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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the OPTIMAL SALES MINDSET Webinar hosted by Fred Diamond, Host of the Sales Game Changers Podcast, on July 30, 2020. It featured author of “Go For No,” Andrea Waltz,]
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EPISODE 264: Go For No Author Andrea Waltz Explains Why Getting More Noes Is a Gift That Can Drive Your Sales Efforts to the Top
ANDREA’S TIP TO SALES LEADERS: “Your reaction to yes and no must be equal. You want to get in the neutral zone so don’t over-celebrate the yesses but you also don’t badger yourself, beat yourself up when you get a no. More than ever, there are a lot of noes out there and more rejection. You have to stop yourself and shut down any negative self-talk about whether you feel that you didn’t do a good job or whether things aren’t working and get yourself off that emotional roller coaster to be most effective.”
Fred Diamond: We have the author of Go for No! It’s Andrea Waltz. Andrea, it’s great to have you here, I read the book, it’s fascinating. You created such a name for yourself in telling people just to go for no, so good to have you here, thank you so much. Why don’t you tell us first of all, what does it mean, “Go for No!”? and then let’s get right into it.
Andrea Waltz: Go for No! is a little bit of a marketing challenge because we teach people to hear no more often and of course that sounds weird because in sales everyone wants to hear yes. But like the subtitle of our book says, “Yes Is the Destination, but No Is How You Get There.” The entire premise of Go for No! is that if you don’t avoid hearing no, if you don’t avoid those “failures”, you open a lot more opportunities to get those yes’s. That’s the strategy, I call it a strategy, it’s also a mindset because when you start talking about intentionally getting more no’s, inevitably questions like, “What does that mean?” and, “What about fear of rejection and how do I deal with that?” and all kinds of nuances come up. It sounds like a simple straightforward topic but there’s a lot to dig into.
Fred Diamond: We’ve actually got some questions ahead of time. Andrea, I have one quick question for you and it’s a saying that we’ve heard so many times at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, “The second best thing besides a quick yes is a quick no, and the worst thing is a drawn-out no.” First of all, is that true? Second of all, give us a little bit of insight into why that is.
Andrea Waltz: It is absolutely true, a quick no is so much better because it frees you up to pursue opportunities where there could be a yes. I think too often all of us in sales one time or another, we want something to be a yes so we will play these psychological games where we don’t ask the really hard questions to just get that no quickly and move on. We divert our attention and don’t just get that no so that we can save all of that time, we’d rather pretend that that sale is out there. It happens, we see it in people’s pipelines where they have all kinds of opportunities where they think, “Maybe the yes is out there and if I can just hang on long enough, it will change” and the reality is it doesn’t. That is such an important saying and it’s so true.
Fred Diamond: Another interesting point is we work with some of the best sales companies around the globe, they’re members or sponsors of the Institute for Excellence in Sales and I know when I talk to a sales professional or a business owner and he says, “We’re doing great, our close rate is 75%” the first thing I think to myself is, “You’re not in the game that much.” If your close rate is so high, you’re going after so few opportunities that you’re cutting yourself short.
Andrea Waltz: Absolutely, I love that. We have something called the Five Failure Levels and level four is what we call Going After Big No’s, going after those big fish. When you go after those big opportunities then your close ratio will go down. Like you said, if you’re closing that many opportunities then what kind of deals should you be going after where they are those big opportunities, those big fish?
Fred Diamond: I want to ask you a quick question, I know you have a couple slides here we’re going to get to and I’m very excited to get into the meat of this. We’ve been doing four webcasts a week like I mentioned in the introduction and we pretty much started doing these when the pandemic started. We do 50 live events per year at the Institute for Excellence in Sales, now we’re doing 5 webinars a week so we’re talking to experts like you every single day. How have things changed for you? I know you speak around the globe and obviously those have gone away but from the Go for No! perspective, how have you seen that modify, shift and change since we’ve all been in this COVID pandemic world?
Andrea Waltz: That’s a great question. First of all, we’ve seen this whole idea, sales has changed over the last few years just with the advent of technology. The funny thing is that when you add in the technology piece, now we’re all selling virtually, the strategy of having to hear no and valuing no and dealing with no, making sure that you’re in the right mindset of overcoming that fear of rejection is more important than ever. That applies no matter what technology you’re using so now as social media came on, Go for No! works for that and now here we are trying to sell over Zoom, it works for that.
Really it’s about applying the same mindset which is not avoiding the word no and doing the things that we’re going to talk about today but doing them with these new technologies. Unfortunately, and I’m glad you brought this up, Fred, is that with what’s going on in business and so much disruption, there are going to be a lot more no’s out there. That is just the reality, people are not going to make fast decisions, they’re going to have far more objections which are in many cases well founded so you have to have that persistence. You have to have that long term attitude and you have to have an attitude of willing to push through those no’s knowing that in the future they’re going to be yes’s. That’s probably the biggest thing, there’s going to be a lot more no’s in the market right now.
Fred Diamond: I want to do a quick poll and the question here for the audience is, “Do you like it when prospects say no?”
– Yes, because we’re on our way to yes.
– Sure, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
– I hate it.
– I really, really hate it.
Andrea, I’m actually kind of curious what the results are going to be here so let’s take a look at the results. Most people are above the curve where they do because they think they’re on their way to yes but most people say, “Sure, nothing ventured, nothing gained.” The good thing is nobody really, really hates it. What do you think about this, is this in line with what you’ve seen in your research?
Andrea Waltz: Not really, we have some Go for No! devotees here today [laughs] which is great. Actually, it kind of does fall into a bell curve to be honest, Fred. It’s a 20-60-20 thing, 20% of the people, I’ve found, do fall into that ‘really, really hate, total anxiety’ around no. 60% really dislike it, they truthfully hate it and then I’ve found that it’s only about 20% that really can see the value, that really like it. I’ve apparently done my job fairly well so don’t you love that I’m taking credit for this? [Laughs]
Fred Diamond: [Laughs] it’s the leading edge. One thing we talked about before we started the webcast is over the seven years that we’ve been running the Institute for Excellence in Sales there are three words that come up all the time: mindset, creativity and courage. Could you talk for a second or two about what that means? What does courage really mean? Again, I’m glad that you talked about the essential mindset because once again, this is the Optimal Sales Mindset. Andrea, once a week we do a webcast on mindset. Prior to when the pandemic started we did one session a year for three hours in October, now every single week we’re bringing on a world-renowned expert like you who studies this, who helps companies around the globe and organizations really get to that optimal mindset. Could you define what courage means in sales for us?
Andrea Waltz: I think for us, selling courageously is about being willing to face a no and help a prospect or customer face a problem and solve that problem, and being willing to go through that even if you are going to hear a no. You put solving the prospect’s problem ahead of maybe your own fears, your own anxieties and hesitations. That’s how we define courageous selling and I completely think that you have filled a gap in the marketplace around mindset because here we are and there’s only so many tactics and so many tools, scripts and strategies.
Probably the biggest hang-ups that we all face as salespeople, sales leaders and as human is it’s mindset issues, it’s our own self-imposed limitations, it’s our own hang-ups and beliefs around things. It’s battling that mindset that if we can do that, then I find that the skills and talents that we have are unleashed so it’s not so much where we need more skills and we need more responses to objections, I don’t believe that’s true. I think we need to constantly be working on our mindset and especially during this time, just working on keeping that positivity because we’re all tasked with that. How do we stay positive when things are not going well and we do have a lot of bad news on the news?
Fred Diamond: My apologies for hijacking your slides but this is a fascinating topic. What’s so fascinating is that you’ve been speaking about this for the last 20 years, you’re known for this particular angle of sales and like I said, mindset, creativity and courage. Whenever someone asks me, “What does it take to be a successful sales professional” I always say it’s courage. On our Sales Game Changers podcast we interview successful sales VP’s and they’ve had 15, 20, 30 year runs of success and they’ve had courage along the way; courage to ask for the deal, courage to work for great companies, courage to get help, courage to bring in partnership. There’s so much that goes into courageous. Quick question, what prompted you when you first wrote the book Go for No! with your partner? What was the instinct that you had that led you to publishing this? It’s given you 20 years of opportunities to speak to some of the best companies around the globe on this particular topic.
Andrea Waltz: When we launched our company we were doing training of all kinds in the area of sales, our specialty was retail and we were training retail salespeople, managers, we were teaching them sales coaching, sales development and customer service, leadership, all of these topics. Of everything that we would teach, and sometimes we were doing half-day workshops, full-day workshops, Go for No! was the thing that people loved and we could tell that they loved it. It’s so actionable, it’s so ‘implementable’, if that’s a word, I’m making up words here [laughs] It’s so easy to implement, let’s put it that way, so we saw that and we said, “Go for No!, there’s so much more to it and we’re giving it short shrift, we’re talking about it for 10 or 15 minutes in a workshop. Let’s write a book specifically on this topic.”
There’s a lot of books on sales and they tackle the entire sales process from beginning to end and everything in between and we just decided, “Let’s just tackle this one issue and be the STP in your gas tank”, it’s the little additive that you need with all of the other training that you’re doing. That was really the impetus, taking something that we were hearing and seeing from our clients that we knew was important and that it was really our favorite topic as well.
Fred Diamond: It’s brilliant, it just did so many angles of sales. I know you have some things you want to say specifically so if you want to start moving through the slides. We do have some questions coming in but let’s get started with what you want to tell us.
Andrea Waltz: My pleasure and I want to say I do love questions, I love challenges so fire away. It’s this idea of this process and this is something that we talk about in the book Go for No!, we talk about this idea of failure and success. If you want to think of this as a process, this idea of changing your mindset and creating a mindset to overcome fear of rejection, it starts with this idea of your definition of failure and success. There’s a model that we show in the book and it looks like this where you’re in the middle, failure is on one side, success is on the other and we’ve all been taught and trained to avoid failure, to not hear the word no. As salespeople, that’s why I joked in the beginning, we’ve created a marketing challenge for ourselves because salespeople don’t like the word no, they don’t want to hear the word no. We’ve all been taught and trained this old model where it’s like we have to choose one or the other, failure or success, yes or no.
The new model, the model we all should be operating with is where we’re on one side, failure, rejection, hearing the word no is in the middle of this process and the success and the yes’s that we seek are on the other side. What we find is this idea of the strategy of Go for No! which we’re going to talk more about in a minute of hearing no more often, people think, “That sounds interesting, I think I could do that” but then they start doing it and they think, “I must be on the wrong path, this must be wrong because it doesn’t feel right.” When people embrace the idea that the rejection is part of the process, yes and no are on opposite sides of the same coin, you can’t have one without the other, in order to hear more yes’s you’re going to by default hear more no’s until you get so skilled that you hear fewer no’s. This really is so foundational to the mindset of accepting rejection and being able to move through it and making it work for you.
Fred Diamond: I want to talk about that for a second. We have a lot of people who are early in their sales career and even though we’re all inside sales now, the traditional SDR, BDR type of a person who starts out in sales, they may make a hundred phone calls and get one person to even pick up the phone so it’s very challenging. What is your message to someone who’s a young sales professional, first job or two out of school that they’re really mainly tasked with picking up the phone and dials? Just by definition, you’re going to have not even no’s but maybe even some aggressive no’s, what would be your encouragement to those types of people at that stage of their career?
Andrea Waltz: When you are operating in a quantity world, there’s a big part of Go for No! which is quantity is important as far as we’re concerned. We think that having a lot of numbers, in other words, going out and prospecting often and a lot will increase your chances, increase your opportunities to get more yes’s. In that process, though, the best thing to do and my advice is not to look for validation during that process, that quantity where you’re sorting through and your whole goal is to disqualify people, that ideally is what it should be. So to not look for validation and to really focus on the behavior of making those calls and not the result. You have to reward yourself for the activity that you do and in this case it’s the behavior of making the calls and not the results because when you execute the behaviors and you get better and you get more skilled, your results will improve and sometimes the numbers, like you said, you make a hundred calls, 99 you won’t get anywhere, one you will. If those are the numbers and they just bear out that way, it really just becomes where you work on your mindset and you power through those knowing that that one is out there.
Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that for a second. You mentioned focus on the activity versus how people are responding, let’s talk about mindset, let’s get real specific about that. Is the mindset to embrace the no and to, “Yes, I want to more no’s because that’s great because according to Go for No!, that’s what I should be doing”? How do you deal with the human aspect of the continuation of the no’s?
Andrea Waltz: There’s a couple things, detachment is probably the biggest thing, to detach from the outcome and detach from the result. That’s something that I think you get from practice so it is harder for the newer person because when you’re in it and you’re just starting out you’re incredibly attached to what you’re doing. It does tend to come with experience, it also comes from quantity so the more calls you make, the better you get, the more you’re able to detach and say, “I get this, it’s not about me.” The funny thing about taking things personally and even in our Go for No! coaching group on Facebook, we talk about this all the time which is when it comes to taking things personally, taking rejection personally it’s never about you even if it’s about you. [Laughs] that’s just something that’s sometimes hard to embrace and that’s something that I learned by studying a book called The Four Agreements. You have to learn how to not take those things personally because often times, let’s face it, people don’t want to be interrupted, they’re having a bad day and if you are the person cold calling them out of the blue, often times they’re going to take it out on you. You really have to depersonalize that, detach and stay focused on just your activity and remember to reward yourself for your activity.
Fred Diamond: We have a couple questions coming in here. This question is from Louisa and Louisa’s from D.C., thank you so much. Her question is, “Where does empathy play if the customer keeps saying no?” That’s interesting, one of the big words that we’ve heard over the last four months of course has been empathy. Obviously being an empathetic seller is something that has always been critical but now we’ve had to be even more empathetic because of all the situations that we’ve been pressed upon over the last couple of months. Where does empathy play into this where someone keeps saying no and you’re being aspirational, you want them to eventually say yes?
Andrea Waltz: I think it comes in where you really have to pay attention and ask good questions, so I’m glad that Louisa asked this question because it’s not about just going out and throwing things at people. Initially I think that the disqualification process gets through some of that and I think it shows a lot of respect to prospects if you can quickly figure out if you can solve their problem or not, if you have something that they want and need. If you can get through that qualification process and now let’s say that you do have someone who’s really highly qualified for what you have but they’re still saying no, where does that empathy come in?
I think the answer to that question is you have to just be human and you have to try to figure out and ask some questions to learn about their situation and if they are struggling and you have something that you know can help them. Sometimes I think you have to be an advocate, sometimes you have to help people off the fence of decision, people are afraid of change. If you can help someone in that moment make a decision that might be ultimately best for them whether you make the sale or not, I think that’s the greatest most empathetic thing you can do. Always helping people make that decision whether it’s a yes or no is how you show the greatest amount of empathy and that’s certainly where we’re coming from. No is a perfectly acceptable answer, the idea of avoiding no is not.
Fred Diamond: We have a lot of great questions coming in here today. We got a question from Al, actually Al’s your friend, he’s in Calgary, Canada and he says, “What if the person is really being mean, abusive or arrogant about the no’s? How do you deal with such severe rejection?” Someone also asked here, “What’s a nice no versus a really mean no?” Let’s talk about the severity of no, how should we handle the really aggressive, “Get the hell away from me, get off my phone, don’t ever call me again” versus the, “We’re not really ready right now”?
Andrea Waltz: That’s unfortunate and if you’re in a position where for whatever reason you are contacting people and you’re getting those really mean no’s, first of all, let’s say they’re a qualified prospect and they’re someone that you want to do business with but you called them a couple times and they’re always really mean and nasty to you. I think life is short and I would never do business with anyone who was really vicious like that or really attacking so if it were me and it was my company, my own business, they’re off, that’s it. I just don’t call those people back even if they are having a bad day.
Now, sometimes people are having a bad day and they will be unnecessarily rude and unfortunately that’s just part of the job, that’s part of what we have to deal with as salespeople, as interrupters if we’re interrupting them or we catch them at a bad moment or maybe three other people have called them from our company and we didn’t realized that and now we’re getting the wrath of this person. That is unfortunate so again, this comes back to mindset of staying positive and putting good things in your head and not taking that person’s anger personally.
Fred Diamond: We have a couple other questions here that are coming in. Do you believe it’s July 30th, isn’t that crazy?
Andrea Waltz: It’s crazy.
Fred Diamond: We’re four months into this. How would you coach a first line manager to help their people be more successful on this? That’s been one of the big challenges that we’ve heard from the companies that are members and that are participating on our webcast every single day, “We’ve put our first line managers” which is probably the hardest job in sales. Usually it’s somebody who was promoted because they were a high performer typically, and now their team is all over the country if not all over the world, they’re not sitting in the room, you can only coach somebody so much virtually, you always see them from here up. What would be some of your advice for first line managers, probably someone who’s been in management for one, two or three years to help their people and then also to help themselves get past this?
Andrea Waltz: That’s such a great question. We actually created a product during this pandemic because we have the extra time called The Go for No Leader, it’s specifically dealing with people who lead and manage teams for how they can implement Go for No!. I think when it comes to managing salespeople, you have to be both coach and cheerleader, and you can cheer so much but eventually people have to take action.
Our advice is always to really focus on behaviors, getting people into action, focusing on the specific things that they can do, that they can implement and then I think what’s so key is to constantly be cheering people and rewarding people for that action regardless of the result because so much benefit will be gained from taking the activity. Learning will happen, progress will happen and as long as people continue to engage in the behaviors and they’re tweaking as they go, eventually those things will turn into actual tangible sales results. For the first time sales manager it’s really understanding what it is to be a coach of behaviors.
Step two is to intentionally get no more often and this is the fundamental core Go for No! philosophy, to intentionally hear the word no more often and depending on your business, this is what we call a Go for No! moment. If you are selling let’s say insurance products, your goal might be to have an appointment – virtually, of course, now – and meet people and share with them all of your different products and find out all about them and ask them all the questions about all of their needs, or maybe you’re in a retail situation. It’s less about appointments but it’s more about recommending all kinds of additional products and services but again, like Louisa brought up, using empathy so it’s asking good questions and making recommendations that make sense for that client or that customer or that prospect. It’s really asking those good questions so you’re not just throwing things at people but you are going for no in such a way that you’re getting those no’s but you’re also getting the yes’s. This is based on the main story that’s in the Go for No! book.
Fred Diamond: Talking about stories here, we have a request from Dan, Dan is in Northern Virginia. He would like to know what is the greatest victory in overcoming no that you have seen, and maybe you could even take that example from the book or maybe there’s one that you want to throw out where it was, “No, no, no” and it eventually became yes.
Andrea Waltz: There are so many and there’s two categories of success here. One is actual numerical results, just dollars in for someone and the other success that we see – this is what I feel is really important and it’s what’s missing from most business owners, we do a lot of work with independent business owners of employed people – having that confidence to face those no’s. In those Go for No! moments where you have the opportunity to ask or not and half the time because you’re operating with that old model, you decide, “I’m not going to ask this person.”
Not going to ask for the appointment, the meeting, not going to ask for the sale, in that Go for No! moment you do not execute so it’s changing your confidence level. Probably our greatest success story is a guy named Ray Higdon who went out and decided that he was going to get 20 no’s a day and that he was just going to do it almost like a machine. Just go out, get 20 no’s a day, ask, ask, ask and he became the #1 earner in his company, he ended up leaving that company and founding his own training organization which ended up on the Inc. 1000 of Fastest Growing Companies. I think for two years he was on the Inc. Fastest 1000 list and he’s one of our big success stories because he just did it without overthinking it and he detached from the outcome, his goal was just to hear no as often as he possibly could.
Fred Diamond: Dan says, “Thank you very much.” We have a question here from Douglas. Dan also asked another question here, he says that every no is a milestone, every time you’re hung up on, you’re never called back and rejection, gets you closer to yes. Quick question on that, is one of your suggestions to maybe get small yes’s along the way? For example, one of our previous guests, John Asher, and he was our guest last Friday, his suggestion is when you go to a meeting you always ask, “Can I take notes?” and the answer is always going to be yes. You don’t ask, “Do you mind if I take notes?” because the answer is going to be, “No, I don’t mind.” The ascension to yes, if you will. Is that a part of your philosophy and how does that play into Go for No!?
Andrea Waltz: It is not specifically part of our philosophy and it doesn’t mean that it’s not an interesting and impactful strategy that could work. We fundamentally approach it a little bit simpler especially in terms of those type of meetings and presentations where there’s all of these little strategies such as getting those micro-commitments, getting that person to say, “Yes, yes, yes” because towards the end they will be more amenable to saying yes. Nothing wrong with that strategy, it’s funny because it sounds like it’s the opposite of Go for No! but I understand what they’re saying. We don’t tell people, “You want to Go for No! just to get no’s, you want to Go for No! for no’s sake.” That would be crazy, that would be sabotaging your progress. Our strategy just happens to be asking good questions, sharing information, making those asks in those Go for No! moments and being not expecting to hear a no but accepting of it. If somebody can get those micro-commitments of yes, I think it’s a good strategy.
Fred Diamond: I know you have a couple more points that you want to make here so we can move on.
Andrea Waltz: Alright, let’s keep moving on here. We’ve talked about changing your definition of failure and success and intentionally hearing no more often, this is a really important idea here and this is about changing how you respond to no. This is your emotional reaction and we talked a little bit about this as well, about dealing with those mean no’s or those people who are really angry or whatever and they respond poorly. This idea is just to keep you as the salesperson off the emotional roller coaster so we often times get a few yes’s and it’s like, “Yay!” and we celebrate and then we get a couple no’s and its like depression and speaking out loud that we’re not making it and this is horrible.
Especially these days more than ever because there are a lot of no’s out there and there’s going to be more rejection, you want to get yourself off of that emotional roller coaster so when you get that no, it’s not the moment where you want to respond poorly either to the prospect, of course, but even in your own mind. You have to stop yourself and shut down any negative self-talk that you’re speaking to yourself about whether you feel that you didn’t do a good job or whether things aren’t working. You have to shut down that negative self-talk to get yourself off that emotional roller coaster and to be most effective. Your reaction to yes and no must be equal, you want to get in the neutral zone so don’t over-celebrate the yes’s but you also don’t badger yourself, beat yourself up when you get a no.
Fred Diamond: Douglas asks here. We talked about first line managers but to people leading teams in general, what would be some of your specific advice if you were talking to a group of sales managers? Not just your first line managers like we talked about before but leaders and managers in general to get their people motivated, encouraged. What would be some of your sound advice for them? Thank you for the question, Doug.
Andrea Waltz: Great question, Doug. A cultural shift, Fred, is what is needed, a cultural shift around the idea of what is failure and are we okay with hearing no, and do we as a sales team talk about those no’s and do we bring those no’s up and say, “I’m having difficulty hearing no, I’m having difficulty with rejection”, something that needs to be able to be shared with your front line sales coach. But also culturally, is it something that we talk about? Is it the elephant in the room or do we talk about, “I’m getting no from this person, what can I do to move past it?” both tactically, what can we do as an organization to get better about handling those but also being willing to talk about those things, psychologically. I think leadership in general needs to shift the culture.
Fred Diamond: I think also one of the things that leaders can do is help their people understand if it will become a yes. One of the most frustrating things when we talk with sales teams is – you mentioned this in the beginning – things on the pipeline that really should not be on the pipeline. It’s interesting because one thing that we talked about frequently prior to the pandemic was one of the big challenges in sales was getting inside information, hopefully having a champion that was going to tell you, “We’re trying to get you on board” or, “You’re in third place right now.” As a sales professional you’re always trying to figure out, “Where do I play?” and get that inside information. Now post-start of the pandemic, everyone’s in the same situation so we all know where almost every company is and what they’re dealing with which is recovering from the economic fallout of the pandemic. I’m just curious again, helping sales leaders really clarify pipeline, that’s one of the sales leadership challenges that I see is even sales leaders don’t really know what a great pipeline looks like. Do you work with that, do you give them advice on how to clean up the pipeline so that a no might become a yes?
Andrea Waltz: No [laughs], in no way. That is a little bit more tactical than the stuff that we do. However, I completely agree with you 100% and I think salespeople and sales managers have to be willing to challenge those things in the pipeline and to pull those things out and to say, “What is the situation here?” Part of it is the courage to talk as openly and honestly with your prospects if they can give you that information. Then if they won’t give you that information to say, “This person or this company is not qualified, we’ve been spending all this time, we’ve spent all this effort, it’s just a dead lead, let’s cut our losses and move on.” Sometimes I think to a detriment we hang onto those things because it’s like, “We’ve spent all this time cultivating this, now we really have to make it work.” No, you’re just better off to cut your losses and go.
Fred Diamond: I’m going to be asking you in a second for your action recommendation, what people watching today’s webcast or podcast can do, something specific. I think you maybe have one or two more slides?
Andrea Waltz: Yes, we want to talk real quick about valuing no as much as yes, and that is a big part of how you get off that emotional roller coaster. When you get those no’s, when you value it, it has some kind of tangible property so see it almost like you were given a gift and then figure out, “What am I going to do with this? What’s the next best step?” If somebody literally handed you a gift, where would you have to put that? If you think about it with that analogy it really puts it in your lap as to, “What am I going to do with this and what questions can I ask to maybe move this forward and turn it into a yes, now or later, or to just accept that no as a gift and then part ways completely?
Fred Diamond: It’s absolutely a gift and I like what you said before, take out the meaning. If a lot of people are stuck on the no’s and the question asked before about a very mean no, so to speak, that’s not a meaning. It’s yes or it’s no so what do you need to do to not just move this deal forward but your sales career? Take out the meaning and keep doing the right stuff.
Andrea Waltz: Absolutely. This is just a fun quote that I wanted to share with everybody, “If everybody said yes, they wouldn’t need to pay you very well so you really get paid for the no’s, not the yes’s.” That’s so funny, isn’t it? The great sales trainer Joel Weldon said that.
Fred Diamond: Joel looks a lot like our good friend Einstein.
Andrea Waltz: He does, yes [laughs].
Fred Diamond: [Laughs] Andrea Waltz, thank you so much, you’re the author of Go for No!, you’re one of the top speakers in the world on helping sales professionals get the right mindset to take their business to the next level and to be successful. We’ve flown through today’s webcast, I want to thank everybody who’s given us an hour of their time on July 30th and all the people who are listening to the podcast. This was a perfect Optimal Sales Mindset webcast, I want to thank you for not just being with us but for also the great ideas. Before we wrap up here we do have a question from Al, he’s asked this question a couple times – my apologies, Al, for not getting to you – the question is, “Andrea, could you please share some tips on how to leave an almost ‘perfected’ voice message? As most times sales cold calls end up into an automated voice bucket.” Is that something you might be able to fix? Do you know what he’s referring to?
Andrea Waltz: Tips for leaving a perfect voicemail. One is go ahead and leave that voicemail, that’s one because I know a lot of people don’t believe in that. #2, brevity for sure and #3 is you’ve got to have that call-to-action. What do you want them to do? I would say when you do those voicemails it’s got to be part of a campaign. If you can follow that up with an email and maybe even follow it up with something on social media if you’re connected on LinkedIn or you can message them, that’s going to be so much more powerful than just that one message.
Finally, you just have to be persistent. In terms of scripting, I’m going to leave that open because I really feel like depending on your industry, seeking out those industry experts for exactly what to say because what it comes down to is why are you leaving the voicemail and what do you want that person to do? Keep it brief but make sure there’s that call-to-action. What do you want them to do?
Fred Diamond: Give us an action item, give us something that everybody watching today’s webcast or listening on the podcast can do today to be successful.
Andrea Waltz: Set a no goal. This is the opposite of setting a yes go, we all typically set goals, set a goal for the number of no’s you’re going to hear either today or maybe it’s set a goal for next week. We do something we call a 21 day Go for No! challenge and people set goals for 21 days, one type of goal throughout the entire challenge. Maybe it’s 10, maybe it’s 5, see how many no’s you can get and count them and make it a goal.
Fred Diamond: That’s very powerful. Once again, Andrea Waltz, thank you so much. Everyone who’s watched today’s webcast or listened to the podcast, thank you all. We have a whole bunch of people saying thank you, Andrea, so thank you for your time, stay safe.
Andrea Waltz: Absolutely.
Fred Diamond: To all our listeners, thank you all very much.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo