ClozeLoop With Hilmon Sorey
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Sales is all about how you create a space that allows for honest and trusting communication. John Livesay’s guest is Hilmon Sorey, the managing director of ClozeLoop. In this episode, you’ll learn why sales is equal parts acting and psychology. Acting comes in when you speak out the script you’ve practiced a hundred times. But you own it in a way that’s engaging, trust-based, and sincere. Psychology helps you understand the triggers that attract customers to your product. Join in the discussion to learn more!
—
Listen to the podcast here
ClozeLoop With Hilmon Sorey
Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Hilmon Sorey, the Cofounder of ClozeLoop and the author of many books on selling. He shares with us the five secrets of rapport. He said that sales is equal part acting and psychology. Find out what he says is the big problem that confusion causes. Enjoy the episode.
—
Our guest is Hilmon Sorey, the Managing Director of ClozeLoop which is a sales management, consulting and training firm located in Silicon Valley, Nashville and Johannesburg. He has worked with companies that range from early-stage startups to Salesforce, Box, SurveyMonkey and some of the fastest-growing companies in the world. Hilmon is an award-winning trader, bestselling author, and sought-after speaker around the world. He thrives on growing individuals and organizations with repeatable and scalable processes. He’s co-published eight books on sales and he’s regarded as the top thought leader in that category. One of his books is 46 Reasons Why Your Cold Calls Fail and How to Fix Them Fast. Welcome to the show.
Thanks, John. Can I take you everywhere with me to step in front and introduce me?
Back in the day, people could call Moviefone and hear what the movies were. I used to impersonate that voice and fool all my sister’s friends, “If you know the name of the movie, you’d like to pay it.” If you know why your cold calls are failing, you can call Hilmon.
It’s still Moviefone.com, which is a whole weird meta-type thing happening.
That alone is something fun to talk about. How important your voice is if you’re in sales? Whether you’re a speaker or not, the concept that our voice is a musical instrument and in order to keep people’s attention, especially if you’re leaving a voicemail is part of what we’re selling.
What’s interesting about that is I often say to teams, particularly teams of newer salespeople, because so much of sales has to do with what’s between the ears, more so than tactics, skills and things like that. Often, when people have got into the profession, maybe they’ve gone through college or whatever it might be, but they’re early to sales and they have a hard time getting over themselves. These are the folks who don’t like listening to their calls, don’t like to watch back at their Zooms, and don’t hear themselves. One of the challenges is not understanding that sales is equal parts acting and psychology. It’s that piece around listening to your voice, being able to create laugh and being able to create inflection. Another interesting piece around this is the listening side.
One of my early careers at the time that I was doing it was called Inside Sales. Now they called it Sales and Development Rep. I lied about my age at fourteen years old and I got this summer job selling two products. It was for a company called Fifth Media Marketing in Chicago. I can say that now because the statute of limitations is gone and they’re not coming after me for it. We were selling World of Beauty so I was calling people around the country all day long. I have developed such an ear from having done that for all of these summers where I can hear crazy stuff going on in the background when I’m talking to a prospect. It’s like, “You’re getting a cup of espresso.” It creeps people out. Listening to yourself as well as the person that you’re talking to is critically important.
I normally ask people to tell us their story of origin and you got a great one at fourteen years old of having a voice strong enough that someone believed that you were older. I had the opposite problem when I got out of college. I was in Silicon Valley at the peak of all of that taking off. There was a Dick Cavett commercial on the radio to buy computers to keep your recipes on because there was no internet back then. I remember getting hired to sell multimillion-dollar mainframe computers and plug-compatible devices. I would make the appointment, I’d go see them in person and they’re like, “You’re awfully young.” I said, “Everyone is young in the tech biz.” They’re like, “Okay.”
46 Reasons Why Your Cold Calls Fail: …And How To Fix Them FAST
It’s the thing with the B.
Now, it’s even more expected that everything is young. I want to ask you about that soundbite you gave us that sales is equal part acting and psychology. Let’s double-click on that. From the acting standpoint, it’s clear that you got to be prepared. A lot of people think they can wing a sales presentation or they can become so robotic with a script. Actors who have to give the same performance night after night on Broadway or multiple takes on a movie do not do it robotically and yet they’re prepared. What advice do you have for someone who does one extreme or the other, either they wing it or they are a robot reading a script? There’s a happy medium like an actor but for someone who doesn’t understand and they don’t want to do either, how do you help them find that sweet spot?
The perception of ease comes from hard work in about anything. I’ve been watching the Tiger Woods documentary on one of the streaming stations. You’re watching a golf ball and you’re like, “He makes it look so easy.” That’s because he’s hit ten million golf balls. It looks like he’s winging it when he steps up there and he doesn’t do all the crazy things that everybody else does when they’re addressing a gold ball. It’s part of perfect practice.
I love that you make that analogy to acting because there are people who say, “I don’t want to sound scripted. I don’t want to be in a script. I don’t like scripts when I talk about sales.” My business partner, Corey Bray often says, “Do you have a favorite movie, John?” John’s like, “I love the Godfather.” He’s like, “You realize Marlon Brando wasn’t winging it, right?” There’s a way you can take a script, own it, bring your own personality and value to that, and have an impact. What is the goal of the script? It’s all about conversation and communication.
Sales is all about how you create a space that allows for honest and trusted communication and this is where the acting piece comes in. When I say acting, I don’t mean it in a manipulative way. I don’t mean even the smile and dial, “John, how are you doing?” You’ve seen people do it. We’ve heard people do it before and hopefully, these aren’t people that are calling you because it’s annoying. If you’re able to get out of whatever is going on with you and reflect on something that offers an opportunity for the person that you’re talking to, to engage in a dialogue that’s trust-based and leveled on honesty around whether or not there’s a problem that you can solve.
Sometimes that requires acting. Sometimes you’re not in the mood. Sometimes you’re talking to somebody who you may perceive in your head to be significantly more expert in their field or have significantly more tenure. You’ve got to act the part. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes you’ve got so much subject matter expertise and you’re talking to someone for whom this is something they do every now and then. You have to be able to meet them where they’re at to able to have a conversation that they want to invest in and feel comfortable having with you.
It reminds me of Einstein’s quote, “If you don’t understand something simple that you can explain, then you don’t really understand it.” People think they have to impress everybody with a bunch of acronyms and big words. I’m like, “You need to be able to talk like a fifth-grader should understand it even if you can speak it at a more complex level.” One of my favorite expressions is the confused mind always says no, and most people will not tell you they’re confused.
I thought this was my thing but I say that confusion does not create conversion, but I like yours better.
[bctt tweet=”5 secrets to getting rapport.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The other thing you’re talking about is with Tiger Woods. His father who people thought was almost abusive would torture him in a way by constantly jangling coins or all the things you’re not supposed to do when someone is about to swing so that he could get in the zone and not let things get him distracted. That’s what you’re also saying where the acting part comes in. If someone forgets a line or there’s a phone that goes off in the Broadway show, those actors cannot let those distractions throw them. You need to stay skilled enough to rely on your skills to keep going.
One thing that is critically important is there is so much in the sales universe with respect to tips and tricks. It’s like, “Here’s how you start a conversation. Here’s how you get somebody to do something else.” Here’s where the psychology piece comes in. We are all human beings and we all operate under a certain set of assumptions that are innate. We are triggered to be attracted and threatened by certain things. This is the psychology piece. As a salesperson, if you understand those triggers and have done the work to create for yourself a framework that you’re operating within. Whether it’s a scripted framework or whether it’s a looser framework where you understand, “These are the things that I need to accomplish to create this opportunity for conversation and to do business.” You have a richer environment in which you can be yourself.
What’s interesting is that the people who practice regularly adhere to frameworks and understand that dynamic to have much more longevity and success in sales because then the authenticity of who they are is allowed to shine through in a way that is received well as opposed to being rigidly adherent to who you are. Not everybody likes Hilmon. Believe it or not, John. Can you imagine having to adapt your personality and shapeshift all day long to get people to like you? That’s not necessarily the goal. We create an opportunity for conversation. This is why we, at ClozeLoop, are huge proponents of this. In all of our books, we talk about things that are framework-driven. Not just high-level tips and tricks without substantiating them with some defensible science.
The other part of psychology that I want to ask you about is the fear of rejection. It’s the number one reason people don’t go into sales, get out of sales, or have trouble bouncing back after a no. What advice do you have for that?
The advice for a fear of rejection goes back to the idea of understanding what you’re doing as a salesperson and not being emotionally invested in the outcome of your conversations. There are a couple of layers that I talked about with respect to this. We work largely with B2B salespeople, folks who are selling business-to-business things. Here in Silicon Valley, we work probably 90% with technology companies that range from startups to growth organizations. Not to say that it’d be any different than B2C but this is my corpus of knowledge.
What we often say is you need to approach the sales having a lab coat and a stethoscope around your neck. How does your doctor engage with you? Is your doctor wanting John to like him and want the treatment? No. The doctor is diagnosing for pain. Having a dialogue with you about whether or not you’re willing and able to resolve that problem. He’s mentioning any resources that are necessary or a commitment that you need to make to do so, and make an agreement to either move forward or to part ways. It’s that simple. What it requires also is for you to have a separation of who you are as an individual and who you are as you’re engaging with someone to solve a problem.
If someone says to me, “No, Hilmon. I’m not interested,” that’s not a negative mark on who I am as an individual. It doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, I don’t communicate well or I don’t know my subject matter. It means this person either doesn’t have a problem I can solve or doesn’t have enough initiative to solve the problem that I’ve uncovered so I’m going to move to the next one. The biggest cure for rejection is ensuring you’ve got a lot of pipelines. This is such a sales axiom. You care a whole lot less about the one that says no when you’ve got 100 more waiting in line when you do and that’s half of your pipeline. Being able to combine those things is important.
