Microsoft's CEO Says This Makes You Better At Sales

0:01Zac Thompson, the man in the shady corner. How are you? Welcome to another episode of Trench Tips. We have a meeting. Great to see you. Yes, it is. Great to see you too, mate. And might I say you're looking well. Thank you. Now we're going to talk about something very, very interesting today. It's the one skill, I'm going to call it a skill, but we'll get into this, that every salesperson needs to have. If you don't have it, I would argue that you are not a good salesperson. Okay. Is that fair to say? I don't know what the skill is. Okay. Here we go. I read an article two days ago by fortune.com.

0:42I don't know if you've heard about them, but they're making some bang money at the moment. Sounds expensive. It sounds expensive. And it was a bit of like a resurfaced quote, blah, blah, blah. It was from the Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella. and it was a quote saying he doesn't see empathy as a soft skill it's the hardest skill that we learn and basically if you read this article it then goes on to talk about like with everything that's happening with ai a lot of people were kind of like losing this skill or they don't have it in in the first place and i think that in sales in life you've got eq and iq with the ai revolution coming through everybody even a schmuck like me i now have access to all of this iq that i've never had in my life before so i'm a genius but the one thing that i think is going to help people as we move through these weird wonderful times is going to be eq and one of the top skills to have is empathy so i guess question to you first do you think empathy can be taught or do you think it is a god-given skill uh i probably think both like some people are just naturally very empathetic you hear people person probably people are attracted to certain careers as a result um and then you also probably a bit of learned behavior in there as well um so you might have noticed maybe in your life when someone is very interested in you and takes the time you might like that person a bit more but you might only realize that as you as you get older um but i know that it's a skill that is sometimes overlooked but i suppose the the in the ai world what i'd ask people to maybe try as a little experiment whether it's your your partner or your friend or someone in your family when they come to you with a problem just jump straight to the solution just jump straight away to why don't you try this have you ever thought about trying this here's how you fix it jump to that and just see what happens i think i i and i'll admit it i'll put my hand up i'm sometimes guilty of this because that's why i paused this yeah i know mate I saw it don't worry um I'm sometimes guilty of this because we spend so much of our time in our nine to five job running the business in firefighting mode problem problem solving mode when you're at home sometimes people just want to be heard so I think that sometimes there are problems that are like one can you just hear me or two can you just like be with me for a minute and acknowledge it you don't need to go into problem solving time and one of the things I sometimes ask is like do you want me to problem solve or do you just want me to be here and and asking that gets that kind of permission as well so I think that that's really important another thing that I was thinking about is I remember I remember a little while ago there was years ago a friend's partner we were all the three of us a friend and their partner we were all talking about something and it was like do you want to do this and they said yeah I want to do that the words were like agreeing with it but the tone and the body language completely changed okay so this this kind of idea sprung to mind when i'm thinking about transcripts so i could take a cold calling transcript or a fireflies transcript i can run it through ai sales process questions stuff like that but if we were asking it about empathy unless they said oh my god my dog died and there was like a real moment to show empathy the empathy could come from the way they responded the way their body language changed their tone changed and i think that that's where some people say one of the things i've been doing recently is i'll ask people in an interview on a scale of one to ten how empathetic are you and what do you think most people say probably probably ten or eight or nine or somewhere around there i always get 10 10 really but yeah northerners northerners 10 i'm the most empathetic person um people know my family and my friends always come to me yeah i'm an empath gen z i'm an empath and then we'll do a role play and we'll there's a few different role plays that we do in our sales environment but i'll say something like oh my god yeah i woke up in the middle of the night actually thinking about this having a panic attack and they go okay and when did you first notice and it's like the question might be right but like what i'm asking for you what i'm looking to see is do you have those soft skills to go i mean that that sounds tough that sounds a lot just to acknowledge that moment of i've been honest with you i've been vulnerable what what other advice would you give to people that are looking to improve that empathy or that eq skills so there's there's a few different practical skills one that i would definitely recommend people throw it in just because it's really easy you should do it anyway excuse me i'd hope people are taking notes right sales people are taking notes and maybe there's a point where someone's kind of your prospects rambled on a bit about say current situation or a problem or what they're using at the minute whatever it is Like there'll be some sort of longer piece of dialogue from your prospect.

6:17And as they go in, you've got to write down notes as you go. Before you move into your next question, just to say it back and not to do the whole like, I'm just going to say that back to you just to make sure I've understood it. Like you don't have to do that. Literally say, okay, so it sounds like maybe there's a few things that you're doing at the minute that are frustrating. You've been using the product you're using for a while. And that's kind of why we're here today. And just sort of repeating things about getting in that habit will naturally lead you down an empathetic path. So you'll have the logical bit I've talked about there.

6:52But then naturally, if you build the habit, when they start then talking about, actually, it's been really frustrating. We've lost massive part of market share. We've had to lose some of the team members this year and shrink right down. Okay, so market share is not where it once was. because obviously the team size, you're not really seeing the growth that you were hoping to see. God, this sounds awful, or this sounds frustrating, or it feels like you're in a really tough spot, or God, how does that feel? But just getting in the habit of saying their words back to you puts you in a position where you're just a mirror for the other person.

7:29So I would say start with that. There's obviously mirroring and labeling, probably other things that we'll talk about, but starting with a summary is a really easy thing for people to just build into. what they're already doing. Would you agree or would you disagree? Mate, I want to disagree with you at every given opportunity that I have. I see it in your face. But I'm actually going to agree with you on that one. Oh, God. I'm so tired. I've just been talking to qualified prospects all day without any wait time. How have you been doing it? Because I've been cold calling people on my mobile, and I reckon I've spoke to one person.

7:59No, no, no. Stop that right now and use Nooks.ai. Why? What does Nooks do? It finds me the right people to call, and it calls them, and it connects with them. over and over and over again. So you're saying it's Nooks.ai and I can just be speaking to qualified decision makers all the time. No other better connection, right? Wow, Nooks.ai. You spoke about labeling there and there'll be a selection of this audience that has listened to podcasts before and they will know what labeling is. But even weirdly, I've spoke to so many people, whether it be through training and they say, yeah, I listened to this, I've listened to this Chris Foss podcast.

8:36And then you talk to them about labeling, but they actually don't know. So the way that you were using your words there sounds like, seems like, looks like, feels like for anybody that's maybe new to the podcast or they're, or they're trying to enhance those EQ skills. If you were to give like a mini masterclass now in labeling, how would you best suggest that to the audience? Okay. So you have mirror neurons in your brain that are, if I spot that you are behaving like me and mirroring behavior back to me, I naturally feel closer to you. So that is your why would I even do it in the first place?

9:13So when you do this thing that I'm going to tell you about, the other person will feel closer to you and more comfortable around you. The alternative to it is probably what a lot of salespeople do, which is your what, how, why, your questions. And questions take a certain amount of bandwidth from your brain, and after a while you get fatigued. it's why people you know oh i was interrogated for hours in the police cell and i just admitted to a crime that i hadn't even done just to make it stop there's an element of fatigue that comes with being asked lots and lots of questions but mirroring and labeling are two skills that don't take that much bandwidth because i'm just mirroring back what you're already saying your brain's quite capable of coping with it so that's the that's the like the why the scene setting so you have mirroring, which is repeating one to three words of what someone just said back to them.

10:07And it can be anything that maybe wasn't clear in what someone just said, or perhaps like a bit that you want to go a bit deeper on. Then you've got labeling, which is what you said then sounds like, seems like, feels like, looks like, which I'm using then as a drill. It's a tool to help me go deeper rather than asking questions to move across. So maybe a good way to demonstrate it is if you give me some prospect spiel, I will use a bit of it. Okay, I'll do it. I do what we do in the interview as the role-playing. Let's see how empathetic. Let's see if you say, okay, great. Well, it sounds like you're in a bad position.

10:45Let's see. Well, Zach, if I'm being honest with you, it's probably been one of the worst years for new business. I think since ChatGBT has come about, it's just completely wiped out our SEO strategy so we're not driving as many inbound leads. And we're just in this position of we don't have an outbound function. We don't get that much from referral. Inbound has always been our saving grace. If that disappears, I don't know how the business can sustain. Wow, okay. So, I mean, it feels like it's tougher than it's ever been. Yeah, I mean, this has been the hardest year I've ever had in business. Okay, okay.

11:25um so i mean it feels like you're probably starting to to give up you've looked at everything already i'm not i'm not i'm not planning i've not looked at everything and i'm not planning to give up completely but i sometimes think like would it be easy to just get a quick exit shut shop and maybe take my expertise to to an agency okay so to shut shop yeah like completely You just like maybe see if I can sell some of our client retainers to a current client retainers to a competitor and just like fold the day-to-day operations. Okay. So sounds like there's something really specific that needs to happen to make it worthwhile us having this conversation.

12:12I would say that I'd need to feel confident that whatever we put in place is going to fill that gap that SEO used to do. Confident, you said? Yeah, like case studies or just knowing that you've got enough expertise that this is going to be something that actually works. I can't waste time or money. okay it feels like there's a bit more there keep going well no i just i just where we are in business at the moment like we're we're a few months away from like run rate i can't afford to make mistakes okay it feels like maybe maybe there's something you're not telling me feels like i'm falling wow that was really good a lesson in labeling and mirroring i think like there was there was so much in there there's stuff like the it feels like i always like the the inflections that you do so it feels like you're or so it feels like you're like there's kind of bits i think you want to struggle with it if you want because i know people have tried this and like people just go yeah or no actually if you struggle with it a bit feels like it's like there's maybe something you're not telling me like if i'm struggling a bit with it you naturally want to kind of jump in to help yeah and you've got to be careful on that people say mirroring doesn't work but what i've seen so many times is people mirror the wrong phrases yeah so like i've been having a really tough year in business i might need to shut shop year yeah yeah a year tough yeah yeah tough year shut shop and i always say the advice as well if you mirror and and someone so you go shut shop and they go yeah sorry what do you mean it doesn't mean that you mirror and then you can't ask another follow-up question but the job is that the mirror does the job well the shut shop bit is the is the extreme that you've raised right so if i go shut shop sometimes what the prospects are well well i don't mean shut shop literally what i mean is just like that's the way so it's just you can use it as a as a means to just sort of sense check like oh you said something quite final there or quite harsh do you actually mean that like you know you built you built that house and i'm just does it fall down a bit when i push it and you change your stance the ambiguity around it i think exactly this is a master class in empathy is there anything else that for people that may be new to their career or people that are like trying to become more empathetic like any low stakes games or things they can be putting into place that you think would help them i think maybe next time you're in a relationship with a relationship next time you're in a conversation with uh anyone you've got a personal relationship with so not maybe not a professional relationship to start with ask a big question how the day was what they've been up to recently what they're enjoying about being a new parent, whatever it may be.

15:21And then just see how long you can go without asking a question or talking about yourself using summary, label, mirror. And you will be amazed how long you can talk for without ever talking about yourself or even asking a question. And I think the thing that goes hand in hand with it, that sounds so simple, it's the most simple advice, but people forget it, is are you genuinely listening? So if you're in a sales conversation or another conversation and you're already thinking about your next question or you're thinking about how to relate it to you, well, then you're not listening. So how can you actually be empathetic?

15:57So just sit there, actively listen, the words that you're saying, I'm hitting them, and then I'm thinking about them. You're allowed to take time to respond. And if anything, it shows that you're probably more confident or more concise with your thinking. So you say, da-da-da-da-da. Okay, so you said da-da-da. It's sound, and then you're into a label. And it feels like, based on that, if anyone's listening to this that comes to an interview, they're going to have a lot more success. Exactly. So how empathetic would you say you are? Empathetic. Sounds like you're looking for something specific.

16:35Very good. Do we have a secret mission, a task this week? something empathetic that the audience can do to show how empathetic they are of course we do um all right here's what you've got to do you've got to post a picture of someone in our team can't be me or jack on linkedin and say i just got whammed and then in the comments put tag me and jack and the first person to do it will get let me think let me see what the budget is on the board for this week. £700, the first person that does it. Well, can I tell you something crazy? I've got a£150 budget left, so I'm going to say if you do Ben Owen, who's our operations director, then I will add that to the budget.

17:22If you want the£700, fine, do it for whoever. If you want£850, Ben Owen's your man. Good luck, guys. Good luck. Take care.