Mr. Persuasion, Jeff Tippett
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
The success of your business depends on how well you persuade. Sharing his mastery on the art of persuasion is Mr. Persuasion himself, Jeff Tippett. As the founder of the award-winning PR firm, Targeted Persuasion, Jeff gives great insights on what it takes to successfully do a pitch, whether you are a new client, someone who wants to get hired, or looking for funding. He talks about what captures people’s attention and, at the same time, how to be consistent with your brand and messaging. Believing that everyone has this superpower to persuade, he suggests ways on how people can tap into that. Jeff also reveals the steps to building trust, crafting a call to action, and storytelling.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Mr. Persuasion, Jeff Tippett
Unleashing Your Superpower: Why Persuasive Communication Is The Only Force You Will Ever Need
I have Jeff Tippett, who is known to many as Mr. Persuasion. He’s a subject matter expert on persuasive communications. He speaks to international audiences through keynotes and seminars and helps everybody become more effective and he has some secret tools to share. His book is called Unleashing Your Superpower: Why Persuasive Communication is the Only Force You Will Ever Need. His bold statement is that we all live or die based on our ability to persuade. He founded Targeted Persuasion, an award-winning PR firm and has worked with big brands like Airbnb and League of Women Voters. He’s an expert on how to get your heart and soul into an emotional story. Jeff, welcome.
Thanks for having me on. I’m excited for us to talk a little bit.
Tell me a little bit about your own story of origin. I know in your book, Unleashing Your Superpower, you have that. I’d like to go back to your high school days.
My first experience as a kid was founding what I thought was a company at the time that I called Snoopy’s Yard Club. At Snoopy’s Yard Club, I would go out and I would knock on doors. In the summertime, I would get gigs mowing grass. In the fall, I would get gigs raking leaves and pine straw. I would hire my friends to come and fulfill those contracts for me so I could go on to then securing the next job. Being an entrepreneur is in my DNA. I grew up this way. It’s who I am. I’m excited that we can talk especially with entrepreneurs to help them better themselves when it comes to persuasion and moving their audience.
You not only sold the job but then you hired other people to do the job. In your book, you talk about the importance of capturing people’s attention. What is the biggest mistake you see people make when they open a pitch, whether it’s to get a new client or to get hired or to get funding for their startup?
The mistake that people often make in capturing their attention is crafting that message. Understanding what it is they’re trying to say to people. We have so much content all over the place and we haven’t figured out how to narrow that content down. Make that content user-facing, make it user-friendly, and speak to the needs of the other person within that content. Once we have this great content out there, it is extremely important to capture people’s attention early especially in today’s world. We have many things that are bombarding us and are out there trying to capture our attention. Ralph Waldo Emerson said it this way, “Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.” What can we do to be out there to capture people’s attention, but at the same time being extremely consistent with our brand and the look and the feel that we put out there for ourselves?
[bctt tweet=”Trust is the foundation to success.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I made a huge mistake in this at one point and here’s what I did wrong. I have a congenial type personality. I love to affirm people. I love to encourage people that match who I am. I love to see people succeed. However, when I look especially on social media and I see people make these little snarky posts and it seems to capture so much attention, they all of a sudden have 500 likes on their posts. I have to admit. I had this little jealousy, a little envy here of what other people were doing to capture attention. I tried it and I wrote a blog post. I sent it out on email, put it out on social media and it created a storm fire of negativity. The subject matter here was, “Your Social Media Sucks, But You Know That.” What I was trying to do here was to give people some great tips of what they could do to capture attention on social media and make things stand out. People took it personally because they know how much I care for people. They thought I had gone to look at their social media and I was upset. I spent days doing damage control over my brand because I tried to capture attention but I didn’t do it incongruity with my brand standards.
That’s a great distinction that it’s not just any attention you want to capture. You want to capture the right attention.
We all have to go through the phase of know, like and trust us. We’re dealing with new clients, pitches, whatever that looks like. We have to go through those phases and sometimes we’ve tried to push the envelope a little bit too much to gain more attention and it can backfire on us as it did for me.
One of the things you are an expert on is helping people unleash their superpower. You talk about that in your book and you say that everyone has this superpower which is to be able to persuade people. Can you tell us what you suggest people do to try and tap into that?
My bold statement in the book is that I believe that we all live or die based on our ability to persuade. That doesn’t matter if we’re a CEO moving a company forward, if we’re in sales, if we’re a sales manager, if we’re an entrepreneur. Maybe we’re pitching for funding. Maybe we’re trying to attract the right type of talent to help our company move forward. Maybe it’s attracting the right type of clients, the customers that we’re looking for. What I help people do is I go through the early stage of messaging, “How do you craft the message?” I talk about the audience and the importance of making that connection with the audience. We’re going to talk through how we position and how we structure a call to action. I talk a little bit too about trust and the importance of trust and building trust with our audience as well. I like to walk through all of those phases with people to help them understand and give them their cape of superpower to persuade others.
Let’s double-click on trust. Everybody knows it’s important to have it and get it. What shortcuts or ideas or must-have on a checklist do you come up with to give people some instant takeaways from the book, as well as your keynote and seminars on how to be better at building trust faster?
