Are the experts misleading you? In this episode, Bill Caskey thinks you should be questioning the experts you listen to as he talks about challenging beliefs and how experts can easily mislead you. Thinking that experts know best can sometimes be detrimental to you instead of advantageous. Bill shares five areas in which you need to take a deeper look at and challenge your own beliefs and the expert’s beliefs. Tune in and take charge of your own beliefs and be wary of experts.
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Are The Experts Misleading You?
I am happy to be with you. Happy New Year. I’m glad to be back with you. Hopefully, 2021 is starting off well. I know that everybody’s talking about 2020 and 2021 and what it’s going to look like. I’ll leave that for the experts. I don’t have any predictions. Predictions that I’ve made in the past have not come true so I got away from the prediction game. One thing that I did notice in 2020 is that we had a lot of experts on the scene. You can call them scientists and experts. Primarily, it was around the COVID and the pandemic. It seemed like you’d hear an expert say one thing and then a month later, they’d say something different or far enough off that you’d say, “Did you know that a month ago when you had other advice? How have you changed your advice so much?” We have become a little leery of experts. That’s understandable. I even said something on Twitter that I’m leery of experts. I had a couple of people holler back at me and say, “Aren’t you an expert? Should we be leery of you?” I should have answered, “You should listen to what my advice is because I give a lot of advice and a lot of tips on this show, but you’ve got to use it and make it work in your world. If it doesn’t, don’t use it. If you don’t believe it’ll work and you know it won’t work, then don’t use it.”
Mislead By Experts: Better questions help, but the questions need to be primarily around their current circumstance.
I always suggest trying things, give it a go, or give it a shot. If something that I say resonates with you and you say, “That makes a lot of sense.” Put it to use and try it. Double down on it if it works. Throw it out if it doesn’t. One thing I’ve realized is that some of the experts in the sales training and coaching business have misled us. I don’t think they’ve lied to us. I mentioned on LinkedIn that there are some lies that are out there, but a lot of what has transpired over the last several years is that coaches and trainers have their set regimen. They have their curriculum and they’ve made no changes in it. These large coaching companies can’t go and change curriculum all at once so they live with what they’ve been using. I’ve got five areas that our trainers and coaches have misled us. I’ve got fourteen, but I’m not going to go through all these. I’ll go through five and then I’ll hear what my audience wants. If they want more, we can do another episode on five more. The reason I think this is important is if you can look at what you’ve been taught to believe and reconfigure it a little bit based on the current model, the current circumstances, the current environment, then challenging beliefs is okay. It’s healthy.
I find a lot of people, when I go in and start coaching a group or coaching individuals, they’ve been taught something when they were young and it’s carried over years and years. When you’re first out of college or school, you take a sales position and you have a strong mentor, coach, or manager. They will say something and it’ll stick with you because you’re fashionable and still forming your opinions. Yet often, we wake up when we’re 50 years old and we say, “How did that ever get into our brain? Where did that come from?” I am a big proponent of checking out your beliefs. Your beliefs and your actions are almost always congruent. If you check out your beliefs, which we’re going to do here a little bit, you might find some ways to improve them.
Here is my list. I’m going to go through five and I’m going to give you the alternative here too. Think about these as if someone has told you this, suggested this, you’ve read it, you’ve heard it, or if you watched it. Number one, if you would ask better questions, the customer will be more likely to buy from you. I love questions. I love finding out what the issues are that a potential client has, understanding those issues, and then crafting a solution to help them solve those issues. There are beautiful things that happen when you ask questions. Number one, never interrogate. I see this a lot. I get it used on me a lot when I’m the prospect. It’s somebody on the phone or face-to-face will be pummeling me with questions. All in the spirit of getting to know more about me and what my dilemmas are.
You’ve got to be careful when you ask questions. You’ve got to deserve the permission to ask the questions. The alternative to that so that you don’t interrogate people is upfront in the process. Simply make the statement to the prospect of the question. “Is it okay if I ask you some questions about your current circumstance, what you’re facing, and what you’re trying to accomplish so that I can better understand whether we can help you or not?” That’s how you get permission. It lowers the resistance for the prospect because now they know why you’re asking the question, as opposed to shining the light in their eyes and getting interrogated. It’s not a good system. Better questions help but the questions need to be primarily around their current circumstance, not around what your budget and when you want to have this implemented. Those are questions you can ask down the road but primarily upfront, you want to get permission to ask questions. Create a safe environment so the questions you ask will be answered truthfully.
You’ve heard the saying that prospects lie. They do, but 90% of the time, they lie because of us because we forced them to lie by not providing a safe environment, not asking the right questions, or asking questions that are too assumptive at the beginning of the sales process. That’s something our trainers and coaches have told us. Ask more questions, ask better questions but there’s a little bit more to it than that. Do that upfront thing where you ask for permission. Number two, if you would work harder, longer, and grind more, good things will happen for you. The old grind it out mode of selling and achievement. Here’s where the old trainers and coaches are a little bit right and where they’re wrong. Number one, they’re right because working hard is not a bad thing. I would rather see you work hard in the market than sit around, eat dark chocolates all day and wait for something to happen because you know that’s not going to be the case.
Hard work is not a problem, but I’m not sure grinding and longer work is the answer. This is where strategy comes in. Here’s an example. I can make 100 cold calls trying to get somebody on the phone, trying to get them enthused, and inspired about training or developing their people or I can create a web page that is designed specifically for the person who is not sure whether they want to purchase training or work with their people and it walks them through some of the elements of that. Should I even invest in my people? How do I know my people are right for investment? How do I know my people are coachable? What kind of metrics would we use if we invest in a training solution? How do we know it pays off? There are lots of questions that people have at the beginning that will be good strategic ways for you to determine whether a person is a prospect or not. Rather than make 100 calls, I would rather you send out 100 emails linking your potential prospect to a page where they can work for themselves. They can decide for themselves if they’re a prospect for you.
I heard a stat from Gallup that was done in November of 2020 survey. It said that 33% of buyers prefer a sales-free process and 44% of Millennial buyers prefer a salesperson-free process. What does that tell you about someone who feels a cold call from you who’s not expecting your call and not even thinking about the problems they have in your area? They’re not going to be open. Whether you believe those numbers or not, I do. Gallup is pretty solid with their research. The question is, how you make the initial part of the process salesperson-free and give them enough information, educate them, and teach them why a lot of people are not prospects for you. That’s okay too. Beyond bias and be brutally honest. On that page, you have a place for them to calendar a call, schedule a call with you, or you follow up. Grinding out a bunch of cold calls, you’re only going to get 5% to 10% of people to talk to you. Those people are probably not thinking about you when they pick up the phone and answer.
I don’t like grinding. It’s better to take a strategic approach and say, “Let’s map the buyer journey. The buyer upfront is not looking for a sales call. What they’re looking for are information and education. How should I be thinking about the product or service you sell?” Number three, I hear this a lot from people like VPs of Sales and CEOs. It’s all about the numbers. Are they making the calls? Are they getting their results? What’s our revenue? How many new customers did we get? I know I have a love-hate relationship with CRMs but in the world of data and all the CRMs that are out there, you’re logging everything into your CRM and somebody can look and say, “Johnny, you only made ten new calls this week. No wonder you don’t have enough stuff going on.” There’s more to it than just the numbers. We’ll say, “What’s behind the numbers?” If I’m not making enough calls, not producing enough LinkedIn videos, or if I’m not doing the behavior that I have decided as a sales professional, I have decided it’s going to take to generate the results I want, then there’s something else stopping me. That’s where people need to look.
Mislead By Experts: If you’re not offering them any value in the sales process, what makes them think you’re going to offer any value once they buy?
Why don’t you like cold calls? Rejection? You’ve got to flip the script. Instead of trying to get them to see you or invite you on a Zoom call, you change the script to, “I’ve got something that would be beneficial for you. Would you like to see it?” When they say yes, you send them a link or you send them a document. That way, it’s not you calling and trying to get something. It’s you calling and giving them something. It’s a whole lot easier to make a cold outreach call. I’m not lobbying for those cold calls to me are one element of prospecting. Unfortunately, most sales organizations still live and die by the cold call and cold outreach. I don’t buy that. There are better ways to do it but if that’s what you are doing and you don’t like doing them then find a way to love and like it. One way to do it is to invite people to a process and something of value for them. If you’re not offering them any value in the sales process, what makes them think you’re going to offer any value once they buy?
I’m a big believer in educating your prospect and making them a more sophisticated buyer. Sometimes, I miss that. I jumped right to, “What are you trying to accomplish? What is the pain costing you?” I don’t educate the buyer. They go off to two other places who might educate them and I’m out. It’s a double loser. They don’t get me. I don’t get them. Is it all about the numbers? The numbers matter, but I want you to look behind the numbers. What is it that’s stopping me from executing the numbers? Number four, don’t worry about your personal brand and who do you think you are. Nobody’s going to say that to you, but they’re thinking that. When you go into your manager or if you’re a VP of sales and you say to your people on the executive team, “We’re going to undertake an initiative this month or this quarter. We’re going to start building the brand of the sales professionals that are on our team.” This applies primarily in the B2B space, not the B2C space as much, but it could. What kind of reaction are you going to get from people? “That’s a great idea. Let’s put them on video. Let’s work on the LinkedIn page. Let’s work on the profile. Let’s have each of them do a podcast.” No, they’re not going to say that. They’re going to say, “Our brand is fine. Our marketing department works on our brand all the time.”
The reality is, in B2B sales, your brand matters. If you have a LinkedIn page, you have a brand. It may not be intentional and sound but you’ve got one so why not take the time to improve that? I’m not talking about being an Instagram influencer or being all over the internet. I’m talking about LinkedIn primarily here, but you need to create your own brand. When someone looks you up online because you have set an appointment and they see nothing of value from you, all they see is a Contact Me page and there’s no video on it, there’s no special advice, suggestions, or education, how important are you to them? I’ve told the story about the purchasing manager for a Fortune 1000 company. He says, “I get a lot of requests for meetings from salespeople. I go to their LinkedIn page. If they don’t offer me any help or I can’t see anything of value they bring, I decline the offer. I’m not going to see people who haven’t taken the time to create something on their LinkedIn page that says, ‘Here’s what we do or here’s how to buy.’” Your personal brand and B2B sales matter. It’s going to matter even more in the next couple of years. Not less but more.
These trainers who are out there saying, “No, I got a cold call. Don’t produce content. That’s not your job. Stay in your lane.” Stay in your lane was the worst piece of advice I ever heard. You’ve got to build your personal brand. Ignore what the coaches and trainers say. It’s remarkable to me how many trainers and sales coaches still don’t believe in personal branding. It’s unbelievable and yet, I can point to twenty different case studies of people who have done it and what’s happened to their income. Here is number five, don’t worry about scaling your business. You let me scale our business by hiring a bunch of more people like you. You need to get out and make calls. Worst advice in the world. That advice might’ve worked several years ago when we didn’t have media platforms that you could create content for and catch the eye of prospects. When it was only a one-to-one game, it was a physical game, and how many people are you reaching out to connecting with and seeing on a weekly basis. I understand that, but if a sales coach and business trainer are telling you don’t worry about scaling your business, that’s poor advice. I want you to scale your leads and the processes.
What if you had five people who set appointments with you every week because of something they saw online, something that you reached out, and they could book an appointment with you right online to have a discussion? What would that be like? Forget about the week thing. You had people who were seeking you out and reaching out to you. Would that allow you to scale your business more? Of course. What if most of those people or 80% of those people had been through a process of some kind so that when they got with you, they were serious about solving a problem? They may not buy, but if somebody is serious about a problem, they’ve consumed your videos, they’ve watched your content online, they feel comfortable with you, they’ve seen you so that you’re not as scary as maybe you are if you’re just another salesperson that they’re reaching out to, how well positioned would you be if that’s the case? If your phone is ringing or your calendar is dinging because you have new appointments, how well-positioned are you going to be? You are going to be great. You don’t have to be all that good, but you don’t have to be a wiz or a master if people are calling you, saying, “Here’s my problem.”
Those are the five pieces that trainers and coaches missed. I’m going to give people the benefit of the doubt that a lot of the world has changed around these people but I am convinced that if you were to check these five things out and you’re doing these or you’re thinking this way, it’s because somebody has imprinted that in your mind from a long time ago or you’re scared but I don’t buy that. If you’re interested in talking more about some of these, you can reach me at BillCaskey.com. We’ve got peer groups and mastermind groups starting where we teach these things. If you’re interested in that, go to BillCaskey.com. There are plenty of ways to get in touch with us there. Hopefully, this helps. Connect with me through LinkedIn if you like. We’ve got some interviews scheduled here in the next few episodes that you’re going to like. We’ll talk to you soon.
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