Video Transcript:
 
I think, the big problem is that they don't think they're good enough. And that comes across because they when people when they're out selling and someone says no or they're not interested and they get rejected, then they make it personal. They take it personally and they start questioning themselves and thinking, well, I'm not good enough to do this or they might have voices in their heads saying, I'm not cut out to be sales.

If they get so many no’s and rejections, they start criticising themselves. And I think the big lesson for anyone starting out in sales whether you're in a sales job, a career in selling or as a business owner is realising you, you cannot take no personally, it's not no to you. It's just no to that opportunity that you've presented to them at that time.

And, if you the negative talk in their head like that, I'm not good enough or I'm not cut out to be sales. A lot of it comes, brings up a lot of fear, so fear starts to bubble up, and that's when you get that internal chatter in your head and that's when all the negative self-talk starts.

And the problem with that is, if you don't nip it in the bud and stop it, then it will just spiral down and you will continue to get consistent negative talk, which will just affect your emotions, which will affect your actions, which will affect your results. So, it's very important that we have strategies in place to be able to manage those negative conversations that we're having in our head and those conversations they get loud, they can drown out all the possible opportunities that we can see because that voice just gets so loud and so negative. And it feels so real.

And as you mentioned that fear comes up and it hey, this, this must be real. But it's just in here. What? What's an example? You you've been in the field for a long time. Let's say somebody's got to do some cold calling and they've gotta pick up that phone. What is that conversation they have with themselves on the lead up to picking up the phone before they've actually dialled the number?

What's the conversation in their head? I think they worry a lot of the time and I'm talking from experience here from when I started out and selling without any sales training, and I literally had to pick up the phone to make phone calls. And I know what was going through my head. I was absolutely terrified about picking up the phone and talking to a stranger, so I knew nothing about them.

I thought they were going to judge me. What? because I worried that I was going to say the wrong thing. I was worried they were gonna ask me a question and I couldn't handle it and that I would stutter, or I would freeze and not say anything. And so, all this conversation of this might happen that might happen. I was future, pacing myself with a with lots of negative stories, and so that stopped me from actually picking up the phone and dialling the number and talking.

I mean, eventually I would. But I was so worked up with all these negative conversations that I usually it was self-fulfilling. I would then, you know, trip over my words and struggle, knowing what to say, and so that was why the first? My first, experience in selling was not a good one. I ended up quitting before I got fired. And the big problem was I didn't have the skills.

And of course, I didn't have the experience, to be able to confidently be able to pick up the phone and make those convers have those sales conversations to prospect. My first sales experience. I think I was about nine and I was a paper boy, and my uncle said, do you want to come and sell newspapers? He said, you can make good money and I thought to myself, well, that sounds good, and I said, what do I do? He said, well, here's the newspapers.

There's the doors, go make sales and I thought it was gonna be that simple. And I walked down to the bread shop, and I offered them a newspaper, and the man behind the counter said, well, I don't believe in the news. I don't read the news and I thought to myself, that's weird. And I went down to the hairdresser because I'd got my haircut from them before and I said, would you like to buy the newspaper and they said, no, we don't have time to read it and I thought to myself, maybe selling is gonna be a little bit harder. And then by the time I had my third rejection, I thought to myself, there's no way that I'm gonna buy from any of these businesses in the future. They all reject me.

They don't want my $1 newspaper. I think I'm out and it is a terrible feeling, and I think for a lot of us we aren't set up for success. I think we're sold by an organisation that selling is gonna be so easy. Our pockets are gonna be full of dollars. But the reality is different. There's a significant learning curve that we've got to go through.

And I think the emotional journey is one that so few people can explain, and they don't explain the self-talk and we hear this self-talk and we think maybe there's something wrong with me. Maybe it's me who's the problem, but often times it just comes with that territory. Now. Over the past 32 years of experience in the selling, some things must have stayed the same what has stayed the same over the past 32 years? What stayed the same is people are still people. Customers are still human beings. And yeah, we haven't replaced them with robots yet.

And so we're still human. And as humans, wanting to buy product we all want to buy. We don't want to be sold to, and I'm gonna make that distinction. We all want to buy products, but we don't want to be sold to. But in order to have a successful, sales relationship, you need to build that relationship.

You need to build a rapport with your prospect because people will buy from people they know like and trust. Now, that's especially true if you're selling high priced products. If you're selling houses, if you're in real estate or if you're selling business to business, you've got big contracts work worth, you know, hundreds of thousands or multiple thousands of millions of dollars.

Then you don't just click a button on a website and make a sale. You have to go out and talk to people, which means you ha, you're meeting with humans, and you have to build that relationship with them and that trust and that credibility before they will say yes to your offer. And that has not changed.

That's not changed at all. And people still have problems that need solving. And as salespeople, that's what we are. We are problem solvers. And so, our job is to find the right person who has the problem and that we have the solution to that problem. And when you get in front of that person, then they're gonna be your ideal client, the ideal customer.

It doesn't mean to say that they're going to buy straight away, because the timing, it also may come into it. And if you get but some of those people maybe about 3% of the people you talk to face to face, they will be ready to buy when you're in front of them selling. But if they're not ready to buy, maybe they're still doing their research.

Maybe they're not even aware that they've got the problem, in which case, in order to get a sale, it would be a future sale, which means you have to keep nurturing and developing that relationship until such time that they're ready to buy from you, so I think that has not changed. We still have to build these relationships.

What has changed, though, and I think it's worthy. Mentioning this is the technology in the business world today has changed significantly. And, you know, you would have been hiding under a rock if you haven't heard about AI and the AI tools available. I mean, I do you wanna talk a bit about AI and the how that has affected sales.

Daniel, would that be something your listeners would be interested in? I wanna come to that in a minute. I wanna stay just on that relationship selling. And a lot of people don't think the relationship is all that important. But it's the relationship that removes the risk. And if you've been saving up or working hard for 3040 years, and now you're going to actually build your first home and you're going to hire an architect and a builder and you've got five or $600,000 on the line, the relationship is so important when, when it comes to building that relationship, what are some of the relationship factors?

What do people have to become good at in building that relationship. Yep. Well, there's many things, and I think an important one is being authentic, being authentic and being honest and having integrity. So those are three of the I think critical values that people need to have. And people will find you out. If you're not honest, and you don't and have integrity, you don't do what you say you're going to do. You'll get caught out pretty quickly.

And so, you know, having those values of authenticity, honesty and integrity that will go a long way to helping build the relationship. So do what you say you're going to do at turn up when you say you're going to turn up how many tradies. I mean, you hear stories all the time of someone wants they need a plumber, or they need a gardener, or they wanna hire someone and they wanna get some quotes and people don't even turn up. They say they're going to turn up and they don't turn up, or even if they book them in for a job, they don't turn up.

And so that's a lack of integrity. It's a lack of honesty. And so, your reputation, then that affects your reputation, and your reputation is very important. Because a lot of people, if you want to, if you need someone to do a service around your house, for example, uh, and you want to hire, a tradie, you would often ask your friends or people at work who do you know that does whatever job it is that you need doing? And so, it's your reputation with your existing customers that is going to help spread the word to other people, so you're more likely to get referrals. And a lot of businesses are grown on referrals, so building the relationships is so important not just to get your current customers, but it's also going to help you get future customers by building the relationship with your current clients that are then going to promote you. So, I think that's, that's very, very important.

It's ex relationship expands further than just the person in front of you. Your reputation will then, take it out to the masses. You mentioned about honesty and a lot of our clients in real estate. They'll often say the biggest liar gets the job, but unfortunately, if you lie at the start, you've got to lie all the way through to the end. How can a salesperson be honest?

How can they deliver the truth? That sometimes, for example, a home seller doesn't want to hear how do they do that? well, at the end of the day, I think if you lie your way to getting a sale, it'll come back and bite you on the bottom eventually. So, I don't recommend that.

I think, you know, at the end of the day because honesty is so important. If you're upfront, if there if you know that there's going to be an objection. So, I suppose it's like an objection that they're gonna not like hearing maybe it's a the project is gonna take longer than the client expects. Or maybe it's gonna cost more than the client expects. Then being upfront and honest and delivering it in a way with empathy and being able to explain the benefit, explain the benefit of why, why it's going to take this long and making and putting the reality in terms of time frames and costing upfront so that they're laid out and you can have a conversation with the client about it. That way you can ask questions.

You can find out exactly what their concerns are, and when you know what their concerns are, then you can address them. But if you just go in thinking I'm going to lie and not tell them because you're afraid of what they're going to, their response is going to be, as you say, it's just gonna it's just gonna confound, confound and come and become even worse at the end of the day because you will eventually get found out, and that becomes a bigger problem.

So I always recommend, have those difficult conversations up front. Be honest. If you know there's something they're not going to like, then lay it out on the table, ask questions, ask for their feedback and their opinions. But then also, you're in a better position to be able to handle those objections, and their emotions around the topic because that's the problem.

There's gonna be a lot of emotions, so the better skills you get at handling emotions, yours as well as the client's. The prospect's emotions, that again all helps build that relationship, and you're more likely to get a sale. I think if you're upfront and honest and you lay everything out on the table, then if you lie your way to the sale and then you have to deal with the consequences at the end and, of course, that then affects your reputation.

And any potential future customers, you may get, hm. We work with a lot of scientific reports, and we always find things within these reports that are gonna hold our customers back. And we know that when we present these areas of development, sometimes it can be very personal. It feels like a personal attack. It's a shock for the individual. It's a hit to the ego, and we've seen it hundreds of times. And so, we know as consultants that we've got to prepare the client upfront.

So, one of the things that we do is we do a pre frame and we ask the client for permission. Mrs. Buyer today, if I go through your scientific report and find anything that could potentially hold you back or hurt you. Would you like me to tell you about it or not? And every single client says yes. Please tell me. And so, we get permission upfront because we know 20 minutes into the conversation, we're going to have to overcome that obstacle.

And once we get to that obstacle, we'll say to them to remember earlier on in our conversation, and I ask for your permission if I could be direct with you and point out things that could potentially hurt you or hold you back, well, here's one of them, and every single time the client goes, thank you so much. I've suspected that for so long, and now it's back into my awareness. How can I fix it?

And once we've done that, it's so easy to deliver the truth. It's so easy to be honest, and it just comes with a little bit of a pre frame. Ask for the per permission upfront, just like going to a doctor. You want the doctor to tell you the truth, and they set the scene a lot of a lot of salespeople.

They don't have the confidence in tipping up the phone. They don't have the confidence to say no. They don't have the confidence to negotiate a fair deal for themselves, and it really comes back to confidence. How can salespeople improve their confidence for 2024? I think it all comes down to several things. First of all, you need to learn the skills.

So, whatever you're doing, if you say you're driving, imagine you're driving. Learning to drive a car before you got in a car and started to learn to drive you. I don't know about you, but I had no confidence about getting behind the wheel. I was quite nervous. I was about 17 and it was terrifying.

And but the only way that I could overcome my lack of confidence was to learn the skills of driving. So, I had to learn. You know, the gear changes. I had a had a manual car and back in those days, and you had to learn the road rules, and it wasn't until you actually got in. It's one thing to learn it from the books. You know, you could read your little book with all the instructions, and it wasn't until you get in front into the driver's seat, and you turn the engine on and you start moving forward that then it becomes very real.

And then you start implementing what you've learnt, and it was very it's always awkward at first, because it's a new skill. But the only way that you get better and better at driving a car is to keep having more and more lessons to keep getting behind the wheel more often, and so that you keep practising all the manoeuvres that you know, being able to pull out the indicator mirror. Look over your shoulder before you pull out all those little strategies and techniques. You've learnt them, and then you apply them, and then you apply them and apply them and apply them and keep going.

So, it's that repetition, and eventually, once you've you know, you've been driving for a number of hours, you get better. Then it becomes weeks. You get even better again, and eventually you do your test, and you pass, and you feel great. And even then you're still practising because there are still situations on the road that you may not have experienced while you were learning, and it's a little bit like sales because you can learn sales from a book and then you can get your coach or manager or a colleague or someone to coach you guide you, mentor you as you implement those skills and to give you the feedback that you need to be able to improve.

But at the end of the day, it's only it's gonna take time, time to be able to be exposed to all the different variables and the different conversations and the different questions that could possibly be asked and it so that's why it takes. You know, they talk about the 10,000 hours, because by the time you've gone through 10,000 hours, you've pretty well experienced every scenario, just like a new driver you've been driving for 10,000 hours, you've experienced the having to stop.

Suddenly you've experienced having to swerve out the way because someone pulled out. You've had all these different experiences, and so you've been able to learn from those experiences so that if it happens again, you know what to do quickly. And it's the same with sales skills. The longer that you are in sales practising it, the more situations will come about that you will. First, you'll be challenged by. But then the next time it'll be easier. And so my I the whole idea, I think behind becoming confident at any skill and especially sales, is to learn the skills, implement the skills as fast as you can learn, get the feedback from a coach from a manager or mentor or colleague, get the feedback and then go again and keep practising. Rinse and repeat, and it's the only way.

And then your confidence will build over time. Yeah, you can't just go to woollies and buy confidence off the shelf. Unfortunately, yeah, wouldn't it be great if you could?