Jason: All right. Welcome back to the sales experience podcast. This is part two of my conversation with Travis. If you didn't check it out, make sure to listen to yesterday's. Part one of the conversation. He has an amazingly different path than I did to get to similar points, but he's making great things happen in relationships and network on this podcast, but he started out in a much different way.

Kind of talk about that. And a lot of those things where it comes to door sales and the lessons you learn, talk about confidence. And so here it is part two. Enjoy.

Travis: Take responsibility, get proactive and decide that it's up to you, not up. To whatever life throws at you.

Jason: Yeah, and generally what I see for salespeople is that there's something they were doing in the past that was successful.

And then they've pushed that aside, usually because they think they know better. So the script that worked, the process that worked, they've shoved that in a drawer. It's under all their snacks and a whole bunch of crap. And like literally pulling that out of the drawer and dusting it off. We'll turn things around because there was some basic fundamental if you were successful at one point selling then you can do it again You just have to find what you're missing and it's not marketing.

It's not your boss. It's not the weather. It's not your schedule It's about what can you control?

Travis: That's what I really like about this type of medium that you're on, man. That's what I really like about podcasting is that they say you can never really know something really well unless you can teach it, right?

Like you don't really ever learn something unless you can teach it or you don't ever learn something until you can teach it. And I find what you said totally to be true. When my first ever sales job, when I was knocking on doors, we weren't the closers. When I first started in door to door, we were appointment generators for solar closers to come in and close the solar deals.

So I remember at first I stuck to the way I was trained and I started producing a bunch. And I went through a lull like six months in, and this is after I had a couple of people on my team, but it was only a couple of people. What happened was we went through like a hiring freeze in the summer. We weren't going to start hiring again until the fall.

So I had two or three people on my team. Wasn't a big team. We weren't doing that many trainings and I started seeing my production go down and I was like, what happened? Like, why am I seeing a decrease in my production? And after like really examining what I was doing wrong. When I was starting to train other people of what how they should be generating things at the door and like what things that they should say and the things that they shouldn't say, I started realizing like when I was telling other people what to do, that I had fallen away from the things that I tell people to do, which is why I brought up the training and teaching point.

Because if you're always training and teaching, you're always trying to think of the best practices and you can examine what you're doing and be like, Oh, that wasn't. So the thing that I was doing incorrectly was I was appointment generator. I wasn't a salesperson, but I had learned so much about the sales process from my own knowledge.

And That when I was generating the appointment, I started talking too much and unloading like 30 minute conversation instead of what I was doing previously, which was like, get in, generate the lead, get out, spend 15, 20 minutes, max, maybe even like 10 minutes at the door if you can. And then you get out of there and let the person that knows everything come in, close the deal, spend time, build, know and trust.

And then you get an extra commission at the end. But what I was doing is I was like taking all the thunder away from the salesperson and like giving everything as much as I possibly could up front. And it was setting up my sales guy for failure because I was. Setting their expectations at a point where he didn't want them to be set.

There was miscommunication that was happening. And all of a sudden now the customer had these expectations and we came in at these expectations. Then the deals weren't closing as much. And I started realizing like, man, okay, I'm doing this incorrectly. And the thing that helped me realize what I was doing was when I was teaching and training other people, I would tell people like, just shut up, just shut up and go.

And I started realizing like, man. You need to shut up, stop talking all the time shut up, move on to the next door, generate the lead, do your job and get out of there, let him do his job, but yeah, to your point, I totally agree.

Jason: Because when you see it from the outside, you can see all the issues, just like in general, most people, when you talk to somebody else or you look at somebody else's life, you can see the mistakes they're making like you can see the choices that your friend is making and the things they should change in their life or their relationship or eating better.

Or working out, it's always easier to see everyone else's issues instead of our own, which is where it's always important to have some kind of coaching feedback, something where somebody is helping you be that voice and looking at what you're doing, especially in sales, right? Like somebody who's going through your calls or your interactions standing with you for periods of time and going, okay, no, you've fallen off here.

And I refer to it like watching the game footage, right? Like professional athletes, they spend most of their time watching replays of themselves of their opponents to see. How to do it and get to what works and I think that's important, but it's fascinating that you talk about it. I see a lot of SDR, BDR appointment setters, the lead generator side and doing what even salespeople do, which is selling past the close.

Like you're supposed to get to a certain point and stop and they want to keep going. And the problem is they're ruining the story, which the salesperson needs to do or account managers or somebody else needs to do. And you're going so far, you're basically telling the punchline, but you don't know it because you're excited or you're nervous or whatever that's coming from.

And you're basically making it un closable past that point.

Travis: Yeah, exactly. A lot of times you don't have the full picture of what that customer's Profile looks like it, what their credit looks like, what their income looks like, what their history looks like. So you might be spouting out projections that are totally unrealistic for this customer.

And the person gets in there to close the deal and they give them the numbers. You're like, Whoa, this other person said this X, Y, and Z. And now you're telling me this, what's the truth here. And then it's yeah, you setting the whole thing up for failure just because you're not doing your job.

Jason: Yeah, and when you do that, when you give information based on something incomplete where you don't know the whole picture, it's so hard to recover from that.

Travis: Oh, yeah, totally. That's the power of anchoring a conversation. Once you have a certain expectation, it's hard to come back

Jason: from that. Yeah, then it's done. So the other topic that I found interesting and what you do now, you're focused, obviously, with what you do now as podcasters, entrepreneurs, like that whole landscape.

But there's one thing that you focus on, which is helping people handle rejection and building self confidence. And obviously that applies to everything in life, including sales and this topic. And so share a little bit about what you've learned, how you do that for people or how you help them short of kicking them out of the van and making them knock on doors.

podcast. But first, are you ready to change the way you view your selling role and become a sales professional? Do you have a team that is hungry for new ways to improve and grow? If so, I have various coaching and consulting programs available. That might be great tools to help you achieve your goals, to learn more about the ways we can work together and to book your free sales power call, go to Jason cutter.com. Now let's get back to the episode.

Travis: It's one of those things that if you can learn how to overcome it, it'll. Unlock the rest of your career. In my opinion, I think that people's ability to handle rejection is directly correlated to the amount of income that they ultimately will generate in their lifetime.

And the best way to get a school of hard knocks approach to it is to knock on doors or to do telemarketing. One of those two probably would be the two ultimate forms of being rejected at times. So I've needless to say, been rejected a ton in my door to door sales career in a lot of different, colorful, interesting ways with a lot of people with interesting language and Physical threats and all these other crazy things that people do, but one of the biggest things to understand about this is that the rejection is not the ultimate problem, like the feeling that you get when you get rejected isn't necessarily the problem, it's just the symptom of your lack of self confidence.

And that's why I talk about confidence as it relates to rejection, because if you ultimately have the confidence that what you sell is a good product or service, and that you know how to sell that product or service, then a rejection shouldn't take away as much from you. Because you know that if you put in a work to reach a certain amount of numbers, that you're going to close a certain amount of those deals and make a certain amount of money.

It's literally a numbers game. At that point, and if you have the confidence that you are somebody that can do that, then that rejection hurts way less. I'm not one of these people that tells people to like, learn how to love rejection because I just don't think that's possible. And if you really love rejection, then you're just a different animal.

Like Gary Vaynerchuk talks about all the time. He's I love losing. I love it. It helps me win. And all that kind of stuff. And Gary might be one of those unique people to where he's just a total weirdo in the fact that that fires him up and makes him even more Oh, I'm just going to attack it even more.

You know what I mean? But I think most people fall under the category of look, you're probably never going to train yourself to love being rejected because you're always going to love the win more like it always feels better to get the win than it does to get the loss. You're going to want that win more.

So I don't ever teach people to try to love rejection. I teach people to try to mitigate. The effect that being rejected has on you as much as you possibly can. So when you first are getting started, every rejection feels like a punch in the face because you don't know if it's something that you can do.

