CUTTER CONSULTING GROUP

E166: Always Make It Personal with Roxana Radulescu – Part 3 of 4

January 6, 2024


How can infusing a personal touch into the sales process enhance customer relationships?


This is part three of the conversation I had with Roxana.


In Part 3, Roxana and I talk about:

  • Patience in sales, management, and leadership
  • Life is all about experiences
  • Sales scripts



Download 
The Power of Authentic Persuasion ebook

Enroll in the Authentic Persuasion Online Course

Get help with your sales team

Connect with Jason on LinkedIn

Connect with Roxana on LinkedIn


Roxana’s Bio:

Roxana is the Founder of All Personal, a bespoke training and consulting company. She works with corporate, small businesses and non-government organizations, and helps them build skills muscles to create innovative workplaces!


Born and raised in Romania, having worked in international Magic Circle law firms for 16 years and having led the Learning & Development department for 8 years, she moved to Canada in March 2017, together with her husband and two kids, and has been, since then, in a constant journey of ‘self-building’. She started Life 2.0 (as she titled her initial blog), both as an immigrant and a woman entrepreneur. She has so far worked with teams and individuals in Europe and Canada, in various industries: digital marketing, financial consulting, IT, legal, non-profit, real estate, recruiting, social media.


Roxana is a TEDx speaker and a Master Coach. She holds a diploma in Learning & Development and a certificate in Human Resources from the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development in the UK, as well as a Master of Arts in Knowledge, Information and Project Management from the University of Bucharest, Romania.


The Podcast

Her podcast series, All Personal, turns the good old saying ‘nothing personal, just business’ upside down, and proves that, in fact, it’s all personal, nothing is just business. She talks to people who are passionate about what they do and are ready to share their ‘skills muscles’ discovery stories to inspire others. 


The Articles

She is also a contributing author to organizational blogs, newsletters and magazines:

The Law Office Management Association (TLOMA) – Article Series on Leadership

Digital Business Women eMagazine, interview: Roxana Radulescu on why it’s All Personal

Training Journal (UK), article: Nodding doesn’t guarantee listening – so, what does?

Young Women in Business Toronto blog series: (Pod)casting our skills muscles


You can reach out to Roxana directly, and follow her on social media:

Phone: +1 647 568 1596

Email: all@personalskillscoach.com

Website: www.personalskillscoach.com

FB Page: https://www.facebook.com/personalskillscoach/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/roxradulescu/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roxana-radulescu-profile/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCQJPPzkpd-i4R2TceaUrAsA/featured?view_as=public

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/allpersonal 

  • Show Transcript

    Jason: Welcome back to the sales experience podcast. My name is Jason Cutter. Welcome to part three of my conversation with Roxanna Radulescu. We’re just continuing this great conversation. I won’t give much of an intro. I just want to dive in if you haven’t already, make sure to check out parts one and two from the previous two days where it sets up this part of the conversation. We’re just going to continue talking about making it personal, not just focusing on business, right? So that mantra of it’s not personal, it’s business and how wrong that isn’t, right. Every aspect and really we get into a lot more of a business concept in this conversation. Part three, make sure joy this part here and I will see you at the end.


    Roxana: What you’re offering. They don’t need it now. They might need it, I don’t know, two weeks later, 2 years later, you never know. Right? You know, keep your message out there and whoever needs to work on something, they will know that they need to talk to you or they will choose to talk to you. Just that for me. But it took a lot of time for me to learn that as well and to start being more patient.


    Jason: Yeah, and I think it’s interesting too because you know, for me and my age and this generation, it’s easy to look at younger people and say, well everyone wants it now. And instant gratification and everyone’s used to it and they’re spoiled now and everything’s on the phone. But I find myself being the same exact way. Like if I’m not getting something instantly, it seems weird. It takes a long time. You know two-day shipping from Amazon used to feel amazing and now it feels really slow. Like I don’t want to wait two days. Right. It’s almost done the opposite where I don’t want to wait that two days. It might be convenient, but I’d rather go to the store and get something now versus how great that used to be. And I think that’s a good reminder for anybody listening to this, whether you’re a business owner and you’re trying to run the business and you’re trying to grow it is to be patient.


