Why You Should Question Your Opinions

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Are you able to distinguish your opinion from reality? In this episode, Bill Caskey helps you rethink the world as he makes the case for questioning your opinions and assumptions if you want to grow your business. Certain beliefs create assumptions. Bill shares three common beliefs that are driving your unconscious behaviors, and that you need to question for yourself and your company. Tune in and learn how you can grow your business by reinventing your opinions.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Why You Should Question Your Opinions

I’m going to share with you some things that I’m working on. It’s always interesting to get a little behind the scenes when I listened to a speaker, an author or a podcaster and find out what they’re working on. I will share with you something now that I’ve been knee-deep in and it’s going somewhere. It’s not just an exercise in writing, although I enjoy that. This is designed to help you rethink the world. That may sound like a bigger bridge to cross than a guy like me would want to pursue. I have come to the belief and you’ve heard some of it here on the show. We have certain beliefs and these certain beliefs create assumptions the way the world is, “I believe this therefore I assume that.”

A lot of times, I hear that from my clients when I first start working with them. I start to share some of what I will call counterintuitive ideas, things that go against the norm. They will get up in the air, get their back up and say, “That wouldn’t work in our business. My boss would never let me go for that. Our customers would not tolerate that.” That’s all opinion. How we have come to believe dictates the assumptions we have about life and then that creates opinions. Not to get into the psychological makeup of it but I’m going to give you three here now. These three will tee off this idea in your brain about the question that you need to ask yourself, which is, “What else do I assume about the world?” That might just be an opinion and might not be reality. Let’s go with this.

By the way, if you are a high achiever, I want you to go to BillCaskey.com. At the top banner there’s a colored banner there for a waitlist. I’m pretty sure we’re going to do a High Achiever’s program. That’s for people who earn $200,000-ish and up and want to level up, pursue, leverage their assets and get to a whole new level. I’m assembling a group of those people. If you’re interested in at least knowing more about it, I’m probably going to be doing a webinar or a little get-together here soon. That’s no obligation. This is not any high-pressure thing. I only want people in this program who are truly committed to growing.

There are no sales at all involved. I’m opening it up first to my blog readers. Nobody even on my email list has heard about this. If you are interested, go to the website. Also, if you are interested in changing the game of selling, there is a document on the website below the banner. It’s called Ten Strategies to Change the Selling Game. Download that. It’s a PDF guide. It’s about 10, 12 pages. It’s got some videos with it. It’s good. If you want some free stuff from me that’s more tutorial-focused, that’s a good way to start.

How you do anything is how you do everything. Share on X

What are these beliefs that we have accumulated? I will consider these erroneous beliefs or industry norms that I’m not sure are even right. Let me go through these. I’ve got 29 of these and I’m only going to go through three. A lot of this comes in my programming and coaching. I believe that I can only teach you so many sales tactics in how to handle it when the customer says X. What happens when the prospect decides not to buy? What happens when you get resistance? I can only teach that for so long. Frankly, I get a little bored with it because at some point that’s not the difference-maker.

The difference-maker is how you think about yourself, company, value, customer, role on the planet and purpose on earth. Those are the big issues. Why would I want to continue to work on the minor issues? It’s called majoring in the minors. Forget about the major issues, which is how one thinks about oneself and identifies in this world. I’m going to share with you three of these that are common beliefs that we have accumulated over the years, maybe or maybe not. Maybe for you, not all of these will apply but we’re on the spectrum at least of having these beliefs drive us and some of our unconscious behaviors.

Number one, your eagerness leads to more sales and to an eager prospect. The more eager you are and we see this a lot of times in hiring salespeople. A sales leader will come to me and say, “I want you to interview this person. We’re thinking about bringing him or her on. We want to make sure it’s the right decision. I want to get your set of eyes on it.” It doesn’t take me long. I don’t even have to do a profile test. It doesn’t take me long to look at that person through the filter of a prospect. If this person is going to be out working with prospects, I put my prospect hat on and ask myself the question, “What do I want this person calling on me?” If they’re too eager, not listening to a word I say, not thoughtful in their responses or too quick on the trigger to say something or answer a question, I know if they’re that way with me, they will be that way with prospects. How you do anything is how you do everything.

Eagerness is not a virtue. I want you to be committed. I want you to be all-in to your job but eagerness is a different animal. I don’t want you to be eager. I don’t want you to appear eager. The only eagerness you should have is the eagerness to find out if the problem the customer has is something we can solve. It’s not eager to sell and it’s certainly not eager to talk about yourself and how great you are. How is that helpful for the prospect? They don’t give a damn about that. This idea of eagerness has been misconstrued and we’ve taken it as a virtue. I don’t see it as a virtue at all.

11BCPCaption1

Question Your Opinions: The only eagerness you should have is the eagerness to find out the problem the customer has.

 

I see it as something that will get in the way. I would rather have you take measured eagerness, be interested in the prospect, what they have to say, be curious about their pains, problems and circumstances but never be eager either to make the next call, set the next meeting or sell anything. Let that happen organically. There are a lot of things to do right there. If you do things right, your close rate goes way up because you’re not trying to make anything happen. It’s happening because the prospect wants your solution badly.

Number two, pressure is good. The more pressure you feel, the more likely you are to excel. Pressure is an interesting animal. I do think there are times when the need to get things done is there. You do what needs to be done. If you are out talking to a prospect and they have an interest and part of your process is putting together a proposal framework. I don’t want you to feel pressured to do that. It just has to be done. If it’s part of your process, it works, it’s going to help the prospect make a decision and help you decide if they’re the right people then you do it. You don’t feel pressured to do it. Most of the pressure that we feel comes from self-imposed sources. We put pressure on ourselves to be perfect, to be the ideal soldier, to be effervescent and magnanimous. We feel pressured to have people like us and take us seriously. That kind of pressure is a losing game because you’re pressuring yourself based on someone else’s opinion of you. It’s hard enough to influence let alone control it. Pressure is going to be a losing battle there.

