Understanding the Value YOU Bring to the Sales Process: From Sales Guru Wes Schaeffer

0:00I've never wanted anyone to say, that damn Wes, he tricked me, he pressured me, he used hypnosis, he threatened me with his jujitsu so I gave him money and now I'm screwed because I have this software. and nobody has ever said that about me. How do you get people to make a decision in the days of not too little information, but now with too much information? Wes Schaefer's gonna show you how. Launch. Launch it, launch it, launch it. Get after it, man. One-year goals are fine. 100-year goals, but what are you gonna do in the next 15 minutes? What are you gonna do this quarter? Don't tell me what the end of 2025 is gonna be.

0:38How's the end of January gonna be? You gotta start by getting into the mind of the prospect. So Wes, tell me your definition of success. How do you see it? Doing what you want when you want it. How did you come to that though? Is that like, because I don't know, as a young man, my definition shifted as I got older and had kids and built businesses and stuff. Where did yours come from? Sure. I mean, you know, growing up, when I was young, we had money. when I was older but young. We didn't have money. And so you tend to kind of define things or set goals based on what you lack. And you don't appreciate the old acres of diamonds, right?

1:29You're sitting on top of so many good things. But I shared it yesterday in our HOA group because we got some negative Nancys. and two guys are on a bus and one's looking at the wall, you know, the rock wall. The other one's looking out in the valley. And so it's like, where are you looking, right? And so, you know, 29 years of marriage, seven kids, fourth grandkid on the way. It's like, okay. I mean, how I define success differs. You know, all the kids, the kids live close. The farthest is in San Francisco. and he pops down regularly, you know, a 90-minute flight. Everyone else is within an hour of us.

2:12And the married kids with kids are 10 minutes away. So, you know, we have dinner every Sunday night at a minimum with them. But, you know, we watch the grandkids multiple times a week. My mother-in-law's been sick. And, you know, my oldest daughter came over last night, brought the grandkids, cooked dinner for all of us. Are there any milestones where that shifted, where the definition shifted for you? I don't know that it was any big earthquake kind of moment. It's just I had a tumultuous W-2 career. Most entrepreneurs, most entrepreneurial people did. Well, I mean, it wasn't of my doing. You know, I caved to family pressure when I got out of the Air Force, made a decision I should not have based on that.

3:06That went sideways. It was not of my doing. I jumped into the fire and did great at another company that decided to go bankrupt a year and a half after I joined. Okay. I was number 26 out of 2 ,200 salespeople in my first year. Was promoted to general manager. And the company started to fail. I got into high tech at the P in 2000, right? The dot com and the dot com implosion. Dude, wherever I go, short that stock. OK, because it's it's crater. So it bounced around in high tech. I would do well. I was laid off and I was over quota. You know, I was one of three people out of 33 salespeople that was over quota.

3:59Three. And they laid me off. So, I was like, well, hell, if it's just chaotic as an employee, it can't be any worse working for myself. You know, so in the early days, just grinding it out. I'm like, I got to make money. And then, you know, and the funny thing is, like, I'm simple, man. My wife pays the bills. Like, I don't need much. you know, and so we've got some investments and some things are working and it's like, okay, I don't have a private jet, but I train jujitsu for two hours a day, six days a week and block off my calendar and say no to a lot of people. So it feels pretty good. You know, it's interesting how success, and I want to go back to your experience because I think it's really important people understand that the jump into your own business is never as bad as what people seem to think it is.

5:00How do you, when you're talking to someone about that, how do you help them understand the distinctions that you found over your career of moving across and taking charge? Because now you're crushing it at the other end, but there's that step that a lot of people like, should I, shouldn't I, can I, will I? Well, I'm going to disagree with you a little bit. It can be hard. Okay. It was hard. I've had, I'm coming up on 700 interviews on the sales podcast and you've been on a couple of times. I speak with a lot of entrepreneurs that did their own thing. and the common thread was everyone either built up a nest egg, right?

5:50So they had some runway. They prepared kind of on the side. They jumped into something that they either had experience in, okay? I just had a friend of mine, Nicole Lucas, on my podcast. She's been in insurance sales for 23 years. And when she went out on her own, she was nervous. You know, and she switched from personal to commercial, but she's killing it. You know, she didn't jump out of insurance and become, you know, a hang glider pilot. Right? Now, if she had done that on the side for a hobby, okay. So it's, you have to make sure, I tell people all the time, it's not the end of the world to be an employee.