    Jason: Put yourself out there, small business, medium-sized business. If you’re a sales manager, working with your sales team, also be patient and not expect instant results from everybody on the team. And then for salespeople, both a patient with yourself and what you’re working on, but then also with your sales business, right? Whether it’s inbound or it’s outbound, you know a lot of sales is a pipeline. You know, the kind of person that I coach and work with is more consultative than transactions. So we’re not talking like an easy transaction. We’re talking about either a longer sales cycle or more involved conversational relationship, more personal like what we keep going back to. And so you’ve got to work really hard in the moment and then you’ve got to be patient in the long term, right? You’ve got to hustle your face off right now and do everything so that at the end of the day you can say, I gave it my all, I left it all on the field and then be patient for the results and know that if you do that a long enough, it’ll string together the results.


    Roxana: Exactly, it’s all about you know, action that’s consistent enough to give you the results, right?


    Jason: And the right action. And uh, and then, you know, and it’s also this weird thing, right? Cause it’s, here’s the balance and the struggle that I’ve had on a different topic is there’s patients and there’s knowing that it’s just going to take a long time. And then there’s the, the weird over-under balance of should I continue to be patient and wait or am I going the wrong direction and this doesn’t actually work. Right? Like should I write this book and then just be patient and then put in the steps or do I actually suck and I shouldn’t write this book or I shouldn’t do this thing or that thing. You know, like even doing a podcast, I started a podcast years ago and I made the fatal mistake of creating a podcast, putting it out there, watching the metrics, watching the likes, the follows the downloads too closely.


    Jason: And then I wasn’t getting the results. So then I stopped part of that. I think I was going in the wrong direction for me. Part of it. I was looking at it wrong when I did this and season one of the podcasts, I looked at the stats every once in a while, but I didn’t care what the numbers were and I just wanted to be patient and just put them all out there and knew the results would come where people would download it and I would just going to make an impact. So yeah. So what do you think about that? Like where’s that over under for you? For patients or just hitting your head against the brick wall that’s never going to fall over?


    Roxana: Well, it’s uh, you know what? It’s patience combined with action, right? So it patients doesn’t mean you’re just gonna put yourself down in a corner and just wait and do nothing. Right. It’s just patience. When I speak about patients, I talk about results, be patient about when results are showing up, not about the kind of action that you might want to take because we go back. Otherwise you go back to, to be or not to be. That’s all right. We go back there. It’s not about that. It’s about, okay, you’ve taken some action you’ve seen, doesn’t give you, maybe it doesn’t give you the results that you expect and you take a look at what, how long you’ve been doing that. It’s all about measuring as well. How long have you been doing that for? What kind of results were you expecting? Are you getting any results and if not, why?


    Roxana: What have you tried? Why wanted to notch? Right? Maybe there is another action that you might want to take or consider taking, but it’s we can, it’s usually, I find it’s about tweaking either your way of acting or your way of talking to people or your way of putting yourself out there or the focus of the podcast. It does not mean to me at least it hasn’t meant so far, not taking any action at all. Just tweaking any, even when you drop something like completely the way I’ve seen this is people dropping something after they’ve tried everything or they’ve tried everything they could think of. Right. And that helps with the mindset as well because otherwise I’m going to be left up with the question, what if? What if I kept going? What if I kept doing that? Modify, kept doing my podcasts by now?


    Roxana: It would have been a tremendous success. I will never know that if I think that I tried, I really did my best. It didn’t work. This is the best I could. I can move on to do any better and it still doesn’t work. Maybe it’s not for now at least I made it a good experience for me because I will feel better thinking about it. Right? Yeah. I tried this, this and this and that and I really did my best. Maybe the competition was high. When I think about it, I always think about actors and how they audition times and times again, and even big actors. I want to some of the superstars that we know, they still audition. Some of them surprisingly, they don’t get the role. They don’t get the part. What do they do? They still do their best. They still audition.


    Roxana: They still go onto the next one. The important thing is what kind of experiences do I want to have? How do I make that a great experience for me regardless of whether I’m going to get the part? Then whether I’m getting the, I’m going to get the client right away because maybe I’m not getting that client right away. One year from now they will still remember me and they will want to work with me. I’m going there to have because if I have a great experience for myself, they will feel it too and they will be just happy to. It’s going to be a valuable time for both. Right. Am I going to make it valuable of a valuable student or not? That’s the way I see it.


