Why Jeb Blount Bets on Process Over Personality for Sales Success (Ask Jeb)

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0:44All right, next up on the show is Andrew Osborne from Manhattan, Kansas. Quick story about Manhattan, Kansas. I've been there, and one of my favorite days there was the wiener dog races, right in downtown Manhattan, Kansas. A lot of fun. Awesome. Awesome. Yes. Tell me what you got going on, Andrew. Jeb, I kind of got a question for you that's kind of left field, if you will. So I don't have a polished sales background. I'm kind of new to the sales industry, originally from a manufacturing supervisor background. Okay. Looking to gain the knowledge to transition into a more sales role, right? Because I see the opportunities in a sales career.

1:24With that said, just for newbie's sake, right? Somebody new to a sales industry, somebody trying to break into the industry, how much of the sales process do you think is more of a people skills problem versus a sales mechanic problem? Wow, wow, it's a great question. So all sales is, is poetry and probability. The poetry is in the messaging, right? It's how you say things, what you say, how you ask questions, it's the art of it. And probability is the science of it. The art and science, right? It's a little bit of both. Sales is a process, a set of steps that you run through. So the mechanics of running a sales process are crucial because what the sales process does essentially is it allows you to engineer the relationship that you're building with the human being that's buying from you.

2:14When you just look at it as a chess game, there's motivation and power. So you're motivated to sell something. They're motivated to buy something. and the party with the most alternatives has the power, right? So if you've got six competitors and you're trying to sell something to this person and all six competitors are selling something similar to you, people you're selling to have more power than you, right? On the other hand, if you've got a pipeline full of opportunities and a bunch of sales you're going to make and they're jacking you around, you've got a lot of power because you can walk away.

2:47But what we're trying to do is we're trying to eliminate or neutralize their perceived alternatives to doing business with you by making them feel good about doing business with you. In other words, we wanna motivate them to do business with you. And that happens through the relationship. So when we think about the mechanics of a sales process from the prospecting call to the first time appointment to how many discovery calls you make, or if you're in a short cycle sale, the structure of your conversation that like brings them through that journey to get to a point, we're running the process so that over that time, we're building trust, we're getting familiarity, we're making them feel good, we're making them feel motivated, and we're making them say, well, these other choices that I have that I can make, those don't feel nearly as good as working with Andrew.

3:34And that's why the mechanics actually matter, right? And those little tricks and tactics, those things, tricks are for kids. Those little tactics, they always end up failing over time. It might work once or twice, but once someone faces a tactic, They figure it out. A friend of mine is a purchasing guy. He put a picture of a fish on his wall that was just ugly because he knew every salesperson would come in and ask him about the fish. It was a joke, right? Because he's like, that's how people build rapport. They ask me about things in my office, right? So you do those tricks, you lose over time.

4:04But the mechanics of how you run a process, that's basics and fundamentals. That does not change. You got to start here. You got to go here. And you're engineering the process over time to build a relationship. and the relationship matters greatly because that's why we're there. And we're not talking about making friends with people. That is not what I mean. I mean, trust, familiarity. You seem like a person that they want to do business with. They like you. They feel comfortable with you. That's what I mean by that. Now, if you're reselling to someone over and over again, like if you're building out an account and that account is going to be a long-term account for you, you're going to be selling them things for the next 10 years, then yeah, becoming friends with them and really getting into their world matters greatly.

4:50If it's a short cycle sell and you're going to see them once or twice, you're just building a relationship inside that particular bubble or that moment. But those two things matter. And if anybody tells you that one or the other doesn't matter, they're just wrong. Until robots are buying from robots, human beings buy from other human beings. And we are biased as human beings to like people and dislike people and trust people or distrust people. So the more you build the trust and the relationship with them, the more likely bending probability in your favor, they're going to buy from you. And by the way, the way I play sales is everything's about probability.

5:25Every move I make on the sales chessboard is about the probability of that particular move at that particular moment in that particular situation, getting me the outcome that I want. You've got to hold on to both of those things. And if you ask me which one matters the most, I would say process, running your sales process matters more than building the relationship, but only slightly. Because the problem with just building a relationship is that we focus our time and attention on being liked or being friends. And that friendship and that likability gets in the way of closing the sale. We're not in sales to build friends.

5:59We're in sales to make sales. The friendship matters. Your ability to run a consistent process, whether it's a single conversation or multiple conversations, will serve you way better long-term than having the gift of gab and being able to build relationships with people and taking to play golf and lunch and all those things. Those things are great, but I'll put my money on the process person way before I'll put my money on the gift of gab person, if that makes sense. Perfect, yes. And I'm actually glad you said that because coming from an operations supervisor, operate production manager, like position, I'm used to being focused on, right?

6:35Systematical was you do this to get this, to move to that. Early on in my sales career, the company that I'm doing a side hustle with, I was able to grow my sales up to 80 ,000 a month, but that was just through random, hey, buy my product, buy my product, buy my product probability. I just increased the number of reach outs in order to get that number of people to say yes. But over time, I didn't have a process. So everything started tanking. And so now my sales are down below minimum, right? And so that's where I'm starting to come through and figure out that sales process, specifically in your neck of the woods, the prospecting, right?

7:11Because all the sales that I've seen, they look at that final number. Oh, you have to make two sales. You have to make 10 sales. You have to make X amount of dollars, right? The systematical layout, that is a lag measure. That's a result measure. That's something that I can't really control. But what I can control is the prospecting. How many reach outs am I doing? How many phone calls am I doing? And now that I'm going through and implementing that and seeing those results, it's making everything a lot easier to comprehend and execute on.

8:02items so I can follow up faster. And if I need a specific detail, Plod's Recall has that ready for me. And that's why Jeb Sr. and I and all of Sales Gravy trusts our Plod Notepen S. Try Plod and stay focused on the conversation while it handles all of your notes. Go to plod.ai forward slash Jeb. That's plod.ai forward slash Jeb and use code JEB to get 10 % off your purchase. It's super important what you just said. So I want to nail this down. You're exactly right. You cannot control the outcome you can only control the activity and so the very top of the funnel is the prospecting now you can prospect wildly and just call everybody you know and you say hey wanna buy wanna buy wanna buy wanna buy or you can get targeted and you can improve the probability that the people that you're interacting with we'll have a meaningful conversation with you that will mean that they move into your sales pipeline the control is targeting who am I targeting and you can control your messaging the targeting is science the messaging is art.

9:00What I go from there is I'm looking for, you ever seen the movie Moneyball? So I'm looking for my moneyball. Whenever I'm working with clients and I'm working in their sales process, there's always a moneyball. Like there's that one metric that if you focus on that has a tendency to drive everything else. Yours is probably different than mine, but mine is first time appointments. Prospecting outreach, the activity, I count all that. We track all that. It all matters. But what matters more is how many brand new first-time appointments, FTAs is what we call them, do you have every day that are qualified?

9:34For most people on my team, and we're in a business services because we sell training to businesses and consulting to businesses, if we have two really good qualified appointments a day, we're going to win. If we have 10, about half of them are going to end up going to the next step. Half of them will qualify us out or we'll qualify them out or they won't show up or what have you. But about half of them will move to the next step. As we progress through the sales cycle, in 30 to 60 days, we'll have closed two of those. So every 10, we typically close two. Now, some of my sales reps only close one, right?

10:08Some of my sales reps only close a half. That's when we start working on the art, right? So if they're getting the first-time appointments, but they're not closing them, then it's either the appointments weren't qualified in the first place, which that means we get to go back and look at what's our targeting, or they're in the sales process and the client doesn't like them or they're not asking the right questions or the business case they're building is not relevant to the customer's business because we didn't really connect on a business acumen level with them. Like we didn't understand how their business worked or what they were trying to accomplish or the outcomes that they were trying to deliver.

10:43So then you go back to, let's work on honing our presentation skills and our messaging skills. Let's work on honing our asking questions and listening skills or let's work on, you know, business case skills, or maybe we're not getting high, wide and deep in the organization, multi-threading as we say in the modern world. But once you get the system working and you would get this from manufacturing, right? You were like in a lean manufacturing environment, right? Once you had the process working, then you can begin to apply lean or Six Sigma in the manufacturing process to begin removing the variables that then start to narrow your output in a space that is acceptable from a quality standpoint.

11:23At first, like if you open up a line, you're spraying the line with all these things. These things are good. These things are exceptional. These things are okay. But that's a really bad way to run a business. As you start running lean or running Six Sigma, you start bringing it in so that you're getting a very standard output every single time. From a manufacturing standpoint, that's exactly how you look at sales, right? So you get the system and the process down, then you look at your results, then you go back and say, where do I have variables in my system that if I can fix those variables will change or get me a better set of results so that over time, instead of what you're experiencing right now, which was up and then down, right?

12:02You get a very consistent, persistent output over time by running the system. And that's why, by the way, I put my money on a system person over a relationship person in most cases, because a system person, it's a lot easier with them to figure out what's missing than it is with a relationship person that's just a burst of energy all over the place. But we have no way of going back and figuring out where in the process things went wrong. Yeah, I appreciate all of your knowledge and all your wisdom there. I mean, I could sit here and I could just start firing off questions left and right to you because a lot of what you're talking about, I'm connecting with and I'm putting the parallels between manufacturing and sales.

12:39So I just wanted to thank you for this time and this opportunity. Appreciate that. Thanks for picking up my brand new book too. I appreciate that. Come back on and we'll take some of the other questions, you can put some of this in practice. And if you've got the 90 day to level up your sales skills, that book is like one exercise every single day, literally like having me as a coach in your back pocket. So you'll hear my voice now that you've heard my voice in the pages and you'll go practice through, just run it through that book every single day, one exercise at a time. It'll transform the way you look at sales.

13:07I'm on day five right now. It's laying the foundation for me, if you will, right? It's not just jumping in and say, Hey, this is how you have to close somebody that's laying the foundation to make sure that you have the stuff to build on. One step at a time. One step at a time. Very good. Appreciate it. Thanks for jumping on with us today, Andrew. Process gives you confidence and people skills get you connected. Ultra high performance in sales is the result of mastering both the science and the art. And it's crucial that you be a mechanic. But a perfect process isn't the finish line. Ultra high performers level up by executing the soft skills that create legendary human connections with their prospects within a well-oiled system.

13:48And remember, when it's time to go home and you are ready to give it up, make one more call. This is Jem Blunt Jr. We'll catch you next time on the Sales Gravy Podcast.

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