Selling From The Heart With Larry Levine

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

Salespeople usually focus just on the product or service that they’re selling. But really they should try selling from the heart. As a salesperson, people skills is a very important trait to learn. You need to know how to sell your memories and experiences with your customer. Join John Livesay as he talks to Larry Levine on how to sell properly through relationships. Larry is the bestselling author of Selling From The Heart: How Your Authentic Self Sells You! He is also the co-host of the Selling from the Heart Podcast. Join in the conversation to learn how to grow your business by knowing more about your client.

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Selling From The Heart With Larry Levine

If you’re looking for new ways to be authentic when you sell something and make authenticity a lifestyle and not a light switch you turn on or off, then this episode Selling From The Heart is for you.

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Our episode’s guest is Larry Levine, who is the best-selling author of Selling From The Heart and the cohost of the Selling From The Heart Podcast. With decades of in-the-field sales experience within the B2B technology space, he knows what it takes to be a successful sales professional. In a post-trust sales world, Larry Levine helps sales teams leverage the power of authenticity to grow revenue, grow themselves and enhance the lives of their clients. He’s coached sales professionals across the world from tenured reps to new Millennials entering the salesforce. They all appreciate the practical, real, raw, relevant, relatable, and street-savvy nature of his coaching. He is not shy when it comes to delivering his message. Welcome to the show, Larry.

John, what’s going on? I can already tell we’re going to have a blast.

Tell me about your story of origin. You can go back to childhood or college, wherever you want to start where you got your first inkling of either being an entrepreneur or the concept of being a heart-centered person.

I hated everything about school. To me, high school was a blur. I didn’t like anything about school. I went to college to appease my parents and I double majored in college. My cumulative GPA by the time I graduated was 2.1 out of a 4.0 scale. The school wasn’t the gig for me but I went because I wanted to make my parents happy.

That’s the thing, growing up with a father who was a rocket scientist. That’s what I did. I’m a big believer in this. You don’t wake up one day and say, “I think I’m going to be a salesperson.” You fall into sales somehow. Here I am with a degree in Marketing and Health Science going, “Now what?” I was getting married. No pressure and no job. I had this little voice inside my head saying, “You got to pull your head out of you-know-what pretty quick because life has been thrust upon you.”

It’s going back to the late ‘80s. I opened up the yellow pages and saw the largest ad in the office technology space because my father had said, “If you could last one-year selling copiers, you’re worth your weight in gold in the sales world.” I took it for what it’s worth. I picked up the yellow pages, the largest ad, called up, asked for the owner of the company and got a job.

 

A week later, I find myself in a room watching a bunch of videotapes and getting trained and so forth. I’m sharing all this with you because the backstory behind all of this translates into my entire career selling copiers. My first year was 1988. It was the worst year and the best year of my life. I made $18,000 selling copiers in my 1st year.

Was that commission only, I’m guessing?

It was a draw against the salary and it was tough. I had to do 50 cold calls a day. I couldn’t come back until I had 50 cards. Once I came back, I had to start knocking down phone calls. I share all this with everybody because I believed what I learned in my first year carried me my entire career in the office technology space. I’m a big believer in this. We all have five senses and we all know what those are but I have no scientific proof behind the sixth sense, though we all have a sixth sense. My sixth sense when I was 24 years old was I have a keen awareness of bull crap.

It’s the BS meter if somebody’s wasting your time or not when you’re prospecting them.

[bctt tweet=”If you can last one year selling copiers, you’re worth your weight in gold in the sales world.” username=”John_Livesay”]

It’s not only that. I say this for a reason. I had this sixth sense of being keenly aware of what was going on in my surroundings, how salespeople are treating customers and what they were doing. I was going on sales ride-outs and so forth. I saw that the customer and commission were the centers of everything. It took me a while to figure this out because I was mirroring and mimicking everybody in my surroundings. It started to mess with me and I knew that wasn’t me. I remember I made my very first sale. I asked him, “Why did you buy from me? Besides, you felt sorry for me because it was my first sale.”

They said something to me that got me to start thinking, “You did something that completely was the polar opposite of what everybody else did. You made it about me, my company and how you can help. You didn’t make it about your products, your company and yourself.” I still remember that. I went on a very inquisitive rampage throughout my entire career. That curiosity led me to always ask questions. The more questions I asked about what was going on inside their heads, their perception of salespeople and experience, I took all of that and that’s how I marketed myself. For many years, I spent my entire career in one sales channel that was selling copiers.