    Jason: Well, and I think for salespeople in particular, if you’re, if you’re listening to this is it’s really about focusing on what you’re doing and then learning, adapting and growing with lots of feedback. Either recordings of your calls or your meetings or outside feedback from your manager. And really looking at it like a professional athlete who is, you know, watching that game footage, getting the feedback, tweaking, changing, always progressing, always trying to improve in every little way that you can. I mean, and like they say, I might butcher this quote, but you know, you don’t fail. You either succeed or you learn from it because it’s, you know, you’re not, there is no failing. It’s just learning from it. And then what do you do with that information? Do you keep going? Do you adapt? What do you tweak? What do you change? And then you know, who, where are you ultimately going? Where do you want to get to? And, uh, you know, what do you have to change to get there?


    Roxana: Exactly. And, and again, going back to, you know, when you have a good conversation with somebody, you know, right? And you know how you feel when you have a great conversation and that regardless of whether you make the salethen, that is going to help you afterwards. Say, have a brain talk with yourself. And just say, Whoa, that was actually a very good conversation that I had actually did pretty well. They just didn’t meet these now. Right? Instead of treating it, ah, again, it didn’t work then will nobody will ever buy from me and stuff like that. It’s that kind of growth mindset that will help you go on and make the next call five minutes after you’ve just hung up with the previous client who didn’t buy from you, potential client who didn’t buy from you. But then you ha you can call somebody else because now you’re pumped because you know you can have a great conversation. You know you have something valuable to say to that person and then you’re going to call them and feel better and better about it rather than worse and worse. So it’s a whole lot of a difference here in how you treat that experience for yourself. For me, this was another chance, formational moment when I saw it work with me and with people that I work with.


    Jason: And so when we’re talking about sales people, you know, if you were to give some advice or what you see them do wrong or not as effective as they could in terms of, you know, personal versus business, this kind of mantra we were talking about, what is it that you have seen? Where do you see people like needing some help or what they’re missing?


    Roxana: Well, in really shows when you believe in what you’re saying, if you just have the script and just read this script to me, I will eventually know that this is what you’re doing and I’m not, I’m going to say something like, you know what? I’m sorry. I’m super busy right now. I can’t take this call or I need to hang up. I will say something like that because it, I mean, okay, but the times when people would just sell by reading from a script over the phone, I think they’re not the times that we live in anymore. So at least believe in something. Find something that you believe in when you talk to people about your product or service or whatever it is. If you don’t believe in it, how am I supposed to believe in it? I will never believe in whatever it is that you’re trying to sell me. I can feel it. You don’t say it, you don’t read it from the script, but I can hear it in the voice, in the, in the, in your level of energy. I can, Mary, when you believe in what you’re selling or when you don’t, right. Or when you know what you’re selling to me or when you’re don’t, you have no idea. You just have some pubs right there and just look at them. No, it’s a, that’s why it’s personal.


    Jason: Yeah. And I, and, and, and I think what’s interesting about the script, because this is the bait and I think scripts are very valuable and important. And then it’s a function of what you do with them, which is what you’re saying. Right? And going back to your actor example, if you’ve ever watched a movie or a TV show or a play, there is a script. Now, salespeople want to fight until they’re blue in the face and say they don’t like scripts. And scripts are terrible and they make you sound robotic. No, you make a script sound robotic and terrible, right? Like if you’ve watched a movie, there is a script. They did that scene 32 times from different angles over and over again. If you go to a Broadway play, they do times a day or three times a day, seven days a week, it’s the same every single time.


    Jason: Like that’s what they do. There is a script. You forget there’s a script you get lost in, in the emotion and like what you’re saying is they’re making it personal. They feel it, they believe it, they’re playing role. They feel like they are that person and that’s why they’re a professional actor in any sense is because they can sell that to you and make you believe what they believe. And then when you’re in sales, if you have a script, your job is to take that script, use it, learn it, memorize it with who you are, and then help people believe in what you believe, which is what you’re selling. So you can literally like the top salespeople, I know, they’ll start with a script, they’ll internalize it and make it their own. And then literally if you aligned up, let’s say they’re on a phone call, it’s, you know, it’s telephone sales.


    Jason: If you took 10 of their phone calls and you were to get them transcribed and then you were to stack them next to each other, literally it would be the same thing over and over again. And nobody realized it because it’s different customers, but it’s the same thing. And they’re taking you through the same journey. They’re making it personal where they can, and then the rest of it is, you know, them selling what they’re doing and explaining and walking through the process. And I think that’s so important is that balance. Because the natural reaction, like I said, of most sales people is I don’t like scripts. Scripts are terrible. They make me sound robotic. I hate when anyone uses a script, but that’s you. That’s not the script, right? You can even read a script and make the script sound amazing. Even if you were to read it word for word, you can still make it sound conversational, but you’re right.


