Selling From The Heart With Larry Levine
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 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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Listen to the podcast here
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.
Selling From The Heart: You don’t wake up one day and say, I think I’m going to be a sales person. Sales doesn’t work like that, you fall into it. You fall into sales somehow.
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.
Selling From The Heart: The best way to define authenticity in the sales world is congruency. Does your walk match your talk?
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.”
Selling From The Heart: Know how you can connect with somebody? And how you can relate to somebody? The faster that you can do this, the faster they will be more comfortable to share things with you.
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.
Selling From The Heart: Ask any salesperson what they sell. They’ll go right to their products, services, and other company-centric things. Instead of doing that, learn how to sell memories and experiences.
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.
Selling From The Heart: If you want to grow your business, know that the more you know about your clients, the more you’ll grow with your clients. And, the more you learn about your clients, the more you’ll earn from your clients.
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.
Selling From The Heart: How Your Authentic Self Sells You! By Larry Levine
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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Own The A.I. Revolution With Neil Sahota
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Do you remember when IBM’s Watson, their artificial intelligence, actually beat jeopardy? Meet Neil Sahota, one of the key people behind the team at IBM that made that happen. Like all great ideas, Watson was conceived at a bar where Jeopardy happened to be playing on the TV. On today’s podcast, Neil joins John Livesay to dive into the world of artificial intelligence and its many elements, including artificial empathy. Neil talks about how artificial intelligence can actually make us more human. Tune in to this episode to unpack this insight.
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Listen to the podcast here
Own The A.I. Revolution With Neil Sahota
Do you remember when IBM Watson’s artificial intelligence beat Jeopardy!? Meet Neil Sahota, one of the key people behind the team at IBM that made that happen. You can only imagine the suspense and the stress they were under if it didn’t work. He also shares what it was like to live in China. He said, “It’s like the Stone Age meets the Space Age.” Find out what he means. Finally, he talks about how artificial intelligence can make us more human and there’s artificial intelligence for empathy. This is an episode you won’t want to miss.
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Our guest is Neil Sahota. He is an IBM Master Inventor, United Nations Artificial Intelligence subject matter expert, and a Professor at UC Irvine. He’s got many years of business experience. He works to inspire clients and partners to foster innovation and develop next-generation products and solutions powered by AI. His work spans multiple industries, including legal services, healthcare, life sciences, retail, travel and transportation, energy, automotive basically everything.
He is one of the few people selected for IBM’s Corporate Service Corps leadership program that pairs leaders with NGOs to perform community-driven economic development. He lived in China when he was there. He also partners with entrepreneurs to define their products, establish their markets, and structure their companies. He’s a member of several investment groups like the Tech Coast Angels. He’s also served as a judge in various startup competitions. I’m thrilled to have you. Welcome, Neil.
Thanks for having me on, John. I’m excited to be here.
We didn’t even touch on all the other things you do. You have a book called Own the AI Revolution. There are many things going on, and you’re also a speaker. Tell us a little bit about your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, school, or wherever you want, that gives us a sense of how it all started. Were you always interested in computers? Did you have a robot friend?
No, not at all. I was a kid from the Bronx that loved playing sports. I live a couple of blocks from Yankee Stadium. We’re playing stickball, basketball, and football. My mom got tired of me always playing sports. She felt like I need to be more well-rounded. She insisted to me to try to learn the piano or the violin. I wasn’t into that. One day, she’s like, “You have to do something else.” We had been walking by a little strip mall area and they were teaching computer classes in there. I told my mom as an eight-year-old kid, “I want to learn computers.” She’s like, “What? Seriously?” I’m like, “Yeah.” She marched me right in and signed me up for classes.
If it’s between that and piano, I understand. I took piano lessons. I like music. There’s a big connection between math and music. It’s quite interesting to see how one little choice like that can make such a difference in how that all transpired. There you are taking computers. You liked it and took to it, but they weren’t talking about artificial intelligence back then, I’m guessing. There’s more coding.
Yeah. I was learning. It was on Apple IIe to date myself here. It’s cool to say that I could write these little lines of code and stuff would happen. You could do a calculation and get some graphics, but you essentially are enabling people to be able to do something with the machine. I thought, “That’s creative because I dig that.” Fast forward a few decades there, I was working with a lot of the C-level execs and they’re like, “Business intelligence was taken off. It’s amazing what computers are telling us.” I’m like, “Computers aren’t telling us anything.” There are cool tools to collect tons of data, slice and dice it, and create nice looking reports but machines don’t tell us anything. Could a machine do that? That’s how I looked down this path going like, “I wonder if there’s a way a machine tells us something. Could a machine find insights?”
You spent this illustrious career over twelve years at IBM dealing with their Watson ecosystem. For those readers who may not know much about that, tell us what that was like from the beginning to twelve years later because things move fast.
The thing with Watson started at a bar with all great ideas. There were three IBM Distinguished Engineers. They’re some smart guys. We’re thinking about something cool to do and Jeopardy! happened to be playing on the TV. We’re like, “What if we could create a computer that could play on Jeopardy!?” Most people are like, “How hard could that be?” It’s like playing chess. Jeopardy! will be giving an answer and you have to figure out the question. You think about language. How hard is it to understand people when they talk?
[bctt tweet=”AI will actually make us more human.” username=”John_Livesay”]
If I say I’m feeling blue because it’s raining cats and dogs, everyone knows what I’m talking about. If you tell a machine that, it’s like, “You’re physically the color blue because small animals are falling from the sky?” That does not compute. These were the hurdles and we figured out how to do this. We had to commit to the Jeopardy! challenge two years in advance. At that point, we didn’t even know if we could do this or not. Chris was like, “Of course, we’ll make it happen.” It’s no secret that it’s 50/50 that Watson would work the night of the Jeopardy! challenge.
