Bulletproof Selling With Shawn Rhodes
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Take your sales career to a skyrocketing improvement when you learn the secrets of bulletproof selling as told by a war correspondent-turned international expert in improving teams’ pipeline and performance. Shawn Rhodes is a Tampa-based TEDx speaker published in news outlets like CNN, TIME, BBC, and Forbes. He joins John Livesay to share what he knows about the sales industry and the secrets that made him who he is today. For Shawn, his experience in the military jumpstarted his love for sales. He made use of it to continue excelling in the world of business by understanding the whole sales process around pipeline improvement. Uncover the methods to become a successful salesperson, as Shawn outlines what one must understand when making sales in the industry.
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Bulletproof Selling With Shawn Rhodes
My guest is Shawn Rhodes, the author of Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For the Battlefield Of Business. Imagine if any objection or rejection would bounce off you like a bullet. He has got a great way of reframing how you look at things and creating a pipeline that will keep generating leads for you so that you can come up with a bulletproof offer. Find out how to do this and trim hope from your sales strategy.
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My guest is Shawn Rhodes who’s leveraged his former life as a war correspondent to become an international expert in how the best teams continuously improve pipelines and performance. He’s a Tampa-based TEDx speaker and his work studying teams in more than two dozen countries, in some of the most dangerous places on the planet. He has been published in news outlets like TIME, CNN, NBC and Forbes. His clients have included Deloitte, Coca-Cola and dozens of similar businesses. He’s a nationally syndicated columnist with the business journals and author of a book, which I am a big fan of, Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For the Battlefield Of Business. That is a ton of alliterations. No one loves literation more than I do. Welcome to the show, Shawn.
It is a pleasure, John. Thanks for noticing all the alliterations.
It is just golden, the battlefield of business. It’s a really interesting place to start because people talk about the war, The Art of War, and all these other things. Are you in fact in a battle when you are in a sales situation or has the buyers become more sophisticated? I like to think of it as you are more of a co-pilot as opposed to behind enemy lines. We are going to get to how you came up with the title because before the show, you and I were talking about how we spend so much time and care crafting even with the cover image is going to be, let alone with the title and subtitle are. I want to have you start your story at the beginning. I’m going to give you complete freedom to start that story anywhere. Childhood, college, wherever you want that you were like a lot of kids grow up going, “I see they are covering the war on TV. I want to go there and do that.” How did that even happen?
This is something that a lot of entrepreneurs will recognize. In high school, I had a lot of potentials but really no outlet for it. I knew that if I went to college right after high school, I was going to do a lot of drugs, probably make a lot of bad life decisions and potentially waste that opportunity. Talking with mentors and friends, I realized I just didn’t have some life skills that I might need like self-discipline, integrity, ambition, the ability to define a goal and then plan the steps out to achieve it. Things that make us successful as adults and successful in the world of business.
The choices for me were to wander the country with a flute-like Caine in Kung Fu. That was an option for me. The other choice was to join the military. It’s polar opposites if you will. The military seemed like it would be more regular meals and maybe a place to sleep every once in a while, so that’s the choice that I made. I started looking at the branches because each branch, you will get this as a marketer, they have a very specific pitch. They are looking for a very specific type of recruit. The Army is all about travel. The Air Force, wants intelligent people to work with technology. The Navy, also about travel, got to love the water and being on the ocean. The Marines were the only ones that were communicating this warrior ethos as a recruiting pitch. Honor, courage, commitment, the few, the proud, these tag lines that we really become familiar with, especially the United States and uniform, obviously can’t be beaten.
As I started talking to the Marines, they took a look at my test scores because you take a test to find out where you might belong in the military. Every job you could do as a civilian, they have it in the military. They said, “Shawn, you failed everything, except for verbal comprehension. On that account, you are off the charts.” They looked at all the jobs and they said, “You would fail as an infantryman so we are not going to let you do that. You would not be a good engineer. Everything you built would fall apart immediately so you are not going to do that.” They went down the list of jobs. The one that they had that would be a good fit for verbal comprehension was as a journalist, writer, photographer, broadcaster, what they called a combat correspondent.
[bctt tweet=”Improve your pipeline with a bulletproof offer.” username=”John_Livesay”]
For your readers that have ever seen the old Stanley Kubrick movie, Full Metal Jacket, the 1970s, 1980s movie about the Marines in Vietnam, I was Joker, running around on the battlefield with a camera and a notepad, just capturing the stories like old school. It was so much fun. I’ve got to travel the world. I did two combat tours in Iraq. I was there for the initial invasion in ‘03 and went back for the battles of Fallujah and Ramadi in ‘04. I’ve got to meet a lot of amazing human beings. It really prepped me for the work that I do now because I saw these men and women achieve the impossible every single day.
For those who are reading right now that aren’t familiar with urban combat, it got about a 50% mortality rate. If 50 people go into a building to clear it and there are bad people in there waiting to take them out, only 25 are expected to walk out of that building under their own power. Those are the statistical averages. You think the entrepreneurs that are trying to factor what their conversion rate might be for customer conversion or pitch 50% expected loss. That’s pretty steep, especially when it’s your life on the line. Yet, these Marines and Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets and Air Force Air Rescue men, I’ve got to work with the best to the best. They all had an incredible rate of coming out alive. The military wanted to know how they were able to do that. We recognized it wasn’t because they were hoping that they were going to be successful like so many entrepreneurs do. You think about the high failure rate of small businesses, it’s one lack of conversion, lack of sales, lack of revenue but the underlying issue is so many of us are just hoping that we are successful. We are not taking the time to train, plan, prepare, map out our strategy and then break it down into time-bound tasks that we can execute.
In addition to taking a look, I made that pitch. I’ve either got the funding or I didn’t. I’ve got the customer or I didn’t. What went right? What went wrong? How can I do better next time? These Marines that I was studying every day, that was their life because their life was on the line. They made sure after every mission to debrief and to take a look at how we could get better. What did we encounter that was unique? How do we share that with our sister units as fast as possible so they don’t have to learn the hard way? Look for that tripwire in that particular location, for instance. That allowed me to really begin taking what I have learned and saying, “How can I apply this into something that I’m in love with, which is the world of sales, the world of business?” That’s where the battlefield of business came from. Bulletproof Selling is all about building those types of systems into your sales process so that you can remove hope as a strategy as well.