Another thing about pressure is when you feel it, you exert it. When someone is putting pressure on you, you will put pressure on someone else. It’s a pass-through. You’re the pass-through mechanism. If your manager is putting pressure on you to make more sales, where do you think that pressure is going to go? It’s going to store it inside, a little bit of it if you will. A lot of it, you will pass it onto the prospect and they won’t even see it. It’s not like you’re saying, “I got to make a sale this month or I’m going to get fired. My boss is on my backside. Can you please help me?” You’re not saying that but it’s the small vibes that you give off that the prospect feels even subconsciously. They decide not to do business with you because they say, “This is about them, not about me. I think I’ll find another supplier.”

Pressure is not good. Getting things done is but when it turns into pressure, you’re not free to be at your best. I see this a lot in a business where a business owner has been working in his or her business for twenty years and they’re tired of it. They’re burnt out and they want to do something else but they’ve built this machine that they can’t get away from. Every day they feel pressure to do something that they don’t love. That is a recipe for illness and disaster. If you have a little bit of that, you don’t need to be a business owner to experience that. If you find yourself, “I’m not into what I’m doing now as I was several years ago.” The pandemic and disruption of 2020 spurred that on for a lot of us. It accelerated some insecurities and might even accelerate some skills and competencies but it changed things. You’ve got to ask yourself, “Do I love what I do?” When I get up in the morning every day, “Have I fallen in love with what I do with my customers, audience, market and whatever?”

When you feel pressure, you exert it. Share on X

Number three is one of my favorites. That is the idea, “I need to do more of what I’ve always done to get to the next level.” I’m putting this High Achiever’s program together. It’s a personal coaching group and that’s a lot of that group. What we’re going to do there is focus on, “What got you here may not get you to the next place.” In fact, it’s almost assured not to get you to the next place because things have changed. The world, market, internet, digital communications and a lot of things have changed. A lot of us are hanging on. I put myself here, too. Even though I talk about this a lot and consult with the client’s coach, there’s still a little bit of this that I am holding onto the old way. I remember we used to fax out invitations. We’d fax them out and 25 people would show up. I’d love to have that now with my knowledge. I would close twenty of them but that is not the way anymore.

There’s not a lot of fax machines hanging around waiting for my fax. I can wish and hope all I want that things go back to normal or the way they were or whatever normal is. The fact is that what got you to where you are now is probably not going to get you to 2X where you are now. If you’re a high achiever, I don’t care what kind of achiever you are. It doesn’t matter. There’s got to be a realization on your part and maybe now is it. It sounds like I’m preaching, “Come up to the front afterward.” At some point, there’s got to be a realization. There’s got to be an awakening inside of you that says, “I can’t keep doing the same things in the same way and expect to get massively different results or expect to get the same results and work less.” This is not only always about 2X-ing everything. Your income and revenue are not always about that. I want you 2X your quality of life, your sense of fulfillment and what you do. Often, what got us here won’t get us there.

The questions for you are, “What is there? What does there look like? What will get me there? Where am I going? How am I going to get there?” Those are the questions that will allow you to get out of this old mindset of, “I just do more of what got me here.” I’ve witnessed people who have changed and reinvented themselves. They have new energy and inspiration. They reignited the fire underneath them. It was like, “I used to do it this way. We’re not going to do it that way anymore. We’re going to do it this way.” There are tweaks along the way. A lot of times, there are infused energy in the psyche when you change things and say, “We’re going to get to a new goal but we’re not going to do the same things that got us here.” Take a look at those three things. As I talk about them, hopefully they resonated with you to the point where you start to examine, “What are some new beliefs?” New beliefs are awesome if you can start to believe something new.

I was listening to a psychologist talk about the disruption of fundamental axioms. In other words, it’s just disruption of things that you’ve come to believe are true. These three things are part of that. When we disrupt those and start to look at them, we can go in 1 of 2 directions. We can either go in awe and say, “If I could get out of this whole belief, look at the future that could be created for me. That’s awesome and awe-inspiring,” or we say, “That’ll trigger us, that shock. There’s no way. I think it won’t happen. It isn’t going to happen in my lifetime. There’s no way that would work on my world.” You go into a runaway from mode.

When I introduce things to you, I probably will lose readers because some of you will say, “Enough, Caskey. You’re crazy. You’re on crack. You’re doing something weird behind the scenes. You’re talking about stuff that I don’t even want to talk about.” We need to talk about it because if you’re like me, you have quite a few years of productive life left and you don’t want to keep repeating the same mistakes. Anyway, I hope that helps you. Go to BillCaskey.com. There are lots of free stuff there. Get on the waitlist for the High Achiever’s program if you’re not on it already. Also, the PDF guide, Ten Strategies to Change the Selling Game is on the website. See you next time. Bye.

The Perfect Sales Process

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BCP 10 | Perfect Sales Process

 

Everything is easier when you’ve figured out the smooth and tight-knit process that works for your business.

In this episode, Bill Caskey helps you achieve that as he shares the six steps to creating the perfect sales process. Understand how you can trigger an event that will lead people to have an interest in your product or service. Learn as well the pitching strategy that million-dollar producers are obsessed about. In addition, Bill shares an approach that he found to receive less resistance when talking to a client regarding the problems you’re trying to solve.

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Perfect Sales Process

We’re going to talk about the perfect sales process. We talked about this a little bit before, but we’re going to go deeper here.

Whenever I start working with either a coaching client one-to-one, which I don’t do a lot, or The 2X Group, one of my small group coaching programs, or my leadership group, I always ask the question, “What is your vision for your business? What’s your ideal outcome?”

It’s hard sometimes to answer that question. I’ve talked about that before as well, but I want to talk about the ideal sales process. Forget about your income five years out. I’m not talking about that. We’re talking about the ideal sales process.

There are six steps to it, and it’s a framework. I want to share it with you because it’s important that we look at our own sales process and say, “Where are we off? Where is it not working?” My belief is that you should be closing 50% of the deals you’re proposed. If you’re going to get 50%, sales process had better be buttoned up.