Nothing like a little drama in a story.
Everyone got the blackberries out and the recipes all ready to go.
It’s visible.
Watson did not start off well. These 6 of the first 7 questions, the execs are a few rows in front, and looking unhappy. Everyone’s like, “I might be in the market for a new job. We have lunch or something.” It’s a testament to how fast AI learns. Watson turned it around. It turned into questions right, applying the strategy, and then it won the whole thing. We’re like, “We did not expect that.”
I’ve read a lot about how it learns fast, even how to bid because it’s not just answering and coming up with the right question for the answer, but also, which thing to bid on and not bid on. It’s fascinating stuff. I’ve worked with quite a few founders in artificial intelligence and trying to work with them on crafting a story around it. For people who aren’t into the weeds of artificial intelligence, there’s this whole thing around structured data and unstructured data, and everybody zones out.
I use the analogy of the tip of the iceberg. What’s above the water is what you can see and that’s what’s structured. This whole premise of how can AI help understand what people are feeling and not just if it’s positive or negative information that you’re trending on social media, but what causes it. My favorite story around this was, you come home and you see your wife crying. You don’t know if it’s tears of joy because she got good news or tears of sadness because something bad happened, or she’s frustrated you left your socks on the floor again. Until we know why someone’s crying, it’s not enough to know if someone’s happy or not happy, especially when you zoom out and look at it from a standpoint of how a company should respond with all this data coming through social media channels. I’d love to have you speak a little bit about how AI has grown past, “Someone’s happy or not,” to “Here’s the reason they’re feeling this way.”
There’s a whole area called artificial empathy in AI. It’s exactly like it sounds like. The machine is trying to figure out the emotional state of a person and dynamically respond to that. People feel emotions. How the world is going to be empathetic?
There are some people that can’t do that.
AI Revolution: Machines can only do what we teach them to do; so far, we have not figured out how to make AI creative or imaginative.
People are like, “Can a machine do this?” The answer is yes. It doesn’t have to feel it. We can teach it things or clues to look for. It’s areas about psychology, kinesiology or body language, and neurolinguistics are clues. It’s things that we, as people, use subconsciously.
Your eyes go up or not. The whole Neuro-Linguistic Programming, you’re trying to remember something or your face gets flustered and you’re angry. It’s not just the computer responding to what you type in. It’s got cameras and can start to see body cues. Ironically, it’s probably better than a virtual world because, for many people during a pandemic, I can’t read body language like I could in person, but the computers are like, “No problem for us.”
That’s a huge advantage. You’re seeing a lot of people build tools to help people connect better in the virtual environment, as well as communicate better. In addition to empathy, the machine has a way to use neurolinguistics to deconstruct language. You learn, “Neil is an auditory learner and John is a visual learner. Neil cares more about the fun factor of a product while John cares more about the value of the product. This is the best way to engage.”
Even the words to use. “You should use these words with Neil and these words with John to help communicate.” A lot started as marketing and sales staff, people realize, “This is an AI communication coach.” If you want to connect better with your kids or you’re wondering why your wife is angry at you, it can help us do that now and respond back. Rather than like, “What’s wrong with you?” The AI is like, “No, don’t say that.” “I feel like something is wrong here. Did something happen today? Tell me.”
There are many questions around just this. I could spend so much time with you. Let’s do it through the lens of marketing and sales. I’m always a big studier of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. I remember that back in the day, that was completely revolutionary information. Especially speakers, you and I are both keynote speakers. When we get up in front of an audience, we know that some of those people are going to be visually-oriented, so you need to paint a picture. Some of them are going to be kinesthetic and some of them are going to be auditory.
My favorite example of that is when I say the car door slammed. Do you see it, hear it, or feel it? I’m always fascinated by the people who feel the door slamming and yet, those people, you can almost predict that they’re going to have an amazing sound system in their car at home and Sonos speakers or whatever. I remember being in a car with a friend of mine and she was driving us around. I just moved up to Northern California in Marin County. She was driving and taking us someplace she’d been before. She’s like, “This doesn’t feel like the right way. Neil, I lost my mind.” I said, “Are you telling me you’re navigating by your feelings? Where’s the map?”
That was my first introduction to not everyone processes the work the way I do. From a sales perspective and speaking perspective, we need to use language that doesn’t make people shift. You’re like, “That resonates with me now because you said it in visual terms or kinesthetic terms.” “Does it ring a bell? Does that feel like the kind of journey you’d like to go on with us?” All those kinds of things are what a good speaker does. Maybe it’s subconscious. If it’s conscious, it takes it to a whole other level. What do you think about all that? How do you use that in your speaking?
It’s about connections. We sometimes lose sight of that. What we’re trying to do is not just this call or making the sale that’s the ultimate thing. We want to be successful. It’s about building relationships and creating resonance. This is a good way to tap into that. People have told me I’m an engaging dynamic speaker and people charged up in a good way. People are like, “What’s your secret?” I’m like, “I don’t know if I have a secret. It’s just that I think about what makes the most sense for the audience. What are the outcomes and the experience that they need?” I’m not at that stage to hear myself talk. How smart I am, I don’t care about that. I’m there because I want to create value for those people so I have to find a way to try and connect with them. That’s why I’m sure you do the same thing I do, John. Every time you’re asked to give a talk, I’m going, “Who is the audience?” All those types of things.
