Sell Without Selling Out With Andy Paul

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

Sales isn’t a simple job; it takes a lot of skill to earn a buyer’s trust. So how do you sell without selling out? How do you earn that trust? John Livesay dives into sales with help from Andy Paul. With over three decades of experience under his belt, Andy gives us a glimpse at his sales insights. From building trust and communication to training and avoiding persuasion, this episode is one you can’t miss.

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Sell Without Selling Out With Andy Paul

Our guest is Andy Paul, the author of Sell Without Selling Out. He talks about how influence rules and persuasion drools and that you are either a sales boss that is commanding people or a sales leader that inspires them. Find out how to be a learn-it-all instead of a know-it-all. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest on the show is Andy Paul, who is a leading global sales expert. He has over 180,000 people following his daily posts on LinkedIn. He is the host of the top-rated sales podcast Sales Enablement with Andy Paul, with more than over 1,000 episodes and millions of downloads. His podcast is a go-to resource for sales leaders and producers. He is the author of the Amazon best-selling book Sell Without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms. He has also written other books and he is the Founder of Zero-Time Selling, which is an advisory firm. Prior to that, he had a successful sales career himself in tech startups, where he sold over $600 million of complex systems and services. Andy, welcome to the show.

John, thanks for having me.

Let’s go back in time to when you knew you wanted to get into sales. Maybe you had a paper out or you sold something and you went, “I am good at this. This might be my career.”

I did not know I wanted to be in sales after I had been in it for a couple of years. Up until that, I was not too sure that I wanted to be in sales. Like a lot of people, I fell into sales. I graduated from university and did not have any concrete plans about what I wanted to do. I worked at the college I graduated from during the summer. Fall came around and my parents were urging me to get more serious about things. I went to the career placement center around campus and the jobs that were available were all the major tech companies. They were trying to recruit people into what turned out to be sales. Interestingly, none of them called it sales positions. They are all marketing management training programs, but they were nothing about marketing. They are all about sales.

Marketing people do not have quotas. That is the big distinction I tell people.

It is this whole idea that sales is dirty and, “Who wants to be a salesperson?” It was evident even then. I fell into it and as I described in my book, I was not too comfortable with what I was being taught and how I was being taught how to sell. I reached the point about year two where it started making sense to me and I started to describe or define a way to sell that worked for me. I could start to see a future in it at that point.

[bctt tweet=”A sales boss commands, and a sales leader inspires. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

You and I both have a similar background in that we sold multimillion-dollar tech pieces of equipment. Tell us about that. What was that like in the ‘90s?

I started off selling roomfuls of computer equipment back in the day. They take a lot of space and a fraction of the computing power of our phones these days that major corporations are running their companies on. I swerved into the personal computer industry for a while and worked at Apple in the early days of Apple and a couple of others what we thought was going to be an interesting startup. I worked for a company that made the first battery-powered notebook computer. That was a glorious failure.

Somehow ended up, by default, I was looking for a job after the last company had been with that imploded. I saw a news article in Fortune Magazine about a company that was revolutionizing the satellite communications business with very small aperture satellite dishes for data communications. I cold-called them. That was a Friday. I called them on Monday. I did not have a job in sales. I was an account manager as a customer success person for about the first six months before I moved back over into sales. That was my introduction to the enterprise of selling large complex systems.

What would you say was your biggest challenge as a salesperson? Was it handling rejection, overcoming objections or getting the appointment? What was one challenge that you thought and you saw all the people struggling with?

I spent a big chunk of time in the satellite communications business and the wireless business and did not have a technical background. I was selling to very technical customers.

It was a different language, was it not?

For me, the challenge was internal sales. How did I rally people to support me and help make up for my deficits in a way that was still valuable for the buyer? I got pretty good at that after a while. It was matching the internal selling as well as the external selling. As in any startup, there are tons of competing priorities and people are ultra-busy doing multiple things and it is like, “How do I get this person to invest some of their time and attention in what is important to me?” That was the key for me to be able to rally support internally for big deals I was working on.

How did you do that? Do you have any tips for someone who is thinking, “That sounds like my challenge, but I do not know where to start.”?

It is the same challenge you have with customers. I write about it in my book. You have to be able to connect with people on an authentic human level. You need to be able to use your curiosity and understand the most important things to them and how you can help them achieve that by working with you.

It is fascinating because you had said originally that people were like, “I am not so sure you will be good in sales because you are an introvert and an intellectual.” There are a lot of people who might identify as, “I am not extroverted. I cannot be the life of the party and entertain clients nonstop. I should not pursue this career.”

As I tell people that in the course of the first 24 years of my career when I was outselling the large 2/3 of billion dollars, I had dinner half a dozen times with clients. The opportunity presented itself. I was all over the world selling. For the most part, I had great relationships with my clients, but we did not feel like we had to have dinner with each other. It was not going to cement the relationship in a way that we were not doing in the office when we were talking with each other because their ability to trust me was based on what I was doing in the context of work more than anything else. Once I established that personal bond and rapport, I had to prove it every time I interacted with them.

How did you come up with the title of your book, Selling Without Selling Out? Do you feel like a lot of people feel like they do have to sell out in order to be successful?

They do. The simplest way to consider selling out is when you put your interests ahead of those of your customers. That is an external customer buying something from you or your internal customer. Whether you are working as part of a team or collaborating with people on things when you put yourself first, you start to sell out.

Do you have a story or example of that?

[bctt tweet=”Be a learn it all, not a know it all.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Think about it from a salesperson’s perspective. You go out at the start of the month or at some point when you start a relationship with a potential customer or client. You convince them through your actions that you are there to help them. They think you are there to help them, but then you get to that last week of the month and your boss says, “We need to bring this order in order to hit our month.” Early in my career, I was forced to go out and try to accelerate decisions that buyers were not prepared to make.

You start offering discounts and other inducements, delayed payment terms, or whatever the company does. In the mind of the buyer, suddenly, you went from being somebody that is there to help them to be purely transactional. It does not mean they will not buy from you, but they are under no illusion anymore that you are there to help them.

Once that trust is broken, it is almost impossible to get it back.

It is very difficult to get it back. They will stick with you as long as you are handy and convenient for them, but as soon as something better comes along, somebody they trust more or a product that is roughly equivalent to yours, odds are pretty high that you are going to be gone.

You talk about the difference between being a sales leader versus a sales boss. Can you give us that distinction?

A conversation that I had on my show with Stephen M.R. Covey, a great author who wrote the Speed of Trust. He has got a new book out called Trust and Inspire. It is about leadership modes. As he draws, the contrast is there are two dominant modes of leadership. There is the command and control, which we are all very familiar with because we have all been victims of it and then there is trust and inspire. That sums up the difference.

As a sales boss, it is all about command and control. Conformity and compliance are most important to me. Trust and inspire is, as a sales leader, you are going to sell to your person, “Here is your patch and territory. This could be your list of accounts of geographic territory.” I am going to support you the best way I can, but you decide the best way to get this business done in your territory. How can I help you achieve that? Trust people to continue to develop, expand, grow and learn with your support. The other is, “I know best. Do what I want you to do.”

One of the things both of you and I witnessed and experienced is a top producer is getting promoted into sales leadership without any real training and failing miserably as a leader versus a salesperson because they are different skills. Can you describe what someone should do to prepare to make that transition if they are not getting the training internally?

From my experience, I did a couple of things. I read what I could that was available about managing and leadership. I did not hesitate to ask people for guidance and mentors, internally, people that were more experienced in the role to give me some perspective on what they were doing. I asked the people that I was leading how I was doing.

It is part of your personality and it is not part of most people’s personality, the humbleness to ask for feedback, as opposed to, “I am going to pretend like I have it all together even though I had never done this before.” It is a completely different mindset to approach something with. In order to get feedback from people you are managing and/or your customers, you have to be willing to listen and not think you have all the answers all the time.

This is what I started pointing out in the book in terms of the contrast between a sales boss and a sales leader. One is a know-it-all versus one that is a learn-it-all. That is what you want to be. You want to be a learn-it-all. The humility you talk about is not just being modest and self-effacing, but it is about being intellectually humble. It is acknowledged that you do not know everything.

We put sales leaders, especially people who do not work in big companies that do not know very formal training programs and development programs, which the majority of companies out there put in tough positions. We promote them and then we do not enable them with the tools, the knowledge, and the training to have a better idea about what they are doing.