It’s an abundance mindset versus a scarcity mindset. You get too attached to one person having to say yes or no. One of the things I love in your book is about one of the many reasons cold calls are failing is there’s no empathy for what a day in the life of that potential buyer is. You do a great job of showing they do this, they get up, they’ve got this to do, they’ve got to deal with this, this happens, they got a problem, and all of a sudden, the phone rings. If you aren’t able to figure out that that person has a life before and after you, you are so obsessed with, “This is all about me all the time,” as opposed to, “Is this even a good time to talk?”
ClozeLoop: The perception of ease comes from hard work; you need to keep practicing.
“They’ve been waiting for my call all day, haven’t they? They’ve been on my list. You knew I was calling at 12:13, didn’t you?” You’re absolutely right. This correlates to something else that’s become more and more popular where you have a lot of salespeople because of the access to information, whether it’s Google or LinkedIn or wherever you’re finding your people. You can find out what they had for breakfast this morning if they’re on Facebook and they posted it. Leveraging that information, sometimes a lot of salespeople believe that that level of personalization directly correlates to trust and it doesn’t. There are a couple of reasons why. One reason is because everybody is doing it. If everybody is doing something and everybody who falls under the auspices of a salesperson is doing the same thing, you get perceived as a salesperson.
I don’t remember what that show was years ago where they would give a synonym. I say salesperson and the person say something. It’s a word association type of thing. I’ve done this in rooms before and people were like, “Shyster slick, self-involved, self-motivated, greasy and snarky.” I’m like, “You’re ruthless salespeople saying this about ourselves.” Imagine the impression of the people who don’t do this all day long. We have to separate from that a little bit. We have to differentiate, but to your point, how can you reflect things that are like that individual?
As magnanimous as we’d like to be, we are hyper concerned to the extent of our nose. It’s all about Hilmon, “What did I do today? What do I have to struggle with tomorrow? What are the conversations I have? What are the things on my plate? What needs to get moved?” The closer a salesperson can get to that level of understanding, whether it’s through inquiry or they understand that to be the role that someone is faced with because of their subject matter or industry expertise. That goes a long way to creating that kind of rapport that is long-lasting and creates opportunities for communication.
Speaking of rapport, you have five secrets to help people build them. Can you reveal a couple of them?
I can reveal all five. How about that?
It’s our lucky day, everybody. Not all the guests are that generous.
It’s just for you, John. In our book Triangle Selling, which is our sales methodology, having trained salespeople for so many years, everyone understands in sales that establishing rapport is something that’s key. It’s talked about all the time and people will say everything from, “You’ve got to smile, be friendly, and get them to like you. You should look them up online and figure out where John went to college or where he’s living now. You should talk about the weather in Austin and what happened a couple of weeks ago,” and all these types of things. They say this is building rapport.
There’s nothing wrong with doing any of that, but there are some smart people over at the NeuroLeadership Institute who has studied rapport and brain science for the last 10 or 15 years. What they have come up with are five drivers that trigger rapport from the standpoint of either reward or threat in human beings around the world. Here’s the important piece around that. We travel around the world doing sales training and helping organizations grow. There are things that you do in France that wouldn’t wash in San Francisco. There are things you do in DC that you don’t do in San Francisco. In San Francisco, there’s a lot more time for you. There’s a lot more qualification. Let’s have a chat in the beginning. In New York, it’s like, “I’m here, John, what’s up?” That’s not considered a breach of rapport. That’s getting down to business.
[bctt tweet=”Fear is the anticipation of pain.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Apart from all of those cultural or geographical nuances, these five drivers have a significant impact on whether or not you can create a trusted relationship with someone. We bundled them into the term SCALE as an acronym. The reason is so that salespeople can understand that if you keep these things in balance, you have a higher likelihood of becoming a trusted advisor and creating a trusted relationship. The first is the S. That S stands for status. Status is respecting and understanding an individual’s perception of themselves with respect to their peers.
Salespeople all the time struggle with this idea of, “How do I get above Hilmon’s head? He’s not the decision-maker.” What a lot of salespeople do is they come in with a blunt hammer and they go, “Hilmon, who else needs to be involved in this decision?” What am I going to say? I’m going to say, “I’m the guy,” even if I’m not because you’re threatening my status. If you think about the status from the consciousness of you walking outside your door, you’re looking at your neighbor’s yard. You’re looking at the car that your friends are driving. We’re constantly comparing ourselves and evaluating our worth as it relates to other people we deem to be like ourselves. As salespeople, we have to ensure that we’re preserving status.
The C stands for certainty. Certainty is key. There are people who are reading this that are going, “Where’s Hilmon going to go? What do A, L and E stand for? When is he going to finish talking about this?” Part of our programming as human beings, which has kept us alive all this time is searching for the next thing and having some certainty towards what’s going to come next. Ambiguity creates a dangerous response. You said this idea around confusion. The reason that confusion does not correlate to conversion is because we don’t know what to do. We don’t have certainty, and therefore we back away to keep ourselves safe. How do we, in the sales process, ensure that someone understands where we’re going and what’s expected of them and the decisions they get to make?
That takes me to the A, autonomy. The most impactful thing that you can do to challenge a person’s human rights is to put them in jail and give them freedom of choice. This is the worst thing that a human being can experience besides death. Autonomy is important in creating rapport. It’s letting people know, “John, you can tell me now. I’m going to share with you a little bit about the types of folks that I’m working with. Feel free to tell me that this isn’t you.” What do we as salespeople do? There have even been books written about this. It’s like, “Get to the yes. Four yeses and then you close.” We know that doesn’t work. It may work temporarily, but it doesn’t work long-term. Allowing folks to have autonomy in their sales process with you is key.
The last two pieces here are likeness. Likeness is relevant. Don’t send me the LinkedIn message that’s constantly telling me that you’ve got offshore people who can do software development for me because I don’t own a technology company. It sounds obvious, but there is a challenge for salespeople to truly have empathy for the role, for the job to be done, and for the challenges that the person you’re talking to on a regular basis, and how you can go about solving their problems. Only reflect on the things that are relevant to that individual. Don’t just pull down that you’ve worked with Google, Amazon and Facebook. If I’m a three-person company sitting outside of Dallas, then that may not be relevant to me. That’s not creating rapport with me.
Finally, this is an obvious one, but equity, which correlates to fairness. How much fairness is there in the process? If I have a conversation with you that’s five minutes long, I can’t expect you to want to hop on a two-hour demo with me and bring your entire team. Let’s create equitable engagements that you deem as fair that I can expect you to make a decision or commitment with respect to given the amount of time that we’ve spent together and the amount of information that I’ve shared with you. Apart from all of the other stuff that is part of being a human walking the face of the earth, and how we’ve established friendships and relationships, if you can nest this scale driver concept, these five secrets into how you go about managing and measuring rapport, you go a long way.
The last thing I’ll say here is when we work with teams, we will often go into their pipelines to take a look and say, “You’ve got these five companies in your pipeline. Who of these you haven’t heard from before? Let’s run them against SCALE and see if there’s anything here that could be a reason as to why they’re not responding.” Ninety-nine percent of the time, they didn’t know what they were supposed to do next, “I didn’t give them a choice. I didn’t demonstrate to them how this is relevant in their world.” All of these things come into play so this tool has been impactful for helping salespeople have a framework within which to authentically show up, and not have to use some nifty little tip and trick to establish trust.
There’s so much gold there to unpack. Let’s take the concept that you were talking about, which is the L, the likeness, “Is this relevant to me?” I tell people that the joy of learning how to tell a story is you’re answering an unspoken question everybody has when they’re deciding whether to buy from you or not, which is, “Will this work for me?” If you’re talking to a coach about why they need to learn how to sell better to get people to hire them as coaches and you have a story of a coach who struggled with selling, then that story is relevant. They see themselves in the story and they want to buy.
ClozeLoop: Listening to yourself as well as the person that you’re talking to is critically important.
If you’re telling a story of a multimillion-dollar company you worked with and they’re like, “That’s not me. I don’t know if this is relevant,” It may give you some credibility, but you’ve got to make sure that you’re not just telling one story and that you have customized stories that allow people to think, “That may not be relevant to me but there’s something else coming up.” That’s where the certainty comes in of that fight or flight response. The handshake was to show that we didn’t have a weapon in our hand. We underestimate the value of giving people a sense of, “Is this safe? Did I get introduced to a warm intro? Is this spam that I’m getting?” All of those levels are unspoken and going on. If you’re aware of them like, “This is a fifteen-minute call. If you decide we want to go on, we can have another call.” You’re like, “This isn’t going to go on forever.” There’s a choice there of what it is. The equity thing is so important because nobody asks somebody to marry them on a coffee date in dating and yet, some of these LinkedIn requests or a five-minute chat is a few hours of commitment and you’re like, “What?” You jumped the gun there.
A lot of times, those folks are self-interested. You hit it on the head. It’s absolutely equity where I know I want to close some business by the end of this month and I’ve got four days left. I’m going to ask John for two hours of his time to bring everybody to the table and to have his checkbook ready. This has nothing to do with you.
The other thing that I loved about the relevance part is if you give someone the ability to interact with you a little bit, especially if you’re having a Zoom call. Have you ever been in this situation? For example, I will talk to a group of people and I’ll say, “Have you ever had someone say they’re interested, they send me some info and it’s crickets after that? You’re stuck at the friendzone at work?” They’re like, “That’s exactly how it is.” You’re like, “I used to have that problem too,” and now you present your solution. In my case, it’s storytelling.
If you present that, they go, “This is relevant to me because you’re talking about a feeling that I’ve never been able to express.” We all know what a friendzone in dating is. I’ve relabeled it to being stuck at the friendzone at work. You get all excited and you tell management, “They’re going to buy. They said they were interested. I sent them something.” You’re like, “What happened there?” In your case, you’re talking to companies to hire you for better sales training. It’s like, “Has your sales team ever been stuck at the friendzone at work and they’re getting all the people saying they’re interested in them?” “Yes.” Now we have a conversation about something relevant because you’ve shown the ability to express their frustrations, pain and struggles in a way that’s fresh to them and not another going, “We get people that say no,” or “We don’t hear from them again.”
Putting a little spin on it makes it memorable and that’s what you’ve done with this acronym SCALE. The other thing you have here that I find fascinating is this wonderful graph between what’s the priority and what’s the timeframe around pain, fear and pleasure. For me, the example is taking a vitamin to stay healthy versus, “I’ve got the splitting headache. Where’s the Advil? I need to take care of that now.” There is something between pain and pleasure that I’ve never seen before graphically displayed, which is fear. Can you talk about those three circles and how they relate?
If you look at this as an X and Y axis of urgency and commitment to resolving the problem, pain is the most compelling emotion that motivates people to purchase. What we found is that people purchase anything for 1 of 3 reasons, the anticipation of pain, which is fear or pleasure. If you think about your last pleasure purchase from the vantage point of things that we buy. My wife and I are looking for vacation because it’s time to get out again. Sure, we’re motivated. We want to do it and now we’re going to find a decent price. We’re going to go where we want to go. We’re highly motivated and excited about it.
If we’re encountering a salesperson in that environment, there’s not much you can do to keep us from going. You’d have to fumble that one. We’ll make a decision on our own timeline. It’s not an urgent thing and it’s something that we’ll get to versus if I’m afraid of earthquakes. I live in San Francisco. Earthquake insurance is probably an important thing to buy but nobody owns it out here. That’s a fallacy. Let’s say that earthquake insurance is an important thing to buy. That’s on my list of things that I got to get done this year. It’s absolutely true or you could say, “I got a Peloton and I pulled my hamstring in such a way that I couldn’t walk.” How long do you think I sat around waiting for that to fix? Not even an hour. I’m going to the doctor immediately because I’m in pain.
This goes back to this concept of human beings and homeostasis. We sweat when we’re hot, we shiver when we’re cold, and we eat when we’re hungry. It’s all about homeostasis. If I’m in pain, I’m seeking to immediately resolve that problem. This is B2B selling. I’m not selling vacation homes somewhere or anything like that. I’m selling solutions to business problems for folks. We coach people to say, “You got to find the pain or else you’re going to end up with pipelines and people who are interested. They want to take a look, learn about your technology, and it’s going to take them forever to make a decision.” Once you find the pain and once you’ve got that prospect to articulate that to you, you can now help them to help themselves. You can now hold them accountable for what they’ve told you is their problem and help to reflect some solutions to that problem.
[bctt tweet=”Sales is equal parts acting and psychology.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I want to say one more thing, which is important about this concept of relevance. As a salesperson, you want to spend time with people who are likely to purchase from you. That doesn’t mean a salesperson should not be spending time with people who should be disqualified. You brought up such a great example of your ability to tell a story that someone can see themselves reflected in. Getting them to opt-in to a process will move a sales process so much faster than you picking out something that is not relevant and having that person try to figure out how this might work and might not work, “I’m thinking about it. I’ll have that conversation with Hilmon later.” Being able to disqualify early, there’s nothing wrong with someone telling you, “John, I appreciate you sharing that story with me but it’s not something I’m experiencing.” You go, “Great, Hilmon. Congratulations. Do you know anybody else who might be?” You then move on.
I’ve never heard anybody describe fear as the anticipation of pain before. I like that because if you have two ways of running an ad, for example, three mistakes to avoid or three tips to be better at. People click on the three mistakes to avoid more than the three tips to be better at something.
It’s self-preservation.
I don’t want to look like an idiot or make a mistake. Even as a cold call salesperson, if you can give them a reason to want to hear something, you might want to hear three mistakes to avoid the next time you’re hiring someone because I know that’s part of your expertise as well. You’re like, “I’m in.” They’re like, “We have best practices on hiring people.” In that framework, especially during a time when salespeople haven’t been getting together for meetings as much, I hear a lot of management saying, “We’re struggling how to keep our team bonded when we’re not seeing each other as much.” Their job is to keep top talent happy. Have you come across any solutions for management? I know you have a whole thing about how to get the top salespeople, but is there anything about keeping them?
One of the things that are important is creating casual conversations. By that, I mean opening up the opportunity to get out of the calendar. Internal Zoom meetings, by virtue of the fact that it’s Zoom, need to be on a calendar. They need to happen at a certain time, everybody’s clicking into a certain link, they show up in their little boxes, do their little things and they go away. One opportunity that exists and we all have a lot more time. No one’s driving to work and your meetings are probably shorter because they’re boxed by time on your calendar now. You’re not just walking in seeing people and having this management by walking around that was such a big deal before.
As a manager, it’s creating opportunities for casual conversation where I just ping John every now and then at 2:00 PM. I ask how things are going. No agenda necessarily, but meaningful conversation. Not also, “How’s the dog? How’s the son?” It’s saying, “How’s your day going? What are some of the conversations you have? What can I help move for you?” That’s one piece.
The other thing that’s important is training and collaborative activities go a long way towards creating camaraderie, esprit de corps, and when you’re coming together and benefiting from it as opposed to coming together and being berated. Some folks have these pipeline review meetings that are punitive. Some folks have meetings in general where everybody’s present, but two people are participating. It’s creating greater opportunities for folks to share opinions, learn things, and be involved in conversations goes a long way. The last piece that I’ll say that we’ve been recommending for a lot of our clients is having cross-functional meetings. Let’s take away the silos because back when you were at the office, you weren’t just friends with the sales team. Maybe in the programs that we’re all together. I’m kidding.
It’s saying, “We’re having a product marketing meeting with a couple of salespeople. Do you guys want to join? You can come on over. You can sit, audit, and you can hear how we do our stuff.” There are relationships that should be fluid throughout the organization. The greater exposure and transparency we have to how our little cog in the wheel is supporting the entire machinery, the stronger the organization is, the greater the contribution from each individual and the bigger impact everyone has. Also, the more cohesive you feel as a team as opposed to them sitting here, staring at my screen, doing the thing, hop on my gerbil wheel every day, and I get off, and I go back to work. I think about those old cartoons. It was those black and white cartoons showing things going across the screen. I don’t know that it needs to be contrived or that it needs to be formalized necessarily. We just need to have a consciousness of it.
ClozeLoop: There’s a way you can take a script and own it with your personality and value to actually have an impact.
If you are a manager of a department, you can easily say, “Does anybody want to attend the sales team meeting? We’re going to talk about what our plans are for next quarter and some of the things that are in the pipeline. It might not be the most exciting thing for those of you who are in marketing or product but do you want to see how we do stuff? Do you want to see how the sausage is made? Come on in. You’re welcome to come.” Things like that go a long way. Whatever your corporate culture is, if you used to have lunches on the Kombucha all the time, once a month, shoot somebody a lunch and have a meeting, and do that kind of thing. There’s a lot of creativity to be had.
If people want to find out more about you and any of your wonderful books, they should go to ClozeLoop.com.
If you want to connect with me directly, I’m Hilmon Sorey everywhere. I don’t check Instagram much but if you go to @HilmonSorey on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, I’m happy to connect with anybody.
Hilmon, thanks for being with us. There are some great ideas in getting over the fear, figuring out how we can be relevant, and more importantly, the importance of being clear so we don’t confuse people. It will give us the confidence to make cold calls turn into something warm and fun.
John, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you for having me on.
Important Links
- ClozeLoop
- Hilmon Sorey – LinkedIn
- 46 Reasons Why Your Cold Calls Fail and How to Fix Them Fast
- Moviefone.com
- Triangle Selling
- Instagram – Hilmon Sorey
- @HilmonSorey – Twitter
- Facebook – Hilmon Sorey
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join The Successful Pitch community today:
- JohnLivesay.com
- John Livesay Facebook
- John Livesay Twitter
- John Livesay LinkedIn
- John Livesay YouTube
Unlock The Sales Game With Ari Galper
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Sales may be a real-world problem, but most salespeople live in a world of fantasy, full of impervious myths peddled by one “sales guru” after another. Ari Galper disdains these myths and dismantles them one by one through Unlock the Game, a revolutionary sales approach that overturns the notion of selling as we know it. Ari is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling who offers his top-notch services to clients in over 35 countries. Does sales seem like a futile exercise of chasing ghosts? Are you constantly encountering resistance right from the get-go? If you’re experiencing any of these, then you are definitely doing a thing or two wrong. Listen in as Ari joins John Livesay in this episode to discuss the most common myths and pitfalls that salespeople fall prey to and shares the best practices that will turn your sales process around.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Unlock The Sales Game With Ari Galper
Our guest on the show is Ari Galper, the author of Unlock The Sales Game. We talk about the importance of storytelling and he has an impressive compelling story to open the episode with. We then talk about some sales myths and why they’re no longer true if they ever were. Finally, he gives us some core principles, some actual new statements to say when we’re trying to get someone to buy something from us. Enjoy the episode.
