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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. Click To Tweet

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.

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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. Click To Tweet

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 Lies We Are Told – Part 2‬

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In this follow-up episode, Bill Caskey jumps right back into how experts mislead us as he talks about the lies the experts tell us. He focuses on challenging beliefs and the importance of taking a second look at the teachings in your life that you thought to be true. Get to know five other ways that experts are misleading you. Learn what trainers and coaches usually focus on that are contrary to the critical components needed for your success. Tune in so you can stay away from the lies the experts are telling you.

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Listen to the podcast here:

The Lies We Are Told – Part 2‬

I’m glad you are here. We’re going to do part two of our lies, myths and misgivings. Things that you’ve been taught and instructed to do by sales trainers and coaches over the years that no longer work or there’s a better way. If you didn’t read part one, no problem. Go ahead and read this, then you can go back. I gave you five. Number one, if you would ask better questions, the customer is going to be more likely to buy. That’s a lie. Number two, work harder, mind and grind longer. Work your tail off and you’ll succeed. I’m not saying that work ethic is not good but that’s not a recipe for success. Number three, it’s all about the numbers. Make more calls and sales. Number four, don’t worry about your personal brand. Who do you think you are? The company has a brand. That’s good enough. Number five, don’t worry about scaling your business. Let me, as your leader or manager, and that’s what the sales trainer would say is, “Don’t worry about scaling. You go out and hammer outcalls one at a time, you’ll be successful.”

From reading this blog, there are better ways to solve problems. I want to give you five more and some solutions around these. If you like any of those five and you didn’t read the prior show, go back and read to it. I give you some solutions there. We’re continuing from the past episode. I got a lot of these from LinkedIn and I want to acknowledge all of the people on LinkedIn who shared their ideas with me. I’ve got 35 to 40 comments and had good conversations with some of you. I’m going to mention a couple of you here.

The trainer and coach don’t pay much attention to your mindset. They’re all about production and behavior. We used to talk a lot about behavior. What are your sales behavior and activities? Not a word was mentioned about, how do you feel about that? What’s your mindset going into that behavior? The mindset on the way into the behavior will determine the behavior and the effectiveness of it. I find that most trainers stay away from mindset or they’ll give you some lousy thing like, “Be more confident and abundant.” I talk about abundance but I would never say to someone, “Be more abundant. You need to ratchet up your abundance thinking.” That isn’t helpful.

The mindset on the way into the behavior will determine the behavior. Click To Tweet

The question is, “How do I do that?” Mindset is a critical component. If you’ve ever witnessed yourself, and it’s hard to witness yourself sometimes, in a slump or everything you touch turns to what things aren’t working in the market. It’s probably got something to do with your mindset, your emotions, and your perspective of the world has changed. When you’re on a high and everything you touch turns to gold, you’re like Goldfinger in the old James Bond series, then you want to make calls and go out because you’re attractive. That’s all about mindset. It’s not about behavior. Behavior is influenced by mindset, but you got to take special care of your mind. What are you putting into it? How are you feeding it? What do you do with it during the day? Do you let it run willy-nilly across the stream of consciousness? Are you delivering to your mind things that are going to help it stay on track? Mindset is huge.

Number seven, I want to know what your numbers are. Don’t worry about the plan. Usually, sales managers and trainers sometimes will say this. I’ve heard it from trainers I’ve been involved with them over the years where I’ve collaborated with them. It becomes get clear on your goal and the rest of it will take care of itself. I do think there’s truth to the clearer and more vivid. You can imagine what your goal looks like when it’s complete. That does energize you but there still has to be a plan. Unfortunately, most sales professionals have been taught how to project-manage. That’s exactly what goal setting is. It’s developing a number out there and an ideal outcome.

Let’s say you want to generate 300,000 hours of personal income next year. You did 150,000 last year. You want to 2X. We’ve got a program for that. It’s called The2XGroup.com. To get from 150,000 to 300,000, it’s going to require some thinking through it and some fleshing out of things. I find that most coaches don’t help you do that. They’re more interested in what you want to accomplish, which is important. I’m not discounting the importance of that, but there is a how-to, “I’m here now. I want to get there tomorrow. What is the middle or bridge look like?” Project management is a critical skill. I’ve said this for the last couple of years, project management is a critical skill for sales professionals in the B2B space. Every goal, customer, initiative or project is a project.

BCP 8 | Lies We Are Told

Lies We Are Told: Position yourself appropriately in the marketplace by creating content that’s valuable for your customer base or your prospect base.

 

Number eight, you don’t need to be spending time creating content. You need to get out and sell. Coaches do not understand the importance of creating content on your media platform for the world to sample. By the world, I don’t mean the world, I mean the world of your prospects, your niche, your audience, whatever you want to call the people who would get value out of reading, consuming, watching, listening, whatever that content is. I don’t think coaches and trainers spend nearly enough time teaching you the theory of content marketing. Content marketing came along a few years ago and it was hot for a couple of years.

It has lost its luster and it’s coming back mainly because I believe you, as a business-to-business sales professional, need to position yourself appropriately in the marketplace. That’s why you wear the clothes, drive the car, and ask the questions. Everything is about positioning and I’m not talking about faking it. I’m not talking about the Instagram influencer faking its positioning. I’m talking about positioning yourself. The way you position yourself is you create content that’s valuable for your customer-base or your prospect-base. That might mean writing an article a week on LinkedIn at a minimum. It could be shooting a video once a week for LinkedIn. I’ve got a couple of clients who shoot them 2 or 3 times a week.

Every time they post one, they title it. They get to test the market to see what the market wants. Don’t let people talk you into, “Your job is to sell.” Here’s what happens if you create content. You create an article, you title it with something that’s relevant to your prospects, take one of the top problems your prospect has. Let’s say you’re in the commercial real estate business. A potential prospect might be asking him or herself, “Should I buy a building, lease a building or lease space?” I don’t know whatever that is. That’s a decision. Why don’t you write an article called, Should I buy a building or should I lease space? A question every business owner should be asking or something like that. When people come across that article, they’re in the same town you are, they start to read your profile, and they say, “That’s a good question. I’m going to have John come in here and talk to us.” You get the call. You had no idea this person was looking. You can’t buy a list of people necessarily. Maybe in the real estate business you can, who are looking. Somebody has found you because you have delivered content. That’s valuable to them.

90% of buyers want to feel safe in their business and in your presence. Click To Tweet

Number nine, we don’t spend enough time addressing the psychology of the buyer. There was a trend in the ‘80s and ‘90s talking about buyer psychology. It seems like we went very quickly to seller psychology. We love the psychology topic, but we went quickly to what’s the psychology of the seller. Brian Tracy even wrote an audio recording set called The Psychology of Selling. We got very interested in that. I liked that. You need to be studying both the psychology of the buyer and the psychology of yourself. We talk a lot about it in this show. Your own mindset, ethos, your soul, and how your energy can rise and fall based on how you think about things. Don’t forget about the buyer. Here’s one thing that you need to know about buyer psychology. This goes for any buyer. Not every buyer might but 90% of the buyers want to feel safe in their business and your presence. When you show up and you are eager, enthusiastic, you’re pitching and you’re closing from the time you walk in the room, that does not make people feel safe.

I know some of you sellers who have become so good at that. It has become so much a part of you. You say, “How can I unhook myself from that?” You’re going to have to because I’ll bet you, you’ve lost sales where you have been too eager and you didn’t condition the environment for the prospect to feel safe. You can still be yourself and do that. We call it the up-front agreement or the setting of the tone up-front. You’ve got to make sure that when you walk into the room, whether the room is virtual or physical, you create an environment for safety. Safe environments sell. It allows the prospect to tell you more about what their issues are or it allows you to move forward with freedom where you’re not constantly thinking, “When is he going to object? How am I going to close? When should I throw the money section out?” You’re not doing that because you’ve created this environment where two people are having a human conversation. I believe that’s important for buyer psychology. You’ve got to pay attention to it.

Number ten, people will shy you away from personal marketing. I know we talk about branding we have but I’m talking about personal marketing. What is your personal marketing plan? I haven’t seen any trainers talk about this. They talk about making cold calls, outreach and going to networking events. There’s more to marketing than that. That’s more sales stuff. I want marketing. I want to know are you doing a webinar? Have you written a white paper or some kind of a free report or a lead magnet as it’s called in the internet marketing world? Something that is enticing enough for a prospect that they would give you their name and email address to download it because they know that there’s something on the other side that would be valuable for them.

That’s the essence of marketing now. It’s giving something away, getting their email address, and then sharing other tidbits, tips, tactics and strategies along the way through email. You have a lot more power when you have an email address than you do when you have a social media connection. I’m not against social media connections, but email is still the killer app. It probably will be for a while and maybe text, but at least email. What are you doing in your personal marketing to capture email addresses from people who have an interest in what it is you do, you say, you produce, and how you bring value to people? If cold calls are your only outreach, then you’re making a huge mistake. You’re undervaluing yourself. You can do better than that.

Read up a little bit on lead magnets. Try to figure out, “What kind of marketing steps can I take?” Maybe you want to have a YouTube channel or record a Q&A every Friday of some of the things that you heard in your market over the week and post them up on LinkedIn, YouTube or the video sites. That’s marketing for you. We’ve got to think about marketing in terms of educating our prospects so that they come back and reach out to us. I’ve talked about the lead Parthenon before and we can talk about it in subsequent episodes. The idea with that is you have a Parthenon, you’ve got 5 to 7 pillars of leads coming in. Some of those may be outbound where you’re making a call going to an event. Some of those we want to be inbound.

I would say, if you don’t have any inbound leads, then you need to start focusing on that because that’s what’s going to help you scale your business. I also casually slipped in The 2X Group. If you have any interest at all and be a part of a small group coaching program, the fees are nominal and the value is extreme. We meet twice a month. If you’re interested in that, you can go to The2XGroup.com, jump on a call with me, and tell me a little bit about what you want to accomplish. We’ll see if it could be a fit for you. See you next time. 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. Click To Tweet

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. Click To Tweet

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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