“Let me talk to a couple of people before I get up in front of them.” I can reference that so that there’s some customization to it all. Salespeople do that before they go on a sales call. That preparation pays off. Computers can do way more preparation than we can. What advantage do you think we have over AI from a sales perspective? If they know what language to use and they can do more preparation than we can, what do we have going for us?
[bctt tweet=”The best way to predict the future is to create it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Machines can only do what we teach them to do. So far, we have not figured out how to make AI creative or imaginative. How do you paint the right picture? How do you tell the right story? AI helps us make sure we’re using the best possible words but they can’t tell us how to craft the story.
Do you think that AI can be a replacement or a substitute for therapy? If people need empathy, someone listening to them, and they can search their database of diagnosis or whatever, “You’re depressed. You need to eat more. Get outside and exercise.” Is that one of the industries that’s probably at risk of being replaced?
I wouldn’t say replaced or substituted but I’d say augmented or supplemented. There’s a lot of focus on this because there are not enough therapists in the world and sometimes, people need outlets. I’m going to tell you something that might blow your mind, John. In Nairobi, Kenya, there’s a project going on called Loving AI. To all the audience, it’s not what you think right away. The goal of Loving AI is to solve the biggest illness in the world, which is loneliness. Before COVID, about 40% of the world suffer from moderate to severe loneliness and they wanted to give these people an outlet. They wanted to create an AI, whether it’s a chatbot or an avatar, or whatever. They want to teach AI, unconditional love. The thought was, “If we can do this, everybody, no matter what time of day or how afraid you are, would have a safe spot to go to.” A substitute for human relationships with a safe spot to go to, engage, feel like they belong to something, and build their confidence so they can go out and engage people. Here’s the mind-blowing part of this. As they try to do this, how do you teach unconditional love to an AI?
It hard enough to teach them empathy, let alone that next step.
The question is, what’s the difference between unconditional love and love?
I know. I have a family. “I love you if you get these grades or if you do that.”
That’s a good example. There are different kinds of love. There’s a love between two spouses, love between a parent and child, and love with your friends. They went from this grandiose idea, which they’re working on to realizing, “This is way more complicated than we thought. We can’t even quite define love. We have to figure out what love means and what conditional love is.” It turned to this deep exploration of what it means to be human. One of the big things that jazz me about AI is that machines, that AI will make us more human.
It does not just free up our time to do higher-value work or do yoga, or whatever. It’s forcing us to think about things. Because we’ve had to teach these concepts to a machine, it’s forcing us to think, “What do these things mean? What is this?” That turns this grandiose exploration and that’s helping us develop better therapists and better psychologists in turn because then we’ll understand some of these things on a deeper level.
That’s what a salesperson is on some level. Even a hairdresser is a psychologist on some level. Anyone who’s interacting with people where they feel like they need to vent their frustrations or open up and share their problems or their fears. Even something like a mortgage broker. You have to say, “Here are my financials.” There’s some level of trust that has to be built. Adweek interviewed me to analyze which Super Bowl commercials told the best stories and it was a fascinating exercise to analyze them all.
AI Revolution: The goal of Loving AI is to solve the biggest illness in the world, which is loneliness.
Google was one of the top because they did that whole thing about the older man losing his memory and using Google to replay their favorite songs of his dead wife and to keep that memory alive. Anytime a product is a Sherpa to help someone be more human. It’s not about the technology. It’s about, “This memory would be lost without it. It helps me grieve and helps me remember someone I love that’s not here. I’m using my own memory.” It’s memories within memories, and then they showed a movie clip, and then you’re like, “Oh my God.”
You’re into the sophistication of stories within stories within a short commercial. That’s what I live for, that kind of analysis, having an advertising background, and all that. What was it like being in China? We can’t let you go without asking a question for goodness sake. Different cultures and different values, your meeting in the world of AI for the common language, I’m guessing. I’ve had some people that live there and said, “We moved to LA to better air.” I’ve never heard of that before, but you probably can relate to that.
China was interesting. I enjoyed my time out there. I lived in a city called Ningbo, which is a small city with seven million people. It was my first time in China, people have always said, “The best way to describe China is the Stone Age meets the Space Age.”
They jump right over the Industrial Age?
You can’t explain the size and scale of China and how things work without experiencing it. That’s true because when I get to China, everything’s on a massive scale. There are many people. The university has 600,000 students. You can’t even fathom that here in the United States. The Space Age meets the Stone Age is, you’ll be in a part of the city and you’ll see these 1,000-year-old buildings. A little bit dilapidated maybe and maybe some wirings. Right next to it is this totally sleek, modern, Platinum LEED-certified skyscraper. It’s such a dichotomy, but you can see the mindset in China.
Living there was immersive. I live like a local and work like a local. I understood how they thought. The thing is they think in terms of long term and in terms of community goals. They’re thinking not so much about what they need to try to accomplish this week or this month. They’re thinking about, “Where does my organization need to be in 10 years or 100 years? What are the steps?” No matter how many small steps they have to take to get there. This has shaped the culture and the mindset out there. They have amazing food.
That takes us to where you’re teaching. What are some of the favorite things you like about teaching?
I never thought I would go down this path, to be honest, but I enjoy connecting with the students, have a chance to share my knowledge, and more importantly, my experiences so that they make new mistakes and not the same mistakes I did.
That’s one of my favorite questions. If you could go back in time to your younger self, what would you say? As a teacher in college, are you saying to them, “AI is the future. You’ve got to learn this and embrace this.” I heard somebody say reading, writing, and coding. When you’re not teaching your children all three, it’s child abuse, to be prepared for the new world.
