SPECIAL EPISODE 009, Part Two: Sales Training Expert John Asher Shares How Understanding Neuroscience Techniques Will Improve Your Sales Skills

JOHN’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “We know that there are many cognitive biases that help us influence buyers. There’s about 100 of them, about 50 of them apply to sales. Figuring out which of those apply to sales, how to use them and what’s the practical application for salespeople is critical.”

LISTEN TO PART ONE OF THIS EPISODE HERE!

For those of you who’ve been long time listeners of the Sales Game Changers podcast, you may recall John Asher was featured on Episode #10.

John is the president of ASHER Strategies and an expert on neuroscience and sales and the author of the sales best seller Close Deals Faster.

He is a top sales trainer to Vistage Groups around the globe.

If you’d like to learn about John’s sales journey, what he thinks from a sales perspective in his career go back and check out our episode with John.

You can also watch John at the Institute for Excellence in Sales 2017 award event speaking about Neuroscience by clicking the image below.

Find John on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: John, on Part 1 of this podcast we talked about how sales professionals need to sell to what’s known as the old brain, the emotional brain, reptilian brain as compared to the new rational brain. Why don’t you summarize what we talked about on the first episode for about 30 seconds to a minute? Then we’re going to get into some specific applications that sales professionals can apply to be more successful at selling once they understand how the customer utilizes their brain to process information and make decisions.

John Asher: Hey, Fred. Great to be back with you. We know now from neuroscience studies in 70 countries that all decisions really come from the old brain, which is a combination of the reptilian brain and the emotional brain. If you’re going to wake up the buyer’s old brain we now know from many functional MRI machines – think of a person with a helmet on with an MRI built into it – that there are 6 stimuli to wake up the buyer’s old brain and if you’re with a suspect, prospect, current customer and you’re not using any of those stimuli, closing rates would be zero.

We also know that there are many cognitive biases that help us influence buyers. There’s about 100 of them, about 50 of them apply to sales and that’s essentially what we’ve been doing for the last 3 years. Figuring out which of those apply to sales, how to use them and what’s the practical application for salespeople is critical.

Fred Diamond: Very good. It’s critical to understand this and what we’re going to be talking about today is once you understand how the customer’s brain works, it’ll help you accelerate your process to sale success and it’ll help you take your sales game to the next level. Thinks with understanding the customer always starts off with me, thinking about what’s in it for me, how does this apply to me. Also, how they synthesize information more effectively using images and using video. We talked about strategies on how you can become more effective.

Also talked about the whole concept that it’ll be more effective if you have a sales call and the customer does all the talking. Obviously then the customer’s thinking about how this applies to you and elite sales professionals understand that, they know that and that is how they take their game to the next level.

John Asher: Exactly.

Fred Diamond: The second part of the podcast series is on cognitive biases. Tell us John, what exactly is a cognitive bias? I know you’ve identified about 100 cognitive biases, about 50 of them apply to sales and marketing. We’re going to talk about a handful of them today that the sales leaders listening to the podcast should be conscious of and knowledgeable on to be more effective. To start off, what is a cognitive bias? What does it mean so the people understand what we’re going to be talking about?

John Asher: The old brain is a complex organ, 100 billion neurons, each neuron has 10 thousand sinapsis or connections and it takes a ton of energy to make decisions. The old brain has learned to develop shortcuts, rules of thumb, tendencies and neuroscientists call them cognitive biases. Cognitive meaning brain and a bias means a tendency, shortcut, rule of thumb. There’s a special case of a cognitive bias called a heuristic, and that is when a cognitive bias can lead us astray and cause us to make a bad decision.

An obvious example would be stereotyping. So somebody comes in to apply for a software developer job, got their ball cap on backwards, shirt’s hanging out, beard’s not trim, tennis shoes are actually dirty and so our old brain could just dismiss them based on appearance, but it could be that they’re the best software developer available in Northern Virginia. Now, that’s a heuristic. It’s a cognitive bias stereotyping that’s led us astray and caused us to make a bad decision.

Fred Diamond: Let’s start off. We’re going to talk about 6 or 7 of these today that you’ve identified that are critical at sales. The compliment bias, what does that mean?

John Asher: The compliment bias means that when you compliment another person a lightning bulb goes off in their brain. Anytime anybody gets a compliment, they’ll immediately smile and they feel great and a lot of research is done on this in the 60’s by the founder of the Gallup organization. He was researching how do you make people better when almost every psychologist was researching how to fix people, and he wrote a little book about it called How Full is your Bucket. A short book, quick read. What the book means is if you compliment other people, you’re filling up their bucket.

If you’re criticizing other people, you’re emptying their bucket. In most companies where the compliments flow a lot, the culture is just through the roof. The practical application for sales is always compliment the buyer quickly when you first meet them. It doesn’t mean you have to compliment their shirt, but do great research. Be able to compliment them on a video you watched on their website or their website, or their facilities or perhaps how you were treated by the receptionist. Always compliment the buyer early.

Fred Diamond: John, you’re wearing a great shirt. That is a good-looking shirt, and that was a great answer. How do we avoid being kowtowing or obsequious? How do we be genuine? A lot of the people listening on today’s Sales Game Changers podcast sell complex products, they sell IT solutions, financial solutions, detailed manufacturing or analytical type solutions and you’re selling to intelligent people. You’re selling to [Inaudible 06:04] people, people who don’t have a whole lot of time, they have big decisions to make. Talk about being complimentary in a genuine way versus being obsequious or kowtowing.

John Asher: Of course it has to be relevant, it has to be true. You can’t just make stuff up to compliment. Again, great salespeople are the great researchers, the great preparers. They will again do great research and know they can compliment something about the buyer’s company – website, video, facilities, whatever. It’s got to be genuine, of course.

Fred Diamond: What are some strategies you have for the Sales Game Changers listening to today’s podcast to know something specific about the customer? To do that type of research so that they can compliment them on something genuine like a big win or something like that, a new certification.

John Asher: Just great research. Sales navigate or level on LinkedIn, social media.

Fred Diamond: OK. How about CrystalKnows? You talked about that a lot, is that a good solution for them to be using?

John Asher: CrystalKnows is really about your personality style, so you probably wouldn’t compliment somebody about their personality style but CrystalKnows is great to use to modify your approach to their personality.

Fred Diamond: Very good. How much complimenting should you do?

John Asher: Just one, right up front.

Fred Diamond: Let them know that you’ve done the research, you’re thinking about them, you understand what’s important as well before you begin the call.

John Asher: Quick example, I’m an outgoing person, I talk to 100% of the people I meet in the elevator. The reason I do in the play it forward idea is #1, I have validated them as a person worth talking to and about a third of the time I can give them a compliment and it’s a sincere compliment. I just gave a young woman one recently in Fort Lauderdale. She was dressed for business, very well dressed, had nine bracelets that all matched her outfit. I mentioned that, her smile lit up the elevator. I made her whole day. That’s the compliment bias, we’re all biased towards people who compliment us.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. I recently had a meeting with a CEO of a company, and his assistant who scheduled a meeting was just energetic, she was great, she was very respectful to me and my time, if you will. When I met the CEO I said that, I said, “Hey, I want to let you know I had a great experience working with your administrator who scheduled today’s meeting. She was very respectful, nice and she really understood what you were looking to meet with me about” and he was blown away. He goes, “That made my day.” He said, “When I hear people talk about my people in such glowing terms, it really makes me feel good.” The reciprocity bias, what is that?

John Asher: We are biased towards people that give us stuff. It’s strong in every culture, particularly strong in China where I’ve been – I know it sounds like a lot – 103 times since 1980. In China, if you do a favor for somebody they must return the favor even if it’s 20 years later, and if they pass, their family must return the favor. In China it’s called the ren qing, but it’s strong in every culture. The practical application for salespeople is always bring the buyer something, maybe a book you read that applies to their business. Give them more information.

What happens when you give the buyer a gift – and again, it doesn’t have to be candy or something stupid – if you give them some reasonable gift their old brain now is energized to give you something back. Of course, in sales what you normally give back is greater insight into their issues, so always give the buyer something. In fact, Kyle who you know, our VP of sales put out a missive to all of us in the company two years ago. She said, “From now on, every email, every LinkedIn in mail you send must include a link to one of our educational videos.” Made a tremendous difference.

