Sales Insights with Berry Schwartz

0:00
Welcome to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. I'm Josh Elledge, Founder and CEO of UpMyInfluence.com. We turn entrepreneurs into media celebrities, grow their authority, and help them build partnerships with top influencers. We believe that every person has a unique message that can positively impact the world. stick around to the end of the show, we're all reveal how you can be our next guest on one of the fastest growing daily inspiration podcasts on the planet in 15 to 20 minutes. Let's go.

All right with us right now. We've got Barry Schwartz. Barry, you are the founder of radical results. And you're on the web at Barryschwartz.com. Thank you so much for joining us. You're so welcome, Josh. So Barry, we want to talk about sales, sales is without sales, nothing getting done in business. Is that right?

0:55
That is certainly correct.

0:57
How did you find yourself in this position? Did you go to school you always knew you're going to be a sales professional or, or how did this come about?

1:06
Yes, my superhero origin story, huh, is that I used to be a lawyer absolutely hated it. And I left I got involved with one of the top consulting firms in the world. I became the youngest partner in six years. And then, after being there for about three years, I left and started my own shop about four and a half years ago now never looked back and just been rocking and rolling.

1:37
So what led you to believe that you could provide sales in a way that maybe was not being done very effectively in the end? Did you start off just working primarily in it with law firms, or did you just did you pinpoint any particular niche?

1:55
My first clients were small businesses with under 15 employees. And after about two years working with them, I started working with some fortune 500 brands like Pepsi, Hoover, we work and so on. And then just been taken off since, you know from there. I mean, nowadays I'll work primarily with my favorite clients are small business owners, with under 30 employees because you can really create tremendous impact. When you're working with an organization with you know, 18,000 people, you're not really going to make too much impact. So, those are my typical clients. And, you know, I got involved with sales because I saw, I saw that I created something called the spiritually shameless sales model, or sometimes I just called the Shama sales model. It has four pillars, so I'm sure we'll get into and I just saw so much confusion around sales sales can be the funnest and most meaningful part of your day when done I

2:59
you know, I see This night, I'm sure you see this a lot. I mean, this is extremely common is that most people get into business. They're visionary, they've got an idea they can solve a problem. And they're good at solving that problem, or they're really great at providing that technical solution or those professional services. But sales and marketing is just not something that's we're not necessarily being taught this in school. It's certainly not part of when you got your law degree. You certainly and you, I don't know that you probably didn't have any classes on either sales or marketing in law school, am I right?

3:37
Definitely not.

3:39
So most people just kind of have to pick this up. And I think most of us, I think, start off being very uncomfortable with the idea of sales because, you know, we're gonna have we're afraid of rejection. We're afraid that, you know, people are gonna think that we're just trying to get sales. That was my biggest thing in the early days. You know, and that that I wasn't valuing them for some reason. But what do you what do you say? What would you imagine be some of the first steps to say, Okay, great, you got a company, okay? You're doing some advertising, whatever. But at the end of the day, you still need to do sales. And so where's a great place to start? Is that something where a founder who says, Allah, I'm never going to learn about this stuff, I'm just going to hire a sales professional, and just trust that they know what to do.

4:28
I mean, a founder can try that. And God bless him if that works. But generally, every founder is a salesperson, and every business owner is a salesperson. No one's gonna care about your baby like you do. We all know that. And the buck stops with you. Now there's a lot of confusion around sales. I mean, look, modern sales arose a short 90 years ago basically, with the rise of marketing as well in the 20s and 30s and The market has changed so much. The average consumer nowadays is so jaded. And so skeptical of all the bullshit promises that corporations and companies have made to them, that if you're trying to sell people with, you know, so would you like to speak Tuesday or Wednesday? And you know what I mean, when like, you haven't even asked them if they want to speak again, right? You're just you're you're bringing a knife to a gunfight. It just doesn't work anymore.