    Jason: It’s the ones who call script or no script and they don’t believe in what they’re doing and they’re going through the motions. Just kind of like life. You can feel it. 


    Jason: Alright. That concludes part three. We’re going to make it a wrap right here for today. Try to keep it under the timeline if you haven’t, make sure checkout parts one and two and then also you can find these episodes everywhere that you would find podcasts, iTunes, Stitcher, Spotify, SoundCloud, Google plus. You can go to cutterconsultinggroup.com and go to the podcast page and find all the links there. Make sure to subscribe so you get all of these episodes every single day if possible. Wherever you get podcasts from. I would love you to leave a rating, leave a review if you could. All of that really makes a big difference and helps other people find the show and then see if it’s what they want and where they want to spend their time. Cause I want to make sure this is valuable for the right people. And if it’s not a good fit, I don’t want people to spend their time on it. It’s the same way that I do sales. It’s all about finding the right person and then seeing if you can help them. And as always, remember that everything in life has sales and people will remember the experience you gave them.




Become a Certified Authentic Persuader

Get the ebooks to help you close more deals

Visit Selling Effectiveness for more tips and get help

Follow Jason on LinkedIn

Or go to Jason’s HUB – www.JasonCutter.com

By Jason Cutter February 19, 2025
What does it take to build the ideal Sales Experience? Why does it even matter? Maybe you think you already have one. You are a professional sales ops leader. You have put everything you can in place to help your salespeople sell more. You have optimized the processes so that your sales team can focus on one thing – selling. But I promise – even if you think all of that is true, it’s not. The Reality: No Perfect Sales Experience Exists I have never seen any company or team with the ‘ideal’ Sales Experience and operation. And to be honest – I have never built one successfully. Why would I admit that? Because the ideal Sales Experience is aspirational and business, teams, processes, and customer needs/desires are constantly changing. So as soon as you put new processes in place, something else needs to change and evolve. The Scalable Sales Success Iceberg In my Scalable Sales Success Iceberg – there are 24 categories that, when built out, create a scalable sales machine – where you can add in an input and get way more output. I would love to see companies have all 24 categories set up and running optimally. But that’s not even possible – because, as I mentioned, things are always changing. Focusing on the Biggest Levers Here is the key – to build the ideal Sales Experience takes focus on the biggest levers. The ones that, when pulled, create the biggest and best results. There are many processes and systems that you can put in place – but those are going to get you a few percentage points of improvement. Instead of putting it all in here, I want to make you a special offer. Email me at jason@sellingeffectiveness.com with your mailing address, and I will mail you the book that I co-wrote with Nick Glimsdahl called Reasons Not To Focus On The Sales Experience. It will be your starter guide, facilitating the creation of your ideal Sales Experience.
By Jason Cutter February 18, 2025
The Numbers Game Mentality is a Losing Strategy Sales is no longer a “numbers game.” You cannot succeed, long term, by focusing on volume of activity. Making a million dials, sending a million emails, knocking on a million doors (the first two are way easier than that last one) is a scorched earth strategy that will sink your business. You can’t out-dial a bad sales process. It will lead to even more bad online reviews. You can’t out-email a terrible sales funnel process that requires people to jump through poorly planned hoops. You can’t out-knock your way past slimy tactics and bad products/services. The Danger of the "Every No Gets Me Closer to a Yes" Mindset The whole “every no gets me one step closer to a yes” mentally is dangerous. That mindset and strategy assumes that it’s a numbers game. That the only thing that matters is finding the right person who will buy from you. Potentially, no matter what you even say – they are just ready to buy. Not only will this destroy any online reputation you have it will also wreak havoc on your team. It is the fastest and best way to burn out your team. It will lead to a revolving door or hiring, training, and quitting as people realize how unfun the game is you have built and how hard it is to be successful. It will also feel like a mismatch – very few people (and hopefully even less over time) are long-term excited about the business model of calling 500 people a day in hopes of making a few sales. If It’s Not a Numbers Game, Then What Is It? It’s quality over quantity. [Now…note – it does take a certain quantity of activity to fill a sales pipeline. So I am not saying that your sales team can just sit and wait for people to fall into their pipeline with money in hand.] It’s about the Sales Experience. It’s about your team ensuring that they are providing the right and best experience for that potential customer – in a way that sets them up to get into the buying mood and mode. All that matters is the Sales Experience. How can you support your team in terms of the quantity of activity to fill a pipeline, and then the quality of interaction that leads to sales? What Does an Ideal Sales