 

You talk about in your book, Selling From The Heart, the importance of authenticity and getting trust when trust is low. A lot of people are aware that they have to be curious and ask some questions as opposed to just talking. What I want to have the readers learn from you is how do you earn the right to even ask the questions? The fact that you’re curious, if someone doesn’t trust you or think you have their best interests at heart, they’re like, “Tell me what you’re here for and I’ll make a decision. I don’t need to talk to you or for you to quiz me.”

Doctors can ask patients questions because assumed expertise and trust are going on there. Let’s dig a little deeper because you have so much experience. That’s the table stakes. Don’t be somebody who just talks. Ask questions. Let’s assume that more than half the people reading know that but are looking for another way to earn that trust, to be authentic so that potential buyers are even willing to answer the questions.

I’m going to dance on authenticity for a moment and the equal business stature. There are a couple of key things there. I believe we’re all authentic human beings. First and foremost, John, I’m going to get that out on the table. To me, authenticity is a lifestyle. It’s not a light switch. We’re all authentic human beings. I have no PhD or Doctoral in any of this, neither Master’s in Psychology and so forth. This is street smarts through decades of getting the you-know-what beat out of me, what works and what doesn’t work.

I bring up authenticity for a reason. The best way to define authenticity in the sales world is congruency. Does the walk match the talk? We can say the BS meters are at an all-time high with people. How you build trust and credibility happens in the first five minutes of a conversation with somebody. This is what I know is going on in their head. John is saying to himself, “Does Larry have the goods? Is this somebody that I can trust, open up and share my business secrets with the things that are going on in my office? Can I trust him? Is he credible? Can I believe what he says?”

I bring this up for a reason because that’s what I was keenly aware of. There are two words that I held myself accountable for my entire career. It’s how can I connect and relate to somebody? The faster you can do this and the faster you can make somebody feel comfortable with you, the faster they will become comfortable enough to share uncomfortable things going on in their office. It’s those uncomfortable things that are gold. Those are the things that you will need to help them solve their issues, challenges, goals, initiatives, dreams and aspirations.

[bctt tweet=”Sell memories and experiences.” username=”John_Livesay”]

I play so much emphasis on how I opened up meetings because I knew if I opened these up correctly and I shared a bit of me, John would share a bit of him. The missing link is we don’t spend enough time on the first five minutes. The first 5 to 10 minutes in most sales situations are product-centric dumps, company-centric dumps, the buyer knows it and the insert name of decision-maker knows it. They know what’s happening and they‘re prepared for it.

I was talking to an optometrist. Salespeople are calling him all day long and he said, “It’s gone from they could bring lunch into we could have a conversation. With the pandemic, you can only talk to me for ten minutes between patients.” What are people doing? He said, “They all say the same thing. ‘Our product is the best. Let us give you all the data and scientific facts to back it up.’” Something he could read on his own.

They’re not saying one thing about themselves or anything that they might have as an idea to help his practice. It’s like, “I only have ten minutes then I got to talk about all this stuff.” There’s no “time” to build rapport or ask a question. He said, “The opposite is true. When you have less time, relationships are even more important to build. Not less.”

 

I’m a big believer that we all can achieve equal business stature. Let’s say I’m talking to a chief financial officer, chief information officer or human resources. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to be as highly educated as them but I need to understand the language they speak and bring it to the table in a very quick amount of time that I understand their world.

In other words, in the very beginning, if you want somebody to feel comfortable with you, start speaking their language and sharing like, “John, these past days, I’ve worked with four chief financial officers just like you. These are the three issues that we’ve been working on deeply to help them solve, issues 1, 2 and 3. I’m curious, do any of these hit home with you?” You can roll that out but what it shows somebody is you’re working with people and using verbiage like them. You’re living in their world. Talk about making somebody feel comfortable, they’re going to go, “What just happened?”

Back to the optometrist because I love stories and I’m always trying to take your words of wisdom and make them relevant through a story, the optometrist said he likes this company that he works with because of their innovation. The problems people have with their eyes in that are not what they’re having. With the pandemic, everyone’s coming in complaining about their eyes being dry, wearing contacts more than six hours because they’re looking at Zoom calls and phones way more than they used to.