  1. There’s a triggering event of some kind in the prospect’s world. It could be that they’re talking with a friend and the friend says, “I’m closing 80% of my deals. How many are you closing?” He says, “I’m closing 10%. How are you doing 80%?” You need to check out this content or this podcast or this person. I’m not talking about me here, just anybody.

    There’s got to be some kind of triggering event. Sometimes a triggering event is you send out an email and it causes people to think. It’s that first step where you’re trying to create some interest in your product. If you think about it as the human nature element of the sales process, at some point, a person has to have an interest. They don’t go from no interest to buying. They go from no interest to interest. The triggering event is supposed to be that.

  2. Search and seek. Once I have some interest in something, I might go check things out, probably online, or maybe with my peer group or friends of mine or colleagues. I go on a little mission to search and discover more. Who is this person whose blog I’m reading or whose video I’m watching? Who else is in the market? Who else has similar content? Who else should I be thinking about when I ask people to bid or start to engage people. It was always a search and a seek part of the buying process.
  3.  Get invited in. Sometimes this can be you’re sitting there, doing nothing at 8:30 in the morning and you get an email from someone and they say, “I checked out your website, your blog, whatever, and we’ve got a problem here. I’d like for you to come in.” That’s the ideal where they invite you in. It’s not where you’re banging on their door trying to get in but where they are inviting you to the party or the table.

    The reason they’re inviting you in is that they have a problem. If you do the right job on that first initial contact, that first initial conversation, it gets a whole lot easier for them to justify inviting you in. The key thing here in terms of strategy and attitude is don’t oversell. Listen to what they have to say. Listen to their circumstance or their dilemma if they have any. What are they trying to accomplish? Why did they decide to seek now? What is there about now that makes it important for them to pursue some engagement or some more information. The getting invited in step is number three.

    In our world, we are very quick to pitch and very slow to ask, so be curious. Share on X

  4. When you get there, they reveal everything and you get out of the way. You do not sell, pitch or convince, you listen. I was on a call with one of my leadership clients. They’ve got twelve sales leaders in the program. One of the ladies on the call said, “This is our biggest problem. I phone shadow people. I’m listening to their calls and we don’t ask enough questions.” We start pitching too early. She said, “When I’m hearing it, I’m signing to the person who’s on the phone, ‘Stop, cut it. Don’t talk about your solutions.

    You haven’t found the problem yet.’” In our world, we are very quick to pitch and very slow to ask. Be curious. I always say that the highest achievers I know, the million-dollar producers and more, they are obsessed with understanding the prospect’s circumstance.

    They want to know all about it. Why did you happen to do that? When did you try to get that fixed? What if you don’t fix this? What’s the cost of the problem? They’re obsessed with that. There’s something that stops us. I don’t know if it’s ego, probably a little bit of ego or if we’re impatient. We think sometimes that if we ask too many questions, it’s going to slow the sales cycle down. It will do the opposite. The more questions you asked and they got to be the right questions. They can’t be intellectual questions and manipulative. You’ve got to truly be curious about their circumstances.

  5. Once they go through that and tell you and reveal everything to you, then you go back to your den, to your office, to your studio and you create a solution. Everybody knows that it’s a presentation, a proposal, a solution. I want to make sure that I have time and that the prospect knows the process I’m going to go through. Once that meeting is done or several meetings, I know this is not a one-call thing.

    You might have several meetings where you’re understanding the issues. You then go back and you return with a recommendation. I don’t like the word proposal. It sets up too much resistance. I like to think of it as a recommendation. Step five, you return with a recommendation and recap the problem. If you have dialed in with the prospect on how much the problem costs them to have, then that’s got to be in there too.

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Perfect Sales Process: In terms of strategy and attitude, don’t oversell. Just listen to what people have to say and their circumstances.

 

Another thing that you do there, and we’re not going to talk about much on this episode, but you’ve got to have a success path. You’ve got to be able to look the prospect in the eye and say, “If you follow me on this journey and you engage me, let me tell you what you can expect. Let me tell you what the milestones are. Let’s talk about how this is going to work.” We are terrible at that. We hope the prospect trusts us. I know that we spend a lot of time talking about trust and relationships and all that. I buy that. Unless you are laying out what working with you looks like, then how are they to know? Are they just to trust you? You’re still a stranger to them. Even if you’ve had a couple of meetings, they still don’t know much about you. It’s important when you return with the recommendation, you also return with a success path.

6. You begin work. You calendar something. You say, “If you want to get this done by the end of June, we’re going to have to start May 1st. Here’s what it looks like. I’m going to need an answer by the end of this week or next week or whatever.” You become very timeline-oriented and focused.

If they start to give you grief or you sense that you’re moving too quickly for them, you can always back off and say, “Do I move too fast for you here? Do you feel pressure because that’s not my intention? My intention is you said you have this problem. It’s costing you $14 million a year. I figured there was an emergency. That’s why I’m urgent because I sensed that you are urgent.”

Your urgency is not urgency to close the business. It’s urgent to get the problem solved and start working on the problem.

That’s the ideal sales process.

Some event causes them to search and seek. They find you, invite you in, and reveal everything to you. You return with a recommendation, and then you timeline the work together. Sometimes it’s hard to follow because if the triggering event is cold calling on your part, that’s okay. It’s still a triggering event. If you’re good at finding the problem and starting to understand the circumstance that they’re involved in, that could be the triggering event. This is not to say it’s not a cold call, but you’ve got to be careful with the cold call because typically, they’re not set up that way. They’re set up to try to get an appointment. I don’t want to run appointments if the person has no pain, no interest, no inkling at all to be curious about their situation, whether they can be helped by me or by anybody.

3 Mindset Shifts To Employ NOW

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BCP 9 | Mindset Shifts

 

Mindset shifts have been proven through time and experience as a good practice that you should employ to achieve your goals. In this episode, Bill Caskey talks about three specific aspects where you should be focusing on your mindset as a high achiever. He shares a tip on what to look for in the services of coaches and mentors to get the value you need. He also talks about our ego and how it relates to building our identity. Finally, Bill puts having expectations in a different light while giving his insight on what it means to have no expectations before a call.