Experience Look Like? What does that look like – the ideal Sales Experience? It’s when your team understands that the potential customer they are speaking with only cares about themselves. They don’t care about the salesperson, your company or the product. They are only focused on themselves. It’s when the Discovery/Empathy portion of the conversation is the most important part. Does your team realize that everything after Discovery – when done right – is just a presentation of the solution? It’s the fact that when you combine the parts of the Authentic Persuasion Pathway (Rapport + Empathy + Trust + Hope + Urgency) that the assumptive close is all you need. If your team is having to ask for the sale they are doing sales wrong. And don’t confuse earning the right to close with asking for the sale. The Sales Leader’s Role in Creating a World-Class Sales Experience Your job as a sales leader is to ensure your team understands that the only thing – above all else – is the sales experience they provide to each potential customer. That customer knows that they have the power and the feeling of unlimited choice. Which means they will decide who to give their money to based on the experience they have with buying from a company. How can you shift your team away from the numbers game mentality to actually providing a world class sales experience to each and every person they speak with?
By Jason Cutter February 17, 2025
The Abundance of Options Today we all have lots of options. While writing this I could speak into my phone and order whatever I want. I can get food delivered before I finish writing this article. I could get a TV delivered to my door before I wake up tomorrow. When someone wants to buy something, they are armed with as much information as they want to access. They can research, read reviews, and watch videos about a product or company. The Shift in Power to the Buyer Because of this, the power balance of sales has shifted away from the salesperson and company to the buyer. Knowledge is power – and they now have all the knowledge they want. With knowing that they have ultimate choice of what to buy (internet and globalization has led to the ability to order anything you want from anywhere…so you are no longer limited to the stores you can drive to and what they have on hand), it means that everything is a commodity in their minds. Nothing is unique or special. Everything is interchangeable. Does the Sales Experience Even Matter? So, this means the sales experience doesn’t matter anymore. There is no reason to put effort into the sales process, the conversations with potential customers. No value in spending time trying to ‘help’ people – since they just view products, salespeople, and companies as interchangeable. You are not special, so there is no benefit in caring. They will walk into your store, and they will decide what they want. They fill out your online for, and they decide if they answer when you call and how the call will go. They walk up to your event/booth, and they decide how the interaction will go and if they want to listen to your elevator pitch. They will let you know if they are interested in moving forward. They will let you know how they want to buy. So, like I said above, there is no real value anymore in the sales experience. Or could it actually be valuable? Is it possible that all that matters IS the sales experience? If people feel they have ultimate information and control of the buying process, how do they decide on what to buy and who to buy from? When I search on Amazon for a product type I have never purchased before, how do I pick? When I want to go shopping for garden supplies for the house, how do I pick where to go? When I need to buy a new fridge, who will I hand my money over to? The cheapest place with terrible service? The place with reasonable prices and great service? The Sales Experience Shapes the Decision I choose based on the sales experience that I will receive. With everything else being equal, I (and I believe most people) will select the place to shop at or the products to buy online based on the experience I receive. To me all that matters is the experience. While I am trying to buy something. Once I receive it – ensure it does what I need it to do. With the feeling of unlimited choices, it can actually be harder now to buy something that in the past. People get into analysis paralysis more often. Which means that for consumers to buy something new they need help. They need a professional salesperson. They need a sales experience that matches their expectations. They want a guide who will help them make the right decision for them, with an experience that goes above and beyond what more people receive any more when they walk into a store, call a company’s toll-free number, or visit a website and have to fill out a form. If you want to succeed in sales – the only thing that matters is the sales experience you provide.
By Jason Cutter February 13, 2025
