ClozeLoop With Hilmon Sorey

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 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!

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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.

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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.”

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?”

 

“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.

 

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.

 

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

 

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Tags: acting, conversion, customer communication, psychology, triggers, voice inflections