Enter a product that makes your contacts less dry after 6 hours and can go for 8 or 10 hours. That ability to stay current and make the doctor look like the hero by having the product that solves the problem is what a lot of companies didn’t use to do. I remember computer companies. They’re like, “We’re going to make something and then it’s up to marketing and sales to get people to want it as opposed to asking, ‘What are your problems? Let’s make a product to solve it.’”

Here’s my challenge to the sales world. We think we sell products. Ask any salesperson, company, sales leader or most people on what they sell. They go right to their products, solutions, service, all company-centric stuff. When I learned this decades ago, it was a monumental shift in everything. I learned to sell memories and experiences. You use storytelling. This is where all of this ties together.

[bctt tweet=”Authenticity is a lifestyle, not a light switch.” username=”John_Livesay”]

In sales, we all live in a commoditized world. I’m here to throw this out there. I came out of the copier channel. There wasn’t much difference between one copier and another. Highly commoditized sales channel. The difference was my ability to articulate how I was able to help them do better business and the experience they would get with me, not my company. The big key is the competitive differences in the company. The competitive difference is you. When I learned how to capture stories and how to repurpose stories, I’m the biggest believer that the best storytellers are story collectors.

I’ve worked with companies who realize that if the rep’s repertoire or tools are only the sales they’ve made and they don’t know anybody else’s success stories to share, they’re walking around with one hand tied behind their back. If somebody else has multiple stories like a playlist or a jukebox ready to go, even if they’re not their personnel, they can say, “So-and-so in another office had somebody in a similar situation to you.”

They tell that story. If that’s the one that resonates the most, then that’s what’s important, even if it’s not necessarily your story. As long as it’s a true story that somebody else in the company did, that’s how you start breaking down silos and growing existing clients. The secret there is not just telling stories but figuring out a way to share the stories across the department.

 

This is game changer stuff for those that are in sales. Let’s think about this collectively for a moment. Salespeople have golden opportunities to capture all of this. You’re having conversations with your customers daily. You’re in sales situations daily. You have opportune and monumental times to capture these stories. This is why amusement parks such as Disneyland, Magic Mountain or the sports entertainment world do a massively good job at capturing memories and experiences. There are no price negotiations.

It keeps going up every year. You don’t go to Disneyland and say, “I’ll have four tickets,” and the person at the window says, “That will be $1,500.” The next word out of your mouth goes, “I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you $1,250 for it.” It doesn’t happen so why do we allow this to happen for those that are in sales? The reason why I believe it happens is that people have lack confidence.

They may not believe in themselves or their messaging. They have low self-worth. When all of this happens, it’s hard to capture these memories and experiences. To be able to have a heartfelt human conversation with somebody with clarity, they get somebody to go, “I get it.” The faster you can tug on somebody’s heartstrings, the faster they will open up.

They open up the purse strings, not just their needs because we buy emotionally and back it up with logic. In your book, Selling From The Heart, you’ve got a whole wonderful visual of someone who is authentic and that there are three parts to around the heart. There’s selling, client management and prospecting, all done through the lens of authenticity. Let’s start with how does somebody prospects authentically? What does it look like when someone isn’t being authentic in their prospecting?

I have a different viewpoint on this because you started with prospecting. It triggers them. Most companies start their training with prospecting and building the pipeline. I’m all for it. I write about it in Selling From The Heart. If you want to have an ever-flowing sales funnel, you must build an ever-flowing relationship funnel. Here’s where I believe companies missed the mark. They start with prospecting first. I start with client management first.

I see monumental growth with this and it ties into authentic prospecting. When sales leaders and sales professionals understand what it’s like and they can comprehend how to build authentic relationships and bring meaningful value to their current client base, this fuels them and will propel them to authentically prospect for new opportunities. I’m all for new business growth and prospecting. It’s 100% non-negotiable.

[bctt tweet=”If you want to have an ever flowing sales funnel, you must build an ever flowing relationship funnel.” username=”John_Livesay”]

It’s a fascinating way of looking at it because I’ve come at it from a different perspective but the outcome is the same. When I was training speaking to a sales team of luxury car salespeople, Jaguars and Range Rover, I said, “You’re going to get noes.” People think, “If you’re selling a luxury car, you don’t get rejected.” Yes, you do. There’s a competitive set for every price point. I said, “What you need to do after the no calls someone you recently sold a car to. Not to try and sell them anything else but to remember what a happy client sounds like.”

