2 Simple Tips to Help Sellers Conduct More Effective Sales Calls: Start and End the Meeting Well!

Hello sales leaders, Mike Weinberg here for the sales management simplified podcast. Welcome back if you're a regular. If you're new, my treat and honor to have you here. My passion is helping sales teams win more new sales. And I do that two ways. One, I work directly with sales teams. In fact, if I didn't write the book, new sales simplified, nobody would know my name and this show wouldn't exist. But this shows for sales leaders because we're the key sales leaders, whether you're the frontline sales manager or all the way up to the chief sales officer or CRO or whatever you want to call it in your organization. If you're in sales leadership, you're the key. You're the key to driving culture. You're the key to driving results. And that's why several years ago, I really changed the focus of my business where probably three quarters of my time is spent with sales leaders because when we get that stuff right, accountability, coaching, culture, cup, team meetings, smart talent management, when we get that stuff right, there's a multiplier effect. So that's why my latest book, the first time I manage your sales, this podcast, our events in Atlanta, the supercharge, your sales leadership events, all of them are for people in sales management or sales executives. So that's what I've spent in my focus. Great to have you here. Yes, it's been a few weeks. A lot of March madness, a lot of travel for me. Obviously, we've been watching a lot of basketball and can I just pause and celebrate Purdue after I threw a little shade and doubt in a previous episode. The second half of the season for Purdue was disappointing to say the least, but oh my gosh, did they rally in the Big Ten tournament when in four straight games and becoming conference champs, beating Michigan at a big upset and then coming into the big dance, March madness as a number two seed, quite a run, making it all the way to the Elite Eight. So we were really, really thrilled. Now it's a sad time with those three seniors, Braden Smith, Fletcher lawyer and Trey Kaufman rent. I got to meet by the way in the hallway when they were here in St. Louis, which was just a fun little thing. They're all gone. So big rebuilding coming from Purdue, but what a fun and to March madness. In terms of just a personal update, I can tell you that this little social media break that I've been on for the past almost two months has been exactly what I hoped, life giving, the freedom I feel and I'm finally over the FOMO like I'm missing out on what someone's saying or joining an argument on LinkedIn about sales theory or maybe I'm getting mentioned somewhere and I'm not jumping into say thank you or oh my gosh, what a relief to get away from the burden of the nonsense, the cesspool that I often joke that LinkedIn is and all the spam messages. I went on truly like one time to promote the last podcast episode, which by the way, if you missed go back and listen how I interviewed and pulled a lot of stuff out of Stephen Rosen as he so painfully and clearly pinpointed one of the biggest issues in sales management, the lack of focus and how to overcome it. It was really that his book truly took my breath away and caused chest pains because it was so realistic and on target in terms of the struggle of being a sales manager. And if you missed it, just go back and listen to the first five minutes of the previous episode. And I share my take on the book. I read a segment from the forward that I provided for him because I really wanted to help promote that book. It's that good people need to read it. And then I read just a couple paragraphs from his introduction, the part that really stopped me in my track. So I would challenge you to do that. And then the last thing I'll say before I get into the meat of this episode is that next week, probably about when this episode is being released, I will actually be at my happy place, the Porsche Experience Center in Atlanta, adjacent to the Atlanta airport, which is one of the cool reasons we do it there because almost every one of the world can get there on one direct flight. And it looks like, I don't want to talk about our government for about 74 reasons, but it looks like they're going to be paying TSA agents again. My goodness, that's a whole conversation in and of itself. And the airport should be slightly cleaned up by next week. But I cannot wait. So one of the largest groups we've ever had a 10 week, we always say we hold it to 50 and then we usually, I know about 55 people there, just because of the way the groups work out. We don't want to say no. And, you know, someone's trying to add an extra person to the group. So it's one of the largest groups, but we have people coming in huge contingent from Canada, three different companies from our neighborhood of the North setting a group. I've got a gentleman coming in from Guatemala and we've got a handful of folks flying in from the UK. And I always try to have dinner, host the dinner of the evening of the event with the folks coming from overseas just as a little extra thank you. And I'd love to spend more time with folks from around the world because you learn a lot when you do that. So I can't wait. If you haven't heard, if you're new here, the supercharge your sales leadership event is something we do probably three to four times a year. And the next one that has seats available is in October, on October 7th and 8th. October 7th is the full day intensive. It's a workshop. People start arriving at 730 in the morning. We start at 8 o'clock sharp and we go all the way until 515 when we break for a cocktail hour in our derf. Now during the day, there's incredible catered snacks and a very high end lunch. The venue is