—
Our guest is Ari Galper. He is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling and is one of the most expensive sales growth advisors in the world. He’s the creator of Unlock The Game, a completely new revolutionary sales approach that overturns the notion of selling as we know it. With clients in over 35 countries, his global sales system has become the most successful trust-based selling systems of our time. He’s been featured in all magazines like Inc. and Forbes, including the Australian Financial Review. In a day and age where technology rules the selling world for many growth-oriented businesses, authenticity and trust have taken a back seat to the sales process. Unlock The Game puts trust back into the selling in such an elegant and natural way that the truth quickly emerges between the seller and the buyer so that the painful and arduous chasing process no longer has to happen to make a sale. Ari, welcome to the show.
Thanks, John, for having me. I appreciate it.
We were chatting a little bit before the show. I asked you about your experience not only as a trust builder and unlocking this thing that’s been in the back seat for far too long. I agree with you, but you also practice Aikido, which diffuses conflict. That might be a fun place to start. Did you start your sales experience or Aikido first?
The sales experience happened first. The story behind that and my whole philosophy is based upon the Aikido concept of defusing resistance first and trying to overcome resistance. Karate and Taekwondo are linear arts where when someone attacks you, you try and overcome the resistance and you back defend. Aikido is different. If someone comes at you, rather than trying to defend or hit back, you step aside and you diffuse the resistance. The concept is at the end, no one gets hurt. I took that philosophy and bolted it underneath my sales approach, and the rest is history.
One of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is you have this amazing story about when you were in the trenches. I know storytelling is part of your process as it is mine. I always like to have people who have been in the field as opposed to just writing a book about what they imagine it’s like. Would you tell us that story of when you thought you were going to get a yes for sure, and then one little accident caused you to have a big awakening?
About many years ago, I was a sales manager in a software company. We launched the first online website tracking statistics tools to track website behavior. It is now called Google Analytics, but it had a different name a long time ago. It costs money back then and now it’s free. Essentially, we lost the first online product and a fast-growing business. I had underneath me about eighteen salespeople and I was the manager of the group. Big leads came across my desk. I’ve got big opportunities. One lead crossed my desk. It was a big company. I recognized the name.
They had lots of websites, a big opportunity for the company. If I close this one sale, it will double the revenue of the company with one sale. That’s how big it was. As you can imagine, we’re excited. The whole team was high-fiving me. They were like, “Good luck, Ari. Get that sale.” I was trying to relax and be my normal self. I called the guy back. We had a nice conversation. He’s my contact there. He agreed to a conference call, and we did a webinar to demonstrate what we do on our tool. They finally came on a Friday at 4:00 in the afternoon. I’ll never forget it. I went into the conference room with my CEO and I closed the door behind me. We closed the blinds. No one could look inside the room. In the room, there was a long conference table. On the middle of the table was a speakerphone, the ones with the three legs on it like a spaceship, the corporate ones.
I’ve been there many times in my career. I am in the story. I love it.
I sat in the room and I hit the on the button and the dial tone came up and I dialed the number that he gave me. My contact says, “Hello.” We said, “Hello, how’s it going?” We have a bit of a chat. He says to me, “Ari, let us tell you who’s with us in the room today.” I was like, “Sure, I’d like to know that.” The next thing I hear is, “My name is Mike, I’m CEO.” I was like, “CEO of the whole company. I had no idea.” I then hear, “My name is John, I’m head of IT.” “This is even perfect.” “My name’s Julia. I’m the head of marketing.” It was amazing. Everybody on this phone call was a decision-maker.
[bctt tweet=”There is an invisible river of tension in all sales calls.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They were all there in one place. This is the perfect sales call you’d ever imagine because it’s going to happen right there or not. I was relaxed and stayed calm as much as I could. I introduced myself. We then begin the live demo over the web to show them one of the websites. We collected the data in advanced to show them what it looks like to log in and see their visitors, to flag around the stats around that. These were the early days of the internet. I was showing this to them online and I start hearing this noise in the phone call like, “This is great. I can’t believe we can see this information. This is fantastic.” They started asking me questions like, “How does it work? How do we install it?” There was almost like a love fest on the phone.
They were acting like they already had the product. They’re trying to have you talk about what’s life going to be like after it’s in.
They had all the right questions and I had all the right answers. It was fluid and I was like, “This is wonderful.” I was a student at selling at the time. I had the CDs in my car back then, and the books on my shelves. I went to the gurus’ seminars. I was studying and I answered objections. I built a rapport. I told stories. I was doing everything I was told to do. They were loving it. My boss in the corner was like, “High five, nice job.” He’s on the phone calling for the car. He wants to go to the bonus money like the wheels, the color of the car. He’s excited. Honestly, this could not have been a better call.
An hour goes by and the call comes to a close and my contact says to me, “Ari, this is great. This is what we need. We love it. Give us a call a couple of weeks, follow-up with us, and we’ll move this thing forward.” I said to myself, “Thank you, God. What an amazing ending.” I was excited. I took my hand to reach for the phone in the middle of the table to the off button. As I’m reaching for the off button, by complete accident or divine intervention, my thumb hit the mute button instead of the off button. They were right next to each other and I hit the wrong button by accident. A small click happened and they hung up the phone. That split second, a voice inside of me said, “Ari, go to the dark side, go where no one has ever gone before the sales world. Be a fly on the wall. You got nothing to lose.” In that split second, I pulled my thumb back for a moment. They started talking amongst themselves, thinking I had left the call. You probably know what happens here, but what would you imagine them said after a call like that? What’s the normal thing you would imagine them saying?
The normal thing and what we all hope when we get that feedback is, “Let’s pull the trigger. Everybody agrees. Yes. Set up the next call and sign the IPO. Send them the order form.”
It’s a no-brainer. Let me tell you what they said verbatim, word for word. I’ll never forget it. That’s why we’re here. They said, “We’re not going to go with him. Keep using him for more information and make sure we shop someplace else cheaper.” Knife in the heart twist. I was in a state of shock. I hit the off button, move to the wall, and I said to myself, “What did I do wrong?” I was competent. I was sharing concepts. I built a rapport. I answered objections. I told a story. I did everything I’m supposed to be doing in selling. I asked myself, “Why were they afraid to tell me the truth?” I realized at that moment that finally hit me that somewhere along the way, it has become socially acceptable not to hold the truth to people who sell.
We’re doing it to them.
It’s okay to say things like, “It sounds good. Send me the information. We’re definitely interested,” without having any intention of buying.
I talk about this in terms of people say, “I’m interested. Send me information.” They don’t even get as much positive feedback as you had. People start celebrating and I’m like, “You’re in the friend zone at work.” Just because someone’s interested, it doesn’t mean they’re buying. You got up to what I call the intriguing rung of the ladder which is, “Tell us more. We’re intrigued. This sounds incredible.” You’re inches away from what you think you have is irresistible to them. Until that paperwork is signed, you never know. What’s unique about this story and if you’ve been in sales at all or you’ve been in that situation and you scratch your head. Especially if you are someone who comes from truth, integrity, and you can’t imagine ever doing that to someone, you think to yourself, “How did I read the room wrong? How is my radar off in who else can I not trust that I’ve been trusting?” It can do a mind game with you.
Unlock the Sales Game: New Trust-Based Selling Strategies to Finally Create Your Sales Breakthrough!
I asked myself at that moment, “Why were they afraid to not tell me the truth?”
If they want to use you, they’re not going to tell you.
I realized at that moment that there is an invisible river of pressure that flows underneath every sales and pre-sales conversation you have with someone. If you aren’t constantly aware of that going on, you don’t remove the pressure from the sales process, you will always never build enough trust with someone. They will feel uncomfortable and vulnerable to tell you where they stand. Therein lies the core behind our whole Unlock The Sales Game mindset approach where our objective is shifted from letting go of the end goal of the sale, to instead focus 100% only on building trust with people.
This is great and you’re busting the myths. The old myth of sales training that I went through back in the day was, “Try to get them to say yes as many times as possible. By the time you ask them to buy, they’re already nodding their head and they’re used to saying yes.” You’re flipping the script on that and saying, “No, get them to say no.”
I’m saying your goal is not the sale. Your goal instead is the truth of where they stand. That mindset shift is everything. We’ll walk through examples of how to use this. That mental shift is a game-changer because that allows you to be present with people and believe me, they can tell a mile away if you think you have that next step with them in a split second. That’s where we’re going to go with this.
That’s an amazing story to open the show with. Thank you. I love the story. It’s memorable. It tugs at the heartstrings to do everything right and there’s a takeaway, which is even better. That’s what a good story does. Is there anything else you want to talk about in terms of storytelling before we move on to some other myths that you’re busting?
That is the story and the premise behind this whole shift in thinking, and that was a painful experience for me. That pain got me to the truth of why is it going on in the industry and the fact that we accepted it as normal. We’d be conditioned to not be aware of how to be able to penetrate that wall of distrust. I hope that your readers can learn from this and use some of what I’m about to share, to help them break through that wall of distrust, get the truth to become more successful and not chase ghosts. Do you know what ghosts are?
It’s like being ghosted in dating. You don’t hear back from them.
People will say, “It sounds good. I’m interested. Call me next week.” They spend 80% of the time chasing ghosts and never know the truth of where they stand. If this is a total flip, you can eliminate the chasing game, imagine their possible revenue opportunities, and your state of mind and insanity as well.
[bctt tweet=”Stop chasing ghosts.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Especially that because that’s what causes burnout. This fear of rejection is high in salespeople. One of the things I’ve heard is whoever is asking the questions, that’s who controls the conversation. Is that a myth or do you think that’s true?
There’s a layer beneath that. It’s the person that is building trust cautiously with the other person is the one who is able to create this bubble of vulnerability, while the other person feels comfortable to tell them the truth. From that point forward, you both can decide if you’re a fit together. If you’re a fit, then you either engage or you disengage. We set up the situation so you’re not locked into a yes mode. You open it up to see if it’s a fit or not. If it’s not a fit, you disengage. You walk away with your integrity and your head held high.
