2232 - How Can Curiosity and Problem-Solving Transform Your Sales Skills with Sales Guru Global's Navid Momeni

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1:05With us right now, Naveed Momeni. Naveed, you are the founder and CEO of Sales Guru Global. You are a sales trainer and sales educator. You're also an author. Naveed, it's great to have you. Thank you, Josh. Thank you. Same here. Same here. Yeah. Listen, before we get going, what do you do for fun when you're unwinding? What are you geeking out on? What have you been enjoying? Hobbies, movies, music, that sort of thing. Well, I used to be an ex-pro soccer player, and soccer is my life. Wow. Well, I mean, here in Canada, we call it soccer, you know. Yeah. They call it football. Sure. So, try to play still once a week, twice a week with a group of ex-pro players.

1:53And on top of that, I've been collecting wine for nine years, and I've been collecting tequila for two years. so I have you know a little bit of passion for it as well and it's a very expensive hobby because you always want to you know keep adding stuff to your collections but yeah mainly soccer wine tequila on the tequila side what are some tequilas that you're proud of i mean i have everything i barrel like 112 bottles right and uh uh one thing about tequila is people think you know the fancier the bottle is the better the tequila is but that's a lie and yeah there are some really good tequilas out there for 30 bucks 40 bucks that that you barely see their names.

2:50So I have bottles from like everywhere. I try to go to Mexico at least once a year. Local bottles. I have bottles from these famous actors in Hollywood and all that. Oh, yeah. I have them all. Yeah. And if you could just give like a couple line answer to this, what is the quality of an exceptional tequila? Quality of the exceptional tequila, I would say a tequila that, A, when you drink it, you don't make that face of, you know, it's burning and all that. Yeah. Like literally tastes like smooth, right? B, you know, any tequila that is an Ejo or extra, I know, right? So I've been around for 10, 13 years.

3:40I would say those are the good ones. and there is a new one actually that I tried the other day at my friend's place. It's a new category of tequila that is called Cristalino, if I'm mistaken. So that they do something with charcoal. And that one was the one that I had the other day. And I was like, oh my God, this like literally tastes like water. So it should be like a good sipping tequila. You don't need to make faces when you're drinking it. And you truly, truly have to enjoy it. Smooth, smooth, smooth is what I'm hearing. Yeah, yeah, smooth. Yeah, nothing like, okay, I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do 10 shots, and I'm going to do something that I regret after.

4:25Yeah. Well, Navid, share with us a bit about your work. You wrote the book. It's called How to Become a Sales Master. And so lest someone make some misassumptions about what it means to be a sales master today, I suspect that you might be able to dispel some myths out there. What are the traits of an exceptional sales professional today? Today is completely different from 20, 30, 40 years ago. There is no boiler's room style. There is no Wall of Wall Street style. Now, some of the major main traits, I would say, you have to be curious. You have to be curious about your prospects industry. You have to be curious about your prospects businesses.

5:15You have to be curious. Second thing is you have to be a problem finder and not only a problem solver, right? So meaning that you cannot rely on what the prospects tell you during that discovery, during that qualification, you truly need to come out as an expert in their industry, as a consultant in their industry. And be a person that you truly, truly want to understand the root cause of what your clients, what your prospects go through daily versus just identifying pain points is a thing that people say a lot nowadays. and the example that I use is the I always say the worst type of the doctors are the ones that they give you medications for the symptoms of your disease but not the actual disease itself right so you want to be that person that truly truly asks the right questions truly truly identify those pain points you understand what is the problem you understand the impact of your client's prospects life and business and then you understand the root cause of this and if you be able to ask the right questions to guide that prospect toward that point of mr prospect these are the root causes of the problems we have for your business today then i would say you know you're a great salesperson right and i know obviously so many people say building rapport uh being the you know relationships and all of these things are important as well but the most important one are the ones that i just shared with you and uh uh ignore the all the noise about recession how bad the economy is and put your head down prospect all the time uh keep you know pounding the phone out with still, you know, my reps and, and trust me, opportunities will come.

7:18Yeah. Well, if I'm being honest, Naveed, that sounds easy. I think what sounds hard is the sales training of the past. You're Tom Hopkins, who is, you know, you know, becoming a master objection handler and, you know, just all of these scripts that, you know, they felt manipulative, You know, here I'm hearing a completely different tone. And so if someone says, well, shoot, that sounds easy. I could do that. How does someone go from being good to really great, however? Because I think the skills that you just shared sound like, they sound simple. But I guess there still is room for a lot of nuance.

8:30Oh, absolutely. how to do a product demo, negotiation, closing, how to maintain and build a healthy pipeline. So these are the people that they do this every day. And I always, now I say that my top reps, they are naturally competitive, right? They are naturally people that they always want to have their names at the top of the list, you know, any CRMs, you know, we use, you know, we use Salesforce every day. They check it 10 times to make sure their name is at the top. Right. And I always tell them that the most important thing that separates the top guys from the average guys is consistency.

9:18Right. Meaning that you cannot be a top performer one month and then two months you deliver average and then come back again and be at the top. The top guys, they consistently deliver. They dominate every week, every month. Every time we have meetings, my top performer is at the top in terms of the activity level, is at the top in terms of the number of deals closed, is at the top in terms of the highest deal closed, has the highest closing ratio. So they're being at the top at everything. But that means we have to do lots of work, weekly sales trainings, weekly demo recording sessions. And they're very coachable, right?

10:02So there are like so many different traits for these top performers. But at the end of the day, I would say consistency. That's super important. And making sure that no matter what you did today or this week or this month, that's the worst thing about sales. The day after when you wake up is back to zero. and don't think about what you did in the past and kind of feel comfortable about it. You just have to go at it every day. To me, it feels like the path to becoming an exceptional sales professional really has more to do with self-mastery more than other things, right? Can you sustain yourself?

10:46Can you keep your energy where it needs to be? You know, so it's almost like a journey of personal development allows you to truly serve the world a little bit better. Is that sound close to accurate? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's and one thing that I can add to that, Josh, is one thing that I always tell people you cannot teach anyone. It's the attitude, right? that attitude that you have when you wake up in the morning right that attitude that you have in terms of okay you know today is going to be another day and just you know wake up and all that or waking up and right from your first call first meeting you're just hungry right and uh uh that's something that you cannot teach people yeah yeah no it's um but if someone did want to like if you can't teach that.

11:46Like how could someone create more, any, any tips for creating more resilience? I mean, cause resilience sounds like a pretty powerful school or skill. I would imagine empathy is going to be exceptionally valuable to you know, just curiosity. Like these are soft skills. And, and obviously I think, you know, the way I would answer that is you just got to do the thing and have the power. I mean, that's going to be obvious. Is there any other way that, I mean, it sounds like you provide some resources for this, for improving some of these soft skills? No, absolutely, yeah. You can see lots of these skills in my book.

12:29But at the same time, I would also tell you that that training, doing it every day and that training, that's another thing that really would really help salespeople to upgrade that knowledge right one example that i always use josh is um and i use this not only with salespeople but also with all my mentees uh you know when you see there is a new um i don't know playstation you see a night before that people go line up because they want to buy it right same goes with a new iphone new tesla new whatever right why because us human beings we want to keep upgrading the technologies that we use, right?

13:12I always ask, you know, salespeople or my mentees, you know, a very simple question, which is, when was the last time you upgraded yourself, right? And most of the time they just look at me and say, well, that's a good point. And what I mean by that is it's important to be curious. It's important to be resilient. It's important to understand empathy. It's important, you know, to be a problem solver, right? but at the end of the day you truly truly need to spend time hours you need to practice one thing that i always tell people is practice practice practice no matter what you do you need to practice you need to role play with your colleagues you need to uh find ways to upgrade this knowledge right uh if you be able to find a good mentor that would be even better right a true mentor Not someone that just comes and tell you, hey, this and that, 30 seconds pep talk, right?

14:08Someone that actually would sit down with you at least once a week and would go through, okay, you know what? These are the areas that you're good at, and these are the areas that you need some help, right? So I remember for me, it was like when I did this with my mentor, he said, okay, you are really bad at your pipeline hygiene, right? Your stuff is all over the place. You have so many opportunities sitting there. And it took me years to master that skill set of how to help, how to maintain a healthy pipeline, right? So today with my reps, now I tell them, hey, don't make the same mistakes that I did, right?

14:46So these are the tiny things that so many people, so many times salespeople don't pay attention to. But this is part of the process, right? And I tell people, don't be distracted. And trust me, just go through that pain now. Because if you'll be able to survive the first couple of years, then you will end up having that beautiful lifestyle that you want to achieve. And Navid, talk about your services. Who hires you? uh from startups to medium-sized companies uh like smps enterprise companies financial companies uh when it comes to startups there are many times that there are founders there are new founders they have great products but they don't have go-to-market strategy they don't know how to sell their products and services when it comes to uh medium-sized companies they are a company been around for 20 years 30 years they are looking for someone to come and do two days three days sales training seminars for their sales floor right same goes with the enterprise companies like financial companies or software companies where they have a big sales floor and they need someone to come and help them you know to upgrade the knowledge of their AEs BDRs, SDRs, sales managers, director of sales.

16:15So basically any company that need help with their sales strategies, with their sales trainings, with their, some of them actually, they come a little bit late where they are in the version of, you know, filing for bankruptcy, because at the end of the day, sales is all you need to do in order to survive, right? and then they come to me and they say, this is where we are. You're kind of our last hope. What should we do from here? And I also have individuals, account executives from companies that they just come to me and they say they want to become better in certain areas. And I also help those individuals as well.

17:02All right. So your services are explained at salesguruglobal.com. To our friend that's listening, what would you recommend their next steps? Next steps, reach out to me on LinkedIn. Also, the book called How to Become a Sales Master is a top seller in three categories in Amazon. 100 % proceeds goes to a charity in Ukraine. So if you want to help a good cause. Yeah, Slava Ukraine. There's also the book. and reach out to me if you're a business owner, if you are account executives, BDR, SCR, CEO, CRO. And I can tell you that you won't regret because I can maybe add a little bit of spice to your business and help you to increase your revenue.

18:00Yeah. Naveed Momeni, again, your website, salesguruglobal.com. Navid, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much, Josh.

18:14Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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