beautiful. It's porous. This North American headquarters. It overlooks two different performance tracks where people get hot laps rides with professional drivers. Packed agenda, packed, packed agenda, premium venue. And honestly, the best part of the whole day is not me and it's not my content. It's the interaction in the room when you're surrounded by 50 sales leader colleagues hungry, share their struggles, share their successes, best practices. Sometimes the interaction in the room, I just let it go because we're covering such relevant topics. If one of them is saying intrigues you and you could use a day in a room with other sales leaders tackling big sales management topics. You've got to do great accountability. How to be smart about talent management and get more out of your best people. How to make sure you've got the right people in the right roles like hunter, hunting and farmers farming and zookeeper, zookeeping. How do you address underperformance quickly and without being a total jerk, but to deal with the truth and confront it? Because when you ignore it, that sales manager, malpractice. Are you pointing the team the right direction, making sure everyone that works for you has got a strategic finite list of either growable accounts and or ideal profile prospects. And that their calendar is filled up chasing and proactively pursuing those names, strategic accounts. That's the first step for a successful sales initiative. We look at team meetings and how to run the kind of sales team meeting that actually energizes and equips your sales people and I give some very practical tips and we work through good agenda topics. We talk about why sales people get commoditized and downgraded to vendor status. And I use that as a setup to throw some guilt in the room about why we have to do a better job and we need to do more coaching of our people and sometimes coaching just means working alongside and watching. So if what I just shared in the last minute, outlining the agenda and the topics and talking about this incredible venue, if that energizes you, go to mikewineberg.com/Atlanta2026 and just check out, read the page, watch the video, you can hit the contact button. If you're bringing a group, we do packages and discounts, but about half the people in the room come by themselves. So I just invite you to Atlanta, my happy place, the Porsche Experience Center. Okay, friends, today's topic I hope was appropriately teased in the title and you can read in the show notes is a big one. We're going to talk about sales calls and I'm not going to do a full unpacking of all the phases of what a good consultative or consultative people like to say that two different ways and I'm never sure which way to pronounce it. Not a good early stage sales call looks like. I'm perpetually and I mean perpetually confused and frustrated and in the old days, you know, back a decade ago when I did more field work as a consultant. I would do longer term engagements and I had smaller clients and I would go get in the car or the airplane with salespeople and watch them work and let that inform and guide my training. And I've been on a few thousand sales calls in my career. In fact, I did the math from one of my books and I did about a thousand sales calls as a seller, the first decade of my career. And then the next decade between being a manager and then a coach and consultant, I did another thousand as the third person in the room watching. And I'll tell you that I'm often impressed with great things I see and I copy and steal those best practices and preach about them. But usually I'm more horrified by the amateurish behavior, the spray and prey approach, show up and throw up, talking first, not having a plan, not owning rules of engagement, too organic. Like I'm all for being in the moment, but I like to argue that a sales call has a distinct number of phases or stages, kind of like a flight. I get on a lot of airplanes and I like when the flight goes in the right order, right? We taxi and then we take the runway and we accelerate and then the pilot rotates the plane. He pulls the nose off the ground and it flies and climbs. And he gets to altitude he cruises and then descends and then lands and then taxis. And I could make the case a really good sales call has a similar number of stages and the sales calls. If you listen from overseas, we in the States use the term sales call in a very broad generic sense. When we say sales call, we typically mean a prospect or a customer meeting typically in person, at least in the old days, it was in person today. Obviously, there are many more meetings taking place virtually, but it's a meeting. It's not necessarily a telephone call because we're calling it a sales call. So when I'm with my friends, particularly from Europe, I change the language to a customer or prospect meeting, but I'm going to use. the big broad generic sales call term as I go through this. There's a lot of phases and I'll run through the Mike Weinberg sales call here just for a second. And then I'm going to pick two segments of it that I want to focus on today. And I'm poking my finger at you in your chest sales leader and saying, Hey, are you confident your people are doing these parts of a meeting well? And I'll say this and I don't know if the word's facetious or obnoxious or sarcastic. But let me just say it. The job is it's titled sales. So the person's job is to sell. They're a sales person. It's in the name of the role sales person. The one freaking thing they should be able to do well like a professional is conduct a sales call. The job of a sales person is to run good sales calls. And I don't understand what's going on in sales management or with enablement people or sales trainers or whoever where there's entire sales forces running around