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Sticky Learning Lunches
#19: Part 3 of The Cunning 4 Stage Sales Plan
The Cunning 4 Stage Sales Plan by Geoff Burch – Part #3. Did I achieve my chosen goal for this visit? Use your time working from home to become the very best version of yourself.
You Can Read the Full Transcript Below:
Nathan Simmonds:
Good afternoon, day three of this four stage cunning sales plan with myself and the fantabulous, Jeff Birch. This is the sales training duo of the century with Team gb, uh, illustrious leader in this session, Jeff Birch. Looking forward to another exciting day of interesting stories, uh, anecdotes and different ways of looking things that are gonna help you change your perspective to get a better result. So, welcome to today’s session.
Nathan Simmonds:
Couple more people still coming into the room. My name is Nathan Simmons, senior coach and and trainer for MBM Making Business Matter, the Home of Sticky Learning. And the idea of these lunchtime learnings is to help you be the best version of you in the work that you do right now at home and preparing you for the return to work, get you set up for success. As the last people turn up, make sure you’ve got a drink available.
Nathan Simmonds:
Make sure you’ve got water, tea, coffee, whatever, and make sure, actually, that reminds me. Good reminder for myself, mobile phones. Let’s make sure they’re on flight mode with zero distractions. Zero out the distraction completely. So you can give yourself a hundred percent to this training because the only investment that is guaranteed is the investment that you make into yourself and your thinking to improve your outcomes and accomplishments. What are we gonna be covering today? What else do we need to cover?
Nathan Simmonds:
Ah, thanks for reminding me, Jeff, you didn’t even realize you did it. If you have not registered for tomorrow’s session already, now is the time to grab the link out of the chat box. They’re gonna have that there in a second for you so that you can register for tomorrow’s session if you haven’t already done so. Now is the time to get that window open so you can get yourself ready. That will appear in the chat box in just a minute. Welcome to the stage, Jeff Birch rip roaring keynote speaker, keynote six, bestseller time selling bestselling author, BBC presenter, and just a phenomenal person to walk, walk, walk, and work alongside us. So thank you very much, Jeff. Jeff. Well,
Jeff:
Very nice.
Nathan Simmonds:
Where are we going?
Jeff:
Well, where do we go? I mean, we’re, we’re, if we’re still working on the vague skeleton, the vague skeletal remains of our four stage plan. The third, the third stage in it, it was we, we’ve, we’ve set up, we did, I achieve my objective was the first. Now and again, to remind anybody watching this, there’s not much point in asking yourself that question if you didn’t have an objective. Um, the second is, what have I learned that that’s the point? What have I learned that will help me with this particular call? So we’re asking great questions of the customer and so on and so forth, uh, that today’s is what have I learned that I can make use of, uh, elsewhere?
Jeff:
So in other words, uh, the sort of vague skeleton that we’re working on today is the fact that when we talk to a customer or potential customer, um, they know their own industry. So I don’t know, you’d say something like, oh, I noticed there’s a new factory being built on the town next in the tank. And I drove through cro and that’s a great big place going up. What’s that? Oh, well, that’s a, that’s a big paper mill. It’s like, oh, you remember the weird kid who worked here with the sticky out ears?
Jeff:
Well, he’s the, he is the new managing director there. Oh, really? Is that, what’s his name? Brian. Brian, that’s right. Brian. Brian said. So, you know, two days later, Brian, whatever his name is, gets a a nice congratulations on his new position and you’ve got an appointment with somebody else in your industry. So, so it’s, it’s very useful to gather information. Now, we, um, one of the things that we haven’t covered in these scintillating broadcasts that we do, he said that with his tongue firmly pressed in his cheek, is we haven’t talked about the role of the boss. Now, a lot of people visiting us are nominally a boss.
Jeff:
Maybe they’re a sort of small business, but they would like to employ somebody who goes out and gets business for them. Or maybe they’re a sales manager, or maybe they’re a managing director or whatever they do. And we talked about a lot when we started this about it’s about moving people, moving people from one place to another. Now, a very famous and scintillating and exciting sales expert who’s me, wrote a book called The Way of the Dog.
Jeff:
Now The Way of the Dog with the maddest book I’ve ever written. I don’t know if I’ve got a copy anywhere. Um, but anyway, it was about this guy, uh, about this guy that’s such a rubbish salesman that he’s trying to sell double glazing, and he blames the customers. It’s all the customer’s fault that they won’t buy this stuff. And he is rubbish.
Jeff:
And he tries to sell double glazing to a strange little old lady who lives in a gingerbread house in the woods, fatal mistake. Um, he noticed some children are eating the roof, um, and points this out to the old lady, not realizing who she is. He says, there’s some kids eating your roof. And she said, I blame the parents. You know. Anyway, she’s so exasperated with his crap selling that she turns him into a dog, right?
Jeff:
So he goes to work as a sheep dog, and this is where he learns how to handle customers. And, and this objective thing, he works with a great sales manager who happens to be a brilliant sheet dog called She, who lets him loose on the sheep to see how he does. And the first thing he does is like, oh, crap salesman. He rushes at the sheep barking.
Jeff:
You know, Hey, you know, like these people that dive out from a, amongst the yer plants in car showrooms, you know, the first and what do the sheep do? They run off. You know, so you, you watch a real sheep dog. And, and, and the shepherd who, who’s going War boy, war boy whoop boy. And the dog goes shut up a minute, right? And he sits on this hillside and sees the situation. He sees where the sheep are, he sees the obstacles, the prickly hedge, the stream, the wood, and then the pen is where they’ve got to be.
Jeff:
Now, anybody who’s listening to this, who would like to make their business work, what I love is, ’cause I’m a miserable git, is I wanna set aside anything about personality, anything about, uh, luck, um, scintillating, whatever it is. You know what? I want to give a simple roadmap to making success inevitable. Now, the thing that fascinates me about a sheep dog is he doesn’t look at those sheep in that field, go, oh my God. Come back to the shepherd and say, can I have some easier sheep ?
Jeff:
You know, the sheep are where the sheep are. The customer is where the customer is. And if you’re starting a new business, the customer is doing business with somebody else today. You know, unless you’ve got a totally new product like levitating boots or something on the whole, you will be going in making an offer of something they’ve already got or using and are using from somebody else. You can’t say, well, it’s useless.
Jeff:
They’re already buying levitated boots. They’ve all got no, you know, the sheep are where the sheep are. Where do you want them to be? I want them to be in the pen. So what are the obstacles? Well, the obstacles are, they don’t like our price. The obstacle is the prickly hedge of doing business. We’re quite happy with the people we use at the moment. Thank you. That is, that is a stream.
Jeff:
We’ve got to get these sheik through. If we rush it and bark in, all they’re gonna do is run off. So we have to steer them gently. And you know, here’s the thing with the sheep dog. You can watch, uh, one man and his dog, and the winner is the dog that does it the quickest with the least number of sheep running off. But they all succeed in the end. None of those sheep dog go, sod this. I couldn’t get the sheep anywhere near the bloody pen.
Jeff:
I’m going home. You know, it’s an inevitable outcome because dogs are quite, this is gonna annoy a lot of people. Dogs are a little bit thick. Their, their mentality is simple. They’re either happy or they’re waiting to happy. They’re waiting to be happy. They have no fear of death. They have no fear of the future. They have no fear of anything else.
Jeff:
They live their life as it goes. And if they’re given this simple task of moving sheep from one place to another, they don’t question it. They don’t complain at the height or size of the obstacles. They just work at it until the job’s done. But we as humans give up, ’cause we’ve got the intelligence to give up. Somebody said to me once, how come really, really, really rich people get to be really, really rich? Can I do it? And I always say, you really want to have 70% of your brain removed, really? Because some of these, a shark is a prime example.
Jeff:
A shark. If you want to take on a shark on, uh, macrame or political discourse or the psychology of, you know, the psychology of groups of people, the shark will lose every single time. The shark hasn’t got a hope. You’ll beat it, fall in the sea and try and take one at swimming, swimming fast than eating that. You are not gonna beat one doing that. ’cause that’s all it ever does.
Jeff:
And well, some rich people wake up in the morning and maybe they got rich selling pizzas. They wake up, the alarm goes and they go make pizzas, sell pizzas. And you say, Hey, do you want to, do you wanna go and listen to this wonderful concert? No, I’m making pizzas. You know, their, their focus is a hundred percent miserable life. Don’t bother getting rich, it’s a waste of time. But if you wanna do it, you have to focus.