You don't have the confidence that this is going to at some point during this day or this week or this month or this quarter. Work out for me because I don't have the data to back that up. I don't have the confidence that comes along with that. I always try to tell people like, just try to make the withdrawal that happens on your confidence bank as little as possible through each rejection that happens.

That's how I look at it. It's like you have this bank full of confidence, just like a bank account. And every time you get rejected a little bit, it gets withdrawn. A little withdrawal happens, a little withdrawal happens. Whenever you make a sale, whenever you get a yes, whenever you get a win, you get a big deposit in that bank account, right?

And you have to have enough deposits to make sure that you're not overdrawn, because when you're overdrawn on that confidence bank account, that's when you quit, you give up, you move on to something different. So there are other ways besides closing deals that make deposits in that account. So when you're a beginner and you don't have anything to draw off of, you don't have that confidence, you don't have any of the sales that you've made, there are some things that you can start to do, which would be like getting mentors, learning the process better, running through your scripts more, practicing scripts with overcoming objections.

Like being super overprepared for any situation that could come your way. Those are things that are going to add to your confidence bank account. So that every time you get rejected, it's just a little bit less that gets taken from your account instead of this big chunk that gets taken from your account.

Again, it's all about, in my opinion, mitigating. The amount that comes out of that confidence bank, every time you get rejected, if you can master that and make sure that when you make withdrawals that they're really tiny and when you make deposits that they're really big, then you're never going to really have to worry about it.

In my opinion, like the confidence, like if you can just think about the last time that you sold, if you can think about the last training that you did, that's going to prepare you for that situation that you lost yesterday, but now you're going to win it today because you got the proper training to make sure that you're helping to overcome that next thing.

As long as you're doing those things and you're continuing to push forward, then that confidence is going to carry you through all the rejections. And some rejections might be a little bit like when I got into the podcasting space, the rejections all of a sudden started taking a more of a dip on my confidence account because I was reaching out to people who actually cared about like the people who were rejecting me weren't like, it wasn't Joe Schmo who I'd knocked on his door and he was being a dick.

So it was easy for me to be like, Oh, who cares? Like F that guy. He was a dick anyway. Now I'm reaching out to like idols and people that I look up to and respect and trust in this industry. And I've read their books and I've listened to their podcasts and I'm a big fan of theirs even, and I'm reaching out to them and they rejected me.

Now it's taken a whole nother type of hit on my confidence bank account. But because I had built up so much of that. With previous experiences and past knowledge, I knew that it was only a matter of time until I could start making those fat deposits in that account again to make it to where those withdrawals were just a smaller percentage every time I got rejected.

Jason: And I can totally see that approach as being very valuable, that image of the confidence bank account. When I think one of the things would be to lessen the withdrawals when those bad things happen that take away from you. And then also as fast as you can and as much as you can create that bank account as a larger vehicle.

And then that way, no matter what happens, there's still a remainder in there, right? Like I'm thinking of an actual bank account and I'm thinking everyone has had that experience in life. Where something happened, something they didn't want to have happen. Let's just say even like a speeding ticket, there's a point in your life when you get a speeding ticket and that's a huge drain on your bank account and your brain, and it's Oh man, this is going to hurt.

And I don't have the money or a car repair. You need new tires. The transmission goes out. That's just devastating because you do not have the bandwidth to handle that. And then there's a different point, if you've ever been there in life, which is where your bank account is big enough to handle those emergencies, those storms, right?

It can get punched in the face and then you look at it and go, that's unfortunate, but I'm still here, right? Who cares? I'm going to keep going. Yeah. Yeah. 500 bucks when your bank account is 600 is different than 500 bucks when your bank account is 10, 000 or even more, right? The key is have enough experience, is do those things you're talking about to get your confidence account to be as big as possible.

So it can handle as many punches you can fall down. Les Brown says, fall down seven times, get up eight, right? Like it's about being able to withstand those punches and not give up. All right, that's it for part two. Again, make sure to subscribe, get the episodes each day they come out, go to cutter consulting group dot com slash podcast to get the show notes, get Travis's link.

As always keep in mind, everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.