5:32
Yeah. You know, I've studied in lead consumer behavior for 13 years now as a consumer expert. And, you know, I can tell you just like what you said is that consumers have never been more savvy to or, or more able to dissect, wait a minute, why did you just ask me A or B? I didn't even I didn't even agree to a or b yet. Like most Think in the old, you know, the olden days, you know, you know, 510 years ago, I think you could still get away with that stuff a little bit. And people would just kind of follow along because we saw the authority of the person who was at the furniture store or selling the SAS, or maybe not SAS at that time, but you know, was selling whatever solution it was at the time. And so we respected that they had a certain level of authority today where consumers just don't make decisions. Most consumers don't make decisions until they've done their due diligence, right. And that's just a part of how we buy today is, is we say, Well, I would be a fool if I didn't at least look and check and see some reviews. Before I give you all my money. I mean, it's just normal. We look for coupons, or we look for we want we want to find out what other users and customers have to say we want to find the complaints and see what well what did people complain about? Is there what's the industry say? about them, what's the media saying about them? a really, really great book on this mark Schaefer, marketing rebellion, I think spells it out brilliantly. They came out last year, just in terms of what large companies know about consumer behavior today. And so if you're on either the front line or managing a sales team, sounds like Barry, this is something you ought to be pretty savvy about.

7:23
Yeah. And don't Also don't forget that a short 20 years ago, if you came to me and said, Barry, hey, I'm Josh Elledge. And here's my thing, and let's do business. I couldn't look up your competitors easily. I couldn't formation about you easily. So I didn't have many options. number one. And number two, there wasn't a lot of transparency. The Internet changed all of that. Yeah, I could look you up on social media. I could see the way you're interacting with people on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on Instagram, if you're there. And people do that. I mean, you know, it's like, just just before I got on with you, I got an email from this company that you know, I'm looking to buy a certain software for some of my marketing funnels or whatever. And, you know, they want to charge me $20,000 which is fine if it can do what they actually what they actually say it can do, which I'm not sure about. And you know, they they just got an email like, Hey, are you going to purchase or whatever? And I was like, Well, I don't know yet if you can really help me, right? They're like, well, well, what more do you need? Haven't you seen our testimonial?

8:31
I'm like, dude, like, you should take my course.

8:36
Like, of course I see your testimonials. So well. I want to see the one star reviews. I want to know how you guys operate when things aren't working well. Yeah,

17:49
so it's just so it's like maybe an eight minute reads. It's very simple. It's easy to get through, and it gives you some basic ideas of the main things to look at in terms of your business, health and health. To improve them. And then at the end of that book, we also offer you a free five minute financial audit, where we can just take a quick overview of your company and give you a quick report on on some of the high level things that we think that you could help help you scale

8:46
yeah. So Let's bury let's take a look then at you've got your you have your four pillars to success. And a good acronym to remember this is IRS EA Rs. So we'll use that Is their template and if you could start us off with number one, which is extraordinary communications.

9:06
Sure. So I created this model to do one thing. And one thing only, which is to have your prospects chase you, it's very important for your prospects to start chasing you, instead of you chasing your prospects. We don't want to be there. So, these four things are four practices. There are four disciplines that if you practice them consistently, your prospects will chase you. And the first one is extraordinary communication. And the reason for that is because if you're communicating in an ordinary fashion nowadays, you're just not even trying. So if you're sending an email with a subject title, that's like, you know, regarding project, whatever, don't send it. You know what I mean? Like people people are, they're behind on emails, they're behind on all their work stuff. They're getting slammed. Instagrams and Facebook's their daughter is sick. They didn't sleep well, last night. They've been hit up four times today already, you're number five. You know what I mean? So, extraordinary communication means you need to start to ask yourself, when is the last time they heard someone speak to them this way. So every time you're gonna get on a call, or walk into a meeting or send an email, you need to ask yourself what I'm about to communicate. When is the last time they heard someone speak to them this way? And if the answer is probably last week, it's not good enough. So just to give you an example, I was working with one of my clients who was trying to land a contract with Disney worth about a million dollars. There were like six other competitors vying for that contract. And so I asked them to send me the final email proposal they were going to send. And, you know, again, it was a classic regarding project, you know, Project X, and I said, hell no, Hell no, you might as well Put in the subject line. We don't want to win this contract for the same price. And I said, Tell me something about the decision maker whose name was let's say, Lisa. And they're like, Well, we know she loves Game of Thrones, because she referenced it in the meeting, because I said, I want something personal. Tell me something personal. I said, Great. Tell me more. Oh, she's a redhead. I'm ready. She's a redhead. Great. Okay, who's an interesting character from Game of Thrones? Who has red hair? Oh, songza. Okay, good. That's your subject title to our favorite songza huh? Now, that's just a subject title before I started their whole email, they got that contract. So the first thing we need to do is grab attention. If you don't have attention, you have nothing. You can't get to work on anything. And so extraordinary, extraordinary communication is really, really critical.