When the next person walks into the dealership or rings on the phone, you have that in your head and not the no. It’s like a sorbet in between courses. I hear you saying before you start prospecting, get in the mindset of the current clients and why they’re happy so that you’re authentically sharing that message.

I fought with sales managers inside the world that I grew up in, which is the copier channel. We were always benchmarked on outdated KPIs, Key Performance Indicators. “How many calls you made now? How many appointments did you go on?” Things that are still alive and well drive me bonkers. I would get into severe arguments then they would say something like this, “Larry, you’re spending way too much time with the current customers. You got to go out and grab some new business.” However, I drove more new business sales in a company year over year than any other salesperson but yet spent the most amount of time with my current customers.

 

Were you getting referrals?

It was referrals but here’s where I learned this. I self-taught myself to power the networks. I knew that when I went high, wide, deep and built authentic relationships inside my customer base, I was one degree of separation from all of their peers, friends and people like them in other businesses with the same titles. I will be the first one to throw up both hands high in the air and say, “I hated cold calling.” I would rather find any other excuse out there than to cold call.

What I did enjoy was prospecting through my current customers. If leaders and salespeople can latch onto this, they will monumentally grow their business. It was simple as this. It’s a silly rhyme but I’ve made this up a long time ago. I stuck to it forever. “The more you know about your clients, the more you’ll grow with your clients. The more you learn about your clients, the more you’ll earn from your clients.” I held myself to these non-negotiable standards that every single day, I was going to generate new conversations, new connections and build new relationships inside my customer base.

I was going to intentionally pour myself into my customers. In turn, they would pour themselves into me. In doing so, I would ask for people like them that I can go out and talk to. Pretty soon they were repurposing stories and sharing experiences. I was driving more new business inside my company than anybody else. That’s why I’m a big believer that we have to flip prospecting on its head. I’m all for a new business but not at sacrificing the relationships with your current customers.

You have taken all this expertise and turned it into a book and a podcast. You also are available for personalized coaching for teams or individuals. You have some sales training available.

This is where this forced entrepreneurship came in because at 50 years old, I was fired. That was my exit out of the copier channel. I had to decide real quickly what to do. I can go back to what I knew or I could try something different. I doubled down on myself. I put 100-pound weights on my ankles into the entrepreneurship world. What I’m bringing is what I believe is sorely lacking. There are great sales skills training and product training out there.

What’s not enough of is people skills and relational skill-building. To me, that’s the missing link in sales. Some might call it soft skills. I say soft skills, yield hard dollars. People skills are human nature. It’s how we connect, relate and create these personal relationships. Everything that we do on our side of life, I believe transfers to the professional side of life. That’s what I coach sales leaders and sales teams to do. They might be going, “Where’s my ROI on this?”

Do you have a particular niche that you’d like to talk to? Is it people who are selling equipment?

What’s been interesting is to see where Selling From The Heart has taken me. It’s taken me into tons of vertical markets and industries. Industries are where relationships matter. You might be saying, “Larry, that’s about every place.” The whole message in the book and the movement around Selling From the Heart attracts like-minded and like-hearted leaders.

It eliminates the dirtbags that are out there that are transactional-oriented salespeople and sales leaders. Nothing wrong with that, you can grow your business that way. If you want to continue year over year to grow your people, you have to transform yourself, your sales team, the conversations and the relationships you have with your customers.

It all comes from developing people skills and relationship skills with your team. I’m a big believer in this and this is why we’re seeing such growth with this. Leaders who lead with their heart and lean into their sales team will soon develop a team that goes out there and leans into their customers and sells from the heart. That’s what we’re all about.

There’s a great way to end the episode. If people want to find out more about you, the book or the podcast, they can go to SellingFromTheHeart.net. Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with, Larry?

Your clients and your future clients would rather do business and connect with a sales professional who sells from the heart as opposed to a sales rep who is an empty suit.

Thanks for being someone who sells from the heart and shows us all how to do it in that wonderful way as well. Thanks, Larry.

 

Important Links

• Selling From The Heart
• Selling From The Heart
• Selling From The Heart Podcast
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: authenticity, building relationships, Client Management, People Skills, Selling Experiences, Selling From The Heart