[bctt tweet=”Entrepreneurs have to be willing to take risks and think differently.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I tapped into Wayne Gretzky. I tell my students out. If you’re not familiar with Wayne Gretzky, he’s probably one the greatest ice hockey player ever. People used to ask him, “Why are you good?” He said, “My secret? I don’t skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck will be.”
That’s why people hire you to be the speaker. You help them visualize what’s coming around the corner, even if you can’t predict the pandemic. Maybe they could because it happened 100 years ago. They’re like, “We’re due.” What advice do you give entrepreneurs so that they can be like Wayne Gretzky in their business planning? The traditional business plans from yesteryear don’t even make sense anymore.
Things happen too fast, change too fast. You probably hear the expression all the time, John, “Feel fast. Learn change.” It’s true even in regular business, not just entrepreneurship. I tell entrepreneurs, “You’ve got to be willing to take risks when you have to think differently.” It’s not just you have to have the great idea. You’ve got the idea, build the idea, own the idea and create the infrastructure around the idea. You’ve got to do all these things to be successful. I have a framework I called TUCBO, Think different, Understand different, Create different, Be different and Own different. If one focuses on the team, they think if I get the T, “I’m golden.” Idea by itself is not worth the whole lot if you’re not going to build it, create it, get the buy-in, and build the infrastructure.
I will share the story of Tesla. Why is Tesla successful in electric cars, where everyone else has failed for decades? They have some great technology and they made some great advancements in batteries. That’s not the selling point. They didn’t think differently. They didn’t create differently. One of the big edges they created was they took away the reasons to say no. Are you worried about finding a charging station? They have an app for it that will tell you where they are. Are you worried about infrastructure charging stations out there? We’re building that infrastructure. We’re out there negotiating with the shopping malls, retail centers, theaters and grocery stores to get prime locations for those stations for you.
That’s what the competitors weren’t doing. I remember there was another electric car company right around the time of Tesla. It was like, “That’s just for rich people. It can’t hold the charge to go from LA to Vegas.” “Somebody put a charging station in the middle?” I like that. That’s a great quote. “Take away the reasons for people to say no,” and that’s true whether you’re Tesla pitching. I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you for a tip since you judge and hear many pitches for investment. Any tips on how to give a great pitch to an investor? What mistakes to avoid? Either one, whatever you want to do.
You have to tell a relatable story. You’d love that, John. I’ve heard over 2,000 pitches in my life. You have to tell a relatable story and you have to connect with the investors in the room. I see people come in and they probably have a great idea and they got some traction going on. They’re saying, “Fourteen-year-old kids are going to love this.” If you look at the room, the average person in this room was 52. How are they going to connect with that? If you said, “Your fourteen-year-old kid is going to love this better.” You have to tell the story and have to make it connect and stick. Otherwise, they’re never going to get it.
Also, a good story makes you memorable. Think of hearing 2,000 pitches. You probably remember the ones that have amazing stories because that’s how our brain works and keeps things in our memory because we’re not AI where we can’t just pull all 2,000 up at one time. We’re going to remember the ones that have that emotional story that is not only relatable but hopefully, has some emotional hook to it. I know you’re involved in social causes as well as part of your own purpose and premise. What’s in the book, Own the AI Revolution? That’s the hint. How’s that for a transition? We have artistic intelligence as part of a play on words instead of artificial intelligence on top of artificial empathy. You’ve given us all kinds of great ways to reframe everything, which nobody appreciates that more than I do. What is in your book that can make people intrigued enough to want to go buy it?
My book Own the AI Revolution is geared around what would I call the three Es, Education, Empowerment and Enablement. It’s been for non-technical business leaders, specifically because most of the books were technical or too high-level, too theoretical, or too fearmongering. It gives you a little sense of what exactly is AI? What can it do and not do? The empowerment is to help you answer the question, how do I figure out something to do with AI? Everyone’s like, “I know I should do something but how do I figure that out?”
It empowers you and shares a framework, a set of steps on how to do that. When the enablement is showing you, how do you do it? How do you build a team? How do you go out and put the product to market? It’s woven in with a lot of different real-world stories. It’s non-technical people that have started new business units, new startup ventures with AI to show you that you don’t need to be a smart technologist to do something with this. Most successful ventures I’ve seen were non-technical people. How many technologists know how smart they are? Know the ground problems of a marketer or a doctor or an accountant?
Own the A.I. Revolution: Unlock Your Artificial Intelligence Strategy to Disrupt Your Competition
When I spoke at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit, I was talking to the CMO of Domino’s Pizza. I said, “Your team built the app that tracks pizza from order to delivery.” What I thought was fascinating, Neil, was their overall goal was to give people the perfect pizza experience. From that place, they said, “How can we use AI to cut down a few seconds on the delivery time for the perfect experience?” We have thought if you want a pizza and it comes faster, it’s almost boom. It’s a Space Age stuff.
If you order the same pizza at the same time every day or the same order week after week, then the minute you open the app or pick up the phone, AI goes, “Let’s go ahead and put the order in before they finish completing it. We’ll eat it if they change it.” Those few seconds of getting the pizza started before the order is completed, the predictiveness that might give the consumer a better experience and they may not even notice it. “My pizza is coming here faster,” but maybe they will. I don’t know. That to me was one of my favorite examples of it being used in a way that most people aren’t aware of.
We may not necessarily notice that. If you think they still do some more small changes like that.