Nathan Simmonds:
Um, for me, when you’re talking about that, I was brought back to an analogy of the greyhounds, and they’re running the greyhound route race. But the truth is, you know, the, the rabbit goes out the track, the greyhounds go hell for leather down the track. Do they ever catch the rabbit ? No. But do they have a bloody good time on the way down the track with their mates? ’cause they’re just ’cause they’re enjoying the run. Absolutely. They enjoy the process, but truth is they never actually win, but they’re too busy having a good time to notice
Jeff:
It’s another
Nathan Simmonds:
Dog.
Jeff:
But here’s another thing about greyhounds. Um, when they go over that line, one of them wins. Yep. Then there’s a thousand quid prize for the winning dog. The second prize gets 500 quid third prize, 250 quid, and the fourth dog gets nothing. You know? And then when you look at the, if you look at the, the photo finish, the dog that actually managed to puff his nose, so his nostril stuck out a quarter of an inch. He’s earning twice as much as the dog behind. Yep. You know, and it’s the same with our business. You know, it, you don’t have to be a thousand times better than your competitors. You just have to be better. Sometimes
Nathan Simmonds:
You just have to be a thousand for a second faster.
Jeff:
That’s all. You see some crap businesses using cry. How are they making money? It’s ’cause they’re less crap than their competitors. That’s all, you know. That’s all you need to be. I used to ride horses a lot. Dangerous lunatic things that they are, it’s my wife’s fault. She said, come on fatty, we’re gonna go riding and horses race not to win horses, race not to lose because they are a prey animal. They get eaten by tigers. So the horses are running and one horse is going bloody hell. There’s a tiger chasing us, Barry. And he goes, no, I know. That’s why I’m running. And he goes, and that it makes us, well, you’ll never outrun the tiger. And he says, no, but I’ll outrun you.
Nathan Simmonds:
Yes. But he, he almost, it is like you say with the shark though, is, is almost having to shift your mindset from being prey to kind of almost being predator and, and finding the right balance between the running distance and the striking distance.
Jeff:
Yeah. And, and realizing that you need to be focused. Now, this is why we’ve been talking about questions, right. And the old chestnut is, um, shut up and sell. You must have heard that, you know, God gave us two ears and one mouth shut up and sell. However, just like this, stay at home, save the NHS business that’s going on. It’s got into people’s heads and that it’s gonna be awfully hard to get outta people’s heads.
Jeff:
And I used to train salespeople and say, shut up. And so, so they would sit there and shut up . So they just sit there and I, and I, I’ve never been able to puzzle this out. You know what, shut up and sell, but don’t sort of shut up completely. You I know. And I, I had this cat, a beautiful big fat cat, vicious brute that he was, but he was big and ginger, unfortunately, he’s, he’s no longer with us.
Jeff:
He is joined the choir invisible. But when we had him, if you took the bin out, you know, the plastic bag out, the pedal bin, there’s this horrible sort of rotting jelly sort of sludge at the bottom. And if you didn’t watch out, this cat got in there, Annette, that sort of slime dripping off his chin. Oh my God. And then on a winter’s evening, you’d sit in your chair and this big ginger cat would come and snuggle under a radiator.
Jeff:
And he looked like one of those pajama cases, not a bone in his body. It’s like he’d melted. It’s like he’d melted. And the, as the radiator warm warmed up, he wa the little chemical factory that was his insides started to produce the stinkiest farts you’ve ever smelled silent hissing flatulence. And you’d sit there thinking, poor Christ, is there something? And you’d look and there’d be this cat specific smile on his face.
Jeff:
Soft. Now if I photographed that cat and said, what do you think that is? Then you’d say, that’s a cat doing nothing. Right? Yeah, you’re right. It’s a cat doing nothing. Then one day I saw him watching a bird in the garden and you’ve never seen anything like it. He is not, he is not a pajama case anymore. He is a, he is a coiled spring of rippling muscle. You know, he’s a killing machine. And he’s sitting there and he, he’s tasting in the air, oh, come on.
Jeff:
Oh, Dicky bird, just another inch closer, just another inch closer, you know, and the eyes are on fire. If I photograph that and say, what’s that? Then you’d say, well, that’s a cat doing nothing. I’d ag on. You said the first picture was a cat doing nothing. Yeah. But yeah. And that is active listening. When you listen to a customer, you are not the farting cat.
Jeff:
I went into a a, a stores the other day and I talked to a person who was just vacant. I said, you know, these, is this a left hand thread or a right hand thread who are, and I realized I’m talking to a farting cat, you know, but that it’s this look. Yeah. Nodding, nodding, smiling. Yeah. Okay. Really? And you want to ah, I see. Hold on, hold. Let me just make a, a note of that. So, okay. Yeah. Ah-Huh, Uhhuh you’re not, you are not talking the ass off the customer, but you are not a vacant boneless lump either.
Jeff:
You’ve gotta have this thing of this wild animal watching its prey, basically. You’ve gotta be ready. Yeah. And, and that takes a lot of mental discipline because what we tend to do is when somebody’s talking to us, what we’re doing is not listening at all. We’re just thinking about what we wanna say next.
Nathan Simmonds:
And I’m gonna interject at that point, eev my question for everyone that’s listening to this now, listening, Jeff, what is it you are taking away from this? And actually, what is it as the coiled spring? What is it as the shark that is ready to know, is ready to do what it needs to do in that water, the cat ready to take the bird? What is it you need to be thinking about that’s gonna enable you to be in that state? What question do you, can you ask or need to ask in order for you to make that happen? Whatever that kill is something. I love the sheep dog analogy about the wrong sheep. Absolutely.
Jeff:
Yeah. So
Nathan Simmonds:
I’m getting into people’s thinking because what Jeff’s talking about is from number one, what is the objective? Is having the objective in the conversation. Now what have I learned from the individual? Is it a left or is it a right hand thread? Okay, what now what are you actually using this one? Okay, what else have I learned to use Now what have I learned to use elsewhere so that you can become the coiled spring and seize all the opportunity that you need to get upon.
Nathan Simmonds:
So what is it you need to be doing that is gonna be helping you to think that way? One thing I wanted to come back to about that active listening is, one of the things you talked mentioned earlier was gathering information and gathering intel. Go back to the manager, because we talked about a bit about this earlier. What is the responsibility of the sales manager, though?
Jeff:
Well now, uh, I, I used to do this thing. I used to say it’s to that, that any manager, not just to sales manager, any boss’s job is to catch people doing things right. Um, and I could do a whole 20 minutes on that. Um, but I won’t on this occasion. I don’t think, um, that, that, that requires a story called the crapping dog. And I think we’ve had enough trouble with animals in their indigestion.
Jeff:
So the first, the first, the the first job, and it’s, it’s to go back to what we started with on this is objective or task. Let’s call it a task. Even, even if you, even if you run a coffee shop and you’ve got a Saturday kid, you know, if you, if you just say to them, oh, go and sweep up Barry. Go and tidy the stock room. That is not enough.
Jeff:
If you have to have a clear, if you’re sending your sales team out, or if you are telling Barry the Saturday kid, or if you are, whatever you are doing, you have to set down clearly what it is you want the task to be. Now that is not as simple as it sounds because A, there’s nothing more dispiriting to anybody to be given a task that they can’t do. So, so, you know, as a, as an early sales guy, I was given a pile of names and a phone and told to make appointments.
Jeff:
That is depressing. ’cause I couldn’t make any appointments. I was told to sort off, I was told this, that and the other. Nobody told me that, you know, make 10 phone calls, you’ll make one appointment. Don’t worry, Jeff. This is the way, you know, the task wasn’t agreed. So, so the the objective or task, you need to sit down with that person, you need to assess what they’re capable of. You need to make sure. Yeah. And again, the same with customers too.
Jeff:
The Americans have got a dreadful expression, but it, it means something very valuable. They called, you’ve gotta build an off ramp. You gotta build an off ramp. And what that means is you don’t just say, if you wanna get to Sheffield, you just wanna go on the M six and stay on it till you get there. It’s not precise enough. It doesn’t hold the person’s hand. Yeah.
Jeff:
You know, a a again, I think somebody at Harvard didn’t experiment, um, saying students, students, uh, need to give five bucks to charity. You know, and, and they, they had a look and certain personalities gave and certain personalities didn’t. And then, then they took a set, a similar group of students and said, they, they gave a background of the charity. They said, we will be visiting you at 3:00 PM in your rooms. Please have your $5 ready.
