EPISODE 464: Funnel Clarity’s Tom Snyder Says this Creative Strategy is Critical for Sales Success Right Now

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[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is a replay of the Creativity in Sales virtual learning session sponsored by the Institute for Excellence in Sales on March 19. 2021. It featured an interview with Tom Snyder, President of Funnel Clarity.]

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TOM’S TIP: “As we emerge from this pandemic, every piece of data screams what people are desperate for from the salespeople they see – it’s human conversation. Enough already with the structure of questions, that’s not bad stuff, you’re a human being. Things like empathy, attentive listening, premise on your questions, providing reaction, asking clarifying questions, these are the ways human beings interact. Now that none of us have been able to interact, we’re dying for it. The door is wide open for you to be the one that does that and be different on that alone.”

THE PODCAST BEGINS HERE

Fred Diamond: We have one of our all-time favorite speakers and sales experts here, it’s the great Tom Snyder with Funnel Clarity. Tom, first off, the Institute for Excellence in Sales has our first Sales Speaker of the Year award going on right now, we’re going to be presenting that on our annual event on June 3rd and you, sir, are one of the finalists for the IES Sales Speaker of the Year. First off, congratulations for that, we’re excited. Roadmap to revenue, let’s get started, my friend.

Tom Snyder: Fred, thanks very much and it is a great honor to always be with the members of the IES, and I’m certainly flattered to have been a finalist in the Speaker of the Year award. A couple of things I want to say before we get started, the subject today I suspect may be a bit controversial. I’m going to make several points that I want you to at least be reflecting on your own sales world as we go through this.

The subject Creativity in Sales is an enormous topic, one that we have studied for a very long time and one that frankly if we were to cover adequately would take hours and hours. I’m going to hit a few highlights, I’m going to try to give you something to walk away with you can do tomorrow. The key to this is that there is no time that the opportunity for creativity giving you an advance in whatever you care about – revenue, margin, market share, product mix – is greater than in a moment like this of change.

We’ve had a year of quarantine, everything changed and now we’re beginning to emerge from it. You are likely to never in your lifetime have an opportunity as broad as these next 12 months. If you can harness the engine of creativity, you can amaze yourself at the results and I think, realistically, really make your competitors wonder what the heck you’re doing.

I’m going to start with a rhetorical question and I want you to think about it from a standpoint of your world. I intentionally asked what sales tactic or strategy have you employed in the last 24 months that you would define as creative or innovative. I picked 24 months because I wanted to go back beyond and before we had the quarantine and COVID issues.

I want you to be thinking about at the same time, did COVID or quarantine shut down cause you to become more creative or innovative? You don’t get points for saying, “We’ve met with customers on Zoom”, you don’t get points for saying, “We have people working at home.” The question is how did you change the way you approached prospects and clients because of the quarantine? Was it utterly reactive or did you find the ability to seek out creativity and innovation as a way to address it?

With that in mind, I’m going to talk today about what it means to be creative in terms of sales, talk about the relationship between creativity in innovation. I’m going to make this point several times, change is the engine of opportunity. The more dramatic the change, the more unexpected the change, the more global the change, the greater is the opportunity. That is going to be the opportunity to thrive or fail but it’s a golden time for those that will embrace it.

What are your prospects and clients seeking from you now that they may not have been seeking prior to our COVID issues? I want you to try a couple of the things I’m going to talk about and then I’m going to share with you a process for periodically finding a creative tap.

What defines creativity and innovation? Great words, we use them in the English language all the time and we have a sense for it, but when we’re talking about the profession of sales and account management, what are we really talking about when we say creativity and innovation? For the sake of ease, we’re going to say it’s finding a strategy, a market and/or a methodology that sparks interest and differentiation that wasn’t present before.

I want you to think about this litmus test, it qualifies as something like that if whatever you’ve come up with matters to a market you care about. How do you know that it matters and was it a difference-maker in terms of perspective of the marketplace? One could argue that those three litmus tests should be true of everything we do. The key is what has changed? How have you harnessed this opportunity that change has provided?

If you’re doing things exactly the same way, it’s just a Zoom call instead of in person. If you’re doing things the exact same way to find new opportunities, you’re just doing it more frequently on the phone. If it’s the same process it always was, you’re not doing anything wrong but you’re not grabbing the opportunity that exists. Everything migrates to commodity status, that means not just the products or services you sell, it means the way you sell.

In the 1980s, a couple of real geniuses, Neil Rackham, Bob Miller, Steve Heiman, a few others changed fundamentally the way sales was done. They went from a world where everything was about show them the demo to the world of uncover what they really care about, and they made themselves famous and rich doing it. They trained us around things like the importance of asking questions, uncovering needs, having an understanding of buyer roles but after 40 years, those things have become commodity.

If you were trained yesterday on SPIN, Counselor Salesperson, Strategic Selling, there’s nothing wrong with those programs, those are all good programs but don’t kid yourselves, too many people would be doing the exact same thing. The world is hungry for a change in the way people sell. Being seen as similar in terms of the way you sell is a short path to disappear into the background of all of your competitors who approach it the same way.

Creativity is being one of the first to identify something that might be both possible and useful/productive. Innovation is the act of converting new ideas to practical reality, overcoming challenges and doubt, having a process or a plan. You can take those two definitions and apply them to the world of sales.

Let me start with the process, it’s not about sitting down tomorrow and saying, “I need to be creative”, that doesn’t work. We’re talking about being creative not in the sense of a musician or an artist or a dancer but in the situation of what are we doing in our noble profession to bring the engine of creativity and innovation into this moment of change to change fundamentally the way we approach the customer, things we provide for the customer or client and how they view us.

Best way to do it, group brainstorming whether that’s two of you or 200 of you. Brainstorming is a science, you do it in sequence, the first part of it is you do it alone. Let your brain roll, what are all the ideas I can think of? The brain does a terrible job of doing creative things and judgment at the same time so just set yourself a clock for five minutes and let every idea stream. Jot it down, put it in your laptop no matter how silly or ridiculous.

Then go back with the judgment part of it and eliminate the 85% that are ridiculous, eliminate the next 5% that are completely impractical but what you will find is there are two or three ideas in there worth talking about. You get together in a group – best small groups, no more than six or eight – review the gems that each person came up with. Have the discussion and boil out the things that we can do now that will likely be seen as innovative. Use that litmus test I talked about and A-B test different ideas. Once you find something that works, socialize it.

Change drives opportunity and if you think about it, if you can be the first to adapt to the change from outside forces emerging from the quarantine, if you were the first to adapt outside forces entering the quarantine world you’ve done exactly that. But there’s also the opportunity to be the agent of change, to be the one who actually creates opportunities for yourself by employing this idea of being the engine of change.

Let me have a moment here with another rhetorical question. Let’s see if we can put some practical application to these ideas I’ve introduced. Let’s think about the simple idea of getting ahold of people, in fact, let’s narrow it even down further, let’s just talk about prospecting. What new methods of contacting customers and prospects has your team employed once the quarantine started? Another way of thinking about it, what’s worked best for your team in terms of getting through the email/voicemail storm?

The data will tell you from Telcom people that voicemail has increased and cellphone traffic has increased more than 300% when compared to pre-pandemic times. The people who provide email services will tell you email has gone up more than 270%, so there’s a storm of stuff and it wasn’t easy to reach people in the first place. Now that storms say, “How can I be noticeable in all that volume?” and I wonder if you did anything different, because there’s a huge opportunity.

Think about the people who were receiving an enormous number of inbound emails asking for time on the calendar, think about the number of voicemails asking for time on the calendar. By the way, the same thing with your existing clients but I want to focus on this time of prospecting. The data will tell you there is no time to have a higher rate of converting your prospecting efforts into qualified opportunities at the top of the funnel than right now because we’re emerging from this quarantine and pandemic problem.

Let’s talk a little bit about the challenges people face in prospecting and the innovative side of how you could do it differently. Most people will tell you if it’s finding new clients, finding the decision-makers is brutal. It’s very difficult to do that by title these days, titles have gone crazy, you have title-flation and you have all these elegant names that people have for their job.

Once you find that decision-maker, it was hard enough before but now getting in touch with them requires ledger domain to be able to do it. If I do find the ability to identify that person, especially in the pandemic world, there’s a phalanx of gatekeepers and their job is to never let a salesperson through. “Hi, I’d like to speak to Bob Smith, please.” “May I tell him who’s calling?” “Tom Snyder at Funnel Clarity” “I’m sorry, he’s busy.” Have you ever left a message with a gatekeeper or with a receptionist or a voicemail and they did call you back? It’s a miracle if they did.