That’s a great tweet. Hope is not a strategy. This concept of debriefing after every call whether you win or lose, I think that’s where a lot of people think, “We don’t have to take a look at why we won. We won, who cares?” You are missing a huge opportunity there to figure out why you won so you can repeat that process. I guess we’ve just got lucky. Doctors do this when they lose a patient. They have an M&M thing where they literally sit around and talk about, “Was there anything we could have done that we don’t make that same mistake again or was this person terminal regardless?”
I can walk your readers through that process if you would like as it applies to a pitch for instance.
I think that would be incredibly valuable. I have had over 300 episodes, no one has offered that, so, please.
Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For The Battlefield Of Business
Whether you get off of a call or you are pitching your company for some funding, whatever that looks like, there are three places that you need to debrief after a sales meeting. We will just lump those all in the term sales meeting for ease of use here. The first thing you want to do is debrief yourself as the salesperson. What that looks like is, what could I have, knowing what happened, I know all the questions that were asked, I know what my responses were or were not if they ask a question, I couldn’t answer and that tainted, what was that situation. Debrief yourself. Knowing what you know now, what could you have researched, prepared, studied, done going in? What objections might you have really benefitted from in studying? I don’t have enough money or it doesn’t sound like you’ve got enough recurring capital. Your model is not sustainable. Whatever objections you’ve got that either got you the solution you want or didn’t, debrief yourself.
The second thing you want to debrief is your prospect. Debrief the customer on the other side of the call. Knowing what you know about them now, what would have been valuable to have to go in there? What pieces of knowledge do you know at the end of a call where they went to school? Where they live? How many family members they have? What interests they have? What challenges their company is going through? How much budget they do or don’t have for the product or service that you are offering? All of that might have been valuable to know going into you now know. Capture that. You are not going to be able to replicate it because you don’t have a crystal ball. Knowing what questions to ask earlier on in the sales process may be what comes out of debriefing your prospect.
The third thing and this is especially applicable if you work with anybody else, or you work for someone else, debrief your company. What could your company have provided to you in the way of samples, in the way of pricing sheets, in the way of training, in the way of anything that is really the company’s job to provide to you? If you are a team of one, like a lot of us are, that ball is back on you again. If you work for somebody else, what could they have done, provided to you or taught you that would have made a difference? Even if you close that sale, getting a larger margin on it, not having to negotiate down so much or being able to cross-sell, upsell or down-sell into different areas of the organization that you just now have as a customer.
Debrief yourself, your prospect and your company, after every what you might consider a major sales call. If you are an inside sales rep and you are making 200 calls a day, that’s not the process for you. If you are using those calls to drive into sales meetings that do make a difference because money is on the line and maybe half of your calls or a dozen a day or whatever that looks like for you, very valuable process. Debrief those three things after every call.
I really want to double-click on the one you are talking about debriefing the company. Having worked in big companies myself and now speaking to a lot of them and their sales teams, there’s this competition, a little rivalry and resentment between marketing and sales a lot. Sales are like, “We need better whatever. The leads are bad. We need a discount. We need this,” and marketing is like, “We’ve got a brand to protect. We are not going to give you a discount. We legitimately do want to give you some tools but we don’t see you using the tools.” I think that is one big thing if marketing and sales could debrief together without finger-pointing as to why, “Your idea wasn’t good enough, that’s why they didn’t buy. You did a horrible job presenting that.” We can get a place where they are not pointing fingers at each other.
You’ve tapped into what I see and I can’t wait to hear your opinion of this, it’s one of the biggest problems in big companies is that everything is siloed. That lack of cross-selling causes the marketing department to pull their hair out because they’ve got to start from scratch every time. There are no introductions between departments, whether it’s a law firm or a medical firm. They don’t even know what to say or they are suddenly afraid of rejection or ruining their existing relationship. There are so many problems. I would love to hear your thoughts and observations and how you help them solve those problems with Bulletproof Selling, with this debriefing process.
[bctt tweet=”Debrief your sales calls.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I will take you a couple of steps back even before this book because the first book that I ever wrote was called Pivot Point: Turn On A Dime Without Sacrificing Results. It was the story of a mission that we ran in Fallujah with former Secretary of Defense James Mattis. This is back when he was a General of Marines rather than a Secretary of Defense. Briefly, the reason we were in Fallujah with him at all, we were having a lot of trouble in that city. If you know anything about the war in Iraq, Fallujah was a big hotspot. Every time we had to send a patrol in there, we were getting shot at. That didn’t allow us to bring in humanitarian aid to turn the water on. People were just living in bad conditions. Sanitary conditions were just awful for the population of 300,000 human beings. They deserve the same stuff that we have, basic health, sanitation, all that. To bring the parties to the table, we have politics in America where we have to create something big to bring the parties to the table to talk, General Mattis shut it all down for the city. He shut down water, electricity, sewage. He said, “Your tribal leaders need to talk with us because we are not going away anytime soon. If you want your stuff turned back on, we need to be able to access your city without getting shot at, let’s meet.”
The tribal leaders being the smart people that they were said, “We are happy to do that General, but we need you to be the one at the negotiation table. You are not going to have more than three Marines in that room with us. You are going to have a small patrol to bring you into the city of 300,000 very angry Iraqis.” General Mattis is a smart guy. He’s a strategist. He knew that this was an invitation for him to be kidnapped, like Blackhawk down was waiting to happen. The patrol that he was on, they called it the Dead Man’s Patrol because they didn’t expect anybody to come back alive. They needed somebody to cover it on the off chance that everybody survived this thing. I was the journalist that they tapped. It was me and maybe a dozen vehicles in the middle of a city of 300,000 by ourselves.
