Dan Waldschmidt Discussion with Brad Slavin of Sales Coach

This is the transcription of the Webinar

Dan: So I will talk fast and hopefully you can promise me to listen quickly and if there’s any questions at all, please leave those as Brad’s as he is monitoring and will make sure that we get properly on those. But let me just also say that this presentation is about some ideas for winning new business.

Really, the only thing that matters in business is that you win new business. I get it that there’s a lot of other things that you need to be doing, but from my personal opinion you can probably fix your finances if you are making enough revenue, you can probably fix your management if you have enough revenue, you can fix your marketing if you have enough revenue, there’s only not a lot of things that you can’t fix if you don’t have enough revenue.

So, that’s really the framing of this discussion today, 4 ideas, and I want to tell you how we learn these. We look at a thousand high performers, not just in business but also in verticals like sports, politics, and that is going to be some of the that is going to be the root for some of these lessons. It’s not our opinions, although we think we have some pretty good ones. This really comes from evidence looking at high performers.

Who am I? Brad already introduced me. I’m the managing partner of an international company called Waldschmidt Partners, of course, we’ve got a company called Connected Strategies as well that does work all over the world, 12 different countries, 30 different verticals. The only reason I bring this up is the simple fact to say that we get the privilege, the honor, to work with companies all over the world and that frames our perspective. We’re not just talking about doing business in Greenville, South Carolina or Washington DC. We’re talking about doing business all over the world and some of these lessons apply to doing that.

What do we do exactly? Well we solve problems, we’re strategists. By the way, what you’re hearing from me isn’t going to something that at the end of this presentation either Brad or I am going to say to you, “Hey, by the way, hire Dan.” We’re not coaches, we’re not trainers, we’re not psychiatrists, psychologists, or any other sort of services that charges you per hour. We’re strategists, we solve hard problems for business leaders. Usually they’re the big hairy problems, “Hey, I need more revenue.”, “Hey, I need more people to look at my emails, my marketing emails.” Usually there are challenges like “How do I come to the United States?”, things like that. But I won’t be pitching you on any of that. I want to frame that up because sometimes you sit in a presentation and when you get to the very end and someone says “Oh! By the way, you should buy this from me.” You won’t hear that today. Plus you can see we’re global. Yay! Let’s jump into this.

Sales is hard work. And If you’re on this call, the reason why you probably joined, is not because Brad or I are good looking. I don’t want to diminish Brad, I’ll give you all the props Sir. But, you joined probably not because you wanted to see us on Hangout, you wanted to learn about how you could maybe make your job a little bit easier, maybe do more business this year than the last year and even though there is turmoil and discussion, all over the world, from Russia to Turkey to the our own United States, you can still drive new business, you can still get extraordinary results, and you don’t have to be someone with a Harvard degree. You’re listening to this and you’re thinking, “Well, I didn’t got to, Xerox Sales Academy!” It’s okay. But what we’re going to learn here is something that will benefit you. You may say, “Look, the company I work for doesn’t have a training.” We don’t really, up until now, haven’t had lot of time to bring in outside experts to help us do this. We’re just people with ideas, we’re trying to do something big, great! So this is the presentation for you.

Overwhelmingly, for people who want to be successful, who need to be successful, this is one of our overall findings when we’re looking at a thousand high performers.

So, there are 4 main lessons. The first one, of course, you can see hopefully on your screen. Brad just stop me if for some reason my presentation slows than when I see it on my screen, just call me out, so that I can time it. But, I’m going to lead you through 4 main principles, 4 main bullet points, that will give you some ideas about how to grow your business this year.

The first one is: Radical results demand extreme behavior. So, if you’re thinking that you’re going to do the same thing this year as you did last year, to get slightly better results, you’re in for a real awakening. So, the first thing that you need to think about right now, right as you’re planning the year, as you’re going through your notes, as you’re looking at, “Okay, January and February is gone, it’s now the second week in March. What are we going to do in this quarter? In half of the year? Trying to take on the rest of the year.” I want to challenge you to think of something radical.

What’s something radical that you can do? Now, of course, we’re kind of a note here, we say take your peak potential, give a 110%, double that. Then you’re only 50% of the way there. But, what are some radical things that you can do right now that will benefit you going forward. Now, here are some ideas. I’m not saying this fits for every person on this call because you’re all coming from different industries. Maybe about a price discount. What if you were able to give away your product for free for six months? Maybe you given it away for a 14 day trial, now you give it away for six months. That’s radical. What if you took your best selling product and made it 75% off, and then use that product as an entry way into a company in order to get more business? So, what we’re talking about here, by the way, in any strategy that we saw really delivering high value results, is that you have to be quite a bit different than anyone else.

Now, let’s jump into the science to that. By the way, why are we talking about extreme behavior in the first place, why does it even matter? Well, as Brad introduced me, EDGY Conversations is all about 4 qualities – Extreme, Disciplined, Giving and Yuman, that spells EDGY, it’s an alliteration – Extreme, Disciplined, Giving and Yuman. Now, the science of extreme behavior is this – desperation and focus. You might be thinking, “Dan, how do I get radical results?” Well, one – you have to be a little bit desperate. So if you’re not desperate right now, you might find yourself getting kind of lacklustre results. Now, that may not be something that you want to hear, that maybe something that seems a little harsh, but if you’re not getting the results you want and you find yourself going, “I want that result, but I can take it or leave it”, so you’re probably not someone who’s going to be doing something radical enough that you grow your sales by 100% this year. You might grow 1-2%, but think about what you need to do to get desperate. Here’s what I’d tell you, thinking about this point of desperation – desperation can be a good thing and a bad thing.