“How are they getting those pizzas? They’re fast.” Any last thoughts you want to share with us? Tell people how to find you for speaking. Any last thoughts you want to have to us about what is coming around the corner that you can share, like the puck?
I will tell you there’s a lot of cool things going on but I know a lot of people are wondering, “How can I be in front of the curve?” The best way to predict the future is to create it. We all have a shot or a chance to be a driver but we don’t realize that. Think about something. Even a small thing, a pain point, or an opportunity or something tedious. There’s probably an opportunity there for you. Do something small or big and it’s worth exploring. If you want to learn more about how to do that, definitely come and check out what I have on my website, NeilSahota.com, or you can follow me on LinkedIn and Twitter. I’m always sharing stories or things about what people are up to or I’m doing. Hopefully, you’ll find some inspiration.
I know we will. You’re riveting and thank you for sharing your intelligence, real and artificial, with us all.
It’s my pleasure, John. I had a blast.
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Social Selling And Making Creative Presentations With Mike Montague
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Age old principles of sales hold true even in the era of social selling. Just with traditional selling, it is all about being creative with your presentation – a feat that can only be achieved by knowing what your client needs and building a relationship of trust with them. Joining John Livesay to talk about this is, Mike Montague, Global Head of Content and a Certified Trainer at Sandler Training. Mike is author of LinkedIn the Sandler Way, a groundbreaking book that documents some of the best practices of social selling from Sandler graduates. He also hosts the How to Succeed Podcast. In an in-depth conversation, Mike delves into the world of social selling, dispels the myths and misconceptions surrounding it and gets clear about the principles that really matter.
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Listen to the podcast here
Social Selling And Making Creative Presentations With Mike Montague
Our guest is Mike Montague. He shares with us his expertise on what it takes to use LinkedIn for social selling. He talks about how to have opportunities, people, and build relationships around that. He also talks about how to avoid sales malpractice and the way to do that is to ask the right questions. He said that the best presentation is the one that your prospect will never see because they don’t need to because you’ve done a good job of connecting with them. Finally, he says negotiate terms, not dollars. Enjoy the episode.
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My guest is Mike Montague, the Global Head of Content and a Certified Trainer at Sandler Training. He’s also the author of LinkedIn The Sandler Way, which talks about social selling, as well as the host of How to Succeed Podcast. He’s got a lot of creative ideas he’s going to share with us from his days as a DJ. I can’t wait to hear his own personal story. Mike, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
I teased out a little bit about you. You’re an expert in helping people ask better questions. You’ve got a book out about social selling, but I want to start with your creativity background. You and I before the show talked about your days as a DJ and how you’ve come up with all creative ways to grab people’s attention. If you don’t mind, take us back to your childhood. Were you a magician as a little boy? Where did you learn all this creativity?
I did do a little bit of that. My family has a term called Creative Nerdery and I own it. If you want, you can to go to CreativeNerdery.com. What that meant for us was being our authentic natural child self of nerding out and geeking out on something or entertaining the family. We would do fake radio shows, we swim across the pool and then interview how it feels to be the winner and do those weird creative projects. I have a cousin that’s a podcaster, interesting designer, rock musicians. My brother did stand-up comedy and we all nurtured our creative artistic side.
Social Selling: The best presentations are ones that don’t look like a presentation. The best salesperson doesn’t like one either.
I loved music and I found deejaying in college. As soon as I turned 21, it was a cool way to make money and meet girls instead of paying money and sitting in the back, not talking to anybody. I did that for twelve years, made it all the way up to the top 40 radio station here in Kansas City. I was on Mix 93.3 as Romeo because of my last name there. I think entertaining and getting people’s attention and having fun brings interest to whatever you’re doing, but even sales pitches.
This concept of creativity and even a little bit of magic, you hinted that you did something with time travel to entertain people. Tell us that story.
That was the presentation that I did in Orlando right before everything shut down. We set it up as a video pitch for the launch of a new Alexa app that we have. We have a My Sandler skill on Alexa. We did this Alexa Powered Time Travel thing where I did the evolution of dance type of video, but I did it live. We went back to the 1960s. I was a salesperson in the 1960s, and then I was a salesperson in the 1980s and a salesperson in the early 2000s. I changed wigs and changed clothes during the presentation and had to run from stage-to-stage. It was a whole lot of fun. I also thought an interesting way to tell the story and get people’s attention rather than say, “Sandler has been around for 50 years. While you might think we’re old, we have a new voice-activated Alexa app.” That’s great, but that’s boring. Instead, we got some good laughs and had some fun.
Tell us a little bit about what the Sandler Training is. I know that you had mentioned to me the importance of asking the right question because you and I talked about you’re going to have a great presentation, but if it’s in the wrong room with non-decision makers or people who don’t see a need, it’s throwing your pearls before swine. What is this premise of the training that you specialize in at Sandler?
[bctt tweet=”When selling don’t try to get married on the first date.” username=”John_Livesay”]
David Sandler himself started many years ago and he passed away in the 1990s, but he had a rule that the best presentation you’ll ever give, the prospect will never see. What that means is if you do a good enough job of asking the right questions, understanding their needs, talking about how they’re going to make decisions and how your solutions might fit, there might be a chance that you don’t even need to give a presentation that they go, “That sounds great. I’ll buy it.” You don’t do this formal dog and pony show and break out the PowerPoint because they trust you to continue to do what you say, work with them on crafting the solution and you move forward.
The other part of that is there is this old stereotype of the salespeople need to be pushy, that they need to be convincing and they need to jump up on tables and make a lot of noise to get people’s attention. You and I both know that’s not true. That sometimes the best presentations that you give are ones that they don’t even recognize as a presentation. Like in your book, a great story doesn’t feel or look like a presentation. That person doesn’t feel or look like a salesperson. They never even see it coming when you do it that way.
