Learn This Sales Skill If You Want To Be Relevant In 10 Years

(upbeat music) There is a sales skill that you're probably not very good at. I've got the data to the back this up. The lack of this skill is a problem for you because in sales, no cash exchange hands until a person says yes. And unfortunately, people are all a little bit crazy. We all think that we're rational, but we're not. And so, even when we give people the right author, and it's at the right place, and at the right time, the right price point, and it's all point from the prospect, they still pass on it, which is dumb, but that is the world that we live in. So what sales skill is required to help buyers make the right purchase and decisions? Well, that's the skill of influence, and it might be the most important and underrated skill in 2025. Now, if you listen to me for the next 10 minutes or so, I'm gonna explain how I know that you probably lack the skill of influence, and how it's one of the skills that's becoming more and more important to sellers who wanna find and close enough deals to make enough money to retire. And my name is Will and I'm the founder of salesman.com. And over at sales.com, we have an assessment that nearly 40,000 sellers have completed. The sales code assessment asks 120 or so questions, and then it provides insights to the person who's completed it on the traits of high performance that that user has, and then any traits of high performance, that they're lacking. And last week, I pulled all the sales code data together. I formatted it in a new way that I've not experimented with before, and something became clear. One of the traits of high performance on the assessment is obviously influence. And this trait of influence was much lower than I expected in the sellers who had completed the assessment. It was so low, in fact, that I compared data between 2025, and then the very first version of the assessment that was launched back in 2019. And the results were, they were kind of shocking to me. 87% of sellers who regularly exceeded their sales quota scored high for influence back in 2019, whereas only 35% of sellers who regularly exceeded sales quota scored high for influence in 2025. So, has the social skill of ethically influencing buyers become less important over the past six years? Well, I don't think so. The trust crisis that we're currently selling into, where everyone is more skeptical than ever before, the ability to influence prospects and help them see our world view our perspective, this is more powerful than ever. So, what the heck is going on here? Well, I think that from hiding behind email, attempting and failing to get deals done over social media and working from home as led a whole generation of sellers to deskill their ability to influence others. And for people who are somewhat new to sales, they never learned that skill in the first place. That is the current state of affairs. Buyers are more skeptical of sellers than ever before, and sellers are worse than ever at influencing buyers. So, what does that mean for you? Well, it means that if you can learn the skill of influence, then you have a massive competitive advantage in the marketplace. And remember this, right? The ability to influence is the ability to convince someone to believe something new or different to what they currently believe. So, if your current prospects believe that, your product was the right product for them, it was going to solve all their issues that the price of the product was less than the value being delivered, then you wouldn't have a job. You could instantly be replaced by an online platform. But, well, your job exists. So, inherently, there must be a need for you to influence your buyers to change their views and to adopt your perspective and new perspective to get deals over the line. So, with that said, let's take a look at three ways where you can dramatically increase your ability to influence your prospects, starting today at the end of this video. So, first up, commitment. Once a prospect agrees that, at least in theory, our product can help them do something, achieve something, change a state of pain or take them further closer to a point of pleasure, then they are much, much more likely to continue to agree this as we increase the scope of our point of view over time. And here is why, humans don't like to change their minds. And this comes back to our tribal days. If we made a decision that didn't harm us or bay it, it benefited us, we weren't good at questioning making that decision the next time around. We'd just automatically do it without critically thinking through it. And this bias towards commitment is how our brains reduce the daily cognitive load. They choose the path of least resistance. We can serve our energy so we can spend it efficiently on new problems that we face day in, day out. And believe it or not, this same principle applies to sales as well. If you can get your buyers to agree with you, even on something that's small or insignificant or seemingly insignificant at first, then they're much more likely to keep agreeing with you throughout the rest of the buying journey. And the best way to do this practically, 'cause I want you to start doing this today, is to leverage the influence technique of microclosing. And again, you do this throughout the entirety of every conversation and every part of the sales process. And it works like this. Each time a bias is yes to a microclose, they positively reinforce the point of view that you've helped them commit to. So the first step in using microclosing, when influencing buyers, is to position something that they almost certainly believe it. They're almost, almost a hundred percent of time, they're gonna say yes to. So for example, when I'm selling salesman.com academy to salesmanship, I ask, is it fair to say that there's room for improvement for your team? And the answer is undoubtedly yes. And so once they agree to that sliver of my point of view, I can continue influencing them to agree the broader strokes that my training program is the correct decision for their business. So that is microclosing. Next up we have scarcity. And this is very simple. We all want the stuff that is hard to get. Whether that be the super attractive husband, wife, partner, the limited edition Rolex, whatever it is, when there is high demand, the thing, again, whatever it is, becomes more desirable. And like the overfundamental influence techniques, the appeal of scarce items goes back tens of thousands of years to innate biological and evolutionary desires. All humans come deeply wired with. Now back, back then, 10,000 to 100,000 years ago, the most scarce resources were food and shelter. And if you acquired these resources, you survived. Otherwise, you died. So our brain values scarce resources as if alive depend on them. The thing is though, in modern society, most of our basic needs are met. But our caveman brains, the caveman part of our brains are just too stupid to realize this. So our brain still puts life and death levels of focus of dopamine into acquiring the scarce resources that we find in modern society. That is why there is rampant desire for material objects when it makes very little sense to crave them, to desire them. For example, you can't eat or get a comfortable night's sleep in a Hermes Hamburg or Ferrari, yet we still crave them. These are luxury items that millions of people aspire to only one day. And the interesting thing is that we can engineer the same kind of lust for our products by increasing the levels of scarcity around them. Think of it like this, for complex B2B products, typically, almost undoubtedly, buys one of work of sellers who are oversubscribed. They want to meet with the best of the best because they believe themselves that the problems, issues, the things that they're trying to deal with are just so important because they're important to them that they need expertise to solve. And so of course, they want to buy from buyers who have clients jam-packed into their pipeline. The example that I always use here is, do you find out you've got brain cancer? You don't want to go and visit the doctor who has zero patients. No, you want to be checked over by the doctor who can just barely squeeze you in this week because he's so down-so-accessful at solving the problem. And for sellers, the best way to appeal to this scarcity bias is by appropriately valuing your time. And this takes a little bit of repositioning on your end. But this is a mindset shift that you need to make. You've got to change your mindset from being this pesky salesperson, trying to corn and trick your way into a deal. And you've got to think of yourself as a doctor, as a consultant, as an expert. You're a deal maker. You're someone who takes a complex series of problems and you produce a solution that leaves everyone else happy. High-level, high-self-esteem individuals value their time. So you need to communicate this with your prospects. So you become a person that they aspire to work with rather than the 47th seller who sent them some crappy semi-AI-generated call email that morning begging for a meeting. So that's scarcity and that leads us onto authority. And authority is the most powerful way to influence a prospect in 2025. Now humans wouldn't have got anywhere without social hierarchy. There has always been experts who know more about a specific subject than the people around them. And we've turned to them for advice, guidance, and reassurance for millennia. Authorities are the individuals whose opinions hold more sway than everyone else. And because of that, they can spur more action as well. So for instance, let's say I get a call from Warren Buffett about changing my long-term investment strategy. You'd better believe that in an instant, I would listen and then probably take his advice. But if I received a call from a deadbeat friend who dropped out of high school and still lives of his dad, and if he'd give me exactly the same word for word of advice, well, I wouldn't take his investment's advice seriously at all. That is the power of authority. Authority truly matters. And if you appear more authoritative, you can influence your buyers instantly. And building authority in the instant age is so easy that I honestly can't understand why more sales people don't lean into it. All you've got to do is post some content on LinkedIn or wherever your buyers hang out that has a strong polarizing opinion, a correct, strong polarizing opinion. Then you've got to brand yourself clearly as the person who solves X problem for why people using Z solution. And you've got to be very bold about the specific people that you help. And the bolder and more narrow niche you can be about the people that you help and you just focus on those individuals, those prospects in the market, the easier it is to build authority because essentially you've got less competition. Then finally, you need to create deep knowledge on your prospects problem so that when they do speak of you, they are absolutely genuinely blown away by the fact that you can articulate their issues better than they can. And let me tell you, being an authority in B2B sales that I've built up this authority over the past 10 years, the barrier to this, the barrier to becoming known as an expert in the space is so, so low. You just got to do these things over the course of a couple of months. And that is more than enough to become known as a top expert in your field. And that is three ways to build influence starting right now after wrapping up this video. Now you need to develop this skill of influence, but it's only one piece of the puzzle here. There are a couple of other things that you need to work on if you want to become a predictable, quote, a crushing professional. And when you implement a effective sales process and you take on the mindset of a winner, then you know what to do and you become the person who's capable of doing it. The only other skill that you need is the ability to influence people so that they take the action and take that leap and where they are right now to where they want to be. When you stack these free skills together, you become instantly unstoppable in sales. And if you want to stack these free skills in the quickest way possible, with one to one mentoring for me personally, then click the link below and book a call in my diary. I ask you a few questions. We'll see if you're a good fit for our sales.com Academy program. And if you are a good fit, I'll guarantee that you'll find and close my deals in the next 30 days or you'll want to back. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)