The Balance of Effort in Sales The blogs this week have been about the other person going most of the way. Whether it’s a prospective customer and your salesperson, where the salesperson truly can’t want the deal or make most of it happen for that customer to truly be successful. On the path for that prospect to becoming a customer, they should go at least 51/49. Whether it’s your team and their manager, the manager can’t want the team to succeed more than the team actually wants it for themselves. It’s not scalable for the coach (manager) to run on the field every play to win the game for the salespeople. What about sales ops processes and systems? What about the tools available to the sales team and the ones that are classified as sales enablement? In a reversal of philosophy, I believe the sales ops processes should go 90, the team should only have to go 10. Why Do We Need Salespeople? Let’s start where it matters – what is the point of having salespeople? I know many owners question the need and desire to have salespeople. They are hard to manage, tough to deal with, always want more money (potentially for doing less work and closing less deals), and are very resistant to change. Of course, that is a generalization. Of course, there are salespeople who don’t check those boxes. However, having worked with a lot of teams in a lot of industries, that generalization isn’t completely wrong or unfair. So if there is even a small part of that which is accurate, why would we even mess with the messiness of having salespeople? Of needing to employ and manage humans? The Human Element in Sales We need them. That’s why. Even in 2025, AI and technology has not successfully replicated the requirements of sales – which is about helping a human (prospect/customer) make the right decision and move outside of their comfort zone to buy something new. It still takes your human (salesperson) to persuade that other human. It’s why I say all the time that its not B2B, B2C, Retail, SaaS, etc. – it’s H2H. Sure, people can buy something online or even in a store without speaking to someone. But if it’s a considered purchase where there are options and decisions to be considered – it still takes a human being involved. That means ultimately your human (salesperson) has one job, and one job only – persuade the right prospective humans to buy. Minimizing Distractions for Salespeople Everything outside of that mission, task, focus is a distraction that takes away from their highest and best use. Imagine if we had a surgeon who had to prep the room, prep the patient, schedule the surgery and meetings, and do all the parts of the surgery themselves. Nope – they show up for the surgery and do what they do best. Then they take off their gown, gloves, and walk away to get cleaned up and move on to the next thing. Your goal as a sales ops leader is to support the team with systems and processes that allow them to focus on the one thing you need them for. The human part. It would be amazing if they could show up, talk to people, and make sales happen. Of course, there is more that they (and any professional) need to do before, during, and after the sales conversation. But your goal is to minimize all that. Every hour that your salespeople aren’t selling or doing sales-related activities, they aren’t moving revenue forward. The Ultimate Goal of Sales Ops What processes can you put in place that go 90 percent of the way, where the salesperson can do the last 10 percent? An example would be building an email campaign that runs automatically, and when the right people reply, the salesperson gets involved in getting that person from email to phone call. Another example would be your CRM serving up people for the salesperson to call – leads or anyone in the sales pipeline flow – with all the backstory, research, data, intel needed for them to review it then take action. What can you put into place that takes away as much distraction and effort from your sales team such that they can focus on the one thing you need to focus on – other humans?
By Jason Cutter February 12, 2025
The Danger of Doing Too Much as a Sales Leader Alright – so maybe they don’t need to go 90. In true servant leadership mode, you would go way more than 10% of the way to your team. But you have to be careful, as a sales leader. The inclination might be to do it all for them. To help them close their sales. To make excuses for them to your leadership as to why they aren’t closing more sales. Especially considering the very high likelihood that you are a sales manager because you were a great salesperson in the role that you are now managing. And there is a slight chance that you are a player-coach…so you are leading and selling. This can make it really tough not to want to run out on the field to win the game each time. But that doesn’t scale. That doesn’t lead to increased results. You can only sell so much as one person. Creating a Culture of Ownership So, you need to have people on your team that are coming to you. What does that look like? The pinnacle is a salesperson who doesn’t close a deal, comes to you right away and asks for feedback. They want some critiques as to where they could have done things better, different that would have led to the desired result – a closed sale. That takes a healthy level of ego by a professional who has the ultimate growth mindset. They know there are always ways to improve. They want to improve. And they are willing to risk their ego (and the internal, protective, primal part of our brain that doesn’t want to risk our place in the tribe) by asking for feedback that could be negative. Whenever you can, encourage that type of response. Ensure that the team knows that the team itself, and you as their leader, is a safe space – where the goal is to improve, grow, win and that everything done to support each other is done in that mode. They truly have to feel safe to share their mistakes and to get support in learning how to do more, better. Feedback That Drives Growth Part of this takes team and individual meetings that are actually filled with positive support. That doesn’t mean it’s always positive, motivational fluff. It’s not even about the shallow strategy of the feedback sandwich. Its