Just to be clear on your story. Journalists don’t get to have the big red cross on their back that people like, “Don’t kill that person because they are medical.” They don’t know the difference between you and anybody else.
There are civilian war correspondents on the battlefield, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and all that. They normally wear stuff that identifies them as such. It doesn’t keep them from getting hurt, unfortunately. For me, I was a full battle guard with a rifle because I was trained as a Marine. I had a rank and all that stuff. I was in the Marine Corps. We get into the city. The reason I bring it up to answer your question is that you think of this patrol going into the city as the sales team. They were the marketing team, the planning team, the logistics team, the operational team, the warehouse to ask to deliver the product or service, the sales team and selling. All that stuff is happening back at the home base. If the sales team just decides to get a wild hair and take a patrol in the middle of Fallujah without letting anybody know or getting any kind of support, their chances of success are very slim, even if they are the best sales team in the world.
We learned this a long time ago so we definitely were practicing it in Iraq. They had to get together before a big mission like this before a big sales call so to speak and get the input, advice and assistance of anybody that might help them become more successful. Instead of building their plan in a vacuum, which is what I see marketing doing a lot of companies and the same sales team doing in the same company, also building in a vacuum. The planning table involved all the parties that were going to be involved, not just the patrol going in but the artillery, the tanks, the air support, even the intelligence community. What have they noticed there in the last couple of weeks that might be helpful? What routes to take, not to take?
Everybody was at the table so that the Marines that were on the line going in, the sales team, had all of the assistance, advice and preparation they could possibly have to do everything to stack the deck in their favor. If companies began coming to the table like this with a singular goal and objective and letting sales be the tip of the spear but understanding, there are a lot of the spear beside the tip. There are all this stuff going on that really has to come into play, like marketing, operations, delivery, customer service, we would do a better job of solving that problem where people are pointing fingers due to lost sales.
Pivot Point: Turn On A Dime Without Sacrificing Results
The other thing that intrigued me about Bulletproof Selling is this concept of the danger with sales improvement program. It’s not that the information is used once and forgotten. It’s the people who forget what all the salespeople are saying. If you are someone who’s just pushing out facts, figures, and feeds or whatever you want to call it and wondering why no one is remembering anything you say, that is not a good strategy.
No. I think it comes from not putting a client-centric focus on your messaging. I made this mistake for a long time before it was finally pounded out of me due to a lot of lost sales. I was talking about me. Everything that you mentioned in my bio, that’s pretty sexy. It’s not the average person can put a claim to being a war correspondent doing all this cool stuff. I learned to never open my sales calls trying to leverage my uniqueness because nobody cares how unique I am or what a special snowflake I can be. I say that tongue-in-cheek.
What you have said is so valuable. I want to circle and highlight it. If I hear one more sales presentation opening with the cliché, “Thanks for inviting us. I’m excited or we are excited to be here,” I think I’m going to scream. It’s what you just said. No one cares that you are excited to be there. It’s the most boring opening to every sales presentation ever. People don’t put the thought and effort into coming up with something unique. The fact that you are talking about you have this amazing, unique thing and you are not opening it and still not making it about you, how much more interesting your bio is that I’m excited to be here? Still, you don’t use it. That’s what I wanted to take a pause there. You are not using that and other people are falling back to that, “I’m excited to be here,” opening. Maybe somebody should really think about what their opening is going to be now.
I would advise you, just try it differently. Do a split test. If you get to do enough of these types of pitches, open it up the way you have been opening. Maybe even embellish your company, its history, the specifications of your product or service, how many gigabytes of RAM it can pull through in a minute or whatever kind of sexy tech specs you’ve got. Try that. On the other side, try something different. Ask yourself, if someone buys my product or service and they use it, they really get 100% of use out of it, not just lip service but they put it to work in their company or their lives, how are their business and their lives different? What changes for this person on a personal and professional level? Whatever your first answer is, go a level deeper and ask, “Why is that important?”
An example, you are selling an efficient solution to a widget manufacturer. What’s that going to allow them to do? Produce more widgets efficiently? I’ve got more widgets on hand, why is that important? I can sell more widgets. What happens if you sell more widgets? I might be able to hire more people in my community. Put some underprivileged kids to work out of high school. Get a nice pipeline in from the technical college. I could make an impact in my hometown. I’m not selling the efficiency of widgets. If I know that going into a sales meeting, I’m going to do everything I can to highlight that person’s hometown, the impact that it would have if they were able to hire more people. I’m just going to happen to build the bridge to the widget efficiency product or service somewhere in the sales pitch. It’s not going to leave there and end there because that’s not what that person cares about. They care about the end result.
We take the time to learn what that end result is, what the actual mission objective is or what we are trying to sell, it’s going to be amazing. How many more conversations we get in because people are going to be more interested in talking with us because we are talking about what they are concerned with, not what we think they are concerned with. They are going to just pretty much open the treasure chest of all the information that we would have had to pry out of them otherwise. If you can help me reach a big goal I have had in my life, all I’ve got to do is reveal some sensitive stuff, like how much budget I might have for it. I still don’t have to cut you a check if I don’t like it but now, we are talking about stuff I’m interested in. What do you need to know? That’s the attitude I hear. We have tracked this across more than 10,000 sales calls. The data holds up pretty consistently.
[bctt tweet=”As a salesperson, you have to break through the noise until you discover what’s your prospect’s preferred method of communication.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You also talk about a bulletproof offer. I’m sure a lot of people would think, “I know what a bulletproof vest does.” What in the world would be inside a bulletproof offer?
We learned this by studying how car dealerships work. We saw it play out over the military and great salespeople. Let’s say you walk into a luxury car dealership, John. If you ever had that experience, Lexus, BMW, Acura, whatever that might look like, you walk in there, they are not going to ask how much money you planned on spending that day. They might not even ask what kind of car you think you are interested in. They are going to say, “Welcome to the dealership. Here’s a nice cup of espresso if that’s your jam. Let me walk you over to our brand new car. It just got in yesterday.” It’s inside the dealership, nice and air-conditioned. Let’s play around with everything just to get you a feel of this brand. Assuming you didn’t walk in and say, “I need to see this car from this year,” You are just here to look around. That’s how they are probably going to treat you.