[bctt tweet=”In sales, it’s not just any attention you want to capture. You want to capture the right attention.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When I was finishing up my book, I got a note back from my editor. My editor said, “Jeff, you’ve talked about trust in every single chapter of your book. You haven’t hit this head-on, expounded and gone deep into the topic of trust. Is trust important to you? Is trust important to your message?” It was like a ton of bricks hitting me, “I really haven’t done this,” and here’s the point. Trust is the foundation. Without trust, every other chapter of my book you might as well shred it and put it into recycling. It’s of no value whatsoever. You can have the best message in the world. You can capture people’s attention. You can find ways to make your message stick. You can do all of those things, but if you don’t have the trust of your audience it’s not going to matter and you’re not going to go anywhere. In the book, I walked through ten tips that users can use to help them get trust with their audience. The first one is being consistent. That’s all areas of our life. Brand messaging, our imagery, our response, everything we do we have to create this consistency.
Sometimes especially with our online, we’re all over the place. People don’t even understand who we are. They don’t understand what they’re doing. How can they trust that? Be consistent day in, day out in every single aspect of our business. The second one is to deliver as promised. If we say that we’re going to get a proposal out by 5:00 PM on Friday, it needs to be there by 4:00 PM on Friday. People are watching every small move that we make, making sure that whatever we say that we exceed expectation. That we deliver as promised. This is one that we often don’t think about, but being open and being authentic with our audience. Sometimes we feel we have to have this fake facade of who we are and create this impression. We can gain more trust from our audience if we are open and we are authentic with them. When I’m on stage, people love to hear about my failures, which is great. I have many of those failures. I can be open about them. The fourth one is show confidence. If you believe that your product is the right solution, is a great solution, have confidence in your message. Have confidence in what it is that you’re doing. Be truthful with people.
Number six is to make people feel safe in our presence. That makes them feel safe with the things that we’re doing with them. If they’re on our website, make them feel safe. All aspects of interaction with people, making them feel safe. Number seven, saying no sometimes especially entrepreneurs. We want a break in the money or saying, “Yes.” Sometimes telling people no and say, “No, I’m not a good fit for what you’re doing here. However, let me tell you about my friend X or my friend, Mary, or my friend, John. That person would be perfect.” We can gain trust for them. When things do align in the future, they’re more likely to come back to us if we’ve been honest and we’ve said, “No, we’re not the right fit. No, this isn’t the right solution for you.” Being open to feedback, listening to what our audience has to say, and bringing value to what they’re saying to us. Making time for people sometimes in our busy schedule, we’re all over the place and we’re making things happen. We’re clicking but we forget the people portion of this. Making sure we make time for people. The last one that I talk about is being reliable in our relationships.
Talk a little bit about how you define reliability? The second one I sum up is integrity, doing what you say you’re going to do. You meet a deadline. Is that kissing cousins to reliability or is there a distinction between reliability and integrity for you?
Reliability for us is similar to some of these other aspects there, but what sets us apart is making sure that in whatever it is that what we’re agreeing to with our audience. Whether it’s through an email response or whatever it is. That without being reliable, the trust isn’t going to be there for our audience. Making sure that we’re following through, that we are the expert in this space, that they can count on us and they’re not questioning at any point, “Is Jeff going to show up? Is Jeff going to be on stage on time? Is Jeff going to return my email on time?” That reliability is there in every aspect.
The way to build that is through number one, the consistency. I love how there’s a thread that one of these characteristics supports the other, which is the overall vibe of at the end of the day, people trust you. I personally resonate with feeling safe and the biggest compliment I can ever give someone or get is that I feel safe enough to be myself in your presence. I can take down the mask, be open, and authentic. If you do that first, then when you’re giving your keynotes and you are open and authentic, that makes the audience feel like, “I can trust this guy. He’s not pretending like he never makes a mistake and therefore I can’t relate to him.” That’s a key takeaway for everybody in our audience.
[bctt tweet=”Without your audience’s trust, a good messaging and marketing is not going anywhere.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The foundation here is trust and we have to gain the trust of other people. Everything else is important. It all matters. This is the real foundation. We don’t even understand why, but if we were to get feedback from our audience, maybe they do not trust us for one reason or another.
I love saying no sometimes and how I don’t think I’ve heard that concept before. The clearer you are on what your product or service, who it’s for and who it’s not for, the better people can self-identify with, “He’s not trying to be all things to all people,” or “The brand isn’t trying to be all things to all people.” This willingness to say no is a huge differentiator if people are saying, “Suddenly, your trust factor in my book went up ten notches because you said, ‘No, I don’t do that. I’m not a specialist in blockchain or whatever it is. I know tech but not blockchain tech. I know sales but if you want marketing expertise, then that probably should be Jeff and not me,’” or whatever it would be. I always say that the riches are in the niches. Your niche is so clear that it’s persuasive communication. That could be for salespeople, but it’s a much broader use there because you’re doing deep dives in people’s culture from the work you’re doing. For example, with hospitals where everyone who’s not a salesperson somehow still needs to be working on customer satisfaction, which is different skillsets than selling skills. Correct?
