Empower your insurance industry sales team with our cost-effective solution for sales pipeline development

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welcome I'm Mary Paul your host for the sales mastery summit what if you could accurately predict the sales from your sales pipeline today's expert is known around the world for helping sales teams get the lumps of coal out of their own sales pipelines with me today is Dave Curlin author of baseline selling welcome Dave thank you Mary it's nice to be here well pleasure to have you this week we are actually focused on how to help our viewers drive greater personal productivity and of course focusing on the sales pipeline is extremely important in this case if you want to get greater return for less effort then of course having the right opportunities in the pipeline and progressing them through the buying cycle is the way to go but this is easier said than done so today I'm counting on you Dave to help our viewers with tips on how to make this an actual reality instead of academic thinking so I hope you're up for the challenge we can try okay fabulous now I know that the topic of helping people create effective sales pipelines is something that you're very passionate about can you share with us why is this such a hot topic for you well I work with a lot of companies and I've been doing this for about 27 years and it doesn't seem to matter what industry they're in how big they are how many salespeople they have who they call on who's managing them one constant thread of I know what it's gonna look like before I even see it is the pipeline and it and it never seems to be anything more than well here's our pipeline and they give me a report it's got a list of all the opportunities and it's not backed up by much information it's not staged if it is staged it isn't in a staged based on any kind of criteria it's just ever stage the salesperson put it in and it isn't in a form where you can take a quick look at it and you know exactly what kind of shape your business is in and one of the problems with that is that if you're getting a report out of a CRM system and it just lists all these opportunities then from one week to the next you're pretty much as a Sales Manager anyhow looking at the exact same report you looked at last week and you can't really tell what's moving how much it's moved where it moved from where it moved to and whether the probability of it closing has gotten any greater than it was last week so you end up ignoring these reports because it's I've seen this before there's nothing here that's useful to me and when you start ignoring the reports in the pipeline and you stop having discussions about what was in that report with your salespeople you can't coach them on moving the opportunities forward based on having a common accurate starting point and in the end forecasts are totally inaccurate and they're generally inaccurate for three reasons we have three variables that sales people tend to get wrong and those three variables are the amount that this opportunity might be worth the value of it how much that that account might spend and the salespeople always overestimate what that might be and then there's the projected closed date and the projected closed date is usually earlier than what it will actually be and then finally there's the likelihood of closing and the salespeople are overly optimistic about their chances of closing a business because if somebody liked them they think they're gonna buy from them so with those three variables always being wrong the forecast will always be wrong and whether I'm a salesperson looking at the output from what I've put in or on the sales manager looking at what my salespeople have put in if I don't have an accurate vote forecast I can't drive revenue and this this is all about driving revenue and doing it more effectively and I apologize for having such a long opening remark oh actually you gave me a great framework for many other questions to ask you so I appreciate that I'm all about framework okay well I hope then that you have a good framework for how to get the gold bullion into your pipeline and keep the nasty coal out well the nasty coal comes from a disease called happy years where sales people hear what they want to hear hope what they want to hope and do what they want to do without it being based on reality so a strong set of criteria for each stage of the pipeline helps to eliminate happy years but doesn't do the entire trick if if I'm a salesperson and I ask a prospect well so how does this sound to you and the prospect says well it sounds pretty good the salesperson with happy years ago they're gonna buy from me and they go ahead and check off all the criteria and say yup yup yup yup yeah but it doesn't really matter what the criteria they're gonna check it off so in addition to having criteria salespeople must approach all their opportunities with not only optimism about the outcome but skepticism about everything they're hearing okay so if I'm a salesperson and I ask that sales same question and I would never ask this question but salespeople ask this question how does this all sound to you and the prospect says that sounds pretty good as a salesperson you have to follow that up with tell me why what what exactly sounds good why does it sound good how does that compare with other stuff you've heard how does that compare with other offerings other companies other salespeople I mean we've got to put it in context sounds good sounds good cuz that might mean you're about to be finished and you leave and I get the rest of my day back maybe that's why it sounds good so that good asking how would you like to solve your problem and then accepting their answer is all right we have an order right sounds good because I heard enough to disqualify you I don't have to worry about you being an option anymore sounds good because I know I don't want to do any business with you and I don't have to talk to you again so without knowing what it means when a prospect says something that's happy years so it requires a little bit of skepticism it requires that salespeople not be so trusting you know one of my companies is a Salesforce evaluation company we evaluate sales organizations we assess sales candidates that's objective management group and one of the findings is whether or not salespeople are too trusting and this this is a staggering number ninety-three percent of the 650,000 salespeople we've assessed are too trusting and that's that's the formula for happy years there's another piece to that need for approval how much a salesperson needs to be liked or in extreme cases loved and when they need to be liked or loved their primary goal is to make friends their primary outcome is that the prospect liked them a lot now if they happen to get business from them that's bonus so the symptoms of need for approval are not not only that they have this need to be liked but they have difficulty asking a lot of questions they have more difficulty asking tough questions and they have even greater difficulty asking the real challenging question the pushback that nobody else has dared to do being able to say to you you know you told me that price was important but can I push back on that I saw a Mercedes belonging to you in the parking lot you've got beautiful Italian furniture in here you don't seem like you've made decisions based on price you look like you've gone for quality why are you telling me that price is important and it doesn't matter what the pushback is it could be pushed back like that or you know you said that one of the things that's important to you is that you do this quickly yet you know as well as I do that in order to do this right you can't rush it so why did you say that so push back helps to differentiate a salesperson push back helps to get a a key decision-makers ear push back builds credibility push back speeds up the sales process because suddenly you're the only one having a particular conversation with a particular prospect yet folks would need for approval cannot under any circumstances ask a question if they fear that they might upset the applecart get somebody upset and then they won't like them anymore okay so so even if they weren't too trusting the question they would ask instead well sounds good give me a call on Tuesday okay they're gonna buy from me on Tuesday and they put it in their CRM system as a Tuesday clothes and they tell their manager we're gonna close this on Tuesday if they weren't too trusting and they were skeptical about call me Tuesday the questions they'd have to ask well Tuesday sounds good tell me if you can what do you expect to happen when we talk on Tuesday or how is Tuesday different than right now what's gonna happen between now and Tuesday they don't assess at 8:00 a Tuesday phone call they can't ask those questions so these these two weaknesses which are kind of hidden nobody really knows they're there not even the salespeople are aware that those two weaknesses are in place that kind of dictates which skills and tactics and best practices they'll actually use on the phone and out in the field so even though they might have heard all the best practices even though they might have been taught and coached what they ought to do in this situation it's it's just stuff that they've learned it's not it's not something they're comfortable actually doing and that's a huge part of why the pipelines are wrong and why the sales cycles are too long because all this time is wasted while they're afraid to ask the next logical the next necessary the next crew good question okay well I can see why 93% of your survey participants are not pushed back type people because optimist optimism kind of goes with the territory for a sales rep so you know being a skeptical sales rep is probably an anomaly yeah and the need to be like that's what causes people to say hey you ought to be in sales right all extroverts that are great at having conversations you should be in sales yeah but those are actually the worst people to be in sales it takes introverts like me who are good at listening and asking questions and who don't care whether somebody likes them or not the introverts make the better salespeople so I like the setup that you had earlier that one way to coach an eternal optimist who doesn't have natural pushback skills into asking these appropriate questions is having your criteria for each stage of the pipeline can you share some examples of what those criteria might be sure if we dig into the sales process in baseline selling that's pretty simple it's something everybody can relate to its first base second base third base in home okay so first base that's a suspect and in this process that relates to a first scheduled meeting can be over the phone can be face to face second base is where the opportunity becomes an actual prospect and to get to second base here we get to criteria the prospect must need what we have there must be compelling reasons for them to spend money to buy what we're selling and additionally some compelling reasons to buy it from us instead of from somebody else we need to develop what I call sob quality that doesn't stand for what you're thinking it's not son of the boss it's it's actually a baseball term speed on the bases I'll do the quick baseball analogy in baseball the greatest base stealers when you come right down to it what they do so well it's not steal a base it's they get the pitcher too more attention to them than to the hitter and if we translate that to selling we've developed SLV quality when we can get our prospect to pay more attention to us than the competitors and we develop sov quality by building a stronger relationship by listening showing that we care by developing credibility trust and we do all of that by simply asking questions more questions than anybody else better questions than anybody else tougher questions than anybody else and then the last criteria to getting to second base is what I call a rule of ratios the rule of ratios basically says that the cost of their problem or the value of their opportunity has to be at least double the price to do business with us so if they're talking about some problem and this problem is costing them $50,000 a year and we're gonna charge $250,000 to fix it not much value there but if the problem is costing them a million dollars a year and we're gonna charge 150 thousand dollars to fix it and that fixes it forever that's a tremendous value so that's the criteria to get from first to second base if you want I'll share the criteria to go from second and third but you asked for an example yeah no I would love for you to continue because what's dawned on me is it's really turning sales-rep into a scientist and rather than proving a hypothesis like most people think scientists are trying to disprove their hypothesis so they know it's ironclad so essentially you're disqualify your prospect exactly as long as they pass your gates they get to keep going exactly yeah and that that helps to prevent the happy years because it makes it object a rather than subjective if it's built into a CRM system these are things that need to be checked off or entered in or agreed to and if and if it's integrated then the pipeline and the sales process hook up together and as you follow the prop sales process and you check off the criteria then the pipeline is being updated automatically so it's all connected so if you would share the criteria to go from second base to third base I would so third base is a qualified opportunity so to become a qualified opportunity the prospect needs to be committed to solving their problem or committed to pursuing the opportunity they need in a in a commodity situation in a price sensitive situation one of the qualifying criteria to get the third would be that they're willing to spend more money with us to get it done the right way the first time right now in lieu of it being a commodity situation a complex sale the that that still might be an appropriate criteria that they'll spend more to do business with us but we want to establish that early enough in the process so that it's not a price war we want to make sure they have the money so those would be the two financial pieces along with that but we have acceptable terms and that they can pay and that their credit credit worthy so anything financial would get done at that point then around decision making there there are several pieces one would be the timeline for the decision that that timeline has to make sense on both sides we need to know and have met decision makers and make sure we have their agenda and their compelling reasons we need to know the process for making that decision and we need to know the criteria for making the decision and a lot of salespeople aren't real sure or clear on the difference between decision-making criteria and decision making process so the process would be first we're going to do this and then we're going to do this and then we're going to talk to these people and then we're going to review those things and then we're gonna meet and then we're going to decide and the criteria would be what happens when they decide what are they gonna base that decision on and then there may be some company specific qualifiers whether whether our it could be anything our location is okay whether our timeframes are okay whether our specs are okay whether we're an approved vendor whether or a minority-owned business look whatever is specific to that vertical or their industry would also go into that second base to third base checklist and then that gets us to third base and then a third base with a qualified opportunity now we start the run home and that's where and you know originally we were going to talk about shortening a sales cycle this is this is one of the areas where we shortened the sales cycle and firm up the pipeline in the forecast the first step between third and home would be to talk about what we do talk about our capabilities tell our story talk about our value proposition and make a needs and cost appropriate presentation of how we're gonna solve their problem or help them leverage the opportunity that's in front of them unfortunately that's where most sales people start the sales process I was thinking okay so for for us we've got that at the end of the sales process at the third base okay so the challenge is buying has changed the rules of selling has change everything has changed since around 2007 so salespeople are having a harder time getting invited in now having a harder time scheduling meetings finding it more difficult to get anybody even take their calls and then all of a sudden they get a call from the prospect they've been trying to reach for six months and like can you come in you know like yes so they get in and as soon as they get there the prospect says so we've decided that we might be in the market to buy such-and-such and we called you in based on your reputation would you be nice enough to talk about your capabilities and what you can do for us and that's the best part of the sales process for most salespeople that's what they're most comfortable with it's what most prepared for it's what's least threatening to them so the the big but it's state in the ground the line in the sand happens right there did they grab that bait and make their presentation and then do a proposal and then chase this business forever or do they put their hands up and say hang on I'd be happy to but first I don't know anything about why you need this or what brought this on is it okay if I ask a couple of questions first and they drive the process back to first base and they collect all the criteria between first and second and they qualify the opportunity between second and third because all the selling happens between first and second and selling in second and third between third and home anybody can do a presentation on a proposal so by just presenting and proposing and especially in technology companies you know that they live to do demos now it's just demo proposed closed chase if they would just take a step back and see how awful they're closing percentages see how pitiful their conversion ratios are they see that they need to go backwards instead of forwards and that would shorten the sales cycle that would strengthen the pipeline the reason the pipelines are so horrible in addition what I've already said is nobody's doing any qualifying nobody's asking any questions it's just prevent presenting proposing and closing so you speak a lot of people up to third base that don't belong there and then put invest a lot of time and effort into a presentation when it might not be to anyone that matters exactly so if the first thing we say to a company once we're working with them is so let's start by restaging all the opportunities in the pipeline okay and whether we do it on paper whether we do it in a group whether we do it orally whether we do it by email in the end most of the opportunities whether they were at that prospect qualified or closeable most of them need to go back to the suspect stage because the salespeople haven't really learned anything about whether they need it the compelling reasons to buy it they haven't differentiated themselves they just come in and presented like everybody else there in any qualification info and it's going to end up being about price because they weren't able to differentiate so it they've commoditized themselves it wasn't the prospect that they self inflicted commoditization Dave have you seen any studies for the time investment for a sales rep at those different stages or different phases and having skipped the first three how much or the first two how much you know how inefficient they are just jumping in it phase three yeah it's very inefficient just started working with a company this month and there their problem is the sales cycle is too long and they aren't getting any new business so their existing business is good it's plenty of renewal business is plenty of residual business but they're flat because the salespeople are failing miserably at closing new business so when we looked at what they were doing we looked at their sales process it's it's exact replica of what we just spent the last 20 minutes talking about so what happens is when we get them when we just make them aware of what they're skipping and when we can get them to do what's counterintuitive which would be to slow down be slowed down the whole sales process right now they're rushing through they just making that sprint from third to home so it seems like a short sales process but the sales process is really measured from when you first identify an opportunity to when you invoice or ship or collect the money so based on that the sales process is long even though they only spent a relatively short amount of time doing anything the rest of it was waiting so when we can get them to actually execute the steps between fur and second and between second and third which slows down their sales process stills process gets cut in half now if we can get them to take an excruciatingly long time between first and second that's the first meeting that's the first discussion that's where they need to ask all those questions and push back and challenge and learn about compelling reasons differentiate themselves through their questions if we can get them to take 30 to 45 minutes or even an hour in that one discussion that takes place between first and second base which is probably 55 minutes longer than they've ever spent in that step of a sales process then then they can cut the sales process again by half so if a sales process was four months by adding second base and third base in they can cut it down to two months and if then if they can take this nice long time between first and second and spend an hour there you can cut that sales process down in half again now some of that's dependent on whether we have to build or engineer something so some sales processes just can't go that fast because of you know what we'd have to do on our end in order to be ready to sell somebody something but if it isn't design-build if it isn't custom engineer if it isn't the government if it isn't OAM manufactured items in most sales processes we can literally chop it by a by 75% just by getting the sales people to follow that process and teaching them how to sell consultative ly between first and second base so that all the questions get asked and get answered yeah you you remind me that when people say sales is a numbers game it's not about the numbers through your pipeline it's about the win rate on the other end right and and it hasn't been a numbers game for a long time you know it's it's a smart game now it's a professional game now there was a time when it was a numbers game just show up get in front of enough people and the numbers we'll be there but there are a lot of companies where the salespeople are showing up and again in front of enough people and the Alvia the results aren't there because they're still selling very transactionally they're still relying on a presentation or a demo and they're not adding any value today with with all the information that's on the internet with everything they can learn on their own if a salesperson doesn't show up and ask the right questions and show that they're they themselves are providing value to the process then the product is a commodity and it comes down to price and they'll buy from who they want to buy from when they want to buy and the salesperson loses out I think you just clarified for us the difference between being busy and being productive exactly good job excellent so you've already given us some great tips on shortening that sales cycle is there anything that you want to add to that before we talk about just overall pipeline management I think I've given away enough in the tip Department let's go to pipeline management okay fabulous what are your suggestions they're okay for for managing the pipeline I think the key comes from the sales management side I mean we can talk about how a sales person needs to self-manage the pipeline but if I if I share the right instructions with you on what a sales manager should be able to do any sales people that are listening should be able to make the translation and do it to themselves okay so so the problem happens when we start a day or we start a week or we start a month or we start a quarter we start a year and the tendency is to look at the calendar and say what do I have to do today who do I have to talk to and the calendar pretty much dictates what we're gonna do but that calendars in a vacuum that calendar is just looking at today the calendar isn't reflective of the business it's not reflective of the goals it's not reflective of what's going on and the mistake salespeople make us by starting with the calendar well you have to look and see what you've got going on today or this week so you can prepare for it the more important place to start is inside the pipeline and that is okay which opportunities need to be moved and do I have enough opportunities in the pipeline how many new opportunities do I need to add and which opportunities are ready for me to close and if I if I start with those three questions and then I go to the calendar I I can make room in my calendar to add the opportunities that need to be added makes follow-ups to the opportunities that need to be moved and make calls to the opportunities that need to be closed but if I stick to that calendar and that to-do list which is what most people work with then I'm not in sync with my business with with the other things that need to be going on that ensure that next week will be productive and next month will be productive and next quarter would be productive because that never stops and a lot of salespeople tend to be event-driven they can work on this until this is done and then they're starting from scratch again so there needs to be enough of a task oriented approach to selling so that they can not only finish what they're working on but also be working on the future business as well a lot of salespeople don't handle that combination well it strikes me that approaching your planning the way you suggest will give you a great feeling of achievement at the end of the day rather than that you checked off a list exactly exactly and it's nice to check off a list but checking off a list has never made me any money exactly so I think you've alluded to it but this could be a nice way to tie everything together getting a more accurate sales prediction through your pipeline what are your recommendations there okay so the forecast is only as accurate as the data and the data is only as accurate as the inspection and the inspection is only as accurate as the information in so there there must be spore stages suspect prospect qualified closeable there must be criteria free stage salespeople must be honest and realistic with themselves about where the opportunity is currently staged and and if it appears that they've missed a bunch of stuff they've got to stage it earlier in the process where it belongs in backfill and that's the big challenge I thought this was closeable but based on the criteria I guess it's still a suspect I need to go back and ask questions oh but I'm sure it's gonna close sales sales managers got to be there sit and I'm sorry we're not doing this based on hope we're not doing this based on what you think is gonna happen we're not doing this based on gut feel out of the 20 criteria that need to be met we've only met 18 I'm sorry we haven't met 18 so we need to go back and and make sure that these are what you think they are and we need to get the information that we don't know about because it's possible that you're proposing the totally wrong solution at the entirely wrong price based on what they really need cuz you don't know what they really need so in the beginning it's a lot of changing and moving and tweaking and restaging and then when you get the hang of it that's that's when it gets really simple and it gets really obvious and it starts to work kind of automatically you know once you own what has to happen in the sales process once you own the process itself once once you're intuitively following the flow and collecting information the pipeline takes care of itself now I can see how getting much more accurate about what stages were in will help us better forecast the likelihood of closed you also mentioned that one of the big mistakes that we make is overestimating the value of a deal so how can we circumvent that we might not be able to part of it is is what a lot of sales training companies and a lot of companies teach their salespeople to ask a lot of salespeople are being taught to ask do you have a budget for this and the prospect says yes we do and then some people will say would you mind sharing what that is and some prospects will say no we won't so that's where the over estimate comes in or the the prospect says no we don't have a budget for this I don't like either of those questions because it just most salespeople either end up getting the wrong answer getting the wrong number I think it's more important to have at the point in the process where they need to talk about money which in my process is after second base in that point in the process that the generic question would be so are you willing to invest a little bit more money with us to get this done the right way the first time right now prospect says yes I don't know it I don't know exactly what this is gonna be yet I still need to ask some more questions and go back and figure it out but ballpark are you willing to invest around and they've got to throw a number out so that you know prospect isn't saying we have a $20,000 budget so it's got to be under that if it's gonna take $35,000 to do it the right way and get get the problem solved or allow them to leverage an opportunity then we shouldn't be talking about 20 or 25 or 27 or 34 we should be talking about 35 and we've got to find out will they spend thirty five thousand and if they will do they have it or do they have to go find it somewhere you know they have to borrow from Peter to pay Paul they have to put something off do they have to go against next next year's budget well but can they come up with that money and will they spend it so if we know though that they can get it and they'll spend it and they'll spend more with us then we can be pretty accurate about what this deal will be worth but most salespeople aren't having that kind of conversation they're just doing that you have a budget yeah you set it up in a really nice way another expert told me and I'll get the number wrong but I think over 65% of closed sales opportunities didn't have a budget to start with it isn't a requirement but they do have to have the ability to pay you yeah I'm not sure if I've got the right statistic on this one from from my own statistics but I think 53% of sales people aren't able to uncover the actual number okay just asking the right questions from not asking the right questions from not caring from skipping over it from happy years but for whatever from not being with the right person who would have the right answer for any number of reasons they don't have the right number going in okay interesting now there's a very simple way of controlling the forecasts and the pipeline and that's this if you have a six-month sales cycle and you have a 25% closing ratio and you have $100,000 monthly goal then it's really easy to figure out what has to happen so six months if let's see today is this is going to be an an archive so so let's let's say that today is January 1st we can't do anything about a January first opportunity in December what we would have to do is impact that January 1st opportunity with a six-month sales cycle in June that's the time so in June if we need to make sure that we're gonna close $100,000 in January and our average sale is $25,000 and we close 25% we just do the math we're gonna need four hundred thousand dollars worth of opportunities entering the pipeline in June and we're gonna need four times for 16 of them so 16 new opportunities worth a total of $400,000 enters the pipeline in June that guarantees based on our empirical data hundred thousand dollar goal six months sales cycle twenty-five thousand dollar average 25 percent closing ratio that guarantees come January hundred thousand dollars comes out the other end it so in part there is a numbers to it but it's not the numbers game we've usually played it's a different numbers game this is this is more based on science than then just showing up so the management challenge is to make sure that the number of months ahead of the month the number of months in the sales cycle ahead of the month we're trying to make sure we hit that we make sure that what needs to enter the suspect stage of the pipeline gets entered so whether that's self accountability or management accountability that's what we have to be held accountable to key performance metrics that guarantees when that month comes we're golden that makes perfect sense yeah and that's a smart way to play the numbers game aware of me to make perfect sense well in case our viewers feel like you do make perfect sense in their lives to wonder is there some place they can go to get more information on baseline selling sure there was a bunch of websites they can go to baseline selling calm okay and that has information on the book they can go to my blog understanding the sales force and that's oMG hub calm oMG like oh my god hub calm except it stands for objective management group they can go to objective management calm or they can go to curl and associates calm okay or if it's too confusing Dave Kurland calm has links to all of those places okay perfect so Dave is there a favorite example that you have of a client that you worked with to really help them establish a smart sales pipeline and get this actor see happening in their own business yeah um I think every client kind of goes through the same turnaround and same epiphanies and the same change but there's one that I'm thinking of that was textbook and all the things that we talked about today so the very first thing we did after we evaluated their sales force and figured out why only seven out of 60 sales people were hit the numbers figuring why'd they had a hundred percent turnover once once we have the answers to that we were able to help them recruit the right salespeople but the first thing we did with them was we customized the new sales process for them so that's that's an incorporation of the baseline selling sales process plus their best practices so we take the goals and the milestones and the steps and the to dues and get them slotted into the right base path and then come up with a sort of a marriage between what they do and baseline selling so once we got them doing the right sales process we created a staged visual criteria based pipeline we had we developed the KPIs to keep the pipeline filled and we developed their sales leadership team and then we started training their sales team so they went from I think they were flat four years in a row at around twenty four million in we started working with them in May we started sales training in October because the first six months was systems processes and sales leadership get them to the point where they could coach to support sales training sales training started October went through May and in June I think they were at sixty million and they got bought my goodness so that's the way it should be that had to feel good it felt good to them they they got bought for a nice amount of money you know and Africa flat for four years and then almost tripling that's that's pretty awesome but what that shows is how much how much business is being left on the table how much how many opportunities are slipping through the fingers of their sales force just because they aren't following a process and they're not paying attention to the details and they aren't trained to sell consultative ly and they're out there just winging it selling by the seat of their pants without a lot of direction without a lot of coaching without a lot of accountability so we can point the pipeline we can point the process we can point to skills and competencies and best practices but in most companies it's all of those things alright the way we need them to be mm-hmm what a great example so Dave is you work with so many companies where do they get stuck as they start implementing this process without question the hardest part to implement is learning to sell consultative ly because that's all about listening and asking questions and most salespeople don't do that very well okay so they're they're comfortable presenting and telling so I'm sorry how do you help them over that repetition a lot of role-playing teaching their sales managers how to coach them better in that area just it takes months to make the transition from selling transactionally the being effective selling consultative ly and we have to overcome that need for approval along the way because that prevents them from asking questions so even though we've taught them what it looks like and sounds like we taught them what the dialogue can can accomplish the first week and we've reinforced that you know every other week for months it takes months before all of them can do it some of them will do it right away but it takes months before they can all do that effectively there's no shortcut I just it's not natural it's not what they've been doing all of their life that's not what they do in their relationships it's not what they've ever done when they've sold and they can see why it's important but it doesn't make any it any easier for them to do it exactly well in most companies are reinforcing the transactional by giving you a lot of product training and not a lot of other skills training so and as and in those same companies in addition to the training they're establishing as one of their KPIs the demo now that's a milestone in the process so how many demos today I mean we were doing that in 1973 you know how many how many sales calls how many demos how many closes and it isn't about demos you know the clothes is just the end result of having thoroughly gone through a process that's been customized and optimized to work in a particular business or industry calling on a particular decision-maker and another vertical so everything it it's an integrated approach to making everything work and a lot of companies will pick one thing you know like the phone and ring you know we need somebody to come in in and train our seed sales people on how to be better at closing it's never about closing it's about all the things that got screwed up and missed before closing so in most companies they don't even know what they need to work on and they don't know why they're getting the results they get so it's usually ten or twelve things that are wrong not one or two very smart advice well Dave with that I'm gonna ask you what is the one thing that you recommend our sales reps and our viewers to do today to help themselves be more successful that's a great question just one thing one thing do the thing that they're afraid to do ask the question they're afraid to ask make the statement they're afraid to say behave in the way they were afraid to behave do the take the one thing that they're comfortable doing and don't do that and pick something difficult instead I mean the questions in their head they're just choosing not to ask it and we could go back to the 1950s I forget the guys name he was from the insurance industry I think his last name was might have been gray but he had a quote that was perfect that's still applicable today in 2012 and it was the only difference between the sales Superstars and everybody else is that the sales superstars choose to do what's difficult enough that still sums it up you could also say they choose to do what they don't really want to do and everybody else just does what they're comfortable doing yeah exactly well thank you so much Dave for helping us in so many areas throughout our sales process as well as our sales pipeline so that we really can get a better return for our effort appreciate it you're welcome Mayer is my pleasure to join you and thank you to our viewers for tuning in and investing in your own success the sales mastery summit is here to help you never stop learning from the best take care