How many times have you been so broke that all of a sudden you got super creative? About 10 or 15 years ago, when I was growing one of my businesses, I invested into a company and was running it, so I was the owner and operator, and one Christmas, from about the end of Thanksgiving through the first part of January, I had no new revenue come in at all. Now, if you’ve ever been in business and had a month and a half  go by of new buying and you’ve had no new revenue, you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach where you’re thinking, “Man, this is not good, this might be the time I need to file bankruptcy.” For about two weeks, my wife Sarah and I, we were so broke and at that time we had 2 kids, that we were finding random ingredients in the cupboard to combine together because you’re kind of not using cash to make all of your expenses, to pay all the bills and buy food. We were finding weird combinations like creme of chicken noodles soup combine that with nachos or something; it was really crazy for about 2 weeks. But the reason why I say that is, whenever Sarah and I are chuckling about hard times, there was really nothing harder than that, and so whenever something comes up that seems to be hard we go, “Well, at least it’s not chicken noodle soup and nachos”, and you’ve had that feeling too. I’m nobody special. You’ve had that feeling too where you’re wondering, “Oooh! My sales are down. Am I going to get fired?”

Okay, so desperation can be a good thing. You know that feeling. You need to think about what you’re mission is for this quarter, this half year, this full year and let that drive, let that turn into a series of action items. Now, if I’m specifically talking to a vertical, one vertical, let’s take medical or health care. I could give you a few of those targets. But looking across a wide range of verticals, a wide range of companies, what is the one thing that you need to do that is extreme? I would say though that desperation combined with focus is always a good formula to get good results. Now, if you’re not focused right now, you need to get focused. Now I already know that’s broad strokes, you’re thinking, “Dan, tell me something I don’t know. I already know that I need to be focused. What do I do?” Okay, I had not pads made up on my desk that say, what are the 3 awesome things that you’re going to do today, and there’s check boxes next to them, 3 awesome things I’m going to do today. I fill that out and then when I’m done I check the box.

Look, I think if you do 2 or 3 really amazing things each day you’re going to be a superstar. From what we learn in studying superstars is that it wasn’t so much that they were, kind of a bull in the china shop. They were running around frantically, hair on fire, what am I going to do? what am I going to do? what am I going to do? No, instead they focused on getting 2 or 3 things done each day on the road towards success. And, by the way, they didn’t just do that 5 days a week, they did that 7 out of 7 days a week. They were constantly getting 2 or 3 things done and what happened was, over a year, they quickly outpaced their competitors. Let me give you one example, so, it could be that in this year you’re not hitting your metrics and you know you need results, because you know in order to exceed what you did last year, you need to do something radical. Maybe you get up one extra hour earlier a day, instead of getting up at 7 you get up at 6, or instead of getting at 6 am you get up at 5 am. Do you what the difference that is, just 60 minutes? Do you know that that adds up to an entire extra month of work per year. So, in other words, if you were to get up one hour earlier, you would have 13 working months a year instead of 12 working months.

Just something that tiny, that little bit of focus, that – I’m going to use one extra hour a day – adds up to an entire month. So, maybe you’re not the smartest guy in the room, maybe you don’t have all that smooth and polish of that person who’s been on your team for twenty years, but you’re saying, “I still need to deliver radical results. What do I do?” How about something as simple, how about something as focused as just working one extra hour a day. Now, what we learned in studying these thousand people and looking at extreme behavior and getting radical results, is that very few people actually are willing to go down this path. So, a lot of people talked about it but very few people actually are willing to do something like get up one extra hour earlier per day.

Isn’t that amazing? I don’t know if that catches you by surprise if you’re listening and still, but that caught me by surprise. I would have thought, if I had a goal, and let’s say my commission was an extra one hundred thousand dollars per year in bonuses if I hit my goal, that I would be willing to get up one hour earlier, 60 minutes, that’s it, per day, that’s it. But you know that for very few people the odds of being successful are very very slim. In this chart, that little red dot is one in a thousand. So, here’s what you should be encouraged by. This is not a negative thing. This is not you feeling like, “Oh! I’m never going to make it. The odds aren’t in my favor.” No. I think what’s amazing about this is, if you do just a little bit better than everybody else, you’re way ahead of the pack. Something like one extra hour of work per day. Oh, and that’s not radical Dan, what’s radical, actually, in the scheme of things, when talking to all of your competitors, when talking to the sales field, that’s actually really quite radical. So think about it.

Right now, you probably have two or three things in the back of your head that you’re thinking, “Well, I’m going to save that for a rainy day. I’m going to see if there’s a problem. If I don’t need to do what I’m not going to do, we’ll see how far it goes.‘ Here’s what I’m going to challenge you on. Right now, you’re thinking about that, I know you are. Write it down, write it down. Maybe you don’t commit to doing it but maybe you commit to an honest discussion about beginning to start doing it. The truth is you’re already way ahead of the pack just by thinking about it. Okay, the second thing, besides radical behavior. So, if you want big results, here’s an idea for you. You need radical ideas.