even in large companies with big budgets where the people are ill equipped to structure and conduct a professional meeting with a prospect or a customer. It is a giant mystery to me. Okay. And here's the reality. Just about everyone who teaches sales calls. Teachers pretty much the same thing. I've read a lot of books. I've got a lot of friends in the sales improvement industry. I'll tell you I have not stolen anyone else's framework. But what I teach is what pretty much everyone else teaches that knows what they're doing because this is what works. We agree on 87% of this outline. I'm about to share with you. Okay. So phase one, you're building rapport. You're getting comfortable. You're getting the prospect comfortable. You're also reading their behavioral style to figure out how you might adapt as you go forward. Phase two, which is one of the pieces I'm going to really focus on in this podcast. I'm not even sure I've done this ever on any of the previous episodes. I cover a lot of times the same ground over and over, but I forget which specifics. But I don't think I've ever really spoken in detail about how important phase two is, which I would argue is sharing your plan, articulating your agenda and getting buy-in from the person you're meeting with in terms of getting their input for what they want to cover and what they want to get out of the meeting. My argument is this is the most undervalued and underappreciated segment of the meeting because if you do this well, it changes everything and I'll talk about that in just a minute. Okay. Phase three is an optional phase. Only with existing customers. And it's what you would do what I call clean up existing issues. If you're meeting with a regular customer and there is some grief, there is some tension, there have been some quality issues, there have been mischipments, there is frustration. You can't sell them anything else until you address the mess that's right in front of you. If there's poop on the floor, "Hey, you're going to step in it and be it smells bad." So clean it up, apologize, figure it out because they can't hear another thing the sales person is going to say until we address whatever the elephant in the room might be. And the next phase, we pivot into what I call the consultant flow. There are three P's. When I'm doing a more advanced workshop or even sometimes a really simplified view of sales calls, I'll just camp out on this consultant flow. It's these three phases that I argue go best in this order. Position, then probe, and then present. And even if it's a long sales cycle, you're not really presenting your solution. There's still some type of selling or suggesting to do some teasing and offer some value and some credibility. So the prospect is interested in then allowing you to secure the next step. So let me go through these real quick, position, probe, present. So so far, we built rapport, we've shared our plan, we've got input from the buyer, we're professionals, we've come to down. And I say, we meaning your sales people. If it's an existing client, we clean up a mess if there is any. And then we're going to take what I would argue is maybe a minute to position, not to sell, not to pitch, not to talk about programs and products in our offerings, but to position what you would argue is using your sales story to talk about your expertise by articulating the issues you address for your customers and the outcomes you help them achieve. So you might start your positioning statement by saying, I'm talking with a lot of CFOs, if you're talking to CFO this meeting, or I'm working, I might say, I'm working with a lot of software service companies and helping their sales leaders who are struggling with A, and they have been challenged to overcome problem B. And they're really hoping to achieve result C. And yet they're facing down the reality of what's going on economically with D. And I'm using my sales story. And if what I just said intrigues you, you need to go to my website and check out our new your sales story, UpGreened Offering, where we've put an AI assist. We just released version two. We had some significant upgrades. If your people don't have good sales messaging and you want some very fast help, I mean, faster and better than I've ever done anything because we built a proprietary AI assist with custom knowledge files built on my coaching transcripts, books, frameworks on how to sharpen your story that give you real-time feedback, instant suggestions. Go to myquindberg.com, click on courses, check out your sales story with AI assist. My team would love to chat with you if this would be something that would be interesting to you. So we are positioning and we're sharing about the issues we address, the problems we solve, what we're hearing, and we do that to build credibility. And then from there, we transition to probing. And I'm not going to even talk about details of probing because that's a whole conversation in and of itself. And honestly, I'm not even an expert here. I talk about different types of questions and macro questions and then macro strategic big picture questions and personal type questions and then specific pain, seeking and opportunity generating questions and obviously buying process questions. There's a broad spectrum of things we need to learn. But I don't see a lot of great probing going on. And there's two extremes. I'll just say this. There's the over-sandler-trained probers that think they're surgeons and all they want to do is dig and cut somebody to death and let them bleed out because we're not going to give them any value. We're just going to torture them with continued discovery until they want to die. Or the other type of discovery is it shallow. It's pathetic. We don't really learn anything. We're so quick to rush to