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The Advanced Selling Podcast
Thriving When Others Panic: Skills for an Uncertain Market
00:25:26
In this special live episode, Bill and Bryan discuss essential skills for sales professionals facing economic uncertainty. Rather than focusing on what you can't control, the guys break down practical strategies for maintaining your edge when markets...
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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome back, everybody, to the Advanced Selling Podcast. The longest running sales training podcast, podcast history. We are live today on LinkedIn, YouTube and Facebook. Brian Neal.
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B
Brian Neal here. Thank you. I love when Bill welcomes me to my own show. We're live on all those things.
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A
We're live on all those platforms.
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B
I didn't know that. I thought we were just live on LinkedIn. I'm kind of new to the live thing.
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A
Yeah. Well, we talked about this a couple weeks ago about going live, and I think if it works and people like it, we'll do it again. Maybe not every time, but once every couple months.
- [00:39]
B
Because live to me is. I don't see any reason not to. I mean, other than if it's a technical pain in the butt to do it. But, you know, it's, you know, even if no one shows up, it's recorded and it's live and people. That's right again. But it's kind of fun, I think, for people to kind of see, you know, there are people that want to start their own podcast. Like, how do I do that? Or they think that because we've been doing it for 19 years that we'd have our stuff figured out by now. Clearly we don't because the equipment didn't work.
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A
This morning, Terry says, good morning from Maryland. I go back away with you two on the Advanced Selling podcast. Whatever happened to the guy that used top Voice? You're open. Used to top Voice. You're open.
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B
Oh, Dave Dugan. Yeah. I haven't seen Dave Dugan in a while.
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A
He's no longer with us.
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B
He died.
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A
No, he's just not with us.
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B
Thanks, Bill.
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A
No, Dave is fine. He's a good. Yeah, we should get. We should get Dave back for a interview now that he's back.
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B
Well, we were in two different places there because I. I didn't know if he was alive or not. And when you said, I'm like, oh, my God. And I would have read that he's kind of a little celebrity here in. Where we live in Indianapolis.
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A
I would say, hey, do you ever. Do you remember a guy named Buster Bodine?
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B
I do. Why do I know Buster Bodine? Why do I know Buster? But keep going. I don't know.
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A
Wnap. Did you ever grow the buzzer?
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B
Of course.
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A
Yeah, the buzzer. The wrath of the buzzer. Buster Bodine was the jock on from three to six and got it. Got a lot. And he just. He just passed. He is literally no longer with us. And coincidentally, he and Dave Dugan were friends because they both did radio and.
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B
Welcome to our brains, everybody.
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A
That's right, use voice Europe. Yeah, yeah, I used to voice your own. That was Dave, dude.
- [02:17]
B
Okay, people, glad you're here. Comment if you need to. Yeah, I can't. Let's see, just a quick little where I'm coming off of spring break. Remember your days of spring break, Bill? Back in the 70s, 80s, man. But I went on my son. So I've got five kids. We're blended family. So four mine, one's hers. But my youngest of my four was his senior year spring break. So it's kind of nostalgic. It's like the last spring break and I was just kind of thinking that we went to Mexico, this all inclusive, which was actually really. Can I. We went to a Cancun, all inclusive. If I say that to anybody, you're kind of like, you know, kind of have changed. Oh, they're so nice. Oh my God, they're nice. But I was just thinking, comparing that to our spring breaks that we went on so here like all the parents went, we've all flew down. We helped our kids with everything and everyone was there continuing pickleball all the time. Exactly. When we went, I remember I didn't go. But two of my friends remember what an Mr. 2 was. An Mr. 2 was like a little car. It's like a little car.
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A
Yeah, yeah.
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B
Mr. 2, little car. Three of my friends drove overnight to, to Daytona our senior year spring break. No parents, three people in a twers car flying overnight all the way down to Daytona and back.
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A
Yeah.
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B
No parents, no way to track anybody, nothing. And we lived, we survived. I just thought I was marking how different spring break is relative to what it used to be.
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A
You know, though I will say this, that I had a few spring breaks where I shouldn't have remembered them from college. But in a way those are the most impactful and the ones I remember more than the, you know, family one at 32 or Jane and I went to Siesta Key and then, you know, the next year and then the next year and then the next year and the next year and they all blend together. But when you wake when you are driving through Daytona beach at 8am because you've driven all night and you all.
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B
Fall asleep at a stoplight, that's memorable.
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A
I, I remember that.