The second thing is that discipline looks like insanity until it doesn’t. We all know the story of Thomas Edison, right? He tried, you know, first there was a thousand tries, then it was like five thousand tries, and then it was like ten thousand tries. Every time I talk about Thomas Edison and ask the audience, everybody’s heard the story. What’s funny about it is that everybody’s heard that there were a lot of tries. I don’t think we all agree on how many tries there were but the truth is we all know that he tried an outrageous number of times.

Here’s what I want to challenge you on. A lot of times you’ll hear sales trainers or coaches say, “Well if you’re not getting results maybe we need to do something else.” – and I agree with them, I agree with them. I also think that maybe you’re not getting results – here’s the word, here’s the word – ‘yet’. Will you get results? Maybe. But you’re not getting results yet. So this is a delicate balance to what? Look, out of the thousand people that we’d looked at, we found dozens of them, dozens of them that were  people everyone thought was crazy until they weren’t. Can I give you a few examples off the top of my head? What about W.H. Macy. We all know Macy’s department store. I went there a few months ago and got a blazer, a blue blazer that I can wear with pants and I don’t have to wear a suit all the time, I could just throw on a sports jacket, okay, so I bought a blazer there.

Do you know that W. H. Macy went bankrupt more than four times before he figured out how to run a department store? More than four times? How many of you on this call have gone bankrupt even once? Maybe, maybe, some of you have gone bankrupt on this call. How many of you have gone twice? Okay, I bet there’s no one who’s gone bankrupt three times trying to pursue their goals. Okay, what’s the big story. Should we burn all of our money, should we throw it to the wind and run around and fig leaves pretending that life is crazy and great and awesome. No, no, no, that’s silly. Things like bankruptcy, things like failure are tough. They’re ballbusting.

You feel stupid, you feel lousy, you feel in a lot of pain. That doesn’t mean you should give up though. And I want to you think about that in sales right now. It may not seem like an edgy idea to say that you need to keep going but that’s kind of the reality of this thing. Just because it doesn’t work once doesn’t mean it won’t work. Hey, W. H. Macy went bankrupt four times, Henry Ford went bankrupt more than five times. The founder of FedEx, do you realize that he flunked out of school because his college professor said that “Your idea of distributed distribution of packages is a fairy tale and I wanted you to write a thesis on real life.” – flunked. Do you realize that Tony Hsieh started Zappos with his own money out of pocket, that they were burning, they were losing millions of dollars per month, millions, while everyone said, “Stop doing this, it’s never going to work. You’re never going to be able to deliver shoes overnight. People are never going to stop buying shoes from stores. They’re never going to want to buy them from the web.” Well, some people were wrong, right? And some people, who were willing to risk things ended up being successful. So, I don’t want you to think, “Well, I did that once, I sent one e-mail.” It takes eleven e-mails for people to get back to you, right? So, sending one e-mail, you shouldn’t be discouraged one moment if someone doesn’t get back to you. But, I’m getting a little off topic here because discipline has two factors to it – the doing kind of discipline and the denying kind of discipline. Now, I’m assuming, if you’re on this call, you’re already perhaps doing the doing kind of discipline. Can I quickly walk you through a few of the items, a few ways to do your discipline better?

Recurring tasks – Listen, have recurring tasks. I use a series of tools to keep me on schedule. I use Wunderlist. It’s a task tracking app for our person who was calling in from Europe. It’s actually made out of Berlin. It’s a really cool app. I can add reminders to it that would pop up everyday. For instance, I can set a reminder to send one hand-written note each day. Everyday at 2 pm, boom, the note pops up, I get a reminder, “Dan, send a hand-written note.” I have reminders that, pulled everything out of my brain, that I don’t need to be remembering. Everything, from sending hand-written notes to following up on social media to sharing several of my friend’s favorite posts on social media.

I have probably twelve to fifteen tasks that I try to do consistently. Another word for consistently is disciplined and I use tools to remind me. Listen, I was joking about being a road warrior and popping into my suite, but it’s the truth. I’m in a suite right now, doing this presentation, outside my office, and it’s so easy to forget about what needs to be done in just the haste of a business day. If you don’t have recurring tasks and the number two thing, reminders and alarms, you’re not going to be as disciplined as you could be. Reminders and alarms – Reminders and alarms are important. Simple things like Google Calendar. Remind yourself ten minutes or thirty minutes ahead of some things parts of your day, even if it’s not an official calendar event where, let’s say I’m meeting with Brad and I put it on my calendar, let’s say I just want to spend two hours researching new clients, put that on your schedule, set a reminder so that you’re not wasting that time checking e-mail, you’re actually doing the things that you’re doing.

E-mail tracking – One of my best friends in all over the world is a product called Boomerang. For not using Boomerang for Gmail you’re probably not getting the answers to emails you want. Ever send an email then you wonder why someone like Brad or someone like myself does not reply to you and you remember I thought I sent an e-mail but I can’t remember. Boomerang for Gmail which is also for outlook lets you send and email and say if someone is who does not reply to me, in the end, fill in the blanks, let’s say 2-3 days, automatically return this email to my inbox and remind me. Guess what, Boomerang isn’t the other one, if you still got your pen and paper and are jotting notes, try Yesware, try Tout app, there is another one called Hero Inbox. Listen! there are a dozen products. Right Inbox is another one, that automatically can tell you what emails are being read, which ones are being read, which ones have not been responded to and we will notify you that.

