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Getting Real Or Not Playing

Getting real involves challenging lazy thinking and penetrating façades, games, defenses, fears, and illusions." ~Let's Get Real Or Let's Not Play by Mahan Khalsa

let's get real or let's not play sales book mahan khalsa

Let's Get Real Or Let's Not Play is one of my favorite sales books: I've been referring to it since first discovering it in 2010. The premise is that buyer and seller need to cut past the baloney and posturing, and get down to a real, emotional, in-depth discussion of what's truly going on and how help may (or may not) be available.

As the salesperson, you have to be completely willing to walk away. If the prospect won't admit to having a serious problem that you can fix, you politely end the conversation. If they won't open up and let you into their world, at least a little, you don't continue.

By the same token, you as the salesperson are not walking around with a hammer looking at everything as a nail. If your solution isn't the right fit for this prospect, YOU TELL THEM SO.

Yes, it takes bravery to sell this way. And getting real is totally worth it. The price of honesty and open discussions will give you much better client relationships.

The Power of Getting Real

"As trust goes up, speed goes up and costs go down. As trust decreases, everything slows and costs rise." ~Mahan Khalsa, Let's Get Real Or Let's Not Play

Speed may not be a shocker here, but costs?

It's worth thinking about, isn't it: that when trust is low, costs go up. Think about implementation alone. People drag their heels. They spend time looking for other options, or trying to shoehorn their own pet solution into place in direct competition. Nobody tells anyone else what's going on, so things break. And of course there's the opportunity cost of dilly-dallying when you could go ahead and get the problem corrected.

Effective ways of gaining trust are to ask a lot of questions, and not push your solution a The One And Only. We ask the people who'd like to work with us a lot of questions. We're not sure, at the start, whether we're a fit for one another just yet. We don't want anyone and everyone to sign up.

How has trust been impacting speed and costs in your projects? Have you been getting real?

2023 Update for Getting Real With Your Prospects

A few months back as 2022 was ending, I was doing a series of (mostly) daily videos. These were a part of Wes Schaeffer's 12 Weeks to Peak sales accountability program. Doubled my income for that quarter, by the way. And during the series I chose Mahan's book as a topic. At that point I realized while I owned the book, I no longer had the audiobook version read by Mahan himself.

Now the topic of the video was "Eating your own dog food". That meant I had to do it. So I did. I went and got the hard-to-find original audio version of Let's Get Real Or Let's Not Play. It's in a nice boxed set of CDs and I'm enjoying them now. You can watch that video here:

>> Jason Kanigan is a conversion expert and sales trainer. To book an appointment to speak with Jason, click here. <<

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Tangible vs Intangible Selling

Tangible vs Intangible selling is a conceptual question. Every offer is primarily either tangible or intangible. But can an individual salesperson sell something of this type?

Tangible items for sale already exist. They are sitting there on the shelf, or the showroom floor. You can walk over and see them, touch them, maybe even pick them up. Examples are washing machines, automobiles, and jugs of milk.

Intangible items to be sold are not yet physicially present. They exist in the minds of the prospect and, more significantly, the salesperson. Some imagination needs to be used on both sides for this sale to happen. Examples are custom programmed software or being a bestselling co-author in a forthcoming book. Surprisingly, perhaps, a customized sign made for a shop.

sign, custom sign, reach for the moon, intangible selling, intangible sale

Photo by Designecologist from Pexels

I first discovered I was good at selling the intangible in the mid-2000s while running a metal fabrication shop. Turned out I'd been doing it all along—general contractors would want a custom bracket made of 3/4" steel, let's say, to hold up the beams of the huge open concept cabin they were building. This kind of thing was a gnarly, heavy, this-time-only-angled and drilled connector. Especially with signs, though, specifically the collaboration we'd do with a sign manufacturer, was where it was really pointed out to me that what we were selling was intangible.

The Difference Between Tangible vs Intangible Selling

Alarmingly, the salesperson at the sign shop said, "People have no idea what they want when they come in here. There's no picture in their head of the outcome. They're trusting me to come up with something." She paused, then continued: "And they're handing over thousands of dollars to me on that belief that we'll come up with something good."

"Huh," I thought. I saw her point immediately. In the metal fab world I was more familiar with, it seemed easier. People wanted metal letters, or a gate or railing. Or wrought iron fencing. Or that kind of structural steel I mentioned earlier. That felt necessary. It wasn't hard to visualize what the outcome would look like.

But a sign? That could be anything. Therefore, I realized the prospect was placing a lot of faith into the seller. Should the sign be round or square? How much wood and how much metal? Should the frame be metal, and the lettering routered in relief out of the wood, then painted to stand out? Would there be a picture, maybe of some trees and a mountain? Or should the design go more abstract? Ought we to focus less on imagery and more on style?

The Trust Scale for Selling The Intangible

Subsequently, I realized there was a sliding scale for buyers when it came to trust of the seller's ability to provide a good experience with the intangible sale.

On one side you've got the fully trusting, "I know you: I like you, I trust that whatever you come up with will be excellent and I don't have to worry about it". This could almost be considered abdication of responsibilty; however, I view it more as transference of responsibility, or delegation. Even if the buyer deep down is not in love with the final outcome, they believe the seller knows best.

On the other side you've got minimal trust. "I want to see this every step of the way along. I emphatically want control over what happens." For those selling the intangible, this can be a genuine source of frustration. "Why won't the customer leave me alone to do what I'm good at? Why won't they let me run according to my own internal schedule, rather than trying to worry me along? I know how long these things take. I know the steps to do them in. Why must I explain everything?"

When selling the tangible, you obviously have the thing right there to point at. Features and benefits are available to rely on. If the prospect doesn't follow along, it's readily apparent: you can stop, go back, and find out what's missing.

Selling intangibles...not so much. You must dig. Get to the heart of "Why" this person wants what they want. Likely you'll have to uncover factors they weren't conscious of, preferences they didn't know they had. Unfortunately, it's easy to blow past key sales factors if you don't notice the prospect sitting there nodding mechanically, eyes glazing over.

Deciding whether your firm is focused on tangible vs intangible selling can even have a big tax implication.

Risk Factors In Tangible vs Intangible Sales

In selling tangible offers, you run the risk as the salesperson of falling back on features and benefits. Reliance on these factors is a lower level of selling: it's less effective. Often you'll miss the prospect's "Why" and not get the sale.

As you sell the intangible, you can easily run past the prospect's true reasons for buying. Trying to fit the individual prospective customer into a "one size fits all" process will cause that to happen.

Unless the prospect is well educated about the offer before they arrive, and has a personal sense of urgency about taking action on it, the fact is that the intangible sale is going to take longer. Significantly, what I have observed over a long period in the sales field is this: some people simply don't seem to be able to make the intangible sale.

Whenever hiring into an organization where the intangible sale is a requirement it is not enough that you look at candidates with excellent sales histories. You must find out if they have a history of successfully selling intangible offers.

What Needs To Happen In The Intangible Sale?

A transference of imagination, from seller to buyer, is necessary to make the intangible sale. I'll come back to this in a future discussion, but I want you to understand this for now. Depending on where the prospect is on that line scale I described above, evidently it can take some time to solidify that image and make that transference happen. There's a process to this, of course, but for now all I want you to understand is that this is what happens. Get clear on the concept: tangible vs intantible selling. Which does your organization focus on? Do you have the right people for the role?

>> Jason Kanigan is a sales force developer and conversion expert. Schedule a consultation with him to focus on your specific situation <<

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The Value of Good Prospecting

Good prospecting is a rarity. If you prospect well, you can stand out in a way your competitors won't. You'll shorten your sales cycle. You'll get to the point faster with more prospective customers than you have before, and faster than your competitors do. Your ideal customers will be saying, "How can we work together?" rather than, "So what's your price?"

