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- [00:01]
A
If you're not bringing real value to your customers, why should they talk to you? Let me tell you something. It's getting harder and harder to bring value because do we even know what our customers are looking for? With me today, Fred Diamond. He's the Sales Changers Podcast. Let me tell you something, he's got the insights. Why am I talking? Let's get the show going. Right now you're listening to the Sales Hunter podcast with Mark Hunter where the focus is to help you as a salesman sell with confidence and integrity.
- [00:34]
B
And now here's your host.
- [00:37]
A
If you're not bringing value, nobody's going to pay attention to you, nobody's going to close, nobody's going to buy. Nothing's going to happen. With me today, Fred diamond, welcome. You are the master of the Game Changer, the Sales Game Changers podcast. And you've got a little other thing too tell the community.
- [00:59]
B
Mark, it's great to see. I was just thinking before this, we met about 12 years ago. I brought you to Northern Virginia. I run the Institute for Effective Professional Selling. And we did this thing called the Big Stage where we would bring world class sales speakers and authors such as you to our stage in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington D.C. and you were so popular that I brought you back two more times right after that. Remember our customer acquisition symposium?
- [01:29]
A
Yes.
- [01:29]
B
And that was a lot of fun back in the day and it's been great to continue the relationship and the friendship with you.
- [01:35]
A
Hard to believe that was 12 years ago now. But hey, let's dive into this because I'll tell you what, you were talking about this in the proverbial green room before we began. How do we bring value? Because this is a critical issue. Salespeople are struggling. What are you hearing? What are you seeing? What are the solutions as to how we can bring more value to our customers?
- [01:58]
B
Mark, I've done over 850 episodes of the Sales Game Changers Podcast. I like to say the award winning Sales Game Changers podcast. And we did a survey of all the words that were ever uttered on the 850. We actually did this when we reached our 750th show. So AI might have crept up a little bit higher in the rankings over the past 100 shows. Value was the number one most uttered word besides the and is, et cetera. I used to think it was empathy. But then value has progressed and we talk about it in almost any show because like you said in the intro, if you're a sales professional listening to this and you have customers out there and prospects. They don't care to hear from you unless you're bringing significant value. And I remember I had Neil Rackham at the very, very first big stage we ever did. And I remember him saying, sales is about value creation, right? Even more so now, because customers can jump online, and within 10 seconds, they can get whatever they need to know from any of their GPTs, whatever it might be. So I always tell sales professionals, you got to be thinking two steps ahead of your customer. You got to know their industry. You got to know where they're going even without them telling you. And the reality is, Mark, there's no excuse now for not doing that. And if you're not going to do that, you're pretty much toast. As a sales professional, I love what
- [03:28]
A
you're saying there, because you're right. We got to do our homework before we make the call. But let's. Let's break down this whole value thing, because the challenge that I find is that salespeople say, oh, I'm bringing value, but my customers don't see it. My customers aren't. And I'm saying, well, then, you know what? You're not bringing the right value. You're not bringing. How do we make sure that we're bringing the right value? And let's define what value is for customers.