One of the things I’ve enjoyed watching your videos from your talks is this concept of the two most common objections we all get. It’s I don’t have enough money, this is too expensive or this isn’t the right time. You have a wonderful phrase that you teach people that I would love you to share. From there, that’s going to trigger all emotion in our audience and more questions. Whatever my objection is, you have the same answer to it. “It’s too expensive. Sorry, we don’t have enough time. This isn’t the right time for us to make a change.” You say what?
With typical traditional selling, when you get an objection, you’re supposed to overcome it. We’re taught that by all the gurus. The problem with that is if they’re giving you an objection that they believe is true and you try to overcome it with them, you break trust with them instantly. The sale is overdone right at that moment because you’re trying to overcome something that they believe is true. You lost the ability to connect with them. I have a whole body of work around trust-based languaging. Not scripts, but phrases you use that does not risk the relationship and re-engage again in real-time and natural flow. Let’s get to this example. We have training around this, but the concept is this. If someone gives you an objection coming to your direction like the Aikido thing, if someone gives you a pressure on you like, “Your price is too high,” for instance. What would be the number one response to that in sales?
“You don’t see the value of it. We have a payment plan,” whatever.
You defend yourself, “We’re the best. We have this.” You start to defend, get your shoulders up and say, “We can work with that.” We either get passive or aggressive. There are only two options. Our approach is different. We’re going to diffuse the pressure to preserve the relationship to re-engage again. It’s the same scenario. The guy says that your prices too high. In this specific situation, what we’re going to say is, “You’re absolutely right.” Here’s the operative word. “It can be perceived as high. If you haven’t had a chance to use it in your company, see the results, document it, and get the ROI. You’re absolutely right, it appears that way from the outside in. There is no doubt about that.” Now stop for a second at the role play. What did I do right there?
You made me feel right. I then feel like, “I’m not arm wrestling you anymore. You said I’m right. You gave me a reason why I should feel right.”
They’re expecting you to defend yourself or negotiate lower prices. That’s the game. That’s called the sales game. We unlock that process by going, “I’m not going to play that game with you. It’s nothing personal, but I don’t operate in that level of that plane.” It can be perceived as high as a true statement. Can it? It’s perceived because you hadn’t had a chance to use it. Obviously, it’s going to be high. It’s logical. It makes sense what they’re saying. You then re-engage with this, “Would you be open to us re-looking at the issues you want to try and solve, and make sure that those problems you want to solve have enough ROI behind it to justify solving them?”
You could use this in a lot of scenarios. You and I are both speakers and we have agents that typically negotiate for us, but that price thing comes up all the time. We’ve never paid more than X for a speaker and that’s below what your minimum is. I love that you could say, “I could see where that would be perceived as a high fee. You’ve never heard me speak. You’ve seen a video clip. Would you be open to going back to the whole purpose of what the sales meetings about in the first place?” It’s like, “We get one more salesperson to close one more sale at $50,000. That seems like that would be an ROI, but maybe not.” It’s that conversation where they’re going, “I got it.” When I called on ad agencies, their job was to get the lowest cost per $1,000. They analyze how many readers you have and you get a bonus if you get them to lower their price every year. The price goes up. We didn’t have any of this training. It was a nightmare for everybody.
Unlock The Game: If you’re trying to overcome an objection that the people you’re selling to believe to be true, you’re breaking trust with them instantly.
It might be helpful if you want to go through some of the sales myths that might help uncover some of this, that people are probably going to be shocked. We’ve been conditioned over the years to believe certain things. Our construct is narrow and I want to bust some of the myths that I think will be helpful for you to understand where we’re coming from. One key myth is this concept called, sales is a numbers game.
Keep calling and calling. I hate that.
The more contacts you make, supposedly the more sales you make. We discovered in our research that it is not how many contacts you make anymore. It’s about how deep you go on each conversation, not how good you are at making more calls, having more contacts or more LinkedIn connections. It’s not about that. It’s how good you are at trust-building. If you aren’t thinking about how good you are at trust-building, you’re missing the whole point of your time and efforts. That’s number one. Number two is that the sale is lost at the end of the process. I’m sure you’ve been there before, John, where you had to deal pending and you worked hard for it.
It’s a green light and at the end, it falls through. They don’t send the contract over and you’re like, “What the heck? What happened?” We discovered in this economy now that the sale is not lost anymore at the end of the process. You lost it at the beginning of the process. I’ll prove it to you in a fun way. If someone calls you on the phone and they say to you, “My name is, I’m with, we are a.” What goes through your mind in about three seconds?
You’re a solicitor.
It’s over at hello. I’ll make the case that most of your readers are losing their sales, not at the end of the process. We’re losing it where?
At the beginning.
It’s the opposite of what they’ve been trained to think about because it’s always been about the sale. It turns out that if you don’t build enough trust at hello, it’s over there and not the end.
I was hired by a real estate company to train their real estate agents that answered phones about setting up appointments for listings and things. They were saying what we’ve all heard 100 times, “To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?” I said, “That’s so scripted. Nobody talks to people like that.” They go, “We want to get their names so they can use their name in the conversation to try and build trust.” I’m like, “Let me role play with somebody.” They’re like, “You haven’t been trained as an agent, are you sure?” I’m like, “It’s fine.” I said, “This is John with so-and-so real estate.” The person goes, “I have a question about a listing in a house down the street.” I’m like, “I’m sure you didn’t catch my name because I said it so fast at the beginning. My name again is John and you are?” It was little things that people don’t even begin to have a real authentic conversation.
[bctt tweet=”Sales is not a numbers game. It is a trust-building game.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There’s one more myth I’ll cover and this is a big one. The idea that rejection is a part of the sales process and game. It came from the old sales managers who said to you over the years, “If you can’t take a no, if you weren’t tough enough, if you can’t get out there and take the bullets, you aren’t made for success.” That’s the old messaging that we’re being brought up to believe. We discovered that rejection is triggered by certain things you say and do unconsciously that caused the other person to put their guard up, push back, make you chase them, and not tell you the truth.
I brought enough personal triggers in my own life. Let’s get trigger around rejection. What causes people to reject us?
Let’s talk about the principles that will roll into it then behind our Unlock The Game concept. Our core principle number one is the idea of always be diffusing pressure in the conversation. Always seeking yourself, “How can I hit the sales pressure out of this so do they feel I’m authentic and I care about them,” which is hopefully where you’re at. Let me give you an example of a live scenario using our languaging and our approach to how we handle this. Let’s say you’re on the phone with somebody for a first phone call or first lead. You’re on the phone with a potential client. Good conversation and it looks like a good opportunity for you. The chemistry is good. It all looks positive and you’re heading to the end of the call. The call comes to a close. What do we normally say to a call like that? We say, “How about we get together? How about we have the next step?” We’ve been trained to move people forward, that’s how we’ve been trained by the old gurus. What could happen if you try and move somebody forward and they aren’t ready yet? What do you break with them right there at the beginning of your process?
I feel pressured. I’m out.
Your trust is over. They won’t tell you this the whole time that it’s over. They’ll play the game with you, but you’ve broken the trust. The same scenario, but our mindset and our languaging. The call is going well. It’s your first to call with somebody, with a good opportunity. The call comes to an end, and rather than saying, “How about we schedule another call? How about we move forward?” What we say instead is, “Where do you think we should go from here?”
They’re in the driver’s seat.
What’s happening there is a power shift where they now feel they’re in control. When you say that to somebody, they’re usually in a state of shock. They can’t believe somebody in business asked them what they want to do. This is astounding for them. Do you know what starts to happen? They say to you, “I’ve got one more question.” All of a sudden what comes out is the truth. At the beginning of your process, you begin with them by you not trying to move them forward. It is counter-cultural to a traditional sale which is all about moving them to the next step.
Believe me, they know when they’re on your process and it’s over when they feel that from you. When you say that to somebody, you send the message, “I’m with you now, 100%. I’m listening.” Listening takes active concentration, not hearing, which is passive. One of the triggers of rejection is languaging. The phrases that you use to trigger an association of you being with the negative salesperson, stereotype. The other trigger is delivery. What do you notice when I said, “Where do you think we should go from here?”
A lot of pauses and a soft voice. I’m always saying that competent people are comfortable with silence and stressful people are not.
Unlock The Game: Most salespeople don’t lose their sales at the end of the process. If you don’t build enough trust at hello, it’s over there and then.
If you weren’t centered in your mindset, you’ll rush through it, you’ll sound scripted and unnatural. When you lower your voice and you’re relaxed and you say that to somebody, they feel almost obligated to step in, save you and bring you back up again. It’s human nature to step in to help people who aren’t walking on top of them. Part of the languaging and being centered in our mindset is about how to deliver this in the most authentic way possible to send the message that I’m not here for the next step. I’m here for your challenge right now.
You have another question that I love when people give an objection that we talked about. Would you set that one up too? I’m guessing that’s one of your principles. It’s one of the all-time favorites.
Why don’t you give me an objection you imagine?
“This isn’t the right time for us to make any changes.”
We have this magic phrase that we use whenever we get resistance like that. Things like, “We don’t have the time or we don’t have the budget.” How about, “We’re using somebody else. Thank you.” That’s a classic one. Let’s say if someone says we already have another vendor or we’re using someone. It’s common. The phrase you always say to create enough space for you to stay calm and re-engage again is you are going to say, “That’s not a problem.” “I don’t have the time.” “That’s not a problem.” “We don’t have a budget.” “That’s not a problem.” That’s the first thing you say to slow things down, to slow motion because you’ll react fast with defensiveness when someone challenges you like that. “We can’t afford it.” “Wait for a second, you can’t.” We’re conditioned to react and hit back to overcome the moment.