sharing our solution. We skip through it. So probing is a very important phase. And then the next phase is presenting. And what I would always argue is we're going to present based on what we learn during our probing and discovery. It's medical malpractice when you prescribe before doing a diagnosis and in sales it's medical malpractice when you present before doing discovery. And so in the presentation phase, you're showing yourself and it could be going over use cases and success stories. It could be doing a demo. It could be looking at samples. It could just be talking. It could be using marketing material. It could be painting a picture. It could be using a whiteboard. But my one coaching is you're going to tie what you learned in your probing and discovery to what you're talking about. You're not just tossing out generic facts about your company and your solution. And then friends, we get to the end of the sales call. And I'm going to spend some time on this in a few minutes here. How do we end the meeting well? And I would argue this two more phases. One, we need to confirm alignment and flesh out potential objections so we can deal with them. Like we're actually going to go there and try to unearth where there are obstacles that our landmines that we could step on or things that could cause our opportunity to go dark or go quiet. That's a very important part of the meeting. I'll talk about that more in a second. And then finally at the end, the job of a professional seller is to secure and schedule the next step. And way too many salespeople think they're running great sales calls and yet they leave and they don't get the commitment from the prospect or the customer of what the prospect or the customer will do next. And that's why deals go dark or people ghost us because we don't ever get it nailed down and then we're chasing and that's no fun. Okay. So I didn't intend to do that much setup. But I thought, well, let me just run through the phases. I'm not going deep on any of those except the second phase sharing the agenda and then how to conclude the meeting well. And the reason I'm doing this is because during sales kickoff season, I had more engagement with sales teams than I do during the rest of the year where I'm doing mostly sales leadership conversations. I was in front of a lot of producers, of advisors, of sales reps, of account executives, of consultants. I've been in a lot of companies. They all call them different things. But it's the job of selling and a shocking number of people in a wide array of companies were very transparent with me that they were not really up to speed on owning those meetings. They didn't have a plan. They weren't structuring a lot of very fly by night overly organic, unorganized sales calls. So that's why I wanted to bring this up. But in particular, I want to now focus with you. I'm going to take a few minutes here on how valuable and yet underappreciated that second phase once you get through building rapport of actually pausing to set up the meeting to share your agenda and to get input from the person or people sitting in front of you. And I'm going to go to the bottom line. The reason this phase is so important is because it takes the tension out of the room or out of the virtual meeting because it all of a sudden feels like normal people sitting down to have a dialogue about a topic. And there's an understanding that you, the prospect potentially have some issues or challenges or desire outcomes. And we potentially have a solution. that's a fit for it. So it's really important that we set the tone. It also is an opportunity for the salesperson to take control. Without being overly assertive and without being a jerk or unlikable, it's a chance to put your fingerprints on the shape of the meeting and also communicate to the prospect, you're a professional. You know what you're doing? I've been here before. I actually have a plan how this should work and my plan has your best interest at heart and a ton of value accrues to the seller who can set the meeting up well and create come in the room and position themselves as this consultant and expert. And I see this happen a lot with the salesperson's nervous. Like nervous like you'd be on a big stage kind of nervous, even though we're just sitting in a room with potentially a couple people and we get off to this awkward start because rapport building isn't done as well as it could be. And then typically a more assertive person from the customer side will say something like here's what we want to do or show us what you got or can't wait to see your product. Let me see your demo and the salesperson is so quick to comply because they're nervous or they come in and they're already in pitch mode and when the salesperson's in presentation mode, the prospect assumes the posture of acidic and all of a sudden their arms across and they're wondering, oh, I'm gonna get sprayed and prayed here. Like, are they gonna spray it out and pray they hit on something relevant? I'm not even sure I should listen. I don't know how long this is gonna go. I'm not even sure what this salesperson's plan is and on top of that, listen, there's a lot of crappy salespeople that have wasted a lot of time of people who sit in in sales calls with sales reps. So you have to understand that. I say this to salespeople all the time. It may not be your fault, but it definitely is your problem. Other crappy salespeople have poised in the waters. They've wasted time. They've manipulated. They haven't delivered the value that they promised. So buyers, they're weary of having their time wasted and of being abused or not getting value from the conversation. So the antidote for all that is for the salesperson to take control and what could be done in 30 seconds is to position themselves