11:54
Now. Well, I think that you know if if Lisa is looking Five or six emails that have come in. And you know, the other ones are all regarding blah, blah, blah. And, you know, it just stands out. And it's just, it's personal, it really communicates that you actually care. And that you're, I think most importantly, is that you're human. Like, we're all human. We're all consumers. We're all people. You know, we may be decision makers. But you know, it's like when dealing with you know, as a consumer expert, one thing I'll commonly do and in, you know, when you have to call customer service, never, ever, ever refer to the person on the other phone as you guys or your company. It's as soon as you do that, it's like, well, you've just drawn the line in the sand. And you, you know, it's us against you, it's me against you. And so instead, you know, you want to, you know, bring them to your side of the table, and you say Listen, if at&t did that To you, like, what would you do? Like what would you ask for? Like, how would you solve this problem? And now you have an advocate instead of an adversary. So I see some parallels there. Yeah. Um, so number two, Barry is shameless advocacy. And by the way, I think he illustrated extraordinary communications very, very well. And so it just recap on that. So making it personal, is obviously extremely making a human. Um, and then would you say those are probably two of the biggest elements to that?

13:37
I would say

13:40
it can be, you know, but the most important question to ask is, is there any way they're not gonna open this email? Is there any way they're not gonna perk up when I say this in the meeting? Because you want to communicate in a way they haven't been spoken to in many, many, many moons like that. Just so critical. And it's not about being provocative for the sake of being provocative. You want to do it in a way that sits well with them and, you know, to our favorite songs is is great. Like it's it's, it's funny, it's interesting it tells it tells her Oh, we're really paying attention, because he just casually mentioned Game of Thrones, the middle of an hour long meeting, right? It hits all these marks. And so that's really where you want to get to with extraordinary communication.

14:30
Number two is shameless advocacy. I see you follow your own advice because your headline on your website as I help small business biz owners get 50% more done, be better with their people and increase sales 30% those some bold claims my friend, they are

14:46
they are bold claims.

14:49
And so why does this work?

14:53
So, you know, one of the big pain points around sales is people don't want to be pushy.

15:00
Now some people get off on being pushy.

