What we can learn from great salespeople (w/ Colin Coggins)

0:28You're listening to How to Be a Better Human. master haggler and salesperson. Despite being at most 10 years old, Ben could consistently manage to convince adults to pay a higher price or to buy an extra toy for their kid that maybe they weren't even considering. Me, on the other hand, I was not a master haggler. I was constantly throwing in extra books for free. I was trying to convince them to take the books even when they didn't want it. You like the Ramona books? Oh, you're going to love this series. Please, you got to try it. Look, I'm going to give it to you for free. Try it out. I insist.

0:58I had a lot of happy customers. And I also had a disconcertingly light money jar. And guess what? Today, I am still very bad at sales. I often underprice myself or don't reach out to someone who might hire me or book me on a show because I'm worried about bothering them. And maybe that's you too. Well, today's guest, Colin Coggins, thinks that we all need to redefine sales and realize that it is a skill that applies to all of our lives. Colin teaches a course on sales at USC, and he's author of a new book, The Unsold Mindset. Here's a clip from Colin on how he got started on this path. When I graduated college, I either had to move in with my parents or take the first job that I could find.

1:38So I took a sales job and I was really bad at it. And for two months, I didn't sell anything. And on the third month, they put me on a PIP, which I hope no one knows what that means listening to this. But if they do, or if you don't, it stands for performance improvement plan. It just means that they're going to fire me. So I was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to screw the establishment over on my way out. I'm going to dare them to fire me earlier. So, you know, I stopped abiding by the dress code. I stopped reading the script. I only asked questions I wanted to know the answers to.

2:09Like I just did everything the opposite of what I was being trained to do. And that was the month that I had broken the sales record on accident. The moment I stopped trying to be a good salesperson and I just started acting human was the moment they started treating me like a human and they stopped treating me like a salesperson. In just a moment, we're going to talk with Colin about what he has learned about sales over the years and why he thinks that it is a skill that applies to everyone, regardless of what you do for a living. But first, we're going to take a short break. I mean, it wouldn't be an episode about sales if we didn't have ads, right?

2:42This is the most thematically appropriate ad break we've ever taken. We'll be right back.

2:53Today, we're talking with Colin Coggins, professor and author and salesperson, about how we can be more effective advocates for ourself and the work we do, and why that means we need to change the way we think about selling. Hey, this is Colin Coggins. Excited to be here. I am the author of The Unsold Mindset. I also teach sales mindset for entrepreneurs at USC. I am a commercial executive, a father, a husband, and really excited to have this conversation. What would you say most people's first impression of a salesperson is? Yeah. Smarmy, manipulative, yucky. It's the question that we open up every keynote with.

3:33We ask two questions. The first question is, what do you think of when you hear the word salesperson? And no matter who is in the audience, the answers are always the same. Like nasty, yucky, pushy, aggressive, et cetera. And then the second question is, who's the greatest salesperson you can think of? And those answers are almost always the same too. The top two answers out of thousands of people are Martin Luther King Jr. and Steve Jobs. And then a close third are like, you know, siblings, kids. Jesus is a close fourth. When I look at the audience, I go, think about that incongruence. And so we wrote the book because we found over decades of research, being a practitioner, then a theorist, and then just a learner and a lover of the space and interviewing some of the greatest salespeople on the planet.

4:20They're the exact opposite of who people thought they were. It's interesting for me because I certainly come in with a negative predisposition to the word sales and to the concept of selling. And in some ways, like my my gut reaction when you tell me like Martin Luther King was a great salesperson is to be like, oh, that's like cheapening the legacy of Dr. King. And I know that's not what you mean. And I think that one of the really interesting parts for me of reading your book and talking to you is how you redefine what the word sales means. So I want you to get in on that, like address the people who are skeptical right away.

4:55I wasn't the one to redefine the word sales. It was all of these incredible people that didn't have sales in their title that were being revered as great salespeople. We were like, wait a minute. We thought we were writing a book about sales professionals and why they're so good. Why are all of these great, phenomenal sales professionals idols, not salespeople? We went to the number one salesperson at Beyond Meat. We're like, hey, who's the greatest salesperson you know? And they're like, John Wexler, the head of influencer marketing at Adidas. Like, that doesn't sound like a salesperson. And we go to John and start talking to him and he talks about this purpose driven lifestyle that he has and empowering the people around them to make these decisions that will move the world.