When you get done looking at this beautiful car and it’s got everything, the Corinthian leather, the claw that comes out and scratches your head in traffic, the autopilot Tesla features, all that good stuff. They are then going to say, “What do you think? Would you like to dig a little deeper into the financing? What else?” Your questions are going to probably be, “How much is that going to cost? What’s the cost to take this baby home?” “This car with the package you are looking at right now is $85,000.” If you are not planning on spending $85,000, what they are not going to do is ask how much you were planning on spending. What they are going to do is say, “What can you live without that we have shown you? What is a non-essential item in this vehicle?” “I don’t need the Corinthian leather. The claws are creepy. It would probably cause me to get into some accidents.” They might take you outside the dealership to maybe the next model down in the line. They will show you that one. They will keep playing this game with you until you settle on something that’s probably going to be above what you plan on spending going in.
I have seen this happen with homes as well. You don’t have the view and pool, and the grade school system. What are you willing to give up? I worked with Infinity and they renamed it. Instead of test drives, they would say, “Would you like to go on a guest drive?” Trying to get people to feel like you were a guest in their home for the essence of what that brand would be. That bulletproof offer is completely reframing it.
Any salesperson can use it. What most salespeople are doing and this is endemic in our industry, John, with our three-tiered packages, you want to hire me to speak at an event? I’ve got the gold, the silver, and the platinum level package. Tell me which one you want. Everybody’s leaving so much money on the table by doing that. What we learned how to do that really made the difference for us, we studied other salespeople that are doing this. They strip away everything that is frivolous. They build a massive singular package, an all-inclusive offer, you might call it. What is your platinum offer? Somebody had an unlimited budget, unlimited time to implement, they just wanted the full effect of your product or service.
What can you sell them? You build this massive package, dozens of items, training, implementation, online courses, the whole thing. Anything you could possibly throw in there because they are paying for it? Why not offer that out of the gate? All they can tell you is, “That’s too expensive.” Your response can be, “What on that list can you live without?” By the end of it, they might have thought they were going to spend $5,000 on your product or service. They will scrape together every bit of budget they can if you can explain how the items on the list that are leftover help them achieve their strategic outcome to our earlier conversation.
Bulletproof Selling: Take the time to learn what the end result is, what the actual mission objective, or what you’re trying to sell. It’s going to be amazing.
What is the difference it’s going to make in their lives, $5,000? If I can spend $12,500 and get twice the amount of impact, twice as fast, I will take out a loan if I care enough about what I’m trying to buy. All-inclusive offer, we wrap it in the terms of bulletproof offer because it’s bulletproof. The sexy thing, John, is if, at the tail end of one of these conversations, you can ask the debrief process again. Debrief yourself, the prospect, the company to say, “We sold a $12,500 package. It came in wanting $5,000, we made $7,500. How could we have gotten more? How could we have delivered more value?”
Continue to ask those questions even on a great close like that, that’s a bulletproof offer because the economy is going to change. The next pandemic might come along. I pray it doesn’t but I can’t tell the future. I want to learn from every sale that I close or don’t close and shift how I’m selling the language I’m using and the offers I’m putting out to my prospects to make sure that I’m staying ahead of my competition. Do you know what our competitors are not doing? Improving after every single call. They are hoping they remember what happened last time that worked well.
It’s like looking at your footage after a talk like an athlete does. They go, “Maybe that pause there really worked or didn’t work.”
“That joke really pulled off. I would never have said it before. It just seemed funny at the moment,” and now you build it in as a joke in every single speech.
“That works in live events but not so much virtually,” or all those little nuances. Let’s hear a little bit more about your ideal audience and some of your keynote topics.
Bulletproof Selling, the idea behind it is that could encompass a whole host of things inside of the sales process but it’s really around pipeline improvement. We find so many salespeople, so many entrepreneurs are treating their prospecting, their outreach, their closing situations out of a funnel. They are using a funnel to do this. The definition is, “I’m going to reach out to 50 people, maybe I will get in five conversations and close one of them.” That’s a simple funnel. The challenge is, if you are qualifying the people going into that funnel and you only close 5, 45 people are going to buy something that you are selling but it’s not going to be from you and it’s not going to be now. The idea behind creating a real pipeline, you can do this inside of a CRM, a spreadsheet if you are savvy but CRM is built to handle this, any CRM. You can set up multiple stages, multiple funnels so that if someone doesn’t convert out of one funnel, they don’t leave your view, your pipeline. They just go to the next stage in the pipeline, the next funnel and you reach out again.
[bctt tweet=”Let’s start removing hope as a sales strategy.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Which is like what you were describing with the car. “If you can’t afford that, you might want this.” It’s the opposite where someone does buy something and then you upsell them after that. It funnels up and funnels pricing down. I love that you have such a specific niche. When people don’t realize, if you don’t have a niche, “You are a sales speaker, Bulletproof Selling, I get it. I know a lot of speakers that talk about selling.” “No. My expertise is pipeline improvement.”
Suddenly, I think to myself, “That’s not my niche.” My niche is helping people on the actual pitch, tell a better story at that moment. I don’t have anything to do with getting them in the room to give that. I’m all about what story you are telling to be memorable. You are all about, “Let me get you to that point.” Of course, you have great strategies and systems to analyze but you are almost, “Let’s look and see what you said and did that work.” I’m like, “I don’t do that either.”
I know five clients that I have spoken to that I can send or I have clients telling me, “In healthcare, during a pandemic, our team never in their career had to make an appointment. They are used to dropping by the office or catching the doctors between. Any suggestions on how we can even get to the place where we can tell the story?” I have a few ideas but again, not my area of expertise. Now, I know, you should talk to Shawn Rhodes. That’s a pipeline problem. That’s getting in the virtual door problem. Amazingly, a whole generation of people has never had to develop that skill but they didn’t. It’s not just one company. It’s the entire industry.
You have heard the saying, “You’ve got a niche to get rich.” I refuse to niche inside of industry but I love niching inside of expertise because I don’t just want to work with healthcare, manufacturing or services. I love working with all of them. If I only had to work with one, I would probably just get out of the business because I do enjoy being challenged learning new things and that helps me really apply a singular skillset to a lot of different customers. Ask any salesperson or any entrepreneur. If you are an entrepreneur and you are reading this, you are a salesperson. Welcome to the club. I encourage you to look outside of your industry for a potential customer basis to ask yourself, “I do sell to this type of person now but who else is also challenged with their problems that could benefit from my product or service. Maybe it was specifically built for financial services and that’s who I have been selling to but who else is akin, who else is in kind of the network of financial services as an industry that could also use this?” Now you can expand from playing in this little, tiny puddle to now being in a pond. Eventually, you can open it up to a whole ocean.
I have a lot of experience in the healthcare industry but there’s a whole, “Does that really include insurance?” Not necessarily. I have architects saying, “We would love to hear what you have learned from healthcare.” That applies here. If you can connect the dots for people, it allows you to play a bulletproof game.
You mentioned outreach is being a big challenge. I will give you three Ms to remember in outreach. This is something that took me years and years and thousands and thousands of lost sales to be able to figure out. The first thing you’ve got to track with your outreach is movement. We are talking about pipeline movement. Many salespeople enter the conversation, not knowing what pieces of information are missing about the prospect they are about to reach out to. Do I know who the decision-maker is in the company, what the budget is when they are buying my product or service if it is time-based? If you don’t know any of those things, now you know what to ask. If you know a few of them, then you know to focus on the missing pieces to get that person closer. To either let’s get a proposal out now, a quote, whatever that looks like for you or if it can’t happen now, reach out in October. You put that in your CRM for follow-up. Without knowing movement, you are just throwing stuff at the wall and hoping you hit something.
Bulletproof Selling: So many business owners are just hoping to be successful. They are not taking the time to plan, map out a strategy, and then break it down into time-bound tasks that we can execute.
The second piece you need to understand is the type of platform you are on the method of outreach. Many salespeople will revert to their most comfortable form of outreach, email, LinkedIn. Even old-school salespeople will rely on the phone, yet I hear tons of times that old-school salespeople are now selling to a generation of Millennials and Generation Y-ers that won’t pick up the phone. They don’t know what to do. You’ve got to expand your outreach. It’s not to say that you need to only use this new thing that’s out like only try to prospect through TikTok. No, mix it all up. Use the phone, email, LinkedIn, social media, direct mail still and alternate how you are reaching out. That’s the method of outreach. You’ve got to break through the noise until you discover what that prospect’s preferred method of communication is.
You’ve got movement and pipeline method of outreach. The third one, this is the one that you are an expert at, John, is the message. The way that I term it is, what is the client-focused story that I need to tell in my outreach that will drive them to the table to want to have a conversation? How can I educate them? How can I engage them? How can I more specifically find out what they are challenged with that’s within my skillset to help?
The movement, the method and the message. Another alliteration. It makes it memorable, doesn’t it? Also, groups of three, lots of techniques that people may not be aware of and they try to just jam so much information out. They don’t group it. They don’t think of a clever way to package it. They are not aware of even what somebody else’s method is. You have given us a lot to think about. The book again, Bulletproof Selling. If someone wants to reach out to you by your book, they can go to Bulletproof-Selling.com and find out how to get you to come to speak to their audience, how to get the book, there’s a podcast. The whole theme, everything is the same font, the same color scheme because somebody cares, people. Any last thoughts or a quote you might want to leave us?
On that website, if you would like essentially a free chapter of the book, we stood up a five-minute sales assessment. It will ask you to choose between 60-plus different pieces of the sales cycle, then you choose the one that’s most important to you. It will reach into the book, pull out that chapter and deliver it to your email. We made standalone resource pages for every single one of our chapters in that way. If you would like to test the book out, take it for a guest drive, as you said, John. That would be a great way to do it. Other than that, let’s start removing hope as a sales strategy. It works in a lot of areas in life. I love hope. I’m a spiritual guy. We could do a whole other show on that. In my sales and my business, I like to fall back on certainty so that I know I can leave my office and go be with my family without having to hope that things work out in my business. Let’s make selling bulletproof.
Thank you, Shawn. I couldn’t agree more. What a treat. What a great gift, not just a gift but a free customized gift. People, look at all those details. That’s a professional in action right there. Thanks again, Shawn.
Important Links
- Bulletproof Selling: Systemizing Sales For The Battlefield Of Business
- Pivot Point: Turn On A Dime Without Sacrificing Results
- Podcast – Bulletproof Selling
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Business Mastery With Bill Prater
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
If you want to excel in business, don’t think like the players in your niche. Instead, figure out what the elite players do and emulate them. Joining John Livesay in today’s episode is Bill Prater, a business owner, entrepreneur, publisher, author, speaker, consultant, and coach. Bill is best known for his long-term success in enabling business owners and leaders to quickly eliminate personal barriers, rapidly reach their current dreams, and embark on a journey of business mastery. Today, Bill shares some insights on how you can think like an elite performer and dominate your market. Enjoy the episode.
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Listen to the podcast here
Business Mastery With Bill Prater
Our guest on the show is Bill Prater, who’s an expert at Business Mastery. He tells people not to use the same approach for all problems. He’s got some insights on how to dominate your market and how to think like an elite performer. Finally, he says, “Always be ignorant. Don’t be afraid to ask questions and stay curious.” Enjoy the episode.