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Listen to the podcast here:

3 Mindset Shifts To Employ NOW

We’re going to go deep. I had a couple of guests on the last episode. Getting back to the knitting of the inner game, the mental side, the soul of selling and achievement. Is that sound scary? It should because I’m going to go on a little riff or tangent and share with you some things that I’m working on for our clients and myself. I’ve got a handful of things. Are you ready? I’m ready. When someone asks me to help them, I’ve got several coaching clients. I don’t take too many because it’s time-consuming and it’s expensive for them. I also believe that the best work doesn’t come necessarily one-to-one. It comes in a group. All of my small group coaching programs have an element of one-to-one to them so there’s always happening but I’ve got a couple of coaching clients. I asked one of them, “Tell me what coaching is.” She has been a client and she’s doing well. Her income has gone up and things are starting to unfold for her. She asked me, “Why is that? Is it because I have another human being to talk to? Is there something magical, secret or surreptitious?”

Here’s the way I look at coaching. If you hire a coach, he/she should be more interested in dissolution than the solution. Somebody comes to me and says, “I’m not earning enough money.” I say, “My solution is you’ve got to work harder, grind more and make more calls.” That’s a solution. A dissolution is where we say, “Why do we have the problem of not making enough money? Where is the belief inconsistent with what’s true?” Meaning there’s probably some belief that they have or that I have. I have a lot of these beliefs or areas for the potential to be released by dissolving old beliefs.

Our ego is there to protect our identity. Our ego will always be at a preference for being right. Share on X

When I say dissolution, I mean the dissolving of old beliefs. Maybe one of their beliefs says, “I’m not worth $500,000 a year,” or there’s a belief that if I got up to where I was leading the company, I would be asked to take on more responsibilities. I’d be asked to move to London or Munich, or my life would change externally because of my success so I’m going to tamp it down and put the governor on a little bit. It could be all those things or one of them. Dissolution or dissolving the prior beliefs is the best gift a coach can give you, whether it’s me or an inside coach inside your company. If your coach is not working on the dissolution of prior beliefs that are holding you back, do you think you need solutions for? You don’t. You don’t need solutions for that. It’s like, I’ve always believed that we all know exactly what we need. We just don’t do it. The reason we don’t do it is that we experienced resistance. That resistance comes in the form of prior beliefs that get in the way.

Another element that we need to put into our programming and I’m coming a little bit clean here with this because we don’t. It holds my company back in the coaching and the training back from the people that pay us. We’re giving pretty good value. People realize awesome results from the work but it could even be bigger if we worked on this idea of change. You and I have built up an accumulation of beliefs, opinions, practices, education, and knowledge over the years, whether you’re 27 and have been in sales for 5 years or 57 and been for 35 years. We have all built up this identity and this is who we are. I come along and say, “You need to change how you talk to your prospect. Here’s what I want you to do first.” The person says, “That’s all well and sounds good but I can’t use that with my customers.” What they’re saying is, “That’s not me. That’s not who I’ve come to know as me.”

BCP 9 | Mindset Shifts

Mindset Shifts: Dissolution or dissolving your prior beliefs is the best gift a coach can give you.

 

This word identity is very confusing. We hear about identity politics. That’s not what this is. The identity is who do we think we are or who has built this structure, this framework around who we are. If I were to say to you, “I’ve got this opportunity to make $1 million.” You say, “It’s great because I’ve wanted to do improve my income in the last couple of years.” I say, “Meet me at the corner of 6th & Vine. There’s a bank there. You and I are going to rob that bank. There’s $2 million they keep. We’ll split it. Ready to go.” If you’re a bank robber, you’d probably say, “Fine, let’s go.” Chances are a person of integrity. If you’re reading this blog and you’re in business, you would say, “No, I’m not going to do that. That’s not me. I want the million dollars but I’m not going to sacrifice my integrity to get there.” That’s a stretch example of that’s not me. I would never say that to a customer or prospect. I never shoot a video. That’s not me. I’m not good in front of the camera or on the mic. All that is the identity that we’ve built up and it could be.

This is where it gets interesting. Our ego is there to protect our identity. It will always be a preference for being right. I may say that I want to double my income, but if I see myself as $100,000 a year person out of $300,000 per year person, and I don’t want what comes along with $300,000, I can say all I want that I want to double or triple my income. It isn’t going to happen because my identity is locked up in my old self. Part of the change if you’re the VP of Sales, you are working with people, you’re a coach, or you’re a performer. If you want to change, there’s plenty of change that should happen. We typically operate at a fraction of what’s possible, but it’s only possible if we’re willing to look at who we are and our identity and allow ourselves to say, “That may have been my behavior for the last many years, but I’m not defined by that. I’m not defined by how I sell, how I ask questions, or how I lead people through the process. That doesn’t define me. It’s behavior and action.”

Change is only possible if we're willing to look at who we are and our identity. Share on X

The closer you can get back to your identity and not let all of these opinions in inform it. You get back to where you’re nimble and you can change. Somebody says, “You should have a YouTube channel, a show every Friday afternoon where you take questions from your audience.” You say, “I don’t know but I give it a go. Let’s try it.” I love that phrase, give it a go, versus the other way, “I don’t have a camera and I don’t have this. What would they think? Who am I going to talk to? What do I know?” You get all that resistance. That’s your identity saying, “That’s not me.”

Number three is the idea of no expectation. I was listening to a podcast by Peter Crone. He was on Aubrey Marcus’s podcast. Peter is British. He coaches sports athletes and pretty high-income people. All he works on is the mindset side. He doesn’t teach people how to have a better stroke. He teaches you how to get out of your own way. One of the things he mentioned, which reminded me of one of our issues that we talk about is having no expectation prior to a call. If you’ve got a meeting set up and it’s the first call with a huge prospect, what do we do? We start getting a little tight, planning, and we over plan. We say, “In the 27th minute of this call, here’s what I’m going to do.” We over scripted, we over-planned, especially if you’ve got a manager who’s saying, “What’s our plan. What are we going to do? We’ve got four people going. We’ve got PowerPoints with 150 slides. How are we going to do it?”

