WTF With All The Sales Talk?

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Sales, Blah, Sales, Blah, Blah…

Last night, I showed my wife my newest toy: SalesOS Call Lab.

She smiled, nodded her head slowly, while I blabbed about how cool AI-powered sales coaching is. (Side note, in Call Lab Pro, you get a nifty dashboard as well as weekly, monthly & quarterly reviews of what you are doing well & what you need to improve on… I may have even said to myself, “Holy shit, Tim…this is goooood!” while we were working on testing and training.)

After I regaled her with how cool it is that we identify positive & negative patterns across calls and ground it in real language, and I told her how my WTF Sales methodology creates intimacy that uncovers real issues… I asked her what she thought, and she said, “That's nice”. Then it dawned on me that no one, especially my wife, really cares about other people’s sales conversations.

I’ve been thinking about sales for most of my professional life & I’ve been pretty successful at it. But, TBH, I’ve never been good at it. (Read my post on how a professional sales guy schooled me…) I was never very structured and was frequently bored with whatever stuff I had on a slide deck, so I always just wanted to talk with prospects about where they are & where they wanted to go.

I tried to teach other people to sell like I do. It’s not possible…they don’t think like I do, and don’t get a thrill from swearing in a professional setting, or telling funny or embarrassing stories about themselves in front of strangers. It’s never going to work.

So, Why The F*ck Should We Listen To You Then, Timmy?

Here’s why…

Sales isn’t a bunch of manipulative tactics held together with hair gel, Altoids & Drakkar Noir. It’s really about creating connections that generate a space in which it’s safe enough to communicate. Communication demands vulnerability. In big and small ways, communication requires vulnerability.

Your prospect has to achieve enough comfort to tell you where everything isn’t working smoothly & express their desire for help. You must be vulnerable enough to respect their situation, and reflect if you can be part of their solution.

It dawned on me that those same skills are put to work when you are building a romantic, family, team or professional relationship. We’ve all had to exercise and grow those skills to stay alive.

You should listen to me because I am here to help you turn your basic human skills into weapons of business growth…crazy right?

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Weapons of Mass Acquisition

those basic human characteristics of vulnerability, desire for safety, and the need to communicate are the complete and total list of all of the resources that you need in order to get really good at sales, at marketing, at leadership, and, if you play your cards right, maybe making some money, too.

Weapon 1: Being interested.

I don't know who said it first, but the best way to be interesting is to be interested.

I just heard Scott Galloway, Prof G for those of you who might listen to his podcast, talk about an interview he had with Oprah Winfrey. He said that he had this overwhelming sense that she really liked him, so he couldn't help but really like her. Kara Swisher, the other Pivot podcast host, said “…you got Oprah’d. She has a tractor beam of charisma!”

You don't need a tractor beam of charisma, but if you're interested and genuinely decide that you like somebody, they are immediately going to be more interested in what you have to say.

Weapon 2: Knowing Where They Are

if you have kids, or if you've ever talked to a kid, you use this skill innately. If you start talking to a four-year-old about the IRS or about capital gains or about geopolitics, they are not going to have a single idea of what you mean. That's why we don't talk to four-year-olds about this. We talk about things that four-year-olds understand. We talk in language that a four-year-old can understand. While we may not remember exactly what it's like to be four, we do remember enough about being young that we can adjust what we say, how we say it, and the examples we use to transmit meaning so that it's palatable and understandable and effective communication to someone with a different frame of reference.

In marketing, we do this all the time. We think about the target audience and “jobs to be done”, “they ask,you answer”, and all million other frameworks for understanding concerns of the customer. If you’ve ever talked to a kid, already know how to do this!

Weapon 3: Alright, Alright, Alright…(Read that in your best McConaughey voice)

You've got to be a judgment-free zone. You might want to call out frustrations and difficulties that a prospect is having, but you can't judge them for having them.

If you've ever heard Matthew McConaughey talk about his way of thinking (I can’t believe I am going to say this, but his book, Greenlights, was pretty damn good - the audio version is better), where he is just open to the experience of whomever he is with, and focused on what makes them them & him, well, him. If you bring that to your sales and marketing efforts, you will be able to create a zone of engagement that is so much more powerful than faux scarcity & deadline driven deals.

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Just Three Weapons?!?! That’s Not Much of an Arsenal…

Au contraire, my friend, that is the arsenal that you need. In every piece of your marketing and sales process, you have got to exercise those three weapons:

1. You've got to be interested

2. You've got to know where they are

3. You've got to be able to understand what makes them them

Part of that is knowing who they want to become or who they want to be seen as or what they want to feel or what they want to experience. In order to do any of those things, you have got to put yourself in a space of vulnerability so you can open your own thinking to the possibility of deeply understanding who your target audience is, what they want, and how you and your team can provide it.

That Feels Like a Lot of Mumbo-Jumbo for a Friday Afternoon, Doesn't It?

Maybe it is.

But here's the truth: You can be you, your team can be themselves, your clients can be who they are—and build a great business.

In fact, that's the ONLY way it works.

When you're selling transformation, you need two things: crystal-clear understanding of where someone is NOW, and crystal-clear vision of what's on the other side. That's it. Those three weapons of mass acquisition are all you need.

All this marketing and sales and systems bullshit is just fancy academic wrapping around a simple idea: we're human, we want things to improve, we want to be understood, and we want to feel like there's potential.

That's what I'm building with the WTF Growth Method - Demand OS, Sales OS, and whatever else emerges. My mission is simple - to stop you from thinking you need to be someone else to grow your business. You might need to stretch and develop new skills, but you don't need to be fake.

So here's my promise: I'm interested in who you are. I already like you. If we ever chat, I'll do my damnedest to understand where you are in that moment, because that's how real connection happens. I'll figure out if I can help. And hey, maybe you can help me too.

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