5:40He's literally redefining what it means to sell. And this is what I think is so interesting, right? Is that we have these predispositions towards thinking that sales is something gross or manipulative or coercive. And then when you go to figure out the people who are really good at it, they completely embody the opposite of that. So I know this is literally asking you to sum up your whole book, but like what makes a good salesperson? What makes a great salesperson? I want to start by saying we intentionally use the word sales because it's so polarizing. Because what we were finding is in the workforce, all of these new entrants that were coming in from college, they did not know how to move people.

6:24So regardless of if you are an engineer or a marketer, like if you are changing your world or anybody's world, if you're changing the world, you can't do it without moving people. Here's the summary of the book. Everyone is either selling an idea, selling themselves, selling a product or a service, even if you think it's a bad word or not. Typically, what ends up happening, especially with people that don't have sales in their title, when the parent has to sell the kid on eating vegetables, okay? Or when the founder has to sell the bank on investing or when you have to sell your friends on which season of The Office to watch.

7:01Like any of these things, right? Like when you have to sell yourself in an interview to get the job. All of us, most of us, decide that the imperfect, authentic version of ourself is not fit for that role. So we try to be the best version of ourself in the interview, the best version of ourself or the version of ourself that would get your kid to eat vegetables, right? The cooler version or the more persuasive version. And meanwhile, that's the opposite of what great sellers do. Like great sellers are really good at being hyper authentic. Not like in this like buzzwordy way. They give themselves permission to let people know that they are very imperfect and a lot like them and they're better at most people at getting people to see themselves in them immediately.

7:50No one ever talks about agency when it comes to selling because normally that word is reserved for leadership. You know, it's like to create agency in the people that you are speaking with so that they feel like they are part of the decision-making process. That's what the greatest sellers on the planet do. That's why the greatest sellers on the planet are the greatest leader, period. Like they'll ask someone a question they've never heard before. That person will answer that question, ideate for the first time in real time. And whatever that answer is, that's that person's answer. Like they weren't sold on that answer.

8:24They took ownership in that answer. So much of your book is saying like, actually care about the person. Like if you want to win someone over to your way of thinking, like hear them, hear their concerns and then actually authentically respond to them. Don't try and pretend like you're making them think you're responding to their concerns while you're actually just being some sort of a robot. It's like, how can you get more into the human connection of it all? Yeah, and I don't know why, but for the last couple of decades, the books out there have been focusing on, not all of them, but a lot of them, focusing on the tactics.

8:59You know, like, hey, somebody somewhere realized that if you can mirror the body movements of someone that you're talking to, then they will automatically, you know, like be more engaged with you. like this conversation of mirroring. That was taught in a book. So you had a generation of salespeople that if somebody was talking and they put their hand on their face like this, someone else would put their hand on their face like this. But no one ever wrote the book that was talking about why great salespeople were so engaged in the first place that the result was mirroring. You talk about how one of the things that a great salesperson can do to build a connection with someone who they're trying to win over is to let them in on what they're thinking.

9:41to kind of give, like let them in on the self-talk so you know what's happening inside their head. You talk about how those moments where people do things like that, where they let us know what's happening in their head so we don't think that they're not aware of what's going on, that really builds an immediate connection between the person who's being pitched, for lack of a better word, and the person who's doing the pitching. You're talking about two really interesting points in the book. One is this topic called show your work. And then the other is one of the byproducts of this hyper-authenticity where almost everyone we talk to literally talk to themselves out loud in front of us.

10:18Sort of two things in the same. Show your work is just akin to like math class. You would get the credit for showing your work and the answer, not just the answer. I'll have students all the time come up to me and they'll be like, I don't want this interviewer, this hiring manager to think I'm just another entitled USC kid that just wants an internship. Like, what do I do? They're like, say that. Go into the interview and say, I have to tell you, I have been thinking a lot about not wanting to show up as just another entitled USC kid. And how do I differentiate myself? But as I was doing research on you, I found that mentorship played a big role in your career trajectory.

10:57So I figured, worst case scenario, you were probably an entitled punk USC kid at one point. These are like real conversations that have happened that have gotten people jobs. You know, like for some strange reason, most of us hide like the imperfect part of us because we want people to think that we are better than that. But most people like people like themselves and nobody's perfect. And really great salespeople are just really good at giving themselves permission to be imperfect because they are very confident the person they're talking to is absolutely not perfect. And you'll, you know, we were talking to someone, we interviewed the top trial lawyer in California and he's telling the story about the judge asked him to repeat himself.

11:43And he looks at the judge, looks at the jury, looks up at the ceiling and goes, what did I just say? The jury starts laughing just like you do. He looks at the judge. He's like, I have no idea what I just said. He was like, I knew I had the jury because that was the moment that they realized that even though I was a lawyer, even though I was a professional, for those three seconds, they realized the human in me. This permission that these people are giving themselves to be human for us came sort of full circle during lockdown. There were this group of people across multiple verticals during lockdown that were doing really well, like at sales, except they were underperformers before lockdown.

12:25And so we were like, why is it that they're doing so well? So we start to look at them and listen to their conversations. And the beginning of most of their conversations sounded identical. They got on the call and they were like, hey, I just want to point out the elephant in the room. I don't even know if we should be having this conversation right now. That's my two-year-old behind me. That's my wife with a mask trying to chase him. I don't even know if we should be in the same room. That's homeschooling that's not getting done. And that's laundry that's not getting done. And these people would immediately reciprocate.

12:57They'd be like, thank God you said this. This is my first pandemic too. This is so weird. I have never seen a prospect and a seller get on the same page and catch a vibe quicker than during lockdown with this group of people. And it was because they knew without a shadow of a doubt that the person on the other end of the Zoom was also in a very imperfect situation. That's a microcosm of what we saw across all of these great sellers. You know, performing and comedy and working in entertainment, there's so much of having to win people over. And, you know, this is one of the things that I think people forget the most when they are first starting out performing, especially like live comedy on stage, is that you think that what you want to do is to do it perfectly, to like hit the lines, the way that you wrote them and to perform it smoothly.

13:48But what the audience loves is for you to acknowledge what's happening in real life. If you mess something up for you to say it, if someone sneezes in the room to say, bless you or gesundheit or acknowledge it, right? Those get huge laughs, even though they're not even jokes, because you're just, like you said, you're acknowledging, like I'm a person, you're a person, we're in this real dialogue together. Like that's what sales is about. Like you want someone to look for the good in what you're saying, look for the good in you. You essentially want them to believe in you, Right. Like that doesn't happen unless you can reciprocate that.

14:17Like you better be looking for the good in your audience. Right. You better be like believing in them.

14:25I am looking for the good in you right now, audience, and I am choosing to believe that you are going to stick around through this quick ad break. We will be right back.

14:40And we are back. I often say that if you really want to have like a great interview with someone, it's a lot like trying to go on a great date, right? You have to like fall a little bit in love. You have to be like curious about them. You have to be excited about what they're saying and be like, oh, tell me more. No, I want to know. I'm trying to connect with you. And that's exactly what you say about great salespeople, too, is that that weirdly you have to fall a little bit in love with the person that you're talking to. You have to tell them why you're excited about them and make a real actual connection.

15:07That's how you convince people to get on the same team as you. If you're going to talk to someone, regardless if they're interviewing you or you're trying to sell them something, you're trying to garner investments, it doesn't matter. Spend three minutes looking for three things that you could love about this person. What are three things you hope to be true about this person? Because we talked earlier about how the greatest sellers are asking the greatest questions. These aren't leading questions that they know the answers to and the other person doesn't. These are questions they really want to know the answers to that they don't.

15:37We have a great example in the book about the salesperson who refused to do this exercise where we ask people to take three minutes and find three things that they love about the person they're about to meet with. And this guy was like a vet, very mature gentleman, decades my senior, and was like, I'm not falling in love with anybody, dude. In fact, I don't need this. Look at the leaderboard. I'm doing just fine. And he was. Everybody else sucked. He was the only one. So I was like, hey, this is going to be a great example. You're our beacon. If you can do this, everyone else will follow. And he's like, I'm not doing it.

16:15And I went, why? And he's like, it's not a qualified lead. I'm like, do it anyways. We'll give the unqualified lead to a rookie. He opens up his laptop. Everyone gets around him. And he starts researching. Clock's on. Three minutes. Go. About 30 seconds in, you hear this, huh? I'm like, what? What? What? And he goes, the guy graduated around the same time I did. And I go, you love that? You love that he's the same age as you? And he goes, no, I don't love that. I'm like, okay. Goes a little further, 20 seconds later, you get the next, huh? What? The guy went to University of Minnesota. Did you go to the university?

16:50You love University of Minnesota? No, I don't love the University. Okay. And then before he puts his fingers back on the laptop, he looks back up at me like, fine, I'll just give it to you, dude. Bob Dylan went to the University of Minnesota. Bob Dylan is around my age. And yes, I love Bob Dylan. And it was this perfect example for the sales team to see someone so stodgy, like would never do this, getting really excited to find out if this person is who he hoped that this person would be. Three minutes is up. It was great. We thanked him. And we go to give the lead to a rookie. Not a chance. He's like, give me that lead.

17:27There's no way I spent three minutes trying to fall in love to not figure out if this dude knew Dylan or not. It was a bro-fest. An unattractive, horrible, unadulterated bro-fest. He did love Dylan. They were the same age. They damn near looked alike. It was the weirdest thing ever. The guy buys. Remember, the guy was just falling in love with the idea of who he could be. He found three things he hoped. And then he went and he affirmed that they were right. And he was asking questions that this dude never had heard before. And then this guy buys, the guy comes back into, and this is the lesson in it all.

18:04He comes back into the room. We're doing an after action review. And the gentleman goes, I just want all of you to know that person did not buy because I fell in love with him. He bought because I had a product and it had value and it fit his need. And I was like, you're a hundred percent right. Except the whole room knows you would have never even been talking to him in the first place. How do you find a connection so that you can open the door so that if you do have something to deliver, they can actually hear that? We do this fall in love exercise in our class where we'll pair students up and we'll go, you have three minutes to fall in love with each other.

18:39We'll only give you one hint. The hint is, what questions would you need answers to to actually fall in love with someone? We're not saying you're going to be able to, but if you could, what were the questions that you would need to ask, to know the answers, to know if it was even possible. And three minutes is up and everyone's like, the F word comes out. It was fate, right? Like we both care so much about preserving like the wildlife. We both transitioned out of majors at a similar time. We both really love traveling. They're answering the question, at what point did you fall in love? The moment I saw myself in them.

19:21Yeah. So in the book you interview, I run from General Stanley McChrystal to tech execs to Snoop Dogg. So what connects all of those people? Because that's a pretty wide ranging group right there. Yeah. And it's going to sound wild, but here's the truth. They all sell exactly the same. All of them. And they don't even know it. And that was the best part of the book. When we interviewed Snoop and we were like, hey, Snoop, why does everyone say that you're the greatest salesperson I know? He was like, my mom told me once, master doing you and everything else will be the same. I mean, everything else will be okay.

19:53Then we go to Chef Roy Chor. Like, why does everyone say that you're such a great salesperson? And he's like, well, because I'm an introvert. So I don't talk a lot. And when I do talk, people listen. And I tell them what's important to me. And I've lived multiple authentic lives. And depending on if I'm in the boardroom or in the chef, I am my most authentic self. And I'm just telling them the truth. You know, we go to General Stanley McChrystal, and he's talking about being intentionally ignorant to parts of his job so that he can show up authentically curious and let other people that he's hired do their job.

20:28All of these people, all the way down to these, like, great sales professionals, they weren't doing the same thing, but they all talked about how they thought the exact same way. So with that in mind, what are three things that any person who's listening can practically put into their life that you'd advise them to start doing right now? Yeah. Number one, realize that who people hope you are and who people expect you are. You know, those are two different things. People might, you know, if you're trying to raise money, if you're interviewing for a job, people might expect you to know all your stuff.

21:06But people hope that you're like them. You know, people hope that you're a lot more real and a lot more like them and a lot more interesting and imperfect and trying to figure it out. That's what people hope you are. You know, ask yourself some impactful questions and show up as the person that people hope you are, not the person that they expect you to be. The second one is I think the love three by three is really important, even though it sounds cheesy. Like, try it out. The next time that you're going to go into a meeting, spend three minutes and look for three things that you could love about this person.

21:36Like, who you hope this person could be. And I think the third thing is another contrasting idea. What you get paid to do and what you love doing aren't always the same thing. But a lot of times there are areas in what you get paid to do that you do love, like the stuff that you would do for free. So this idea like isolate what you love and then the stuff that you don't, see if it's possible for you to intelligently and intentionally ignore those parts of your job. There's a kind of an interesting meta example here because you're writing a book about how to be a great salesperson and how selling is counterintuitive and people who don't think that they need to sell can actually change their lives by selling.

22:20So that's the premise of this book. But then the meta part is you had to sell that book. So I wonder if you can give us like a specific example of how you approached the process of being like, I want to go from this book being an idea to being a book that people can buy and how that used some of the lessons that you actually ended up writing in the book. So this concept in the book, we call it celebrating the process. Because sales is a really long sales cycle. And any sale that you're doing, if it's teaching your kid to read or if it's getting an investment or getting a job, it doesn't happen in a week.

22:55Sometimes it takes 18 months, months at least. And if you only celebrate when you win, quote unquote, you're going to have a really miserable 18 months. And so early on in the book writing process, we really wanted to eat our own dog food when it came to celebrating the process. So every time that we failed, and we failed a lot, we would figure out a way to have a celebration. Like, not always to our wives, you know, smiley faces. They weren't the happiest about it sometimes. But we were like, if we can't figure out a way to celebrate when we're wrong, right, then we won't be able to celebrate the learning from it.

23:38And that was really important because that was the whole part of the book was that these great salespeople, like they were all about prolonged gratification. So when they got a good yes, they would celebrate. When they asked a good question, they would celebrate. When they got a great objection, they would celebrate. When they got a no, they would celebrate. It was this idea like getting no's is your job and getting the same no twice means you're not doing your job. I'll give you an example. We wrote a book, hundreds of pages, and took it to this person at Talent Entertainment and Talent Agency for famous people, not for people like us.

24:10But we were able to take it to her. And she read it and she was like, this is really good. Like, we're not going to rep you as an agent because you're not famous, but we'll tell you what. We will tell you who to go to. Here are the top five nonfiction business book agents in New York. Went to New York, fell in love with all five of them. And the last one of the day was the one who was like, hey, this is not how this works. This is good, but you're going to throw this away. If you want a real publishing deal, you're going to have to write a proposal. And we're like, how long is the proposal? It's like 100 pages.

24:45And then you'll have to rewrite the book once you get the deal. And we're like, damn, we just wrote an entire book and she's telling us, okay, fine. So we sign with her, proverbially sign with her. And then we turn in our proposal two weeks later. It takes her two weeks to get the proposal back to us. And she probably had more red lines than we had words. Like she ripped it apart. And then for a year and a half, we wrote thousands and thousands of pages. And you've never seen anybody celebrate when it was the hardest to celebrate. Like every time she sent it back with red lines, we were like, damn it.

25:24let's go to the bar. Damn it. Let's go on a hike. Damn it. We were trying to figure it out. And then one day she was just like, all right, we're good. And we were like, what does that mean? She was like, I'm taking it to auction. And we were like, what? And then the next day she's like, yep, okay. We got bids. Bids, bids, bids. Bids are like, oh my God, this is happening. And then we find out that the publishing world is so amazing. HarperCollins has been a family to us. They took a shot on two unknown authors. They didn't have to take that shot. And they treated us like we were going to debut on the Wall Street Journal list.

25:56And all of the celebrating felt like it was all worth it when we had a reason to celebrate. And eventually the book came out. I love it. Well, Colin Coggins, thank you so much for being here. It's been a pleasure talking to you. This was awesome. Thanks for having me, Chris.

26:14That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. thank you so much to today's guest, Colin Coggins. I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and information about my live comedy shows at chrisduffycomedy.com. How to be a better human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniela Balarezzo, Whitney Pennington Rogers, and Jimmy Gutierrez, who are currently all doing deep research on each other in order to prepare for their next conversation. Every episode of our show is professionally fact-checked. This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Mateus Salas.

26:45They are both unafraid to hand out scripts with red lines and more red lines and more red lines, all in pursuit of the truth. On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team that refuses to make an offer every time I tell them that I have a bridge that I would like to sell them. Morgan Flannery, Rosalyn Tortosilius, Patrick Grant, and Jocelyn Gonzalez. And of course, thanks to you for listening to our show and making this all possible. If you're listening on Apple, please leave us a five-star rating and review. And if you're listening on the Spotify app, we've got a discussion question up on mobile that we would love to hear your answer to.

27:18We will be back next week with even more episodes of How to Be a Better Human. Thanks again for listening.