BCP 9 | Mindset Shifts

Mindset Shifts: When you go with no expectation, you’re free. The idea of having expectations is deceptively harmful for you and your prospect.

 

I would rather you go into these situations with no expectation. You don’t expect the deal, be awesome or fail. I know this goes against a lot of what you’ve been taught. You maybe even teach your people. When you go with no expectation, you’re free. You’re not encumbered and enslaved by the expectation of, “If I get this life, we’ll be better. If I don’t get this life, we’ll suck.” All that stuff is noise. It gets in the way of you being present with the prospect, which is what I thought we wanted to do in the first place. This idea of having expectation is deceptive. It’s deceptively harmful to us and the prospect. We always say, “We want to serve our customers. That’s what we want to do and bring value to customers.”

We go in with all these expectations and it ruins the present moment. We start to act in a manner that is in line with what we want to happen. What difference does it make in what we want to happen? Isn’t it the prospect’s decision? I thought we were in it for the prospect. Now we’re not. Is that where we made the change. Having no expectation is a way for you to exert your own freedom. I have found and my clients have found the less expectation you have, the better the outcomes because you’re able to be present with the person you’re in front of or the people. You’re able to find out what’s happening in their world, what’s going on, working and what’s not.

Let me share with you how we would look at that. It’s an organic, casual and useful conversation rather than something that’s all scripted out. Have no expectation, try that on. See if it fits and you can tell your manager. If you’re a manager of a team and you’re getting ready to do a presentation or something say, “Let’s try this. In years, is this going to matter? Does any of this stuff matter?” The answer is no. It doesn’t. It matters at the moment. We want to put our best foot out there and we want to do well. Would we rather have the business than not have the business or the prospect say yes than no? Of course, but that’s not going to define us whether we get this deal or not. You can’t let it define you.

Try having no expectations. That doesn’t mean we don’t prepare or have an agenda. It means that psychologically, we don’t want to constrain and enslave ourselves to some expectation. It has nothing to do with what the prospect wants. Try those things out. I welcome you. If you’re a high achiever and you are in that place where you’re saying, “I need to reinvent myself. I’m doing the same thing I’d been doing for the last many years and it’s still working a little bit but I’m on the cusp of some big things. I want to focus on myself, my own growth and mindset.”

I invite you to go to BillCaskey.com. At the very top, there’s a banner there that says, “Waitlists for the High Achiever’s program.” I am strongly considering doing a High Achiever’s program with a handful of people, 1 or 2 groups, but we’re limiting it to the number of per group of 10 or 12. Taking you through a High Achiever’s course, people who earn $200,000-ish a year and have tremendous upside. Go there and get on the waitlist. I make no promises about whether this thing is going to happen or not. I’ve been talking about enough. If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen at the end of the first quarter of 2021. Put your name in. There’s no obligation. It doesn’t cost anything and I’ll send you some thoughts. I’m working on a document that might help you too. I’ll send that to you. See you next time. Bye.

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Attention High Achievers – Part 2

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7BCPBanner

 

In the second of a two-part series on some tips for high achievers, Bill Caskey takes a look at why you should start building your online platform and how it all ties down into your personal branding. He talks about digitizing your connections and making digital content for people to sample you, get their trust, and ultimately do business with you. Finally, he dives deep into accountability and emphasizes why it’s needed.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Attention High Achievers – Part 2

We are on a journey here to part two of our two-part series on how to be a higher achiever. That’s not the title of it, I don’t have a title of it, but I do know this. I get a lot of email and sometimes even calls from people who are high achievers, already good at what you do, but you want to do more. You want to be better, but you don’t want to burn yourself out doing it. Grinding is not the way to go from $200,000 a year to $900,000 a year. There are not enough grinding hours in the day to do that. We’ve been taking a look, if you have not read to last episode, read this one and then go back and read to that one. They’re not necessarily sequential, but I’ve got seven tips here. We talked about some of the traps that a high achiever faces in last episode. I’m not going to go over those again, but I will quickly recap the first four of my seven tips.

Number one is get clear on vision. Where are you going? What do you want life to look like? Not that it’s bad now, what do you want it to look like in your ideal future? Number two, what’s your required mentality in order to get to those things? If we don’t change the mind, we can’t change the market. Change your mind first and figure out what those things are. Number three is limiting beliefs. Where are you limiting yourself? You might even call this limiting self-beliefs because these are beliefs about you. This has nothing to do with the outside world.

This is only what you believe about you, about your future, about your potential, about your role on the planet, about your purpose, which brings me to number four, purpose. Why do you do this? What’s behind it all? Not just why are you here traipsing around the earth, that might be part of your purpose, but why do you do what you do in your business? Is there a real purpose or is it to make money? Hopefully, it’s more than that. I think most high achievers have a purpose beyond money. Money can be a by-product and a submission, but I don’t think it can be your sole purpose.

Those are the four things that we talked about last episode. I also mentioned that I am considering putting together based on the feedback that I got from the last session and over the last few months, putting together a high achievers small group coaching session series. These would be for people who are in the $200,000-ish range and want to grow more. If you’ll go to BillCaskey.com, at the very top, there’s a thin banner. You’ve got to have to look for it. Get on my wait list. There’s no commitment there. I’m not going to be charging your credit card or anything, but I want to know who’s interested and who’s not. If you’re interested in something like that, get on the wait list. As I start to craft this thing, I will let you know and keep you updated. Let’s get back and talk about 5, 6 and 7.

BCP 7 | High Achievers

High Achievers: If you’re a high achiever that wants to get to the next level, you’ve got to digitize your connection points.

 

Number five, the high achiever needs to think digitally by building his or her platform. I dumped this into the same area as personal branding, but a lot of the way you got from where you were several years ago to where you are now, was from grinding. It was from physically showing up at networking events, making calls, doing deals and getting referrals. I think all those things still work although I know with COVID the networking thing probably hasn’t so well, but it could be online. I’m interested in you building your brand online, building a platform. A platform could be LinkedIn. I’m not just talking about getting on LinkedIn and linking to a whole bunch of people until you have 5,000 connections. What are you going to do with that?

