The Lies We Are Told – Part 2‬

 

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.

 

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.

Important Links:

• The2XGroup.com
• The Psychology of Selling
• Parthenon – past episode