Mobile access – Here is another thing to think about is mobile access, if you can’t access your tools and your technology from your phone, you need to get new tools and technology, and if your company won’t pay for it, you need to spend the money on mobile tools. What do I mean by that? Your address book should be on your phone. Your CRM should have some sort of mobile access. Your social media, mobile access, your e-mail, mobile access, your calling, mobile access. Even the ability to create proposals, all have mobile. This is how people work nowadays. If you have to go into an office, you have to open up your laptop. You’re just not going to be as disciplined as you can be. Of course, you can see all the other things at the bottom of the screen.

Team collaboration. Brad and I were using Google Hangouts. What are you using? Are you using Whatsapp or are you using Facebook. What are you using to stay in collaboration with your team. If you can’t dash off a quick message to somebody really quickly, you’re not communicating as well as you can be.

Relationship Management. I’m really in love with a product called Contactually. There’s another one called FullContact. There’s Cobook. There’s LinkedIn Address Manager, which I’ve been using for a couple of years now which I think was released to the general public six or seven months ago. There are a number of tools which can tell you when you haven’t talked to somebody in a while. If I want to talk to Brad every six months it’s going to notify me if I haven’t talked to Brad. Okay, listen, part of discipline is using these tools.

Follow up & Follow-through – One of the biggest reminders I have. Everyday says that the day after I have a meeting, I send follow ups. So today, I will look through all the meetings I had yesterday and send emails to those people thanking them and reminding them of what needs to come next. If you don’t have a reminder telling you to follow up then guess what’s going to happen. You’re not going to follow up and not because you’re an evil person and not because you have horns on your head, just because you’re busy. Okay, you’re busy busy busy busy! And the number one reason why your prospects don’t follow up with you is they’re busy. The number one reason why your existing clients don’t follow up with you sometimes even though they’re paying you money is because they’re busy. Busyness is the number one reason why we’re not disciplined and there’s no excuse for it because there’s awesome technology out there to help you. By the way, I gave you a bunch of sales, I threw them at you, if for some reason you’re saying I want a specific name, task that to Brad, just leave a question and we’ll make sure that we get that to you.

So what do we talk about ideas. Number one, what’s radical. Think about something radical. Not something slightly better than average. What’s something radical you can do to jumpstart yourself. Okay, number two, we talked about discipline and more specifically some tools to help you stay disciplined. Number three, let’s talk about being giving. This is a radical idea all by itself. All subset is giving – giving, giving, giving, giving. High performers give more value than people pay for. They give more value than people pay for. Now, let me just correct some thinking out there. Some of the popular sales trading on the market is about trading. You’ll hear things like, you need to trade commitments, you’ll hear, and I went through a popular sales training, I took Sandler sales training, for years. I studied NLP which is body movements and bio language negotiation tactics. I studied some really popular sales training and negotiation tactics over the years and they all talk about trading. Trading commitments. I’ll give you something if you give me this. There’s nothing wrong with trading but it’s not giving. Right now, one of your sales strategies might be if you give me your name and email address I will give you a white paper. By the way, don’t get me started because most of these white papers are crap, right! We all know. Someone now expects you to for.our. Giving isn’t trading. Nothing wrong with trading but in giving, giving actually has a lot of value, and when you give it’s transformational because people aren’t used to being given gifts. They’re used to having to trade something and that might work in a kind of a prison system where I’ll trade you my cigarettes for some inside information, and my work in commerce where you’re borrowing but it doesn’t work when you’re trying to woo clients. Think about that.

Let’s talk about the science of giving. So, the main thing I wanted to tell you was why don’t just show John my screen, giving isn’t trading. If you’re trading white paper for someone’s e-mail address, that’s great but you’re not really giving them a lot of value. You might think you are, you might even be shaking your head going this Dan full of crap. We spent six months with this and I’m just going to tell you this, giving isn’t much as you think it is. It’s probably trading a lot. So, let’s think about what humans consider really awesome. So let me pull up my pointer here. Now, here on this vertical right here, you can see “Value Delivered by You” high and low and then of course, you can see another one at bottom here with “Value People Expect.” So, if people expect high value but they get low value delivered by you, they’re outraged. This is common, right? You know, you could even be going, if you went to the Ritz Carlton, for dinner and you sat down and you were expecting someone to serve you and let’s say if they brought out a tin foil plate and it had two tacos wrapped in Taco Bell wrappers. You would be like, “What is this! Get it off my plate.” Let’s say the waiter ignored you, spilled water on your lap. Here you are at the Ritz Carlton and you’re expecting the best service in the world, you’re expecting high value, guess what you get, you get Taco Bell. You’re not happy.

