[E51] Q&A Week: Rewards of selling, hacks, and red flags

Welcome to Week 3 of Q&A mode on TSEP.

In this episode, I answer:

• What is the most rewarding aspect of working in sales?

• What are the most important hacks in sales you should have known earlier?

• What red flags do prospects demonstrate that effective salespeople understand as a proper reason to abandon the sale?

If you have any sales or mindset related questions, send me a message through the contact page or via LinkedIn.

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Episode 51 – Transcript

Coming Soon

Welcome to Episode 51 of The Sales Experience Podcast. So excited for another week of questions and answers. Hopefully, you’re enjoying it. The last two weeks I’ve gone through different questions, sales related sales manager related, things that I know from experience that a lot of reps have asked, as well as things I’ve seen online or been asked through LinkedIn, Facebook.

And I just thought this is a fun way to share kind of my experience and knowledge with everybody that’s listening and address different questions that come up. So here we are going to go into the third week of this episode 51. Like I said, very excited.

Make sure if you haven’t already, subscribe, rate, rank the show, leave comments, do whatever you can to show others the value you’re getting from it. And if you have questions of your own, make sure to send me a message, you can do it through the CutterConsultingGroup.com website.

You can find me on LinkedIn and send me a message there. I love chatting with people about sales. Like I’ve said, recently, I consider myself a sales nerd. Everything sales related psychology, behavior, selling, whether it’s business to business, business to consumer, I just enjoy all of it and the process behind it, why some people are successful, why some people struggle. Like all of that is just super fun for me and I love talking about it.

So reach out to me, we can get on a call, we can chat online, whatever it is just love talking about sales. So also send me your questions if you have something you want me to address them but for now, let’s jump into it.

Now the first question I have is, what is the most rewarding aspect of working in sales?

I’m going to speak from my experience personally, for me, the most rewarding thing about being in sales is helping other people get what they want or need. So, when you’re dealing with a prospect, when you’re dealing with a customer of lead and you’re trying to convert them into a client, then the biggest thing I enjoy is helping them transform.

Now part of that is just my own personal mission where I enjoy and love helping people transform from where they’re at now to where they’d rather be or to a better state or getting a goal or solving a problem or working through a transition. Like for me, that’s very rewarding and I do a lot of that with sales as the vehicle in the same way that some people could do it with personal coaching, life coaching various other things.

For me, sales is that way to take somebody from where they’re at, to where they could be, should be rather be whatever it is. If that was selling cars, it’s where they want to be, something they want to own, something they’ve dreamed about owning.

If it’s helping somebody who’s in financial struggles, it’s helping them get from a bad place where they’re at now where they’re struggling and waking up at two in the morning, and just stressed about their situation and they have no idea how they’re going to get out of it to a place where now they’re on the right path. Sleep at night, they know that they’re going the right direction, they’re solving their problems, they’re taking the right steps, and they can be in a better place. So all of that for me, that’s the most rewarding aspect.

Now there’s the money side, that’s why most people get into sales is that cash reward. It’s the money, it’s the bonuses, it’s all of that, that drives some people. And if that’s for you, then that’s great.

And you also know that the only way to get that is by helping other people get what they want, that’s how you get paid. And like they say, the bigger the problems you solve, or the more problems that you can solve, the more value you have, and the higher pay that you will receive. So hopefully that helps answers that one.

Now second question, what are the most important hacks in sales you should have known earlier?

And I get this one a lot where people just want to know the quickest way or what can I do right now, how can I be successful, what should I know so that I can close more sales and be more effective? I think really the biggest thing, and this is in the vein of what Gary Vaynerchuk has been talking a lot in the last few years is self awareness.

I think the most important thing, and what kind of got in my own way in the first, let’s say 12-24 months of my actual sales career was that I didn’t really know who I was. I didn’t really know my sales style and I really didn’t understand how that affected other people.

I talked about this a lot in the behavior weeks, where I covered the different types, the four different behavior and personality groups that you can kind of narrow people down into. And when I talked about the analysts, which I am, I didn’t realize what I did in my head and then how I approach the sales process.

I used to give people so many choices when they came to me. I was in the mortgage business at the time and I would give them every loan type. I made this giant spreadsheet that, you know, it was on par with a cheesecake factory menu of choices.

And it literally cost analysis paralysis in most of the people I were talking to, and they literally wouldn’t move forward and didn’t end up using me to either buy a house or refinance because literally I just overwhelmed them. Soon as I realized that and I was more self aware of who I am my strengths, and then also what other people want, instead of giving them what I think I want, I gave them what I think they want.

And all of a sudden I would give them two choices or three choices or one choice based on all of the questions I asked and dove into. And then it was an intelligent discovery with an intelligent presentation, which then made all the difference.

So for me, the biggest hack that I wish I had known early earlier on in my sales career as well as in life is just self awareness, just understanding who I was, and my strengths, and my weaknesses and where I fit in best and what I enjoy the most and what I can do even though it’s a struggle, and how to blend all that together and make that into a successful sales career.

There’s some people who operate on a different level in sales. There’s how I operate, and everyone is kind of different, but the key is knowing who you are, because then you can apply that to anything.

All right. Third question, what red flags do prospects demonstrate that effective sales people understand this proper reasons to abandon the sale?

Now this one is tough to answer as a general thing for everybody who might be listening to this because your specific product or service will have its own red flags. It will have its own things that make a prospect either not qualified or not somebody who would be a good fit for whatever you’re selling.

And I think the key is to take a general approach to this answer, which is you need to discover what the red flags are for you and your product or service. It could be financial, could be time it could be resources, could be availability, whatever that looks like you need to determine that for your specific product or service, and figure out what that is that would disqualify somebody from being a good customer.

Because again, this podcast, my focus, all of the coaching I do and training is built around having a product or service that isn’t necessarily a good fit for everyone. It’s more of a consultative approach. or you have a product or service that could apply to everyone.

However, there’s going to be a different combination, a different formula, a different kind of section of the catalog of menu options, right, [??? 7:19] that would apply to somebody else. So, if you’re a financial planner, yes, you could help anyone with their financial planning, but the presentation you make to somebody in this category is going to be different than that category.

Now, the red flags that you’re going to have are going to be specific to what you have to offer and who it makes sense for and who it doesn’t. And you need to look at that and basically write all of that out and create that list in your mind as far as what to look for where you don’t want to move forward with the sale.

Now, with that being said, a lot of times you have to be careful because I see a lot of reps, and this is why I want to address this question, even though this is kind of a general generic kind of answer to it. But the key is, is that I see a lot of sales reps, over time, they develop in their mind a list of red flags.

Then what happens is, they go into every conversation with this list on their mind. And based on their experience, they know certain people don’t buy or don’t move forward. And then what they end up doing is prejudging prospects early on in the process.

The classic to this is if you’ve ever gone into a jewelry store or a car lot and you’re dressed in bummy clothes, like maybe shorts, flip flops t-shirt, you don’t look the part of somebody who’s there for business who’s going to buy and you’ve observed how sales reps treat you.

I used to do this when I would go into jewelry stores and I would be in Birkenstocks, shorts and a t-shirt. And it was interesting how many different stores the wraps that people behind the counter would literally ignore me.

And I would wait like four or five minutes to see if they would come over, they would ignore me and I would just move on to the next store. And I would do that over and over again until I found a store where as soon as I walked in, they greeted me and they didn’t prejudge me.

And then right there, they had my money because I appreciated the service. So, you have to be careful as a salesperson not to take that list of red flags and then use that as a way to prejudge and kill sales early on in the process because you don’t want to do that.

Now, there will always be pre qualifying questions and things that you have and parameters where not everyone’s going to be a good fit. But you got to make sure you don’t go into that prejudging zone because somebody that you think isn’t going to buy and doesn’t meet your parameters could really be interested in could really be the right person if you had given them more of an opportunity instead of cutting them off too quickly.

All right. That’s it for today’s episode, Episode 51 in the books. Make sure again, to subscribe and send me a message, I appreciate hearing from you. But until next time, always remember that everything in life is sales and people will remember the experience you gave them.