Anthony Stears: Well, on that point, you’ve said you’re absolutely right. If you talk to or talk with, somebody, you will learn something. The problem that you tend to find in sales is they’re talking to somebody. They’re not really interested in what you’ve got to say. They just need to get their pitch off their chest in the hope that you might say yes and if you do, they can ring the bell and they’ve hit their target for the day.

Martin Henley : Yes and this is where the whole thing for me is mis-aligned, because everyone I’ve ever worked with in sales is just desperate to get hold of someone and desperate to sell them something. My approach was entirely different. I had a brilliant sales manager. My first sales manager was amazing. I went to him after three days when I obviously can’t do this and he said, just phone people and make friends, it’s not hard. After two weeks, it’s like, well, I am making lots of friends I can’t get them to buy anything. He’s like, well, see if you can sell them a media pack because they’re free. It was like that. It’s like do the marketing type stuff. People don’t understand because they call them telesales, they don’t understand what they’re actually doing is marketing. Actually what they’re doing is finding people who actually have an interest in, and will benefit from buying the thing, because then what you’ve got is a happy customer. When you’ve got a happy customer, they’ll introduce you to other people who also have an interest in and might buy the thing because their mate is telling them they should. That’s the way it works. It feels to me, and this is the danger of your assassin thing because this leans into this horribly, but it feels to me like people are desperate, I’ve got to get someone on the phone, and when I get them on the phone, I’ve got to sell to them, and that’s stupid.

Anthony Stears: There’s definitely a mentality. There’s a panic of getting people on the phone, which got made even harder during lockdown if people are working from home. When you’re desperate and behind target, when somebody does finally answer the phone, you don’t want to let them go. So you then tend to come across a little bit strong and overbearing, and then you try and troubleshoot any objections. If they push back, and they are not very interested in this they are like no let me tell you a little bit more about it. They’re trying to kind of keep it going rather than taking the approach of cultivating a relationship.

Anthony Stears: That’s where if you’re prospecting, I often get people to map the journey that you would take a prospect through before they become a client. Quite often it takes a few different, at least a couple of conversations before you can convince somebody to actually do something otherwise, you’re a complete stranger. Most people have had a really bad experience with somebody selling down the phone to them and then buying something that they didn’t want, or being conned, or something along those lines. That’s where I think a lot of salespeople are just impatient. When you can get them to slow down and on that first call, I want you to make friends with them and as part of making friends and getting them to like you, I’d like you to start seeing if you can get them to trust us a little bit. Not to do anything yet, you just want them to trust us. So what I would then set you as a bit of a goal to do based on what I do is say what is having a bit of a chat with them can you drop off a case study of a company in their industry that we’ve worked with who thinks we’re amazing just so that they can see what our customers say about us. If they ask any more questions, brilliant, but if not, all we want to do is let them know that if they are looking for this service in the future, people in their industry use us for a very particular reason and hear it from the horse’s mouth.

Anthony Stears: All of a sudden I’ve turned what felt like a stressful sales role, where there’s the pressure to get some sales to you got to drop off some pizza menus. Can you go and give out them free media packs?

Anthony Stears: Because you give out ten media packs and the harder you work, the luckier you seem to get. The 10th one goes, actually, we’re looking at this at the moment or we’re going to be looking at this next month. Maybe we should have another chat. Everybody else is being cultivated so that when you’re ready to talk, we want to be the person that you talk to.

Anthony Stears: Salespeople are like. But it’s really important and I want you to talk about it now. They don’t understand that you butted into somebody’s day and what you want to talk about is not on the top of their priority list. So you have to respect it.

Martin Henley: 100%.

Anthony Stears: That’s where you can then use things like social media in the modern day where we could, I might reach out and connect with you on LinkedIn and say, Hey, I just wanted to connect, um, because I’m gonna reach out. Um, you might be interested to look at a couple of my recommendations, people in your industry who I know you’re connected with. Um, and at some point would love to have a chat, uh, and see if there’s a test drive I could offer you that might be of interest for you to have a look at what I do. Right. So I might reach out, but it’s not a, hi there, can I take your order? It’s, uh, when you’re ready, let me know. And I deliberately use the language of a test drive because it has that kind of universal try before you buy kind of feeling to it. And people go, well, like you say, the, the message that you got from the fitness guy saying, well, why don’t you try this? You go, well, why not?

WHAT DO YOU THINK?