Jeff:
Um, in the envelope provided, and this, this, this, it was a list of precise instructions and the giving went up by like 300% or something. So if you make it clear to people every step of the way, you know, like a recipe or whatever it is, or, or a task or the objective needs to be agreed. And then the steps to it need to be agreed as well. The next, the next step for somebody who’s managing somebody is to give them the tools to achieve it.
Jeff:
So I mean, are you sending people into battle without any weapons? Are you sending your salespeople without the correct, uh, presenter folders are they have, do they have up to date leaflets? You know, I, I’ve seen expensive companies send out people with leaflets and brochures with a sticker on them because the address has changed. ’cause somebody, the boss, I can’t be asked to reprint and own a new leaflets.
Jeff:
Shonky isn’t the word to describe it, you know, again, you know, if you want people to look professional, if you want people to look professional, you have to give them the tools to do that. One of the tools may be the information. The other thing that they say or that, that is to remove obstacles. You are the boss. You own the business. Nobody can remove obstacles for their people more efficiently than the actual owner.
Jeff:
You know, if you’ve got a restaurant and, and you know, the, you can see one of your staff having a struggle, you introduce yourself to the customer as the owner and say, oh, I’m sung. So glad you could join us. I’m Jeff, I’m the owner of, of Noosh NA’s hours, you know, and I’m, uh, hope you are enjoying your evening. Is there anything I can do it. It’s incredible.
Jeff:
It’s magic Spell the owner of a company has more clout than anybody. Years ago I worked with this guy who, who’s, uh, he was my boss. I was like, only a kid. Uh, I, and, uh, but he was the, he was the chief executive of a big company employed me. Um, but he belonged to a weird religion, really weird religion. And it, and it’s rules were, you can never tell lies. Anger is the work. If you’re, if you are angry, then you’ve been possessed by the devil.
Jeff:
They, they actually believed that and that you were a servant to all. So, so first of all, he wasn’t allowed to tell fibs. He wasn’t allowed to shout at me , which was amazing. I’ve never had a boss that couldn’t before. And, um, and he made himself accessible. And I’m, I mean, let’s imagine, I, I don’t want to say who they are, said, well, let’s imagine they made buckets.
Jeff:
And I’d talk to a customer and I’d show in the buckets and the customer say, I like the buckets. What colors do you do? Blue, red, green, whatever. Uh, we really liked them in our company colors. Can you do that? How many would you? Well, 50,000. I’m not sure we can, but I knew that I could, it was before mobile phones. I could say, can I just ring my boss? Sam Martin.
Jeff:
Sam Martin Higgins, you know, he’s the chief executive chairman and of, of Martin Containers Global, whatever it was. And he would pick the phone up. Hello? I’d say, oh, hello. It’s, it’s Jeff, but Oh yes, I know you Jeff. Hello. You’re one of our sales champions, aren’t you? Yeah, because he knew them all. And Charlie, well, well, what can I do? I’m with a customer he wants to talk to us about.
Jeff:
Oh, well, would you like me to have a chat? Hello, it’s Sam Martin here. How did jolly nice here. And how’s Jeff getting off? Well, very well. We just wanted to know if we could have buckets in the company go. Oh, absolutely. We’d been delighted to do that for you. And he just pop Jeff back. Just, just go pop Jeff back on the phone and I’d get him to take all your details. And we’re, and he’ll send us a sample of the color. We’d be delighted to do that. Charming. I didn’t have to do any work.
Jeff:
I mean, I just didn’t have to do any work. I mean, the, the fact that the, that the boss would intercede to remove obstacles and things. You know, this, you, and again, uh, if you don’t empower or enable your people, it just weakens them. Excuse me. I just wonder if I could have my chips on a separate plate. I’d have to ask. I’ll have to ask an example of that. So, sorry, go on. Um,
Nathan Simmonds:
Um, and for me, that brings up that psychological safety because, you know, as a leader, as a sales manager, as a business, if your people feel that you are there to help remove those obstacles, they will go and remove more obstacles for your clients and make more people clients rather than feeling that friction and tension. And because that, that stuff’s contagious.
