Automated sales for communications & media

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- We are going to talk about effective communication in sales. If selling is any part of your job role whatsoever, please leave a comment about that below. We'd love to hear about it. Now, we've all had negative experiences with bad sales people. And for some people we don't even like talking about selling. It makes us uncomfortable, but we're gonna hope fully change that today and look at selling and communication through a slightly different lens, a refreshing lens, I hope. We're gonna talk to Jason Marc Campbell, the author of the book, Selling with Love. He also has a podcast and a YouTube channel with the same name as the book. And he's got a really unique take on this, and I think we're gonna get a lot out of this conversation. So let's into it. Well, welcome, Jason. Nice to see you again and welcome to the channel. How are you today? - I'm doing fantastic, Alex. It's good to be here. Glad to see you again and excited to share. - Yeah. I'm happy to share what you've got to say. Hear what you've got to say and talk about your book a little bit. Now, one of the things you talk about in your book is that sales is everywhere. It's not just some isolated type of job description or job role that only certain people have. Can you tell us more about this basic premise where that sales is everywhere? - Yeah, and you know, the problem I see is a lot of times we look at sales in that little box as you say, right? It's that activity that happens over there, has nothing to do with me, and it's labeled for those manipulative, slimy, you know, evil people, that go and manipulate and make some things that, you know, we wouldn't be proud doing ourselves, right? We wouldn't apply sales to a family member. How dare we do that? That's where people with no values and no morals, they'll do the sales. And I find it's quite unfortunate and I will make the admission. Yes. There's a lot of sales that happen that aren't done in the best of ways. There's an unregulated industry in sales, which means anybody can join it. They can do it. A lot of the cultures can be toxic and that means that sometimes we get to experience a negative sales process ourselves and by doing so, we might have decided to come clearly reject it within our lives and put it in that box that we're not associated with over there. But the problem with that is, as I mentioned, is sales is actually everywhere. It's not just people with a label of sales, development rep, or business development rep, or sales representative. We do it all the time. Like whether we are trying to find employment, right? An interview process is actually a sales process. If you are trying to build a business, well, you'll need to do sales in the process. If you're trying to raise funds for an IPO, you're trying to motivate your team, right? Let's say there's a goal that you want to achieve this quarter. You'll need to sell them on the idea, get people onboard and engaged. So sales happens everywhere in the business setting, but if we go over into our personal lives, you can see where sales can be present as well. Let's say, for example, in romantic relationships, to be able to find a partner, there is a sales process that is involved, especially when I talk about a book called, Selling with Love. I need to bring the romantic example. - That's right. - And even more important than that is I often mention that if you wanna maintain and grow a relationship, that's also a sales process, right? It doesn't stop the moment it closes. It actually starts the moment it closes. And I find this is something that allows us to open up our eyes to realize, oh, if sales is happening everywhere, maybe I shouldn't just look at it as the evil art that's happening over there. We need to integrate it. Because if we reject sales altogether, most of the opportunities we want to take advantage of, the impact we wanna make in the world will stand on the other side of making a sale. And if we're hesitant about it and not embracing it, we're gonna hold our sales back so much in the life we wanna live. - Yeah. I totally agree with you. And you know, in your book, you mentioned that one of the things you have in mind as your focus is small businesses, entrepreneurs, people who are doing sales because it's just part of their business, like, so you own a flower shop or you're a freelance photographer, or, you know, you're just trying to get something going, well, you're gonna have to put yourself out there. You're gonna have to spread the word about your business if you want it to go someplace. So the definition that we're using here is a lot more broad than, let's say, you go to a car lot, you know, and you've got a by a car and you get that weird high pressure sales situation. So we're talking about this more generally, and on a related topic, you mentioned that, I love this quote. You say that sales is communication with much clearer goals, and this is a communication channel. So could you talk more about what you mean by that? - At the beginning of the book I really talk about, you know, know why we hate sales, right? Why we have, you know, you even said it yourself, when you think sales, you think about a car lot, a used car salesman, high pressure tactics, right? So this is the stereotype we all have about sales. And what I first do is I try to at least build a bridge for people to acknowledge sales in a different way so that we can actually use it in a healthy way in our lives. And this is the only time in the book that I substitute word sales with communication, because you're really just communicating with somebody else, and I add the fact that we have clearer goals because if you're in a sales conversation there's usually an intent, there's a goal. And you know where you want to bring the person by the end of that communication. That's a good way to communicate in general, but often time just a random communication you're having might not have as much intent in the goal. But in sales you might say, well, I'm hoping to earn them as a client, or I'm hoping to bring them to this point where they'd consider me for at least an initial meeting, or if we're talking a non-professional scenario, a sales process would be, well, I'm hoping at least go on a first date, you know? If we bring in the personal side, you always have a goal. And when you understand that sales is just communication, yet you have an interior goal, just because you have a goal, doesn't make it evil, but if you have a bad goal, then we can see how it can be tainted. And if you're not having integrity in the way that you're selling, yeah, you can taint it, but people can have bad integrity in a lot of activities we do. It's just that sales holds such a power that we have to acknowledge and take responsibility for. - Yeah, you know, when I even talk to clients, I think almost exactly like you do. Clients call me, they talk to me, and they want to maybe, you know, we're gonna start a really relationship, a business relationship where I might do some workshops for them or do some consulting for them and I really do just see the whole process as a communication process, but there are goals, right? They want to get to know me for a purpose and I wanna get to know them for a purpose. We have to decide if we're gonna do business together. So there is a goal, we're not just purely socializing. So I appreciate that definition. Now, to the heart of the book. There's a theme that drives through this, Selling with Love. And let's talk about that theme. I love the title of the podcast and the book. It's really catchy, when I shared it with my wife, she said, oh, that's really good title. That makes me wanna know what it's about. So in a nutshell, how would you boil this down? What does it mean to sell with love? - Yeah, it's the premise of what I wanna bring to the world. Right? So selling with love, it's kind of an ethos. And what I speak about in the book is that throughout every transaction, there's actually an emotion. And the broader way that I define sales is an energy exchange between conscious beings, all right? Now, I come from the personal growth field. I love spirituality. So I love the term energy, right? But energy's really powerful as a word because it encompasses everything. If you're selling a product or service that took energy to create, if you're exchanging it for money, well, money, for those of you who might have blocks around money is nothing more than stored energy from a past activity that generated value, right? So we can take away some of the baggage that often comes with sales because money being the thing that gets transferred, often trips up a lot of people that have a lot of these other emotions that come in and skew our perception of what we're doing in sales and make us feel maybe yucky about it. And so in the book, when I talk about energy exchange, I say, guess what, emotion is energy in motion. And there's always an emotion that happens when the sale is made. And the biggest categories I talk about. If it's not love, it's shame and guilt blockages, which, you know, if you think selling is like, oh my God, I'm a terrible human when I sell, that's gonna make you not too excited about selling. And the person's gonna be like, oh my God, I don't want to do business with them. They're shaking, they're not feeling confident about their product. Could be because you have a bad product, then you should definitely fix the product. And then the second level is what I call a fear pride paradox, which is when you're selling, but you don't care or take responsibility for the sales you make and unfortunately I see so many people be able to make the sale and then walk away. And then people are left with a inferior type of transaction that makes them feel yucky. But the person that sold from there, they also numb themselves to the reality of their sale just so that they can realize that I can do it again and not deal with the root cause that, guess what? You have to take responsibility for those sales. A lot of people sabotage themselves. They try to up rationalize and they don't even take initiative to lead people towards making the purchase that's gonna solve problems in their lives. And that's where I see a lot of people get stuck. And this is when you put that box away, you're like, I'm not a salesperson. I'm not gonna use any of the tactics. I tell people if you want to bring people a place of solution, like you've identified a problem. You know you have a great way of solving it and what you ask in return is less than what you're gonna be providing. So you say, listen, this is gonna solve $2,000 worth of problems in your life and I'm gonna charge you 1000, then you need to lead people and speak the language that's necessary for them to understand that. And that's the language of selling with love. It's actually going and knowing that what you're gonna do is gonna provide so much more value. So you start using the process, you start using the techniques because you genuinely want to help people and make that impact. - Right. Yeah, that's true. And I know that we've all had bad experiences, you know, like we've said, but I am thinking now about positive experiences I've had where I am a customer and I'm excited to buy something because I see it as much more. I'm willing to trade my 10 bucks or my 50 bucks or whatever it is for that thing because I think that thing is more valuable than the money I have in my hand and I'm happy to make that exchange because I feel like I'm getting so much more for it. And that's when the process is great for everybody where you feel like you're getting the better part of the deal in terms of all the value you're getting. Let's say I'm offering, you know, I'm selling my flowers from my flower shop and, you know, you see all these delighted people, or if I'm doing a workshop or, you know, a seminar and everybody's so happy that I'm there to do it and I feel happy that I'm getting paid to do it. It's a great process where it's a mutually beneficial exchange, so let's get even more concrete, though, about what you mean by this. You have a number of chapters that break out the different aspects of what we're loving about this. And the first one, the first chapter where you start breaking it down is loving your impact. So what does that mean to love your impact? - Yeah. So in the book I break down five loves in selling that you can refer to, the first one being love the impact. And this is where you always should start. If you're trying to sell something, build something, there's a goal that you're setting in the communication that you're having, it should start with a goal that's actually gonna make an impact and I tell people to take a moment and get clear on what impact you're gonna make for the client that you're selling to. So in your case, Alex, if you're selling, let's say communication services and improvements in communication, you could take a step back and actually, if you're listening to this, you might take a paper and start journaling. What difference am I gonna make for this individual's life because I've decided to go out there and sell what I offer as my product and service? Well, in your case, it would be a case of, oh my God, you'll end up having people that develop their communication ability, allowing them to grow their business, maybe be able to teach better, transform the lives of the students that they teach to. If they're getting interviews they'll understand that they can get a better job, get paid better, have more satisfaction in life, have less of a burden that happens for everything they're doing because they struggle with communication and you can start listing out more and more. And if you've had an existing business and you've dealt with some customers, you would have an idea of what are the results that they typically get. You know, in the traditional sales talk you might say, well, make a list of your benefits, but it feels impersonal. Instead I wanna inspire you to think about what impact you are making in people's lives. And in the book I expand even further and I start thinking about ripple effects, right? Because I want people to sell with love, to be doing sales in a way that every transaction leads to a positive outcome and solves genuine problems that we have on the planet, right? I found there's too many great salespeople that might be selling cigarettes, right? And instead, if I have someone like you, that's doing communications training, creating your YouTube channel, helping so many people learn how to communicate better, I would assume that one of the ripple effects is if we all learn to communicate better, we're gonna have a lot less confusion, a lot less tensions, a lot less aggression in the world, when we all take the time to start understanding each other. And to me that becomes the ultimate motivator for myself and the ultimate clarity for the people that I sell to as to why I'm selling them. And I think a lot of times we wanna understand why someone pressuring me to buy this. If you know why they're doing it, then you start actually understanding, ah, well, I want to be a part of that or not. And so in my case I wanna create an army of enlightened sales individuals that are working towards helping people sell in an ethical way, makes the businesses that are making a positive transformation embrace the tools of selling, embrace the power that comes with selling, so we can start shifting the kinds of companies that do succeed where they actually serve more buyers. So to me, I will get on interviews. I will sell my book. I will go and do some trainings. Build products so that it all serves that ultimate mission and people know where I'm coming from. And it makes us relax because we don't see the ulterior motive anymore. - Right, the motive is the positive impact you wanna have for the client, for the customer. And they feel that, they feel like you're on their side. You're trying to help them get what they want and that's a great way to approach it rather than getting the salesperson be focused on closing a deal for the salesperson's benefit. You also talk about, in another chapter, loving your client. So expand on that a little bit. I mean, I could already hear where you're going with that, but could you tell us what you mean in that chapter? - Yeah, the thesis about loving the client, like we've already gone some idea of the impact we make for the client. What I'd want expand in this section is the actual way that you show love to the client is actually to understand them, right? So you often hear about, this might shock some people that have resistance in sales, but some of the best sales people in the world are great listeners and are introverts. And unfortunately, I can't say that I am an introvert. I'm definitely an extrovert, but the capacity to listen and to understand is the difference between someone that's gonna be a good salesperson and a great salesperson. And so this might come to some relief, but when you really wanna show that you understand the client, how do you actually understand who they are, what they're living through, and what problem is happening in their life because you haven't come and provided the solution. And what is the repercussions of continuing to live with that problem? Like in my case it's so clear to me that when I work with small business owners, and I can vividly remember when I first wrote this book, I got clear on who I wanted to write this book for, and it was a lady called Tracy Fenton, working at World Blue, small business, doing some ethical transformation to promote freedom in the workplace. And when I was writing my book I was thinking about her. And I was saying, wow, if I don't go out and start supporting businesses like hers that are genuinely gonna be doing a positive impact on so many other businesses, which will make the world a better place, bring more democratic principles in the workplace, more freedom, all of those good qualities that I wanna see in the world, if she doesn't embrace sales and have more success by doing that, she will not be able to continue making the impact that she has such a strong belief for. I need to make sure that I understand her, the struggle she's facing, the pain that she's experiencing, so the moment I go in and provide the solution of my sales consultation, then I know what kind of relief it's gonna bring. I know the value it's gonna bring and I'll know how to price myself and deliver a product that genuinely solves the problems that she has so that now there's a match. - And instead of assuming they have the same problems as the last client or last customer or that we're trying to, as a salesperson, put them in the box that you want them to be in. If you start by loving the client, listening to them, like you said, really listening carefully, empathizing with what's going on with them, then you're much more likely to help them meet that need because you understand it better. I have people approach me all the time because of my channel, basically emailing me with all kinds of weird requests and offers and I'm like, this has nothing to do with my channel. Like, I don't know why you think I would be a good fit for this because they're not taking the time. But the people who do take the time, you know, then you're willing to have a good conversation with them because you know that they're understanding you and then, love the product. Tell me more about this. So I have a little example I wanna share, I think, about loving the product 'cause there's one product I think I could really sell, but not many, but because I love this product, I think I could sell it all day. So tell us about this. What does it mean to love your product? - Yeah, it's very interesting because when I first started writing the book, loving the product was of the first loves, but a lot of times we can get caught up in the product and we fall in love with the product, but it might not necessarily serve the impact that we ultimately want to do and the client that we ultimately wanna serve. So you want to get clear on impacting client before you move on to product because the product will be created as a, call it consequence, of the knowledge that you have about the impact you wanna make and the client you wanna serve. So you have to realize that the product isn't always about you, it's about how is it gonna solve the problem for the people you wanna serve. So that being said, I often, you know, ax the myth that I hear a lot in the sales world, which is it till you make it. - I hate that. - That's not the right approach. What I tell people is don't it, make it. Like you can spend some extra time to make your product incredible and you can go above and beyond to make sure you ultimately serve. And when I talk about love the product is that you are proud to actually bring this into the hands of your customers. I remember a couple months ago I was looking at putting together kind of a group coaching program. I did a whole challenge where I was teaching people the principles of selling with love. At the end, I'm like, hey, you can all buy this coaching program, six weeks, get you to this point, only costs this much, and you can all sign up, just send me a message and we'll start working together. People started messaging me. I started having conversations with them. I started understanding them better. And I was like, they're not gonna get the result that I promised in six week. And I couldn't sell it. I couldn't sell it because I was like, I could take their money but I wouldn't deliver the value that I promised. And so I had to go back to the drawing board and think, what is a better way that I could serve? And this is what I mean by loving the product is understanding that you want to design a product that you build that truly is gonna serve the people that you work with. So I've made the decision that the people I work with is gonna be over a one year period. Because oftentimes when you're really serious about overcoming your blocks on sales, there's a lot of mindset work that you have to do. And I love that, I lay out the principles in the book, but I realize that if I'm gonna hold people by the hand and really bring them to the finish line, how do I work with them for an entire year? And now I'm so excited to sell it because I know it'll take them across the finish line. That's what I mean by loving the product is really knowing, because we hesitate in sales if we feel like, oh, would I sell this to my mother, my father, my relatives? And that's the level of product you wanna be able to create and be happy to sell. Now the blocks will melt away. And any of the shame or guilt that would come from selling a product that is subpar will not exist. Don't it, make it. - Make it. Yeah. Well, I love the way you're explaining that, because when you love the product and the way you just said it, you're really looking for that fit. You know, do I love the product for this client? Do I see this as fitting their needs, their interests? Is this gonna get them what they want? Is this a good match? It's almost like you're a matchmaker. Like you have a single friend over here and another single friend and you're like, I think these two people fit together, but you wouldn't necessarily try to set them up with other people. It's just that you see the compatibility and you see that there's that potential there for that good fit. I love that approach. So there's probably two products that come to mind that I could sell and love. And this is not explaining it exactly how you, the way you explain it sounds better, but I really love my Mac. You know, my Mac computers. My Mac PowerBook and things like that, and I get so excited about it. I don't think I would like standing in a retail store. Like the context is not my favorite place to stand all day in a retail store, but I like it so much and that if it depends on what they need, of course, if the client really need what this offers, I think I could do it. And the second one is bass guitars. I don't think bass guitars really fits. I just get too geeked out about that 'cause I play bass a little bit. - You know, I do wanna expand on that, 'cause in the book I actually speak about my experience buying my iPhone and I walked into the Apple store and the salesperson just says like, hey, how's it going? Did you come here for just window shopping? Admiring? Were you planning on buying something? What did you need? I was like, well I'm actually looking for a iPhone. He's like, great. Let's look at what's available. Super animated. He's like, how long you been in Miami? I was like, oh, I'm just here for a couple months. And we started talking. By the end of the conversation he had helped me pick the exact iPhone that I needed. And I just remember in the process, he's like, well, are you using iCloud? And I was like, yeah, I am. He's like, okay, well then get the cheaper one with no memory. You're not gonna use the memory. It's all gonna go in the iCloud. So don't worry about that. So I was like, oh wow. He saved me money. He's helping me out. But most of the conversation had us talking about vegan tacos and I ended up referring him to a place to go have vegan tacos that I was excited about. So I ended up selling him on some vegan tacos. He ended up selling me a phone, but you know, Apple does it right. It's one of the most valuable companies in the world. Why? They design great products and they sell the hell out of them. - Yeah. In a great way too. Had a very similar experience when we just bought my wife a laptop where they didn't try to point her to the top of the line model or anything, they really just wanted to know what she was gonna use it for and we bought something that was relatively affordable compared to some of the options on the table. And I really felt like, oh, this is exactly what we need. So that was a great experience as well. I don't know if everyone has great experiences at the Apple store, but we've got two. We've got two good experiences here on this one video. - Yeah, no, they are one of the most valuable companies in the world and you look at it. If you make it easy for people to buy and you sell them something that people are excited about, you look at their average value per customer. It's massive. And you know, I'm a cultist, right? I have a bunch of Apple products. They're doing something right both by selling it and building it. But the selling aspect is incredible. It's extremely easy for you to buy Apple products and that's something you want to think about when you build your process of selling, which is also one of the loves I speak about. So you make your process easy, you make it fun and you sell a great product. You know the impact, you understand the client, you'll become unstoppable. - Awesome. Thanks for being here today, Jason. And as mentioned, he's got a book, he's got a podcast. I'm gonna put links to all of that in the description below the video and be sure to say hello in the comments section. And again, if you're doing any kind of selling in your role, whether you're a actual salesperson on your business card or not, tell us about that, we'd love to hear about your experience. Hey Jason, thanks for coming by. I'm really glad we finally got you on the channel. Congratulations on the book launch. - I appreciate it, it was a pleasure. Thank you, Alex. - See you all later.