The First-Meeting Mistake Killing Your Pipeline: Lee Salz

0:00You mentioned, I don't know if this links Lee, you'll have to correct me if it doesn't, but you mentioned something in the book about empathetic expertise. Yes. Where does that come into things? Maybe you give the listeners a bit of a flavor of what that is.

0:12Lee Salz:You know, that's, that's one of my favorite topics today. There's an expression in sales. And I'm going to guess you've heard it somewhere around 4 million times. You ready? People buy based on emotion justify their decisions with logic. Did I get it right? You've heard it 4 million times. Yeah. No, you've heard of 4 million and one because you just heard me say it. Now, every salesperson on the planet has heard people buy based on emotion, justify their decisions with logic. Now find a salesperson that actually puts that into practice. I'll bet you the deed to my house that if we recorded 100 first meetings across all sale types, all market segments, all around the world, 99 of that 100, if not all 100, were entire logic conversations.

1:01Lee Salz:So every salesperson on the planet has heard that concept and no one's doing it. Well, why is that? And I struggled with that answer. And I finally had this epiphany. I had two sons that played college baseball. And I remember when they were first learning the game and coaches would say, now the name of the game is to hit home runs. And they'd say, big smile, got it, hit home runs. Well, guess what? until you taught them how to hit home runs, nothing changed in their game. And what we're doing with salespeople is we're preaching to them this concept. People buy based on emotion, justify their decisions with logic, and they're saying, got it.

1:39Lee Salz:But we're not teaching them how to put this into practice. And I'll give you an example. One of the questions we commonly ask is something like, what's the biggest challenge that you face in your business today? That's a fact-based question. We're going to get information as a result of that. But what if we phrase the question like this? Zach, what is that one thing in your business? The one thing that you're like, oh, I got to figure this out. What's that one thing? I mean, here we are in a podcast, right? A fictitious environment, if you will. But you felt that question, didn't you? And the information you're going to share back with me, I'm not just going to get information.

2:20Lee Salz:I'm going to get color, flavor, texture. I'm going to know how you feel about what you share with me. Because emotion is the deal energizer. If we're only having logic conversations and you wonder, why did my deal just stall out? Why did it go nowhere? It's because we haven't aroused enough emotion to energize that deal. And there's a lot of ways that we can do it. There's also a chapter in my book, another thing that I'm going after. We've told salespeople, you share features with benefits, right? Again, 4 million times you've heard that. And the title of that chapter is Features, Benefits, and Boredom.

3:03Lee Salz:Again, we're back into lecture. No one wants to sit through that. In a discovery, when we think about discovery, we think about what am I going to tell them? In a consultation, the question we ask ourselves, what do we want them to remember? What do we want them to remember? And there's countless studies that show that people remember facts when they're embedded in stories, as opposed to facts that are just thrown at them. So what we want to master is the skill of storytelling. And there's a framework that I provide in the book and how to put together effective stories. much more memorable, much more engaging, and they're emotive stories when we put them together so they become memorable and it helps to further energize the deal.