as a professional and come and when you do this well, the tension leaves the room. So I'm gonna share with you verbally my preferred method for doing this. Do you need to use my words? Absolutely not. I'm only sharing this for illustration purposes only. And I have a more formalized version of this. Everything on sales calls is in chapter 11 of New Sales Limit. I got all the phases described that I did it earlier in the episode. And then I actually run through a somewhat formal way of doing what I'm about to do here, a slightly more casually. But it could be a very helpful resource if your people aren't good at setting the tone for the meeting because there's a point in time when you're done with rapport building, when you can tell the buyer, the prospect is ready to move on to business. And it's the salesperson's job to be sensitive and aware of what that looks like. And what I like to do at that point, let's say I'm meeting with some senior VP of a large equipment manufacturer. I've worked my way in there because they've known I've had a lot of experience in large equipment and dealer and distribution networks. And they are trying to upgrade sales management effectiveness across their dealer network. This is a common conversation for me. And so I get in and I have the meeting and a lot of my meetings are virtual. So this is fine if it's virtual. And we're online and we're doing some some chit chat. And eventually I've learned a few things and I can sense more of the style of this person. I've used a cool item or two. I picked up doing some social engineering as a research on this person during my rapport building. So we had some fun dialogue. And now I'm ready to pivot to business. And let's say I'm meeting with a woman named Dana. I'll say, hey, Dana, we initially set this up for 30 minutes. Just want to confirm how are you doing on time because I want to make sure she's not about to get interrupted. And I'm showing some some deference and respect. And typically what my contact with that one is, yeah, I'm good. Thanks for asking. And I'll say something like this. Dana, here's what I was hoping. Give me about a minute here on the front end to paint a picture for you of some of the real big issues and challenges I'm seeing in your space. And some of the major things we're trying to tackle with other senior sales leaders from large manufacturers. And then after I share that with you, I'm going to pivot. I've got a whole bunch of questions about how you're handling the current environment and situation. And then in our, you know, dialogue before the meeting, you mentioned you have got opportunity be. So I got a whole lot of things I'd like to understand better. And then depending on what you share with me, I may be able to recommend a suggestion or two of where I might be able to play or might be able to help you. We can talk through different options, potentially, where I could bring you some value if it's a fit. And then after that together, we can decide what makes sense as a potential next step. And then I pause and I say, Hey, Dana, more importantly, what do you want to get out of this meeting? What do you want to make sure we cover? And friends, I can't begin to tell you what happens psychologically, the dynamic in the room, what a professional salesperson in a calm, conversational way paints that picture and communicates to the prospect. I'm not a jerk. I'm not about to show up and throw up and drown you in 97 slides doing a monologue. Like I'm approaching you like a human. I'm conversational. I'm telling you, here's my plan. So you know where we're going about just jerking you around, you know, like you're being in the back seat of a car. I don't know where you're going. Blindfolded. Here's my plan. It also gives them comfort to know, oh, you're a professional. You're not going to waste your time. It also puts the prospect on notice, hey, this is going to be a dialogue, not a monologue. I'm going to talk for about a minute. And then I've got a set of questions trying to understand more about your situation. So they're like, oh, this is good. This is engaging. And the best part is it puts the rep in control and it comes everybody down. And I just want to challenge you sales leader. Have you observed specifically how the majority of your average sales people, not your great people because they're probably doing it fine, but the majority of your average and underperforming sellers, how effectively are they starting off a meeting? And are they accomplishing the things that I've already articulated? I'm not going to repeat them again for the sake of not being redundant here. But I'm telling you, friends, and I mean this like as your podcast sales guy friend, I'm not seeing this done well. And meetings get off to a really crappy start. And it's very hard for the sales person to recover. And doing that well in the beginning changes the feeling because instead of getting the folded arms and the cynical approach and the critics of a sudden the buyer is like, huh, did I like this? There's a plan. And I'm going to interact. And then the buyers like, oh my gosh, they get the meetings about me. They're asking, what do I want to cover? What do I want to get out of it? And at that point, they start sharing some things. And now your sales person is so elevated in their mind. So that's the early piece of the meeting drives me crazy that it's not done well. Feel free to take this little excerpt and share this little five minutes. I just went through with your team where you could take a look at chapter 11 and new sales simplified. But that's really important. Okay, I'm going to fast forward and skip through all the middle, you know, the meaty midsection of the sales call. And I want to get to the end because not only do I not see them started