I wanted to ask your opinion around this because my belief is that the premise of people has to get to know you and then they might like you and eventually trust you is all wrong. We’ve heard that phrase, you got people to know like, and trust you. I remember in my days of competing against IBM, we were trained. You have to earn the right even to ask a question. My premise is that people have to trust you first before they will even let you ask them questions. What are your thoughts on that?
I think trust is the keyword in that know, like, and trust. Sometimes people will buy from people they don’t like if they trust them more. All things being equal, people still do like to buy from people that they like. They have to know that you exist. All of those things are relevant, but sometimes they do give the wrong stereotypes or they slow down your sales process because you think, “First they have to know everything about me.” No, that’s not true. They need to know that you exist. They don’t need to know your company history and your background. What they need to know is that you can solve their problem and that they can trust you to do what you say you do. You’re right on there. That’s also a lot of what we do at Sandler is talking about, “Before you give this pitch, how can you thoroughly understand their needs so that you’re solving the right problem?” A lot of times, the problem the buyer brings you is not the real problem. They’re bringing you a symptom of something else. If you pitched that symptom, you’re not solving the real issue and they’ll give you a, “Yeah, but,” answer.
Social Selling: Sometimes, what a buyer brings you is not the problem, but a symptom of something else.
It is much like a doctor who has to ask the right questions to figure out what’s causing the symptom and not just deal with the symptom of things are slow here or there’s no engagement.
We use that doctor analogy a lot because it’s a great one for a good professional salesperson that you can trust. They’re going to ask you, “How long has it been hurting? Does it hurt when you do this? What have you tried to do to fix it?” “Are you taking any other medications?” Those are all great questions as salespeople too. We need to know the whole scope. Otherwise, it is the sales malpractice. You’re guessing at the solution and you’re prescribing an answer before you know what the problem is.
I’ve never heard that combo before. I like that a lot. I want also to ask you about your book. This concept of social selling and that LinkedIn is a platform where that probably works, people run ads on Facebook. I see it now, a lot of sponsored things on Instagram. This concept of social selling, tell us where the concept came from. What’s a big mistake people make when they’re trying to sell on social media platforms?
There are two things. The first one is that we wrote this book with LinkedIn and I teamed up with a guy named Koka Sexton at LinkedIn. It’s authored by Sandler and LinkedIn and you can get it for free at Sandler.com/linkedinsecrets. We wrote it because there’s so much stuff out there about social media marketing. When people hear social selling, they think the wrong thing, they think making sales pitches or blasting out a tweet or update posts that people click on and they buy from you. That’s not what we’re talking about here. I’m talking about salespeople in the sales profession and people that need to build relationships and they want to add more information about a current relationship. I know you did a lot of enterprise selling. If you’re selling to Coke or Pepsi, you’re not going to send out a tweet and have them send you a $1 million advertising contract.
[bctt tweet=”Avoid sales malpractice.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You’re going to need to build that relationship, but you can find out so much more information about the organizational structure of a Coca-Cola by going on LinkedIn. The other thing people don’t do is they don’t listen. If you go on social media to look for opportunities and you see what the other people, your clients and buyers are posting about, that’s where you can find a lot of gold, not worrying about what you’re going to post. That was my way of flipping the script on traditional social marketing and talking about how salespeople can use it as a tool to make headway and get more deals in their pipeline because that’s what we’re all trying to do.
I was up for a speaking engagement for a high-tech medical company. It was between another speaker and me. People don’t realize the irony sometimes of being someone who gets hired to train salespeople or be a speaker at an annual sales meeting is you have to sell yourself to get the job in order to train salespeople. You’ve literally been in their shoes. During that process, one of their regional vice presidents reached out on LinkedIn. I accepted the connection. I took it a step further and started looking at some of the articles he had written or posted, and not only liked them, but commented on them. He said, “That’s what I’m trying to get my sales team to do with the doctor’s posts.” The fact that you organically did it means you’re the right fit for us because you’re doing it. I’m not asking you to teach them something to do that you’re not doing. I wanted your thoughts on that of building the relationship through something. When I say make a comment, I mean not a good job or interesting. Make a thoughtful comment, show you’ve actually read it.
I think even likes and shares do count there. You went above and beyond by making a thoughtful comment. The way I explained it is there are millions and millions of people on social media begging for someone to pay attention to them. If you’re the one that’s paying attention, you’re the one that’s valuable on social media, not the people trying to get attention. What you did is by commenting on their stuff or replying and making messages is you get to start a conversation about sales things and about stuff that’s important to them versus trying to be the one broadcasting messages and hoping that somebody sees it and it starts a conversation with you. It’s a lot more proactive. It’s what people want. They’re dying for people to listen and pay attention to them.
I also have experienced this and I see other people complaining about it. As the expert around this, do you see it? What are your thoughts? Someone that you don’t know invites you to connect with no real reason. Supposedly, if you put a note with your request to connect from your desktop versus a mobile where you can’t make a big difference. When you say yes and then the next thing you get from them is, “Do you want to buy X, Y, Z?” No relationship building at all.
Social Selling: People are dying to get others to pay attention to them. Comment on their stuff on social media and start talking sales from there.
