SALES: Mastering the Art of Sales with Mike Esterday: Insights from "Listen to Sell".

0:00And now, Taking Care of Business, your hosts, Craig Moen and Shai Gillad. Welcome to Business Owners Radio, episode 241. Our guest today is Mike Estaday, founding partner and CEO of Integrity Solutions and contributing member of the Forbes Business Council. He is the co-author of the new book, Listen to Sell, How Your Mindset, Skill Set, and Human Connections Unlock Sales Performance. Good morning, Mike. Welcome to Business Owners Radio. Well, thank you. It's great to be here. Yeah, we're excited to have you here to talk about this great book, Listen to Sell. Man, we've been excited to read this one.

0:43Tell us what inspired you to write the book. We've been in sales skills training for over 30 years. And Shia, it's interesting that with all the places you can just click online and buy something today, there's some people that wonder if sales really is a future profession. How long will they need salespeople? And we're really advocates for this being a noble profession. And in fact, today is probably the best time in history to be in sales because you go online and you might see 10 ,000 choices. You need a professional who can help you think through what's the right choice for you as a business owner or you as an individual.

1:18Yeah, that's an interesting concept. I mean, I had to really stop to think about it, you know, with all the evolution of artificial intelligence and the different implementations of that. I'd never asked myself the question, will salespeople be obsolete or will that skill become obsolete? What got you thinking about this kind of question and how to reframe this and give us new ways about thinking about the future? We've seen a number of our clients that have had reductions in force, sales teams, more and more people going towards technology. But today you need to elevate skills. And we believe that sales success really involves three conversations.

1:56So whether you're a large organization, a small organization, an individual, solo entrepreneur, the three conversations are one, you've got to have a good conversation with the customer. Do I understand how to gain rapport, ask the right questions, talk about my value proposition, and so forth? But there's a second conversation that most salespeople don't realize that they have that's going on all day long. That's the conversation they have with themselves. Do I really believe in what I'm selling? Do I have a passion for what I'm doing? Do I see the benefit I'm creating for my customers? And that conversation we think is extremely valuable and critical to your success.

2:36And a third conversation is the one that a manager has with his or her salespeople. So regardless of the size of your sales team, it's critical to have a conversation with people that deals with both the conversation with the customer and understanding what's going on in their head. So this book deals with all three of those conversations, and we've broken it up into mindset, conversation with yourself, the skill set with the customer, and also coaching from a manager viewpoint. I really love the way that you're thinking about that, especially grounding it in this conversation with ourself, right?

3:13Because it's really creating that belief that there's purpose to what we're doing here and that it's bigger than just hopefully making a few dollars, that we're helping people solve problems. It really is. And unfortunately, so many people today, they have a poor view of selling because of what they've seen on TV, movies, experiences they've had. If you can have a positive view of selling that I'm creating value for people, it's identifying needs, filling needs, creating value for people. If you have a purpose and a belief in what you're selling, that increases what we call achievement drive. And so we did a global study of sales leaders.

3:51And out of all these, we put them into two buckets. One is, do you have the selling skills and selling knowledge and product knowledge? The other part is values, achievement drive, sense of passion. We asked them, of those two buckets, which one is more important to your top salespeople? And 100 % of them said, it's that second one, that achievement drive, that passion, that belief in what I have. So unfortunately, a lot of times sales leaders only talk about products and how to make the sale. But if we can get inside our people's heads and help them have a sense of purpose about what they do and light that achievement drive fire, they're going to be much more successful.

4:35Mike, you're talking about this traditional view on sales, and we have so many examples being negative in our lives. But we all remember one or two, maybe more, salespeople that really were not selling first. They were part of the solution evaluation and recommendation side based on their experience and alternate views. We have a very different experience there. Why has this happened that there's so many varieties of sales, sales staff, and even the customer service side? Why, after all of these years, are we dealing with such a variety and some of them that give such a bad reputation? You know, you're really right, Craig, that the folks that stand out, it's like, wow, that's a different experience.

5:23This person really is here for me. They're on the same side of the table trying to help me think through what's the best decision versus trying to just sell me stuff. And people can pick that up. I grew up on a farm in the Midwest, and my dad told me, you can tell these animals if you get in that pig pan. They can kind of tell if you're afraid of them or not. And I believe that people are at least that sensitive. They can tell if you're there for them or if you're trying to do something to them. and the salespeople who can truly be customer needs focused. They're there with an attitude. If they have a need, I'm going to have a professional obligation to help people get what I've got.

6:03But if they don't have a need, I'm not going to try to force them into something they don't need. And people can pick that up and they can appreciate the trust and the sense of being customer focused. That comes through loud and clear. I guess one of the examples of being a great salesperson is do you get referrals? And just like you're saying, this relationship and this customer experience they've had with what we used to call a salesperson, but maybe they're a sales engineer or a customer assistance. assistants, the experience is so different that we'll recommend them to everyone. And that's rare in the traditional historic classification of sales.

6:44And having those great experiences really reinforces that this is a profession and partially an art. Yes. It's interesting that studies have shown that most people when they have a good experience are willing to give you a referral, but a very small percentage of people even ask for referrals. Now, sometimes it's because you didn't do a good job of selling. You didn't have that customer-focused attitude. But if you firmly believe that you're there for the customer, you've done the right thing, you've made the right recommendation, you've helped solve their problem, you have an obligation to try to help other people that they know.

7:21So asking for that referral is critical. And then, of course, those kind of folks that are referred are a lot easier to sell because they're coming from a trusted source. especially if you can ask that person to refer you and call and introduce you. It's amazing how we don't measure that in our businesses, how we measure do the sales of the past reflect future sales and expansion of new customers by referral. It's an interesting change in a measurement process rather than just numbers. The measurement of sales probably defines a bit of the performance of the sales and the reputation of the company they represent.

8:02Can you tell me about some of the experiences you've had? In our book, Listen to Sell, in the mindset part, we talk about something called the sales congruence model. And in that, we look at a couple of dimensions of success. And one is a person's view of selling, the view of their ability to be successful, their values, their commitment to activities, and their belief and passion in what they're selling. Unfortunately, too many managers focus on activities, which are necessary. But if someone's not performing like he or she should, it's probably not just the activities. There might be an underlying cause.

8:41It may be that they don't have a strong belief in their abilities. They may not believe strongly enough in what they're selling. They may not have a strong view of what selling is. A couple of examples. We were working with an organization in Texas. There's a salesperson who had been a school teacher, realized he loved teaching, but he couldn't make enough money to put his kids through college. So he got into sales, was failing miserably, just didn't feel in alignment there. So his manager worked with him to help reshape his mindset of what he was doing, to realize the benefits he was providing for families through the insurance products that he sold.

9:18By shifting that mindset, within about 30 days, his activities doubled, and within a couple months, he was succeeding. So it's not just the product knowledge and not just the activities. It's what goes behind that. So as a business owner, if your salespeople are struggling, I'd like to challenge them to think of not just how much you're selling, what are you measuring, but also get behind those numbers to see what is it that drives people to be successful. Do you know what people want money for? Do you know what they want to prove? We had another example of a salesperson who was newly married.

10:00He worked in a call center. And unfortunately, his in-laws were kind of embarrassed that their daughter had married someone that worked in a contact center. But he was proud of what he did. So his goal was to prove to his in-laws that he could be the very best at what he did. So do you know what people want to accomplish? What's their purpose? Do they want to make money to put their kids through college? Do they want to buy a lake house? Do they want to save people's lives of what they're selling? Do they want to make a difference in a business's financials? What is it they want to accomplish?

10:35And if you can understand that, that can be the leverage to help that person succeed. I can't help but think about what a great overall leadership concept that is. And I think this book has a wonderful name in terms of listen to sell because it really does have to start there. You have to certainly know some good questions to ask. But if you don't have the skill to shut up and actually listen carefully and really listen, not just with your ears, but also with your eyes, looking at people's body language, listening to their voice, watching how their face changes when they talk about the future and what they want.

11:11You know, you can miss a lot. So it's really important to fully engage around that. Well, I'm so much in agreement with that, Shai. Too many times people listen to decide what they're going to say instead of truly listening to what the person is saying, what's in between the words, what is their body language you said, what do they really mean by what they're saying. And if your mindset is, I'm going to listen to understand instead of listen to talk, people also pick that up. They tend to trust you more. So if you can listen, throughout the book we talk about listening to the customer, but also listening to what you're saying to yourself in your mind.

11:49Are you saying it's self-defeating thoughts? Are you encouraging thoughts? What are you listening to your manager? Listening is just a critical key in success, as it is with coaching. In the book, Listen to Sell, at the end, we have multiple chapters on coaching to help business owners and managers coach and build their people. It's not just driving revenue. It's building people. As you build people, they'll build your sales. At the end of every chapter, we give coaching tips and coaching corners with almost 200 questions throughout the book that you can ask people to uncover what's driving them and how to help them improve their sales.

12:31It's so great because that accomplishes two things, right? There's an organizing philosophy around the book, which is actually a pretty simple approach, but a very powerful one. But then you have all these great tactics about really how to apply this. and you're also modeling some behavior here because you're encouraging the reader to really reflect on these questions first and then think about how they can apply them in these different scenarios and this is not just theory what i find is that some books i read are really good but they're very complicated yeah someone told me one time a consultant says if you make it more complicated they'll pay you more and i think that's the opposite where it should be i need I need something that's fairly simple to say, I can use that.

13:12I can use that today in my customer conversations and help customers and be better in my career. In the back, folks who get the book, you'll see there's a lot of assessments, too. You can actually assess yourself, assess your people, and with some tips on how do you help them improve. Because that's what's the purpose of the whole book is how do we get better at not just listening, but selling and serving other people and coaching our salespeople. And, you know, another running theme you have is developing emotional intelligence. And, you know, we hear this frame a lot, but it's difficult sometimes for people to visualize, well, yeah, but how do I get better at that?

13:50What are the competencies of emotional intelligence and how do I improve? What are your thoughts on that? And maybe give us an example of the kind of tips you use to really help people understand that better. This has been a very popularized topic over the last 30 years or so. Daniel Goleman did a lot of studies in the 90s. Travis Bradbury has been very prolific with his books, Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and the Emotional Intelligence Habits, about how do we understand our own emotions and how do we pick up on others? Some of it can relate also to what we call behavior styles. Am I sensitive to how other people like to communicate?

14:26And can I communicate in the way they want to communicate instead of the way that I want to? Emotional intelligence has been proven to be a lot more effective in success than IQ. They call it EQ versus IQ. And so there's a long chapter in the book towards the back about how do I recognize where I am on the emotional intelligence scale, then how can I improve myself and also work better with my people? Mike, there's one area in your writings that was fascinating to me and had to do with customer service and sales and this gap. that occasionally occurs between the organizations when they're not really glued together well?

15:07What are your observations and what's going on there? Well, customer service is not just something done by, quote, customer service people. This should be a part of the culture of every organization, whether you've got two people or 2 ,000 people or whatever in your company. Customer service ought to be a part of everybody's job description. We worked with an organization in California one time that they said that every meeting needs to start with a customer service message and end with a safety message. This is part of everybody's job, not just externally with customers, but we also have internal customers.

15:43And studies have shown that as we give better service to each other, break down the silos, support each other, that gives stronger external service too. There's a study called the Service Profit Chain that was done by Harvard and published in the HBR that goes into this in depth, that it's extremely important for us to have a mindset that I'm serving other people within the company, and that drives profitability and growth. When you think about customer service, a lot of times people don't understand that if I don't interact with, quote, customers, I don't need that kind of training. We work with a healthcare organization in Florida, and in the cafeteria, they trained every single employee on customer service skills.

16:25And the person in the cafeteria went through this and thought, well, why am I here with all these other important people, the doctors and nurses and executives? All I do is make the jello. But then she started to realize through the training that some people couldn't eat without the jello that I made. She thought about the kids playing in the jello. She said, now that I understand the purpose of what I do, I'm proud that I make the jello. So whether it's in service, whether it's in sales, whatever it is, If we can help people see the bigger picture of how they impact others, that tends to drive stronger activities and a stronger sense of purpose.

17:01And it also improves retention and productivity of employees. Mike, looking forward, where do you see the positioning of sales and the profession of sales as we move forward into the next decade? I believe it truly is a profession. People today, I think, are craving human-to-human interaction. They want somebody they can trust. In today's time, when you have so many options, and sometimes there's parity of products, how do I figure out what's best for me or for my company? We need someone who is truly a professional, that's addressing it with a customer-needs-focused attitude, asking questions to truly understand what the customer needs.

17:46making the right recommendations. And when you do that, you help solve problems. And when you do that, you create a long-term customer who's willing to give you repeat business, referrals, and good work turns into more business. In this book, we celebrate sales as a profession. The salespeople are respected, valued partners for customers, and we see the profession growing. That's a great point, Mike. And I can't help but think about not only there being a bright future for people in the realm of sales, but more importantly, how universal this skill really is. And it's still worth the investment to develop more in your own personal leadership of any kind of company and developing your team.

18:35These skills will help make you a better leader, no matter what the context. And I know that I'm very excited about the book, and I'm sure a lot of people will be too. So thank you so much for joining us today. We really enjoyed having you. Shia and Craig, thank you for having me on. I appreciated sharing some of these ideas and hopefully if people pick up the book, you can get it at listentosellbook.com and it's available on Amazon and bookstores. And in the book, there are a number of QR codes. You can get some free resources, assessments and things you can download to work with your team. Also on our website, interior solutions.com, There's over 200 articles, blogs, videos, and tools that you can use to help increase your business too.

19:18So thank you for having me. And anybody that has any questions, feel free to reach out to us. Our guest today has been Mike Yesterday, co-author of the new book, Listen to Sell, How Your Mindset, Skill Set, and Human Connections Unlock Sales Performance. You can learn more about Mike as well as find links to his book and resources all on our website at businessownersradio.com. Thank you for joining us on Business Owners Radio. We hope you enjoyed today's show. As always, you can read more about each episode along with links and offers in the show notes on our website, businessownersradio.com. We want to hear your feedback.

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