Jeff:
Yeah. Well, if you take my sheep dog analogy again, the, the, the chief executive is the shepherd, and he is quite happy to let the dog go. I mean, the, the dog scoops up these sheep and they threw the prickly edge and they get this, that and the other at the last minute, which is the most important bit. The shepherd is holding the gate open on the pen. You know, you’ve seen him do it. He is there, you know, the gate opener is the shepherd.
Jeff:
And, and if we’ve got our flock of salespeople, we should be the shepherd that opens that gate and holds it while the, while they go in. I mean, imagine the dog coming back saying, oh, how’d you get on? Ah, fantastic. I got the, I got the sheep, got them moving. They weren’t frightened. They trusted me. We got them through the prickly edge of, you know, we got ’em across the stream through the trees. I got ’em to the gate of the pen. So you’ve got them in the pen. Uh, no, but they were very interested in it. . But,
Nathan Simmonds:
But, but leading on from that is, you know, the shepherds there with the gate open and, you know, enabling, removing the obstacle. But at the same time, he’s got a pocket full of dog treats in the nicest possible way.
Jeff:
The third step, the salesperson, is they’ve got to agree the task and the objectives. They’ve got to remove the obstacles and give the correct tools. And their third job is to say thank you, thank you to the, it, it’s, it’s unbelievably beneficial to work with somebody who’s rewarding catch people doing things right. And again, again, I, this is a very controversial thing, but I, I would base my reward structure of my people to their ability.
Jeff:
If I’m trying to train an unruly pup that poos everywhere and bites people, I would reward him just for not biting, but my best dog shack, if he lets one sheep runaway, I’m cross with him. That’s not, he’s too good for that. You know, I’m, he’s too good to let that happen. But if I start kicking the pup, because he, he failed. But you can’t expect that. You know, I know the pup’s got it good in him. I know, I know that he know his parents. I know that it’s Shep and Lucy, my two best dogs potential.
Jeff:
But you are just despirit him. If you kick him every time that he may, he, he has an accident. And the other dogs shouldn’t turn around and say, hang on, this isn’t fair. The puck gets all the never gets told of, and he will. But we need to stage him towards, towards doing that. We, we need to ease people into having great behavior. And, and before you, you intercede. I, you know, you know, I hate motivational phrases.
Jeff:
If you want a soar with the egos, don’t hang around with the turkeys. You know, that one , I saw a bum, I saw a saying that was more worrying than that. Somebody said, you want me to be an an e? You want me to be an eagle? How can I be an eagle when I work with turkeys? You see that? And that was a sales manager who said that, how can I be an eagle when I work with turkeys?
Jeff:
And I thought, hang on mate. You, you’ve employed them. You know, if, if you are gonna employ, it’s like the, the, the Irishman. Every day, every day he would open on a building site, he would open his sandwiches and say, um, oh, cheese again, I ate cheese. And he’d throw ’em away. And then he’d open them the next day and say, oh, cheese, I ate cheese and throw ’em away. And on the third day, he just threw the packet of sandwiches away without opening them. And his mate said to him, why didn’t you, why did you do that cheese? And he said, well, how did you know they were cheese? You didn’t unwrap. And he said, I made them
Jeff:
And it’s, and it’s the same with people. You know, you, you’d think that the people you’re working with a bunch of idiots who gave them the job. You know, what, what, what, what are you doing recruiting them? You know? And if, and if, if you say, well, I recruit them to a certain standard, then if you can’t bring them up to perform for you by, by, by acting in the correct manner, then it’s not the fault it’s yours.
Nathan Simmonds:
Absolutely. And you know, it is the moment that you judge someone, you cannot influence them. The moment I think someone’s an idiot, I treat them like an idiot. Therefore they can’t, they can’t exceed my expectation ’cause I’m too busy pressing them down into that box.
Jeff:
Could you tell Mrs. Birch that
Nathan Simmonds:
Yeah. You two have been together long enough. I’m, I’m, I don’t think I can change that one for you.
Jeff:
She’s, yeah, she’s convinced I’m an idiot. You know, behind every successful man is a very surprised woman. They say
Nathan Simmonds:
But this, this element of thank you. And this is something that I teach, we teach when we’re doing feedback in the nicest possible way. I could stand at the doors of, you know, the factory of, you know, acme shoehorn makers or whatever. And I could shake everyone’s hand as they walk out. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. But by the time that they all 1600 people have got to the car, they have no idea who I am.