15:04
You know what I mean? So, you know, if you take a trip down Wall Street on some streets over there, you'll find people who love that. But most people don't want to be pushy. And so there comes a point in the conversation where it's like, we're playing the politeness. I call it the politeness game. So like, I'm going to put like when you say, Oh, this is really Oh, Barry, this is super intriguing. Oh, yeah, your sale system sounds really cool. Why don't you send us over a proposal and we'll take a look at it. And, and so like, I'm gonna, which, of course, is a polite way of saying No, thank you. You know, so I'm going to pretend like you're really interested and you're going to pretend like you're interested are both going to pretend like we don't know that what's really happening underneath the surface of these numbers is nothing's gonna happen. And it just, it just doesn't work. So shamas advocacy is about really owning the value that you can do. If this person this is important. If this person is the right fit for you, and you do your best work with them. them, what kind of impact can you create over there? So those are, those are two things, if this person is an ideal client for you, and you do your best work, what is possible? So, for example, I was recently I was just two weeks ago in LA, um, you know, a, a, you know, well known, you know, management of talent in Hollywood company brought me in to troubleshoot some of the artists that are popping off the way they want to. And, you know, I started looking at their communications around some of these artists and I saw, like, the email they're sending is like, to some of the big studios and labels is like, Hey, you know, something like, you know, hey, I thought you might love to check out this music from one of our artists, we think we think it's killer, you know, link, whatever. And I was like, what's really the value? So here, here's this executive Sitting at some, you know, hot label gets this email, what value do you represent to his life? Like, like it's all about you, right? So it's like, oh, please pay attention to us, please take a look at us, please help us doesn't give a shit about you. What can you do for him? Or what can you do for her? And I said, Isn't it true that if this artist really pops, it would change the very trajectory of this person's career. If they were responsible for bringing in an artist who hit the top 40. It would change the very trajectory of their career, their bonus that year would be insane. You're not owning the value you represent potentially to this person. And so we changed it to you know, hey, Tom, hey, Lisa. I'd love to help change the trajectory of your career and turn you into a rock star. I want this year to be the fattest bonus you ever get WARNING This Artists music is addictive, you may find yourself listening to it on repeat. Here it is. So, you know, it's and you know, their response rates blew up after that they've been emailing me. Because Because it accomplishes a few things. One, it tells people you're not shy about owning what you're doing. You're a real professional like you're you're not hedging your bets. You're not Oh, I can't say certain things like, if that's what you do own it. And it's it's really about being shameless about it, which this is why I like to say it's really a spiritual model a lot of this because it's really about owning how valuable you are, which is hard for people because we have a lot of shit with ourselves. And we often feel like a fraud we often feel like we're not that valuable, frankly. And this is spiritual work. You know, it's spiritual work to deal with your shit, own the value, represent and communicate from that place, and that shameless advocacy

19:04
now, so now it's now you got to deliver, you got to deliver. But But you also need to communicate.

19:11
And to be clear, we're talking about the advocacy in the outcome that we want to bring the other person. So I am their advocate. I'm not just advocating for my own results generically. Like No, I want to bring this I am able to bring this change in you.

19:29
Yeah, exactly. So, it shameless advocacy of the value that you represent to this person to their life, right. I know, for example, when I'm sitting with a small business owner, I could change this, this person's life, their very life, because if their business grows by 30%, their life is changing. Both the quality of their life, the surface of their life, everything. I'm gonna own that now. I can't help everybody. And I have I'm very selective about who I work with fine, but at least when I'm communicating what I can do for them I'm going to make it all about them. And I'm going to be shameless about the value I can bring to them. If that's what I do

20:07
is how do you balance that versus the, you know, being careful not to over promise? Or I guess you just you just need to know what your capabilities are. Is it? would you would you greet that? That's it,

20:19
I would say you need to know what your capabilities are number two, and I also say over promise and over, deliver, do both, like one of the things that now now, don't over promise and don't deliver, okay, but what over promise and over deliver means there's a there's a two there's two things happening here. One is that we're being shameless and getting our shit out of the way so we could own how valuable we are, number one, and put all the insecurities and fears and doubts we have on the side and look at what have we actually done for people when they were our best client and we were doing our best work what's actually possible here, you know, I'm sure Josh, you know that. You've had clients that were ideal fits for you. You did your best To work with them and you change their life. Yeah. Right. So like that's just the fact of the matter.

21:07
So when we move on then to number three, which is radical honesty. So tell me more because I honestly like I can I get insecure when I when I read that and I thought, Oh my gosh, Barry, are you are you about to say something really? That it's gonna leave me in tears or something like when you're radical radically honest, I help me help me understand this.

21:35
Yeah so radical honesty is just about continuously pointing to the elephant in the conversation. Hmm, that's all so someone says that sounds super intriguing send me over proposal. I'm gonna say something like, you know, I have no problem sending you a proposal, Josh. But I know that very often people are being polite when they say that are really not all that interested. And that's totally fine. If that's you Yeah. Is that what's going on here? I love that.