I’m talking about creating digital content online so people can sample you. People can say, “I’ve been watching Phil’s videos. It’s time for me to buy a building in downtown Chicago. I like Phil’s videos. I’m going to call him and see if maybe he’ll work with me.” The idea here is that high achievers want to get to the next level. They’ve got to digitize their connection points. Building your platform and your brand is all part of that. I’m not necessarily talking about blogging or vlogging. I’m saying, “If you’re not consistently producing content, and I like video and I like audio, written is fine, that’s helpful to your market.” That’s critical. It can’t just be all about you, how great you are, how great your company is. We know because we’ve asked you. You say it’s great. This content needs to be, “How am I going to help my customer? How am I going to help them walk through the processes?”

Number six, as we talked about with vision, you’ve got to have a clear understanding of where you’re going. Number six is building the plan. I call it the plan suite. The plan suite are 3 or 4 different plans. There’s the longer term 3 to 5, if some of you want to go ten, you can. I know some people have 25-year goals. I feel like that’s a little too far out there especially for a guy my age, but 3 to 5 is a good starting point. Let’s say, “What do I want to be, do, have, earn? What is my lifestyle? What do I want it to look like in five years?” That’s a good space. That’s the end goal, 3 to 5 years.

We’ve got the one-year plan. We’re shortening it up and saying, “The next year, what do I want to accomplish? What skills do I need to have? What are my mindsets? What are some of my limiting beliefs I need to break through? How am I going to build my platform?” Virtually anything that we talk about in these seven could appear on a one-year plan. I have all of my small group coaching clients, if we do this high achiever program, we’ll do it there, create a one-year plan. You would be shocked about how many people come to me six months into the year and say, “I’m done for the year. Everything that I had on my plane has come true.”

It’s not any kind of magic. It’s when you write something down and you refer to it often and as you’re building your monthly plan, you’re referencing those one-year milestones, goal-setting and goal-achievement is not that difficult. When we don’t write it down and we don’t have a plan and we don’t have an action-oriented way to implement those things, then it becomes a difficult. The third element of the plan, we’ve got the five-year, we’ve got the one-year, we got some a 30 or 90 day. Some people like the 90-day thing. I’m more of a 30-day guy. That would be the next one. You’re using your one-year plan to reference when you’re planning your 30-day plan.

If we don't change the mind, we can't change the market. Share on X

If your one-year plan is, “I need to improve my video skills,” and it’s August and you haven’t done it yet, then get to work. That should be part of your monthly plan is, “I want to reach out to someone and have them coach me on video skills.” The other plan is probably the short-term, one day, one week. I like the weekly plan, but at some point, you need to know what you’re going to be doing every day. I like to do that Friday for the next week. That’s up to you. Those are the four plans in the plan suite. Number seven, the last one and I can’t overestimate the importance of this and that is an accountability factor. I call it a factor because it doesn’t have to necessarily be a group, it doesn’t necessarily have to be a person, but you’ve got to find some way to be accountable to someone outside of yourself for the behaviors required to get to your level of success that you want to.

I don’t like it to be a spouse or a family member. Preferably I like to have a coach, someone from the outside who doesn’t base on whether I win or lose. There’s too much garbage and drama that goes along with that. That’s why I don’t like spouses to be your accountability partner because they’re in the game with you. A coach has to be sitting on the sidelines, looking at the game. That’s why I like coach and small groups. We have a group called The 2X Group, which is a sales B2B sales group. That is exactly that. We hold each other accountable in a nice, gentle way. We don’t spend a ton of time each session on it, but we do spend a little bit of time.

When I commit to another human being and look them in the eye and say, “By the time we meet next, I will have this lead generation program written.” I have an extra added level of incentive and commitment to do it. How many times have you written the paper the day before it’s due when you were in school? It’s accountability. It’s due. I put it off until the last minute and that’s not good, but at least I got it in. It’s the same thing with any accountability group, factor or coach. Have somebody around you who holds you accountable. They don’t babysit you. They don’t call you at 6:00 AM to make sure you’ve rolled out of bed or lifting weights already. They don’t make sure you’re not eating donuts all day. That’s not what an accountability partner does. Accountability partner meets you on a frequent basis, weekly, biweekly and you check in with each other.

Those are my seven things. If you liked these and if you feel like, “I’m doing well, but there’s another gear, but I don’t want to work harder. That’s clear. I don’t want to go from 50 hours a week to 90 hours a week to make an extra $200,000.” You should not. If you might be interested in what I’m putting together, I’m working out some of the details now. I don’t know exactly what it looks like or what costs, but I’m looking for 10 to 15 people who might want to join me on this journey of high achievers.

We’ll talk more about the money later. If you’re interested, go to BillCaskey.com. On the top upper part there’s a little thin banner there. Click on that, it’ll take you to a page. We’ll also be sending you out something too. I’m working on this document called The Required Mindsets of the High Achiever. It’s not done yet. It will probably be another couple of weeks, but I will send that to anybody who puts their name on the waitlist as a gift. I enjoyed having you. I’m glad that you read every week.

Attention High Achievers – Part 1

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BCP 6 | High Achievers

 

High achievers usually have a slightly different view of what’s possible in the world. In this episode, Bill Caskey talks about the constant need of high achievers to re-envision themselves as they grow and operate on a different plane. Learn the traps that most high achievers fall into that you may be trapped in as well and the things high achievers need access to. Tune in and learn why you may need to rethink your own goals and possibilities.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Attention High Achievers – Part 1

We are going to speak about high-achievers. Those are the people who you might be one and you might not be one. There’s no shame if you aren’t, but this is going to be speaking to those people who are in the $200,000-ish range and above, either an entrepreneur, a business owner, a VP of sales or a sales professional, and primarily someone who has upside potential in that income. We’re speaking to the elitist achievers. If you’re not in that income range, that’s cool. You can still read. I will never ever know, but the topic deals with that group. I might even make this a 2 or 3-part series because I have so much to get to.

Here’s where this topic came from. I have quite a few people in one of my small group coaching programs. We call it The 2X Group, who is in that income range. They’re at higher levels of income. What I have found is that those people have a slightly different view of what’s possible in the world. They have accumulated some assets, have some money to invest in themselves and their business. I was watching a guy named Benjamin Hardy, who’s written several books on Psychology and personality. He said that we have to keep re-envisioning ourselves every few years because we learn things, have experience, get wisdom, and get financial wherewithal. If we say, “I set my vision ten years ago and we haven’t changed it, then the person we are now is capable of so much more or so much different.” By more, I’m not talking about working harder either. I’m talking about reaping the rewards from that knowledge and wisdom.

BCP 6 | High Achievers

High Achievers: You have to keep re-envisioning yourself every few years because you learn things, have experience, get wisdom, and get financial wherewithal.

 

I have found that the highest achievers in the top 2% or 3% range of income earners have different needs of different things they want to work on. If you look at Maslow’s Hierarchy, they’re not looking at shelter as a big foundational need for them. They’ve got that checked off. They’re not looking for belonging. They have that checked off. They’ve got good families, got good works situations, got good clients that they are also friends with. As we get higher in Maslow’s Hierarchy, self-actualization, self-esteem, what’s possible and visioning, all those things they do need help with. That’s the purpose of this episode. It’s to introduce you to some of these things.

You are saying, “Where is this going? I feel like this is going somewhere.” It might be, I don’t know. I am giving some thought to spinning up a group of 8 to 10 high-achievers. I don’t know yet if there’s interest. There might be but I don’t know. Here’s what I would ask you to do. Read this blog in my website, BillCaskey.com. At the top of that, there was an orange bar, click on that, and there will be a waitlist for you. If it opens up how much it is, when it is, how it is, what’s going to be covered, but get on the waitlist. I’ll send you a couple of valuable emails to some other things follow-up to this. You have to earn $200,000-ish a year to get into this program.

If you’re a $30,000 person, it’s not for you. There are several traps that high-achievers fall into. I don’t think this is just high-achievers, but it’s everyone. There’s the ambition trap where it’s never enough. I’ve got an appetite for more. I’ve got to work harder. I’m doing well, but there’s much more I could be doing. That’s that trap. At some point, you lose sight of what’s important because you’re always striving for the next hill to go take. Two is the imposter trap. It is the feeling of fraud. It’s those deep inadequacies. I have a little bit of this or a lot of it. I’m not sure, but I know I struggle with this. It shows up for me is I will come up with an idea of a product similar to look at high-achiever product.

If you get the mindset stuff right, everything else trickles up from there. Share on X

It used to be that I would talk myself out of it as quickly as I talked myself into it. That’s the imposter trap, “Do you know what I could do with this and that? We could do this. We could do a show, LinkedIn video and have a website.” At some point you say, “It’s not me. That’s not for me.” That’s the imposter trap. In imposter syndrome, you’re saying, “This is a great idea,” but then you’re talking yourself out of it. The third trap is the comparison trap. I’ve always heard the term contrast, but don’t compare. It’s hard not to compare ourselves to others. It’s not just others, but it’s what we envisioned for ourselves. “By this time in my life, I thought I would be X, and I’m not.”

That’s a trap you get into. Finally, there’s that perfection trap, which is a perfect as my line in the sand, and anything less than that is not good enough. It is a constant reminder when I’m putting something out there, and there’s a mistake made in the copy or, “Why didn’t I think of that? I should’ve.” That’s that perfection trap. Those are traps we can’t follow into, but we do. Here’s what I find is going on inside the mind of the high-achievers. Number one, they want to continue to grow their numbers, but they don’t want to burn themselves out.

The idea of going from $200,000 to $700,000 if I have to work 40 more hours a week, “It’s not going to happen. I don’t want to do it.” You shouldn’t do it. There are ways to get you to that $700,000 mark without burning yourself out. Another thing that I hear from high-achievers is, “I don’t feel like I’m leveraging my talents and skills. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough of the things I’m good at, what I would call the zone of genius or the high pay activity.” Zone of genius was a term by Gay Hendricks in a book called The Big Leap.

He talks about, “You have things and I have things that we’re naturally good at,” but we only spent an hour or two a week on those things. It was like, “Why are we spending twenty hours a week doing things we’re not good at or don’t get paid for, and then that sacrifice is a time in our zone of genius?” A lot of people feel like, “Am I leveraging my God-given talents and man-acquired talents along the way?” Here’s another concern, “I feel like I’m proud of what I’ve done. I’m earning a good income and have a good stable job. I know some people don’t. I’m thankful, blessed and grateful for that, but is this all there is to it? I keep doing the same thing. It’s like Groundhog’s day. It’s the same thing day in, day out. I’m trying to infuse myself with adventure and for other things but sometimes, I feel as if this is all there is.” I know we’ve heard that saying a long time.

6BCPCaption2

High Achievers: Building your brand is not always about making more money. It might be how are you going to give back.

 

I feel like high-achievers have that because they operate on a different plane and a different perspective. “I don’t feel like I’ve built my personal brand well enough.” This goes for almost all high-achievers. There’s a certain amount of reluctance to build a brand. Once you get to a place where you deserve to build a brand, it’s almost like it has the opposite effect. We’re reluctant to do it because we say, “Why would I build a brand? I’m doing fine. I’m reaching out to people going to networking events. Everything is going well. I’m pulling in my $250,000 a year. Why would I want to go down another path?”

My reaction to that is, “Why wouldn’t you? Why wouldn’t you want to tell your stories? Tell the stories of prospects and clients, tell your stories of how you’ve helped people, tell stories of how people have come to you in bad shape, and through your wisdom and talent have helped them transform their lives or improve their business results or outcomes. Why would you keep that from the general public? Would you keep that from your audience?”

It’s going to take the opposite approach. Building your brand is not always about making more money. Usually, it is. It’s about how are you going to give back? How are you going to take the experience you have and send it back out to the world and the market? This is not an exhaustive list, but I hear this idea of accountability. Whenever I start a small group coaching program, as we do, I always ask, “What’s one thing you want to get out of this group? It’s bizarre in a way. Almost always it’s the highest achievers who say, “Accountability.”