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Welcome to the show. Our guest is Bill Prater, who’s a business owner, an entrepreneur, a publisher, author, speaker, consultant, and coach. He’s best known for his long-term success in enabling business owners and leaders to quickly eliminate personal barriers so they can rapidly reach their dreams and embark on this journey of Business Mastery. His own story was that he was excelling in sales, sales training, and sales management at IBM in the computer division as a national sales manager and a partner in the country’s largest oil and gas securities firm. He raised more than $750 million of equity capital in eight years. He recruited, trained, and led more than 100 sales professionals and achieving average revenue growth of 100% annually. I know how hard that is. Bill, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here, John. Let’s make this happen.
One of the things I want to ask about having sold multimillion-dollar mainframe computers myself earlier in my career is your own story about that. We can start the story before IBM. If you’d like, you can start with school, college, or wherever you got this passion for connecting and sales.
The connecting and sales lineage started back with me being a full-ride football guy at a university. I got a scholarship. I got hurt before the season started. After the first year was over, I had to figure out how to go to school on my own. I ended up working in the land surveying civil engineering field and made pretty good money that I thought, “Why bother going to school?” That’s my first relationship with the value of money. I ended up flunking out of school. I went back and saw the Dean of Men at the University of Washington. I said, “I like to come back into school because I’m a good guy,” and I went through my whole spiel. He said, “No. Why would I let a flunk out in the school when I have these eager young freshmen that want to come into school?”
Business Mastery: If you think you know the answer to something, go ahead and ask anyway. You never really know what you don’t know until you ask.
That was an excellent point. He vented. What he said is, “I’ll let you into night school if you get straight A’s, then I’ll let you go into the day school.” I said, “How do I get straight A’s?” He says, “I don’t know. Ask the professors.” He needs to know I’m dead serious. “Think this through. What kind of students asked the professor how to get an A?” I said, “Probably A-students.” He said, “You got it.” That was my first major learning about effectively, the art of asking questions or, better yet, asking for help. You and I have a sales background, sales management background. You’re stuck with it. I’m still in it, even though I don’t claim I’m a sales guy.
A big major lesson that I got early on is always to be ignorant. By that, I mean, even if you think you might know the answer to something, then go ahead and ask anyway. You’ll never know what you don’t know until you ask. Fast forward, I did ask the professors how to get A’s. I ended up getting straight A’s for the rest of my college career and graduating on the Dean’s List. It’s all because of that simple question, which I asked over and over again. It was amazing the kinds of things these people would do to help me get an A.
They know you’re that committed. What I love about what you said, “Always be ignorant. Ask anyway,” as opposed to assuming you know what the answers are going to be. I’ve helped some people when they’re interviewing for a job ask a question. At the end of every interview, people say, “Do you have any questions for us?” Unfortunately, a lot of the younger people might say, “When’s my vacation start?” I tell them to ask this question, “What would it look like if I were to exceed your expectations in this job?” It is another way of saying, “What do I need to do to get straight A’s?” Most people never ask a future employer that question, nor do they ask a professor that question.
When people are reading this, they can start to think, “What question am I not asking that I could ask that my competition is probably not asking? What set me apart?” Once you have that momentum going in any conversation, whether it’s a sales conversation or trying to get your team motivated to grow and scale, which is your expertise, it completely shifts in the box traditional way of solving things. Also, what I love about that story is your resilience. A lot of people would have given up. “You got a good point. Why should you give it to me when you got all these hungry freshmen? That’s too high a bar. Straight A’s? Forget it.”
[bctt tweet=”Allow yourself to be ignorant and ask questions anyway.” via=”no”]
There are lots of things that come out of that story that starts to give me a little more color and texture, almost like a painting coming to life. I know how hard it was to get a job at IBM. They would test everybody. If you think getting into college was tough, getting a job at IBM was tough. It was the best of the best. You just didn’t get a job. You thrive there. I’m sure there’s a little more context. I specifically want to know when you were at IBM, this premise of scaling 100% out of 100%, there are two things that come up all the time when I’m talking to people who are entrepreneurs, salespeople, or both. One is fear of rejection. The other one is, “I had my best year ever. How am I going to top myself?” That’s where the superstars like you shine, is the consistent growth, not just, “I have a great year. Don’t ask me about next year.” How do you start to help people with that mindset and strategy?
That’s exactly what it is. It’s the mindset. What it is that all of us were programmed as young people to act in a certain way. A lot of that becomes part of our subconscious. Since it’s in our subconscious, we’re able to deal with a bunch of stuff. We don’t have to think, “What color is that light? What color is red?” You know red means stop the car. You don’t process that through. A couple of points about mindset is that it had happened at IBM that I realized what my programming was.
When I was young, I remember vividly that when something would happen in the house where my grandmother lived with us, she’d say, “Billy, do something about that.” I didn’t have any idea what it was all about. I jumped up and took action. I didn’t think. I just responded. That’s lesson number one. I realized that in a company like IBM, there’s a lot of telling you what to do going on all the time. I decided, “No. I’m going to think this through, not be reactive and figure out how can I reduce the amount of time it takes to get something done?” If you remember IBM, they used to be greedy good at giving you performance appraisals.
I was a systems engineer to start with. I get in performance appraisal. My boss, his name is Dave, said to me, “Your score is outstanding.” I said, “That’s great. I’m outstanding. Now what?” He said, “What do you mean now what?” I said, “If I’m already at the top, what’s next to your point?” He flounders around a little bit, frankly. I got him in a box because I was outstanding. I said to him, “If I’m your number one systems engineer, am I the highest-paid systems engineer?” They don’t like to answer that question, but he did, unfortunately, and said, “No.” I said, “I don’t understand how I could be rated number one and not being the number one paid?”
Business Mastery: Most of us were programmed as young people to act in a certain way. A lot of that becomes part of our subconscious.
He went through. He got the old chart out. You’ve seen the charts of how many years and what your score is. The maximum raise you can get. It’s all a Mathematical model. He said, “The only way to get paid what you’re worth in IBM is to be a sales guy.” I said, “Okay, sold.” He said, “No, not so fast. You’re my number one systems engineer. I don’t want to let you go.” I said, “Dave, that is not a good answer. You’ve got it.” He says, “I’ll let you go to sales school if you finish in the top three.” I go, “Okay.”