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

I've covered what's wrong with prospecting before. And I've also provided a FREE solution. But I have to tell you, the records show that you folks don't click over and follow that free course from someone else who's not associated with me, ie. I have nothing in the game in sending you over there. It's simply great stuff.

The Effective Prospecting Course I Share For Free That No One Gets

Yet almost nobody hits that link.

Why?

Is the idea that you're going to have to learn something, do some work, actually go through a course to be able to prospect well too much? Or did you not see the link because it's at the end of the article? Curious.

Anyway, I signed up for a free accountability program from another sales trainer who I respect. It offers to accelerate your results through the rest of 2022, the final three months of this year. I wasn't struggling, but I do always want to be better. It's been about a week and I've already:

1 - made a new series of videos on effective prospecting, as my daily video content creation per the program

2 - hit a personal best in closing six five figure sales in one day.

And my prospecting & qualifying method, as outlined in this video series, is responsible for a lot of that result.

Here is the playlist. Keep coming back to it because I'll be adding more videos, sharing more prospecting tips. As people have pointed out many times over the years, my stuff isn't some idea, some unproven concept: it's based on trial and error and real results in the sales world over the past two decades. (Man, when I think back to the late 1990s, after I got out of college and was in my first bizdev job, just how little I knew about selling...and that nobody trained me on anything beyond technical features of the products!)

Good Prospecting Training Videos Playlist

 

The first video alone will show you the difference between the spam-a-lot outbound leadgen machine, "throw spaghetti against the wall and hope something sticks" method almost everyone has adopted and something that looks, sounds, smells and is treated differently by the prospect.

Why Is Bad LeadGen So Rampant?

Why do you think it is the automated spamming outreach method is used so often? Is it because "that's what everyone else is doing" and so that must be the way you do it? Is it because people are afraid to be human beings, and want to hide behind that automation? Then you have something to blame, right? Must be the email deliverability. Must be that headline. Must be the message content—too long, or too short. Must be anything but YOU, the person ultimately responsible for your performance.

What if, instead of (Option 1) spamming 1000 attempted connections with automated tools over an afternoon...

...using the same bland and personality-less outreach message aimed at all those undifferentiated people you probably know next to nothing about other than "They are in X industry"...

...you (Option 2) focused on 30 leads you personally pre-qualified, who are likely to be receptive to your message because of where they're at and what situation they find themselves in...

...and your intention was to start a genuine dialogue with them as individuals, not immediately whip your offer out and shove it in their face?

I can tell you from personal experience that the second option, applied consistently and not as a one hit wonder, gets you much better results over time. Just like the results I experienced, closing six high ticket offers in a single afternoon.

It is not because I am such a great salesperson. Or that I always know exactly what to say. It is because I chose my prospects and hence where to put my effort carefully.

You Can Have An Effective Outbound Lead Generation Method In Place Today

Get started on that playlist! Apply what you learn, apply it consistently, and watch what happens.

What if your employer uses the automated mass outreach approach to generate leads for you?

No problem! Use the same methods on the leads that you're given. Filter them quickly. Qualify for those indicators I teach you in the videos to look for that show you this is likely to be a good lead. Follow up using the process I demonstrate.

Just about everyone in the online marketing world whines that "If only I had more leads" they would be so much better off.

This is a lie. A falsehood. Generating increasing quantities of poor quality prospects that lead to no engagement will only waste the time and energy of the front line salesperson.

You don't need more leads.

You need good prosecting in place to bring you a manageable number of better leads you can personally engage with.

This isn't something I've made up. I've been talking about it and building my process for many years.

>> If you're ready for the full version of what is explained here, including Challenger Sale instruction, how you should think as a founder beginning to operate your business, what to give your new hires to train them up quickly on effective selling, then get Sales On Fire <<