well, I really see them concluded poorly. So we've gotten through positioning and probing and then presenting some ways we can help. You know, and if you're in a short sales cycle transactional, one call, close type of business, it's very possible. You know, your next step here is to try to get a deal in order. Most of the companies I work with, that is not the case. We're selling for a next step. So the presentation is more vatiser or setup or a beginning look at our solutions. And then we're going to come back and tell or something for some more formal presentation or proposal later. Whatever the case, it doesn't matter in both situations, super short and super long sales cycles. There is a very important job or actually I'll say two jobs at the end of the meeting. One is to confirm alignment and flesh out and deal with objections because the best time to find them is now because those of the landmines will step on later or the obstacles that are going to get in the way that cause someone to go dark on us because we just didn't uncover something and some buyers are too nice or some are too deceitful to actually tell you what they're feeling or thinking. I'm going to give you a very simple technique to share with your salespeople about how to uncover how someone's feeling about what you shared at the end of the sales call. And then the last part is we need to end it well by getting some type of commitment. So let me start with fleshing out the objections. If I like, I'm only going to model for you here how I like to do this. You probably have your own way. That's great. All I care is that the salesperson is making an attempt to confirm alignment and seek out obstacles and objections here. So if I've had a meeting, and let's say I'll go back to my meeting with data, the senior vice president of sales at this large equipment manufacturer who's got a dealer network. And we've had the conversation and I found her paid by asking good questions. And I shared some ways that I've helped similar organizations and we talk through even potential options of things people that she could be getting from me, whether it's cohorts for managers or bring people to one of my events or bring me in for a full day or multi-day workshop or do some type of ongoing thing using the sales management and simplified video coaching series. They're plugging and playing different pieces. I've given her some options. And she appears to be excited and agreeing that she thinks I could help her and that were a fit. What I like to do right here is confirm that. And I'll smile because I'm feeling good that I found pain and pain in a compelling picture for her that there's a big ROI using me and I'll say something like this. Data based on what we shared with each other and our conversation, this really feels like a good fit to me. I'm very comfortable with it. this and I'm convinced you will get a ton of value from what we discussed and using me as a solution here. Then I pause and I ask one question, what do you think? And truly when I'm in front of a workshop doing this, I grab my lips and twist them as if I'm shutting my mouth and locking it closed because there are a few times in sales when silence is really powerful, really important. And this is one of them. So I'm saying, Dana, I love this conversation based on what we share with each other. I really feel like I am or this is a good fit for you. You're going to get a ton of value. What do you think? And then you pause, you don't move, you don't breathe because we need to understand what is going on in the prospect's mind at this very point because it is foolish and premature and amateurish to try to move on to closing or confirming securing the next step. If we're not sure that this person's aligned with us because maybe we were on two different planets, maybe we thought that we were really connecting and the solutions we were outlining made a lot of sense for this person. But in their mind, there were all kinds of challenges and obstacles and you know, there are company that only uses Pepsi and you're you're recommended and bring it in like Coke vending machines and they're like, uh, and behind the scenes, she's like, I can't sell this internally. The HR people are going to kill me or like the procurement people have this long term contract with Pepsi and I'm trying to bring in Coke and it's not compatible and who knows what's going on on her head. So I pause and I make her share it and when I sit there, after I say, what do you think? I'm now waiting. I'm looking at body language. I'm listening for tone. And if I don't get a pretty significant pseudo concrete affirmation, y'all, this makes a lot of sense, Mike. If there's hesitation, if there's a pause, I'm going to proactively try to unearth what's causing that. Amateur salespeople leave with happy ears. They're like, they don't flesh it out. But the best time to find an objection is now because these are the things to come back to bite you in the ass later. So if my prospect is pausing, I'm going to be, hey, Dana, I'm sensing you've got some concerns or maybe you're even picturing some some obstacles. Tell me what you're thinking because the job here for salesperson is to unearth those objections because we might need to step on the clutch for those of you who know what a manual transmission is. Might need to step on the clutch and actually back up and go back to probing and presenting again. The last thing in the world, a professional salesperson should do is step on the gas. Well, we're not sure that the prospect is aligned and try to push forward to get to the next step because there's obviously more selling that needs to be done. I might even ask the prospect, hey, I'm a little confused when we went through this piece of this. You shared you had problem A