I got the challenge of finishing the top three. I ended up finishing at the top one. I was number one in sales school. I came back, and I walked into his office. The school ends on a Friday, and I’m back at work on Monday. He doesn’t know anything about what happened. He said, “How did it go?” I said, “It went pretty well. When’s my sales job?” He said, “What do you mean?” I pull out my gold cross pen that has IBM on it and I hand it to Dave, and he uttered a nasty word. I said, “It’s time for sales.” He said, “You don’t want to go now. This is September. You’d have to have a whole half year’s quota.” I said, “Fine.” He says, “You don’t know what you’re saying. You got three months to do a full half-year.” I said, “I want to go now. You’re barking was if I did this, I get there.”
I ended up doing pretty well. I bought myself a Porsche in the whole deal because I completely shut it out. I shut the lights out. You and I talked before we got into our interview about cold calling. I figured I might as well go cold calling people. I don’t know anything else about what to do. I go. One of the very first people I banged on the door of, I walked in, and the receptionist said, “You’re with who?” I said, “IBM.” She said, “I’m sure that David wants to see you. We’re looking for a computer.” That was it.
Once you got into sales management, how did you keep the momentum going when your team would have a good year and the quotas would go up accordingly? This is why I was excited to have you on the show is we can go into this subconscious mindset. I feel from my observations that a lot of salespeople think when they’ve had a great year, it’s a fluke. Therefore, when you were asked to repeat it or exceed it, it’s the same thing for the business leaders you deal with, a new council. They don’t have a plan or a roadmap in place.
[bctt tweet=”Be curious to get insights.” via=”no”]
They say, “Everything started lined up as a perfect storm.” They had a big knee. They had a budget that they’ll never have again. “I can’t possibly find another client like that. With these numbers, I’ll never make it.” You take the mindset and the strategy. It’s not just one or alone. I wanted to get a sense from you when you work with companies. Companies hire you to pick this expertise and give them the scalability issue that you’re great at. Not just growth but dynamic growth. What is it that you do that helps people overcome their initial negative self-talk that they can’t possibly exceed the best year they’ve ever had in terms of mindset? What are they missing strategy-wise?
I’m going to finish up with mindset and then we’ll jump into strategy or positioning. A lot of what you asked me and a lot of the answers I deal with is the notion that we’re originally programmed or taught that we need to deal with the environment we’re put in or the hand that you’re dealt. You’re given a certain quota, a crappy sales territory, a sales team, but half of them are rookies. We can continue to list all of that. All of that, in general for all of us, you and I and the people that are reading, if you think about a bell curve, most salespeople, sales managers, business owners think of themselves as in the middle. In the middle is what’s called the standards or the averages. That’s the way you measure the middle of any industry.
The people that end up looking at the environment through the prism of being in the middle of the bell curve are going to stay in the middle of the bell curve. What you need to do mindset-wise, I found is you’ve got to figure out what the elite players in your niche. If you’re 1 of 140 salespeople, they’re not all performing equally. You don’t think the revenue of the company, divide by 140, and everybody does that Math thing. Instead, there are some super laggards. There’s the mass unwashed middle, and then there are the superstars. What are the superstars doing? One, they’re not waiting until they get their quota in the middle of January. They’re starting day one, minute one. Second, you remember this with IBM, every year, they had a different sales plan. The sales plan was designed to benefit the company called IBM.
They wanted you to sell certain things. They wanted you to add certain kinds of software and a variety of it. They put all that stuff in the sales plan. Step one, minute one, don’t deal with all that stuff, go figure out what the fastest path to the cash is, and go do that. It’s usually a machine they want you to sell etc. Number one is don’t think like the rest of the players in your niche, instead figure out what the elite players do and emulate them. Their mindset is one of mastery, dominance, excellence or extraordinary. Emulate that. Strategy is an entirely different thing than tactics, but a lot of people get that stuff mixed up. For example, a tactical thing to do is to make cold calls on the phone or send out cold emails.
Business Mastery: Once you’ve got the goal and assembled your resources, the next step is to execute.
The question is, why are you doing that? What’s the strategy? What’s the higher-order bid? What’s the reason that you have to go down the road you’re going down? Once you’ve figured out your reason or your strategy, then you can start doing tactics. Maybe cold calling is a perfect fit, but maybe it isn’t. Maybe, instead, what you want to do is go and interview your last year’s customers and have them tell you, for example, here’s the question, “Sir, I enjoyed working with you last year. How could I have served you better?” That’s the question I taught my people to ask. We went and interviewed all of our customers the previous year, ask them how we could do better, how we could serve them better. We got this huge list. We got our whole tactical plan from asking people, “How do I get an A?”
Were there many surprises? Were those things you knew you could do better and didn’t have the resources to do, or was it, “I had no idea that was something people wanted, so we weren’t doing it?”
Mostly surprises. Companies like IBM or Transamerica are large organizations. The senior executives don’t have a clue what’s happening on the street. The people that know what’s happening on the streets are the people that are on the street. Just because the sales plan or the missive from on high says, “X, Y, Z,” that doesn’t mean that something like, “P, R, Q,” is what you should be doing. The only way you can find that out is to ask people that are your customers. Prospects are going to give you the answers too, but they don’t have much context because they haven’t seen what you’ve done in the past.
This Business Mastery system that you’ve been doing for many years, helping companies, small and large, figure out a killer strategy, makes a lot of sense in that context. One of the things you have on here is this wonderful blog about What’s Stopping You From Getting Better Results Every Single Time?, as opposed to, “I’m going to try, be like a baseball player, and hit a certain percentage.” You’ve got four beautiful colored circles, things. Would you walk us through what those are? We’ve touched on them. I want to intrigue them to read this blog. If you described what the four things are and how they all keep going round and round to keep growing, it might be a light bulb moment for some people saying, “No wonder I’m missing this key part while I’m doing 3 of the 4.”
