The Impact of AI on Sales and Customer Buying Process W/ Jeffrey Gitomer

0:28Welcome to the Big Success Podcast. customer service, et cetera. The second segment today, like in the first segment, when we're talking about success, Jeffrey gave me a definition, by the way, that I've never really heard. So I think that's really interesting to change the way you think about success. But in the second segment, when we're talking about prospecting and loyalty and customer service, oh my God, some gems, absolute dropping bombs of knowledge that you and me need to get to make sure that we are successful in that arena. And then finally, his perspective, and I'll give it away when we go into how to go from good to great, Jeffrey actually said to me, Brad, it's not about good to great.

1:03Let me tell you the secret. The secret has gone from shit to great because you're not that good. I'm like, thanks, Jeffrey. Appreciate your feedback. But his books have been bestsellers all over the world, many different languages. He's actually runs a great podcast, Sell or Die. You'll check out me on Sell or Die with Jennifer, his wife. He's inside a club, Sales Mastery teaching. He teaches how to do podcasts. The guy's a genius. He keeps going and keeps going. This is the one, Jeffrey Gittema. So the Jeffrey Gittema, I can't believe we finally got together. I need to know a question though.

1:38What is success in the Gittema definition? What's your definition of success? I think, Brad, because I'm a family guy, I start with that. Like how close knit is my family? I have four daughters, four granddaughters. And as of last week, my first great grandchild, also a girl. So I'm nine family members, a wife, even the dogs are girls. But it's important to me to be the leader of my clan and to be a successful leader to spawn, you know, whatever my children do, whatever my grandchildren do. I want them to be success at it. So I encourage them. I coach them as much as anybody. I explained to girls, I said, listen, you can do whatever you want.

2:26Just before your head hits the ground, I'll be there to catch it. And that tells them they can go take a risk. You know, I have a 14-year-old daughter that's been to Paris nine times. So if you want to teach your kids about the world, you show them the world. So that's a very important part of success for me. The second thing is in my business, I want to be as successful for myself as I want to be for my employees, my team, and my customers. I want to be able to create a message that goes out to the world. And I've done it by writing and speaking and social posting, not just by, you know, being a good guy and going out.

3:09I can't know which is the most profitable. Here's the answer. I don't care. I'm not looking for profit in one particular element. I'm looking to be well recognized, well regarded. If you Google my name, you come up with about 400000 things and thank God none are bad. You know, none are, you know, that jackass. So I feel like reputation plays a very important part of success. And I don't post for reputation. I post for content and value. And reputation follows that. I was very lucky to have very smart parents. And so I inherited intelligence. And then I had to decide how to use it. because in your early 20s and even into my 30s, I kind of wasted it.

4:04I owned several businesses. I sold them, but my personal habits were not the greatest. I grew up in the 60s. That should explain everything. Well, let me put it this way. Bill Clinton said, I never inhaled. I never exhaled. So I think that rolls around as part of the entire process. So that brings me to a question, though, Jeffrey. When did you choose success? Because I know in life people have to at some stage choose to be better than average or choose to be successful. When did that happen to you? uh when i left new jersey i had gone through a pretty bad period of life time family breakup other issues of business and when i got to charlotte i decided oh this is my home now i'm going to build it here however go back 30 years when i was in europe in 1967 i had dropped out of college and got to Vienna, Austria and realized I did not know who the Habsburgs were because I cheated off a Louis Poland thinking I was the smartest guy in the world to get a better test grade from the guy sitting next to me.

5:25And I decided then that I was going to stay a student, even though I just dropped out of college, I was going to remain a student forever and learn one new thing every day. That was my goal. And in my one year travels in Europe, I did things like, I read the diary of Anne Frank on Anne Frank's doorstep. And I'm sitting there crying, and people are coming into Anne Frank's house and, are you okay? I'm fine, I'm fine. But you go through that revelation of life. And that tells you where you are and who you need to become, Not who you want to be, but who do you want to become? Those are very distinct things.

6:08But you work on who you want to become. You can dream about who you want to be. Is that part of your formula for success? Or what is the Jeffrey Gittimer formula? How does success happen? I have a philosophy. I give value first. I help other people. I strive to be my best at what I love to do. I establish long-term relationships with everyone and I have fun and I do that every day. And I try to make 10 people smile every day because when they smile at me, it ends up I smile back and I perform one random act of kindness every day, no matter what. Whether it's holding a door for somebody or tipping a little bit extra, that random act of kindness, no one pays me back for that random act, but the world pays me back.

7:06And when the world pays you back, it's times 10 every time. And that's, you know, that's my evolution. My parents have gone, but they're checking up on me. They're looking down and going, you know, bastard did okay. And, you know, that's part of the core of life is who are you proud of, but who makes you proud? And so when you think about that whole when you think about that whole becoming thing, how much of a difference did that make in your life, knowing that, you know, I need to become.

7:45I'll tell you, it's the essence of life, because I wake up every morning and I do things that other people don't do. I have a routine of five things that I do every day. I read, I write, I prepare, and that causes me to think and create. And I do those five things sitting in my office or sitting in a hotel room somewhere around the world. And I've done that for almost 30 years now, every day for an hour, seven days a week, doesn't matter what. I devote the first hour to me, most important person in the world. And yes, I have kids and yes, I have family. I get up before they do. You know, did they get up at six?

8:27Great. I get up at five. I'm lucky my kids like sleeping in, so I can get up before them pretty easy. So that's the way it is. So our similarity is, though, we pride ourselves in our family. Yeah. I can go to your Instagram, and I can see hundreds of pictures of you and your family. Hundreds. Yeah, the story is nothing but family. It's like, you know. So I want to ask you a question, though, because during life we have setbacks, failures, mistakes, whatever you want to call them. How does failure teach success? Well, my dad taught me early on the realities of life. He said, son, if you really want to succeed, you've got to fail a couple of times.

9:19and so after my second bankruptcy

9:25so you have to look at it it's the way you look at your at the things that happen to you and it's it's not what happens to you it's what you do with what happens to you and I've decided to take everything in a positive light so regardless of what it is I'm going to be happy. And I created a line when I first started writing in 1993, which is the essence of selling and no one uses it. Well, people have tried to appropriate it, but it's mine. I wrote it. And that is when someone gives you an objection or a barrier or refusal or whatever, you know, oh, we're not going to buy from you right now, or your price is too high or I've got a satisfactory supplier.

10:10My response is, I was hoping you would say that. And I say it with just that much enthusiasm because our best customers come from people that reject me. We're just blown away by that. They can't believe that somebody would take it that way because usually salespeople are either dejected or tell you how many miles they drove to get there or they come up with some kind of phony sales pitch bullshit. And that's not me. I teach why people buy, not how to sell. Much more powerful. And I look at it from a standpoint of, can I make somebody smile or laugh? And if I did, I win. I totally win. You're on the Big Success Podcast.

10:57This is the Jeffrey Gittimer. We're going to be back with him, man. And we are going to get into selling and how to succeed at sales and loyalty and prospecting and all those things. Come back in just a moment. You're on the Big Success Podcast with Brad Sugars. Business empires are where most people create the vast majority of their initial income and wealth. Through Brad Sugars' Entrepreneurs Event, you will learn how to turn your companies into valuable and sellable assets. Visit bradsugars.com to attend this program as a standalone or as part of Brad Sugars' Entrepreneurial University. And you're back.

11:27Big success. this little red book of selling. This is where I started with you, Jeffrey. Gosh, I forget how many years ago, but then I invited you to come to Fiji and chat with us and teach us sales. How do you succeed at sales in this day and age? What are the keys to being a successful salesperson nowadays? Well, there's three words that you have to think about in terms of selling, and they have nothing to do with sales. Three words are help customers win. If the customer feels like they have a better deal, if the customer feels like they got some kind of value or some kind of victory as a result of doing business with you, you win.

12:12And you may not win at that moment in time, but they're going to accept your call. They're going to talk to you again. They're going to go out to lunch with you. They're going to refer somebody to you. You're going to have a pool of people that will rally around you and love you. And that's all I've tried to do for the last 20-something years. The Little Red Book, there's a new edition of the Little Red Book. It's called the Classic Edition. It's 20 years old. It's the largest selling sales book of all time. And you can talk to anybody, any sales guy, and they go, yeah, yeah, I buy one for all my people.

12:49Cool. It's 20 years old, Brad. It doesn't say the word social media in it. Actually, let's dive into that. Why is it that salespeople hide behind social media so much these days? Because they have no balls. There's no sales balls involved in hiding behind a, you know, am I allowed to really swear or not? You can. We'll beep it later. All right. I'm writing a book for millennials. It's called pick up phone.

13:25That's one of the issues in selling that salespeople are waiting for the phone to ring. And it's not going to ring unless you proactively go out into the marketplace and build your brand. Your phone rings because you build your brand. My phone rings because I build my brand. That only took 20 years. Yeah. So how do I teach that to my kids? How do I teach that to my kids who won't even pick up the phone to call me? I mean, they'll text me like, Dad, stop calling me. I'm texting. I love my daughter as well. We live in a different world. Yeah. And I think that you're going to have to adapt and adopt to your world by allowing more people to have easier access.

14:04That's why I'm using AI. That's why I'm trying to appear on more people's podcasts because you don't know who their diverse listener is. But our podcast, Sell or Die, has 3 million downloads. There's a reason. Yeah, because I was on it with you. That's why there's 3 million downloads. You know, that's probably the reason. I hadn't equivocated those two things. But now that you mention it, you're probably correct. So let's talk loyalty, customer loyalty. How do you succeed at customer loyalty? You do things to serve people that they're not expecting. So, for example, if you sell a machine to somebody, you're there when it's delivered.

14:50You give them your personal cell phone number and say, listen, if anything goes wrong, don't call anybody. Just call me and I'll take care of it. You want to make sure that you celebrate their victories, not just yours. And so I want to know what happens after the customer takes ownership, not just make a sale. I'm about follow through, not about follow up. Follow up is where's my money? I'm calling about the money. Is it ready? Follow through is, hey, you're probably not going to believe this, but I ran into somebody and I think they're going to be a good customer for you. Let's have lunch. I'll bring the guy.

15:28Excellent. That's the essence of building a relationship. And loyalty, by the way. Let me define it for you in one sentence. Will you do business with me again? Will you refer me? That's it. Everything else is baloney. I'm looking at this from the perspective of people measure customer satisfaction. Biggest joke on the planet. Biggest joke on the planet. J.D. Power has the customer satisfaction awards. They give them to airlines. What could the category possibly be? You know, least shitty. That's the category. But I'm going to write a column called Could J.D. Powers Win Their Own Award? Because they don't answer their phone.

16:18They hide behind voicemail. They're all a bunch of know-it-alls. And they charge people a fortune, especially the car industry and the travel industry, to be in their, you know, circle of lousy influence. Yeah. So you wrote a book on trust. You wrote a book on service. If we combine trust and service, how does that work in your mind in this day and age? Well, if I don't trust you, I'm not going to do business with you. But there's a higher category. I have to like you. I have to believe you. I have to have confidence in you. And then I might trust you. Liking and believing and confidence leads to trust.

17:05So that's number one. Number two, the way you talk to me is going to determine how I talk to you. And keep in mind, I grew up in New Jersey where people eat their young. And I sold in New York City where up yours is a greeting. And everybody wants a bribe. So I grew up in a pretty tough environment to make millions of dollars worth of sales. But the bottom line is, the way I talk to you is going to determine the outcome. If you've ever called an insurance company for a claim, that person on the other end of the phone will say, have you read your policy? I'm like, honey, I'll give you$1 ,000 if you can find my policy.

17:47No one knows what their insurance policy is. Tell me what you can do, not what you can't do. Tell me what you can do, not what you can't do. And so those things combine to generate loyalty, to generate trust. If I know I can count on you, if you tell me I'm going to be there at 10 o 'clock, I expect you to be there at 9.58 and vice versa. If I tell you 10 o 'clock, you can bet your butt I'm going to be there. I've had the charter planes to be there on time. I've had the, you know, Whatever I had to do, go right from the airport to a seminar, not stopping to eat or pee or go to a hotel room. You do whatever it takes.

18:34You do whatever it takes. And that breeds trust and that breeds loyalty. And there's no other way to do it other than with your actions. You know how the customer service theory has sort of evolved into the customer experience process? And it's being proactive rather than reactive. What are your thoughts on how that change happened or what are the important aspects we should take from that? Well, the experience has to do with how you feel you were treated. And if you feel you were treated fairly, then you have a positive response. If you feel you're treated unfairly, you go on social media and make a stink out of it.

19:21That's the new world. So that's the new world. And I'll confidential. We're listing our property with a very large real estate company. Very, very one of the top two in the world. OK, so I get a text from my wife that the lady who's courting us to try to get the listing just sent her flowers. Now, why do you do that? You do that. And the first thing she did is say so and so text, send me flowers like, OK, cool. She gets it. She totally gets it. And she didn't send me flowers because I don't care about flowers. But if she gets to know me better, she'll know what works for me. And all you have to do to find out about the other person is Google them or go to their Facebook page.

20:13It'll tell you everything. Why do salespeople, why are they so lazy that they don't get on social media before they speak to someone? That kills me. You gave me the answer because they're lazy. And here's my statement. Most salespeople will not do the hard work that it takes to make selling easy. There are people that send me stuff that I can't. I'm going to give you one example. I've stayed in hotel rooms thousands of nights. Thousands. You have too. At the Burbank Hilton Hotel in Burbank, California, instead of a fruit basket in my room, they gave me an autographed baseball. I collect sports memorabilia.

20:57This is signed by the staff of the hotel, the Burbank Hilton Hotel. It's only been on my desk for 15 years. Let's talk digital. Digital world is taking over. you've been leading the way into that digital world, podcasts, AI, etc. How is it changing sales? How is it changing the process of customers buying? Well, at the moment, it's scaring people because they don't know how to deal with it. The first thing I thought of when I saw AI is how do I monetize it? Not how do I use it? How do I monetize it? Because that's how I was grown. That's how I was taught. how do you earn money as a result of doing this?

21:44And luckily, you and I are in the same boat. We have hundreds, thousands of hours of content that we can offer to the world through artificial intelligence if the program and platform is right and we promote it right. And we make it inexpensive enough to buy. So that's the path that I'm on right now. I've had my podcast for seven years. And it's never going to go away. The podcast is never going away. I've taught other people how to podcast. We have a class on podcasting. And there are a lot of people out there that have been very successful as a result of coming in and paying us money to take our class in podcasting.

22:19So I've been able to monetize our success. You know, you come to my library, we have$10 ,000 weekends where you come and just hang out and talk about sales. And people are happy to do that. They love to do that. They want to be here. They want to experience it. They want to feel it. Same with you. They want to go and they need to go to your event on an every year basis. They need to experience where you're growing and who you're becoming more and more every year. You can't help it. It happens. Yeah. Someone asked me yesterday about AI and they said, you know, is AI going to take over the world?

22:57And my response to that is I still go to concerts. exactly exactly you know and all of these things and you and i've seen this enough and i i want your thoughts though jeffrey every five or ten years there's another thing that's going to destroy the world and you're never going to need a salesperson you're never going to need you're never going to need how does a salesperson adapt to this current digital world how do they use it to their advantage well let's take ai as an example you may go into chat gpt or one of their one of the offshoots and ask it how to do an email or ask it how to do a tweet or how to post something.

23:33And you get back their standard response that has no humor, that's mechanically driven to you. And you have to take that. The salesperson has to take it and make it their own and customize it. It might be a time saver, but it's not a customer earner. You have to earn that customer on your own. And the salesperson is the transition person to make that happen, it's not going to replace sales. It's going to enhance sales. And the people that ignore it are going to die. And the people that embrace it are going to win. They're going to double their income. Plain and simple. Jeffrey Gittimer, The Legend of Sales.

24:09We'll be back in just a moment. We're going to talk scaling up here on the Big Success Podcast. Jeffrey Gittimer is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The Sales Bible, The Little Red Book of Selling, The Little Black Book of Connections, and The Little Gold Book of Yes Attitude. To learn more about Jeffrey Gittimer, please go to gittimer.com. All right, Jeffrey Gittimer, how does someone go from good to great? Not just okay, not just that, but a salesperson that goes from doing good to doing amazing. What's your key to that? Okay, let's start at the very beginning. I have a book in my library that says every great chess player was once a beginner.

24:53Think about that from a standpoint of selling. You started out knowing nothing. You took a job and you had to train. So, and sometimes the training was good and sometimes the training was crappy. So I'm writing a book, Brad, that says from shit to great, cause you're not that good.

25:14The reason I'm writing that is the, the good, the book from good to great has a premise of you think you're good. You may not be that good. So I'm looking at it from here's your evaluation to find out how you get to good, because if the person is not good to start out with, they're never going to get to great. So they got to good by being a student, by practicing on a daily basis, by going from proficient to excellent. And the only way you're going to get there is with repetition. You have to repeat it. So I'm going to give the fundamentals of what it takes to get good, because most people just think they're good.

25:58It's funny. I gave a speech almost 20 years ago now at the National Speakers Association, where the thing was always record your speech and have it documented and transcribed and turn it into a book. And I'm giving this speech to all these speakers. I said, let's get something straight here. Your speech is not that good. And people were howling. The best speakers in the world were at this session. They were howling. Okay. So you may be the judge of your goodness, but somebody else is judging you as well. and if they're not you know if you're not a five in today's world you're toast you're not going to you're not going to a restaurant that's got a 2.5 rating you're going to go to a restaurant that's got a 4.5 rating and so my my question is would your customers rate you a five because you can rate yourself all day long if you think it's valuable and i think it's crappy it ain't valuable if you think it's amazing and i think it's not amazing not amazing so you have to go out and look for feedback.

27:10And the one thing that people can do right now is garner social proof. Garner people that will tell you that this was impactful. It changed my life. This is the best thing ever. And go online and read the comments on your books. Read the comments on my book. Read the comments on The Little Red Book of Selling. It has almost 2 ,000 comments and it's a 4.6, 4.7 rating on the Richter scale of Amazon. And they're wonderful quotes. They're wonderful quotes. And that's the proof of who you are. I can say I'm great. Doesn't mean crap. My kids can say I'm great. Doesn't mean crap. My readers say I'm great.

27:55Ah, now I got something. Now I really have something. So it's a matter of how you grow up in life. You know, maybe you are good now, but if you want to become great, let your customers tell you how to get there. Yeah. They're going to show you the critical, you know, this was really good, but you know, your language, which I get chided for all the time. You know, I grew up in New York. I grew up in Philly. It's a different language. But the bottom line there is people will critique you and evaluate you. And you can either say, oh, that guy doesn't know what he's talking about, or you can take it seriously.

28:36So I get good when other people give me feedback. You know, I've lost customers because I said the wrong thing or I did the wrong thing. Everybody does. The question is, how do you learn from it? How do you grow from it? And how do you not make that happen again. And we're living in a woke world where people get offended by anything, anything. So that's why I'm relying on more on social media and more on technology to be able to get from good to great to legacy. So let's think about that from this perspective, buddy. how do you get someone to go from a goal of good to a goal of great? Let's forget the actual process of getting there, but even setting the goal of amazing, the goal of, you know, not a million, but a billion sort of thing, not, not a million, but a hundred million a year in sales.