The thing that is ironic about that is that if you run polls, you look at the polls, surveys and research data, who is the single most influential in the life of an up-and-coming salesperson? It is their immediate manager. The people we should be investing in the most, we do not. According to LinkedIn, we spent roughly about $15 billion a year on sales training in the United States, of which 10% is spent on sales leaders and sales managers.

At least half of it should not be spent on sales managers. If they are the people having the most influence on the development of individual sellers, we cannot invest in them enough. Stop providing that training to sellers because they are going to get the guidance and knowledge they need from watching their sales managers.

[bctt tweet=”We are the sum of all the influences that are out there—our peers, our managers, the things we read, and the other information we absorb.” username=”John_Livesay”]

One of the things you talk about is people who say, “Let’s model what the top producer is doing. Let’s all march to that drum and say exactly what they are saying and try to be a clone.” You are saying, “That is the kiss of death. It is counterproductive.”

It is not like I was the best salesperson in the world, but no one sold like me because it was me. No one sells it like you. People did it better. That is great. I tried to learn from those people, but I had my own unique way of doing it. That has developed because we are the sum total of all the influences that are out there, our peers, our managers, the things we read, and the other information we absorb.

To force everybody into a single niche about how to sell is self-defeating. You have frameworks, you set up and you have expectations, “This is how we conduct business,” but within that framework, as a sales manager, I want to give you the freedom and the flexibility to go experiment and find out things that will work for you based on your unique strengths as a human being.

If you are going on a sales call with a boss and that boss is hyper-critical and expects you to be perfect, you do not have any room for failure trying something on your own, and then you are shutting down someone’s creativity and authenticity.

Selling is one of the most creative professions you can be in. To me, that was the one thing that has kept me in this, that in every situation, your approach is different. The way you present the solution and how you interact with the people will be necessarily different because they are also different if they are buying the same product. It is a fresh problem to solve, not solving the same problem over and over again.

I think of that as a doctor or a dentist. I thought, “How do they not get bored doing the same surgeries and over again?” I realized, much like a salesperson, in every patient and every situation, “We are putting a crown in your mouth,” or “We are removing your appendix.” Whatever it is, the outcome is the same, but there are so many unique things that require you to think, “I have never had to do it quite this way before.”

There are no small things to your customer. To your point, this is not to a patient. There are no small things when it comes to people’s health. As a seller, there are no small things in the buyer’s mind. If you try to serve to glom over those, assuming that they are like everybody else, you damage that relationship and the trust you have built.

One of the biggest reasons people are buying your book is that you have provided a guide on how to be successful on their own terms without having to fit into this mold of, “You have to be an extrovert. You have to do XYZ. You have to play golf.” All those stereotypical things of what salespeople used to have to do or would do and it is like, “I know what my terms are. This is how I entertain clients or not. This is how I sell. This is how I build rapport that might be different than you.”

It is becoming more essential because we are becoming more diverse in the people we are recruiting into sales. We are not doing enough. We could do more, but they all have different lived experiences. The perspectives people bring are what we need. We need more different perspectives. There is no one way.

You have so many great soundbites. One of my favorites is, “Influence rules, persuasion drools.” The visual on that is great. Tell us what you mean. A lot of people think, “I am going into sales. I am going to persuade you to buy this for this price.”

If you are persuasion-driven, you are putting your own interest ahead of those of the buyers. By definition, that is what you are trying to do. You are trying to persuade somebody to buy your product irrespective of their requirements, their needs and the things they want to achieve because you are in that mode where you are selling hammers and everybody is the nail. Even when you look at the definition of the word persuasion, it talks about prevailing or trying to prevail through force. In the wrong hands, persuasion is meant to be coercive and a little bit manipulative. Unfortunately, a lot of sellers are the wrong hands. That is not how buyers want to deal with the salesperson.

This is a big a-ha moment. I want to take a pause, circle it, underline it and highlight it. I am not in the persuasion business. Nothing against all the wonderful books about how to be persuasive, but let’s reshift this and start reframing how we think of ourselves.

Influence is all about having an effect on the thoughts and actions of others without the apparent use of force. That is what influence is and that is what position we are trying to get into. We are trying to build this connection with a buyer built on some level of trust that when the trust exists, they open up to us. When we bring our curiosity to bear, they will share information with us, perhaps at a deeper level than they would with someone where that trust and connection did not exist. Suddenly, we have more insight into the most important things to them in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they are trying to achieve by addressing those challenges.

When we have that understanding, we can work with the buyer to help shape this vision of success of what it will be like to get the value from the product or service you are selling. If you reach that point, that is something you do collaboratively with the buyer. It is not something you impose on them by trying to persuade them about it.

[bctt tweet=”Humility is not just being modest and self-effacing, but it is about being intellectually humble. It is acknowledging that you do not know everything.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I love that your definition of persuasion is, “I know better than you. I am right. You are wrong.” That is selling out. That is what this book is helping people not do. The opposite is the concept of selling which I have never heard of before. Therefore, there are no assumptions that you know more than they do or even vice versa. Think of it in terms of being a copilot with the buyer and this concept of, “Let’s make sure people feel heard and understood first before we jump into what we think they need.” It’s like when you go to a therapist, sometimes there is something called the presenting problem, which is a couple comes in and they say, “Our love life is not where we want it. That is why we are here.”

The therapist will go, “That is the presenting problem. I bet there are some reasons behind that.” As salespeople, we need to start thinking of ourselves as, “Whatever they tell you upfront, this is why we are changing, looking, upgrading or whatever the reason is for doing a proposal in the first place.” There might be other reasons they are unwilling to share yet, or maybe they do not even know yet. If you can help them discover that, then your trust factor has zoomed up.

Sometimes sellers are a little taken aback when I say this. I said, “You cannot take anything at face value that the buyer tells you.” They are not lying to you. They are not, not telling you the truth, but there is always more to it. If you accept what they tell you, you will hop down one path that is not the path the buyer wants to go down.

Building this level of trust so that they open up to you, as I write about in the book, then they give you permission to stick your nose into their business. What you are trying to get to is deeper level information that they do not readily share with everybody. I was in a conversation with someone on another podcast and they are talking about, “If you ask buyers scripted questions, you get scripted answers.”

If you are a robot, then they are going to give you robot answers.

You have trained them, not you, but sellers in general. Be the difference. This is the thing that I stress in the book. In the majority of instances, buyers oftentimes decide to buy from a seller despite the seller, not because of them.

If we flip that around and make it not in spite of but because we have a new tool in our box.

 

That is what you are trying to achieve. You become the reason they buy from your company. You, the individual. From supporting data from Gartner, Challenger and Forrester, we know that when customers make their decision, the majority of the criteria or factors in their minds are the experience with the salesperson.

That is everything from a home or the broker you pick to, if you are in Corporate America, deciding what vendor to make your equipment purchase from. People are buying your energy, your passion and your empathy.

How they experience you. Your understanding.

If people want to reach out to you and figure out how to get more coaching, more information and get on your email list, where should they go?

They can email me if they want to at [email protected]. They can connect with me on LinkedIn. Direct message me there. I would love to connect with people that are reading this.

Do you also have programs that you offer on your website?

If you go to AndyPaul.com and learn about the programs that I offer. You can download a free chapter of the book if you wish. We have an assessment that you can take there if you assume that selling out and selling in are polar opposite ends of a spectrum. You can start to determine where in that spectrum you sit. Are you leaning more towards selling out or selling in? It is not super scientific, but it is a fun quiz. Come buy the book on Amazon or wherever you purchase books.

[bctt tweet=”You cannot take anything at face value that the buyer tells you. They are not lying to you. They are not telling you the truth, but there is always more to it.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Thank you so much for sharing your insight. We are going to all become people who learn-it-all not a know-it-all. Any last thought or a quote you want to leave us with?

One of my favorite quotes is right at the beginning of the book from Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Insist on yourself. Never imitate.”

Most people think they have to become a clone in order to be successful. That is not the case at all. Thank you so much for getting us this new awareness and this new ability so that we can be ourselves and be successful at the same time. Who does not want that? Let’s go get the book, everybody. Thanks, Andy.

Thanks, John.

 

Important Links

• Andy Paul
• Sell Without Selling Out
• Sales Enablement with Andy Paul
• Stephen M.R. Covey – Sales Enablement with Andy Paul Episode
• Speed of Trust
• Trust and Inspire
• [email protected]
• LinkedIn – Andy Paul
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: Communication, Humility, leadership, Sales, Sales Training, Trust