It comes from the high-achievers knowledge that that’s exactly what’s going to get him or her to the next level. It’s accountability. Yet we’re reluctant to ask for it from our managers when a guy like me comes along and does a small group mastermind program. That’s where people want to go, especially the high-achievers. Accountability is huge. I’ve got a couple of clients in The 2X Group that I offer extra accountability sessions. It’s transformed their business because every week we chat only 10 or 15 minutes, and it helps them. When they’re thinking about putting something off, they know they can’t because they know I’m going to ask them about it. They do it and doing it works.

Here are a handful of things. I’ve got about 9 or 10 things that I think the high-achievers need to get access to. I’m going to share with you a handful and then we’ll come back next episode and talk more. I have this in a pie chart. One section might be 25% of the pie chart. One might be less depending upon the importance of each one, but this one is important. I’m not sure what percent to give it. What is your vision? What is your ideal outcome for 1, 2, 5 years down the road? Do you have constructed a vision of where you want your life to be? Your financial life, business life or relationship life. We’ve got lots of different lives. Where are you going? High-achievers need this. They must have this. They must start thinking about it differently than just assets or financial because there’s more to life than that. That’s one part of life, but there’s more to it.

The second thing is, what are the required mindsets that you’re going to need to adopt or embrace if you’re going to level your business up? What kinds of mindsets do you need? How do you look at the world? How do you look at your value? How do you look at your customers? How do you look at your roles in the customer’s life? Those are all mindset issues. If you get the mindset stuff right, everything else falls from there. It trickles down from there. It trickles up. If you get your mind right, everything else follows. Mindset is an important part of this. We’ve got vision and mindset.

Number three, it’s important to pay attention to limiting beliefs. We hear a lot about limiting beliefs. We don’t hear much about how to unlimit them. The first step is you have to get clear on what you believe about yourself, and that’s not easy. Sometimes you need another human being there to help shine the light on what your current beliefs are. One way to look at your current beliefs is what are your results? It’s almost impossible for you to believe something different than your results are getting you. If you’re a $200,000 a year person, and you say, “I’m a $500,000 a year person masquerading as a $200,000.” You’re not. Your beliefs are you are a $200,000 a year person. If you thought you were $500,000 a year person, you’d be earning $500,000. That’s not always the case but generally, your beliefs are congruent with your results. If you want to go from $200,000 to $500,000, you’ve got to check out those beliefs that might limit you from getting there.

Your beliefs are congruent with your results. Share on X

Here’s the fourth thing, and then I’ll pause and we’ll do the others later. Why are you here? Why are you on this planet? What’s your purpose? What are you here to do? Alignment of purpose is critical because it’s the fire that will be released and the energy will be released once you decide what it is and land on what it is. My purpose in life that I’ve come up with here over the last couple of years is to use my experiences, my talent to share with the world, so people can expand what’s possible for them. My purpose is not to have everybody be a top-level achiever. My purpose is to take what I’m learning and share it in a way that people can consume it like we’re doing on this show. It’s one good example so that people can expand what’s possible for them.

Everything that I do needs to be focused on that purpose whether it’s a fee-based program or a free video on LinkedIn. I always believe that is focused and aligned with my purpose. What is your purpose? This is not the special purpose like Steve Martin had in The Jerk but it’s why are you here? Are you incorporating and aligning what you do in your business to why you’re here? You’re not here to earn money. It might be an output of the purpose, but that’s not the purpose. If you can get clear on this, it will unleash energy in your world.

We’re going to go through this a little bit deeper next episode. If you like the overall topic and might consider being a part of a group if we do decide to assemble one, go to BillCaskey.com, the orange bar at the top will say something like High-Achiever. Click on it, put your name and email address. There also might be a question there too that I ask you about what you might want to include if you decided ever to do something like this. I have no pricing other than I know I’ve got a handful of people who want to do this. I’m opening it up to my readers to get on the waitlist. Hopefully, that helps. I love you, guys. I appreciate you. If you want to leave a review on iTunes, I would love that. Thank you. Bye.

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Are The Experts Misleading You‪?‬‬

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BCP 4 | Mislead By Experts

 

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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Listen to the podcast here:

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.”

BCP 4 | Mislead By Experts

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.

If it resonates with you, try it. Double down on it if it works; throw it out if it doesn't. Share on X

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.

BCP 4 | Mislead By Experts

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.

Your beliefs and your actions are almost always congruent. Share on X

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.

Important Links:

Selling Using Social Media with Connor Dube

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On this episode of the podcast, I sit down with Connor Dube, Director of Marketing and Sales at activeblogs.com.

We discuss the most modern methods of using social media to conduct sales. Connor gives us 4 methods you can use to get the most out of social media when it comes to selling.

Also, enrollment is now open for both The 2X Group and The 2X Academy.

The 2X Group (Small Group Coaching): http://the2xgroup.com/

The 2X Academy (Online Virtual Training): http://the2xacademy.com

Also mentioned in this podcast:

 

The Survey Results Are In!

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A few weeks ago, I asked you to share your perspective on THE most important skill heading into 2021.

If you did so, thank you. If you didn’t, no worries…I wanted to share the results.

I shot a quick video laying out THE #1 skill area on the minds of our subscribers AND gave you a couple of tips on how you can improve immediately. 
 
Also, enrollment is now open for both The 2X Group and The 2X Academy.

The 2X Group (Small Group Coaching): http://the2xgroup.com/

The 2X Academy (Online Virtual Training): http://the2xacademy.com

Establishing Authority in Your Market

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If you want to be influential in your network, you must establish authority.

On this episode, I’ll give you some ways you can position yourself as a relevant influencer in your market. The first step is to answer the questions that are on your buyer’s minds. 

Also, enrollment is now open for both The 2X Group and The 2X Academy.

The 2X Group (Small Group Coaching): http://the2xgroup.com/

The 2X Academy (Online Virtual Training): http://the2xacademy.com

Also mentioned in this podcast: