[E166] Always Make It Personal with Roxana Radulescu – Part 3 of 4

Jason: Welcome back to the sales experience podcast. My name is Jason Cutter. Welcome to part three of my conversation with Roxanna Radulescu. We’re just continuing this great conversation. I won’t give much of an intro. I just want to dive in if you haven’t already, make sure to check out parts one and two from the previous two days where it sets up this part of the conversation. We’re just going to continue talking about making it personal, not just focusing on business, right? So that mantra of it’s not personal, it’s business and how wrong that isn’t, right. Every aspect and really we get into a lot more of a business concept in this conversation. Part three, make sure joy this part here and I will see you at the end.

Roxana: What you’re offering. They don’t need it now. They might need it, I don’t know, two weeks later, 2 years later, you never know. Right? You know, keep your message out there and whoever needs to work on something, they will know that they need to talk to you or they will choose to talk to you. Just that for me. But it took a lot of time for me to learn that as well and to start being more patient.

Jason: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting too because you know, for me and my age and this generation, it’s easy to look at younger people and say, well everyone wants it now. And instant gratification and everyone’s used to it and they’re spoiled now and everything’s on the phone. But I find myself being the same exact way. Like if I’m not getting something instantly, it seems weird. It takes a long time. You know two-day shipping from Amazon used to feel amazing and now it feels really slow. Like I don’t want to wait two days. Right. It’s almost done the opposite where I don’t want to wait that two days. It might be convenient, but I’d rather go to the store and get something now versus how great that used to be. And I think that’s a good reminder for anybody listening to this, whether you’re a business owner and you’re trying to run the business and you’re trying to grow it is to be patient.

Jason: Put yourself out there, small business, medium-sized business. If you’re a sales manager, working with your sales team, also be patient and not expect instant results from everybody on the team. And then for salespeople, both a patient with yourself and what you’re working on, but then also with your sales business, right? Whether it’s inbound or it’s outbound, you know a lot of sales is a pipeline. You know, the kind of person that I coach and work with is more consultative than transactions. So we’re not talking like an easy transaction. We’re talking about either a longer sales cycle or more involved conversational relationship, more personal like what we keep going back to. And so you’ve got to work really hard in the moment and then you’ve got to be patient in the long term, right? You’ve got to hustle your face off right now and do everything so that at the end of the day you can say, I gave it my all, I left it all on the field and then be patient for the results and know that if you do that a long enough, it’ll string together the results.

Roxana: Exactly, it’s all about you know, action that’s consistent enough to give you the results, right?

Jason: And the right action. And uh, and then, you know, and it’s also this weird thing, right? Cause it’s, here’s the balance and the struggle that I’ve had on a different topic is there’s patients and there’s knowing that it’s just going to take a long time. And then there’s the, the weird over-under balance of should I continue to be patient and wait or am I going the wrong direction and this doesn’t actually work. Right? Like should I write this book and then just be patient and then put in the steps or do I actually suck and I shouldn’t write this book or I shouldn’t do this thing or that thing. You know, like even doing a podcast, I started a podcast years ago and I made the fatal mistake of creating a podcast, putting it out there, watching the metrics, watching the likes, the follows the downloads too closely.

Jason: And then I wasn’t getting the results. So then I stopped part of that. I think I was going in the wrong direction for me. Part of it. I was looking at it wrong when I did this and season one of the podcasts, I looked at the stats every once in a while, but I didn’t care what the numbers were and I just wanted to be patient and just put them all out there and knew the results would come where people would download it and I would just going to make an impact. So yeah. So what do you think about that? Like where’s that over under for you? For patients or just hitting your head against the brick wall that’s never going to fall over?

Roxana: Well, it’s uh, you know what? It’s patience combined with action, right? So it patients doesn’t mean you’re just gonna put yourself down in a corner and just wait and do nothing. Right. It’s just patience. When I speak about patients, I talk about results, be patient about when results are showing up, not about the kind of action that you might want to take because we go back. Otherwise you go back to, to be or not to be. That’s all right. We go back there. It’s not about that. It’s about, okay, you’ve taken some action you’ve seen, doesn’t give you, maybe it doesn’t give you the results that you expect and you take a look at what, how long you’ve been doing that. It’s all about measuring as well. How long have you been doing that for? What kind of results were you expecting? Are you getting any results and if not, why?

Roxana: What have you tried? Why wanted to notch? Right? Maybe there is another action that you might want to take or consider taking, but it’s we can, it’s usually, I find it’s about tweaking either your way of acting or your way of talking to people or your way of putting yourself out there or the focus of the podcast. It does not mean to me at least it hasn’t meant so far, not taking any action at all. Just tweaking any, even when you drop something like completely the way I’ve seen this is people dropping something after they’ve tried everything or they’ve tried everything they could think of. Right. And that helps with the mindset as well because otherwise I’m going to be left up with the question, what if? What if I kept going? What if I kept doing that? Modify, kept doing my podcasts by now?

Roxana: It would have been a tremendous success. I will never know that if I think that I tried, I really did my best. It didn’t work. This is the best I could. I can move on to do any better and it still doesn’t work. Maybe it’s not for now at least I made it a good experience for me because I will feel better thinking about it. Right? Yeah. I tried this, this and this and that and I really did my best. Maybe the competition was high. When I think about it, I always think about actors and how they audition times and times again, and even big actors. I want to some of the superstars that we know, they still audition. Some of them surprisingly, they don’t get the role. They don’t get the part. What do they do? They still do their best. They still audition.

Roxana: They still go onto the next one. The important thing is what kind of experiences do I want to have? How do I make that a great experience for me regardless of whether I’m going to get the part? Then whether I’m getting the, I’m going to get the client right away because maybe I’m not getting that client right away. One year from now they will still remember me and they will want to work with me. I’m going there to have because if I have a great experience for myself, they will feel it too and they will be just happy to. It’s going to be a valuable time for both. Right. Am I going to make it valuable of a valuable student or not? That’s the way I see it.

Jason: Well, and I think for salespeople in particular, if you’re, if you’re listening to this is it’s really about focusing on what you’re doing and then learning, adapting and growing with lots of feedback. Either recordings of your calls or your meetings or outside feedback from your manager. And really looking at it like a professional athlete who is, you know, watching that game footage, getting the feedback, tweaking, changing, always progressing, always trying to improve in every little way that you can. I mean, and like they say, I might butcher this quote, but you know, you don’t fail. You either succeed or you learn from it because it’s, you know, you’re not, there is no failing. It’s just learning from it. And then what do you do with that information? Do you keep going? Do you adapt? What do you tweak? What do you change? And then you know, who, where are you ultimately going? Where do you want to get to? And, uh, you know, what do you have to change to get there?

Roxana: Exactly. And, and again, going back to, you know, when you have a good conversation with somebody, you know, right? And you know how you feel when you have a great conversation and that regardless of whether you make the salethen, that is going to help you afterwards. Say, have a brain talk with yourself. And just say, Whoa, that was actually a very good conversation that I had actually did pretty well. They just didn’t meet these now. Right? Instead of treating it, ah, again, it didn’t work then will nobody will ever buy from me and stuff like that. It’s that kind of growth mindset that will help you go on and make the next call five minutes after you’ve just hung up with the previous client who didn’t buy from you, potential client who didn’t buy from you. But then you ha you can call somebody else because now you’re pumped because you know you can have a great conversation. You know you have something valuable to say to that person and then you’re going to call them and feel better and better about it rather than worse and worse. So it’s a whole lot of a difference here in how you treat that experience for yourself. For me, this was another chance, formational moment when I saw it work with me and with people that I work with.

Jason: And so when we’re talking about sales people, you know, if you were to give some advice or what you see them do wrong or not as effective as they could in terms of, you know, personal versus business, this kind of mantra we were talking about, what is it that you have seen? Where do you see people like needing some help or what they’re missing?

Roxana: Well, in really shows when you believe in what you’re saying, if you just have the script and just read this script to me, I will eventually know that this is what you’re doing and I’m not, I’m going to say something like, you know what? I’m sorry. I’m super busy right now. I can’t take this call or I need to hang up. I will say something like that because it, I mean, okay, but the times when people would just sell by reading from a script over the phone, I think they’re not the times that we live in anymore. So at least believe in something. Find something that you believe in when you talk to people about your product or service or whatever it is. If you don’t believe in it, how am I supposed to believe in it? I will never believe in whatever it is that you’re trying to sell me. I can feel it. You don’t say it, you don’t read it from the script, but I can hear it in the voice, in the, in the, in your level of energy. I can, Mary, when you believe in what you’re selling or when you don’t, right. Or when you know what you’re selling to me or when you’re don’t, you have no idea. You just have some pubs right there and just look at them. No, it’s a, that’s why it’s personal.

Jason: Yeah. And I, and, and, and I think what’s interesting about the script, because this is the bait and I think scripts are very valuable and important. And then it’s a function of what you do with them, which is what you’re saying. Right? And going back to your actor example, if you’ve ever watched a movie or a TV show or a play, there is a script. Now, salespeople want to fight until they’re blue in the face and say they don’t like scripts. And scripts are terrible and they make you sound robotic. No, you make a script sound robotic and terrible, right? Like if you’ve watched a movie, there is a script. They did that scene 32 times from different angles over and over again. If you go to a Broadway play, they do times a day or three times a day, seven days a week, it’s the same every single time.

Jason: Like that’s what they do. There is a script. You forget there’s a script you get lost in, in the emotion and like what you’re saying is they’re making it personal. They feel it, they believe it, they’re playing role. They feel like they are that person and that’s why they’re a professional actor in any sense is because they can sell that to you and make you believe what they believe. And then when you’re in sales, if you have a script, your job is to take that script, use it, learn it, memorize it with who you are, and then help people believe in what you believe, which is what you’re selling. So you can literally like the top salespeople, I know, they’ll start with a script, they’ll internalize it and make it their own. And then literally if you aligned up, let’s say they’re on a phone call, it’s, you know, it’s telephone sales.

Jason: If you took 10 of their phone calls and you were to get them transcribed and then you were to stack them next to each other, literally it would be the same thing over and over again. And nobody realized it because it’s different customers, but it’s the same thing. And they’re taking you through the same journey. They’re making it personal where they can, and then the rest of it is, you know, them selling what they’re doing and explaining and walking through the process. And I think that’s so important is that balance. Because the natural reaction, like I said, of most sales people is I don’t like scripts. Scripts are terrible. They make me sound robotic. I hate when anyone uses a script, but that’s you. That’s not the script, right? You can even read a script and make the script sound amazing. Even if you were to read it word for word, you can still make it sound conversational, but you’re right.

Jason: It’s the ones who call script or no script and they don’t believe in what they’re doing and they’re going through the motions. Just kind of like life. You can feel it. 

Jason: Alright. That concludes part three. We’re going to make it a wrap right here for today. Try to keep it under the timeline if you haven’t, make sure checkout parts one and two and then also you can find these episodes everywhere that you would find podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google plus. You can go to cutterconsultinggroup.com and go to the podcast page and find all the links there. Make sure to subscribe so you get all of these episodes every single day if possible. Wherever you get podcasts from. I would love you to leave a rating, leave a review if you could. All of that really makes a big difference and helps other people find the show and then see if it’s what they want and where they want to spend their time. Cause I want to make sure this is valuable for the right people. And if it’s not a good fit, I don’t want people to spend their time on it. It’s the same way that I do sales. It’s all about finding the right person and then seeing if you can help them. And as always, remember that everything in life has sales and people will remember the experience you gave them.