We get stuck in the game and we’re like, “How did I get here?” If you can stay centered and relax and use, “That’s not a problem.” When they hear that from you, they go “Really, it’s not a problem?” They get confused. They’re expecting that. They’re expecting a reaction back. When you say it to them, “That’s not a problem,” they open their mind up waiting for what’s next. There is the next step. The first step is to defuse the moment and have them recognize you’re not going to play the game with them anymore. They can back off a bit. After saying, “That’s not a problem” when they say to you, “We’re using someone else,” you can say this, “I wasn’t looking to replace who you’re currently using.” That’s the first thing you say. What does that do by saying to somebody, “I wasn’t looking to replace what you’re currently using.” What’s happening there?
That’s even more confusing because it’s like, “If it’s not a problem and you don’t want to replace the person, are you thinking I have a budget to hire two people?”
The wall of defensiveness is coming down. They’re like, “That’s good.” You’re relaxing them by diffusing the pressure with the languaging. You’d say, “I wasn’t looking to replace who you’re currently using.” You then say this, “I wanted to see if you’d be open to a different perspective on how you guys track your visitors that you may not have access to before or seen before. Would you be open to that?”
That’s it. Now, you’ve taken down that defensiveness, and 9 out of 10 people love to think of themselves as open-minded. It’s part of their job to look at all the options. Even if it’s just you and you’re running your own show, you’re like, “I’m an open-minded person. No, I’m not open to hearing any other options that are available to me in the world.”
[bctt tweet=”Sales only sucks if you focus on the end goal instead of on the truth.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The keyword there is, would you be open? The sales world is typically, would you be interested? Never again use the word interested forever after this show. That’s the sales word that sets alarms off. Instead, always use these words, “Would you be open,” because the word open doesn’t force them into a yes or no. It creates an open space. It gives them permission to tell you the truth. We get no space to engage as we’re wired to chase the next opportunity.
It’s a whole game changer. I can see why you’re in such demand. The book is called Unlock The Sales Game. You can see how Ari has shown us how to unlock each lock on someone’s head, their heart and their gut. I believe you first got to make people safe. It’s a fight or flight response. Once you diffuse that response, then you might get them to say, “Would you be open,” and then, “Yes.” It then can get into the head a little bit without all those other blocks and reaction happening.
If you remove the noise from the sales process you create a deep human connection, which is called real trust. Not fake trust. Fake trust is the whole rapport-building thing, “How are your kids doing? I love that golf on your wall there. How’s it going over there in Milwaukee?” That’s fake rapport. We’re talking about real trust. It’s when you remove the noise, you connect with them at a deep level, and they can sense that you are present in their world, not your world. I’ll give you one key phrase for everyone to know, and take an oath with me to remove this forever for the rest of your lives.
It’s open, not interested, then we’re no longer going to say the next steps.
This is a new one now. For those who have been in sales for a long time, this might hurt a bit. I’m going to ask everyone to remove this phrase forever and never use it again, it’s follow-up.
I’m following up on a call, a voicemail or an email.
What’s the only industry in the world that uses the word follow-up? It’s sales. You’re trying to be heart-centered and authentic in helping people but your languaging screams the opposite, “I’m giving you a call to follow-up on our last proposal.” They’re like, “What?” It’s over at hello. There are classic ones. Do you remember the old days? There are a few other ones like, “I’ve given you a call to check-in.” That’s a classic one. There’s one more, “I’m giving you a call to touch base.” It’s classic sales 101, the 1980s. These were all horrible words that will kill your trust right there. Let me give you the answer to all of this, which I have in our work here.
Rather than say hi or tap an email, “I’m writing to you to follow-up.” You say, “I’m giving you a call to see if you have any feedback.” Don’t ever ask questions. That’s cross-examination like a lawyer. You say, “I’m giving you a call to see if you have any feedback on our previous conversation, any feedback on our proposal or any feedback on my previous X.” You go backwards, not forwards. Follow-up and touch base is moving things to the sale. When you say feedback, you’re going in the opposite direction. You’re moving the momentum. You’re taking the pressure out. When you say to them, “I’m giving you a call to get feedback on our previous conversation.” Do you know what starts happening? They start talking. They tell you the truth. They tell you everything like, “This guy was right.” It’s like a dam opens up. They’re like, “I got some feedback for you. Here it is.” It comes rolling out their chest. It’s amazing what happens when you change your mindset and your languaging.
That has got to be one of the most insightful things I’ve ever heard from a guest, and I’ve had over 300 guests. The concept of pressure moving forward, destressing people, let’s go back and see if there’s feedback on what we’ve discussed. It causes you to rethink it without making you move forward at a pace that you’re not ready to. How can people find you to hire you as a speaker, to take your course or learn more about how to unlock the sales game so that they can get feedback and never ask people if they’re interested in anything or ask anybody for a next step?
Unlock The Game: Never say “interested”; always say “open.” Never “follow up”; always ask for feedback.
Go to UnlockTheGame.com and there is a free course that they can register for. My book is there. We have a couple of interesting courses that we have in our membership program. One of the courses we finished is called the One Call Sale. How do you onboard somebody on a preset consultation phone call without closing, without pressure, without proposals, and without next steps out of one phone call? It’s a powerful course. You can check that out when you’re in there. After our free course, you can access that. This requires somebody who’s willing to challenge their own thinking and evolve into the future. If you’re stuck in your old ways, please do not approach us because we can’t help you. You got to be open-minded and challenging your current thinking.
It’s a choice. We can continue to be like what Blockbuster was and be, “This is working. Why would we change it,” or be like Netflix and go, “Maybe we should come up with something else besides mailing out an envelope with a disc in it.”
I’ll tell you a funny story. You’ll enjoy this. I was brought to a company in 2019 with a big opportunity, a big sales team and a multimillion-dollar business. I did a talk with a sales team and they enjoy what they heard. They have me come in and discuss moving forward. I told them that my fee was high on a retainer basis. I came in to the conference room myself, they had the sales and the CEO in this conference room. It’s a similar story before, but a little different. The guy says to me, “Ari, we like your program and stuff, but your fee is way too high. We’ve never paid anybody that money before as a consultant from the outside. We need from you a proposal. We need it broken down by ROI. We need to see a document that lays this so we can go to our board to justify getting that fee.”
That’s not a problem.
This is more black belt level now that I’m getting done. What I said to him was, “We don’t do proposals. We don’t know how to do proposals. We’re not in the proposal business. We’re in solve the sales problem business. That’s what we do.” He was in complete shock, John. He turned white and said, “What?” He then said to me, “For that amount of money every month, how much of your time do we get for that?” I said to him, “Not much. It’s not about time. It’s about focusing in on solving the problem. If we have to do a lot of time, that means we’re not focused.” He said, “We’re doing well already. We’re doing $8 million a year. We have sales coming in. Why should we invest in this to change?” I said, “It’s not about how much money you’re making. It’s about the 80% that you’re losing by chasing all these deals that never get closed that falls through your fingertips. All those losses justify this.” The CEO in the corner is listening to the whole thing. He gets up and he says to us, “Enough of the game’s already, just invoice us. Let’s get you paid and get it started right away.”
You have to be confident in who you are and what you do, and not be attached to the results. People can smell that a mile away, just like in dating, if you’re desperate or not. If you are that confident in what you do and you kept shifting the focus of time.
Your prospect wants to frame you. They want to put you in a frame, which gives them control to trigger like a pinball in the pinball machine. They want to be able to control everything, make you bounce and jump, and put your hopes. They want you to play the game with them. We unlocked that game in the beginning. We let them know that we don’t play those games, but we will focus on solving your problem. It’s up to you to choose what you want to do. We walk away from those who can’t accept that and that’s the end of it.
You look at how much time you saved by not chasing people who are going to ghost you anyway.
It’s called the hopium. Do you know the hopium drug? We hope we got the deal and we never get it. The hopium, “It was a great meeting. They loved it.” You go back to the office, “We’re looking good.” You then have this hopium drug in your body. You are so excited and you chase them down, and they will call you back. You just detox the whole hopium. You’re like, “Sales suck,” because you don’t focus on the truth. You focus on the end goal.
I love that it’s about how many deep relationships you have, and not how many conversations you have. That’s true in social media and everything else. What a great gift you’re giving the world, literally. Thank you for being on the show and sharing your wisdom and your insights. I appreciate you. Thanks.
Thank you, John.
Important Links
- Unlock The Sales Game
- https://UnlockTheGame.com/
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join The Successful Pitch community today:
- JohnLivesay.com
- John Livesay Facebook
- John Livesay Twitter
- John Livesay LinkedIn
- John Livesay YouTube
Big Little Breakthroughs With Josh Linkner
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Many people are stuck with exciting ideas that could cause significant changes but cannot bring them to the surface because of the lack of resources, funding, and motivation. But by embracing creativity and doing even the smallest, everyday innovations, you can finally realize your full potential. John Livesay is joined once more by Josh Linkner, the author of Big Little Breakthroughs, this time to share how the best concepts always start with lousy drafts and several revisions, all fueled by that single spark just waiting to grow. Josh also discusses how jazz music taught him to become creative in real-time and as fast as possible. Furthermore, he talks about his concept of “dinner mint,” which is all about making a huge impact even with just the smallest yet interesting effort.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Big Little Breakthroughs With Josh Linkner
How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results
Our guest in is Josh Linkner. He’s the author of Big Little Breakthroughs. We talked about creativity and how everyday people can become everyday innovators. Let go of the thought that you’re not creative. It’s not true. He said, “Start before you’re ready.” We also talked about how jazz is creativity in real time. He has a great tip about making sure that you do something that he calls the dinner mint. Enjoy the episode.
—
Our guest is Josh Linkner, who you might remember from being on the show earlier. He’s got a new book out. He is known as a creative troublemaker. He passionately believes that all human beings have incredible creative capacity and he’s on a mission to unlock innovative thinking and creative problem solving to help leaders, individuals and even community soar. He’s been the founder and CEO of five tech companies which sold for a combined value of over $200 million. He’s the author of four books, including the New York Times bestsellers Disciplined Dreaming and The Road to Reinvention.
He’s invested and mentored over 100 startups and is the Founding Partner of Detroit Venture Partners. Josh serves as a Chairman and Cofounder of Platypus Labs, which is an innovation research training and consulting firm. He’s twice been named the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and is the recipient of the US Presidential Champion of Change Award. He’s also a passionate Detroiter, a father of four, a professional-level jazz guitarist and has an odd obsession with greasy pizza. Josh, welcome back to the show.
Surely a pleasure to be with you.
[bctt tweet=”Creativity is a skill anyone can work on.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Likewise. Your latest book we were talking about, Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results. Before we jump into your personal story, let’s dive into the story of the book cover, for those who haven’t seen it yet, which looks like a piece of art.
The whole principle of the book is democratizing innovation. We hear about people like Elon Musk and we can be happy for them but you say, “I could never do that.” This book is for innovation for the rest of us. It focused on helping everyday people become everyday innovators. What it does is dispels the myth that innovation has to be giant. In fact, it encourages people to think small and the notion is by putting together lots of small micro innovations, lots of everyday innovations and making a habit of creativity. That is what unlocks people’s potential. The book cover with that context, it’s a pointillism painting. Any one of us can put one simple dot of primary color on the page, the actual individual dot isn’t that difficult. When you put enough dots in the right order and it adds up to something great, that was the art form of pointillism and the inspiration for the cover of the book.
Let’s tap into your expertise in jazz because that’s an easy connect the dots, no pun intended. The way to talk about innovation and innovation is part of jazz.
Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results
Jazz is a beautiful art form, in my opinion, whether people like listening or not. It’s cool because it’s spontaneous innovation. It’s creativity in real-time. When I play jazz, less than 1% of the notes are on the written page and the rest of it you have to improvise as you go. It reminds me of the business world that we’re all living in. We’re not given an instruction manual. We have to figure stuff out as we go, which is basically like playing jazz. The cool thing that I learned is that jazz musicians themselves, certainly me included, are no more creative than anybody else but the cultural boundaries of playing in a jazz combo encourage responsible risk-taking and these little breakthroughs along the way. I would say that individually, we are all creative like all human beings are creative. If you put them in the right setting and give them the right structure, we all can to a degree improvise our way forward.
This concept of a lot of people being told as a child or as a self-esteem issue is like, “I’m not creative. I’m not innovative.” If I would look at the theme of your whole career and all of the books that you’ve put out, that’s the myth that you’re busting. When people do start to realize that, “Maybe I am creative and I am somewhat innovative. It doesn’t have to be comparing myself to Elon Musk, I can do it.” What I love about this book is you give us an anatomy of an idea almost like a doctor. We start with this concept of how do we expand our input base? What are your ideas around that?
You touched on something important there, which is too many people don’t feel creative at all. To me, that’s a tragedy. It’s not my opinion. The research is crystal clear that every human being has enormous reservoirs of creative capacity. Your brain is wired as the same as Leonardo da Vinci’s, Paul McCartney’s and Beyoncé’s brain. We have the hardware and capacity, it’s a learned skill. It’s not 1 out of 1,000 of us are creative and the rest of us have to suffer. The other key point here is that we can be creative in our own ways.
[bctt tweet=”Start before you are ready.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I play jazz guitar pretty well. I can’t draw a stick figure if I tried when my third-grade teacher looked at my art and says, “You’re not creative,” what a tragedy. I would encourage everyone to expand your definition of what creativity looks like. We think it only means painting on canvas, doing interpretive dance or something. Why can’t you be creative as a customer service rep, furniture manufacturer, car salesman or writing a line of code? My point is we can all discover ways to express creativity but we all absolutely have it within all of us.
I remember when I was taking a Photo Journalism class in college and the professor said, “Photography is painting with light.” Suddenly, for me, a light bulb went on. I’m like, “I can never paint but I could paint with light?” The way I structure apertures on camera. It was a completely eye-opening way of expressing creativity for me. The other thing you talk about is sparks. What sparks an idea? What sparks a conversation? What you’ve tapped into here is an unspoken feeling that so many people have which is, “I’m a perfectionist and if I can’t do something perfectly, I’m not going to even try. I’m certainly not going to say anything out loud.” Yet you have a concept around encouraging people not to ignore those sparks.
Backing up, you started talking about the anatomy of an idea. I answered a different question that you asked. What I did is I tried to put the creative process, which seems squishy, mysterious and stick it under a microscope and say, “Could we dissect that? Is it wizardry that is some magical power or is it more a magic trick that any one of us could learn to do?” That’s what I discovered. If you dissect an idea, it has different components. The first one you talked about is inputs. Before you come up with an idea, what are the inputs going into it? It’s the ingredients before you make a new stew. Those inputs could be your background, experience, training and learnings that you have.
Everyday Innovations: When you have an idea, do not pressure yourself that it has to be the final work product.
In short, if you want to be more creative and have more creative outputs, it’s helpful to have more creative inputs. The second little part of the anatomy that you’re discussing there is called sparking. You’re exactly right. Too many people think that an idea has to be perfect at launch. It pops out of your head, it’s in a binder, there are tabs and everything lines up. It’s perfectly formatted for the PowerPoint and there’s this bulletproof financial model. When we put the pressure on ourselves to have a perfect idea upon launch, we then look at the first draft and say, “I’m not very creative.” The truth is this. There’s a wonderful saying, I love this, “The one thing that great authors have in common, lousy first drafts.” It gets back to this notion of sparking. When we have an idea, let’s not put the pressure on ourselves.
That idea has to be the final work product. It’s the beginning, not the end. It’s a spark. We’ve got to let ourselves have some time sparking and not judging and not prematurely extinguishing those sparks. Realizing that an initial idea might be flawed but it’s the idea that leads to the idea that leads to the other idea that becomes the magic you’re seeking. In that sparking phase, I want people to let their hair down, send your linear analytical mind off for a Starbucks and let your creativity flow.
Not judging yourself and being in a safe space where other people aren’t judging. From my advertising days, it’s almost like improv, “Yes and not, that’s stupid.” It’s filling in that acting analogy. You talk about taking it out for a little audition and this is a part of your expertise in why you’ve been so successful in startups, I believe. It’s you understand before launching something in a big way the importance of getting a product-market fit, if you will or somebody will pay for something that you think they need. In the framework of auditioning and ideas, it’s clever. What is it that people could do to start an easy audition?
[bctt tweet=”Jazz is creativity in real-time.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Thanks for that. I’ll get back quickly on your previous point. We want to give ourselves creative freedom. If you’ve ever been in a meeting, I’m sure we’ve all been in this meeting, there are five people in the meeting. One person has an idea and the other four become the instantly appointed idea police. They tell you all the reasons that idea is never going to work. We need to give ourselves the creative freedom to let the ideas breathe. Back to auditioning, that’s the other big obstacle when people think about innovation. First of all, it has to be a billion-dollar idea or it doesn’t count, which puts so much pressure on you that we end up doing nothing. We agree that we can have small ideas that are still meaningful.
The second thing is instead of having an idea, the way you test it as you roll it out to every customer and your entire company all at once, why don’t you give it an audition which is embracing an experimentation mindset? The best way to de-risk ideas is to test them before launching them fully. When I say test them, it’s small controlled tests. Next time, fix-money tests. As a leader and when I say leader, you could be a leader of yourself, leader of a big company or anywhere in between, we should all be giving and conducting 5 or 10 tests a week. Those little experiments or auditions are our wonderful chance for us to see if there’s any product-market fit. If there is, double the size of the experiment. If not, let it go. There’s nothing wrong. We’ve been told that failure is like a four-letter word. There’s nothing wrong with 4 out of your 5 ideas not working out at all because that one that’s left, that’s the gem you might be looking for.
When we also say, “Now I need to refine something.” This analogy you have of sanding something to perfection. How do you know when something is ready to go? In your book, there are many versions of the manuscript but at a certain point, a lot of people have analysis paralysis. “It’s still not ready to let this out into the world.” My question around the refinement stage is when is good enough, enough? When do you feel like this is something that people should not keep obsessing on?
Everyday Innovations: The best way to de-risk ideas is to test them before launching them fully.
There’s no magical answer, obviously. It depends on the medium of work that you’re shipping. We were going in order. You talked about sparking and auditioning. Refining is, let’s say you audition 100 ideas and there are three remaining candidates. You narrow the field. The question there is, how can we polish them up before launching them? That interim phase is interesting. One of the people that I covered in the book is Lady Gaga. She says, “We often think of this creative act. You write the song and then it’s done. My creative process is I throw up ideas and it’s fifteen minutes. I might spend two years refining it.”
That refinement phase is often overlooked. The difference between great work and mediocre work is the number of refinements. That being said, you bring up an awesome question. How do you know when to launch? My general belief is when you can look yourself in the mirror and know that you’re putting your best foot forward but at the same time, there’s something magical about getting going. It depends again on the medium. If you’re writing a book that’s going to be in the Library of Congress, that might be one thing. Most of us aren’t always doing work that’s permanent. If you’re writing a report or you’re making a sales pitch, I would recommend this principle start before you’re ready which is polish it up, refine it the best you can but don’t wait. Take the initiative, get it out in the market, be willing to adjust, course correct, tweak, adapt and pivot once it’s already launched.