- [03:51]
B
You know, it's interesting. I read a quote. You and I are doing this interview In April of 2026, in the middle of April. And I read a quote this morning. It was about Albert Einstein and Einstein's view of success. And one of my favorite quotes. There's two Einstein quotes. One is only a life lived in. The service to others is a life worth living. The other quote is, you can view the world as everything is a miracle, where nothing is a miracle. And Einstein was talking about being selfless. This is the most famous scientist of our lifetime, one of the most important men in the history of the world over the last 200 years. And he said when he learned that, it really wasn't about him, it was about being selfless, then when that's the case, and it's a journey to get there, and as selling professionals, you're taught your product. You're taught about how does your product fit with other products? How do we sell our product? Right. The great sales professionals now realize it's not really about that. It's about how are you helping the customers achieve their goals at the end of the day. So if you could figure out, how do you get to that place and I don't want to be metaphysical here, but the reality is, how do you be selfless? How do you put yourself out of your place and putting yourself into the place of where your customer is and where they're going? Not today, because you're already. They've already figured that out. But where are they going a year from now? Where are they going two years from now? One of the greatest lessons I ever learned from one of the top sales leaders I ever met who said to me that, you know, his value wasn't explaining what he did, it was talking to the customer on those terms. And I said, how did you learn to do that? He said, years. You know, it took years. You know, it's kind of like the piano player and who's playing at Carnegie hall. And. And someone said in the audience, I would give my life to play as good as you. And the piano player said, I did. You know, the same thing. The great sales professionals right now are giving their lives, they're really deep into it to understand where does our customer need to get to a year from now, two years from now? Because I'll tell you this right now, your customer, I'm sorry, your competitor isn't thinking that, you know, your customer's thinking, how do I be successful selling my blank? If you can put yourself into that place, you're gonna set yourself aside.
- [06:10]
A
I think I love where you're going with this, because we do. We truly do have to separate ourselves from everyone else out there. And sadly, a 2 watt light bulb looks pretty bright in a dark room. And fortunately, there's a lot of salespeople out there that just don't get it. But now let's. Let's look at this. How are we supposed to find out where the customer needs to be a year or two down the road? Because you're right. If we can help them solve that, now we're creating value. What are some of the things that you see in your playbook as you talk with CEOs? You talk with CROs. What, what are they saying?
- [06:41]
B
Yeah, so, you know, it's. First of all, you got to get out of the house, right? So I think one of the. You and I were talking about the problems that are facing sales professionals right now, and we talked about some of the places like universities that are teaching, I think, you know, to talk about some of the systematic problems. We're still struggling with the pandemic and what the pandemic has done for us. You know, the pandemic told a lot of salespeople that you can be successful from your apartment or from your home office. And if you learn how to use zoom and how to present and you know, those are what sales is all about now. And it's using these automation tools and it's about using these, you know, devices, et cetera, those are important to perfect your craft, but it doesn't help the customer. Right? And the customer wants to know that you're interfacing with them, that you're, you understand what they're going through before. Before you even ask. And how do you get there? Well, you get out of the house, you go to events, you read publications. You know, I'm just not going to, you know, on my podcast I always ask, give us an action step. Given some advice. Listen to podcasts. Great. Well, not listen to podcasts. Listen to these three podcasts about your industry. If you're selling cybersecurity products to the government or B2B or healthcare or financial institutions, you should be listening to the top three cybersecurity podcasts every day. You should be interfacing with your GPT every day on. Excuse me, what are some of the new trends in Blank blank as it relates to cybersecurity? There's no excuses for that. The other thing, too, people always ask me, how am I going to become the most successful salesperson? I say be the Dell guy who sells to the Navy. Big brand selling to huge marketplace. And you know what, Mark? You're not going to be flipping burgers today. No disrespect to people who flip burgers. And tomorrow you're not going to be the VP of sales at Dell selling things to the Navy. It's going to take you 10, 15 years to prove it, to understand the customer, to get in the room, to have the authority to get in the room. And you just don't wing that. You study it, you practice it, you spend time talking to experts, you force meeting with experts. You know, remember the day, Mark, when everybody would go to conferences and if you're forcing yourself to go to a conference, man, nice to know you enjoy and be grateful for a career you had because it's going to end.
- [09:18]
A
Oh, man, so much of what you said there, because again, something that I'm going to pick up here at the end, but then I want to come back to the beginning of what you said. The whole networking, it is about creating the relationships with people in your space. I tell people, whatever industry you're in, you got to make a list of who are the top 25 people in that Industry. Do you know them? What are the paths you're going to take to get to know them? You may not be able to get to know all 25, but you know what? Along the way, you're going to get to learn, know a lot of people and it's going to increase your knowledge base. But to me, that's something so basic and yet salespeople don't do that. Why?
- [10:00]
B
You know, to use a basketball analogy, let's say you're bad at free throws and the coach says, I want you to stay after practice and shoot 300 free throws. Well, first of all, you have to have the will to want to get good enough to shoot the 303 throws. And then you need someone to kind of coach you along if you're practicing 300 bad ways to throw free throws. You know, you might be devoting the time, but you're not going to get better. You know, it's up to you, Mark. Sales professionals listening right now. It's up to you, Mark Hunter, Fred Diamond. We're not going to bestow you with a great career. You're going to have to work on this. You're going to have to be out there pounding the pavement, scheduling coffee calls. Remember, I had a conversation on my podcast recently with a guy who is still actively a very successful selling professional selling a particular product into public sector. And he said, I can't get people to meet with me during the day, so I asked people to meet with me for coffee at 7 o' clock in the morning. Now, in 2026, that used to be kind of standard in the 90s, in the 2000s, before the pandemic kind of changed everything. But he's doing that now. And he said people are meeting him at Starbucks. I think it was Starbucks or any whatever this coffee place was near the Pentagon every morning because you can't get into the Pentagon anywhere. You can't get into most buildings because of security. You know, remember one of the great sales strategies was walk the hall, you know. Yeah, get it. That doesn't happen anymore. You can't get into the building. You know, it's very difficult to park. First of all, in a lot of places, there's all these security checks. Your customer is probably not going to be in the office. You have to, you know, maybe his. Even if he's a VP or she's a vp, they're saying, okay, we need you in the office Tuesday and Thursdays. Okay, well, you have to process all of that. And you know, they're building all this time together, those type of things don't work. So you got to make it happen, right? You got to make those meetings, you got to show up, you got to be there. And it's, yes, it's easy to say, but it's, what's the expression, you know, the easier it is, the harder it gets. Or something along those lines. You just got to do it, Mark. You know, it sounds like it's an easy thing to do, but you got to do it.
- [12:10]
A
But you know what's interesting is it is actually easy to do once you train the muscle to do it. Because I think like you, like you just were describing, oh, I can't get in, I can't get in. So then we just revert back and say, well, I just can't do it. So I did, I just got an email. I just got to blast them with 10,000 emails. Nobody's, nobody's responding to my emails. Well, hello, no joke, nobody's going to respond to 10,000 emails, but you're going out of your way. And again, I think it comes back to creating relationships with people in this because nobody takes a meeting with anybody without first checking them out, right? I mean they, they absolutely check you out. So you begin creating these relationships. You begin and just saying, hey, I'm going to meet you for coffee at 7 o'. Clock, I'm going to meet you. Right? It's, it is, it's, you have to change. We the salespeople, sales community have to change to fit the new dynamics and the parameters of what the customers are all about. You, you shared something also right up front saying about, you got to read the, read up on your industry, understand. And I couldn't help but think as you were sharing that the book Atomic Habits. You've read the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's those little habits and I really see knowledge, knowledge industrial knowledge that we know about the space that we sell into as having compounded value. Just, just, just like money in the bank, it creates compounded interest. So too does this knowledge. But you got to make those deposits every day. Every day doesn't have to be a big deposit, but if you make that deposit every day, it's amazing at how knowledgeable you'll be because your competitors aren't doing it.
- [13:47]
B
Yeah, no, I remember, I interviewed someone for the sales Game Changers podcast and he's a, he's actually retired now, but he was a public sector sales leader and he discussed selling to the federal marketplace as the NFL. And the same thing with a lot of the industries that people are listening to. If you're going to be selling to the top 10 financial services companies, the top 10 healthcare companies, the top 10 entertainment industries, you know, everyone's trying to get into those places and you're competing against great companies, you know, so how are you, you differentiating yourself now? Your company needs to bring the tools to the marketplace and you gotta have great things to sell these days, et cetera. Customers don't want to risk making a mistake, but you have to understand where they are. And, you know, as we're talking this thing through, it comes to work. One thing I want to follow up on that you just said, there's a guy, you probably know him, Dave Curlin. Yes, Dave posted today. Dave and I follow each other on LinkedIn. He did a, he calls him his rants. He did a rant today that the number one sales device that people don't use anymore is the phone, right? And I've been saying that for years. The number, you've heard me and I've. You've talked about this. The number one sales tool, people listening, is still the phone. It's easy to delete emails. I use a lot of LinkedIn. It frequently gets me connected. But then you gotta pound it and you gotta make it happen and you gotta get through there. And the other one, it's like being where the customer might be. And you know what, Mark, Another friend of ours, James Muir, who wrote the book Perfect Close, you know, I remember when I first read the Perfect Close, I was expecting that the Perfect Close was about to close. The moment where the customer says, here's the check or whatever it might be. He talks about 42 steps that you got to close along the way. And I get excited when I am pursuing a new company and someone returns my phone call or someone sends me an email back and they say, hey, Sarah told me to schedule a meeting with her. Those are wins. We got to celebrate those. But you can't just rely on them. You got to keep making them happen more and more. And the only way, once again, man, the people are going to come back to you is if you're bringing this value that's going to help them get to. And, and you have to do it. Now. Maybe you have a great manager who understands this and is committed to you learning and getting great. Perfecting your craft is the other way to say it. But if you ain't doing the work, if you ain't doing the research and if you aren't thinking right, that's a key Word that we don't often use, Mark. Right. You know, take time to think and process. Okay, where does my customer want to get to? I do this on a artist like, you know, those artists, like sketch pads, sketch. And I map this out. I write down, like, in think, okay, here's my customer. Here's them at the North Star. Where do they need to get to and how can I help? And if I do, I do. And that might help me get to the next stage. And if I don't, I'm definitely not getting to the next stage because they don't need me. And why would they want to waste a millisecond of their precious time if they have no need for me?
- [17:08]
A
But it's one step at a time. I got. I got a question I want. I want to bounce past you. We talk about value. People are saying, well, it's probably because we're delivering information. I think we can deliver incredible value by asking questions. What are your thoughts on that?
- [17:23]
B
Yeah, absolutely. You know, one of the cool things, too, is, well, I think you got to get into the room with asking the questions. You know, it was funny. There's a prospect that I have, and we've been working on this prospect for about a year. We've had some wins, etc. And I spoke to someone who's probably a peer of yours. What would be your suggestion on me getting to the next level with this prospect? And that was his answer. He said, you know, let's think of provocative questions. And I said, my challenge is in coming up with the questions. My challenge is getting in the room with him to be able to have the opportunity to ask the questions. But I agree with you. You know, the question should be focused on, you know, like, what's the expression? You should always know the answer of a question that you should be asking, and it's not what keeps you up at night. The question needs to be something like, you know, how is this industry shift going to change your revenue opportunities? Or how is this change in regulations or this new law, how is this going to affect how you interact with your customers? So, you know, questions that you know are going to take you to where you can hopefully provide some degree of solution.
- [18:35]
A
I love that. In fact, I love asking questions at. I know the customer can't answer, but I can't answer either because it forces a conversation. Now, I know that's controversial, but I love that because if I'm sitting across the room from somebody and I can ask that, I get a conversation going. Wow. Especially if it's, you know, relative something to their company, their industry, their competitors. Wow. It's amazing at what can happen. But it's fascinating because you've shared a number of ways with which how we can create value. Is there a go to method that you would say you use more than any to create value?
- [19:16]
B
Well, you know, you and I, you and I are great at asking questions because we've done between us, you know, hundreds if not thousands of podcasts. So. And people always say that to me, you must get this all the time. Oh, great question mark. You know, and it's funny when I, when I, when people respond to me on my podcast with that because we've already agreed on the questions that I'm going to ask and I always love it when they say, oh, that's a great question, Fred. But you know, which goes to the other thing when I mentioned before about, you know, being the Dell guy who sells to the Navy, right, Or being the Dell guy who sells to United Healthcare. Like I said, you've had to have gotten to that place. So I always tell people to be known for something. If you're a sales professional, even if it's local, be the real estate guy in your neighborhood, right? Be the life insurance guy in your town. So how do you get known as that? Well, the old way of course was a lot of advertising, but now you got to be presenting yourself with the answers. LinkedIn of course, is continued to be a great way. You know, you see someone posting about something and people think you're the expert. You know, the joke used to be the expert was the guy who came 50 miles away wearing a suit. Well, now the expert is the guy or lady who is posting and publishing interesting things. And the reality in our business world, LinkedIn is pretty much the main place. You know, you and I are friends on Facebook, but I get 0.0 interaction on the business side. On Facebook, even Instagram I get 0.0. One thing else, if you don't mind my taking in a slightly different place, is to be known for something else which allows you to engage in conversations. You know that I'm a world renowned expert on Lyme and tick borne disease and personal challenge happened to someone in my life which led me to becoming an expert on tick borne disease and Lyme disease. For people who don't know about it, a tick can transmit up to 25 diseases. The most well known one is Lyme. Unfortunately, if you don't treat it within a, within a couple weeks, it becomes chronic and will cause a lot of challenges in your life. I wrote a book, I do a podcast on Lyme disease. I've gotten three clients from Lyme disease. And I'll tell you one brief story. There was someone, I was pursuing the VP of Sales and I'm pursuing this guy for 10 years. They participated in some of our things, wanted to take him to the next level. This was about a year and a half ago. I was at an event, I was out of my home office at an event and I saw this guy and we waved and he started making his way towards me and I was thinking, oh, okay, I've been trying to get this conversation like you just said. And he said to me, what's all this about Lyme disease that you're doing? And I told him a little bit about the story. He said, I have a 32 year old son who hasn't left his room in three years because of chronic Lyme disease. I didn't have to ask him, well, what, what is your pain? I know what his pain was. He has a 32 year old son who has been in his bedroom for three years with this incurable disease. We talked for 40 minutes about Lyme disease. Then at the 50th minute I said, he said to me, what's going on with the Institute for Effective Professional Selling? And I said, oh well, we have these programs. He said, well, maybe it's time that we re engaged. We did a zoom. Two weeks later, a month and a half later, they became a customer. So I'm not telling people to become an expert on some obscure disease in the likelihood or sub likelihood that one of your prospects children may have that. I've gotten three clients of this because it's raised my profile from just the guy who runs the IEPs to someone who understands something that may affect them.
- [23:13]
A
I love that story because it's, it's, you have to, we have to have this personal life and it's amazing how the personal life and the professional life can go hand in hand. Fred, Absolutely mind blowing conversation today. Your podcast, share the platform and then your organization.
- [23:32]
B
Yep. Sales Game Changers podcast. Sales game changers podcast.com we're over 850 shows and I run the Institute for Effective Professional Selling.
- [23:46]
A
I love it. Fred, you are an absolute gem to the sales community. Thank you. Because your podcasts absolutely do change lives, impact lives and of course your book on Lyme disease. Absolutely a game changer. And it's amazing the work that, the work that you do. Hey, you've been listening today to the sales hunter podcast, two episodes a week. One like this where we do a deep dive. Fred diamond certainly matches that criteria. Deep dive into a specific topic. Second show is just me where I unpack one single topic. Why do I do the show? It's to help you see and achieve what you didn't think was possible. Do me a favor, leave me a review on your favorite podcast app. And hey, make sure you tell a friend. And oh, by the way, if you haven't picked up the book Integrity First Selling, you need to pick up a copy of it. I'm Mark Hunter, the sales center Great selling.