Absolutely. When my editor first read this section on saying no, I got a little pushback from my editor and he was like, “Jeff, your whole book is about getting people to say yes. Does this fit in? Are you sure this fits because you’re giving them an out in this?” I was like, “Absolutely not about giving them an out and absolutely yes this is staying in.” This is extremely important. If someone comes to us and we know it’s not in our niche area, we know it’s not what we do too well, but we take it because we want the money, or we think we need it. We don’t perform well because it’s not what we do. We’re going to lose their trust versus handing this to someone else and saying, “No, I’m not good at crafting an exact pitch. I need to hand you over to my friend, John, because that’s his specialty,” and great. John makes the money. John gets the contract. They do the work there, but then that person will remember me and they’ll trust me because I didn’t lead them astray.
Targeted Persuasion: Sometimes, we’ve tried to push the envelope a little bit too much to gain more attention, and it can backfire on us.
This plays out into all areas of our lives. I’m thrilled to hear you say this about the message and the audience because that was my intent. I want to be a specialist. I am a specialist. I want to continue pushing that in persuasive communications. Does it play out in multiple fields? Absolutely. As an entrepreneur, does it play out? Yes. For healthcare professionals? I do a lot of work for healthcare professionals. Does it matter? Yes, because they have to work toward compliance. Sometimes they struggle a little bit in helping patients understand why this should be taken to the next step with them and what that looks like, but also satisfaction. Hospitals are graded by patients. Even now, a single tweet at times can create multiple havocs for us. It can span to go into the media. It can go all over the place if we haven’t had that customer satisfaction. Persuasion is around that as well.
One of your niches is how to craft a call to action that users can’t resist. Is this call to action something that’s on a website? Is it something a salesperson’s saying? Bring that to life for us.
The answer is yes. That’s what’s beautiful about this book. You could take the topics that are here and you can apply them to an email that you’re going to send. You can apply them to a face to face conversation with a person. You can apply them to a landing page that you’re creating. You could apply this to a regular website that’s part of your product. These tools apply across multiple platforms. They’re not media-specific. You can understand these tools and play them across a variety. Let’s talk a little bit about a call to action. I put thirteen tips in here to help people understand how to craft a call to action that users can’t resist. The first one is to make your ask clear. How many times have you read an email or left a meeting? You walked out scratching your head saying, “What exactly do they want me to do next?” Hang up the phone and like, “Am I supposed to do something?” What’s happening next in this whole thing? Making sure that our ask is clear.
[bctt tweet=”The riches are in the niches.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The second one is making sure that there are strong action verbs in the ask as well. We don’t want a passive voice. We want strong action verb in there. The third one is to make it personal. I encourage people to put the word you or your early in our communication, in our language, in our conversations. What it does is it pulls the person in. It helps them understand that this message is for them. This isn’t a generic message where it could apply to anyone. This is for you. This is for your success. This is for your results. When the user hears that or when they read that, they feel connected and they feel that what you’re offering is specifically for them. The fourth one is to communicate value. This is extremely important on the landing page. We’re asking people to give up something personal, oftentimes it’s their email address. What value are they getting in return? Making sure we clearly put in front of people, “This is the value,” and sometimes it’s affixing a number. Sometimes it’s an outcome. It can vary, but understanding, “What is the value that you’re offering? Have you clearly put that in front of the user?”
The fifth one is to be clever but don’t be tried in all of this. You’ve got to find a way that’s a little bit different, a little bit unique. It needs to adhere to your brand standards, but you’ve got to find some little way to stand out in all of this. Number six is emotion. We know that people buy for emotion, not logic, as Zig Ziglar has taught us. Making sure that we understand like, “How do we pull out the emotion in the person that we’re working with? How do we speak to that emotion?” The seventh one is to create a sense of urgency. Number eight is to create a singular call to action. Sometimes we have a call to action and there are five things that we’re asking people to do. They don’t know which one to do first, which one to do second. Am I supposed to do all five? Does number three fit me or is it number four? They look at all that and you know what they do? They do nothing. They take no action. I will admit, sometimes we do need people to take multiple steps with us to get somewhere but give it to me in a linear path.
Give me the first one. Get me to say yes. Get me to, “I bought into what you’re doing, and then take me to the second ask or the third ask.” That’s extremely important on landing pages and things of that nature, making sure there’s a singular call to action. I encourage people to use strong, punchy language when they’re asked to have the call to action there. “You were invited. Reserve your seat now.” Give us some strong, punchy language there. Number ten is to reduce the risk. Psychologically, when we look at this offer, we are analyzing the risk. What are the downsides? What bad could happen? Is this worth the money? How do we reduce the risk that’s there? Can we offer a 30-day money back guarantee? Can we offer three days? What can you do there? What risk are your users thinking of? What’s concerning them? How do you reduce the risk? Number eleven is scarcity. Pull back. Don’t have all of it out there. Create some scarcity. Number twelve is the social proof using the power of a crowd. The last one is make it easy, especially if it’s something online. If you make it too complicated, users are going to drop. You’re going to lose them. What is the easiest path forward for your user? Make it extremely easy. That’s my thirteen tips to craft a call to action that users cannot resist.