Fred Diamond: John, I’m going to take a short detour here. Not many people know this but you just eluded to this, you’ve been doing business in china for a long time and you’re one of the world renowned sales experts. By the way, for the Sales Game Changers, we mentioned this on the part 1. John also is the author of a best-selling sales book, Close Deals Faster that came out 2017. Great book, I highly recommend that you read it. John, why don’t you give us a little bit of an insight into selling in China? I know that’s not what’s on the agenda for today, but you eluded to it. We have Sales Game Changers listening around the world. Can you maybe give us a minute, a minute a half worth of insights into the differences between selling in the US where most of our listeners are or Australia or Europe versus what it means to sell in China?

John Asher: Interesting. My first book actually in 2012 the title was – for the Chinese – How to Sell to The West. I was a co-author with my president of operations in China. One of the interesting things about China is because they’re so skeptical as a people, because of foreign domination, confuses rules, men rule women and all that sort of thing then rapport building in China even more important than it is here.

That’s why you hear about going to China, you’ve got to go out and have 30 drinks, toast and all that sort of stuff. Unless they trust you, you just can’t do business with them. Rapport building all important. Second issue is if you’re selling in China, they want to see the boss. I’ve had many trips to China where I fly over, have pre meeting with my team, go to the meeting with the prospect, have a debrief with the team and fly back. The only reason I do that is because they must see the boss or you just can’t get the business.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. This isn’t a political podcast, this is Sales Game Changers podcast. We’re helping sales professionals around the world get better. We’re actually recording today’s podcast in July of 2018. Has the trade conversation changed selling in China for US or western companies? Have you seen anything yet?

John Asher: There’s always some upset to it, but I think as you know, the president is doing what most business people are like him to do, and that is get China to change their behavior. Stealing our IP, requiring that we have a partner if we’re going to sell in China and all that sort of thing. All this upset right now is just him negotiating the way most business people want him to negotiate. Most people don’t particularly like all these tweets and stuff, but what he’s actually doing from a business standpoint is what we want him to do.

Fred Diamond: I agree. A little bit of a detour there in the Sales Game Changers podcast. Special episode with John Asher, again my name is Fred Diamond. Not sure if I mentioned it or not but today’s podcast is sponsored in part by the Institute for Excellence in Sales. The third bias, John, is the similarity bias. Tell us about that.

John Asher: Hundreds of millions of years ago when you first saw somebody else, you had to make a decision. Is this a threat, is this a friend or is this a potential partner? You have all these images, and so if they’re similar to you then it looks safe. An example would be if you go over to a friend’s house and they have had a baby and the baby is 3 months old and you pick up the baby, what’s the baby do? Immediately cries. Stranger danger type of thing. We’re all biased towards people who are like us. Age, gender, religion, sports preferences, personality. We’re just totally drawn to people like us.

The practical application here for salespeople is use neurolinguistics programming techniques. Find out everything you can about the buyer before you go to see them so that you can use NLP. If I’m with a buyer for example, and they’re talking slower than I’m talking, I’m going to slow down. If they’re talking louder, I’m going to talk louder. If they’re doing all kinds of body language then I’ll slowly integrate in some body language. If they’re using acronyms associated with their business, I’ll pick up on those pretty much right away.

Then within a very short period of time in the buyer’s old brain, the old brain says, “Wow. This person is just like me, therefore they must be awesome” and you get the deal or the sale. It’s just called a similarity bias and I know you’ve heard of NLP and I know your listeners have heard of NLP. It’s been researched in Stanford, there’s a day, two day, week long courses, books. It all just goes back to the similarity bias.

Fred Diamond: Very good. Actually, we did a special episode with a man named Ramzy Ayachi who I know that you know who is an expert on NLP. That was a previous episode of the Sales Game Changers podcast, I believe it was special episode #6. We also wrote a couple articles about that based on that. John, we’ve spoken numerous times and a lot of people believe that they need to be the last company to present, that their odds are going to go up of being successful if they’re last but you tell me you want to be first. That’s called the anchor bias. Tell us about that.

John Asher: It’s another one of these cognitive biases. From a sales standpoint it upsets what we’ve all thought. If you’re going to make a presentation and two other companies are in the same time frame to a buyer or a group of buyers, because of the anchor bias you always want to be first. The reason is the buyer’s old brain anchors on your presentation. Unless your presentation’s all hosed up, when the buyer hears the next two they’re not looking for a reason to change their mind, the buyer’s mind.

Remember, the buyer’s old brain doesn’t want to change its mind, it looks for negative aspects to quickly get rid of it. If you’re giving presentations with other companies in the same time frame, always be the first to present.

Fred Diamond: Next we have the status quo bias, the competition is not your biggest competitor. Tell us how that applies.

John Asher: There’s three main companies in the US selling B to B and B to G – government. If you ask most salespeople and most companies, “Who is your biggest competition, your competitors or your status quo?” Most of them will say, “Probably the status quo” and it is true. 80% of the competition is really the status quo that was getting buyers to move. It’s why so many companies have what’s called a clogged pipeline, you just can’t get them over the finished line. To give you an example, if there’s a prospect for your customer and they’re unhappy with their current vendor we have a real chance. That’s a great opportunity but if they’re happy or OK with their current vendor or supplier, very difficult to get them to move.

There’s three reasons that all buyers know, one is there may be switching costs, they may have a warehouse full of inventory of the current vendors. All buyers know that all change is difficult, even good change and buyers just won’t shift for a small, say 4% improvement. In many cases, buyers will discount the salesperson’s claimed ROI and it’s not that they think salespeople are dishonest, they just know salespeople are going to put the best spin they can on their offerings. The practical application for salespeople is if you’re going to get buyers to move, you must address the switching cost.

For example, I’ve got a customer in Alabama, hardware manufacturer sales to distributors. When he’s trying to get a new distributor, he’ll offer to buy their inventory of the current distributor, sell it off in a discount but now he’s got a big new customer. That’s one way to address the switching cost. From the change standpoint you’ve got to show the buyer that they do not have to lift a finger to make the transition. You will totally take care of it.

Then from an ROI standpoint, we know from the latest ad from the big outsourcing and technology companies, Accenture, KPMG, Deloitte, etcetera – and it doesn’t matter what the financial metric is, higher revenue, higher cash flow, higher gross margin, lower cost – you must have at least a 15% improvement or buyers just won’t move. It’s an example of why the challenger sale idea is such a good idea, you’ve got that big difference you can make for the buyer. You see this play out in real life, we’ve all heard the Geico ad, “Give us 15 minutes and we’ll show you a 15% improvement.” If the Geico ad said, “Give us 15 minutes and we’ll show you a 4% improvement” would anybody call Geico?

Fred Diamond: Probably not. Again, we’re talking to John Asher. We’re talking about some cognitive biases to help you be more successful once you understand the neuroscience behind sales. John, let’s just take one more bias here. Let’s talk about the single option aversion bias and actually, let’s just take a second here. 

John Asher: The single option aversion bias means that if the old brain doesn’t see a choice, it can’t make a decision. It goes back to the first podcast we covered, that stimuli #4 clear difference. The practical application is never offer the buyer only one solution. There are numerous studies over all 33 industries that show if you offer the buyer a single solution, 10% will buy. If you offer 2 similar solutions, 64% will buy. That’s a difference in closing rates to 640% so the practical application is never offer the buyer just a single solution.

Fred Diamond: How about the choice paradox? How does that apply specifically?

John Asher: The choice part of the choice paradox bias means many salespeople think, “If I can just show the buyer all 7 of our solutions, one is bound to stick.” The paradox part of the choice paradox bias means if you offer the buyer’s old brain more than 3 choices, the old brain becomes confused.

Because of the choice paradox bias, never offer more than 3 because of the single option aversion never offer only one. So the right answer combining those two biases is always offer the buyer 2 or 3 choices, and you see this play out in real life a lot. If you take your partner to a fancy restaurant for your anniversary, it’s a white table cloth, how many specials do they typically have?

Fred Diamond: Two or three at the most.

John Asher: Yeah, two or three. At my age when I bought a car 30 years ago there was all these options to consider. Now, two or three packages of options.

Fred Diamond: Sometimes even when you’re the seller and you have to describe the three options, we saw this, I think it was a 2016 republican debate with Rick Perry, the governor from Texas. He said if he becomes the president he’s going to eliminate three agencies. He mentioned the first two and he couldn’t think about the third one. Same thing in selling and ironically the third one happened to be department of energy which of course he is the secretary of. You want to make it as simple for you. I think one of the key things here selling to the old brain, we talked about again the 6 stimuli, #2 was make it simple and easy to grasp not just for the customer but for you to be able to communicate as well.

John Asher: Agree.

Fred Diamond: John, before we wrap up, is there any final thoughts you want to share with us? Once again, thank you so much for the great insights on the last two podcasts. This is information that sales professionals around the world truly need to understand as it gets more complicated at the customer site, and you need to be as clear and differentiated as possible.

John Asher: I’m an engineer, so for me this is all thrilling. To be able to finally understand the real science behind sales and for the elite salespeople today it takes that understanding of the old brain stimuli and an understanding of the 50 cognitive biases that apply to sales.

The post SPECIAL EPISODE 009, Part Two: Sales Training Expert John Asher Shares How Understanding Neuroscience Techniques Will Improve Your Sales Skills first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

SPECIAL EPISODE 009, Part One: Sales Training Expert John Asher Shares How Understanding Neuroscience Techniques Will Improve Your Sales Skills

JOHN’S CLOSING TIP TO EMERGING SALES LEADERS: “The comprehension rate of our brain for video is 60,000 times as fast as reading words on the internet, so the practical application here is get more videos in your proposals, in your presentations, on your website. And the best videos are where you can turn down the audio and still get the idea.”

LISTEN TO PART TWO OF THIS EPISODE HERE!

For those of you who’ve been long time listeners of the Sales Game Changers podcast, you may recall John Asher was featured on Episode #10.

John is the president of ASHER Strategies and an expert on neuroscience and sales and the author of the sales best seller Close Deals Faster.

He is a top sales trainer to Vistage Groups around the globe.

If you’d like to learn about John’s sales journey, what he thinks from a sales perspective in his career go back and check out our episode with John.

You can also watch John at the Institute for Excellence in Sales 2017 award event speaking about Neuroscience by clicking the image below.

Find John on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: We’re going to talk today about how neuroscience has changed in selling and how sales professionals need to be more conscious of how they speak to their customers and prospects and how recent studies in science have shown that we’ve been doing it wrong the whole way and now we’ve discovered better ways that we can be using science to be more effective in selling.

John Asher: Agree. It’s always been an art and science to sales, Fred and many of us have been in sales for quite some time. We’ve learned from experts, we’ve read books, we’ve gone to sales training and we’ve had our sales managers coach us. Sum all that up, the science part of sales has always been have a sales process, steps you can follow. The art of sales is we all have different personalities so how each one of us accomplish each step could be different but that’s OK as long as we follow the process.

Now I know there’s a real science behind sales – neuroscience behind sales and it’s come from a world-wide forum of 70 countries with neuroscientists sharing their studies, sharing their research, collaborating. In many cases, especially in the last 3 years many of these studies are done with what are called functional MRI machines – think of a buyer sitting on a chair with a helmet on and an MRI machine built into the helmet, so we can now see exactly what areas of the brain wake up, which areas of the brain stay asleep, when do different areas of the brain wake up with various techniques salespeople use.

If you ask these neuroscientists why they’re doing all this, they’ll say other than academic reasons we really want insight into human relation, human communication and decision making. If you ask neuroscientists how does this all apply to sales, they may give you a blank stare or say, “What do you mean by sales?” Our company’s job for the last 3 years is to really take all that information, boil it down, see how it applies to sales and give these new techniques to salespeople that they can use tomorrow.

Fred Diamond: Basically, we’ve been doing it wrong. We’ve been speaking to the wrong side of the customer’s brain, we’ve been selling the wrong way. Why don’t you talk a little bit about the brain, the concept of the new brain, the rational brain if you will versus the emotional brain and the reptilian brain?

John Asher: About 500 years ago – sounds like a long time ago – the reptilian brain came on the scene and it’s with the advent of vertebrates and it’s all about fight, flight, freeze, appease brain. It controls our autonomic or automatic functions that we don’t have to think about like breathing, heart rate, digestion. Then about 150 million years ago with the advent of mammals like a manatee or a whale the emotional brain came on the scene, and the emotional brain is all about excitement, engagement, emotion. The emotional brain doesn’t see facts, figures, can’t do complex thinking.

Then about 2 million years ago with the advent of primates like us humans, the logical brain came in the scene. The logical brain is the brain we all know we’re using. It’s all about facts, figures, complex thinking and if you ask neuroscientists so boil this down and make it even simpler they’ll say, “Well, since the reptilian and emotional brains are both over 150 million years old you can call them the old brain and the rational brain the new brain.” It really begs the question, “Where do we all make decisions? The old brain? The new brain? A combination of both?” And the answer to that question many listeners I’m sure have heard this statement: we decide on emotion and justify with logic.

Everybody’s heard that statement so the real question is what does that practically mean from a day to day decision making process and of course what does it mean for sales? Here’s what it means for sales: your company and two others are after a hot opportunity and all three companies have great experience, good quality, good service, reasonable prices. In the buyer’s mind all three companies are tied for first, so which one does the buyer choose? Well, the buyer’s going to choose the one where they like the salesperson the best. The salesperson that’s built the best rapport, the salesperson they feel the best about.

Here’s where the logic comes in. Your company and two others are after another hot opportunity, your company and one other are tied for first in the buyer’s mind and then there’s an average company. Even though the buyer may like the salesperson from the average company the best they’re not choosing them because they don’t have the logic to justify the emotional buy. The practical application is this, many salespeople think, “I got such great stuff, that’s all we need to sell it.” When in fact, it ain’t, that’s just the logic.

You’ve got to get the emotional buy from the customer. That’s a way to think about the old brain and the new brain, the old brain really makes the decisions and we in fact know this from many studies from neuroscientists who study people in hospitals who have tumors, got sick, car accident, have lost their emotional brain. Those people can’t make a decision, they can’t decide whether to have the ham or turkey sandwich for lunch, so we know all decisions come from the old brain.

Fred Diamond: Interestingly, one way to think about it is if you’re showing up with features and benefits and bullets you’re probably not going to get the sale. The customer’s not really listening to you.

John Asher: Their old brain is fast asleep. [Laughs]

Fred Diamond: John, let’s talk a little bit about the six stimuli, let’s get deep into this. What I want our listeners on the Sales Game Changers podcast today is to get a better understanding of how they need to be thinking, how neuroscience should become a part of their sales process and then later on we’re going to talk about some specific ways to make that more successful, they can become better at the art and science of selling. We call this the old brain and how it responds to the six stimuli. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

John Asher: We now know from these functional MRI studies that there are six stimuli that will wake up the buyer’s old brain. If any of us are with a buyer – whether it’s a suspect, prospect or even a current customer – and we’re not using any of these six stimuli to wake up the buyer’s old brain, closing rates would be zero. We now know there’s six stimuli, the first is because of the reptilian brain mainly we are al, “Me, me, me” focused. It’s all about ourselves, our own safety, our own happiness, our own success.

One way to think about this is if you’re giving a logical presentation to the buyer, the buyer’s old brain is not awake. The buyer’s old brain does not see facts, figures, graphs, it only will see pictures. So the buyer’s brain is not awake when we’re giving a presentation so here’s the practical application of that. To drop back and give you a little bit of information about sales, people in the US according to Harvard – and Harvard has the biggest research department on sales – right now there’s 25 million hunter salespeople in the US selling B to B and B to G. Not B to C, cars and Macy’s, but B to B and B to G.

About 20% of those are elite, so about 5 million elite salespeople in the US which means 80% or 20 million are pretty bad, usually untrained. When you watch an untrained salesperson give a presentation, here’s their architecture: here’s the vision of our company, here’s a picture of our executive team or our facilities, here’s the list of our 7 integrated cyber security solutions, let’s start with the details of cyber security solution #1. So what do you think? Would the buyer’s old brain be awake yet?

Fred Diamond: No.

John Asher: Obviously not. When you watch great salespeople give a presentation, totally different, totally upside down and they take advantage on understanding the buyer’s brain’s, “Me, me, me” focused. Their title of their first line is, “Here is our understanding of your need.” And if you’ve got that pretty well nailed – you don’t have to have it perfectly nailed – then in 95% of the cases, we know from these functional MRI studies that’ll cause a big conversation. Once that conversation is over, how many slides in our slide deck of 21 slides do we have to show? Obviously not too many, maybe a few.

To give you a quick example, I was in Toronto recently doing a Vistage presentation as Fred mentioned and one of the women running a marketing company when I got to this point, she said, “Wow. I’ve got a big presentation company tomorrow to Telus, a big telecom company in Canada. There’s 4 of us presenting. 3 large companies, one’s the incumbent and me, I’m a small company. I’m pretty sure they invited me so they could check off that we talked to a small business or a small women-owned business box.” So she said, “What do I have to lose? I’m just going to dynamite the presentation and start with the customer needs.” I said, “Let me know what happens.”

She emails me a day later and said, “I won.” She got a conditional win and that had to meet with the buyers so that they could tell her which of the people in the incumbent they wanted her to bring over to her company but she basically won by taking advantage of this first old brain stimuli, start with the customer needs.

Fred Diamond: Just a quick question there, a lot of people are probably thinking, “My product needs to satisfy customer requirements. The customer is going to buy my product because it does what they need it to do and I can prove that.” I want to make it clear that you just said there she won the deal because of appealing to the customer’s old brain but then the customer said, “On the condition that you’re going to be having people who know what they’re doing”, if you will.

John Asher: Exactly.

Fred Diamond: So you still need the goods, but the point here is how do you get break through early on to get into the sales process further down the bat, if you will.

John Asher: Exactly. Another example of that, “Me, me, me” focused is are buyer’s old brain energized by listening to salespeople talk? We all know the answer is no. Another way to think about this is we know from these latest functional MRI machines if you can get another person to talk about their passion, interest, problems, issues, where they came from, how they started their company more of the 3 positive hormones – dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin – are released in their brain than during romance or a great meal.

The practical application here is always do the right research on the buyer before you go to see them. Use the sales navigator on LinkedIn, use the #1 app for salespeople, CrystalKnows, www.crystalknows.com to find out everything about them. Then when you first meet them, ask a question to get them to talk about what they love to talk about. It’s another practical application of this first old brain stimuli, the, “Me, me, me” focused.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. Let’s talk about maybe the concept of simple and easy to grasp ideas and moving on to the second stimuli, if you will. How does that apply?

John Asher: The second is the salesperson says to the buyer, “We have a flexible, integrated scalable solution with 50 next way points.” The buyer’s logical brain goes, “Great” but how about the buyer’s old brain? The buyer’s old brain is confused. We all know a confused brain will not make a decision so the practical application here – we’ve all heard this through our whole lives – keep it simple. You do not have to keep it simple for the buyer’s logical brain, but you must keep it simple for the buyer’s emotional brain and that’s where the decisions are made.

To give you a quick example of this, I’m doing a keynote in February, the IPPA, the payroll industry. I had 2 different keynotes so I had time to walk around and if you were a vendor to them, you could rent a booth for, I think it was 20 thousand dollars for a 10 by 10 booth. If you asked trade show consultants how should you design a 10 by 10 booth they’ll say, “Well, the average person walking by gives it 3.3 seconds.” So you want to design your booth so that a qualified lead in about 3 seconds could say, “OK, get what these guys do or come in and talk to them” and an unqualified lead would say, “No, I don’t need this” and move, and most importantly not come in and waste your time.

Having a round look at all 20 booths out there in Vegas, every single one was too complicated. One had 17 products and services listed on the front column. The practical application is consider simplifying the description of your products and services.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you, John. A lot of the people listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast around the globe sell IT or complex products or complex financial services products and they’re selling to smart people: directors of IT, CIO’s, chief technology officers, financial analysts, if you will. These are typically smart people, so we talk here about the need to keep it simple and easy so they can grasp the ideas but what if your customer’s smart? What if your customer has master’s degrees or you’re selling to people who are creating infrastructure architecture?

John Asher: Remember, their logical brain is going to say, “Yes, yes, got it, got it” but not the old brain and the old brain is where decisions are made. That’s the fallacy.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. Do they know that? Again, you’re talking to someone who’s really intelligent. Is the customer conscious of this? Again, we’re talking to sales professionals today listening to the Sales Game Changers podcast with John Asher from Asher Strategies. A smart customer, is he or she conscious of the fact that it is the emotional brain – the reptilian brain, if you will – that is making the early decisions?

John Asher: I would say right now maybe 10%, but when you drop back in general most very savvy buyers love dealing with elite salespeople. They don’t want to deal with crappy salespeople.

Fred Diamond: That’s a great point. You also got to be prepared. You need to be able to engage them. You’re not just talking about going in there and talking about very simple concepts, we’re talking about taking sometimes challenging, complex concepts and making them simple and easy to grasp.

John Asher: We’re talking about it a little bit but one of the best ways to do it is with a video.

Fred Diamond: Interesting.

John Asher: I’m sure you’ve heard.

Fred Diamond: We’re talking today with John Asher. The question is, “How do you sell to the old brain?” We’re talking about neuroscience in the sales process. John’s a global expert on this, he speaks all around the world on using neuroscience for sales. We’re talking about how the old brain responds to the six stimuli, we talked about the, “Me, me, me.” The concept that your customer is always thinking about themselves, “What is in it for me? How does this apply to me?” Secondly, the need to make it simple and easy to grasp so that you can ensure that you get to the next stage of the process. John, what’s the third stimuli we’re going to be talking about?

John Asher: The third stimuli is the beginning and the end, and because the brain is such a complex organ – 100 billion neurons – each neuron has 10 thousand synapsis or connections, it takes a ton of energy to make decisions. We’ve learned over 150 million years the old brain has to get the idea right up front and then he can go to sleep and then maybe wake up at the end. An example would be if you have a friend who’s a pastor and you ask them, “When you went to theological seminary, how did they teach you how to give a sermon?” The architecture of the sermon’s been around for centuries, three steps: tell the congregation what you’re going to tell them, tell them, tell them what you told them.

The great pastors when they started the sermons, they bring the biblical passage to life and with emotion, and everybody in the congregation is on the edge of the pew and listening. Then when the pastor gives them the details of the sermon, everybody in the congregation’s old brain goes to sleep. Maybe at the end the pastor, they know what they’re doing, brings it together with emotion again and shows them how that applies to our daily lives. The practical application for all of us is in any interaction with the buyer, whether it’s in person, on the phone, email, LinkedIn, in mail, always start and end with emotion or a bang.

Fred Diamond: We’ve always heard the point, “Death by PowerPoint.” Let’s say you get that opportunity to come in for the first call and let’s say yourself and maybe an engineer, maybe your manager if you will. Let’s say there’s 4 or 5 customers in the room and you’re in their conference room and you have the opportunity to present. Using this concept, let’s say you get an hour. What do you do around the 30th minute knowing that you got to start off with the bang? We talked about some examples of how we talked about the customer’s challenge in the beginning and we’ll talk about some ways to show that.

Then of course at the end we want to come up with a big bang to get them further engaged and want to continue to do business with you and take it to the next stage. Of course, every sales call needs to end with what’s the next thing that we’re going to do. What do you do in the 30th minute? What are some of the ways that you keep the – I don’t know, do you want to keep the momentum going? Do you have to be at a high pitch? Give us some thoughts on how do you avoid going into that 30th minute when you’re down and people are looking at their phones and you need to keep their interest before you get to the end?

John Asher: If you drop back onto stimuli #1, the great salespeople always start by getting the customer to talk about their needs. Once that’s a huge conversation, you don’t have to show them any of your slides. You only show the slides that now apply. That’s the first thing to start up front so you don’t get into this, “Death by PowerPoint.” Then always at the end – and I’ll talk about this in the sixth stimuli – have a video of a customer story.

Fred Diamond: That is a great point. I guess the key message here is you don’t want to be doing that 30 slide presentation and always the best sales calls go when the customer does all the talking. Your letting them talk goes back to the, “Me, me, me” so that’s excellent. John, the fourth old brain stimuli, clear contrast to make a difference. You, your product, your company must be different. Let’s talk about how we demonstrate that.

John Asher: The old brain cannot make a decision unless it sees a difference. A simple example would be if the buyer wants 7 days a week delivery, post office has 7, UPS has 6. The buyer’s old brain can easily make that decision, so you must give the old brain a clear difference for it to make a decision. This of course has led maybe in the last 50 years for companies that emphasize what’s called a unique selling proposition. That is how are you different, so if you can say things like, “We have unique testing facilities” or, “We’re the largest supplier of this end of the DC area” those types of terms, “Only”, “Unique” that separate you from the competition then the old brain can easily see the difference and make a choice.

Fred Diamond: How about talking about customers? “We provide solutions to American Express”, naming the largest companies in the world. Is that something that’s a distinction or differentiation?

John Asher: It isn’t much of a differentiation. It goes to one of those what are called social biases where you’ve got the branded companies which is good, but doesn’t show a big difference unless you’re the only company in this industry who sells to them.

Fred Diamond: I have a question for you, John, a little bit off-track here but we talked about elite sales professionals and one of the missions of the Sales Game Changers podcast is to help sales professionals and sales leaders take their game to the next level, step it up if you will. You’ve trained thousands if not tens of thousands of sales professionals in your career. What are some of the traits of the better presenters that you see? We mentioned elite professionals before, we talked about starting off with the customer telling us his or her challenges. Why don’t you give us some other thoughts from you about what makes a tremendous elite sales professional such a great presenter?

John Asher: #1, always start off with the customer needs, get the big conversation going. When you totally understand the customer needs, again then when you give your presentation it is not very big, maybe 3 of your 21 slides do you really have to focus and show. The other aspects of the great presentations are videos which is actually the next stimuli.

Fred Diamond: Let’s talk about that now.

John Asher: Remember, the old brain only stores images, doesn’t see words, facts, figures. The old brain is full of images and then later does pattern matching. One of the cognitive biases I will know is stereotyping, and that stereotyping comes from all those images we have stored in our brain. The practical application here for salespeople is a video, let’s say a one minute video. 60 seconds, 30 frames per second or 30 pictures per second, 18 hundred pictures stored in the buyer’s brain.

That’s why videos are so impactful. The comprehension rate of our brain for video is 60 thousand times as fast as reading words on the internet, so the practical application here is get more videos in your proposals, in your presentations, on your website. I’m sure you’ve heard this, the best videos are where you can turn down the audio and still get the idea.

Fred Diamond: John, a lot of the sales professionals listening on the Sales Game Changers podcast maybe they have a marketing team or something. What have you seen with obviously the advent of the smartphone and the ability to take videos? Can sales professionals shoot their own video on their phone and use that to get the message across? Are those effective today? Have you seen that with the elite sales professionals or do they rely on well produced from marketing, if you will?

John Asher: They are, and LinkedIn has some data that people watch a native video – one made by yourself, a cellphone taking a video of yourself – people watch those three times as long as a production video. There’s a couple interesting reasons, they’re waiting for somebody to screw up [laughs] and they also know it’s a real person. It’s not actors, so it’s real interesting. People watch it 3 times as long, a native video as to a production video.

Fred Diamond: That is interesting. What else can you tell us about images or video that would help sales professionals be more successful?

John Asher: Again, it’s all about emotion. TV advertising is into this big time. We’ve probably all seen the Subaru ad – the guy goes to pick up the girl, the girl’s dog doesn’t like the guy, several more scenes, the dog doesn’t like the guy. Then at the last scene they’re at the campfire, she’s chilly, he puts his coat around her shoulders, the dog sees this, comes over and puts his head on the guy’s knee and then the last slide o frame is Subaru. How many words on the TV? Not too many. It’s all about connecting that emotion, great feeling with Subaru. Hardly any words, just pictures.

Fred Diamond: We have a lot of people listening on the Sales Game Changers podcast who sell services, very black and white type services. IT services, data analytics services or financial services or things like that. Talk a little bit about how you can apply emotion in video or something to something like that. If I’m an IT provider and I pop up a video of myself on a date and I’m putting my jacket around her and the dog… [Laughs]

John Asher: [laughs]

Fred Diamond: Then at the end it says, “DBA Analytics”, that might be coming across as corny or contrived if you will. How would I use something like that if I sell a product that’s valuable but it’s not really tugging at your strings like a car or food might, if you will?

John Asher: You’re a good, straight man, Fred. We’re coming to the sixth stimuli that answers that question, basically. That is we now know from these latest functional MRI studies that the best way to wake up the buyer’s old brain – emotion, excitement, engagement – is with a customer story. Meaning your customer talking about how great your company has done for them in a video. Many of the listeners I’m sure have heard that the great salespeople are the great storytellers.

We now know from these latest functional MRI studies where you’ve got a buyer with an MRI machine built into the helmet and you take a customer story and you tell it 10 different ways – 10 different architectures of the story –  we now know exactly the right architecture that best wakes up the buyer’s old brain. The practical application here is again on your website, the best possible use of the stories is videos on your website of your customers telling a story about how you’ve helped them following this great architecture.

Fred Diamond: Let’s bring it back here, from a storytelling perspective, let’s give some practical suggestions to the people listening on today’s call. What are some things that you would train them on or tell them to do to get better a telling stories?

John Asher: I know now the right architecture, I’ll give you a quick example of the story. Let’s assume Fred you’re running a mechanical contractor. You’re the buyer, I’m the seller so I could say, “Fred, we worked for a company just like yours last year in Rockville. Walt, the sales manager told me that sales were stagnant for 2 or 3 years and that’s why he asked me to come speak with him.

I said, “Walt, how many sales people do you have?” He said, “21” I said, “Where’d they come from?” He said, “Well, we’ve never actually hired a salesperson. They’ve all come up to the customer service route, the field tech route, a couple over at sheet metal benders who wanted to get into sales” and I said, “What’s the aptitude for sales for those 21?” he said, “What do you mean by aptitude?” So I gave all 21 an aptitude assessment and it turned out that their aptitude was what you would get by giving it to the general population.

Few high aptitude, few low, most in the middle, that is not what you want for your sales force. Obviously you want them to have a high or at least a moderate high aptitude for sales. Over the next 9 months we helped restructure the sales force so there was 9 with a high aptitude, 7 high moderate. Sales went up by 30% and gross margins because they were getting more sales on less sales people up by 70%.” As I’m telling this story to the buyer, the buyer’s old brain about halfway through the story feels like it’s in the story and near the end the buyer’s old brain is going, “Wow, I wonder if I could get those same results.” That’s an example of the optimum architecture.

Fred Diamond: Interesting. Do you do any training on working with sales professionals to be good at telling that type of story? Because you just told it to me in a minute and a half and I’m visualizing what Walt’s team looks like and I’m visualizing if I was the sales leader or CEO how those strategies would be critical for my business to make us more successful.

John Asher: That’s the power of the story, and you combine the sixth stimuli – the story- and the fifth stimuli – video – and now it’s like, “Wow, you got it.”

Fred Diamond: Interesting. This is the Sales Game Changers podcast, it’s a special episode, neuroscience and selling. It’s critical, it’s become huge in the last couple years. We talked about why it’s so critical and why you need to be selling to the customer’s reptilian or emotional brain and how the customer thinks. John, just in summary, one of the key things here is you got to not be thinking about you and you got to be thinking about your customer. We’ve actually noticed this in the Sales Game Changers podcast, it comes up time and time again that the elite sales professionals that we’ve interviewed through the podcast and we’ve met through the Institute for Excellence in Sales, they are providing tremendous value to their customer. They are providing not just a solution that their company has delivered but they understand the customer’s business challenges, they understand what their customer’s going through and they can relate to them from a value perspective and bring them significant value understanding this, understanding how the customer thinks, how their brain works. It can even take that to the next level.

John Asher: I could not say it any better than you said it, Fred.

Fred Diamond: I appreciate that. Once again, John Asher, this is a special episode of the Sales Game Changers podcast. John, this is a part 2 podcast, we’re going to do a second part where we’re going to talk about the cognitive biases. Can you talk about what that means for a second or two and tee up the second part of this podcast?

John Asher: Neuroscience has discovered about 100 cognitive biases and they are really what’s called a shortcut. They’re a rule of thumb, a tendency so it’s never black or white, it’s just a bias. Again, the reason for the bias is that the old brain wants to get the idea right away and then just go to sleep. There’s 100 biases, we’ve looked at them all, we’ve boiled down the top 50 that we cover in our sales training that apply to sales and so in our second podcast we’ll cover a handful of them. The ones that are most interesting, of course, are the ones that upset what we thought was the right thing to do.

Fred Diamond: Once again, thank you so much John Asher. On Part 2 of this podcast, talking about neuroscience and selling, we’ll be talking about the cognitive biases, the top 10 according to Asher Strategies.

The post SPECIAL EPISODE 009, Part One: Sales Training Expert John Asher Shares How Understanding Neuroscience Techniques Will Improve Your Sales Skills first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 031: John Carter Applies Storytelling Lessons He Learned from Making Films into His Sales Processes

John Carter is the sales director at Alexandria-based Pinxter, an app development company that develops custom apps for associations, nonprofits, and member groups for year-round member engagements. He works with member groups designing mobile communications for collaboration, education, revenue and growth. Prior to Pinxter, John handled business development and supervised campaigns for Coca-Cola, Condé Nast, Maxxis Tires, Burger King, and AT&T. He co-founded the nation’s first point-of-purchase advertising network in America’s 12 largest commercial airports.

He’s also produced three feature films with Emmy- and Oscar-winning casts. His latest film, American Exploitation, deals with the little-known and probably misunderstood human sex-trafficking industry and focuses on the small wealthy town of Naples, FL. When selling to an individual or a group, he focuses on the need for story to engage his buyer. “Without story, you’re just not relevant,”John says, “and your buyer is just not interested.”

Find John on LinkedIn!

Fred Diamond: What do you sell today and what excites you about that?

John Carter: This took me a while to really understand. When I get that question I used to go right to the product. Now I think it’s important to describe what I do as a better way for people to tell stories to inspire, educate, simplify, motivate, collaborate, and even launch new movements.

Fred Diamond: How did you get into sales as a career?

John Carter: I went into it right after college. I sold for a radio station and was thrown to the wolves. [Laughs] Wow, I learned a lot. I mean, I guess I was 21, 22, and selling ads for local AM radio station in Gainesville, GA.

Fred Diamond: Storytelling and the need to tell stories in the sales process: Why don’t you tell us what that means?

John Carter: I think that as humans it’s critical for us to be able to tell story and hear story. We use story to embed critical pieces of information, knowledge, to educate ourselves—something that’s entertaining by the fire so that we can pass that along to future generations, to friends, to family. The better the story, the more we remember it. In terms of selling, you might have a product or a service. If it’s going to improve their life, you want them to remember it. So what better way to do that than to wrap that in a compelling story with a beginning, middle, and end? What’s in it for me? How is this going to make my life better? Well, tell me a story!

Fred Diamond: So tell us a little bit more about Pinxter. What exactly does Pinxter do to make that happen?

John Carter: Today, as we all know, collaboration more and more is on the mobile device, and that was [Steve] Jobs’s promise: He was going to make this thing that’d inspire and educate people, you could collaborate on it. Well, a phone is just a phone without any sort of program or application that allows you to do that, so I found this group that has done an amazing job at making apps for specific member groups. Those apps—they’re native apps—allow you to collaborate and get inspired, get educated, by and with your specific member group that you’re more interested in.

With our careers and our professions, what that looks like is an association or a club that you’re a member of. You’re able to more efficiently, to connect and collaborate with the people who matter most to you in your personal life and your profession. We use these apps, these native apps, to do that. It really takes your phone up to a whole new level.

Fred Diamond: John, go back to some of your first sales jobs. What did you learn?

John Carter: I just would walk up and ask somebody, “Hey, don’t you want your commercial on the radio?” I didn’t really look at what their product was, who our audience was, and how that product, whether that story was told in 15 seconds, 30 seconds, or one minute, was going to translate to that audience.

And you have this retail store in Gainesville, GA. Maybe they’re selling tires. They have a story of why they do what they do and how they might make your car safer, perform better with their tires. Well, it was more about, “Hey, look, we’re going to translate that story of why you’re a second-generation car-tire seller and what you do that’s special and unique for your customers. We’re going to provide a way for you to be able to tell that story effectively.”

Truly people needed that ability. If I’m driving on the road and I’m listening, and I need a new set of tires, I want that story. I want to know what’s going to make my life better other than just a set of tires, how are these people really going to do something for me that the other guy couldn’t. And so we were the storytellers. We had the radio station, we had the medium, and we had writers. We had the ability to make the message. And it was on me as the salesperson to find out what that unique story was and get that to the copywriter so that it was told properly.

Fred Diamond: One of the key themes that keeps coming up over the Sales Game Changer Podcast is the need to provide more value to your customer. Your customer has plenty of options. How do you provide more value?

John Carter: Maybe I’m wearing this out a little bit, but how often have you called somebody up and said, “Hey, man. Coffee tomorrow—wait till you hear what I’ve got to tell you. You’re not going to believe what happened at work today. You’re not going to believe what happened out on the soccer field with my kids.” Or, “Let me tell you another story.” I mean, the campfire story is more alive than ever before.

We need it more than ever before. We are on these islands with these phones and on the internet. We are still lonely as a species, and we still desperately need to impart specialized knowledge, data, and information to each other. This podcast is a great example of that. We’ve got this new technology. Fred, you’re using it, right? What have I learned over 25 years of doing this for small business and big business? The better the story, the more we’re going to remember it.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little more about what you’re truly an expert in. John, tell us a little more about your specific area of brilliance.

John Carter: Concept to script, scripting and concept to produce an emotion picture image, that story, and getting it in front of an audience. And what I’ve learned, Fred, is that mastery never ends. You’re always looking for that new thing, that advantage, that little key piece of learning or getting a little better. And I’m taking that and putting it into becoming a full-time sales professional with Pinxter. It’s very rewarding, and it’s very relevant.

Fred Diamond: So how has filmmaking been associated with your sales career?

John Carter: First of all, filmmaking is expensive, so you’ve got to talk a lot of people into writing a check. You really need to have your story down. You need to know why this is compelling, how you’re going to do it, how much it’s going to cost, how long it’s going to take, when investors will get a return. It’s a big sales process, but I read something in a book, The Storyteller’s Secret by Carmine Gallo, and he brought something by Peter Guber, a little passage here that I thought was really cool. Peter Guber ran Mandalay Entertainment Group for some time, and he says the following: Purposeful storytelling is a game changer. He says that anyone can build a story in three steps, and this is so relevant to selling. Step number one, grab your viewer’s attention with a question or unexpected challenge. [Next,] give listeners an emotional experience by telling a story around a struggle that will ultimately lead to conquering the challenge. And this is classic, this goes back to the Romans. How far back do you want to go? And then number three, galvanize—I love that word—galvanize listeners with a call to action.

Fred Diamond: That could be a really compelling device to show your customer that you understand the challenges that they’re going through and are a resource to help them achieve some of those challenges.

John Carter: There are a lot of different ways that you can be of value as a sales professional. You can change the game for someone significantly. You can transform their whole business if you take the time to really understand who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go.

Fred Diamond: Tell us someone who has significantly impacted you as a selling professional.

John Carter: Two men come up for me: Raymond Goldsmith was the founder of the point-of-purchase advertising network. It’s kind of amazing. We were the first ones to actually have monitors with a looping advertising network in the 12 largest airports. This is back in the late ’90s; we were on laser disk. But Raymond taught me, “John, no one is going to sell for you. You can’t assume that people are going to just understand your value, what you’re able to do for them. You can’t just leave it to someone else to tell that story to sell for you. You have to really learn to become a sales professional.” And I had the instincts for it, but I think just recently I’ve realized what that’s all about and what a worthy journey that is.

That leads right into the second person, my father-in-law. Second- , now third-generation construction company. He asked me one day, “John, what business are you in?” I said, “Well, I’m in production and marketing. We do commercials.” He goes, “No, John. You’re in the sales business.” Everyone within the organization affects sales. Everyone’s in charge of telling that story, understanding it, understanding the clients, and loving it. And just loving the fact that they can have an impact on another organization. So we’re all in the storytelling, the selling together.

Fred Diamond: John Carter, what are the two biggest challenges you’ve faced today as a sales leader?

John Carter: One is kind of a piece of learning; the other is kind of funny. It’s with that “no.” I think almost everybody, when we hear no, it’s just, oh, boy. No, no, don’t have time, no. Wow, kind of a scary thing to hear. But if I’ve done my homework and I do feel like I’ve got a good understanding and I do have something to bring to the other person or the organization, when I hear no, I hear,  “Tell me more story.” They just don’t understand yet. That’s a recent thing for me. We sell apps, and that’s the simple way to put it.

Fred Diamond: You just mentioned something that’s a very interesting distinction. We’ve often heard “no doesn’t mean no; it means not yet.” I love the way you just said no means “tell me more story.” Very impactful. What’s the number-one specific sales success or win from your career that you’re the most proud of?

John Carter: Just last week I was in front of a group of customers in an association. I’d been working on my pitch for quite some time. I was able to string together the story of why this product, this piece of software is relevant to them, and they got it! They were like, “Wait a minute, this isn’t a website, this isn’t some sort of app for an event that we’re going to do in six months. This truly is going to take my phone and turn it into a whole brand-new device that I never thought I had.”

I was able to really weave that narrative together, feel their questions, and come back to them right there in the room, with 7, 8 features of this piece of technology. I could just see it in their eyes. So it was the learning and the process and the storytelling and the listening and to be able to bring that value, just last week. It was really exciting for me.

Fred Diamond: Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment, John Carter, where you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard” or “It’s not for me”?

John Carter: Great question. Yes, in the thick of the night when I wake up and I’m not going to make it, Fred. It’s just, nothing’s going to work. My go-to is, “I’m just going to go to Florida and teach tennis.” [Laughs] Love tennis. Yes, yes, doubt killed the warrior. All I can say—and I’m beating this dead horse but it works—is when that happens, I go back and I say, “Okay, John. Hang on a second. [Don’t think about] the product itself right now or the service, not what I did two weeks ago or four years ago, not that. What if I’m sitting around the campfire with six or eight people and I’m telling this story today about what I’m doing to connect people, what I’m offering. What does that sound like?” And I instantly start to feel better. I instantly start to feel like I’ve got a reason to wake up in the morning and get in front of people, because I think as sales professionals we’re at our best when the campfire’s roaring and we’re in front of a small audience.

Fred Diamond: What’s the most important thing you want to get across to younger sales professionals, junior sales professionals, to help them improve their career?

John Carter: The word “no” means “Tell me more.” I had a great client a year or so ago that we sold a commercial package to. They were an auto-repair business, and their previous commercials weren’t doing well. I said, “Let me just come over and talk to you.” So I go over, and long story short is he was selling this technical solution like, why your 2004 Honda Accord needs $3,000 worth of work to keep going and what a timing belt is all about, etc.

This technical, “why you need to spend the money”—what I found out we’re selling was if you’re a young family and you’ve got a couple of new kids and you want your car to last another 50,000 miles, come here. And your car payment won’t be $350 a month, your repair payment will be less than half of that. So what they’re selling was extending the life of the existing car you have, so you have a lower monthly payment. We got to the truth of what they were actually selling, and you can’t do that unless you have that dialogue directly with the customer. “No” means “tell me more.”

Fred Diamond: Very good. What are some things you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

John Carter: I go to my PowerPoint. I don’t always use my PowerPoint presentation for every sales pitch, but when I do I want to really form this great narrative, this beginning, middle, and end—what Guber said. We’re going to ask compelling questions, and we’re going to face the challenge. We’re going to have a galvanizing conclusion. My PowerPoint of like 10, 12 slides has that, so I go back to that, and every time I do, Fred, every time I get back to that PowerPoint, I find one little tweak.

Fred Diamond: What’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

John Carter: We’re pumped around here. We just signed on as an official channel partner for a major organization that distributes marketing software for associations and really helps associations market themselves, increase memberships. They have been doing it for quite some time and are very successful at it. We’re their official partner on mobile software, so we build their apps. I leave here today and we’re going to a conference to start spreading the good word about how we can take what they do in terms of web-based solutions in training and into the mobile space.

Fred Diamond: John, sales is hard. If people don’t return your calls or your emails, why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

John Carter: Everybody uses Steve Jobs, but I think there’s something here that I haven’t heard it too much. And it’s the essence, the core of what he promised with these new mobile platforms that he created. What Jobs did was say, “Hey, look, I’m going to give you this new thing, and it’s up to you to really use it.” So he gave us this tool to create anything we wanted, right?

And I think we’ll look back at this today, and actually we’re still doing it after so many years, we’re still finding new ways to use what he gave us. And I think he initially said what these things can do for us is create storytellers who ignite our inner fire, storytellers who can educate, simplify, motivate, and launch new movements. And if I think about what we’re doing with an app on these phones, we’re doing that! We’re just taking this tool that he gave us and we’re putting software on it that allows organizations to do those things and educate, simplify, motivate, launch movements. I mean, that’s the promise, so yeah.

Fred Diamond: What’s the final thought you want to share to inspire our listeners today?

John Carter: I’ll go back to the fact that as humans we have to hear no all the time, and doubt killed the warrior. And I think that if we love what we do and we do our homework and we surround ourselves with good teams, no matter what, good things will start to happen.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo
Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 031: John Carter Applies Storytelling Lessons He Learned from Making Films into His Sales Processes first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.

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EPISODE 010: Close Deals Faster Author John Asher Highlights the 6 Closing Principles and Other Critical Sales Lessons

John Asher is the co-founder and CEO of D.C.-based Asher Strategies, a business providing sales advisory services to companies from start-ups to Fortune 500. John has been in sales for more than 40 years. In his Navy career, John managed a $2 billion submarine combat-systems program in the Pentagon. In his second career, he co-founded a Northern Virginia-based engineering company that grew by a compounded growth rate of 42% per year for 16 straight years. His current business has provided sales aptitude assessments, sales training, and sales process improvement workshops in 22 developed countries, and I’m also proud to say that John’s company is a platinum sponsor of the Institute for Excellence in Sales. He is also the author of the new best-seller Close Deals Faster, now available on Amazon. John has been recognized by Vistage International as one of titseir top sales speakers on the planet.

Find John on LinkedIN!

Here’s a transcript to the podcast:

Fred Diamond: I know you had a great career and trained tens of thousands of sales professionals. Let’s talk about your career, though, in sales. How’d you get into sales as a career?

John Asher: As you know, I started my career in the Navy, and my last job was a program manager of a very large program. You’ve got three jobs in this role. First, you’re the program manager, managing the program. Second, you’re a buyer, and your staff puts out RFPs for local government contractors to bid on. And third, you are totally a salesperson. You’ve got to keep your program top of mind. You’ve got to respond to budget cuts. You’ve got to justify the ROI of your various components. My last job at the Navy was a total sales job.

Fred Diamond: Tell us a little bit about Asher Strategies and what excites you about what you’re doing today.

John Asher: Our main mode is to make the complex simple. The world is really getting more and more complex, especially with technology. Our whole deal is how can you help salespeople take all of that information out there and boil it down to what you really need to be successful in sales, and that typically includes having the right aptitude, having the right skills, and of course, having the right sales processes.

Fred Diamond: What were some of the key lessons you learned from your first few sales jobs that have stuck with you today?

John Asher: I learned early there’s a revolutionary new concept about sales, and that is listen to the customer. I know it sounds kind of funny, but you’d be shocked at how many people do not listen to the customer. It’s all about talk and not listen.

Fred Diamond: People just kind of wait to talk, waiting for their turn, show up and throw up, without even truly understanding the needs of the customer.

John Asher: Totally agree. The second thing I learned actually goes back to the Pentagon, and that is figure out when the buyer’s ready. I can’t tell you how many presentations I saw where there’s the admiral we’re presenting to, there’s a whole bunch of people in the room. It’s obvious to everybody but the presenter that the admiral’s ready to say yes, and as soon as he gives that hint, the presenter will say something like this: “No, no, no, no. I’ve got more stuff you need to see.” And so I learned way back when that you better know the six closing principles if you’re going to be a successful salesperson.

Fred Diamond: Do you want to summarize the six closing principles in one minute or less?

John Asher: Here they are:

Number one, you can’t close till the buyer’s ready.

Number two, if the buyer is ready and you don’t recognize it and you never propose a close, your chance of losing the sale is 90%.

Number three, knowing when they’re ready is a combination of the dialogue and the body language, and the body language is the true signal.

Number four, buyers want a definitive closing approach. They don’t want a two-paragraph close. Example, “Fred, would you like to get this project started on the 15^th of June?” There’s no ambiguity there. It’s pretty obvious what I’m asking for.

The fifth closing principle is once you propose the close, be silent. Let the buyer respond. The reason is buyers are thinking, considering, comparing, processing, and if you interrupt their thinking, they’re no longer thinking. And if you’ve interrupted their thinking it comes across as rude, and now the probability game is deal has gone down to 5%.

And the sixth closing principle: Once the buyer has agreed, quit talking about the deal. Shift the discussion to sports or weather, because you could say something that will cause the buyer—and it’s happened to me—to think, “Whoa, I didn’t realize your simulation didn’t cover that,” and shift back to no.

Fred Diamond: John, I know a lot of people consider you to be one of their mentors. Talk about an impactful sales mentor for you and how they impacted your career.

John Asher: I’ve never had a specific mentor other than some very senior admirals when I was in the Navy, and then my main mentors in my civilian career have really been books. I know it sounds impossible, but I really have read about 300 sales books, and one of the reasons is I’ve been to China 106 times. I’ll read two sales books, one over, one coming back; after a while it adds up. There’s where my real mentorship has come from, just learning from the experts.

Fred Diamond: John, what is the number-one sales success or win from your career that you’re most proud of? Take us back to that moment.

John Asher: Well, my second career, running an engineering company here in the D.C. area. On one day, we won three major government contracts for a total of $450 million, and that really caused the company to take off. It’s kind of amazing, three wins all together in one day.

Fred Diamond: How much of the $450 million came to your firm?

John Asher: Let’s see. I’m guessing for two all of it came, and for the third we had three or four subcontractors, so we probably got probably overall 80%.

Fred Diamond: That’s not bad. John, you’ve had a great career in sales. Did you ever question being in sales? Was there ever a moment when you thought to yourself, “It’s just too hard or not for me”?

John Asher: When you go back to aptitude assessments, you find people who’ve got a natural talent for sales, and I have a reasonably good talent. Then, for me it’s all about the thrill of the hunt and the close. I don’t care what I’m closing. I just want to close something. It’s not quite that bad but almost.

Fred Diamond: Before we take a break, I’m going to go off script here a little bit. You mentioned assessments a couple of times and how that’s a critical part of your business. Would you mind just talking about the value of assessments at this point, and what are some of the things that you’re looking to assess when you try to determine if a sales professional will be successful?

John Asher: There’s a whole bunch of them out there. We recommend one of the top three, and we represent it also, the APQ. It essentially shows you on a bell curve how much talent people have for sales. So, 20% of us are brilliantly suited, 60% are moderately suited, and 20% of us are not suited. Those 20% are like the engineers. So when we bring a customer to our company, everybody knows “Don’t let Bill talk to the customer.” We don’t want to hire knuckleheads from a sales standpoint. We want people who have high talent.

And so, you peel back the onion a bit and say, “What does it mean to have a high talent?” If you look at nine personality traits, I’ll just give you a couple where it’s pretty apparent. You want people with a high goal orientation firing up the building. You want people with a high level of assertiveness so they don’t have any problem at all asking for the order at the right time. You want people with a high social drive so they actually like to go out and meet new people and build rapport. And you want people with a low detail orientation so they don’t get stuck in analysis paralysis. Those are four of the nine traits where you can pretty much tell who’s got the talent and who doesn’t.

Fred Diamond: We’ll talk about that more later on, but we’re going to take a short break here, listen to one of our sponsors. John Asher of Asher Strategies has given us a lot of great information about his career, things that he’s thought about over time. When we come back after the word or two from our sponsor, John, I’m going to ask you for some of your tips for sales professionals who want to get ahead.

John, what’s the most important thing you want to get across to the young sales professionals and anyone who’s listening on today’s podcast to help them improve their career in sales?

John Asher: Selling is a terrific profession.The problem-solver salespeople are really the champions of the business world. As the late great Zig Ziglar used to tell us, “No sales, no company.” And so, when you watch really the great sales people, there’re four things happening:

One, they know how to build rapport and make an emotional connection with the buyer.

Two, they really know how to listen to make sure they totally understand what the buyer needs.

Three, they know how to come up with custom-crafted solutions to satisfy the buyer.

Four, and most important, they understand the neuroscience behind sales, the six stimuli to wake up the old brain and the various cognitive biases that cause us to be able to build relationships faster and close deals faster with buyers.

Fred Diamond: If someone came to you and said, “John, I’ve been selling for three years. I love it,” what would you tell them to do? What would be one thing that you would say, “You need to do this or you’re not going to be successful.”

John Asher: If you want to go to the next level… you [need to understand] the neuroscience behind sales. In the past several years there has been an explosive growth of studies in neuroscience, how the brain works, and therefore how the buyer makes decisions. We know this now from studies at Harvard and other top universities where buyers are fitted with many MRI machines on their head.

Various sales tactics are used by inside and outside salespeople so the researchers can actually see what part of the brain is awakened with what techniques and what part of the brain shuts down with what techniques.

Sales has always been thought to be an art. We all learn by trial and error. We learn from our boss. We learn from experts. But now we know for sure, sales is a science. And now that we have the science behind us, it has actually upset a lot of what we used to think was the right thing to do. Now we know it’s not, and we know what is the right thing to do.

Fred Diamond: That’s interesting because you and I have talked about The Challenger Sale many, many times. The customer is in control now. The customer has access to a lot more information, so you need to be providing value. You need to be helping them understand things that will help them in their business. I can understand how different parts of the brain now need to be enacted for you to be successful today versus where you could be successful 20 years ago.

John Asher: I totally agree. Let’s discuss for a minute the six stimuli that will wake up the old brain. We now know from these various studies that all decisions are made by a combination of the emotional and the reptilian brain called the old brain, and the decisions are not made by the logical brain, the rational brain. Some of the listeners may have heard that we decide on emotion and justify with logic. We’ve all heard some version of that. That’s been around for a long time. Now we know for sure that’s how it works.

So what this really means is if you are in competition with two other companies for the business, and all three companies have pretty good stuff, good quality, good service, reasonable prices, who gets the job? The one that makes the best emotional connection with the buyer gets the job, and if you want to wake up the buyer’s old brain there are six stimuli to work on.

First, the old brain is “me, me, me” focused, so it’s got to be about the customer and not about the salesperson.

Second, the old brain wants clear, simple-to-understand ideas. Make the complex simple. Keep it simple.

Third, the old brain is all about the beginning and the end. It takes a lot of energy for the brain to make decisions, so it’ll hear what’s happening at the first, go to sleep, then wake up again at the end.

Fourth, the brain wants a clear contrast.

Fifth, the old brain only sees pictures. So your picture better be self-explanatory, because the old brain does not see facts, figures, or logic.

Sixth, the old brain is all about excitement and engagement.

And we know from the Harvard studies now that the best way to wake up the old brain is with a customer’s story. In other words, a story about a customer you’ve worked with who’s similar to the prospect you’re after. As soon as you start talking about that, the buyer’s old brain starts thinking about that story, then the old brain feels like they’re in that story, and they also, near the end, start thinking, “Gosh, I wonder if this could happen to me too.”

Those are the six stimuli that we need to wake up in the buyer’s old brain, and if we don’t wake up any of those stimuli, closing rate is pretty much zero.

Fred Diamond: If we go to the IESBD YouTube channel, John gave a tremendous presentation on this topic back in June at the IES seventh annual award event. So if you’re out there listening, you need to understand how the customer’s brain works, and you need to understand how you trigger the right things based on how the brain works to help your sales happen. John, what are some of the things that you do to sharpen your saw and stay fresh?

John Asher: I really do read a sales book a week, subscribe to various sales manuals, and research on the internet because in today’s world, innovation is really everything. And as Fred mentioned, with all the information out there available to everybody it’s very easy to have one of your competitors go challenge the buyer, as in The Challenger Sale, and upset you. You really need to stay ahead of the competition, and for us who do sales training, aptitude assessment, sales process help we have to stay ahead of the pack.

Fred Diamond: John, what’s a major initiative you’re working on today to ensure your continued success?

John Asher: That is really this continuous learning, and so for our company, our main mode is keep the complex simple for salespeople to get what they need to do and [engage in] continuous learning. Making the complex simple sounds simple, but it’s actually not. Some of you may have heard a famous speechwriter from a long time ago. I won’t mention his name, but he basically said, “It took me a week to develop a 10-minute speech.” It takes a lot of hard work to boil down a complex technology, integration of technologies, and get it so salespeople can easily use it and be successful.

Fred Diamond: John, sales is hard. People don’t return your calls. They delete your emails. Why have you continued? What is it about sales as a career that keeps you going?

John Asher: As I said before, Fred, it’s the thrill of the hunt and the close. I really don’t care what I’m closing. I just want to close something. It’s not quite that bad but almost. And so, when you have people who have that attitude and have that aptitude and their personality fits for sales, then life’s pretty damn good. If sales is a struggle, then life is pretty tough.

Fred Diamond: John, you’ve given us some tremendous information, and we could probably talk for hours about things that you’ve discovered. I know you’re a student of sales. Give us one final thought. You talked before about making the complex simple, continuous learning, how the brain interacts and how as a sales professional you need to know about it, but give us one final thought to share to inspire our listeners today.

John Asher: I’ve read 500 business books over many, many years, and there’s one book I recommend above all business books. It’s a short read. It’s a story. It’s called The Go-Giver, and the subtitle is The Five Laws of Stratospheric Success. It applies to all fields really but especially to sales. It’s a two-hour read. It’s a fun read, and it changed my life when I read it 10 years ago.

Fred Diamond: John, before we wrap, you also have a book that’s coming out in the very near future. Tell us a little bit about your book.

John Asher: It essentially takes everything we’ve learned over 40 years of sales and puts it in one book. The title of the book is Close Deals Faster. It takes essentially most of the stuff I’ve been talking about. That is “How can you use all our new knowledge of how the brain makes decisions to close deals faster?”That’s the bottom line for almost all of us.

Fred Diamond: John, tell our audience how they can reach you.

John Asher: You could come to the website. It’s www.asherstrategies.com, and of course, we’re on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. We have on our website a new Vimeo portal where all of the various, probably 70, videos are, including the one that you mentioned.

Produced by Rosario Suarez

The post EPISODE 010: “Close Deals Faster” Author John Asher Highlights the 6 Closing Principles and Other Critical Sales Lessons first appeared on Sales Game Changers Podcast.