282 - Are You Going To Join Me?

0:00I graduated from Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, a hundred years ago. Not quite, but it's a while ago. And I got an engineering degree, and during the process of graduating, we took interviews with companies to see if we could actually find a job. So I signed up for a lot of those at Northeastern. They had a recruiting and outplacement department. And I just took basically a whole lot of them. And one of the ones I took for practice was with a company called the Torrington Company. and they were hiring for sales engineers. They hired engineers to sell. And so when I sat down with that person interviewing at the campus, I basically said to him, you know, I don't think I'm a, we called it in those days, Fuller Brush Company door-to-door salesman.

0:56I don't even think the Fuller Brush Company is around anymore, but I don't know, maybe it is. They sold brushes and they went door to door. So he says, I think you've got a different idea of what sales is. Sales is not that. This is technical sales. We sell to engineering departments. We need sales people that have an engineering degree, and you have that. But rather than me tell you all about that, why don't you take a visit out to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, never been west in the United States before. I was an East Coast boy and spent a day with one of our sales engineers. And so I said, wow, okay.

1:37I must have gotten on a plane. I can't remember that, but that would have been the first plane ride in my life, certainly. So I spent a day with that salesperson. We went around and we called on customers. We went to a brewery in Milwaukee. I thought, oh, wow, you could get a job doing this. This is pretty awesome. But I changed my mind on what selling was. And in its simplest format, selling is finding a need that someone has, coming up with a solution that will fix that need, solve that need, and then convincing them that or showing them that you are the best person to provide that solution.

2:19So you identify a need, you identify a solution, and you identify you as the way that solution can be implemented. A lot of people don't think of it that way, but when you think about selling, think about the fact that you will be selling everything to everyone. You're going to be selling your idea to your board of directors to get those. You're going to be going through and selling professionals to work with you. You're going to go through financial institutions, all of those things. And it's surprising to me when I do the VIP Mastermind two-day events with my marketing director and we do role plays, how poor the sales skills are.

3:05The listening skills are terrible. I think that has to do a lot with how we're distracted nowadays and we don't spend as much time concentrating as just following the ding on our phone that we instantly go over and look and see what that is. But listening skills are super important and selling skills are super important. A lot of people don't think that's the case and this process takes them a lot longer than it should. So as a result of recognizing what that problem was, my marketing director and I decided to do a one-day virtual sales summit where we're going to talk about selling skills, implementing selling skills, getting you better at selling, etc., etc.

3:54That's going to be March 15, 2024. And so if you are struggling with that, if you don't know how to sell, if you could be better at selling, I would highly encourage you to join us on that summit. If you want to know the details on what we're going to cover, get a pencil out now. I'm going to give you two links here, so write this down. Or remember the time stamp on this podcast and go back and listen to it again. So go.brucewhipple.com forward slash summit2. Go.brucewhipple.com forward slash summit2. That will give you the details of what we're going to cover. At that sales page, you're going to see a price.

4:43But don't click out using that. By listening to this podcast, I want to give you a chance to save some money. brucewhipple.com forward slash special will take you to a checkout page which has a discount on it so go to go.brucewhipple.com forward slash summit 2 to get the details of what we're going to cover but to purchase it go to brucewhipple.com forward slash special march 15th not that far away certainly. So I'd encourage you to do that. I would also encourage you to think about how you're doing so far, the obstacles that you've run into, and if you have the ability to improve those, I don't know why you wouldn't take advantage of that.

5:33You may look at it and say, well that's more money than I'd like to spend, but think about the time that you're going to waste and the money that you're going to waste if you don't improve your sales skills and you don't close more deals and you don't do more acquisitions etc etc etc so take a look at that and I hope that I see you on March 15th