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[EDITOR’S NOTE: The live, in-person programs the IES was famous for return on Friday morning, October 8 featuring Arnold Sanow, the “Get-Along Guy.” Register now by clicking here.]
Register for the IES Women in Sales Leadership Forum whicj starts October 15 here.
Find Arnold on LinkedIn here.
ARNOLD’S TIP FOR EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “We’re going to talk about six key ingredients to get people, be it customers, co-workers, and prospects, to be singing your praises. Everything starts, for example, with your attitude and being reliable and responsive, and we’re going to go on from there. I think the #1 reason people go to meetings is also the networking. You’ll get that and we’re going to give you plenty of time for that.”
THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE
Fred Diamond: I’m very happy today to be speaking with a past guest of the Creativity in Sales webinar, Arnold Sanow. I call him The Relationship Guy, he’s written so many books about relationships and integration between marketing and sales. The reason we’re talking to Arnold is because, ladies and gentlemen, for the past 18 months because of the pandemic, we had stopped doing live events. Prior to March 2020, the Institute for Excellence in Sales which is based in the Washington DC region, we had done close to 50 live events per year. Some would get 15 people like Mastermind groups and networking sessions, some would get 400-500 like our Annual Award Event.
But we were frequently known for what we call the Big Stage Programs which are typically the first Friday of every month in the Washington DC northern region. We would bring great speakers such as Arnold, Mark Hunter, Mike Schmidtmann, Tom Snyder, John Asher, Colleen Stanley, the author of Emotional Intelligence for Sales Leadership, to talk about topics of interest for sales organizations. We were very fortunate, companies that would attend programs like this included some of the top sales organizations on the planet: Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, Intel, Red Hat Software, Cvent. Again, we were very fortunate to do those programs.
Arnold, the last one we did was March of 2020 right before the pandemic really kicked in, before lockdown really kicked in. We had Tim Riesterer from Corporate Visions and we weren’t shaking hands that day, nobody was wearing masks, we didn’t know about that, it was March 6th, 2020. We bowed in front of each other instead of hugging, we did fist pumps, and we did elbow pumps and it was a great, great day. We had 200 people.
Now, we’re starting again on Friday, October 8th and I’m very excited that you’re going to be the first speaker of the brand new IES Live event. It’s going to be very safe, it’s going to be at the Marriott Fairview Park which is in Falls Church, Virginia at Fairfax, right off of the beltway near Tysons Corner in Washington DC. Arnold, we’ll get 70 people or we’ll get 300 people, we’ll see how comfortable people are returning.
People have been asking me for the last year, “When are you going to start doing live events again?” We’re starting Friday, October 8th. We’re going to open the doors from 7:00 to 8:00 for breakfast and networking, and then you’ll take the stage for close to two hours. It’s not a keynote, it’s not an intense workshop, but it will be intense for the two hours that you will be on stage. You’ll be doing an interactive program and it’ll be a great chance for the sales professionals of the DC region to get back together.
I call you The Get-Along Guy. First of all, are you looking forward? We’ve been talking during the pandemic, I know you’ve ventured out a couple times, I know things are beginning to pick back up for you again. Are you excited to come onto the IES stage?
Arnold Sanow: Definitely. I definitely miss getting in front of people and I think you’re going to get the most out of something like this if you come to it because as Fred said, we’re going to be doing some interactive activities. You’re going to hear from all the other experts in the room too, I’m not the only expert there. There’s a lot of people in there who we’re going to hear from, every three to five minutes we’ll have examples, stories, anecdotes, exercises, something to keep it going. My promise to you is you will walk away with real tangible information and content that you can use right after we leave that day.
As you said, Fred, I’ve been doing a number of these already and there’s nothing like being in person. I encourage you all if you have the chance, to come out as Fred said. It will be safe, I won’t get in your face like I normally do when I walk through the audience, I will be far away from you, but you will get a lot of information. I can give you some tips right now of what you’re going to get.
Fred Diamond: First of all, I call you The Get-Along Guy. How many books have you written, by the way? Is it over ten?
Arnold Sanow: I’ve written seven books so far.
Fred Diamond: We first got to know you with your classic The Get-Along. What was the official title of that book?
Arnold Sanow: It was called Get Along with Anyone, Anytime, Anywhere! 8 Keys to Creating Enduring Connections with Customers, Co-Workers, and I even put in “with Kids Too.” I don’t know how to do teenage girls, but that’s another story. That’s for another book from somebody else. But otherwise, that’s what we’re going to get.
Fred Diamond: I actually have two daughters and they were both teenagers at one time. I tell people, just show them love and they’ll be happy.
Arnold Sanow: I don’t think I could help them, that’s beyond me.
Fred Diamond: [Laughs] we’re not going to have too many teenage girls at the event, but we will have a lot of sales leaders from some of the top companies in the DC region and they’ll be bringing their teams. It’s just going to be an opportunity. Why don’t you do this? Give us three things that you’ll talk about on Friday, October 8th.
It’s interesting, when you think about relationships, most of the interacting that we’ve had over the last 18 months has been like this, over Zoom, Teams, Meet or whatever it might be. We use GoToMeeting for a lot of our things and you can only see people at a certain level, you see people from their torso up.
We tell people – our good friend, Julie Hansen is the expert on doing the presentations virtually – you’ve got to use your hands and you’ve got to stay focused, and you’ve got to remember to look at the dot. You don’t want to be doing things like this [glancing at watch] and you always see people like this [looking away to the side].
As we begin to get back with human beings and we begin to interact with them, why don’t you give us three things that you’re really going to focus on to help the sales professionals who will be attending take their sales career to the next level?
Arnold Sanow: Besides what I’m giving, I just want to mention out too, this is a great opportunity to connect again and network. I don’t like to network in a negative way, but network just to connect with people and see. We’re wired as humans to want to connect, so whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, we want to get out there and this is going to be the opportunity for you.
Let me give you a few things that you’ll walk away with. I first of all want to go over the four keys to developing better sales relationships. When you look at those four keys, I’m just going to give you a few here, we’ll get into details there later. First of all, when people are deciding whether to buy from you, they think of four things. They think, do you care about me? Because if you don’t care about me, I don’t care about you.
Not in any order, but the second thing they think is, do I trust this person? We’re going to talk about how to establish trust, how do you build that trust? What does trust actually look like? The third thing they look for is your competence, do you do a good job? That’s the bottom line, do you have a good track record on that? The fourth thing is your likeability IQ.
There’s an old saying, everything being equal, people deal with people they like and they trust. We all know that. But on the other flip side of everything being equal, we still deal with people they like and trust. Have you ever gone out to buy a car and the car had the right price, it had the right color, it had the right engine, everything was good but there was just something you didn’t like about the salesperson? How many times have we walked away or people have walked away from us because of something in our personality?
When you really boil it down, your personality is your greatest asset. We’re going to talk about some of those areas. I also want to talk about specific things you can do, how to soften your image, for example, to make yourself more approachable, likeable, trustworthy. It’s that body language, the tone, we’ll talk about the words you can use and not use that gets you into trouble on those aspects. We’re going to also talk about those misunderstandings that derail connections and cause people to lose you.
I know you asked for three things, I’ll give you one more. We’re going to talk about six key ingredients to get people, be it customers, co-workers, and prospects, to be singing your praises. Everything starts, for example, with your attitude and being reliable and responsive, and we’re going to go on from there. But these are just a few of the things we’ll talk about when we meet in person. Again, I think the #1 reason people go to meetings is also the networking. You’ll get that and we’re going to give you plenty of time for that. Fred, I’ll let you go into that one a little more.
Fred Diamond: That’s what Arnold Sanow is going to be talking about. I’m excited to bring him onto the IES Live Stage, it’s going to be our first event since March of 2020. People are itching to get back, you’re going to learn a lot. It’s interesting, Arnold, it’s almost like a Brave New World, people are beginning to go to things like this. People obviously have gotten out of the house, they’ve gone to parks, I went to the beach a bunch of times this summer and no shortage of people. People have ventured out, but people haven’t really ventured out into events like this, inside events for business to reacquaint, to re-meet and to rethink. It’s almost like a Brave New World.
Once again, Friday, October 8th at the Marriott Fairview Park in Falls Church, Fairfax, Virginia. We open the doors at 7:00 with breakfast and networking, and then Arnold’s going to hit the stage at 8 o’clock. He’ll go till 10:00 and he also has some special gifts that we’ll send to all of our attendees. Just go to the I4ESBD.com website and you’ll see the banner on how to register. Very excited to see everybody again on Friday, October 8th.
Arnold Sanow: Thank you.
Transcribed by Mariana Badillo