But now look, people, even if you have relatively high value and you deliver relatively low value, people complain. I often hear sales people say, “Well, no one’s complaining, so must not be a problem.” For every one person who actually complains there’s probably fifty people who are annoyed with you and never just take the time to fill out your support request because they you’d probably won’t answer it anyway. And they’re already disgusted and they’re ready to move on, right? And so, you can’t just say, “Oh! no one’s complained. So I must be giving them good value.” That’s probably not the case. And of course, if you deliver middle of the road value and people are expecting middle of the road value, guess what you get, you’re kind of a ‘Meh’. You’re not good, you’re not bad, you’re kind of what I pay you for. Now, if you want someone to become a customer for life, if you’re really thinking like, “Dan, how can I this year woo my prospects? Get them to love Me?”, well, you need to deliver way more value than they pay for. Notice, this extreme delight is in the low value quarter. So, people who are expecting low value, what do you deliver? You deliver high value and they become a customer for life. What’s an example of this. Let’s take this Zappos model. Let’s say I order a pair of shoes, and I buy a pair of shoes for $80.00 and I’m thinking, “You know what, they’re $80.00, I got them on a pretty good deal. If they work they work. I get those shoes and I put in the fact that I want 3 day shipping.” And let’s see what Zappos does. Well Zappos knows that you’re a customer I want and I overnight my shoes to you. I get those shoes. I’m thinking the next morning I go outside and I get them. Wow! I have really great thoughts about you, you delivered much higher value than what I thought I was going to get. Wait, there’s more, there’s more. I walk around in those shoes for a couple of days and I go, “Man, I don’t really like these shoes. I mean, they’re from a great brand name and I liked the previous shoes I had, but this don’t feel good.”, so I wonder, “Man, what can I do?” So I pick up the phone and I call Zappos and so I say, “Hey, I’ve just bought some shoes from you and I walked around a day or two. I’m not sure what you can do for me. I just don’t like the feel of them. I have to be honest with you, they’re just kind of, I don’t know, they’re really not that good.” How would you feel if Zappos said to you, “Hey, no problem. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. Do you still have the box?”, “Yes, I still have the box.”, “Take those shoes, put them in the box, send them back to us. Even though you’ve walked around in them, even though you’ve probably got a little mud and dirt on them, we’re going to give you 100% of your money back. Oh, and by the way, you paid for 3 day shipping, we overnighted it you, we’re actually losing money on that relationship.” How would you feel? You will probably become a customer for life. And this is no surprise then that Zappos went from a one million dollar a year company to one billion dollar a year. By the way, if you’re good at math, you know that’s a thousand times, one thousand times growth. How did they do it? Well they delivered outrageously high value for something as stupid and sometimes as stinky as shoes. And they made sure people were so in love with their outrageous service that they became customers for life, and you can do that same thing. Think about it. What can you do that’s outrageous, that is high value? What can you give them that make people going, “Oh my goodness! I can’t imagine how they pulled that off.” This is really amazing and they tell their friends and their friends tell those friends, it’s a million to billion dollar growth. By the way, you may be making a thousand dollars and go, “Dan, I’ll just be happy with a million.” Well, you get there the same way.

Okay, so what did we talk about. Review number one, ‘what’s radical?’. If you’ve written it down, I’d salute you. Write it down, ‘what’s radical?’. Number two, tools that you can use to be disciplined. Third, ‘what can you give that’s really high value and unexpected? what can you give?’, think about that. And then number four, I want you to think about, the fourth lesson we learn from high performers, is that they understood that most of life is about the logical illogic of other people. Okay, what’s the big lesson in that without being too philosophical or on the way, other hands seeming like I’m reading from a Dr. Seus book, most people are as logical as we make them up to be, we’re not as logical as we make them up to be. Listen, someone hurts your feelings a day before you come in to work with a chip on your shoulder. Now, is it logical that it sticks around for twenty four hours, probably not, but it still does. You’re late for work, you’re running your little frazzled, all of a sudden you start making bad decisions just because of something as stupid as, you know, you’re running a little bit late for work. And so, one thing that high performers understand is that, how ego impacts the person you’re selling to, how by changing the conversation, by talking about real issues, not what the other person says is the real issue, they close more business. When I was in DC growing my businesses before I sold them, I used to say all the time to my sales team, it’s always what it’s not. So if someone says, “We’ve got budget.”, I would challenge them, “Are you sure you have budget, are you sure..”, because it was always what it was not. If someone said, “This isn’t a problem.”, I expected it was a problem. Why, why? Well, when someone bring something up and when they recall you have to question, why did they bring it up? Now, you might be thinking, “Dan, you’re over thinking things, you’re skeptical, you’re cynical.” What I found is that we’re really good at putting up our shields, and so if I can put up my shields and block you from trying to pitch to me I’m probably going to do that. Now, take a look at the chart that’s hopefully now loaded in front of you. So, why does, you shape-shifting the conversation to talk about what’s illogical matter. You could see this yellow dot here off to the side about what you should be talking about. This is the flow of the conversation, this is the flow of what the conversation should be. Now, you’re sales strategy would probably be somewhere in the middle. You won’t be too far out wide but you’re not going to be close. In other words, you might be talking about budget but it’s probably not going to be something that really is the real budget issue. You might be talking about a number but you might not be talking about the process. Horrible sales people, which I’m assuming none of you are, but since you’re on this call, you’re not even close to having the right conversation. You’re off doing something else and so I’ll leave that out of this discussion but I’m going to talk about bridging the gap between where your sales strategy leads you and what you should be talking about. Here’s how you find this out, and I realize Brad, I’m going to talk fast, it’s 2:40 right now and I realize I’m probably talking my way quickly through a seminar that might have been done a little quicker.

Brad: Well, we seem to be good. I’ve already prompted some folks to get ready for some questions and to post them into the chat but I think timewise you’re pretty good.

Dan:  Fantastic! So I will take more. But what are the ways you can figure out what you should be talking about is to dig deeper into what people say. So, listen to that last example that I just gave you of budget. “Hey Dan, we’re really excited about your project. Budget’s not an issue, so let’s just talk about how the process is going to work.” You might be trapped or might be fooled into thinking, “Oh budgets not an issue, let me jump right in.”,  well “Hey Brad, I’m glad budget’s not an issue. Here’s the process.”, only to find out two weeks later that budget is an issue. What should you do? Here’s one way that you might consider, two questions, if you’ve got your pen and paper back out, write these down, number one – what makes you say that? – I love that phrase, oh my goodness, I love that phrase, and here’s the other, it’s not really a question, it’s a phrase – tell me more. You might be fooled into thinking you need to know every answer to every possible question, you need to follow where the customer leads it and I would challenge you on those things. I would tell you that instead of doing those things you should question whatever they say. Back to the scenario, “Dan, budget’s not an issue.”, I listen, I nod my head ever so slightly because I’m being empathetic and I just say, “That’s great Brad. What makes you say that?”, and then usually they pause for a moment and say, “What do you mean?”, “What makes you say that budget is not an issue?”, and now I find the heart of the issue, “Well Dan, we had a million dollar set aside to do this project and we haven’t found the right vendor.”, now what did you learn, than usually important.

So, I could have gone down the path of telling them our process and not figured out exactly what we should be doing. Let me run the other scenario bio, hey Dan budget is not an issue, and I go, great Brad, tell me more! Now they are caught off guard, what do you mean? Tell me more! Most clients we talk to, budget is always an issue, it is fantastic to hear that budget is not an issue for you, tell me why that is! And then I shut my mouth and listen and I will tell you what happens, you find out such fantastical information simply because you are able to listen to what they have to say.  You find out such fantastic information because why, you are talking about what you should be talking about instead of where your sales strategy tends to lead you, okay! Think about the next time you are not sure where to go, simple question, what makes you say that, simple statement, tell me more, you will be better positioned to then answer the ill logic that you might find unprepared for ritually. So we have talked about four things and there is one more slide and I will be done here. My challenge to this year is to sell differently, you probably already have a process, and this discussion is less about skills and more about wealth.  So combine this with great training, great mentoring and great coaching. I am not going to teach you on that stuff because I don’t do that but find a great coach who can coach you in sales, find a great trainer who can help teach you great tactics and then combine that with your radical ideas, combine that with disciplined technology, technology to keep you on schedule, combine that with being giving more value than people pay for and never forget the fact that people are more illogical than you probably give them credit for being. And that is our discussion for today, that’s the point that we wanted to get across to you is that if you are thinking how you can grow more business issue or how you can deliver more results, you think you are running out of time, you are not really sure what it is you can do to make sure the results you have match up to what your manager or what your industry is expecting, there is a few ideas for you;

1. Be radical

2. Use tools to keep you disciplined

3. Give way more value than people pay for

Upfront you can lose money, one of the chief objections I hear from people is well Dan its is going to cost me a little bit of money, upfront it might but not in the long run, long run can mean 3 months, long run can be 3 weeks, you end up making customer relationships are unprecedented and number four is address the illogical parts of all these sales relationships. I will put up in your window, a quick blurb; Brad is that showing now to everyone, the pop up?

Brad: Yes it looks like it is good.

Dan: So you don’t need, there are no gimmicks, there are no special things you need to pay for, I will trade you your email address and your name for the first few chapters of my book, I won’t give you anything, I will be happy to trade that with you. And let us take some of your questions, if you have any questions about how you can perhaps be radical or how you can be disciplined or what tools you might want to use, how you can give more value and how you can address some of the crazy illogical deals, crazy illogical clients you might have! Let’s talk about some of that.

Brad: So, Dan that is great presentation, of course I have not started typing in questions but I certainly see Mark had said Budget issue question mark, buyers or liars’ exclamation.

Dan: Yes, well buyers have learnt that how to handle sales people, instead of saying listen I know you are not going to spend time with me if I say I don’t have budget so, why get the information and tell their boss all the information they have learnt about the your specific industry, you know and we are not answering those illogical questions, you are right, buyers tend to manipulate us because we want to believe them when they say, budget is not an issue because it is always an issue, someone says that it is not an issue because we are so giddy to hear them that we are quickly to buy into their illogic so…  good observation there from the audience.

Brad: And next actually part of our sales process, its part of the buyer seller system, definitely buyers have learnt this system in which they can get free consultation, they can get market comparisons all done by the salesperson who is the of coarse educated in their specific market and then you know they specifically look for a presentation or something like that and then once you have delivered all your value that is when they start to hide and then you as a salesperson start try to follow up with them and they were easy to get in touch with when it was time for you to provide them value, it is impossible to find them when it is your turn to get some information and some data from them, so we have a system at SalesCoach they addresses this component head on for the buyer seller system.

Dan: Yes it is widely needed, wildly needed, wildly not widely because you are right! All of a sudden this client was calling everyday ‘Oh do you have a information on that this prospect, I am not a client yet you know’  ‘Do you have any information on that?’  or ‘Oh what if we got two of those, how would we compare!’

Brad: Oh the carrots, right!

Dan: That is right! And then all of a sudden you end up giving them all these information and you say, so when are you guys looking to move forward and they go ‘Umm , Aaa’ and then you call them the next week and their numbers detached and they seemed to have moved to Jamaica somewhere and they say ‘Well let us talk about it when I get back from my two weeks trip to this trade show and then I have got a vacation’ Let’s circle back to a den, right!

Brad: Yes!

Dan: And it begins the slow death.

Brad: Can you tell me a little more about your daily workflow, as you were talking; I was rushing to add everything from full contact to Whatsapp to Yesware to ToutApp to Boomerang and really everything else that you have mentioned, what does your day look like? Are you waking up an hour early and getting a 13^th free month?

Dan: I am trying! I got to tell you, I am usually not an early riser if I got to be completely honest. One of my goals for 2014 is to get up; I get up now at about 5:30, one of those was just caused by my own inability to sit quietly. We open up a new office in Istanbul and, they are 7 hours ahead of us and so well I guess now 6, so if am not up by 5, you know, it is already noon there, so 5:30 I will make my coffee, I am probably, actually usable by 6 am. You know people say don’t check your emails in the morning, it is actually the first thing I do. I go through 300-400 emails in a day, any given time, let me just check right here, I have got 19 emails in my inbox right now so I keep very few emails in my inbox once they are not read, a product you might want to check out, it’s called ‘Streak’, it is a CRM that fits right inside Gmail. So, pretty cool, I could go into more detail but check it out, Streak.com, not paid advertising but really cool.

Brad: I have gone ahead and posted that in the link.

Dan: Okay.

Brad: We have a question, this is going to be quick, it is from John, he says please define the edgy acronym again.

Dan: Yes! So it stands for four qualities:

1. Extreme
2. Discipline
3. Giving
4. Yuman

Of course we use ‘Y’ instead of an ‘H’ because ‘edge-H’ is less cool than ‘Edgy’, so! So some creative license will be prepared to call me out for not having it spelled right, yes we get it! But we came to these four variables looking at a thousand high performers, for the book that I have given for the first two chapters I have put that blurb on your screen, I wanted to know how ordinary people made lots of money, not how somebody found it in MLM program, not someone who did B2B sales or B2C sales, I wanted to learn how ordinary people, some with college degree, some without college degree, earn their success, and so I looked at these thousand people, took notes, tried to compare them, and we came away with these four qualities:

1. They were extreme.
2. They were disciplined.
3. They were givers, by nature.
4. They were human.

And so, a lot of times, the decisions they made were always spreadsheet based, lot of times they were like, this is pain and fear, we’re going to address those qualities, and that was important. So, those were the qualities. We go into more detail in the book, actually if you get those two, the first two chapters, you can read it and see if you like it. I think the table of contents is actually in there so you need not have to buy it, you can just check it out and see if it’s something of interest. But EDGY is now kind of our lenses into which we view the rest of the world. Is our strategy extreme enough to work? Is it disciplined enough where we are going to keep building on top of our successes? Is it giving, so people feel good to be around this? And then why is it yuman, are we addressing the real pain point or are we just kind of putting a bandaid on a problem we are going to have to fix down the road.

Brad: That makes a lot of sense. And playing right off of that, Dianne asks if you could please share some examples of extreme behaviors in some companies that either you have worked with or from the outsider’s perspective that you have seen.

Dan: So, let me give an example. Fortune 10 company, one of the largest medical devices companies in the world, we changed dramatically how they communicate with their customers. Of course, you’re selling to doctors so your natural reaction is probably thinking, “I can’t be extreme to them.” We changed the messaging around with email marketing specifically, where we changed subject lines to a word like “Yo” or “Hey” “Hey, what is it like, fourth quarter results show, doctors need increased focus on enhanced imaging device.” It wasn’t that, it wasn’t all the things educational based marketing, it wasn’t consultative selling that you hear many people tell you about. It was more personal, “Yo” We drove into the details around how busy the doctors were, on certainty around things like Obamacare and at the end of the day, they went from a replier rate of one in a thousand to one in two. What does that mean? It means they had to message a thousand doctors to get one of the doctors to do anything, click on a link to subscribe, click on a link to take them to a website, or reply. When we were done, nine months later being edgy, most of that being extreme, we had improved that from one in a thousand to one in two. So, that’s five hundred times more productive. You have to ask yourself, what would you do if you had five hundred times as many leads as you do now. You may be more overwhelmed. You may not want to be edgy. But if you’re not then that’s some of the real practical results for something like this.

Brad: And which types of firms work best with you guys? Does EDGY work when you’re small or does it scale all the way up to larger companies?

Dan: Yes, it does. So, this is a company that does six billion dollars a year in this one division. We had another company that manufactures small metal parts, around fifty million dollars. I know that’s still a larger sized company but it’s not a billion dollar sized company. We dramatically changed their entire sales process and when working together with them, in six months we landed the biggest deal they had ever landed in their life of twenty two million dollars. So, what’s the lesson there. Well, the lesson is that if you’re a fifty million dollar company and if you close a twenty two million dollar deal, you’re growing your sales by fifty percent and in six months already. I mean, it’s massive. What’s the difference? Well, you stop selling  parts and in occasion you start selling other things. I cannot tell you details of what we sold because that would tell you who it is. But, at the end of the day, you provide services in a conversation style that’s powerful. Most people think they are being extreme, most people think they are being extreme by taking what they used to do and like and add ten percent to it. What I want to encourage you on is to not think that way. We also worked with a software development company that I was actually on the board of and brought into an action and invested into, where most people say you can’t message to developers. Give them the product, let them think about it, if they like it, they’ll make up their mind and do something with it. We dramatically changed that. We took the trial process, most trials for softwares. We said, let’s disrupt that. Instead of being thirty days or fourteen, let’s make it twenty one. Since it’s completely different, they won’t know what to do because it’s a whole new timing factor. We then, instead of giving them one or two e-mails, we delivered them eleven e-mails in twenty one days. If you’re like my client, they said, “Oh, that’s too much. We can’t do that. That’s outrageous.”, they’re going to get angry, that’s never going to work. We doubled sales for them the first year we were there, and we added ninety two thousand four hundred and seventy three new customers buying their product.

Brad: Wow! Was it a B2B or a B2C environment?

Dan: Well, it was a B2C that grew into B2B. That’s awesome because those C’s worked in B’s, and B said can we do bulk purchases, and absolutely turned into a much larger play.

Brad: That’s exactly what happened to Dell. They were selling computers to individuals and those individuals worked in companies and then they just moved upwards.

Amy has a question. She says here that most of her clients are elderly and she wants to know if there is a way to be edgy without alienating.

Dan: Yes. I would have her playing on the ‘G’ – the giving. What are the things that you can give that doesn’t even cost you a lot of money? It’s time, and relationships. I’d say, the easiest thing to give is a smile. So, in working with elderly people, you know they are not going to use the fancy technology, technology – throw it away, it’s a waste of your time. But you know what elderly people really enjoy? A phone call. Pick up the phone and call them. You give your time, you give your value, and you’d probably make someone else’s day. This worked really well with a project we had with nursing homes, nursing care, where it was in-home care. No one was following up. We realized that by calling, this is going to sound somewhat selfish but hear the whole thing out, calling patients to make sure they were actually filling their prescription, we took one of the largest pharmaceutical drugs in the country and doubled sales for it in one year by simply calling people and making sure they understood what their prescription was, they were using it as prescribed on the side of the bottle, and just giving a little time and attention. You know what happened, doubled sales. So, this is a stuff that works. One more thing I would just like to say is, that cost us something. Giving costs you something. We had to staff a little bit of a call center, we had to have nurses, we could just have ordinary Joes calling, but we had nurses calling. It cost us a little bit a money. At the end of the year, it ended up massively in our favour with the added sales, but upfront it costs you something. So, if you got to give then you’ve got to be willing to invest in the giving.

Brad: So, it sounds like in that example, you were edgy to an existing customer base that had already been a consumer of your product. Does edgy work as well for existing customers upselling into their as it does for getting new customers through new sales acquisitions? Is there some advice around that?

Dan: If you have existing customers and all of a sudden it’s March 12th. On March 13th you walk in and you’re like, “Aah! Tear this thing apart!”, you might lose some trust with your clients because they are not used to you being edgy. But if you’re going after new clients, of course, you know that the process of being extreme, discipline, giving and yuman, carries through and adds a lot of value, but you know, no one gets angry on you if you follow up and follow through more. No one gets angry at you if you use some smart technology to boomerang an e-mail back to you so that you remember to do your job to follow up and get an answer that someone asked for. No one’s angry when you’re edgy. Your existing customers appreciate you more and new customers and new prospects are just all the more convinced that you’re the right person they should give their money to.

Brad: That absolutely makes sense. I am not seeing any new questions here. Dan, are there things that you want to add that you may have missed? It is noon so it’s a good time to wrap up because I know that we made a promise to everybody that we’d only keep them for an hour.

Dan: Well, I’m just delighted that you had me coming here. Like I said, I’d love to share more if they can download the first few chapters. It doesn’t cost them a penny. We blog a couple of times a week at www.edgyconversations.com. or www.danwaldschmidt.com. They can come find stuff there. We don’t charge you for any of that stuff. There’s no hook with strings, stringing you along. Just we want to help ordinary people change the conversation about how to be successful. So, this is our way of doing it and thank you for having me come and talk to your audience all over the world. Very impressive Brad!

Brad: Dan, thank you very much and to everybody. Hopefully this worked out well for you. I’ll be sending out a webinar replay link to those of you who have missed it or had to leave early and then please make sure that you drop by Dan’s website at www.edgyconversations.com and take him up on his exchange which is to get a few chapters of his book for free on the book EDGY Conversations. If you have any questions in regards to this webinar please feel free to send e-mail and thank you very much and we’ll see you guys the next time that we do one of these sales hangouts. This is Brad Slavin with www.salescoach.com. Thank you very much. Thanks Dan.