about being real, honest, and empathetic – meaning “I see you are here, I know you want to be there, I will help you get there – even if its hard and it means saying hard things.” It should never feel mean or abusive or like an attack. But you can give some really direct feedback that will sting that ego I mentioned, but the person will know the intent behind it. The second part is hiring this type of person. Hiring people for the team that wants to win, grow, succeed. And they know that you don’t get better by being coddled, sheltered, or protected. You want people who don’t like the thought of perpetually living safely in their comfort zone. And they are excited about the opportunity to be a part of a team that pushes everyone, empathetically, outside of their comfort zone. Are You Leading or Just Managing? If you find yourself as a leader having to push your team, or going to them most of the time, or most of the way mentally – then they see you as a manager not a leader. They see you as someone who manages them, pushes them, and wants them to do things they don’t want to do. I have written some blogs here that go into what your role should be – as a leader, not a manager. Pulling people along with you, inspiring people, and supporting yourself with a team of people who want to win. Not just those that want to show up, do as little as they can and hopefully go unnoticed (yet – complain about not making enough money and how the comp plan isn’t fair, or the leads are bad, or their schedule means they can’t be successful.) Make sure your team knows that they need to come to you – at least 51/49. They should be asking for help, guidance, training, feedback, and support more than you are having to push it down onto them.
By Jason Cutter February 3, 2025
If you have seen the movie Hitch, then you know the scene. Will Smith’s character (Hitch) is trying to coach Kevin James’ character (Albert) on how to finish out his upcoming first date. He is giving him pointers, one being that if his date fumbles with her keys at the door, it could mean she wants a kiss. So Hitch wants to see if Albert knows what to do – for a good night kiss. Hitch gives him the advice “you go 90 percent, and then wait for her to go 10%” which Albert then asks “wait for how long?” Hitch: “as long as it takes.” Albert leads in, Hitch is holding back to see if Albert will wait, and then Albert goes all the way and gives him a kiss. Hitch gets upset, and says “You go 90, I go 10 – you don’t go the whole 100%.” The Sales Analogy Kissing our prospective customers is not acceptable (just ask HR!). But the concept is the same. You don’t want to ever make 100% of the effort for your prospective customers. You don’t want to be the one who is doing all the work. Fundamentally, it is not good practice to want the deal more than the other person. When you go your 90, you need to wait – as long as it takes – for the prospect to go to their 10. And I would say that you want to go somewhere between 10-49, in reality. How Successful Sales Professionals Balance Effort Successful sales professionals know how far they have to go to meet the prospect where they are, while also knowing how much effort the prospect needs to put in to show they are committed. Where most salespeople get in trouble is they get desperate. They want the sale (kiss) more than the other person and they go the full 100%. Of course, persistence is important. And you won’t get what you don’t ask for (although…if you have followed me for any length of time, you will know I am very against having to ask for the sale). But you also have to ensure that your prospects actually want what you are selling. And they want it for their reasons and their motivations. They are driven to pursue your production option(s). They must go 10, 40, 60% of the way to you. The Pitfall of Chasing Your Prospect Just like courtship and relationships – if you find yourself chasing and one-sided-pursing the other person then it means you want it more than they do. It also means they own you. You are essentially begging them for the relationship – convincing, manipulating, begging, bribing, persuading your way forward. Which means they consciously and/or subconsciously know that they are in control. Because if they say no, you will keep pursuing and offering solutions. In sales – that looks like a salesperson who is calling, emailing, stalking a prospect – making offers, offering discounts and trials, and trying to find any way to make deal work. They are going 90-100% of the way for the prospect, not requiring them to go anywhere towards the agreement. This will end terribly. If they do decide to buy – taking the discount, free trial, taking the sale bait – they will not be happy (since they weren’t bought in for their reasons), they will look for reasons confirming why they didn’t really want to buy anyway, and they will know that they own you. Your company will have to convince them on a regular basis to stay in the relationship. The Right Balance for Customer Ownership You fundamentally need that prospective customer to come to you. Not 100% where you are just an Order Taker. But potentially 51% of the way – so they want it more than you. The more you can get them across that 50/50 threshold, the more they will be a satisfied customer. But remember – at 51/49 – they still need persuading, they still need to understand the value of your product for where they ultimately want to be in their life/business, and they still need your support. They lean in the right amount, you lean in the right amount = sales magic!
Show More
Share by: