are to your point, Andy, a piece of this underlying philosophy. Well, why do you want those things? Because I want to do good in the world. I want to do this. I want to do that. Right? Like there's, there are many, I think we all have enough experience that I think one of my favorite jobs was I ran a sales team for an education software company and we were selling into the, kindergarten through third grade.
world and we were teaching kids how to read, digitally, like on, this is when computers first started coming out and being in schools and it's like, there's something super altruistic about that. Like, I'm, I am making a difference, even today I'll tell people I did that and I'll say, we sold Carmen San Diego.
They're like, Oh my God, I loved Oregon trail and Carmen San Diego. Right? Like, like it.
I love
And
played those when he was growing up,
exactly. Ian's young enough to know, like, I probably. Yeah. So, right. How many times did you get dysentery on the Oregon Trail, Ian? Go ahead.
was going to say principles and values are aligned, right? There's, what are you selling? What do you stand for? It's like, who are you? Who are you and what do you stand for
us.
Having space to even figure that out and what that means and having time like that to me is where it all stems from. You could sell anything and genuinely find purpose and find meaning in how you're helping people, right?
But fundamentally, it's about knowing yourself and knowing what your values are and what you stand for. So if your values are For example, authenticity in Richard's book, I love the chapter around, bring yourself and bring your whole self to work specifically your whole self. What I say is if you want to become a great salesperson, you must become a great person first.
It's the same idea. It's about genuinely being authentic and not being attached to an outcome detaching from whatever happens. Cause you know, you're worth, yourself, you've shown up. With integrity, you shouldn't up with a desire to serve and to help, you've done things the right way and not cut corners.
I mean, I think it all stems from that. Those are your personal principles, your personal values. And if you could, again, I'm not sales enablement for teams, but if I was. Leading teams right now and in a company, that's the first thing I would be doing is really getting people to say, who are you, what do you stand for?
Where is the shown up in your life before? What are some of the challenges you've been through? And really getting people to believe in themselves and recognize like, I don't have to be someone else. I don't need to sell like Niraj or you. Andy or Richard, I can be me and be authentic, nor can you, and you can't model that.
So I think it all starts there is just knowing your own values and principles and recognizing your worth based on who you are. And then, and that leaning on that is for me, nobody talks about that, but that's what makes great sellers is they're authentic and they care and they're curious and they're just, the qualities of them are pretty ubiquitous.
we do get into that and sell without selling out. I mean,
You do. Yes, you do a lot. And Richard does too. I shouldn't say no one does, but I'm talking about sales leader, sales manager, it's like the numbers and the training I'm talking about frontline.
Because they can't.
Right. I mean, the subtitle of my book was a guide to success on your own terms, right? That's, this is such a critical thing as none of us can sell. Like other people, right? We're only gonna be able to sell like ourselves. And to your point precisely, we have to take the time to figure out who we are in that dimension.
And in some cases, it requires that we, yeah, push back and stand for something. I, I'll admit, I'll be the first one to admit, I had sort of a reputation as sort of a doctor no in some places, cause, boss would say, well, let's do that. And my response would be, well,
No. I was
Let me think about that because it didn't really align with what I had my sense of what my strengths were and my values were going forward and I thought, I'd predetermined early on my careers, there's gonna be sort of a path that I've had to find.
That was going to align with me to be authentic to me. And yeah, I would push back, but I think you have to, as a seller. Right. As you have to find who you are and you have to have these conversations with your manager, whomever about, sure, hold me accountable, but I think there's a better way for me to do this than what you're prescribing. Richard, go ahead.
No I'm sitting back. I literally just took like a ton of notes about some stuff I want to now write and obviously give credit to everybody on this call. But like, it's. Thank you for recognizing where I was going with that concept. And I think y'all described it better than I did in the book, but but that's kind of what happens, right?
Like here's a place of change, right? Like the, that we've been talking about is like, okay, I put something out there. I think I'm pretty knowledgeable, but wow. Right now I'm just absorbing what y'all are saying. So
Well, but you really address this in the book too. At that point, Ian was making is, you coined this new word in your book, professional P E R fessional. So the combination of conjunction of pro personal and professional. Which I think is really powerful for people to think about a concept is we can't separate the two
no,
and
to, I did anyway.
Yeah.
Why that's the way we're trained. Right. I mean, I like to say is on sales. We do a pretty good job of training humans, how to be sellers, but we don't do anything at all to train sellers, how to be human
Correct.
and
The next part of the book. That's my next book,
Your next book. And that's really essential, right? Because AI notwithstanding, this is still a human business. That's not going to change anytime soon.
Agreed.
What do you think, Niraj?
I love this. When I ask most sales leaders who are struggling, how much time do you spend on a Monday with your team doing one-to-ones? And they say, yeah, most of 'em will do that. I said, okay, what do you know one-to-ones? Well, we go through pipeline. How much is closing? I said, okay. How much time do you actually spend.
Asking your individual team members, how are you? And he goes, Oh yeah, I asked about the weekend. No. How much time do you spend asking your team members? How are you? And just being quiet and listening to their answer with intention. And hardly anybody says yes. And when I do one to one coaching, the reason I get results from people is because I do the small things or the things that many sales leaders seem insignificant. How are you? How can I help you? What do you need from me? Not a typical question. What's closing this week? Why isn't it closing this week? We have to get more money. We have to hit target. There's a hole in the business. We have to fill it.
I agree. And that's not a, that's not a one on one. That's a pipeline review, right? And you have to see, like, I've talked about this. I don't want to go deep, but, in a management role, there's a pipeline review and there's a one on one. Right? A one on one can even be what I call a drive by.
Where I am walking the floor, old school and just saying, Hey, how are you? What was your weekend? Like, what'd you do? Did you do anything fun? Okay, cool. Anything you need help with today, right? It doesn't have to be a formal one on one. I mean, you do need to have them every week, but you can still do many ones in my opinion too.
So I really appreciate what Niraj is saying here.
Yeah. I mean, I wrote this in sell without selling out. I described. The job of a salesperson, and I said, look, job, a salesperson is to listen to truly understand what's most important to the buyer, the most important thing to your buyer, and then help them get that. And I wrote a post, I was going on LinkedIn.
I said, but you know, that's a rule for life. You only have a better spouse, listen to your spouse, understand the things that are most important to them. Then help them get that. You'll be a better boss. Listen to the people who work for you. Listen, find out what's most important to them and then help them get that.
I think there's this, there's two components that will make salespeople. Start to feel more confident and start to step into their own skin, if you will one of them is caring, right? Knowing that their leader or somebody genuinely cares about their well being as a human, right? And is interested in them.
And the second is belief, believing in them. They got hired and put in that position for a reason. And I see this again with my coaching clients. It's the simple act of instilling belief in somebody. And someone who cares and believes in you, you want to go to bat to prove them right. And when I did poorly as a salesperson, I had a manager where I felt like I was just a number and he could give a damn about me.
And when I did great. I had someone who believed that I had a huge potential and actually promoted me, even though I wasn't on the top of the leaderboard at the time. You could take one person. He took me in that following year. I finished number one at Salesforce globally. And it was this unwavering belief he had in me as a person.
And I just think, the world needs that people need that more than ever. And you got to care and you got to believe in people.
right. And I think for younger people, and this is such a lesson for managers, you experience that, and I did, I was very fortunate early in my career, my first two managers We're great. Actually, I think probably my first or the first 10 years of my career, I worked for a lot of really excellent managers.
You model that behavior. If that's what you're experiencing, then you model that out to the world, not just in your interactions. Maybe if you get promoted, people that work for you, but you model that behavior to your peers, you model that behavior to your customers. And this is, we overlook this.
That's why I brought this up earlier. We want to teach sellers how to be better humans. It's really starts with managers and modeling behaviors that you want the sellers to exhibit. If you want them just to be drones making, a hundred dials a day. Great. And that's what you get a lot of times.
But if you want somebody that's going to be somebody that can have successfully navigate the world and grow and develop, and you're going to take, ownership and helping them do that. It's a different approach. Richard, you're smiling.
Yeah. It's interesting because I've been writing about this recently that we're applying. That the concept of improving sales is not a single lane road. You've got to run things in parallel, right? It is sales training and management training combined. And the management side is teaching the managers how to manage humans.
None of us, very few salespeople I know were promoted because they know how to understand conflict resolution or motivation. Like we were promoted because it
knew how to set up
right. We knew how to sell. We knew how to close. We knew how to prospect. We knew how to follow a process. We knew how to not make waves, right?
Don't complain about stuff. we were never taught how to manage. The only thing we got into for management was maybe we helped on some interviews, or maybe we helped with one little part of onboarding and showing them how to do something. And we said, I want to be a manager. That's how you got promoted.
And, but nowhere in there were the soft skills taught. And I had a coach many years ago telling me that, the soft skills are the hard skills.
Absolutely.
Right. And that's the same thing in sales. It's the soft skills that matter. And that's, a big piece of why I wrote the book is that there's a lot of the soft skills in there along with the tactical, well, here's how you actually do it,
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I call the soft sales essential skills. I mean, it's, there's nothing soft about them. And in some cases, it takes Stephen Covey jr. In his book, the speed of trust. He said, look, you can quantify trust. You can quantify the value of trust and, give several examples of it.
But one is like. Trust facilitates economic relationships. So, if you're looking at duration of a sales cycle, for instance, our ability to move a deal more quickly, you can actually put a value on that trust.
there's a part in the book too, and then I'll shut up because I know Duraj has sat here so quietly. I feel like we've dominated over him. But our job in sales is to get our customers to fall in trust with us. not fall in love with us, a hundred percent to what you're saying is like, and it starts at every step of the way, right?
Like every, from the first interaction all the way through, it's all about building the trust so much so that they reduce the anxiety they feel about making a decision to work with you. That's our job.
Yeah. And in the process, you said they don't fall in love, but they do become fans and they want you to succeed as a result of
Yes. Yes.
That's again, something that sellers don't oftentimes think about is the value of these connections. We make, and I use the word connections cause there's this whole cadre of people out there that don't want to talk about relationships and sales, but you know, it's the value of these connections you make that, yeah, people root for you to succeed
Yes.
and they will help you.
Niraj.
I had a training session today and there's an SDR. She was struggling a little bit. I mean, just on the training session on email writing last week. And I said to everybody, okay, based on what we've learned here, I want you to send me your new and improved emails. And hers was the best. And I congratulate her to today on the training session.
And afterwards, she mentioned me to say, thank you. Nobody has ever congratulated me on anything. I find that shocking. Nobody
That is
A lot of people are just seen as numbers. You hit your target, good for you, you're amazing. That's not good enough. If you see people make any kind of improvement, or take any kind of initiative, or show any kind of support to a colleague who is struggling, you've got to recognize it and you've got to appreciate it.
People will always do better when they have managers or leaders who genuinely care about them. It was fascinating. For those of you who are listening to the podcast, I'm currently holding up pages upon pages of notes that I took on Richard's book. And none of it has been covered today, but we're having such an important human conversation.
And this is really getting to the heart of sales, which is about people. It's about mindset, it's about caring, and it's wanting others to succeed, and that's probably one of the smartest things you can take, even though this book has got so much more value, and so many more amazing things to say, what we're talking about really is the heart of soul and sails.
It's
right. I mean, I, it's funny. I had a couple of people comment to me. It's like, well, Andy, you're all about the human side and helping buyers. And that you've got this podcast called the win rate podcast. You're focusing on winning. I said, well, my job in sales is to help my buyers. I can't help them if I don't win their business. This
also helping them win,
Yeah.
like that's where I see it, like you're helping them win within their own career and life and job
I can't do that if I don't, if I don't win the deal. So it's not, yeah, this is not antithetical. It's yeah. If you want to be able to help, hopefully we're in the business to help people. Right.
Well, here's the irony of it is if you think about people like Scott Ingram, Scott has a podcast,
Yep. No
Jamal Raymer, there's people that I always ask, what is your win rate? And routinely I hear 70, 80, 90 percent of deals. How is it so high? He's like, well, I don't engage until I know I can help them.
And I understand where their challenges are. And then I propose and then I get to the point because win rate really is when you propose, it's not when you have a conversation. Count that as a loss. It's we're proceeding in a sales cycle. And the way you want to improve your win rate is when you actually can focus on helping them win.
When you help others succeed, you succeed. You want to improve your win rate, figure out how you can help others be successful. Period.
Yeah. I mean, Zig Ziglar said, yeah, what you paraphrase, you'll get everything you want out of life. You've got to help enough. If you help enough, other people get everything they want
I am, I'm not kidding. I mean, my, my coaching business is here. Very blessed and fortunate. It's taken off. We are going to be an Inc. 5000 company. And my sole focus from the beginning has been how can I make my customers successful? And we are hiring a customer success manager to do the onboarding to make sure everyone's participating in the calls that they know where to go that we can give them a learning path.
No one's not nobody. But that's not a normal approach, but it's needed because it's For the adoption of any training program or courses is generally pretty low. You buy something and only the 20, 30 percent of people industry wide, complete courses. I'm like, how do we change the paradigm? Well, maybe we should treat it like a software company where there's people actually holding their hand and making sure that life doesn't get in the way.
And it's just these little things. If you put the customer first and really focus on their success you're going to grow your business. You're going to thrive and. We're trying to do that right now, but that's the point of all of this is to be a person that wants and cares about making other people succeed as a leader or as a sales rep.
Exactly. And that's, I think, partly why people flock to you guys as coaches and so on is that they need something they're not getting at work. Getting back to sort of the key issue, right, is I would wager, I'd certainly, I'd look at my coaching clients, Ian and so on. I bet you, if they're getting what they needed from work, we'd have many fewer clients and the things that their manager should be doing, they're not. So, yeah, to Richard's point earlier, yeah, we don't fix sales, help sellers be better as, yeah, fixed sales management, which I agree a hundred percent. All right. Unfortunately, we're sort of running low on time here, but Richard, excellent book. We encourage people to go out and buy it again.
Thank you.
The title is the seller's journey, your guidebook to closing more deals with neat selling.
And I presume it's available wherever you buy books.
It is wherever you buy books or thesellersjourney. co. You can find it there. That'll get you to all the other links if that's easier.
Okay. And audio and digital versions.
Yes, audio's coming, digital's coming. I'm going to have to ask Andy some advice on the audio side. Cause apparently my office is too echoey. So I'm trying to figure that out,
you want to know that you want to know the secret? I posted a picture when I recorded my audio book. I was in closet, walk in closet in our bedroom, which is in the middle, middle of our house. It's completely isolated, rows and rows of clothes and it's me squeezed in there with this recording microphone and everything.
I think I'm going to do that. And I also think I'm going to go buy one of those booths that you hang carpets over or something like I've been on Amazon. So,
Well, we'll talk about your closet and your closet may work. So, all right, everyone. Thank you so much. I presume everybody can find you on LinkedIn if they want. And Richard also gave the URL for finding the book. So, thanks for joining me. I look forward to having y'all back again.