BONUS 02 | SALES: Why Selling Isn’t About Selling — Mic Drop (#GoldenNugget)

Listen Founders, welcome to this Founders meeting. Your Monday morning snack to cake of the week. I'm your host Helka and every week we're diving into the minds of Founders worldwide, uncovering strategies and stories behind their biggest wins and toughest challenges. Whether you're just starting out or scaling to new heights, this podcast is your short of motivation. Martin, welcome to this bonus episode of Founders Meeting, focused around the incredibly interesting and complex topic of sales. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for having me. You are a business coach, speaker, and author from the UK, but you are based in Dubai, at least currently, there you are living your dream of having freedom and being able to work from anywhere. You work with creative agencies, owners, freelancers, and small studios helping them scale their businesses with more clarity and freedom, and I should know, because my agencies, serious business, were so lucky to be able to work with you and it's been a total game changer. But you also run a coaching accelerator program called Creative Life and you also host a very nice podcast that is called Creative Courage. I'm so honored, I know that you're a busy guy and I'm so honored that you carved out some time to meet me in this Founders Meeting and even though you work mainly with creative studios and freelancers, you have such an interesting insight into sales in general and that's your jam, I would say. And I just think that your perspective on sales in general is very broad and applies to all industries even though your differentiation is of course creative fields because anyone running a company knows that it's not a smooth sailing and sales is just a topic that is so big and broad, so important and it's just has so much stigma around it and it has evolved so much throughout the years and I'm really looking forward to just stick a little bit deeper into all of this with you. Yeah, me too, looking forward to it. Who was Matt Assam as a kid and how did you grow into the entrepreneur and the coach, the business coach you are today? My mum always reminds me that I could talk before I could walk and so I think I was always a talker and I think ultimately sales is about communication, right? If you can't communicate well it's going to be very difficult to get people to buy into an idea. I think most people think that sales is about getting someone to buy from you but for me sales is really about helping someone to make a decision and I think when you can frame it like that in your mind it changes the whole conversation, it changes the way that you communicate with people. I'm an only child. I lived in the UK from the ages of when I was born to up until about I think 18 or 19 and I lived in the middle of nowhere basically we had in the UK we call it Elaine like a very small road that just about fits one car down it and there was one other person who was similar age to me that lived on that road. She was kind of like a surrogate sister to me because we were both only children. When I was younger I had to communicate well because when we would go on holiday with my parents I was an only child and my parents would play with me for a bit and kind of entertain me but then ultimately they would get kind of bored and they just wanted their own holiday and so they would kind of push me to go and make friends with kids, complete strangers people that I'd never met. That feeling as a young child is pretty intimidating, right? That's like hey there's a bunch of kids over there, sometimes they didn't even speak English. Go make friends basically and so I got pretty good at communicating with people both verbally and non-verbally and looking back that was probably one of the reasons why I became fascinated with communication and why I became a coach because as I got a little bit older and as I went through school I thought communication was all about talking but as I got older and as I received some coaching and some counseling myself I realized that a lot of communication is really about listening and I realized I wasn't actually very good at listening and so as I got a little bit older I started to realize the importance of this and that's one of the reasons I trained to be a coach because being a good coach is really about being able to listen and being able to ask the right questions and I think that translates so much into sales and it's probably one of the reasons why I'm so passionate about the subject of sales and I'm so passionate about the subject of communication in general. I love how you tie it to your childhood like that you know you know what you're doing that's the thing. No but I really think that it's such a beautiful story because I cannot imagine you know I'm not an only child and I had my share of complexity having siblings actually you know that's also an interesting experience not always pleasant for little child you know and for you to push yourself in this direction to like hey either I'm gonna be alone or I start to break out of my shell and communicate and I love how you talk about of course the learning of talking versus listening and that it is about helping someone to make a decision. Sales has such a bad reputation and why was that necessarily something that you went into to master? I only decided to master sales in about 2017 when I met an entrepreneur called Daniel Prisly. Prior to that I was obsessed with marketing and storytelling. My first kind of real job that I considered to be a job that I didn't feel like it was a job was for a TV and film advertising company in New Zealand and so I was always obsessed with marketing essentially like how we communicate at scale with people and how we kind of position our brand within the market and it wasn't until I had run my own business and I'd run my own I guess I'd call it a marketing studio it was kind of like fundamentally a web design agency with marketing services kind of built in and around it it was going okay but I had got to the point where I wasn't really enjoying the kind of clients I was working with and I'd reached a lot of my goals in terms of being able to run the business fully remotely and work kind of anywhere in the world but I just didn't have that sense of fulfillment. I didn't feel like the work I was doing was really making an impact and so I saw out a new direction and I read this book key person