It’s the trust factor. They’ve immediately destroyed the trust because they’re pitching right away. Would you like the other tweetable comment? The other thing we call it is, “Premature presentation syndrome.” Prematurely trying to sell something before you understand if that person has a need, if they have a budget for the year solution and if they have decision-making authority over it, all of that is trying to get married on the first date. What we want to do on social media is that’s the bar scene. We want enough interest to get a phone number, enough interest in a phone conversation to get a face-to-face appointment or a Zoom call, and then enough interest there to get a second one. Eventually, somewhere down the line, we’ll get married. I know that sounds like a lot of work and it sounds like it will take a while, but that’s the only way successful relationships are built. Everything else is transactional.
It’s also interesting that I’ve noticed, Mike, is that a lot of people don’t spend a lot of effort on their LinkedIn profile. They’re like, “I’m not looking for a job. What do I care?” I tell you as a speaker and an entrepreneur myself, I have found that the time I’ve spent making sure that the visuals on my LinkedIn profile are strong, that you instantly know what I do. Seeing me speak in front of a crowd, detailing that I had a sales career, where it was, what accomplishments I had there, that helped me get this speaking engagement. This was between another speaker and me.
The guy said, “You have been in sales. I wanted a speaker that’s been in salespeople’s shoes.” The other speaker just looked like they wrote a book on it. I thought to myself, “That’s not the case in the other candidate, but the other candidate didn’t make it clear. It was buried in a paragraph that they’d done sales. It wasn’t detailed, ‘Here’s the company,’ or anything like that.” What are your thoughts on the importance of a LinkedIn profile and making it clear where you got your credibility from?
A lot of tips here and you can check out a bunch of these in the book. The first thing is to have it filled out and make it look like you know what you’re doing and showing up. The way I relate this is to in-person events. You don’t show up in a T-shirt and shorts if you’re trying to get booked as a professional speaker or somebody in financial services that are always wearing a suit. The old dress for success. Dress for the job you want, not the job you have. I think the LinkedIn profile is the same in what you said there, but also a lot of times people fill that out backwards in retroactive looking and we encourage people to make a forward-looking profile about your customers.
[bctt tweet=”Negotiate terms not dollars.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When you fill in your job description and your summary, talk about who you help and the problems you solve for those people versus your background, your track record, your history of success. Those things are all great, but nobody cares. What they’re looking for is, “What can you do for me?” If you put that front and center on your profile, I think you’ll have a lot more success. That’s talking about the job you want, not the job you have, even if that job is working as a speaker or as a salesperson for that buyer.
It’s like a good elevator pitch in your LinkedIn profile. I don’t have to work that hard to understand who you help and what problem you solve to decide whether that’s something I might want.
That’s exactly what you should put in your summary is your 30-second commercial. The other one to note is that the headline area, a lot of people get way too cute with that. They start using resume speak and it’s like, “I help companies increase their revenues and decrease their costs.” I still have to click on your profile to find out what you do. I don’t even know what you’re selling there. I like to position company, industry, major keywords that you’re looking for there, make it simple to know that people found the right person and that you’re a salesperson. There’s one stat that it’s people that have sales on their business card and on their LinkedIn profile sell more than those that don’t. They’re confusing the issue like, “I’m a territory executive representative.” People don’t know if you’re looking to buy, would you contact the territory manager or would you contact a salesperson?
All of these buzz words like I literally have virtual sales keynote speaker, not hiding it, not trying, my title, Better Selling Through Storytelling. I embrace the word, selling, and many people in sales, I’m biz dev, I’m this, I’m that. I’m everything, but a salesperson, because of all the negative connotations around it. My whole premise is, if you embrace it through storytelling, it’s not such a negative stereotype. How about the concept of recommendations on LinkedIn? Another, I believe overlooked key element, what I love about these recommendations are that person has to write it. It’s not something that you can say, “Here’s what so-and-so said about me.” This is something right from their LinkedIn that they have to take the time and it’s a little bit of effort. To me, that makes it even more meaningful.
Social Selling: Get really good at disqualifying. Do not try to negotiate on bad terms and bad footing.
It does for everybody else too. We’re seeing social proof becoming more and more important in the sales process. Whether that’s Google reviews, if you have a retail establishment, LinkedIn reviews and testimonials and enterprise sales that use G2. I think all of those are great when they’re written. Just a thumbs up or five-star on Amazon, “That’s great. We’ll take it.” When you get that personal testimonial and you can see that they will recommend and speak on your behalf to people, I think that’s when it gets powerful and it means something. You don’t have to go out and get hundreds, but I encourage people to get at least five and at least overwhelming support. Whatever that is, you want, ten times more good ones than you have bad ones on whatever reason for review side.
Is there a tip you have for someone who wants to say, “I don’t know that I could be as creative as Mike with the time travel and change the costumes and wigs, but I would like to do something creative maybe. I don’t even know where to start to think creatively.” What recommendations do you have for people?
I think the easiest way to do something novel is to combine other stuff. When we combined the idea of the evolution of dance video with the history of Sandler, it became something that nobody’s ever done before. An example I have given speeches a lot to is if you think about stormtroopers, stormtroopers are a dime a dozen in Star Wars movies. If you think of the idea of a circus that’s been around for a couple of hundred years and not popular anymore. Either wouldn’t even be particularly creative, but a stormtrooper circus would be something that nobody’s ever seen before. If you take 2 or 3 ideas and combine them together, you’ll have a lot of fun. What I did, we did a masked trainer contest in the middle of our virtual sales kickoff.
I put the COVID mask over our presenters from our last meeting and had people guess who was in the picture and we did a trivia game there. It’s easy to combine a trivia game with relevant content to them, anything like that, or you can do a fill-in-the-blank or a word search or other things like that to have people pay attention and listen to your presentation and actively participate. It makes it much more powerful than, “Let’s hear what you got. I’m going to sit back and sleep for the next 30 minutes.”