You also brought up an interesting thing of all these ideas being curated down to the top three. Of course, you’re one of the top speakers on creativity, innovation and speak to companies around the world on this. That’s why Big Little is important for the world to know about how to have these breakthroughs in a corporate environment. Oftentimes, people forget that as speakers, we have to convince somebody we’re 1 of 3 choices. You are so good at over-delivering and figuring out why you are what I call the “irresistible” choice. I thought it would be worth asking you about that because I can’t imagine, interviewing you and not asking about your successful speaking career and how you’re applying the Big Little Breakthroughs in your own speaking career.
[bctt tweet=”The difference between great work and mediocre work is the number of refinements.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We spent a time so far chatting about this anatomy and of idea. Half of the book is focused on what I’ve discovered to the eight-core mindsets of everyday innovators. In the book, I spent over 1,000 hours of research and interview people all over the world. Amazing people, champions of industry, CEOs and billionaires but also a lot of everyday people that have done cool stuff. What I discovered are these common patterns or mindsets that are generally embraced. One of those mindsets directly ties to your question about how do you stand out and win in a pitch situation. That principle is what I call “Don’t forget the dinner mint.” Here’s the gist of it. I’m sure you’ve been to a nice restaurant. At the end, they say, “Here you go, sir, here’s this beautiful little piece of chocolate.”
If you order the chocolate, it would be nice and all but it’s the unexpected surprise and delight, the over-delivery even by a teeny bit that makes the meal itself stand out. My suggestion for those pitching because obviously, that’s the theme of the show is you’ve got the basics, the fundamentals of your pitch, the meat and potatoes down then ask yourself this question, “What’s the dinner mint?” I define a dinner mint is no more than 5% extra effort, money or resources but a little creative flourish, a little something extra and a little bit of surprise and delight that elevates your pitch so that it stands out completely from the competitive set. We can apply that sense of creativity to a product, pitch, process, interview or anywhere in between.
One of the other things you write about, which I love now that I live here in Austin, the theme for the whole city is, “Keep it weird.” You talk about being obsessed with reaching out for the weird. Can you give an example of what you mean by that?
Everyday Innovations: A little bit of surprise may elevate your pitch so that it stands out completely from the competitive set.
We tend to, as human beings, gravitate towards what we know. When you make a decision in life, big or small, you might say, “It’s 1 of 3 things. It’s either A, B or C.” Reaching for weird is saying, “Consider, is there a D or E?” I like I to call them option X? Option X is that weird, unorthodox, bizarre idea that could perhaps make all the difference in the world. I cover a whole bunch of them in the book but one fun that comes to mind. There’s a beautiful seaside town in Iceland. It’s idyllic and it’s lovely but they were having a problem that over the years, traffic incidents involving pedestrians had grown by 41%.
That’s a real problem. You don’t want people getting hit by cars. Think about the obvious approach like your A, B and C choices. You could hire more police officers, install expensive new lighting or issue a bunch of fines but they chose the weird approach. Here’s what they did. They repainted the crosswalks as a 3D optical illusion, so when you drive your car up to the sidewalk, it appears that there are these concrete slabs floating 3 feet in the air. There’s absolutely no way you’re going to barrel through the intersection. It added almost no cost and traffic incidents dropped significantly. Those are these magical ideas where it doesn’t take a bunch of money or resources, it takes a little creativity to uncover a remarkably better answer.
The thing that I find inspiring about this book, Big Little Breakthroughs, is when you say it’s time to take your shot. I’m reminded of the musical Hamilton. I’m not going to miss my shot. It ties full circle back to what we were talking about at the beginning where many of us might’ve missed our shot if we were told we weren’t creative. It’s not too late to take our shot, is it Josh? How can people do that?
[bctt tweet=”Take the initiative, get your idea out, then be willing to adjust and pivot once it’s already launched.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I wrote a lot about Lin-Manuel Miranda, the author-composer of Hamilton. He’s done a bunch of other work. We look at this person who’s this genius and I could never be him but Lin-Manuel Miranda is an average person like you and me. He has good days and bad days. He sometimes has fear, doubt and insecurity. The first thing we talked about with him specifically is saying like, “We’re all the same. We all can be creators. Don’t put somebody else on a pedestal when we, ourselves, can be as creative.” I did close the book with that song from him and the notion is it’s never too late. To be creative, it doesn’t mean you have to be Picasso. It doesn’t mean you have to be Mark Zuckerberg in the tech industry. Let’s think about how we can build a habit of everyday creativity.
Big Little Breakthroughs that I write about is micro innovations. Those little big breaks do a couple of things. First of all, when you think about taking your shot, it de-risks it. If you think about your shot as betting your entire life, your house and your family, that’s terrible. Don’t do that. I love these big little breakthroughs because they’re way less risky. Furthermore, when you do a series of them, when it becomes part of who you are, you develop a skill around creativity.
Think about da Vinci, for example. His Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in the world but that wasn’t his first painting. He first had to learn to paint. He had to learn to paint every day. He had to pay bad paintings before he could get to the good ones. By doing big little breakthroughs or ongoing habit of daily creativity, you build your skill in the same way da Vinci did. You get the double benefit of that. These little things add up to big stuff, you’re building your skillset in the process and it’s much less scary and risky.
Everyday Innovations: Everyone has so much creative potential to do everyday innovations. If each one brings something to the surface, the world will be a better place.
If you had a closing story or a closing thought about what’s the cost of someone not taking a big little breakthrough? What is the real compelling reason for people to take action now? You talk about how important it is not to wait. I want people to have a sense of urgency to get big little breakthroughs. What happens if we don’t keep expanding, growing and trying new things?
I feel that too often, we gravitate toward the status quo but then we look back at the end of our lives with regret. I know this is going to sound like a Hallmark card but I believe that all of us have this huge reservoir of dormant creative capacity inside of us. What a shame if we don’t bring it to the surface. In the book, I don’t suggest that people aim for 1,000% improvement or something. I encourage people to consider a 5% creativity upgrade. Five percent is within our reach that we could do that. If you and me and others around the world became 5% more creative, my argument is that would create a disproportionate set of rewards for our environment, kids, healthcare outcomes, the planet and society.
If we have it inside of us, if we have this natural resource that’s untapped, what a shame if we don’t deploy it. I hope that people do that. It is within our grasp. I’ll tell you a brief story. I wrote about a guy who I got the chance to interview named Trewin Restorick. You don’t know who he is because nobody does. He’s an everyday innovator, which I love even more. Trewin was an average everyday person. He went to college, didn’t get good grades, graduated barely, got an okay job, tried to make it through life and pay the bills. He was an absolutely everyday person like you and me. He was not Mark Zuckerberg. He said, “I care about the environment.” He was always drawn to the outdoors and he lived in Central London. It turned out that cigarette butts and litter on the streets of London are the single biggest litter problem that they face.
[bctt tweet=”We all can be creators. Don’t put somebody else on a pedestal and think of yourself less.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Not only is it unsightly but small kids or animals could ingest it. It’s a safety hazard, bad for the environment and caused a bunch of money to clean up. They’ve tried all these things. They tried shaving people to take compliance like, “Don’t litter.” Nothing worked. Here’s Trewin Restorick, an everyday innovator, he comes up with an idea. His idea is he created something called the Ballot Bin, which is a bright yellow painted box that’s mounted at eye level. It could be mounted, for example, on a street pole.
Imagine, this bright yellow bin and the front of it is glass. On the front, it’s asking a question such as, “Which is your favorite food? Pizza or hamburgers. Which is your favorite superhero? Batman or Superman.” What happens is there’s a little receptacle. It’s a big yellow ashtray. As smokers see this, they get to walk over and literally vote with their butts. They put their cigarette butt in. It’s like, “I like Superman better,” and because it’s glass on the front, there’s a divider, you see the tally. It’s a real-time bar chart made out of cigarette butts showing which people prefer.
This idea didn’t require a billion dollars, PhD, fancy training or a bunch of stuff. This guy came and made this Ballot Bin. What happened? Cigarette litter was reduced by 80%. He started a whole company around it. It’s in 27 countries right now. It’s making a massive impact on our planet. Back to your original question, what would happen if Trewin didn’t do that? What a mess. We all have so much creative potential to do everyday innovations like that. If we all brought that to the surface, the world is a better place.
The book again is called Big Little Breakthroughs. There’s a website BigLittleBreakthroughs.com. You can also check out Josh on JoshLinkner.com. Josh, thank you so much for writing this book and inspiring us to unlock our own creativity and realizing that process can be fun and also make a difference. What a great combination.
John, thank you so much. Thank you for this wonderful show and all the love you put back into the world. One last comment. I put something together for your audience. If they go to BigLittleBreakthroughs.com, there’s a button that says Toolkit and that requires a purchase. Don’t purchase it. You can use the word PITCH, obviously in honor of your show, as a secret code and they can get access to anything that’ll be on there. There are all kinds of downloads, worksheets, assessments, and goodies free for all of your audience. Go to the website and use the secret code PITCH.
Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. Thanks, Josh.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Josh Linkner – Previous episode
- Disciplined Dreaming
- The Road to Reinvention
- Detroit Venture Partners
- Platypus Labs
- Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results
- JoshLinkner.com
- https://JoshLinkner.com/toolkit/ – Use PITCH as a secret code for free content
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join The Successful Pitch community today:
- JohnLivesay.com
- John Livesay Facebook
- John Livesay Twitter
- John Livesay LinkedIn
- John Livesay YouTube