of influence which is one of Daniel Prisly's kind of most famous books right and it was this idea of you know what do you really want to be known for if you have to commit the next 10 years of your life to something what do you really want to be known for and I realized I couldn't really answer that question and so I started working with Daniel on his team. One of the things that I realized very quickly was that I wasn't really having sales conversations with people when I was selling websites and when I was selling marketing I wasn't having a sales conversation it was a transaction but after working with Daniel I realized it very much wasn't a sales conversation and I got away with it because when I ran my marketing studio websites were a very popular thing it was at a time where everyone needed a website and there were lots of demand and very short supply there weren't that many people that could do brochure websites well and so it wasn't really very difficult to get clients but when I decided I wanted to move more into coaching and more consulting I didn't know where to start I didn't know where to start in terms of marketing because no one was really kind of knocking my door down saying hey I need some business coaching or hey I need some life coaching and so working with Daniel where I realized that I didn't really know how to sell I didn't really know how to listen to what people's frustrations and desires and goals and pain points were and I didn't know how to frame what I did in relation to those things and so when I saw the power of that and when I saw this guy who had a very different approach to sales and was extremely successful you know he's had four or five businesses go north to seven figures in less than a year he's had some businesses go north of ten million and he attributes a lot of that to his ability to generate leads and make sales basically and so when I saw the power of that I was like I need a piece of this I need to figure out what this is and like where my skill gap is wow I had never heard about Daniel priestly before now of course I'm very aware of his existence and I'm so thankful for this book and actually it's one of the books that really changed my life actually I'm so glad that we connect through this book and of course you talk a lot about this book and Daniel priestly of course he's a great influencer. 100% it's a fantastic book. You talk about like good and better sales conversations like what does that look like then? Well I think just going back to your point before about sales has such a bad reputation I don't know about you but when I was younger I remember our house phone ringing off the hook around in a time and just getting these constant calls from people trying to sell something whether it was like double glazing or insurance or whatever it was and you know my mum physically being aggravated this was kind of before the days where you know you could put your number as X directory or whatever and I just remember that vividly and I remember having these experiences as a kid of these real kind of like door-to-door style salesmen or if you kind of went out on the street somewhere there was always someone trying to sell you something and it felt very much like you were being harassed basically I've traveled a lot as well in my time and when you go to places like Southeast Asia or wherever there's often this feeling of people trying to sell you something so I think we're kind of exposed to this idea of sales from quite a young age really at least I was it's almost like this process of having to go through and reframe what sales actually means and almost like reprogram our beliefs about it because I think I don't know about the type of people that listen to your podcast but I know just through coaching creatives the majority of creatives kind of hate the idea of sales and they kind of hate the idea of of selling themselves and so I think the first thing to acknowledge is that potentially the things that you think about sales right now might not actually be true and there might be a process that you have to go through where you just reframe what sales actually means in your head and so just to kind of reiterate what I said at the beginning is that most people think about sales as getting someone to do something or getting someone to buy something like that is the idea and I think the reason people have a negative emotion towards it when they're being sold to is because we actually hate being sold to we hate the idea that somebody else is manipulating our decisions we love the idea of agency and free will and so if we ever feel like someone's trying to get us to do something that isn't our choice it feels really uncomfortable Daniel taught me this phrase he said people hate to be sold to but they love to buy and so I think sales is about helping people to make a decision but also helping people to feel good about that decision and helping to feel like they are buying something rather than being sold to for so many businesses of course it's always this like are you a bit to be or be to see or even both and it's very different approaches even though on the other end it's always just a human being that needs to make a decision the caveat when people talk about B2B and B2C and it really is human to human right but I think the caveat is that typically when you're selling B2C you are selling things that are less of a considered purchase so when you say I just go out and buy stuff I don't imagine you're just going out and buying things that are like 10,000 euros right you're buying some clothes that are like 50 euros here or 150 euros there so this kind of sale is not a considered purchase and typically the type of sales that we're talking about now and that I'm talking about and that I feel that I have some kind of education in is what I would call a considered purchase and they're kind of higher end higher ticket sales and so this does come in the B2C market in the luxury market selling things like cars selling things like houses you know obviously that's much more of a considered purchase but they're typically edge cases and what I mean by that is if you're selling a 10,000 dollar Rolex it's not quite the same as selling a 10,000 dollar service package right it's a product it's a luxury item people's motivations for buying that thing are very different to people's motivations for buying a 10,000 dollar branding sprint for example like there's some crossover but it's a different type of sale in the end people are always just wanting to make themselves feel better it doesn't matter if it is for individual purchases or for you as an employee like purchasing something that is going to support whatever department in your company or in at the company that you work for you just want to feel better about yourself like your performance or how you look how you smell how you climb the corporate ladder everything that is sold out there falls under the category of expectations what do you mean by that somebody selling something and you look at it and if you buy it you're expecting something you're expecting it to make your life better you're expecting it to make your life easier cooler cleaner faster whatever yeah totally I mean there's quite a famous saying which is this idea that people buy based on emotion and they justify it logic so like really most sales are an emotional sale we have to feel that it's going to improve an era of our life in some way like you said it might just be an employee who feels like if they do this they're going to get a promotion and therefore they're going to have more money or it might be that they feel as if that CEO whatever is going to get off their back or it's going to be happy or there's usually like an emotional reason why we purchase something you were running a marketing storytelling agency and you kind of pivot into coaching other creatives what was that shift was there a moment I was sat on the side of a mountain in Canada in 2015 with a snowboard strap to my feet and I was a Tuesday afternoon I pull out my phone and I'm about to take a photo and upload it to Instagram and this was like the early days of Instagram my feed kind of looked like you know Monday is a fine you just hate your job here's a selfie of me snowboarding on a Tuesday afternoon don't you wish you were here kind of thing and I'm about to upload this photo to Instagram and I get this real like visceral feeling and it's a feeling of disingenuous or inauthenticity in some way like what I'm portraying to the outside world isn't what's actually happening behind the scenes because the truth was although I had this incredible lifestyle where I was getting to travel the world and do all these amazing things behind the scenes I was actually pretty like empty and unfulfilled and I was a bit stressed because we had a bunch of clients that hadn't paid invoices on time and like cash flow was really tight and I basically just like didn't post the photo and I had this kind of existential moment and literally as I kind of closed the Instagram app a message from my mum came through and it says please call me as soon as you can which is never like a good message to get from your mum when you're the other side of the world so I pick up the phone and I call my mum and I'm like what's up what's going on and she says Nigel who's a family friend about has died and he was like in his late 30s and I was just like what and it was just totally unexpected he didn't have like cancer or anything like that it was just he just one day was alive next day he was dead I'm like okay I'm going to come back to the UK so I kind of come back to the UK I'm like with our family we go to his funeral and I start having this existential crisis really which is oh my god life is actually so short like it literally could just be taken away from you any moment and I started watching some of these videos and I remember watching this Steve Jobs commencement speech and in that speech he says I get up every day and I look at myself in the mirror and I ask myself if this was the last day that I was going to be alive would I do what I'm about to do today and if the answer is no for too many days in a row I know something has to change it just resonated with me so much because I was like I would not be doing this I'd not be running this business I'm not be doing all these things but I was confused because I'm sure you've experienced this where you have what looks like success externally so like objectively you've got this amazing life but internally you feel unfulfilled or you feel like there's something missing or you just you're just not really that happy and it's kind of a hard pill to swallow because it's almost like get the mini violin out you know all poor Matt he's not happy he's traveling the world with this business that he can run from anywhere and he's a little bit unhappy poor you and so it's quite like a difficult thing to talk to people about and so I end up getting a life coach and I'm trying to work through all of this stuff and so one of the first things that I realized with this life coach is that like I don't have any purpose in my work I don't feel like what I do makes any kind of difference really like if I'm not building this website for someone I'm helping them with their social media somebody else is and the kind of people that I'm doing this for aren't really people that I feel kind of proud of like I'm not working with NGOs and charities and I'm not like oh my go we just built this website and then we've saved 250 orphans or whatever it's like for this finance company or for this shoe company or whatever like the work I was doing had no purpose so that was kind of my first realization and my second realization was I don't know if I'm in the right lane I don't know if I'm actually doing the kind of work that I'm best position to do I don't know if like the skills I have because I was looking around me and I was seeing like some very talented people like I've worked in some incredible agencies and I've been surrounded by some incredibly talented creative people and I was like you know if they're premier league I'm like voxel conference here and I'm finding other people to do the work so maybe this whole like web development thing and like it isn't really my jam and so I just started reflecting and the question that really shifted it for me one of the things was reading key person of influence which was like what do you want to be known for and the other thing was my my life coach asked me if you only had a year to live and you knew money was no object and you weren't going to be judged for how you spent your time what would you do and I listed all of these things but one of the things that came up was I want to help people to fulfill their potential that was the kind of theme that came up at the time it was this idea that I see so many people they're not reaching their full potential for for various reasons right and I just kind of had this urge in me to like help people do better and I felt very drawn when I went through the key person of influence exercise I felt very drawn to creatives because I was surrounded by them I kind of considered myself as a creative but these were the people that I saw struggling the most like these were the people where I was like my god there is so much raw talent there but they're stressed out they have no money like they're struggling like there's a real mismatch here these people should be should be getting paid and they should be really thriving and so I kind of went on this journey really of learning how to coach people I did like a life coaching degree I studied NLP and I just started kind of doing this in my spare time so one of my first kind of clients that I remember having she was a copywriter who was helping me with some web stuff but she also was a musician and on the evenings and weekends she used to gig and stuff and so I said to her like would you be up for doing an exchange like I coach you a little bit and you know we work on some copywriting and stuff like that she said yeah okay I can do that so we committed to I don't know six sessions maybe right in the first three sessions like her block that she came to me with was I just can't write music anymore every time I pick up my guitar I just feel like I'm just drawing a blank I've got this real creative block and so I pulled all these things out of my kind of toolbox that I was learning and within three sessions of like 60 minutes spread out over maybe like a month or something she had gone from like not being able to write to writing a whole album and then the month after two of the tracks that she had written that I got her to submit to the BBC got chosen for BBC six music record of the week it just blew her mind and I just remember like seeing the look on her face and seeing her realize her potential like wow like if I actually put my mind to this I'm really good at this right and I realized I had more impact in those three hours of coaching than I probably had in the last three years of running my marketing studio and that was the moment where I realized like I'm just in the wrong lane like I'm not doing the kind of work that the universe or God or whatever you believe in like wants me to be doing are you in the right lane now do you feel like that yeah I think so I think when things feel easy and when you can see the impact that you're actually making on people's lives you're in the right lane if things start to feel too difficult there's like some resistance there and you aren't getting messages from people being like that was amazing like I don't you don't have to like be changing people's lives but I'm so grateful for this this really had impact on my life because like if you're not regularly getting that kind of feedback from people I mean this is just for me personally right I can't give everyone advice but if you're sitting there struggling feeling like you lack a sense of purpose or you lack a sense of impact in your work I would look at like where's the friction where do things feel really hard and where are the times when people are giving you that positive feedback and saying this really had an impact on my life and some of it might be totally unrelated to your work right and that's the interesting part and that's where you start to kind of bring the jigsaw pieces together of course you talk a lot about courage and it requires one for sure but could you maybe elaborate a little bit on how does courage connect to sales I think it connects to sales in a couple of ways number one the courage to ask difficult questions so most people are afraid to kind of rock the boat in a sales conversation because they think that if they challenge people too much they have less chance of closing the deal and it might experience the opposite is true so the courage to ask difficult questions the courage to speak your truth as creatives or as founders we see things that other people don't see and often will be in a sales conversation and we'll hear a prospect say something which is a belief or a way they see the world and we know that that's just not true or we have a different belief and we're afraid to challenge it so I think courage shows up in the way that you challenge your prospects the truth that you speak and then I think the final way that it shows up is the courage to let go of the outcome so to show up to a sales call and not be attached to making a sale and that is even harder when that's the only sales call you got this week and your team needs to be paid and you know that if you make this sale everything will be good and if you don't make this sale everything will be stressful if you can show up in those moments with the courage to let go of the outcome it will transform how you feel about sales and more importantly how people feel when they're on a call with you you talk about questions and having the courage to ask difficult questions could you give some examples of these questions yeah so we've probably all had the experience where someone comes to us and they say like oh we were working with these agencies in the past and we spent this much money in it didn't work and blah blah blah blah blah like I'm a bit reluctant to spend money again on this thing and most people go into justifying like oh well you know we're not like that we have a slack channel you can message us 24/7 we have this we have that and we start to try and justify why we're different to whatever they've tried in the past right my approach is I want to know why it didn't work out if you go back to the dating analogy and someone says oh I was in relationship for five years and that ended all of a sudden well I'm curious why did that end like what happened what do I need to know about you that will help me understand why that relationship didn't work I asked those same questions to the prospect which is okay tell me why you think it didn't work out with the agency and if they constantly point the finger at the agency I'm like I'm sure all those things are true but I'm just curious what part did you play in that relationship not working and that's a difficult question right because it's quite confronting and most people wouldn't ask it because they're like well if I ask that then maybe they'll say that we're not the right agency but I can guarantee that that prospect hasn't been asked that question and it changes the relationship dynamic from you're the person serving me to your our creative partner if we choose you to be I was also wondering like of course we work with so many people that are launching products and that are also kind of down the line and they are finding themselves in the messy middle and they are facing a sales problem these are two very different sales or what like what is the difference between like launching something and selling it versus having a sales problem and solving it I don't know there is any difference what makes you think there's a difference when you are launching something you have a fresh mind then you're like you're not aware of the problems you're just like launching you're just starting you're full of optimism okay so you mean the difference between a startup and somebody who's been in the business for a long time yeah or if you are internally inside of our old company and you're launching something new could also be well I mean it's just energy when you launch something new it's fresh and exciting whereas when you're just trying to sell your existing product you've probably been trying to sell that existing product for years you know you can get this like proximity bias where you're so close to it that you're almost bored of the features like you've you've probably heard the story I think it was Ford the brand changes every time I hear the story but the idea is that the CEO of Ford hired this really expensive creative director right to help them boost their sales and he did all these ads and he ran all these ad campaigns the CEO goes into the creative director's office one day and he's like how much longer if we got on this campaign I'm sick of seeing this advert everywhere and the creative director goes we haven't launched it yet and so like he's seeing it everywhere because it was internal like they were promoting it they were getting everybody on board they were changing all the things but it hadn't even gone into the outside world yet and I think that can often happen for us for ourselves because we're seeing it every single day and that salesperson selling that same product and so those kind of like shiny features and those benefits and all of those different things that were once new get dulled down and then all of a sudden we don't think they're that exciting anymore and therefore we bring a different energy to the conversation whereas when we launch something new it's easy to be excited you know there's two schools of thoughts around this but I think excitement and passion is contagious right when you meet someone who's like really sure about this thing like oh my god this product is so cool because blah blah blah and they're really excited whether you buy it or not you're kind of like I'm curious like what's this person so excited about like what is this thing you also talk about selling before you build what does that mean and how does it work well it means getting validation that people actually want the thing I'm sure this happens in tech as well but it happens a lot in the creative industries and one of the reasons I think it happens is because the creating process is fun is often very safe and it is often an intellectual pursuit whereas the sales process is often quite boring because you're having the exact same conversations every single day just with different people it's not an intellectual process in the sense that it's a human to human you have to be good at listening and it's not about thinking it's about being present and really listening to the person and more importantly it is not safe because people get to tell you no and they get to ask difficult questions you have to come up with answers on the spot sometimes so it's a very uncomfortable process for people that are used to creating behind the scenes and so what typically happens is people want to create but they don't want to sell and so they spend a long time creating and building because it's the safe comfortable fun process and then they take that thing to market and they find out that no one really wants it well this is quite a common thing in the startup world I'm probably teaching people to suck eggs right but the idea is that you sell a concept and you see how people react like if you can't sell the concept and get a essentially a soft yes or a soft commitment of like yeah I'm interested in hearing more even get people to sign up with some kind of brochure or yeah I'm putting a deposit down or whatever if you can't get that then there's literally no point in going any further because the concept is the first part and that's what actually Daniel Priestley talks about in his entrepreneur revolution which is the chaos method the C stands for concept the A stands for audience who are you selling it to the O stands for offer and the S stands for sales so chaos but with the C rather than a K right can you articulate the concept so when you explain it to people people are like oh yeah understand what that is do you know who you're trying to sell it to so not just everyone but tech founders in the B to B tech space do you have an offer that you can put in front of people preferably that isn't built yet so it's a slide deck it's a brochure it's something that you put together that conveys like the same way if you're going to go and buy a house off plan right you see the little CGI model and you see what it's going to look like that's the offer here's what you're going to get and then can you actually make a sale can you get someone to say yeah I'd love to live here I'm gonna put a 10% deposit down and that's what they do right once you've sold 70% off plan you go and build the building you don't go and build the building and then go knocking on everyone's door being like do you like living here or would you like to live somewhere else because we just built a load of flats down the road no I think that one of the biggest takeaways for me working with you was this thing about the free time we were very tired of the creative industry being stagnant in this like giving free pitches and giving so much free work and free concepts and everything and then you kind of brought this very important insight and perspective that if you are free give your time show people what you can do and who you are you're efficient in your work and carve out some free time to actually be able to share with the world the value you create for others or those who work with you I never thought that I would be brought back to this part but it's totally different than giving free pitches and being like all night and all evenings and all weekends like prepping for some pits and then pitching and then losing the pits and everyone is just like burned out or whatever but this just feels so much more healthy and beautiful and I think it's such an incredible tool. Where did you learn all the tools that you use and teach and coach? First of all from my own experience of just trial and error because it's like you I've been in that situation of going and spending all of this time and energy and off the money on a pitch to then lose it to somebody else and kind of walk away with my tail between my legs feeling pretty horrible about myself and my business and then just I've just invested so much money and time and energy over the last decade and people who are ahead of me who seem to have worked it out like if I find someone who's achieved what I'm trying to achieve and I can understand how they've got there like they can a little bit like in maths class I can see their working out so it's not just like oh here's my Lamborghini in the garage like I'm really rich do you want to be rich like me I don't mean that I mean like there's a specific goal that I want to achieve and it could be winning more pitches right and I see this person here and it's like this is how we win 80% of our pitches and they have a blueprint or a way of doing things and they give away their ideas and I'm like wow that makes so much sense to me I will just pay that person to teach me how to do that for my business I value time so much and I want speed to result I'm kind of past that point now when I was younger I was happy to learn stuff myself and experiment and test but now I'm like I just want to find the way to do it that kind of works for me in our lines with my way of doing things you know I've literally spent over a hundred thousand pounds on different mentors courses masterminds whatever you want to call them and I've just watched people do it and be like oh so it does it like that I've never really thought about that and it's amazing how this person communicates with models and then this person communicates with kind of metaphors this person sells from stage and gets people lining up at the back of the room to give the credit card like how do they do that oh look they've got a course on how they teach people how to do that and I go and do it and I'm like is that going to work for me or could I take a bit of this person's thing that does that and it's not from stage it's on zoom and I don't get people signing up with their credit card I get them to book a call with me and you know so I'm just kind of like picking different parts from different models but it's literally just finding people that have done what I want to do what I'm trying to achieve and paying them for their years and years of experience and ideas and frameworks and models and whatever they're offering basically you of course talked about challenging the person you are in a conversation with and of course you are there to listen and help this person make a decision how do you challenge them there are three things that are kind of crucial to having powerful sales conversations the first one is energy right you've got to bring the right energy to a sales conversation and there's usually two places that people operate from on the energetic spectrum this end of the spectrum is scarcity energy like oh my god I need this thing and so when you challenge people it comes across as maybe a little bit aggressive maybe a little bit like needy and then there's this end of the spectrum which is kind of opposite which is abundance but it's like further than abundance and one of my sales mentors used to call it fuck you energy this idea that you've kind of arrived and like you're so good and you're so high and mighty and everything that you do behind the scenes like we are the best at branding we're the best at this thing so if you don't see the value of this that's your problem and it's kind of like I've arrived you can call it I've arrived energy if you don't want to use the f word right like I'm so good so the energy that you've got to come to the cool with is curiosity and compassion and I want to be very explicit here and make sure we're not using the word empathy compassion not empathy and the difference in my mind is that when you're empathetic you're there with the person in that world in that emotion when you're compassionate you can see where they are and understand where they are but you're not buying into that world to have powerful sales conversations I believe you need to lead with compassion so you can be compassionate for people but you don't get dragged into their story you don't get dragged into their beliefs and you don't get dragged into their world so number one energy and then number one point i or whatever is or one a is curiosity and one b is compassion so that's the first thing like when you're showing up to sales calls check your energy and so those two things are so important because when you're curious and you challenge someone it sounds like oh okay so just tell me more like why do you do that thing rather than this thing but if you don't have the curiosity and you're trying to do it because you're trying to lead someone somewhere it sounds like okay well why did you choose that rather than that and so you're saying the same thing but it the tonality and the body language just comes across completely differently like you're not genuinely curious you're trying to challenge someone because you want them to think in a different way and so you're not really being compassionate either because you're not really seeing their side of the coin and you're not trying to ask in a way that helps you to understand you're trying to ask in a way that helps them to just trying to get them to choose something different i love how you phrase it like not empathetic because then you get sucked into the world but with compassion and curiosity you kind of keep a distance you zoom out 100% so that's the first thing so when you challenge someone you have to come into that conversation with the right energy and if you're not in the right energy and i've had this plenty of times myself i've been in fuck you energy loads and loads of times where i'm genuinely frustrated i'm like you idiot you just laid out all of this stuff for me you said now is the time you have to change you said that if you don't change these things are gonna happen and you still don't want to move ahead with this thing like i've been in that energy before and it it just never works people never buy because they feel judged they feel threatened they just don't feel safe so if you find yourself in an energy which is not compassionate and is not curious it's okay to actually take a breath on the sales call and just maybe ask someone another question or just be like okay and do you know what will happen people will go like this is weird this guy's just sitting in silence and often they'll try and feel the silence and they'll start talking and that buys you a little bit more time to just ground yourself and just come back to that grounded place where you're not judging where you're just genuinely being curious so checking that energy is number one like energy is everything the second thing is you've got to be detached from the outcome it's got to make no difference to you whether they say yes or no and it says okay for them to say no is it is for them to say yes what's not okay is for them to say maybe because if they're in maybe land it typically signifies to me that you haven't done a good job on the sales call your number one job as a salesperson is to help people to make a decision and if that decision is no that's totally fine because we've made a decision so be detached from the outcome don't worry if someone's going to say no that's absolutely fine someone's going to say yes that's called as well either way is good with me and so then when you're challenging people you're not trying to get them to a yes that's not your objective you're challenging them because you either want them to be yes or you want them to be no this is the traffic light method the red yellow and the green and the maybe people they are the yellow and those you don't want you want to destroy them you want to push them up into either red or green the yellow ones are sometimes the ones that we linger on we hope like oh maybe it's going to happen but if they are yellow it's time wasting I just say like when I look at that traffic light system at the end of sales call I'll just ask somebody where they are there's three places that people usually are right now number one is they're green and this feels like a really good fit and they're ready to move forward number two is their amber they're pretty sure it's a good fit but they still have some questions or concerns or they're red this doesn't really feel like a line to where they are right now like where are you and so it gives them this really easy decision like they don't have to try and explain their objectives or whatever they just have to pick a color and most people will say to me I'm between amber and green and I'll say okay cool it wasn't one of the choices but I'll take it I'll just then be able to ask a really simple question I will just say something like what would you need to know to be a hundred percent green or what are some of the things that are coming up for you right now that are preventing you from being a hundred percent green and then they will tell me their actual objections right so again I'm just going in with this idea of curiosity but the concept that I try and get across to people is the greens make money reds save time but amber's waste time and so I'll always say to people like and no is totally okay I would rather you were a hundred percent no than an amber and also I'll just say it's not a no forever it's just a no for now and often people will go no I think we can get it I think we can get the budget I do want to move forward let me just talk to Susan or Jim or whatever and I'll be like cool so if Susan or Jim approves this thing you would be a hundred percent green and they're like yeah okay great so there's nothing else right now today or nothing else that might come up that would still make you amber you're a hundred percent green right and so I'm just kind of getting all of the objections out and so then I'll say okay great why don't we get Jim on a cool together so that we can make sure that he's a hundred percent green because what I don't want you to do is try and go to Jim try and convince him here's an amber then you come back to me and say actually we're an amber and now moving forward into the future do you have any kind of forecast on how the sales process is going to evolve and develop and how we need to adjust to whatever is coming the basic thing to understand is supply and demand you can never take a sales call in your life if you have enough demand because all the sales does all that having a powerful sales conversation does is increase the likelihood the someone will become a client or increase the likelihood that they will refer you to somebody else who will become a client this is what I believe about sales if you can have powerful sales conversations whether somebody becomes a client or not you will increase your chances of getting more clients because that person will leave that call feeling like it was one of the most powerful calls that they ever had because up until that point no one has challenged them on the thing is that you just challenged them on up until that point no one has asked them those questions and made them think about that or made them see things in that way if you can genuinely come to a call with those principles of staying curious really managing that energy having compassion being detached from the outcome and not being afraid to actually challenge people's assumptions then people will have a transformational conversation and so if you use that as a basis and you say well we got five inquiries this month and we really need four projects then my advice to you would be get on as many calls as possible and practice really listening really having curiosity compassion really being detached from the outcome and challenging people's assumptions if you do that enough you will get more clients if you have a hundred inquiries this month and you only need four projects then you could just ping people proposals your conversion might be 10% or 20% that's more than enough so this obsession with automating everything or AI is going to take over my business or whatever like maybe but the truth is unless you already have a very strong online presence and a personal brand and people are already bought into your way of working and your way of doing things and they're like I'm ready to become a client and I'm literally just inquiring over email or WhatsApp or whatever you use unless you've already got that whole bank and that whole authority in your industry it's going to be very difficult to take someone from being a complete stranger to working with you and spending 30k upwards if they've never jumped on a call with you what about differentiation how does that play a part why is it important and how does it connect to sales well it just goes back to the supply and demand thing if you need a new website and you have 20 agencies that seem like a good fit within your budget that can build you a good looking website and you are one of those 20 agencies you have a one in 20 chance of getting that project right whereas if you are able to differentiate yourself so that to your ideal client it seems like there is no other agency out there and there are a lot of people that seem to want to work with you then all of a sudden the supply and demand curve get shifted the demand is high IA there's lots of people that want to work with you and the supply is low there's only one agency like yours so differentiation is just really about increasing demand and reducing supply you're trying to make things like why are things more valuable why is the diamond more valuable than a pebble that you find on the beach well it's because there's millions of pebbles and only a handful of diamonds right that's why they're more expensive and that's why they're more valuable because of their supply and demand like more people want diamonds and there are diamonds available obviously you've got other stuff around it you've got branding you've got perception you've got all of those kind of things but that is part of differentiation it's part of the idea that there is no other brand like this there is no other apple out there there's only one apple right even though the actual hardware and the screen and everything that makes it up is exactly the same as any other computer and that's brand I mean you're you guys are the expert in brand but that is where brand comes in this idea of differentiation so the supply and demand when a new iPhone comes out or the new AirPods or whatever there's a queue outside the Apple store because they only release a certain amount and there's millions of headphones on the market but there's only a hundred or a thousand or however many of they release AirPods Pro 3s so how does that connect to Courts like how do you use your Courts when you need to differentiate the not markets that is flooded well there's a few things number one is the courage to stand out so from an evolutionary perspective we're not really built to stand out right we're kind of built to stay in a tribe it's like safety and numbers if we can kind of blend in we're not kind of seen by too many people then we have less risk of something happening to us so it's the courage to stand out and be different to anybody else and that comes with all of its own kind of risk factors but it's also the courage to go all in on one particular industry or niche or problem yourself so I'm going to be interviewing Simon who's the founder of robot food in a couple of weeks a branding agency basically for food and beverage businesses that is their thing that's the thing that they spent the last 20 years being known for well that's quite bold it's quite bold and courageous to say we're only going to work with food and drinks brands like that's our thing and I'm sure they've had plenty of opportunities over the years of other brands and other industries that have come to them and they've had to have the courage to say no because we don't want to dilute our portfolio we don't want to dilute how we're known in the market and so it's the courage to just focus on one thing and go all in on one thing it makes sense and it does require a lot of courage and also a lot of internal digging into like what do you have fun with like what do you feel confident with I know that we were doing everything for everybody for five years or whatever it was and until enough mentors and coaches and experiences just taught us like you have to narrow down so I think the courage to stand out and narrow down I think it's a great notion to give yourself some slack actually that the awareness of knowing that actually I'm coming from this societal norm and to be able to be bold there to stand out to differentiate me or say something that is maybe controversial or challenge with difficult questions you know it just requires this like this awareness of course we could talk for hours and hours but if there is one thing that you would like our listeners to take away and whatever industry they are what would you like them to take away from from this conversation the thing that I would love everyone to take away is the idea the sales is not something that you do to someone it's something that you do for someone and it's not about getting people to buy your stuff it's about helping them to make a decision and if you do sales well and if you do it right it can be a transformational conversation whether that person becomes a client or not before we wrap it up today where do people find you your program podcasts books talks so our podcast is called creative courage podcast so if you're listening to this and you enjoyed it then just search for creative courage with Matt Essam and if you are trying to get better at sales and you would like some help I have something called the one page sales framework so free download it comes with some training and it's basically how I structure my sales calls to allow you to do some of the things that we've talked about today and to have more transformational conversations and essentially build positive brand equity in the market so that when people jump off a sales call with you even if they don't become clients they're still speaking very highly about you and your brand and what you do so I will get Helga to link to that in the show notes below for sure I will Matt it's been a true pleasure to have you on this Founders meeting and please continue to inspire more courage in the world of business and it's amazing to follow your journey thank you for joining this Founders meeting if you're feeling fueled up hit that subscribe button so you remember to fill up your tank next week as well and hey if today's episode brought you some value share it with your fellow Founders who could use a little Monday motivation to keep building keep believing and keep smiling doing what you love until next time keep on going people you got this