and you were trying to get result B. And I painted a picture for you of how one of my options here is a really good fit for that. Looks like you've got a little reason to pause here. You're not your not as convinced as I thought you might be. Tell me what's going on in your mind. And then we got to back it up and slow down. So that's why we flesh out objections and we try to address them. And if we're not aligned, if they're not showing a level of willingness to move forward or agreement that they're convinced this is a fit, they're going to get a value. We got to go back to selling again, which means more probing and discovery and more presenting. So that's the second and last space of the meeting. And the last one is, and it's easier than ever because 100% of the population, ten years, they're calendar with them and their phone. The job is to define, secure, and schedule. And those are three very intentional words. To find secure and schedule, what is the next step? And what I typically want to talk in with a salesperson after a sales call. And they tell me how great it went to how articulate they were and how excited the prospect is. My first question I always ask is, okay, that's great. What's the next step? And invariably, the salesperson will tell me, oh, I'm going to do this, that, the other thing. I'm working on the proposal. We're putting together references. And I'm analyzing to their particular data first so we can we can we can customize what we bring back to them. And I'm like, that sounds great. And now let me ask you, what did you get the customer, the prospect to commit to? As their next step, and then they usually look at me and they go, I don't know, and I look at them back and I go, then you failed because you giving yourself six assignments at a bunch of next steps. But not scheduling the next step of what the customer is committed to. That's a failure. And it's really, really simple how to do this. I go through great detail in the in the final phase of chapter 11 of new sales liplified. The customer, if they don't suggest to you what the next step is, all of a sudden, look, I'll go back to my sales column with Dana and I know it's gone well and we fleshed out the objections and she's excited and she wants a proposal from me. I'm going to look at say, Hey, Dana, what do you see as a good next step or what would you like me to do now? I love to ask them first. And then she's going to say, Mike, I really feel good about this. Why don't you put the proposal together? And I may have you speak with my CEO as well. And my comeback is always going to be something like this is a quid pro quo. Retreating something for something else. Quid pro quo. I'll say, Hey, Dana, that's great. So let's agree. I'll go back and work on sketching out the potential agenda in the proposal. And you agree, we're going to review that together next Wednesday and somewhere there also, let's pick the time that I'm going to get connected with your CEO. So grab your calendar. Let's schedule that now. We're both so busy. There's no reason for us to chase each other playing email tag. Grab your calendar and let's set up the conversation where I'm going to review the proposal with you. And friends, that's how you do it. You don't let the customer off the hook. It's not okay to give for the salesperson to leave with a ton of homework. And we're doing all this, that the other thing. And we got no commitment from the customer for what they're going to do next. And that's why deals also go dark or people ghost us. And we end up chasing them around because we never got them to agree to anything. And most people have integrity. And if they shake your hand or agree in particularly if you grab your calendar, write that and set up something, they're going to honor that commitment. So this went a little longer than I expected. I spent a little more time outlining the full sales call. Wasn't really my intention. But part of the reason I'm sharing it with you like this is because of my level of concern, confusion and frustration. When I'm in these companies doing segments of a sales kickoff or a breakout session, I'm structuring good sales calls and bringing value and not getting commoditized. And I'm just not overall impressed with the percent of sales people that really own the flow and structure or meeting. And particularly the two pieces I just shared with you how to start and how to end the meeting so that we win. So that's my thought for you today. And I must tell you friends. This episode's brought to you by pursuit sales solutions. My good friends Carter Jake the whole team at pursuit sale solutions. They do one thing. One thing and they're the best in the world. They recruit and place a player sales people in all kinds of jobs. They do about a thousand sales people a year. And it's all they do. And every single person I've ever referred to them comes back and tells me it was an amazing experience. I can't believe how well that went. This is not what I expected for sales head hunting. This is like legitimate professional recruiting. If you want some help expanding and growing your team or upgrading and you need some A players that are a fit for your culture and your job requirements go to pursuit sales solutions.com/windberg and just set up an exploratory conversation and tell them about your situation and let them tell you what they do. The reason they're sponsoring this podcast is because I trust them. And they've done amazing work for my friends and my clients. Pursuit sale solutions.com/windberg. All right friends great chat with you today. The next time you hear from me will probably be as I'm giving you my recap of watching a lot of the master's golf tournament. Hey I wish you great sales leadership and your people tons of new sales. [BLANK_AUDIO]