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B
Yes. Or we, we had, I think 14 guys in one hotel room at the Lanny Kai in Fort Myers, Florida. 14 human men, like grown, like 20, 21 year old grown men, but not grown men. But we Thought we were physically. Yeah. All six foot and above. Ish. It's just different. You know what I mean? And you're right. Those memories are forever. Where my kids are. You're remembering like, you know. Oh, yeah. Remember when? You know, remember when my wristband got cut off and I had to get a new one? Exactly.
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A
Or that dolphin tried to jump in the boat? Yeah.
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B
Right.
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A
Remember that time we all got stoned?
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B
Remember when?
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A
Oh, yeah. Never forget that.
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B
Okay. Okay, let's do a topic. Spring break's over.
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A
So here's. I picked a topic for the first episode, and the way we usually do it is what each of us picks a topic. And my topic was going to be the idea of skills. What skills do we need to have and possess and work on and get better at? As of last week, a lot seems to have changed in the market. Stock markets and kind of a free fall. And. And there's a lot of anxiety about what's going to happen in recession. No, recession. Reset. I hear that term. But whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is. The question is, what can we do about the world? And it's not what impact is the world going to have on us, but what impact can we have on our world? And taking that agency, taking this notion of personal responsibility and ownership, as Jocko Willink says, or George Mack talks about high agency, what can we do? And I thought that might be a good jumping off point since everybody's kind of got their. Got one eye on what's going to happen over the next week or two. But you should have both eyes on what you can do regardless of what happens.
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B
Yes, that was my thought. I love it. Yeah. So we'll roll skills into that. And. And you sort of said it with your very last sentence there. From my standpoint, first is, I think sometimes people, I've heard this when I coach kids, like kids coming out of college, like, what I'm trying to figure out what I want to do. Or I just heard a dating app commercial this morning and this guy said the same thing. Before you figure out your type of person and your ideal, you know, partner, you need to define what's your not ideal partner or to figure out what you want to do. It's easier to what you. To decide what you. What you don't want to do. And so in this case, the question is, you know, what can we do? I say let's first, let's really focus and get clear on what we cannot do, because there are a lot of things we can't do. We can't change the fact that there are tariffs. We can't negotiate between the United States or your home country, wherever you are in other countries. We can't do that. We can't control the stock market. We can't control consumer pricing directly where we're doing. And so as you start to filter out all what I, what I. First kind of lesson here for me is 98% of this stuff is out of your control. Very cliche, but true.
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A
That's right.
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B
And as soon as you notice yourself concerning yourself with something out of your control, it's got to be a reset point. It's got a. Was it Barkley, Charles Barkley, who snapped his rubber band when he missed the free throw or something like that? As a negative. What I thought one of there was NBA basketball player who, when he'd miss a free throw, he'd snap a rubber band on his wrist to like it. So it hurts, you know, so it's bad that you need to have some mechanism to like, snap yourself out of that thinking.
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A
Yeah, because you can go down that, that path pretty easily and you can get pretty far down there almost to the part of depression or despondency or surrender.
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B
Panic. Yeah. No. Yes, completely.
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A
I. I think surrender. We. We talk about surrender in our programs a lot. The idea that sometimes surrender is a good thing. If I'm surrendering to an outcome, like if I'm getting ready to do a podcast with you, you know, I'm trying to be as present as I can. I have no idea of what this is going to mean. If I surrender to the outcomes or detach from the outcomes. That's a good form of surrender. A bad form of surrender is when you say, I give up.
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B
I can't do it.
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A
You know, Market's not being kind to me and I don't know what to do. So screw it. I'm not gonna. I'm not gonna figure it out.
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B
Yes. That's my first one.
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A
Okay, so you're saying to ID what.
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B
You cannot control, and if what you're worrying about or concerned about is in that bucket. Stop. That's what I'm saying. With extreme clarity. Stop. Don't do that.
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A
So do you want to talk about a couple of those things first, or do you want to just. Was that just a.
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B
That was kind of a salvo? Yeah, that was. That was a kind of like your opening song, guy, where maybe didn't fit right. Or the, you know, mic was too hot. But yeah.
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A
Okay.
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B
No, I think I want to Start there, and then I'll give maybe some more tactical things after that. So.
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A
Okay, well, my first one actually is a good. Is a good pivot from that. Can I share that one, please? As we start. So what Brian said, there is figure out where you have gone down the, you know, no ownership rabbit hole, where you feel like, oh, you know, I don't know if I can do this, or it's. It's beyond my control. And start to identify all the things that you do have control over. Like, you don't have control over whether a customer makes a decision to buy from you. You might have some influence in that. You do have some influence. How you show up, how you ask questions, how you portray your value, how you lead them through the process, how you even make the first meeting happen. So I think a lot of times we abdicate control and we say, well, you know, I can't. I can't get people to call me back or I don't have enough in my pipeline. Okay. I think that's going to be an issue coming over the next few months is. I think our pipelines are going to start to reduce just because there's going to be a tepidness about committing and buying and stuff like that. And so what you've got to do is say, well, where do I have agency? Where do I have input and influence in my pipeline? Forget about the customer. Just where do I have influence? Am I sending out enough emails? Am I doing enough webinars? Am I doing any webinars? Am I reaching out to enough people? Cold, warm, otherwise, am I connecting with people in any way on LinkedIn or any of the platforms? So I think. I think sometimes when stuff like this happens, we have to really look at where do we have some control? Because that's going to give you some inspiration because you're not going to be a hostage to tariff percentages and reciprocation and all that garbage that's thrown around out there.
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B
That's great. Yeah. So you make the first list of things that are not my control. I see that. Then I make a list of what's in my control and then saying, am I doing those sorts of things and with what level of discipline? So that would be the next one for me. And it's. I'm going to start with the mindset because we talk about it a lot. Y'all listeners talk about, you know, Bill and I talk about the abundance of a marketplace. And I. I like here to take the concept or the theory of abundance and put it into A number. So here's what I mean by that. Most people I work with, Bill, say you. You agree, disagree. Most people I work with will run a territory or a bank of clients that provide them a certain number of annual revenue. So salesperson. And typically the number or the N of number of clients, the N is not very big globally, it's like a hundred. So to have a really good sales territory to make, you know, to do, to post, you know, $4 million in my territory, I might get that $4 million from 38 clients, let's just say, or something like that. Like, we're in the hundreds of clients. We're not in the tens of thousands of clients. If you're a B2B salesperson, I get consumers different, you know, that sort of thing. And so you've got. And then you got to say, how many clients. So if I sell to dentists, and I've got a, you know, group of dentists, and I'm going to make my number on, you know, 28 to 40 of them, I've got to look at that and say, okay, that's not a very big number, actually. And I think too often people get all wrapped up and the scarcity side of that, they don't. They see the abundance around them, but they don't. They don't put it into a number. Like, you don't need that many to make a really good year. You just don't need that many, and it becomes very achievable. So if I told you you're gonna run a marathon, you know, like, there's no way. But if I'm like, well, the first thing you're gonna do is, you know, take a walk around the block. You're like, well, I can do that. I can walk around the block. We're just gonna keep going. And then a year later, you run marathon. It's like that. So just try to take an abundant theory and put it into math for yourself and say, yeah, what do I really need? What's the.
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A
What's the resistance there? Because I totally agree with you, and yet I. I see some resistance or reluctance to do that. Is it because we get or ashamed of the fact that it's a numbers game at some point? And I don't know what's the.
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B
I. I wonder if it's let. Maybe. I don't know if it's resistance as much as it is just naivete. Is that a right word?
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A
Is that how you say that? French?
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B
Coming right off a spring break.
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A
I.
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B
Was dropping Spanish bombs like it was my job. Even though I studied Latin in high school. I, I think maybe people, they, they just freeze. They panic when they're like, oh my God, they start.
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A
What do I do?
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B
I just, you know, like, just break it down, man. Just slow down. Just break it down. Little chunks in math and just. You say, okay, I've got to get that. Because even when we go, it's so funny too. Have you seen the stock market chart? The five year stock market chart. Go, go to the ten year stock market chart. And it's gorgeous. It's gorgeous, man. It goes and it has to correct. Peter, who's the guy from the 80s, Peter. The economy. The guy who owned Fidelity.
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A
Yeah. White haired guy.
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B
Yes, he was talking. He, he was. I just saw a clip from like 98 or something. He's like, this is what the stock market does. Yeah, it goes up and it goes down. It goes up. It has to go down to go back up.
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A
That's right.
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B
It always goes up. So chill. Everybody needs to chill.
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A
I was thinking the other day that, well, I don't want to get off on stock market. We can do that. Maybe next episode.
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B
Peter Lynch. Is that his name?
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A
Peter Lynch? Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. But you, when you were talking about when you threw a little French in there. I'm always amused by the people who are Southern Indiana people. No offense.
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B
Thank. I'll take it. A one, two people.
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A
And then they throw out a French term like. And it's like, oh, no, no, you got to come up with another word for that.
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B
Yes, I love that. I love when I watch newscasters who. Or might be Spanish, might be their original language or for. And they. And they're talking totally perfect English, no accent at all. Then they say a Spanish word. I'm like, okay, take a log off the fireman.
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A
Worse, when a, A white American who's never learned a Spanish tries to imitate the.
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B
Yeah, totally.
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A
Rolling of the elves. Okay, so what, what is your. So we talked about that. What's your first one?
- [15:03]
B
Yeah. So after that I would say skill wise in an economy that's going down or soft is the. I'm going to say productivity. Skill. The skill of productivity.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And taking a good hard look at how you manage your days and your hours and your weeks and your months. The recent, and I'll say recent meaning last. I'm gonna go even last 10 years has trained and coached a lot of salespeople. Not trained like you and I do it, but the market has trained them that they, that their market runs them. They don't run their market because they haven't had to because there's been enough business rolling in and they've been so busy they couldn't keep up. And so they haven't had to be disciplined with their calendars.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And so the skill of being disciplined in all your behaviors and what I'm talking about there, and I've talked about it on the show before, my guy worked with for a couple of years, David Meltzer, taught me this, to be a student of your calendar. And by student, that means study. And you're literally looking at the hours and you're looking and saying, okay, is this, is this calendar going to deliver what I need it to deliver? The way it's written right here, that's what skill.
- [16:12]
A
That's awesome. That's good. Welcome to some new people who have joined us. Terry, Greg, Mike. I say that James. Let's see. Is it James? Yeah. James Austin. Good job. Glad you guys are here. We're live. For those of you that maybe just joined us in the podcast, we're like, we're do that. Going to be doing this occasionally.
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B
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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A
You know, there's, we talked about it before, the whole thing of are you, is it happening to you or are you happening to it? And I heard that the other day and I thought, God, you know, that's kind of the, that's kind of the essence of life is, are, are you, are you living slightly outside your comfort zone so that you are happening to it? It being life or it being your marketplace, or is it all these external things? Are they happening to you? And I think part of this skill is how do we identify where we are being happened to versus versus where we are happening?
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B
So, yes.
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A
Okay, so here's my third. Okay, that was just a throwaway.
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B
I like it. No, it's a good one. Keep it.
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A
Third is, we've got to recognize that our customers might be in a very different place in Q2 and 3 than they were in Q1. So the fact that all this stuff is happening and when this happens, everybody kind of gets a little, gets a little fidgety and their voice goes up a little bit because then. And we have to recognize that our messaging has to be congruent with what the circumstances of our client is. So if you know your client is in a business where. Let's just say again, I hate to bring up the term, it's like bringing up the term Covid tariffs, but let's say you're Your clients are in the business where they're going to be products coming in or tariff and they're going to have to raise their prices to compete. If you have a way to help them either lower price or compete better at a higher price, then you should be talking about that versus the old message which might have had something to do with efficiency and effectiveness and you know, all that stuff. So yes, and I think that's always, I mean, recessions are times where your business and my business flourish and prosper because people are, it always happens that way. So yes, people, during these. And again, I, I'm kind of reluctant to talk about the doom and gloom. I don't know, I mean, you know, this thing could be corrected middle of this week. I mean if, if all these countries come and negotiate all this stock market be back up. But this goes for whatever is going to happen. Because I think on, on the, a cousin of this is AI. And as we look at digital technology in the marketplace, that's all changing. And you may not be using AI to explore customers, but your customers may be using AI to explore vendors.
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B
Ah.
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A
And so if, if we can't, if we're going to compete in the same way we did pre AI in post AI or during AI, I think we, I think we're kidding ourselves. So I would suggest that. I don't want you to, I don't want us to learn to be AI prompters, but you kind of have to have a sense of what it can do. If you don't, you have no idea what the customer might be using it for.
- [19:17]
B
That's so good.
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A
And we have a common friend, Vince Freeman, who has really gone all in on studying AI and all the platforms and all the things it can do. And you know, when you start to look at it, it's frightening in a good way, it's frightening also and maybe a bad way. But I would say that one of your skills that you could learn in the next few months is the, is the AI impact skill. Understand how it can help you, how it can serve you, how it can serve your customers better. And we just have to acknowledge that it's here and not just for writing emails. I think that's a simple way to think about it, but it's much more than that.
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B
It's the eyes I, it's the AI impact skill, also known as the eyes. See what I did there? No, I did a I, I S ice. Everyone will get it.
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A
Everyone will get it. But you'll get it.
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B
They'll get it.
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A
That's okay.