It’s similar to the steps you gave us on how to build our trust, in that a lot of these coexist. The sense of urgency is created by the scarcity. The clarity is connected to only talking about one thing to do next so you’re not confused. One of my favorite lines is, “The confused mind always says no.” People won’t even tell you that they’re confused, they’ll just say no. What I love is this emotional connection too. A lot of people intellectually know it and then forget it. That’s why I love storytelling so much because one of the best ways to have an emotional connection with people is to tell them a story. I know you have lots of great stories. Can you pick one? You can pick anything you want that gives people, “Intellectually I should have an emotional connection in what I’m doing. I’m going to remember the story Jeff told me about his personal life or whatever it is.” Maybe it’s your own journey of you can train at the same time, manipulation versus persuasion. What’s the story there? That’s an emotional hook.
I have a whole chapter in the book on making a connection and in that chapter, I’ll walk through five ways to make a connection with your audience, to make a connection with the other person. Number four is storytelling is extremely important. Early on when I’m on stage, I tell the story of going through an international adoption of where I brought a baby from the country of Haiti to the United States to be my daughter. It wasn’t a situation where I had a lifelong dream of adopting a baby or going to Haiti to bring someone here. It was not part of my thought process whatsoever. My father went over to do some humanitarian relief in Haiti. While he was there, he struck up a relationship with a translator who happened to be a ninth grader who was in an English-speaking Christian school and she happened to get pregnant. The school gave her a choice. They said, “Here’s what you’re going to do. You’re either going to give up your baby or you’re going to drop out of school because we’re not going to allow you in our Christian school as an unwed single mother.”
I can’t even imagine what was going through her head or heart to realize that she has to give up this baby in order to continue in school. I don’t know that I could even make a decision like this, but she did. She decided that the best for her was to be able to finish school. She wanted to graduate from high school. At the same time, she felt like if she could find a home that could take care of her baby, it would be the best for her baby. I looked at the picture of this unclothed baby being held there by her mom. For whatever reason, I knew in my heart that I was supposed to adopt her. I didn’t know what was going on in Haiti. At that time, Presidents Aristide’s government was collapsing. There were riots going on between his supporters and his detractors, happening all over the country. I had no idea. This was the first time in my life that I had a gun held at my head. Imagine what she would do with the machete held at your neck? Having to flee the city and jump in the back of a pickup truck to get out of the city because the college students are creating these riots and you feel unsafe. It was the first time I experienced anything like that.
[bctt tweet=”Sometimes, we do need people to take multiple steps with us to get somewhere.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The lowest point of my adoption was I was back in the States and my Haitian attorney sent me a note and he said, “Jeff, this governmental office that needs to sign this next document for you is closed. We don’t think it’s going to open. We don’t know if it’s going to open. At best, you should consider your adoption on hold. At worse, you need to accept the fact that this adoption may be over and you may not finish this adoption. You may never be this girl’s father.” I was devastated. I had already been there. I’d held her. I had kissed her on her cheek. I was in love with this baby. I flew over the next morning and he was my mode of operation. Every morning I got up and I walked with my translator from my attorney’s house to this government office that I needed the signature. I went every day, optimistic. I thought I was going to get it signed, only to walk back totally deflated, devastated the person didn’t show up.
About two weeks of doing this, finally the person showed up. You can imagine what’s happening in my head. I had all these emotions. All this stuff was happening in me. I didn’t have any English-speaking people around me to start with. I hadn’t had a chance to talk to a lot of this. I’m scared. I’m frightened. I’m afraid. I lacked hope for the future. I started talking to him and I’m going off. For 30, 60 seconds I’m expressing all this stuff. I looked at him and he looked at me. I asked if he would sign it. His response was, “No, I’m not going to sign this.” I had to figure out what was going on. I only had seconds to do this because the life of this girl, she was in an orphanage at this point. She didn’t have anyone take care of her. She didn’t have money. No promise of hope. Nothing was happening. I had to turn this around.
I had limited knowledge of Haitian culture, but what I knew was this. They loved their babies and they loved their children. They love family and they view them as jewels in their life. I turn this around because what I found was I had been using words like I, me and my in all of my ask. I was twisting his arm. I was forcing. I turned it around and I looked at him and I said, “I know you love children. I know that Haitian children are valuable to you guys as a culture. Here’s what’s happening with his girl. She doesn’t have a home. She doesn’t have anyone to love her. She doesn’t have anyone to provide an education, to provide hope for her. I’ll do that. I’ll offer that but I need you to sign this document to help me take care of this beautiful Haitian daughter.” In ten minutes, he signed it. I started walking back trying to figure out what happened in that. Here’s what I realized. I realized that I was manipulating. I was making this all about me using I, me and my instead of persuading. That was this a-ha moment that clicked for me when I began to understand what’s the difference in persuasion and manipulation? How is persuasion of value where manipulation is not? That was that a-ha moment for me that started this journey of persuasion and persuasive communication.
Targeted Persuasion: The clearer you are on what your product or service is and who it’s for, the better people can self-identify with them.
The stakes aren’t always that high but the lessons from that story resonate with us all. I totally get that I need to learn how to become more persuasive. I understand I need to build trust. I know I need to have a clear call to actions and I need to stop manipulating and use persuasion by shifting my language. Is there anything else to put it all together for us?
Let me leave with a conversation with this. I finished the adoption. We fly out of Port-au-Prince and I make it back to Miami. I’m in the Miami terminal. I make it through customs and all that. I’m standing in the terminal and I’m holding this baby. She’s whimpering. She had screamed the whole way. It turns out she had double ear infections and lots of things happening inside of her body. I hold her and I’m looking down at her as she was whimpering. I do feel accomplishment. I’m proud of myself that I did this in a few months during this devastating time in the country’s history. I’m proud. I’m excited. As quickly as that comes, it goes out of the window when it leaves. I looked down at her and I start wondering about her life. I began to wonder like, “What’s she going to be? Will she be a doctor and heal people? Will she become a humanitarian and relieve suffering? Will she become a teacher and impact hundreds of students that could then impact thousands of lives?” While I couldn’t answer any of those questions, what I understood at that moment was the adoption wasn’t over. This wasn’t something that was completed. This is only the beginning, like tossing a pebble into a lake or pond. We toss it in. We hear that thump that goes in. What happens next? We see those rings. They go out, the ripples that continue from that stone being tossed in.
My adoption was that stone being tossed in. I have no idea the lives that my daughter is going to positively impact because I took that step. Here’s what I do know is that she will impact lives that I will never know. People that will far exceed even her life because of the actions that I took and the lessons that I learned. Oftentimes in business and being entrepreneurs and running our companies, we can get so much into returning emails, going to meetings, doing our pitches. Going to mixers, trying to shake the next hand, meeting people, we get into all of that. Sometimes we forget that this is even bigger than these business transactions. Things like growing our companies so that we can hire people, which mean that a person can then put food on the table for his or her child. Maybe we grow the company and someone gets a promotion and they get more money. Now they can afford to tutor for the kid. The kid can then expand the knowledge there and maybe can get into a different type of college or maybe have a whole different future. This is much bigger than we think it is. It’s much bigger than the transactional elements. If we lift our heads up, we can be encouraged that our actions can live well beyond us and impact many lives.
[bctt tweet=”If we lift our heads up, we can be encouraged that our actions can live beyond us and impact many lives.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Jeff, thanks again for being such a great guest.
John, thanks for the opportunity. Thanks for being a gracious host and allowing me to share. I appreciate it. I’m grateful.
Links Mentioned:
- Jeff Tippett
- Unleashing Your Superpower: Why Persuasive Communication is the Only Force You Will Ever Need
- Targeted Persuasion
- https://JeffTippett.com/
- Quantmre.com
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Selling To The Point With Jeff Lipsius
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
In a field as competitive as sales, earning high commissions is top priority. Jeff Lipsius is the president and founder of Selling to the Point, which is a sales training and consulting umbrella platform. He developed Selling to the Point sales training during his 30 years of sales training experience. Back in the late ‘70s, he pioneered inside selling for the natural foods industry, successfully training the first sales force of this type in that industry. As a result, Jeff’s sales model is now being used by many natural food industry brands. Learn how to cultivate great relationships and enjoy your career as a salesperson – the Jeff Lipsius way.
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Jeff Lipsius, who is the author of Selling to the Point. He has some great insights about internal conversations and internal confidence and internal choices and internal clarity that need to happen because most people are so focused on the external. He says, “What’s going on is they can’t hear you over your sales pitch,” and the best way to stop pitching is to start listening. Once you start listening, you learn by observing and when that happens, you get less distractions and your performance soars.
Listen To The Episode Here
Selling To The Point With Jeff Lipsius
Our guest is Jeff Lipsius, who is the President and Founder of Selling to the Point, which is a book and a sales training and consulting umbrella platform. He developed Selling to the Point sales training during his 30 years of sales training experience. Back in the late ‘70s, he pioneered inside selling for the natural foods industry and trained the first salesforce of this type in that industry. As a result of that success, his sales model is now being used by many natural food industry brands. He’s trained over a hundred sales people, both inside and outside, as well as sales trainers throughout his career, and the sales people that have been trained by Jeff are some of the highest commission earners in their industries. They are also able to cultivate great relationships and enjoy their career as salespeople and having been a former salesperson myself, I know how important it is to enjoy what you’re doing in order to be successful. The thing that stands out for me is that the salespeople who’ve been fortunate enough to be trained by Jeff have cumulatively sold over a billion dollars worth of products. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. Thank you for having me.
I’m always interested to ask my guests to tell us their own story of origin. You’ve been doing this for quite awhile and you weren’t always a sales expert. Would you mind taking us back to the days when you were working as sales and marketing manager for an allergy research group and how did you decide that you are going to become who you are?
Way back when, even in college when I was discovering who I was, the real theme would have to be applying conscious awareness to performance. These days a lot of people are talking about mindfulness and conscious workplace practices, but I was a little ahead of the curve. When I was nineteen years old still in college, I was pursuing a way to be able to be more conscious on the tennis court and play better tennis matches. I was a college team player and what I found was that as I became more conscious, in other words, as I put my state of mind in a more aware place, I was able to play better tennis and actually practice my state of mind to get mentally tougher on the court. Later, in my professional career, I decided to try the same thing. What if I was consciously aware during my sales performances, during my interactions with my customer? It was a mindfulness approach because I’m a mediator. You put the ego mind aside and focus on the customer and the interaction as it was rather than the distraction of, “Is this going well for me? Is this not going well for me? Do they think I’m smart? Do they think like me?” They were all distracting from what’s taking place in the interaction I discovered.
What that revealed was a second conversation taking place at the same time I was talking to my customer. It would affect the relationship. This second conversation is the internal buying conversation between my customers ears and as I would say one thing which is you could say conversation A, my external conversation with my customer, the customer would hear something uniquely different. They would assign a meaning to what I’m saying and come up with a whole different interpretation that I needed to know. Putting my distracting thoughts aside and really paying attention to the customer, I could begin to discern how the customer is receiving what I’m saying and lo and behold, I felt that was much more important because the goal of selling is buying.
[Tweet “Ask intriguing questions to get attention”]
Nobody’s going to give you credit for, “That was an incredible presentation, but nobody bought,” is what you’re saying there.
You, as a salesperson, don’t get a sale unless the customer decides you’re going to get that sale. It’s really the decision process that determines the salesperson’s success. The way I put it is a good salesperson is going to pay more attention to their customers buying performance, their salespersons’ selling performance.
In the world of startups, for example, if you’re pitching an investor and you’re trying to get that investor to “buy your vision and invest in your company,” then you would be smart to do what Jeff is suggesting, which is to look at what other types of companies that investor has “bought into and invested in.” When I was selling ads for Condé Nast, I would call on brands like Lexus and I would look at where else did Lexus by so that I can get a sense of what their past buying performances is as a criteria that might help me decide, “They liked that. If I can come up with something similar to that, then that might help me with their criteria to buy from me.
That helps when you have a background in the prospect’s buying performance, buying patterns, but I’ll take it one step further. You might have all that background and see that there is a certain type of buying style that this customer has, which is great. What I’m saying though is don’t be wedded to it. Don’t try to steer the conversation to mimic what you’ve learned because who knows? Maybe they had a bad cup of coffee that morning and they’re in a horrible mood. They’re not going to act today the way they normally would under other circumstances. You don’t know that until you begin paying attention at the moment to exactly how things are as it is and the awareness is going to allow us to modify what we need to do in order to make what we have to say well-received.
What you’re saying here is that this conscious awareness, being out of our head, we’re worrying about whether we’re liked or not. Trying to figure out what we think they might want, we can do all the due diligence in the world and preparation, which is great, but in the end we should be present in that moment to be able to zig or zag according to what that person is feeling and giving us this feedback.
Don’t let your preparation be a distraction.
Unfortunately, the majority of salespeople don’t even prepare. Let’s not discount the importance of practicing your pitch or your preparation or your sales presentation or whatever it is you want and what you can do to get your confidence up, but we can add to that of now that you’ve prepared almost like an actor. They memorized their lines, but then when the cameras start rolling for a movie, they are in the moment with the other actor and not wed to what all the rehearsals were, but they still rehearse.
That’s a good analogy. That nails it on the head what I’m trying to articulate. The connection between awareness and performance is learning. What you could say is we perform by learning and we learn by observing, by awareness. If we are less distracted, we’re going to be better observers, which will make us better learners, which will make us better performers. This is true in any performance activity, not just selling, but I’m using selling as a metaphor, and this is my greater purpose, is to be able to show people examples of how conscious awareness could be benefit in the workplace and in our performance so that more people can see the value of living life more consciously, ultimately will be the message I’d like to get out there.
Let’s say you as a salesperson are prepared and you’re in the moment and you’re not distracted and you’re willing to learn and perform at your best, what do you do or what suggestions do you have if the person you’re talking to is distracted? They’re constantly checking their phone while you’re talking. They’re clearly not interested in what you’re saying. What tips do you have to counter someone who’s distracted? Even if you’re playing tennis with him, if your tennis partner isn’t present there’s only so much you can do I suppose. I’d love to hear it in the sales analogy.
The main thing is to be asking questions. Salespeople need to be learners, not the teachers. Salespeople need to be great inquisitors, asking good questions because you see, the buying process that customer’s decision making is an internal process. The salesperson doesn’t know that conversation going on inside the customer’s head, but when you ask questions, that’s the salesperson’s window into getting insight. What is this customer’s decision process or what mood are they in? Like you said, in your example of the customer, it just looks distracted. If a customer’s distracted, it indicates that they’re disinterested, it indicates that for whatever reason, you haven’t established value, the value of paying attention to you. As soon as the customer starts paying attention, they’re no longer distracted. What you want to do with a question is steer the customer’s attention into something that’s going to be relevant to the decision to buying your product. When you ask a question that’s intriguing enough, the customer’s attention is going to shift from their iPhone on to you. How do you ask an intriguing question? You learn the customer’s values and priorities and beliefs and that will allow you to create the kinds of questions that are going to direct the attention.
Going back to the Lexus analogy, I knew from my research that Lexus was trying to get people to perceive Lexus as an emotional buy like they do a BMW as opposed to what they currently had, which is Lexus was rational buy. If I was to ask them a question about if we could show you a way to get people emotionally engaged with Lexus like they would BMW, would that be something that would be useful for our conversation? They’re like, “Now you’re talking about something that’s important to me and now I’m going to pay attention to that because that’s what I’m tasked with doing.” In order to ask smart questions, in my opinion, you have to do your research and be in the moment. Ask intriguing questions to get attention. That’s going to be one of the tweets from the episode. That was great. Let’s jump into this wonderful book Selling to the Point. You have a chapter they are called, “They can’t hear you over your sales pitch.” What a great title and since this is all about pitching for anything to get hired, to get people to buy from you, what have you, tell us what’s going on there when you wrote that? What’s happening when people can’t hear us over our sales pitch?
Selling To The Point: Because The Information Age Demands a New Way to Sell
The first thing I want to say overall about my book is consistent with what we’ve been saying so far. My book is one of the first selling books in the form of a fiction novel story. It’s got a plot with romance suspense. The reason I made it a fiction novel instead of a how-to book is because I want to show salespeople how to learn from conversation. I said salespeople are the learners, not the teachers. Where do sales people learn? They learn during the course of interaction, from dialogue. The customers will reveal their beliefs, their values, their priorities, their frustrations. As a salesperson learns his, the salesperson’s able to respond, and of course learning requires awareness, which is getting back to the original skill that I’m saying we need for our performance is good observation, good awareness.
What I was wanting to get across to the salespeople is that you can say whatever you want. If you’re talking to an unreceptive customer, it’s of no use. You could go through all kinds of training at the home office and get your pitch down and talk to the customer and relay all the selling points that you were trained and memorized and got them all out. If the customer is not interested, if the customer’s unreceptive, you haven’t accomplished a thing. Maybe one point that you might consider to be minor or almost irrelevant, you just happen to mention on the side of the customer really grabs on to that. In their own beliefs and values, this is very important. It’s not your pitch, but it’s how your pitch is being heard that’s going to determine whether you get the sale or not. I wanted to get that across in this particular chapter. The best sales pitch is a pitch that’s well received.
That’s also I think with the benefit to the readers of your book is instead of another how to book, you’ve put it into a fiction, so we are entertained while we’re learning as opposed to just learning and that makes it much more interesting and engaging and that’s the main reason for doing this. One of the things in your book and the story along the line is a character, Martin. He writes down that customers make the best buying decisions when they have the three C’s, Internal Confidence, Internal Choice and Internal Clarity. Let’s take a minute and go through each one of those. What is the emphasis on the word ‘internal’ around these three C’s?
The three C’s are what customers need to possess in order to make the best decisions. As a salesperson, you need to be skilled in decision coaching because sometimes you could say all the right things, but the customer still doesn’t buy because they might not be the best decision maker or they have a decision style that might not be optimal for this type of decision. They need to go into a coaching role. You need to shift from salesperson to decision coach, and if you’re going to be a decision coach, you have to gain a higher level of trust, which comes from letting the customer know that your goal is to help them make the best decision. That’s important because usually sales people’s goal is to get the customer to buy the product. The customer doesn’t share that goal. The customer’s own is to make the best decision. If the salesperson and customer are on the same page, then they work together as a team and you can have a coaching relationship.
One of the best things I’ve ever heard people say in the sales conversation is, “This may or may not be a good fit for you, let’s find out together.” That automatically goes, “Then you’re not so attached to me having to buy, that may not be the best decision if you find that I can’t afford it or it’s not what I need or whatever.” That also removes a lot of the pressure.
It does one more thing. It turns the conversation inward. You’re asking me what do I mean by internal with the three C’s and you gave a great example. If the salesperson is urging the customer, “You should buy, because I know this is a great product for you,” that’s outward. That’s about the salesperson’s point of view. If the salesperson says, “I don’t know. Let’s explore this.” Then it becomes more about the customer’s point of view, which is more inner. I’ll give you an example, I’ll start with internal confidence, which is one of my three Cs. If I ask any salesperson about confidence, they’re going to say, “Very important, confidence.” They try to get that, “With every sales call is to have the customer trust me. Customer is confident that what I say is actually what’s going on.” That’s external confidence.
Internal confidence is the customer’s self confidence in their ability as a decision maker. This is primary because the customer’s not going to trust the salesperson unless the customer first trusts themselves to decide if they’re going to trust that salesperson. What I’m trying to get sales people to do with this book and with my courses is turn your thinking around from external, which is about me and my performance to internal, what’s going to make the customers have the best decision performance. If you’re a coach and you’re coaching a customer and that customer has self-doubt in their ability to make a decision, then you’re going to have a compromised buying performance. For example, the customer may make an inappropriately conservative decision because of their self doubt and a salesperson skilled in asking the right questions can prevent this from happening and have the customer make a better decision. That’s internal confidence.
I was talking with someone who was thinking of hiring me to help them as their business coach with their pitch and modeling and they’re in this buyer’s remorse type of thing and it’s exactly what you described. They don’t trust themselves enough to make a good decision because they’re so afraid of making the wrong decision. They said, “On a scale of one to ten, I’m at a nine.” I go, “I’m going to feel so relieved if I get you to help me but then my internal monkey mind kicks in and I’m like, “How do I know he can help me and how does he know he can help me and on and on and on and on.” They just start spinning their wheels in such a crazy way. I have my own way of trying to help them calm that down, I’d love to hear your thoughts on that because that happens so many times no matter what you’re selling.
Ask a coaching question. For example, you could ask the customer, “If my services worked out well, what would you notice happening that would indicate that? Get the customer to start thinking about, “I would have this occurring and my people would be working more as a team with each other and there would be a better communication.” “Really, better communication, how would you measure that? How would you know the communication is better?” Getting them to focus on what they can know. From the scenario you’re describing, that customer is like, “I don’t have a crystal ball.” They want a crystal ball. If you bring it back like a coach would to a tangible, observable things, they realize that, “I can make this decision because I have a handle on the different indicators that would show me if it’s working out well or not.”
[Tweet “Shift from a sales conversation to a decision coach by building trust.”]
It’s future pacing them into things that they can measure, which then allows them to have more confidence in their internal decision process. Let’s jump into this internal choice. Let’s create a scenario. You and I are both keynote speakers. In this situation where the agent has said, “They like what you have to say. They’re just about ready to schedule a time to have a conversation with you before they decide but they think they like another speaker better and if they want to talk to that speaker first and if that doesn’t work out, then they’ll talk to you.” You’re like, “Their internal choice process is not really working in my favor. I have to hope that somebody else’s as opposed to let me get in the game.”
You have to take a little bit deeper dive into, “Why they feel compelled to listen to that person, the next presenters, and as a matter of fact, why don’t they want to hear three presenters, five or six? What’s going on? Typically, the low internal choice is the result of a self-limiting belief. When a customer has a self-limiting belief, it lowers the amount of options they feel they have at their disposal. You say that salespeople are selling options, selling choice. We’re selling solutions that the customer hadn’t previously considered. A lot of the times, it hasn’t been previous considered because there’s a self-limiting belief. An example could be somebody’s going to a company and looking at the org chart and they’re wanting to talk to the highest-ranking executive because they have the most choice, they have the most decision ability. Every salesman knows to do that. You get in front of this VP and start talking to them who extensively has the most choice because they’re ranked so high in the org chart and you hear them say, “I’m pressured by the board and I have regulators are getting in my way now and people are after me so I can’t make any mistakes, the shareholders are angry at me from last quarter so I really don’t want to make any decisions right now.” They have low internal choice even though their external choice, which is their positional power is very high, their internal choice is very low and you’re not going to get the sale.
It was almost like, “My hands are tied.” That’s a low internal choice, right?
Very much so. The self-limiting belief was when the executive said, “People are after me right now, people are wanting to watch me screw up so they could blame me for something.” It’s a self-limiting belief. They feel they don’t have options to choose from when it finds time to look for solutions. Internal choice is also very important to instill in a customer in order for them to make the best decisions. A customer with low internal choice is the most frustrating for salespeople because those are the customers that really liked the product, they really want the product. They think it’s the greatest product, but they won’t buy it because they don’t think they have the option to do so, even though they liked it so much. We all know customers like low internal choice.
Any recommendations on what to do when someone’s who’s got this? Maybe I don’t want to talk to a lot of salespeople. I get overwhelmed by all the choices or what to say?
That’s a perfect lead into my last and third C, which is the most important, which is what I call internal clarity. Internal clarity, if I talk to a salesperson about clarity, “You got to let the customer know about the products, all the features of the product, what it’ll do, how it’s better than the last model we made, and really make them clear.” That’s external clarity. Internal clarity is the customer’s self-awareness. Does the customer know what they need? Are the customers a clear on their goals? Is the customer in touch with priorities and values? If the customer doesn’t know what they need, how in the world can they figure out if your product features will satisfy that need?
I remember helping a real estate agent not waste his time with a bunch of potential buyers who was showing them endless amounts of houses and he hadn’t gotten them to define what would be the ideal house and when they saw it, they would pull the trigger because they didn’t have a criteria. They just go, “They always found something wrong with the house.” I’m like, “We’ve got to figure out the three things that when you see it in one place, you’re going to say yes to.”
The customer has to be clear and the salesperson can help customers get clear. I was talking to a financial planner and he had all these products that he wanted to present to me, but before he did anything, he goes, “What are your needs going to be after retirement?” He started asking me what’s going on with me? Then based on what I said, he was able to pick which product to present. That’s internal clarity. You could be lost, like lost in a mall or lost in a park or something and be looking at the most accurate map. If the map doesn’t have a, “You are here” mark, you’re still lost. You need that internal clarity in order to be able to work with the customer and getting back to your other question, internal clarity also increases internal choice.
Selling To The Point: Internal clarity also increases internal choice.
It’s all connected. Jeff, you have a special gift to offer the audience. Would you please share that?
Anybody that wants to hear more about what I have to say about this, I will have a free fifteen-minute consultation with you over the phone. You can reach me at [email protected]. My Twitter is @JeffreyLipsius. You can reach me anyway. I’ll be glad to talk to you and have a fifteen-minute conversation to see if I could give you any tips to help using the Selling to the Point method.
Who is your ideal audience that you love to give keynote talks to and workshops to?
All kinds of sales, but especially when salespeople have customers that reorder products, reusable products, or the relationship between the customer and the product is really important. That seems to be the sweet spot in terms of companies that really flourish hearing my keynote.
The renewable relationships, not the one-offs. Jeff, I can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom, your generosity, and most of all just helping all of us get better with realizing we need to shift from having external thoughts about confidence and clarity and choice to internal and that when we become conscious aware of what’s going on in the moment, it’s going to improve our performance.
Thank you so much, John, for having me on.
My pleasure.
Links Mentioned:
- Selling to the Point
- Selling to the Point – book
- [email protected]
- @JeffreyLipsius – Twitter
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