22:03
Okay, that saves a lot of time. What do you say? That's gonna save a lot of time? Exactly.

22:08
I don't want to play the plague and you don't want to play what are we doing here? Yeah, no. Or if someone says, uh, you know, it, you know, let's have been speaking to a, you know, a potential client or whatever, for some time. And they're like, Well, can you send me testimonials or whatever. I would say, I'm happy to send you testimonials. I have like 50 testimonials on my website and LinkedIn, you could go take a look at them. I'm happy to send them to you. But it's not really what's gonna help you make a decision here. Really, that's really what's going to help you give the clarity to know whether this is a worthy investment or not. I'd rather take a look with you what would help you make that decision. So radical honesty is about having the courage to elevate a polite sales conversation to an authentic real conversation between two human beings who are not putting up before We're not playing the polite game. And we're just actually authentically saying what they're actually thinking.

23:08
You know, I think that that's being honest with one's own purpose as well and say, Listen, you know, I have a, I have a purpose here. And that purpose is to, you know, deliver, deliver that the outcome that I know that I'm capable of, but, you know, if I got lost in my thoughts here, but, you know, if we're, I think we're staying true to that, then we really don't have time to play any other games. And so it almost evokes a sense of urgency to say, you know, that, you know, I have this power to do this. And so, you know, let's I like where you kind of, you're searching for clarity on what they really, really, really want because that's going to help facilitate your you the best outcome that you could provide?

24:03
Yeah. And also,

24:06
I would say do it from love, do it with love, like, people are not used to radical honesty. And so it's important to be gentle with it, you know? And people are their own worst enemy like, no one's no one's it's not personal. It just, you know, everyone's just playing like it like, I don't know, something like a month ago, I was I just got on the phone with a VP at a max, whatever. And like, he was like, you know, after a few minutes, it became clear like, he's like, oh, we're not actually looking for a sales trainer. We're looking for a system to generate more leads. And, you know, one of the now I happen to know that one of the things that happens with companies when I work with them as their lead generation starts to explode although my system is not directly related to lead generation but You see there's a certain framing now in the conversation because once he says that anything I say is going to be heard as what? Like, like if you say, oh we're not looking for that and then I say, oh no my thing also does that

25:13
is that heard as yes heard as bullshit.

25:16
Yeah. So a lot of times radical honesty is helpful to take away a certain framing so that you could communicate in a way that they could actually hear so you know, I said to him, Look, man I know that what I'm about to say can be heard in this in this way and that's not how I mean it.

25:36
I actually mean it that here's the results people have

25:39
now and and I'm just telling you, what's true like I'm not saying I'd even agree to work with you Like there's so many we were so early in the conversation wasn't even about that but it was like I you want to use radical honesty sometimes to take away a certain filter people have so that they could

25:56
actually hear what you're saying. I love this and then finally, number For and oh, man, we are overdue. Sorry. Radical service Barry, I think you're gonna listen. Maybe just touch on that real briefly and then let's get right into where people can read when they can connect with you and how they can learn more about the pillars.

26:15
Let's leave that as a teaser.

26:17
Okay. All right, Apple

26:18
services the teaser.

26:20
There we go. And so Barry, your website is Barry Schwartz.com B E R R Y, berry like a strawberry. There we go. And S C H W A R T Z.com. You're a speaker. You're a consultant, and you got a podcast. And so the name of your podcast is radical results know how to get radical results in your small business.

26:44
I changed the name of the podcast A while ago. It's called The Shameless Sales Game now. Great, great and you also have the sales Academy as well. And what happens in the sales Academy. Sales Academy is for people who can't afford my premium rates. Or who don't even want that. It's a online Academy. I run it four times a year. It's quite affordable. It's 1000 bucks per person. It's 12 weeks of some of the best on hand sales training that is out there.

27:14
Fantastic. And again, that's all at Barry Schwartz. calm. Barry, thank you so much for joining us. You're so welcome, Josh. I'm a beautiful day man.

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