If you were lucky enough to get them on the phone, to have them see the email, to have them unlock the voicemail, to look at your text message, how in the heck do you get them interested? If you do, how do you get credibility? How do you rise above the sea of everybody else who learned SPIN Selling, everybody else who learned Strategic Selling, everybody else who’s chasing the fox?

How about we search for people not with job title but we search with keywords, and if you don’t know what Boolean search is, you should learn immediately. The Boolean search strings allow you to access things in LinkedIn and a number of other search engines in a very elegant way and the object is to find keywords that would occur in the profiles of the decision-makers you typically want to reach. It’s not about job title, it’s not about the name of the company.

I don’t want to get 13,000 responses to my search on LinkedIn, what good does that do? Imagine if I got 15 that I knew had a really good chance of being the kind of decision-maker I wanted to reach. Boolean search, if you want to learn that we can teach it to you in about 20 minutes.

Forget finding their corporate phone number, how about finding their cellphone number? “Oh my God, Tom, their cellphone number?” Yes, their cellphone number because if you have something important to say, if you can sound different, if you can be creative in what you say at the first 10 seconds of that call, they won’t mind if you call them on their cellphone. What’s irritating is when the typical approach is what you hear on the other end. How about the email address they most often monitor? How about where their profile is and how you can send them an InMail? That kind of thing.

Aligning with gatekeepers. Did you know that research has shown that approaching a so-called gatekeeper in the right way provides not only access to the decision-maker you want to reach but it actually provides more information? If you’re calling someone’s admin and you say, “Hi, Bob, is Mary in? This is Tom Snyder with Funnel Clarity.” What is he going to say? “What’s this about?” “Well, I was trying to reach her because I am the founder and managing partner of a sales training company.” “Hold on, please.” Guess what? He’s going to come back and tell me Mary’s busy.

Imagine if instead, I were to say to him, “Hi, Bob” – first of all, I know his name before I even call – “Hi, Bob, this is Tom Snyder with Funnel Clarity. I was wondering, I need some advice on how I can get on Mary’s calendar.” He’s still going to ask me what it’s about, but rather than making it sound like I want to sell Mary something, I’m going to make it sound like I want to get her insight about something I’ve learned from her peer group.

If on the other hand I get a receptionist, somebody who’s job it is to answer the general phone number, I’m not going to introduce myself. How radical does that sound? I’m going to make one statement. I say to people this is the only scripted sentence in all of sales. “I’d like to check the spelling of a name, please” and I do that regardless if it’s Smith or Jones. He or she will pull up on a screen a bunch of information I want. Just think how different that is. What would you ask him or her? What would you do to make those things happen? These are the kind of creative tactics I’m talking about.

Generate interest. Did you know when we teach prospecting, for example, that the easiest thing to do is to get somebody actually interested in what you have to talk about? What’s the main reason people hate prospecting over the phone? Because no one will engage. Look up what it means to be in System 2 Thinking. If I were to say to you in the biblical story of the great flood, how many of each animal did Moses bring on the arch, you would almost all say, “Two.” I would point out that Moses did not have an arch, Noah did and the reason the mind told you two has to do with why it always fails if you can’t generate curiosity first.

Establishing credibility is what you know about their peer group. These are all learnable skills but I want the slide to have this message. If you look at the left hand side, that’s the same left-hand list that would have happened whether it was 2016, 17, 18, 19, pandemic or not. It got more challenging in the pandemic and it worked even worse if you did it the intuitive way, the grind-it-out way.

If you don’t do the things on the left, even in the best of times, you’re not really going to use the phone to prospect, are you? But if you do it now and you do it the right way, most people are only relying on email and those emails aren’t even any good. That’s what I mean about being creative. Think about creative keywords, think about different ways you will talk to the people who are gatekeepers, think about the way you can get this person into so-called System 2 Thinking.

Want to know how to stifle creativity? How about this? We rely solely on email, we think our technology stack is going to be the answer. “If we just had one more application.” Playbooks, do you think somebody’s really written an effective playbook for the pandemic? No, they haven’t. Playbooks are nothing more than training wheels, they have a half-life of about 10 minutes and they’re often far too stilted. They crush creativity.

Scripts are even worse, the pitch, this is my favorite. “Quick, get them to the demo, do anything you can to get them to the demo.” It’s the cause of misunderstanding what qualification means so though I gave you examples in prospecting, it’s true in every aspect of sales. Remember, people have jammed schedules and when you jam your own schedule, you’re going to suffer. You need time to reflect and be creative.

Another question rhetorically, how are your salespeople providing insights to new prospects about the not-so-obvious impacts of COVID in their market, in their client base, in their customer? The data prove that if you’re making a cold outreach with a message about peer group, current issue and/or the immediate future, you can generate three to six times as many opportunities. You can’t do it without stopping to think, “How are we going to do things differently? What are we going to do to innovate?”

Here’s a couple of things. The Wall Street Journal poll recently showed that 80% of buyers felt that salespeople didn’t know the right questions to ask and were too talky. Isn’t that flattering? Wouldn’t you love to have the people you reach out to say too talky? But here’s the one I think is most interesting, 39% of business-to-business buyers select the vendor according to the salesperson’s skills rather than price, quality or service features. That piece of data alone is worth thinking about, it’s worth talking about with your peers. What does it mean? Does it mean that we’re in the 40% that do it or are we in the 60% that don’t? What does it mean, skills of the salesperson? Worth thinking about.

Those that provide insight actually produce three times the results of those that are really driving to the demo and 74% of the decision makers report selecting the provider that first created value during the sales process. The first book I ever wrote was called Escaping the Price-Driven Sale, you create value in one of three ways as a salesperson. Reveal to the buyer a problem they didn’t know they had, they didn’t know they were going to have or it was more severe than they thought. Reveal to the buyer a solution set they didn’t know existed or broker the capabilities of your company that have to do with things not just sales, and they will call you a value creator. Otherwise, you’re just like everybody else and once you’re seen as a commodity, you won’t be seen.

What do they value? Insight into what their peers are struggling with. Think about those kind of things, what could you do to reflect on the client base you have and the people you talk to? How can you use that creatively in other conversations? What are their competitors doing? Meaning companies, products, services, markets. How is the customer’s marketplace evolving and what kind of innovations are emerging? You want to know one of the most powerful lines you can say? “Things have changed.” Your counsel is around making a better decision.

Understanding their own challenges in greater detail, you’re a decision coach, you’re somebody that’s helping reveal to them how to make a better decision. You may be providing an alternative solution, you may be doing a lot of things but you have expertise they don’t have time to acquire, you have sold your product, your services to more decision-makers than they will ever have a chance for decisions to make. They’ll only make a few purchasing decisions in their life like this, you do dozens of them. Collect the knowledge, use it as the base where your creativity and innovation comes from.

Remember that discovery goes both ways, it’s not just a one-way street. I love when people say, “Step one of our sales process is discovery” and all they do is stream questions and look for bant. If you’re going to do that, you’re costing yourself a huge amount of opportunity. Your questioning model is outdated, do you know that most of the questioning models that are taught these days whether it’s SPIN, spot, Counselor Salesperson were developed more than 20 years ago?

If you read SPIN Selling, the first thing Huthwaite talks about – and he was my mentor, by the way – that book still talks about the innovation of a fax machine. Most of you are too young to even have ever seen one of those things. Questioning models need to include these things that I’ve listed here. It’s a different world and if you can master those things, you can adapt to the modern world, still be seen as the company’s primary differentiator. It’s about you, not the product or service.

You have a world where in the pandemic and coming out of it, your customers are going to use more decision-makers to make any purchase. They’re going to have greater hesitance to move forward because we’ve all been worried and disturbed about what those sudden changes have done to us – once burned, twice shy – and they’re looking for a more precise connection between that solution and what they purchased. That means a better counselor by the salesperson, that means creativity.

If you harness your expertise, your experience, your ability to provide insight, you’re going to find out you can do this and you can beat the pants off the commoditized salespeople who went through tired old sales training and do it the same exact way. Your customers are sick of it, I’ve got data to prove it. Help them understand their own situation better and you’ll surprise yourself at how receptive they are.

The last thing I have here is to talk about aligning with the buyer, again, huge topic. Let me show you something that comes from the world of purchasing strategy and I want you to be thinking about this from the perspective of creativity. What could we do to look different?

Here are two axes, the vertical axis is labeled Strategic Importance. What that’s saying is your customer, the higher they would rate you on that vertical axis, the greater they consider you strategically important to them. The lower you are, the more they see you as simply a part of the machine that grinds on. The horizontal axis has been labeled Difficulty of Obtaining a Substitute and here the customer is saying, “When I look at you, the further I place you on that graph to the right, the harder it is to find somebody that I could substitute for the services, products and especially for you, the salesperson.”

When they look like this, they look and say, “I can map four purchasing strategies.” The first thing I’m going to say if I regard you, the salesperson and the services and products I’m buying as easy to find and not strategically important, I don’t even want to see a salesperson. Imagine copy paper, I can’t imagine many places where copy paper is in a strategically important idea and you can get it at a ton of places. Does anybody have a salesperson dropping on them to only sell them copy paper? Come on.

On the other hand, if they judge that you and/or the products and services are strategically important but there’s still a lot of you out there, now I’m going to leverage that, I’m going to hold a big giant carrot in front of each of you and make you compete for it. I want you to just stop before I go any further, what can you do as a salesperson from the very moment a prospecting contact to the very close of that sale for you to become strategically important? Forget what you’re selling, what can you do?

You can help them make a better decision, you can reveal to them things they need to know. It takes creativity to do it and if you’ve got sales training that’s been around for 40 years, you don’t know how. But if you use your own head, you step back and say, “I’ve talked to a lot of these customers, I know the kinds of things, I’m going to figure out a creative way to leverage that.”

If they say, “Not really that important but there aren’t very many of them out there” then I’m going to maintain more than one relationship. For a lot of people, overnight delivery services are not strategically important, but I also don’t want to be able to not do it so I’ll keep a DHL account and a FedEx account and I’ve always got the USP. Then if I’m really strapped as the customer because you’re strategically important and there aren’t many of you, then I’m going to make you a partner and we could talk about that for hours.

This is a purchasing strategy that reveals to us where our creativity should be applied. What can we do as a sales team, what can I do as a seller, as an individual, how can we approach potential customers and prospecting, existing opportunities in our funnel and maintain the relationship with our existing accounts as account managers in such a way that they say it’s difficult to find another person/company/team that can do that?

What can we do to become, in the eyes of that customer, strategically important? If an account management function is only reactive to complaints, does that really sound strategically important or difficult to substitute? We really need to think creatively, these are golden times to do this. We are unlikely to have a time like this again in our lifetime and hopefully we never have another one of these things, but these times of tectonic change, sudden change, volcanic difference, your radar should go up. If I can get creative and innovative right now, I’m going to dominate my competitors.

I want you to think about this in closing. If you canvassed your sales team and asked when was the last time that a buyer they were working with had an a-ha moment, could they answer? Could they answer because they did something creative and different, took a different approach, brought a different message and had a different kind of dialogue, presented things differently than just the standard demo? You should think about that, because in the end it makes a big difference.

I told you, this is a big subject, there is a ton to talk about. If you’re interested in more dialogue about this, please reach out to me but if not, take something I’ve talked about, employ it, see if you can’t harness the engine of creativity and innovation in this rich and golden moment as we emerge from the misery of this quarantine and pandemic. Fred, I’m going to hand the baton back to you and see if we have any questions.

Fred Diamond:  Tom Snyder, we have a ton of questions so let’s try and get to as many of them as possible. Denise said, “I’ve had success in reaching out to companies by literally finding them on the street. I am in food sales so I look for signs on food delivery trucks and then I follow up.” Tyler says, “Tom, can you give some examples of how we can specifically be more creative?” and I’m going to ask that in a slightly different way. You made a great point that you need as a sales professional to distinguish yourself above everybody else who’s a commodity because they’re asking the same questions and they’re using the same sales methodologies and technologies that you’ve instructed people with for the majority of your career. Maybe you’ve seen something over the last year, what’s a way that a sales professional has distinguished themselves by showing customers more value to answer some of the questions that you’ve brought up before that you might have seen?

Tom Snyder: I’ll give you an example and there are many examples. Let’s take an example where you are moving along a trajectory with a set of decision-makers who are considering a purchase of your product or service. Obviously, for the majority of that journey, each of those decision-makers is likely in a different place but let’s suppose we have them in a place where we have been asked to come in and show our wares, it’s demonstration time. We’ve even been clever enough to ask multiple decision-makers, “What are the criteria you’re going to use to compare the various offerings that you’re considering?”

Imagine if you were to reflect on that instead of just take it at face value. Suppose you were to say, “I wonder if you would help me connect the dots. We’re in this world where so much is changing so fast, could you connect for me the relationship between those points of comparison and what you were trying to ultimately achieve as an outcome?” The answer to that question is often going to be something that may not be thoroughly thought out, so you want to be prepared when you go into that demo to do something dramatically different.

If the demos all look the same, “This is who we are, this is our mission statement, this is all the places we sell, these are the logos we’ve sold to and my name is so-and-so, and here’s the feature.” Imagine if instead you started backwards, you did the entire demonstration backwards. Start with the end and work backwards, think about doing that in a way that tracks with an increasing dissection of what happened but it started with the outcome, the benefit and work backwards. Perfect example of something no one does, but the few times we’ve seen it done it’s masterful in making a difference.

Fred Diamond: Tom, I want to ask you one last question and it relates to being able to get to the point where you’re communicating this value that you’ve figured out. Let’s say you’ve done the brainstorming, you get the team, you’ve been doing this for years. You’ve figured out something that’s really going to help your customer solve their problems. You could call them, you could send an email, what are your thoughts on how sales professionals or if they should independently present themselves as true field experts?

Let’s say you’re in the government technology space, you’re selling for a company, you’re going to be out there hawking their wares at some level and we’re talking about some ideas on how you could more effectively accelerate the process. What do you think? If I’m that guy or lady, should I be popping out videos on YouTube? Should I be blogging not about why my company’s great but about the challenges that the customer feels? Part of that question comes in from Terry who’s in the DC area, I’m expanding. What are your thoughts on the sales professionals presenting themselves that way? Is that going to make a difference?

Tom Snyder: Big question. I’m going to take it apart because I think there’s actually three questions in there. #1, if you’re doing blogs, podcasts, videos, white papers, anything like that to build your own brand of expertise, that’s great, I would call that marketing and not sales. When we’re talking about being engaged with a decision-maker or a set of decision-makers around a purchase, attempting to take the role of expert without earning the right to do that first is going to risk being anywhere from a know-it-all to view it as obnoxious. You have to get the invitation for that.

There are two fundamental rules that underly being a value creator and the techniques of doing it really evolve straight from this. #1, customers, clients will always put a higher value on what they conclude than they will on what you tell them. #2, customers will always put a higher value on what they ask for than what is freely offered. Freely offer your advice, your opinion, your viewpoint, your expertise and it will be dismissed. Get them to ask for it, and it will have high value.

Getting them to tell you why your product or service is great opens the door to creating value and when done correctly, they’ll invite you. “Mary, what have you seen? What’s your insight? What’s your idea?” As soon as I ask for it, you’re now in the role of expert. Announce you’re an expert, you’re going to be dismissed.

Fred Diamond: Tom Snyder, thanks for the value, we’re getting a lot of nice notes here. Jerry says, “Thank you so much.” Elisa says, “Excellent.” Martin says, “Thank you so much, Tom, good to see you again.” I want to thank everybody for being here for being a participant.

Tom Snyder, I’ve mentioned this to you before, you’ve helped tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of sales professionals. I’ve literally been in the room with you at least half a dozen times watching you in action live and of course, over the last year virtually as well. You’ve inspired so many sales professionals to not just get better at sales but to improve their lives by taking their careers to the next level so I want to acknowledge you for that and I want to ask you for one final action step, something specific that our listeners today can do right now to take their sales career to the next level.

Tom Snyder: I will do that and then I want to make one closing comment. If I had one thing to say you could do right now even if you’re doing it by yourself, I want you to take that process that I described as the creative process, I want you to sit, give yourself five minutes, set a timer on your iPhone and let ideas flow without judgement, write them all down. When the alarm goes off, then look back and eliminate all the ones that don’t make sense or are too silly and then when you get the three or four real gems, start thinking about, “How do I implement those?” Brainstorming is the one thing that I would want you to do more than any other.

The last thing I’ll say is that more than ever and as we emerge from this pandemic, every piece of data screams what people are desperate for from the salespeople they see, it’s human conversation. Enough already with the structure of questions, that’s not bad stuff, you’re a human being. Things like empathy, attentive listening, premise on your questions, providing reaction, asking clarifying questions, these are the ways human beings interact. Now that none of us have been able to interact, we’re dying for it. The door is wide open for you to be the one that does that and be different on that alone.

Transcribed by Mariana Badillo

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