Nathan Simmonds:
They couldn’t care less. And then for me, it’s that specificity, you know, like say, catch them getting it right when you give that thanks for me is be really specific. This is what I saw you do today. It was phenomenal. Please keep doing that tomorrow. And they’re more likely to come back tomorrow and do it again, which makes their job easier and your life easier as a sales manager.
Jeff:
A hundred percent. Absolutely. And and again, it’s the same with this, this goal setting. Sometimes this business is setting an unachievable goal. It’s like swimming after a Lilo bed, it’ll drown you in the end. You’ll never catch it. And then you just give up and sink. Yep. And, and again, you, you get this dispirited workforces that just give up and sink. You need to show people they can do things. Agreed. That, that’s absolutely vital. I mean, again, for another, another session on another day I’ll do my basketball story, but we’ll leave that. It’s long complicated and very weird. And, but it’s about catching people doing things right
Nathan Simmonds:
And this is valuable. So quick, rundown, conscious time, please. Any questions that you’ve got right now, please put them in the question box as we’re just doing a recap now, any questions? Fire them in. What are your top takeaways? What questions have you got? Let’s bring them. And like I say it is, is about catching people getting it right. Look, you know, give them the specifics about what to do so you know where they’re going and they know where they’re going.
Nathan Simmonds:
Give them the tools to do it and remove the obstacles. And then thank them specifically for taking advantage of the obstacle being removed and actually achieving the objective along the way. Ah, here’s a good question. How better, how do I better ask? What budget do you have?
Jeff:
I don’t know. I I kind of like that one. What budget do you have? I mean, that’s, that, that is actually something that I, that that, that’s something that I regularly do really because I, I I, I like to know obviously, uh, I’ll put the, the only thing with that is that they, it does invite the customer to tell fibs, you know, that they will always, they will always undershoot, I would think, on the budget. So, so I think it’s not so much asking people what budget they’ve got is you’ve got to get them excited and desirous of the product to then say, you know, again, it’s a, it’s, it’s interesting.
Jeff:
It, it’s, it’s analyzing what people say. So you, you, you present a price to them and they go, well, that’s too expensive. We tend to then think that they want to pay less. But actually that might not mean that at all. We need to investigate their comment. So you sell too expensive? I’m sorry? How, how do you mean too expensive or, you know, I I, I do tend to, people say, Jeff, we’d love you to speak at our conference and I I I, you know, how much do you charge?
Jeff:
And I do tend to say, well, do you, do you have a budget for that? And then when they tell me, we either go, yeah, well we can work within that, or, or we, we, we try and work them up to be able to afford us. But I do like to know, I do like sort of base figures of what people are thinking of. But, but do you remember yesterday we talked about the past, didn’t we? Yes. And again, I think you can do that with budget.
Jeff:
How, how much have you been spending on this up until now? What, what was, what did you pay the last time you had this done? So you can, without scaring the customer off or forcing them to give a budget and also actually provoking them into telling fibs if they tell you. Well, uh, the last, you know, we had, uh, we had Dick Perkins at our conference last year.
Jeff:
Oh, he is brilliant. I like him. Never dissed the competition even though I’m thinking he’s a pillar. Um, oh, brilliant. He is good. He is funny, isn’t he? Um, um, have you any idea what fee he charged? Oh yeah, yeah. We paid him 12 grand. And you think, oh, that’s interesting. ’cause I would, I would’ve been half that. But like if they, if they, they paid a
Jeff:
2 grand and then say, is that the sort of, would you be spending the same this year? And they go, no, no, no, no. We just, we we contacted you ’cause we urged you were cheap. You know, so, so we know where we are going with this now. So, so this, that, that’s how you would do it.
Nathan Simmonds:
And for me, as you were saying, I was thinking and asking the question, okay, well what have you spent previously? What was the result you got last time that’s causing you to look for somebody else to do this? ’cause maybe the result wasn’t what they wanted or they were expecting to get.
Jeff:
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And did you, did you actually, was it good? ’cause if they said no, absolutely brilliant. We absolutely loved the Watkins hedge trimmers. They were fantastic, but they’ve gone out of business. So you’re looking for something similar. Oh yeah. If we could get exactly the same again, that would be fantastic. You know, ’cause sometimes what we do is we oversell our product. Here’s a, here’s a really interesting thing.
Jeff:
What I used to do, I used to get a flip chart and I used to say the Thunderbolt 5,000 risk watch, it is digital batteries last for three years. It does pulse time will link to your phone is waterproofed to 25,000 feet. Um, is digital and analog, uh, has four alarm chimes, uh, timer speed timer, egg timer and musical birthday reminder. All this four. And I used to say to mys name, the price Go on how much?
Nathan Simmonds:
20 quid.
Jeff:
Exactly. 1999 every single time. And then I’m making these names up, by the way, you have a glossy page in the same magazine with a single clockwork watch that does bugger all. And it says timepiece created by yours for 3000 quid, 8,000 quid does sort all and it’s clockwork, you know, and I call that feature dumping. The more features you give, the lower your prices. Oh, and we deliver, oh, and it’s the same, does the same hedge cut in, but it comes with a T making device and it does it and it does this and it does that and it’s cheaper than your last one.
Jeff:
That’s what the customer’s now expecting to hear. You know, it’s not created again. Another thing that drives me nuts is people showing how strong I, I was watching, I was working with some guys selling office equipment and one of their salesmen used to kick the filing cabinets to show how strong they were.
Jeff:
And look at this. They’re made out the same metal. They build tanks, bang, bang, bang, bang. And the customer winced every time he did it. And he’s saying, well, I shown how strong they are. And I said, that’s first of all, who wants a strong filing cabinet. I don’t don’t want my filing cabinet to take armor piercing shells. And secondly, if you handle, if he’d put on white cotton gloves and slid the drawer out, glided it out and touched it, like he loved it.
Jeff:
You know, I, I used to watch a salesman in a garden center, a saleswoman. It was a woman and she didn’t do it consciously, but when she was holding a potluck, she stroke it like it was an animal. And she sold more plants than anybody in the place because she, she was adding value at the way she handled and respected her product.
Nathan Simmonds:
Agreed. And it’s the same with our people. It’s the same with our people because they’re the ones that are potentially selling the product. Um, yeah. And showing them that care to create that psychological safety where they feel loved and cherished and they will love and cherish the client at the other end.
Jeff:
I always think that with the High street, everybody on the high street earns to same money. They’re all on this kind of minimum wage. But you go to the pound shop at one end of this high street and you go to, you go to the sort of French fashion shop at the other, and the staff are different. Why? Why have they got different personalities when they’re all earning the same money?
Jeff:
One lot walk around like they’re royalty and the other walk around scratching their bottoms and you can work out which one I’m talking about. So why it, it must be the culture. Um, another thing, people don’t manage their cultures. They don’t even know what their culture is. They don’t manage it. They don’t build on their reputation or the anything. They don’t know that they’ve got a culture, let alone manage it.
Nathan Simmonds:
And that we’re gonna save for another day because right now we are about 12 minutes over time, Jeff. So look, um, got a comment at the bottom. Be the shepherd who opens the gate. Absolutely. This is, you know, if you’re gonna be a, a leader, a salesperson, it’s about removing the object. Um, your obstacles. Make sure your people know where they’re going. Remove the obstacle and then going, you know, support people getting it right by telling ’em theyve got it right and thanking them for it. Jeff’s looking for his dog walking book.
Jeff:
Yeah, I can’t find it. I’ll find it for tomorrow. I promise. on the cover of the book is a dog herding sheep. It’s called, by the way, if you wanna get it on Audible, it’s actually me reading it. It’s very funny then. Um, but the Russian is a huge bestseller in Russia and I didn’t understand why. And then when I looked at the Russian version, the dogs are wearing, the, the sheep are wearing suspender belts and the dogs got like a satin smoking jacket on. I thought what I book and they think they’re buying.
Nathan Simmonds:
I thought it was ’cause they were still wearing one man and his dog. ’cause we stopped that in 1986. ,
Jeff:
I’m not making any, I’m not making any difficult jokes, I promise
Nathan Simmonds:
Right everybody, thank you very much for today illuminating. Appreciate it. Jeff. If you haven’t already signed up tomorrow, the link is in the chat box, please go and sign up and we will see you here tomorrow. Jeff, thank you very much. Really appreciate it.
Jeff:
It’s a pleasure.
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