[bctt tweet=”Sales malpractice is guessing the solution and prescribing an answer before even knowing what the problem is.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Our mutual friend that introduced us, Mark Olsen, talks about in terms of mental real estate and that the premise of, “You’re The Pitch Whisper.” “I know what a horse whisper and a dog whisper is. What’s a pitch whisper?” I moved to Austin and I asked somebody, “Is there a place around here to get your shoe repaired?” He goes, “There’s the shoe hospital.” I’m going just for the name.
You remember those things and it’s proven by human memory that the more connections you make, the more memorable things are. If you tell somebody something they hardly ever remembered, if you tie it to one of their favorite childhood memories of eating a cold popsicle on a hot day, they know what their favorite Popsicle from the ice cream man is when that song starts playing. You run it by and you go, “I’m going to bon bon or I’m going ice cream sandwich.” You know what your favorite is and when you can tie those memories together, those make permanent long-lasting impressions.
My advertising background and jingles and music and emotional connections, that music evokes an emotional connection. You and I had a conversation around the a-ha moment for many people that people buy emotionally, and then back it up with logic. Let me hear your thoughts on that.
It doesn’t have to go long. If you’ve ever had an argument with your spouse or child about what they want. You can tell that they want it because they want it. The rest of it becomes a reason why that’s a good idea. There’s also been a lot of psychological and physical studies about how the brain works and the chemicals in the body. Basically, we make a lot of our decisions on gut instinct and on our buyer feelings. Our brain works to make that true. That can happen in a lot of different ways when we’re talking about goal-setting and what you want for your future is to decide first and then work out the details later.
LinkedIn the Sandler Way
Even when we’re buying in a short impulse purchase is when you’re walking through the checkout in the grocery store and you see the Snickers bar over there, your body is already decided it wants the Snickers bar. From there, you’re going, “Did I work out today? How can I logically justify the Snickers bar?” I don’t know about you but for me, it’s like, “I had a rough day, I have the extra money in my pocket, I worked out hard or I’m going to be working out this weekend.” You can stretch those reasons far.
It’s true that the voice of justification one way or the other, whether it’s getting us off our goals or keeping us on our goals. It’s important to be aware of how loud we are letting it become. I know a big part of your focus is helping people become better salespeople through The Sandler methods. One of the things you also talk about besides asking great questions so you don’t waste your time, anybody’s time is also you have a lot of focus on how to be better negotiators. I briefly want to get a little snippet to entice people enough to want to know more about your tips on negotiation.
You’re trying to talk somebody into something or talk them out of something, the same rules apply. What we were talking about is when you want something, you will intellectually justify it. If somebody doesn’t want to buy your stuff, there’s no negotiating or talking them into it. We have a gumball analogy. If you think back the old big gumball machines when you were a kid. If you want a green gumball, you put your quarter in and you crank it. If you get an orange one, you can’t get mad at the gumball.
You can’t get mad at yourself. There wasn’t anything you did. There’s nothing you can do to talk that orange gumball into being a green ball. I would say the first step would be you got to get really good at disqualifying and not try to negotiate on bad terms and bad footing. You have to have a willing partner and you have to have somebody that has a problem that you can solve and that wants that problem solved and has the budget and everything. Even when that comes down to it, the other subtle stuff that we were talking about does play a huge difference that you probably again happen with a spouse, a business partner, a child where if they say, “Do we have $100 to go to dinner?” If you say yes too fast, that ask becomes $200. They go, “I should ask for more,” all of a sudden.” There is a little bit of gamesmanship and psychology in this that we work with in Sandler.
We don’t think about it manipulatively or taking advantage of anybody, but sometimes people are going to try and take advantage of you. We think about judo and karate. How do you have defensive moves when people are trying to cut down your price so that you can have equal business stature and maintain the profit level that you set, not take advantage of people, but get your price and make that non-negotiable and negotiate terms instead of dollars?
How can people find out about your book, about Sandler and about following your creativity?
If you want to learn more about Sandler, our sales management and customer success programs, go to Sandler.com/sell. There’s a ton of free resources. You get a year’s worth of access to thousands of podcasts, videos, webinars and stuff that we’ve done from people like Bob Burg, who wrote The Go-Giver, Olympic athletes, the drummer for Pink and cool stuff in there. If you want to get the free copy of my book specifically, go to Sandler.com/linkedinsecrets. My side project, the personal passion thing, is CreativeNerdery.com. It’s a private social media site for people who are trying to be more creative, be more authentic and their real selves and not hide that nerdery passion topic, whatever it is for you, if you like to geek out on stuff, it might be for you.
Any last thought or quote you want to leave us with?
My favorite quote is, “Whatever you are, be a good one.” That’s Abraham Lincoln. To follow that up would be Steve Martin, “Be so good they can’t ignore you.” I think those go hand-in-hand that if you’re trying to give a presentation or you’re trying to be a salesperson and you’re upset and frustrated that people aren’t paying attention to you, the question is not what’s wrong with them. It’s what you can do to make yourself more interesting and worthy of being paid attention to.
What a great note to leave it on. Who could have ignored that time travel opening that you gave? Thanks for showing us and not just telling us.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Mike Montague
- Sandler Training
- LinkedIn The Sandler Way
- How to Succeed Podcast
- CreativeNerdery.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling
- The Go-Giver
- My Sandler
- https://www.Sandler.com/linkedinsecrets
- www.Sandler.com/sell
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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