[bctt tweet=”Don’t think like the rest of the players in your niche. Instead, figure out what the elite players do and emulate them.” via=”no”]
Even using baseball or softball, either one analogy is a good place to start. Nobody told you that you had to have a good batting average. Your coach didn’t say that. Nobody said that. That’s not baseball. That’s not what it is. If you’re up for batting, what is the first thing you’re supposed to do? It’s not hit the ball. The first thing to do is get on base. How can you get on base? The ball can hit you then you go on base. You can hit the ball and have nobody catch it or throw you out at first. You’re then good on base, or you can walk. There are at least three different ways.
The point of it is to figure out how to get on base. That’s back to that comment about a tactic versus the strategy. The individual player, the job of the batter, is to get on first. They do have a term in baseball and softball called on-base percentage. That’s much more important than a batting average. It’s the same thing as though in business. What I discovered of a variety of things and I won’t go in order because frankly, John’s describing, it is a cycle, number one, and it fits for any size company in any niche privately held and republic he held but even more magically if it’s in every department in every company. Even more magically, it fits in every team in every department, in every company. It makes my life easier.
Those of us that are in sales is a practical matter. We’re a business owner. We have a geographical territory, some product niche, or specialty. All of that is an entrepreneur’s or business owner’s jive. We already talked about this concept of the environment. The environment is where all your resources are. That’s where you have your tools and potentially some team members. Most people operate their business, territory, job from the standpoint of whatever they have from a resource standpoint. For example, if you’re physically in San Francisco and an opportunity comes for you to service somebody in, let’s say, Baltimore, and you say in your mind, “I’m in San Francisco.” That would be resource restrictive that you’ve allowed yourself to be contained by your environment.
Instead, what you wanted to say in your mind is, “How can I service somebody in Baltimore at a high-quality level?” That’s one of these four phases, which is effective alignment, but most people put that a front of planning. It should be behind plan. Your plan should be the pick of the year. “I’m going to be 300% of quota this year. I’m going to grow my business by 300%. I get 300% more new customers.” That would be effectively an annual goal. Once you’ve got that, it’s time to look at what resources you do need. Not the other way around, make your decision about what you want to do first, then find the resources. For example, we could cold call. We could figure out a way to get a bunch of referrals. We could survey all of our existing customers and all of those.
Business Mastery: Dominate Your Market: How to Quadruple Revenue in Four Steps (Business Mastery Series Book 1)
The temptation a lot of people might have is they’ll hear an idea like that, and they’ll put it in action. It may or may not be a good idea. The way to do it is to do it after you’ve figured out what your goal, objective, or strategy is for the year. Once you’ve got the goal, and you’ve assembled your resources, next is to execute or go get into action and do stuff. Instead of being like, “I did with my grandma jumping up immediately when she told me to.” Think, gather your resources, then execute. The fourth phase is to figure out what in the world happened.
The answers are either red and you fell on your face. Green, you exceeded whatever heck you’re after doing. The third is some Amber or a yellow, meaning you’re just about okay. The cycle is to analyze your situation, figure out a new plan, gather the resources you need, execute. After you execute, analyze the result, adjust your plan, find new resources if you need to, then execute. It’s a cycle. All businesses, departments, projects, individuals with a sales territory, all people with some project that they’re managing, you should run them through that four-phase cycle I gave you.
When we clarify something, we’re not limiting ourselves to one answer, and you zero in on what do we want to focus on first. The thing that I love about this Business Mastery system you’ve created is the alignment. Not just executing without other people’s agreement, understanding. That’s crucial to what you’re doing that makes this fly so much. I did also want to touch on this wonderful quote of yours, which is, “Don’t use the same approach for all problems.” If you go to sales training like, “You get this objection, here’s the answer regardless of who’s saying it or what the situation is.” I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I tell people, “You’ve got to think of your brain like a jukebox with multiple stories ready to go depending on what the problem or the challenge is.” The fact that you talked about this is another wonderful blog about how you bring results to people. Give us a little taste of what this means in terms of some things that require more finesse etc.
Objections are problems. However, most of them are disguised. What I mean by that is most people that you’re having a sales conversation with are not very skilled at giving you quality objections. They may say something, but they’re hoping you’re going to go away. They’ll make a comment to see what you’re going to do. If you say, “I’d give up,” then mission accomplished. What teed up in my mind is whatever you hear from anybody is likely not a well-thought-out response. Sometimes it could be, but you simply need to practice this art of ignorance and say, “Could you elaborate more on what you mean by that? Would you flash that out more?”
[bctt tweet=”What’s stopping us from getting better results is almost always not asking questions or for help. ” via=”no”]
I don’t believe in a Rolodex type of thing where you get a certain question. You need to find that answer and deliver it. That’s what you get when you have a chatbot or something like that running on a robot. All you have to do is be genuinely curious. “I’m surprised you said that. Where did that come from? What’s the backstory of that?” That’s the key. The key is to be ignorant, don’t act like you’ve heard that before because maybe it isn’t quite the same and ask, “Tell me more. May I ask for more? Can you help me out here? I don’t quite get it,” things like that.
Are there any last thoughts? You have this wonderful book that people can get. It’s called Dynamic Growth.
In GetBillsNewBook.com, and you’ll get a chance to get the pre-publication version. It will give you a book form. It will encapsulate a lot of what we’ve been talking about here.
It’s called Dynamic Growth: How to position your business as a 24/7 cash-producing ATM. Who doesn’t want that? Bill, thank you so much for sharing your gifts, including this wonderful book, and more importantly, this awareness that when we’re curious and when we’re not pretending we know something, no matter how much experience we have, get our mindset and our strategy in place, there’s nothing that we can’t do together. Thanks again for being on the show. I’m looking forward to having all kinds of feedback on how many people are going to be giving me insight going, “That was a great episode. Thanks so much for having Bill on.” Nothing makes me happier than to have guests like you that have so much wisdom and a heartfelt passion for what you do.
Thanks, John. I appreciate it very much.
Important Links
- Bill Prater
- What’s Stopping You From Getting Better Results Every Single Time?
- GetBillsNewBook.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
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