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B
It's a thing. All right. I thought, I thought my last one. This one. Here's who's gonna love this one. CFO is gonna love this one. CEO is gonna love this one. Sales leaders, mostly sales people. Y'all listen, you may not like this one, but you gotta do this.
- [20:26]
A
Oh, I gotta hear it now. Now that you ready? Come on. Come on.
- [20:29]
B
In this any sort of softness in a market, I'm going to go levels here. One thing to do, really good customers who are awesome and you're integrating their business, you need to consider strongly consider raising price with them. And then those who are new to you do not lower price. The skill of holding price becomes a thing because everyone wants to start to bottom things. Well, we're cutting costs, we're cutting this. Everyone wants to caught cut, cut, cut, cut. You have no idea how much extra volume you have to do and how much extra volume you have to do to maintain profitability. Now I'm talking to the CFO person.
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A
Yep.
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B
They know. They're like, yes, yes, yes. And you can lose clients. You can lose clients and hold price and still maintain margins or hold clients and raise price even better and lose more than you think you.
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A
From a macro standpoint, from the business.
- [21:20]
B
This is really having a business acumen about understanding how dramatically price impacts profitability and cash flow in a company. And salespeople are really quick. Any level of softness to. To just cave to cave, you've got to be able. That's a skill too, to facilitate that conversation, to talk through it, to understand the other person's point of view. That's a skill to develop raising and holding price in a soft economy.
- [21:51]
A
So it seems like that's a great one because it seems like we have two choices. If, if you are impacted by raising, by rising costs of goods or tariffs or whatever, you're. You're impacted by that because companies overseas, there's extra prices and extra fees put on. You have two choices. You can either eat it, you can eat those and not pass it on to your customer and thereby reduce margins considerably. Or you can work on the skills of commanding a premium in your market so that when you go out and you, you are a 10 premium, you have no trouble commanding that price because of your skill set and your marketing and your branding and your positioning. It's not just sales skills. To me, it's more than that. But now it's easy just to eat it. It's harder to work on the skills. So you have to decide, are you going to take the easy route and sacrifice margin and the company goes out of business. Or, or, or is less than because we can't make any money anymore. We're just kind of hanging on for years and years and years. Or you're going to say, oh no, I need to figure out how can I command a premium through marketing, branding, positioning and selling.
- [23:00]
B
Yeah.
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A
If you can do that, you don't have any, you don't have any worries.
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B
No. And you can. It's not binary. It's not like you either raise price. You don't, you know, it's a, it's a skill of doing math, of saying, okay, we can, we, we may not raise price, let's hold it, but let's extend terms or let's extend contract term or whatever, or shrink term. If the person like, oh, you don't want to be caught, you know, in this big three year contract, can we get out of it? Like, yeah, but your rate's going to go up. But if, you know, just talk. It's a skill to develop. And salespeople really, they start to shake and it goes back to how we started, which is they start to hear all this stuff. They worry about things they can't control. They get weak on the inside, head, heart and soul gets weak. And then they just come and say, hey, Bill's gonna leave us if we don't, you know, drop 10. Like that's not what Bill said. You know, that's not what Bill said. But we don't have the skill to facilitate a conversation. That's the, that's the lesson here.
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A
Yeah. And I think we also don't have the belief sometimes that when you talk about raising price, I think a lot of times we don't have the belief that we're worth the extra price. We become so comfortable with $10,000 as our thing, as our price on something that if you say we need to go to 12, we have all these years of comfort zone around 10 and we. Well, it's worth 10. But is it worth. Well if, if it's worth 10 because it generates an extra million dollars for the client, it's not worth 12.
- [24:21]
B
I know it's not.
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A
Yeah.
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B
So amazing.
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A
Hey, we've got, we've got a challenge here in that we have gone quite a, quite a ways with this. I'm wondering if we should keep going and then break the episodes up into let's do it. I like I can keep a lot of people on. Greg Walters is on. He says selling is changing because buyers are changing.
- [24:39]
B
Yeah.
- [24:40]
A
Says he's learned AI over the last 28 months. He said AI isn't taught, it's learned. I love that. So, so hopefully those four or five things have given you a start. And we decided kind of on the fly here, as you heard, that we're going to do another, like a series two of this where we're going to go deeper on some of these. And I think we each have some more skills. So we if you're listening, then this is the end of this podcast. We'll come back here next week and we'll resume this. But I'm glad you were here. I'm glad the live people were here. And we'd love to hear from you on LinkedIn advanced selling podcast.com LinkedIn to go to the group and make some comments. We'd love to hear from you.
- [25:18]
B
Love it. See you next time.