Lessons

Lesson Info

Class Introduction

Thank you for being here. I know many of you have flown from across the country. The people that are watching at home, thank you for taking your time. That's what I wanna thank you for because I know time is so valuable today. It's one of the commodities that we not longer have and we're gonna be talking quite a lot about that over the course of the next several hours. And I just wanna say that I have spent many many years in sales, in sales leadership, in sales management, and I hear an awful lot of talk about selling, how to sell, about the sales process. But I don't hear nearly enough talk about the buying process. How is it people buy? Why do people do what they do? And here's the cool thing, it's formulaic. We're more similar than we are different. There's certain predictable, repeatable patterns in how people make decisions. And as I've traveled around the world, as Laura said, and thank you for that lovely introduction, Laura. As Laura said, I've been in sales and sales leadersh...

ip and training sales people all over the world, and as I've traveled for the last 30 years, one thing I've noticed, most people have never learned the science behind decision making. So what ends up happening is selling behaviors don't align with how people actually buy. I mean imagine if we knew for a fact what was going on in the mind of the buyer. Imagine if we knew what was going on in the mind of our spouse or other people. So these aren't just work skills, these are life skills. And that's why I'm so excited. So anybody play poker? Just out of curiosity. You do? Okay, people play poker. Imagine for a moment that you're playing high-stakes poker and you've got this awesome hand but you're not quite sure and all of the sudden, suddenly and magically, without cheating, you got a super power. And you can see the hand of your opponent. Would that change things? Would that give you an unfair advantage? Absolutely. And that's what we're gonna be talking about because think about it, the difference in selling is we're not talking to an opponent. We're talking to a client. And I can assure you this, when you combine the science of selling with how people actually buy, when you combine the science of selling with the heart of communication, everything changes. We're gonna replace the hard sell with the heart sell. And I ma so excited because I know that there is many people watching at home and they're artists, they're not salespeople at all. I'm guessing we have a room full of salespeople and entrepreneurs here, so I just wanna take some stock. How many of you have sales on your business card? Can I see a show of hands? Or some euphemism, right? We've got all the euphemisms now, right? Business development, SDR, leader, there's no longer the salesperson, but like show of hands again, raise high. Okay so we have a room full of salespeople that probably actually like selling, yes? When you're selling, right? And when we're not selling, it's like the worst, darkest, most awful feeling in the world right? And it's tough and it's stressful and it affects our personal lives as well. But I also know we have a lot of people watching today, that are amazing artists. We have bloggers, we have copywriters, we have photographers. And they love the doing, I imagine you love the doing of what you do, but when it comes to selling it, it's kind of a four letter word. And we're gonna be talking about that four letter word a lot. In fact artist is the only profession I know that has the adjective starving before it, right? So for the artists that are watching, we are going to change that for you and it'll be very, very exciting. So let's go ahead and get started and I'm gonna share with you what my commitment is to you over the course of this course. What are you gonna take away? And here we go. We have been working on these slides for weeks. So we are very excited that they're looking good. My commitment to you is for those of you who don't sell for a living, or don't have selling on your business card, I promise you by the end of this course, you will feel pride in your profession. You won't have to be concerned about the selling of your wares, if you will. I believe in all my heart that selling is simply communication. Selling is simply influence. And better people make better salespeople, not the other way around. I suppose that's why I'm so passionate about what I do. I'm so passionate because when we learn the skills that make us better salespeople, skills like empathy, listening more than we talk. When we learn the skills such as having optimism which is a skill, forcing yourself to be positive. When we learn the skill of being able to take massive rejection, right? I mean who wants this? Like who would try to get rejected, right? But that's what we have to do as salespeople. We take rejection every single day. And when we can learn to break through that, as salespeople, it helps us in every aspect of our life. And that's why I'm so passionate about what I do and what we're going to be doing and what you're gonna take home. We're gonna break through the noise. So there's a lot of noise today, right? We've got a really fabulous social media expert, digital selling expert in the room today. You may not know who he is. I'm gonna be introducing him to you later. But there's a lot of noise out there, right? It's very, very hard to stand out in the crowd, to get your message heard. So we're gonna break through that. We're gonna learn to inspire, influence, and connect with anyone. Like I said whether it's in your personal life or your business, what is the science of connection? How do we combine the science of connection with the heart of connection? So we're gonna be doing both. Tap into your courage. This is big, again, for those at home, tap into your courage to ask for what you want and deserve, get the money that you deserve to have. And so we're gonna look at how do you balance? And this is one of the hardest things, I've found, for salespeople, is how do we balance this customer need for heart and authenticity with our need to roll up our sleeves and make money? This is the most difficult thing and you all took a test earlier, before you came here today, and the audience will get to do this as well, to see do you lead more with empathy or do you lead more with courage? Because we have to have a balance of the two. And finally, and maybe most importantly, to make sure that your contribution and your compensation match. Most people I talk to don't feel that they're getting adequately compensated for all of their hard work for what they do, and for what they contribute. So that's my promise to you. And before we get started, what I'd like to do is find out a little bit about you. Then I'll tell you a little bit about me. And then exactly what you're gonna learn, we're gonna go through the agenda of this course. But I wanna find out a little bit about who's in the audience, and I'm sure those of you that are watching at home wanna see who these good looking people are. So I need a volunteer to come on up. Come on up. Alright we got a microphone for you. Hi. Hi. Thanks for coming. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah! So we have met before. Yes. Do you wanna tell the audience how we met? This is so cool. Yeah so Shari and I were in an unfortunate circumstance of being stuck on a plane, grounded for about three hours. It was one of those unfortunate circumstances, but an amazing opportunity to have met her. And we had to wait there for, like I said three hours, while they de-iced the plane in Utah. So it was a pleasure getting to meet her and ever since we've kept in touch and I'm really looking forward to learning more from her today. Great and what is the title that is on your business card? And your name, I think everybody needs to know your name. Yes, my name is Jared Winn, and Director of Customer Success. Great and who are your customers? My customers, basically are you speaking in regards to client? Yeah, yeah, who's your client? Who do you sell to? The executives. Executives such as clients like Disney, Ford, basically trying to keep the customer happy. Okay and what is it you do every day? Like when you wake up in the morning, what is it you do? I check on my customers. Make sure that they're happy, that they have everything that they need and we're giving them everything that we promised. Okay and what would you say is your greatest struggle? What do you wanna get out of this class? What's gonna be important to you? (sigh) My greatest struggle. You know I would say that at times it's making sure that I'm giving the customer what they need versus what I feel like they need. Having that empathy is something I've always tried to really have, but making sure that it's something that they need versus that assumption I think is really important. I'm looking forward to getting more from this class for that. Right thank you so much, let's hear it for Jared. (applause) Awesome! Alright who wants to come up really quickly and what I wanna hear is what is your struggle? What would you like to get out of this class? And who'd like to come on up and talk to the studio audience here? And Mario you're nudging somebody here, and just so you know whenever somebody nudges somebody else in my class, they're coming up. So come on up Mario! No no, that means you're coming up! Absolutely. You nudge somebody in my class, that means you're coming up! Yeah, yeah, both of you, alright. Both of us? Yeah you can come up too. Love standing next to Mario. So tell everybody what you're name is, what you do, and what is your struggle? What do you wanna get out of this class? Mario Martinez Junior. I'm the CEO of Vengreso, a digital sales transformation company. And my struggle is dealing with time balance of selling along with actually moving opportunities and deals along. And that's a big struggle, especially as a small company, is taking the time to be able to figure out how much time should I be focused here on the implementation and or delivery versus the actual selling time. And we live some often times, the consultant's curse. Which is you sell, you start delivering, your pipeline goes down. You sell, you deliver, your pipeline goes down, right? So that's one of the challenges that I have. Awesome, awesome, yeah. So my name's Brandon Davis, CEO and founder of Xproduct Labs, which is a software development company. Awesome. I've only been at it for six months, so I'm here to learn how to sell. That's basically, that' it. So you've never sold anything? Never sold anything. Okay now I am gonna say we all sell all the time, right? So I'm seeing a lot of head nodding. Daniel Pink tells us 45% of our time at work is involved in getting somebody to do something or getting somebody to part with some sort of resource. And if you think about it, whether we're trying to get a raise at work, or whether we're trying to talk our spouse into taking us for sushi instead of tacos, right, we're all selling all the time. So we're gonna learn skills for selling so that it's not a four letter word. So I'm sure we'll be able to help you out with that Brandon. Alright let's give these two gentlemen a hand. Thanks for coming up. This class is gonna be super interactive. We're gonna have fun. Are any of you guys nervous by the way? 'Cause you're gonna be up here. Like quite a bit. We're gonna wanna interact with the audience as well quite a bit. And just to tell you a little bit about my philosophy about selling. I wanna take you back to a story, something that happened to me years ago that really changed my life. I had first started my training company and I was doing a course down in Cancun, Mexico when a man, the first day, raised his hand in the back of the room and he said Shari I really like everything you're training. I like all these ideas about sales techniques and discovery questions, and isolating objections, he says. But if I use all these techniques, isn't the customer going to feel sort of manipulated? And I thought wow, that's a good question. And it worried me because that's not who or what I wanted to be. So I told him let me think about it overnight and I'll get back to you. And fortunately that night I met a man who introduced himself to me as Apapacho. I said Apapacho, what does that mean? And he told me that in Mexican Spanish it means hugger or affectionate one. He's a big teddy bear of a man with a great smile and he says Shari I have a confession to make. He says I've never had any sales training in my life. But I've always been number one. I guess I'm just apapacho. Well at that moment I knew I had an answer for the man in the back of the room. What I didn't know is that he told me something that would change my life. So the next morning I said to the man in the back of the room, if all you do is use sales techniques and tips, you're in the wrong business. You probably shouldn't be selling at all. On the other side of the coin, if you don't learn anything, you don't learn any sales tips or techniques, and all you have is apapacho, you'll probably do pretty well. But when you combine technique with apapacho, that's true success. What great salespeople have in common is that they not only know the science of selling, they know the heart of connecting, they know who to be. In David Brooks' recent book on character, he talks about resume virtues versus eulogy virtues. Resume virtues, he tells us are those things that make us skillful. Eulogy virtues on the other hand are what people remember about us. They're our character. Things like empathy, curiosity, optimism, integrity. And I can assure you that resume virtues without eulogy virtues don't work. And that's why so much sales training fails. And that's why creatives think oh my god I don't wanna do it. But when you combine the two, everything changes. So when we talk about discovery and we talk about asking questions. We're gonna talk about having the real empathy, having the real curiosity, the real caring. And here's what we're gonna learn over the course of the next several modules here. The first thing that we're gonna talk about and we're gonna do quite a bit of this this morning is what I call The CALL Method. This is brand new material for those of you that have been following me for many years. And this is exciting because it works no matter what you're selling. So we're gonna look at what is a sales process regardless of whether you're selling technology, whether you're selling real estate, no matter what it is, and this method will help you balance this heart and authenticity with the need to close sales. Next we're gonna look at, and this is gonna be exciting. This is sort of ground breaking for a lot of salespeople, we're gonna look at objections and what happens when we get resistance. We're gonna see that of all the objections you've ever heard, of all the nos you've ever gotten, the truth is there's only six real objects to purchasing anything. Very illuminating. Now how many of you have had the situation where you've got a deal, you're really excited about it, you send the proposal, and then the customer goes dark, does that ever happen to anybody? Yeah they just go dark. We have no idea what happened, where they went. We're gonna learn to break through the excuses and get what we want. How do we tell between an excuse and a real objection? Because a lot of time customers say oh I've gotta run it by the board, I've gotta run it through procurement, if you're an artist, well I've gotta talk to my husband, my lawyer, my son-in-law, my dog, whatever it is, there's always like somebody else somewhere else that needs to be involved in the decision making. So we're gonna look at that. We're gonna look at neutralizing objections. How do you actually overcome an objection? This can be very very scary for people. We're gonna do some live role play. We're gonna look at eight negotiation techniques that will help you get what you want, like I said in any aspect of your life. We're gonna talk about something called constructive delusion, kind of an interesting word. We're gonna learn to trick our minds so that we can be more productive and have greater fulfillment in everything we do. I find a lot of salespeople struggle with inconsistency. They struggle with feeling good about themselves when they're not selling. If we can actually use some scientifically proven techniques to feel good, what we'll find is that our sales will grow. The other thing we're gonna do is we're gonna talk about sales hell. And these are the four demons, yes, am I allowed to say things like that? Sales hell? Yeah, okay. We're gonna look at the four demons that hold us back from getting more sales. So before we go on to the next segment, a little bit about who am I? Like I said, I'm Shari Levitin. I am CEO of Levitin Group. And I also wanna tell you that I was not born a great salesperson. I don't believe salespeople are born salespeople. And my life changed when I met the man who would become my mentor. And he told me something that I wanna share with you before we begin and dive into the content and that is this. He said Shari there's three goals of any sales presentation. Number one, you may wanna write this down. Make the customer feel better about you before they met you than after they met you. Excuse me, let me say that again. Make the customer feel better about you after they met you than before they met you. That's goal number one, not goal number two. Goal number two is to make a sale. But it's goal number two. Because back in those days, right, if somebody didn't feel good about you they'd tell 10 people. Today they'll tweet it out to 10,000. Goal number three, he said, is the one that will change your life. He said if you didn't get the sale, find out the real reason why. Learn from it and don't make that mistake again. Number three is the one that will make you wealthy. You can lose the deal but don't ever lose the lesson. Once I heard that, I started looking at how did I lose the deal? What happened? And since then my life has been a laboratory. And I am going to instill all that information to you, all of my mistakes. Who here has heard you should learn from your mistakes? Yeah, don't bother, learn from mine. Okay, it's gonna be a lot less painful. So I'm gonna be sharing with you a lot of mistakes I've made but more importantly, a lot of the lessons I've learned studying with neuroscientists, studying with top salespeople, and being out in the field. What I need from you is I need you all in. I need you all in, get out of your comfort zone. We ask our clients every single day to get out of their comfort zone, to change. Selling is just changing. I'm gonna need you to get out of yours, so I'm gonna ask you guys to be all in. I'm gonna have you up here quite a bit. Audience I want you all in as well. And then here's the big thing and that is this, there is nothing I can do in two days that is gonna change your career. Nothing. It takes practice and repetition. That's the key to success. And with that, we're gonna do a quick exercise. And I want everybody to take out a piece of paper please, you've got a workbook there. And if you're watching this at home, I want you to do the same, if you would. Take out a piece of paper. I would like you to draw something for me. You've got exactly 30 seconds to do this. And I need you to draw a picture, please do this at home as well, of either the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge, since we're here in San Francisco, or Snow White's castle. On your mark, get set, and go. You've got 15 seconds. (laughs) Five seconds. Alright it's time to stop. Please sign your artwork. (audience laughs) Now artists, what I would like you to do is exchange your art with a friend. Friends, I would like you put an age on this artwork that corresponds to the age that it looks like the artist who drew it is. And get back your art. Now just out of curiosity, and hopefully you did this at home as well, did anybody get a 20 or higher? Can I see a show of hands? You did, are you a real artist? No I gave him higher. Are you an artist? No. Alright. How many of you got under a seven, can I see a show of hands? Under a seven? How about under, yeah, under a 10? Under a 10? Yeah, okay. Can I see somebody's art here? Yeah. Is this the bridge or the castle? (audience laughs) That explains it. (laughs) So why do we do this exercise? Because if you're like most people, when you were a little kid you learned to draw. And you drew every single day. But when you got a little bit older something happened. You started taking algebra, you started taking science and pretty soon we have a skill set that's frozen in time. So in other words, unless we do something every day, we never get any better at it. I'm gonna tell you a lot of your and your people, I know we have a lot of leaders in the room, a lot of our sales presentations look like this to the customer. So training isn't something we did, it's something we do. So what I'm gonna ask you is after this couple of days, what I'm gonna ask you to do is to keep practicing and training because we're gonna go through concepts that need repetition in order to become part of your repertoire. So deal? Are we all in? [People In Audience] Yeah. Yeah and we're gonna be practicing. [Woman In Audience] Yes. Awesome, alright.