6:38Okay, one of my best friends, an early sales mentor, has never been on his own. And he is literally the number one salesman at a major, like a Fortune 50 software company. Okay, he's killing it. I could never do that. I could maybe go back in time and do it now. I was never patient enough. When things are dumb and inefficient and it's like, you want me to update Salesforce.com and create an Excel spreadsheet and send it to you as a PDF? No, kiss my ass. I would rather sell solar door to door, you know, sell vacuum cleaners than do stupid stuff. So that's just me, right? So, but as long, if you have a plan, I had a sales coach, a sales mentor.

7:25I became a licensee of his. So I had intellectual property. I had a process that I could follow, but it was on my own terms. and so that made the transition much easier for me. Yeah, I think that we definitely agree it's hard work to go into business for yourself but if you do it the right way and let's talk, we're going to get into sales and marketing in a minute and if you follow a lot of the advice that Wes will give you, then holy heck, it can be easier than a lot of people make it and that's for sure. I just want to ask, though, do you have like a ingredients list for success or a formula for success that if you do these five things or these five things are always present or however many things are always present when someone is successful?

8:18Well, are we talking about like sales success? Yeah, we can talk sales success. Let's dive into that because I think that's an easy one for us to give definition to. Well, I mean, I just want to make sure I answer it from the right angle. right? Because how we define success, it varies for everybody, right? But I mean, we're talking business and consulting and whatnot, right? So most people, when they start out, if we're talking about entrepreneurs and smaller businesses, most people under value their skills, right? There's a real thing called the curse of knowledge. When you do something a lot for a long time, you think it's common knowledge.

9:09You know, that's nothing. So don't price your services on the effort it takes you. Right? Because I just had surgery a couple months ago. It took the surgeon 15 minutes to do what would take me 12 to 15 years to learn how to do if I started today. Okay? So you have to price your services on the value it provides. How do you know the value it provides? You have to ask. But it's not easy to ask that question. Prospects will play those cards close to the vest because they've been screwed over by greedy commission-breath salespeople. And so they're like, well, just send us a proposal. And so they turn into quote monkeys, you know, spraying and praying, hoping they price it right.

10:06So you have to understand the value you bring. You have to understand how to get the prospect to quantify their pain. Okay. And until they do that, any proposal you give them is, it's a pipe dream. It's a wish. It's a wing and a prayer. and and by personality types you know you can look at disc or myers-briggs or whatever and there's all kind of good ones but in general if you follow the roughly the disc the myers-briggs we all fall into about four about four camps and and so naturally we're going to get along with about a quarter of the population without even trying you know so those are the easier sales so now you have to look at the others because to succeed in sales we i have to match how you buy i have to adjust my sales process to match how you buy if i really want to grow sales otherwise i'll just naturally close a certain percentage and i need to be happy with that so but if i can understand people you know i'm just hammering the the old quote from robert collier it's about 100 years old, you know, the, that we must enter the conversation going on in the mind of the prospect, you know, so are we seeking to serve?

11:30Because sometimes the answer is no. Like I've sold software for a long time for small businesses. And I tell more people no than yes, because they'll come to me saying they want, they want infusion software, they want, or, you know, keep or HubSpot or Salesforce. And I'm like, no, you're not ready. You're not ready. You know, I'll say, what do you have now? I have Salesforce. I want to switch to HubSpot. Okay. I make more money if you switch to HubSpot. I'm like, why do you want to switch? You know, you probably don't utilize what you currently have. Okay. And so nine times out of 10, it's better to stay where you are and optimize the tools you have than make the switch.

12:12And so, but I've just always been that way. I've never wanted anyone to say, that damn Wes, he tricked me, he pressured me, he used NLP, he used hypnosis, he threatened me with his jujitsu, so I gave him money and now I'm screwed because I have this software. Nobody has ever said that about me. Let's go back to that pain point thing because I think there's nowhere near enough digging into the pain of people. There's way too much celebrating what the benefits of the thing is. Take me more into your thoughts on that because I love some of the perspectives I've read of yours and listened to of yours over the years.

12:53Men are bad at this especially because we want to just solve problems. You know, if you've been married more than a minute, your wife has come in frustrated and started out with, I don't need you to solve this. I just got to vent. And again, the curse of knowledge. We want to jump in and fix it. As soon as we hear something, hey, I have a headache. I've got aspirin. Hey, I've got brain surgery. You know, maybe I'm just dehydrated. I need a glass of water. You know, so we need to be, we have to be better at listening and diagnosing, you know. But we have to be comfortable being in the presence of uncomfortable people.

13:37And we have to be comfortable making them uncomfortable. Okay? And so, you know, the surgery I had, right, was with a urologist. Hello? That's uncomfortable. And we weren't alone. There's a room full of people in there saying, Hey, let's shave that thing. let's get to work and i'm like oh my gosh and man and i know this guy from church right it's so i did not want to be that intimate with him this was another day this was this was him standing here like you and me he literally the nurse prepped everything he walked in and son he grabbed me and went to work i mean literally not 30 seconds after he entered the room okay It's a funny analogy, but it's 100 % true.

14:28He was comfortable being in the presence of me being uncomfortable. He was comfortable making me uncomfortable because he had to do his job. So if you and I are talking, I'm like, Brad, what's going on? I need some software. Why do you need software? Most salespeople right there mess up. I've got software. I've got blue software. I've got red software. I've got blinky software. I've got remote software. Like, bro, slow your roll. So it's like, why do you need software? What kind of software? I need a CRM. Why do you need a CRM? What are you doing right now? Are you switching from something or is it total chaos and you need to create systems?

15:02Yeah, I'm switching from something. How long have you had it? Why is it an issue? Who else besides you cares? So, you know, and I'm rapid firing this for the, just to be concise here and quick, but the reality is this, this may be a long drawn out process. You've got to be comfortable. If, if you feel like I'm interrogating you, you're going to back off. Okay. But it's very conversational. Why is that an issue? You know, what's going on? Tell me about the size of your company. You know, in round numbers, how is this impacting your bottom line? Well, I'm not comfortable answering that. Well, I can't really make a recommendation.

15:36I mean, if you want some, some, you know, broad numbers, you know,$50 a month,$50 ,000 a month, is that good enough? You know, if you can answer a few questions, I can narrow this down for you and we can, we can get pretty precise. So you've got to be willing to, you know, cause, cause once you strike a nerve, once they feel open with you, you can't get them off the phone, you know? And then it's like, okay, I see what's going on here now. So if you tell me, you know, you've got a 50 person team and, and, you know, you're 20 efficiencies are 20 % off because of this, that, and the other, you know, you're doing$10 million and you know, 20%.

16:15Okay. That's$2 million. You know? So I'm like, man, If I can, for$50 ,000, for$100 ,000, you know, software plus services, get it set up, train your team, blah, blah, blah, take six months. You know, if it costs you$100 ,000 to solve a$2 million pain, any reason you wouldn't move forward with that? Not at all. Okay, easy peasy. I've had to teach my people to slow down sometimes because even like a couple of days from when you get the prospect to fill in the questionnaire type thing, And they fill in the questionnaire and go, I don't even know the answer to some of these questions. They say, good, let them sit with that for 48 hours.

16:59Let them live in the pain. How do you teach people to slow down a little on that and get to sit in the pain, I guess? I mean, it's a cultural thing, right? It's a training thing. if salespeople feel under the gun, they're going to make sloppy decisions. Okay. So you have to, and that comes down to recruiting, right? And it comes down to systems and processes. What, what do you give your people? Cause in, from the sales standpoint, you've got to, I always say you manage activity and you pay on results. So are you giving the people, your sales teams, the right activity because the sale, closing sales is a lagging indicator, just like weight loss.

17:51You know, it's the beginning of the year. Hey, I'm going to lose 30 pounds in 90 days. Well, everything matters. Do you drink black coffee or do you put cream and sugar in it? That adds up over 90 days. Okay. It's a lagging indicator. You look back and say, did I do the right things? Because I can't force someone to buy from me. if I'm doing the right activities every single day, every 15 minute interval of every single day, the opportunities are going to be coming in. And when I have a big fat full pipeline, I can almost have like, I don't give a crap attitude. And there's a fine line between being cocky and arrogant and being like just laid back.

18:31Like, Hey man, it's okay if you don't buy from me today. It's okay. So how do you instill that in your people? Right? It, I mean, it's, it comes from the top, right? You gotta, you gotta help them be comfortable, but you gotta kind of lord it over them. Like, here's what, here's what I expect you to do every day, you know? And I'm not big brother, but, uh, I am the boss. You know, if you're hitting your numbers, you can do whatever you want. You can go golfing, whatever. I don't care. If you're not hitting your numbers, you got to do this. And chances are, if you don't do this, you won't hit your numbers.

19:08So good luck. Yeah, I do that. I've got marketers on the team and they, I mean, they lead generators essentially. And if they're working one hour a day and producing the 10 leads a day that they need to produce, good for them. If they're working eight hours a day and still only getting five leads, eh, bad for them. You know, that's the thing. I want to talk more about the marketing leading into sales today, because I think there's been some stuff that you've taught, and I love the way that, even since COVID, how there's more and more focus on marketing, and you, you know, HubSpot, we use HubSpot, we love the fact that it scores our prospects, but it gives them a lot more education along the way to the buying process.

19:53take me through how you see that shift and how it's been made over the last few years and even before COVID I guess it started yeah the internet and then social media I think are the biggest things that shifted how sales happen because like before the internet we didn't have the info right the salesperson was the keeper of the knowledge if you wanted to buy a car you had to go in and you had to haggle and endure well now you can download a car fax you can you can get the MSRP You can haggle online. So now the salesperson, our role is much more of reassuring the prospect that they're making the right choice.

20:31Because before they had lack of information and couldn't make a decision. Now they have too much information and they can't make a decision. Yeah. I hadn't thought of it that way. We have to help them sort, sift, and separate. Right? And so marketing, it's such a fractured world. It's so noisy and chaotic.

20:58I've got a thing I call process before login. And I make people get off the computer and write on a piece of paper, put it on a whiteboard. We use the big sticky notes, the huge ones, and we'll write them out and stick them on the wall. We do the processes. and it's like just think through what do you want to have happen and then let's go searching for those kind of tools so your marketing you know again we must enter the conversation going on the mind of the prospect everybody's got multiple screens multiple tabs multiple devices whatsapp is pinging telegram discord speaker whatever on on twitter now facebook emails things are piling up on our desk and now we see an ad or we get a call okay i like that thing boom i tell people all the time i you better be following up because i don't even read the things i want to read on time yeah so you send me a one-off message like interesting yes it's an athorn you better follow up you know And I've always told people this.

22:07They try to get too cute, too in-depth, too profound with some marketing. But it needs to be like courting. It's the congruency and consistently showing up. You remember Back to the Future when he goes back, he's got his dad. He's got to get them to go on a first date. And he gives them a script and he looks at her. He says, you are my density. And he looks back at his card. Destiny, destiny, you are my destiny. Right? He delivered it incorrectly, but he delivered it sincerely. And because he kept showing up, he won her over. So maybe send shorter nuggets of information, but do it more often. Send it as an email.

23:02Send it as an audio file. Send it as a GIF. Send it as a video they can watch. Mail them something. You know, but that consistency and congruency, you know, it's got to, you can't be Neiman Marcus one day and Walmart the next. It confuses the prospect. Like, well, who is this guy? What are you, what's really going on here? And a confused mind says no. So be consistent, but be steady, right? Congruent. Always kind of the same look and feel, the same warm and fuzzy, you know, and you'll win them over. Yeah. I want to go back into that too much info thing. How do salespeople today help people make decisions given the fact that there is just so much noise out there?

23:55It goes back to asking the questions. You know, it's like, how do people show up? So we have to adjust how we sell to match how they buy. When my wife goes shopping, God bless her, she still writes everything down in the notebook. Okay? She'll have all these tabs open, but she's writing. So when she shows up at your store, she's referencing this big notebook. Okay? So right off the bat, I recognize. Now, there are still some dummies, I'll just put it mildly, that would look down on her, talk down on her. You're a woman. This is a big purchase. You don't really know. Look, set that aside. Let me show you what's really going on.

24:41Well, I'm just going to sit back behind one of those police shields because she's about to rip your head off. Okay? So when they show up like that, say, I can see you've done some research. What have you found? What questions are still unanswered? Oh, I've got them answered. I'm just deciding between you and them. Fantastic. May I ask you, what are your top three non-negotiable criteria that will help you realize that you're making the right decision? Wow, never really thought of that. That's when you know you're on the right track. Your goal is to ask a question that they cannot answer. That's how you prove your competency.

25:25okay because if i just start rattling off and i ask this question all the time when i do live training in a group and there's women there ideally hopefully because women go to doctors men don't go to doctors if i'd gone to a doctor a year ago i could have alleviated a whole lot of pain in the last three months but i digress women go to a doctor and i'll say hey who said the same doctor for 10 or more years and several hands will go up so i'll pick one i'll say do you know where your doctor went to school? One out of 10 will say, oh, I think they went to UCLA, whatever. Okay. Do you know where they go to medical school?

26:00Oh, I don't know. Where'd they do their residency? I don't know. What brand of mammogram x-ray equipment do they use? I have no idea. Yet you've gone to this doctor for 10, 15, 20 years. You don't know where they went to school? Do they use GE? Do they use whatever? Why do you trust them? They're like, they just treat me right. They spend time with me. We get to know each other. They know me. They know my history. Oh, okay. So then it kind of hits home. They're like, I don't need to rattle all this stuff off to most people. I just have to get them thinking about something. I got to bring something up they haven't considered.

26:43That's how they know I'm the expert because I know enough to dig in to where they haven't even gone. And then hopefully I have an answer, right? I train all of my clients, I push them as much as I can to write, to write every day. Look at the questions that you get. Look at Reddit or Quora. See what questions are being asked and write them out. Ideally, you publish them as a blog, make a podcast out of it, send it as a newsletter. But, you know, I've got, I'm literally updating my website right now and, you know, 1 ,200 blog posts. so that I've personally written over the years. So when somebody says, how about this?

27:24Not only do I have an answer, I've already created the answer. Usually it's a blog and a video, maybe an infographic, and I just send them. They're like, oh, holy crap. Yeah. Yeah, a salesperson shouldn't have to answer. They should have a written answer, and the marketing team's job is to provide those answers. But how does the marketing team get the answers? They interview the salespeople, you know, or the engineers, or. or or but i think i think that's a big part of it when you think of that whole process now we bring people to decision making today and it's almost it's a lot easier but it's a lot harder to get them to that decision today what are the things that today are really working to get people to actually finally make the decision signed on the dotted line you know how we actually I hate the word closing, but how are we making the sale today?

28:17And how's that different to what it was? I think COVID and all these crazy elections have had people worried. I think there's some clarity now, at least like the stock market. The stock market, people can show the numbers. It's up or down, Democrats, Republicans, whatever. But investors just don't like uncertainty. Once they know which direction things are going, okay, we can figure it out from here. Um, so I think things will get a little bit better, uh, in 2025. Um, but people are COVID changed a lot of things. Um, I'm, I don't know if I'm jaded or old or just super intellectual. I'm going to go with the smart one.

29:08Okay. But like, I've, I've always, I've always been, you know, I spent time in the air force. I've never trusted the government. So I've always been a little leery. So when crazy things start to happen, I'm like, I told you. But anyway, I digress. So I think people are waking up to like, this is the new normal, which I hate it during COVID.

29:32So, but here's what I'm telling everybody. Oh, I zig when the market zags. Okay. So the zag right now is AI. Everybody, all the gurus are out there saying, buy my course, come to my master class, come to my retreat. We're going to show you in five minutes how to create five years worth of content for just$5 ,555. So 15 years ago, VA, remote VAs, overseas VAs were all the rage. So you would have a VA write an email, then I would have a VA read the email and delete it. Okay, now you're paying AI to write the emails and I'm paying AI to read it, sort, sift, and separate, and delete it. So the zig today to the zag is to be human.

30:16Show how you're different. If you're getting, you cannot send emails, you cannot send fake videos that look and sound like your competition. And that has always been the case. Look at what your competition does and do the opposite. Okay, so be more human. that will help cut through the clutter. Put in, you know, right the way that you speak. And I understand, like a good friend of mine is an attorney. He's a great attorney. He can't send a gif of a talking ferret. Okay, he's probably going to lose that$100 million workers' comp case, okay? But I can. You can. man, you got pulling profits out of a hat and you're the owner.