Overcoming objections is a farce

Hey, great to be here. Thanks for having me on today. I appreciate it, Michaelis.

It's funny you start that way. I was at Berkman for almost one year and saw what two CEOs take over. And they brought in a a a new executive and she wanted to do things differently. And even though my sales team at Berkman had more than doubled sales in that one year time frame, she basically cut the whole team, let us all go. And while I was dusting off my resume and going through the job search again, I just had an epiphany and said, you know, I'm tired of doing this. I'm tired of playing this corporate game. I am not a political creature. I hate doing the corporate politics. So, you know, screw all of that. I'm gonna just do this for myself from now on. And that's when Paulson coaching was born, you know, we started doing sales coaching and sales development work and really the stuff that I had done throughout my entire career, not just as a sales executive, but as a sales producer, helping the the sales professional achieve those levels of success that most of them were having a hard time achieving.

Yeah, I tell you what, that is very rare, you know, that that that founder's magic, so to speak. and I say that because most founders, 90%, 95% of the founders that I have worked with, that I do work with, you know, they will reach a natural obstacle, a natural limitation to their growth. And it's it's not because of their ability. They're all very, very talented. Most of them are very talented at wearing different hats. Today I'm operations guy. Today I'm accounting guy. Today I'm salesperson. You know, and so they wear, you know, many hats. Where they run into that limitation is what hat do they take off and leave off so that they can focus their energies into that area that will take them to the next level of growth. And for a lot of founders, That is a difficult thing to do to give up an area of responsibility because they've been so hands-on in everything in their business. It's their baby, it's you know their creation, it's their piece of art. And to give up a piece of it sometimes can be very scary to them. And so where I come in is I help them give up the sales part of it and the business development part of it so that they can focus on the operational side of things. Now the founder's magic is what person can actually do that naturally, see that that's a you know, the natural limitation to their growth, that that's the barrier, and then just instinctively do it and search out the people that will take over those functions for them. That founder's magic is very rare.

Most of the time, the biggest misconception about sales very easily is that there's some magic words that you can speak that will make people buy. You know, everybody wants the magic words, well, what do I say to this objection? What do I say to that objection? And you know, it's a total misconception. They think that, you know, it's all just kind of a a verbal dance, you know, a a type of a verbal tango that somebody's going to eventually give in. And that's just the wrong way to go about it. That that leads to a a career filled with frustrations, a career filled with you know, nothing but confrontations on a on on some level. whereas if if those salespeople can change their mindset into problem solver, you know, find a need, find a s you know, develop a solution, help people solve problems instead of thinking, Well, I've got to overcome objections. it would be a lot easier. But, you know, a lot of people think that that's, hey, I just got to overcome objections. And, you know, that's more of a transactional mindset than a relational mindset. And it's I see a lot of people burn out in that kind of transactional, overcoming objection mindset. So that's easily the biggest misconception is that I just got to overcome objections. That it's a farce.

Well, I I I hate to put things in terms of right or wrong. There's good ways to do things and then there's better way to do things. So in terms of what will give you the best outcome, you know the the studies over the decades have shown that it's really more of a relational mindset that leads to longer term success. If you like what you're selling, you believe in what you're selling, you believe that you're helping your customers, then finding solutions to their problems really becomes the long-term key to success. And, you know, how do I, you know, how do I go about it in terms of meeting a quota, you know, having to generate revenue for my company and balancing that? Well, the way I go about it, the way that I coach people to go about it, is really on the the front end. You know, how do you how do you find your customers? Not everybody's a customer. So disqualify, disqualify as many people as fast as you can so that you can find the people that you can actually help. They don't want your help or they don't need your help, fantastic. Move on. They're they're they're not your customers. And you know, if if you need a little ego boost to, you know, to help you move on, then they don't deserve your help. They don't deserve your expertise. But just move on. You know, you don't have to try to make everybody a buyer. It just doesn't work that way. That's not how life is. And there's there's plenty to go around. There's plenty of customers out there. There's plenty of people who need your help out there. Just get good at finding those who need your help and who will accept your help and who will pay for your help.

Now you get into the marketing side of things. And that's where marketing and sales, you know, sometimes work together, sometimes they miss, you know. I don't want to say that that's marketing's job and leave it at that. In a perfectly aligned selling organization, that would be marketing's job. They would be able to find those customers and bring them into. you know, the the sales organization where then they can be brought on board as customers. however, that's rar not always the case. I don't want to say rarely, but it's not always the case. so salespeople have to get good at finding their own customers because marketing departments will always fall short of what sales needs to do. So how do you do that? whether that's traditional Cold calling, picking up the phone, smiling and dialing, if that's what your industry is suited for. if that is LinkedIn outreach, social media outreach, if that's networking events, you know, if you're going to a local rotary club or a local small business kind of organization, whatever the networking events might be, you gotta go where your customers are. And if you don't know where your customers are, then you're really not into your industry. You're not into your business. And that just becomes th that falls back is then on, you know, being a professional, being a a a industry resource. So you got that's the best way to do it is getting involved and imbibed in those industry events, you know, that you're that that that you're supposed to be in.

So you you mentioned framework and there's lots of selling frameworks out there. we rely on the the the oldest and the greatest in my mind, which is the old Xerox selling by need satisfaction. And really that is, you know, you mentioned discovery, discovery of a need. you know, not everybody has a need, so in in that discovery process, if the customer or that prospect doesn't have a need that your product or service would solve, then they're they're not a good prospect. And you know, you keep a relationship and you touch base with them every few months or every quarter or whatever that would allow. But the the the first stage in that is the need discovery. So how does the salesperson do that without coming off as you know an interrogator or or doing it by really by building a level of trust where that customer is going to be comfortable sharing their problems with you. And even even in the needs discovery, there's this notion out there that if I just ask the question, you know, what are your focus for the next quarter? You know, what what what kind of challenges are you is your business facing right now? If I come up with, you know, those type of questions that the customer's automatically going to, you know, start spilling their guts and sharing their pain with me, that's another mistake. The customer has gotten so used to hearing that That kind of questioning that on a subconscious level, their resistance goes up and says, man, I'm about to get sold. You know, salesperson acts kind of kind of kind of fake, you know, you know, gives that canned line, you know, what are your what's your business challenges for the next 60, 90 days? Well, they've heard that a hundred times and they know they're about to get a pitch right after that. And so again, Subconscious resistance goes up, that person's saying, Well, we really don't have any, and thanks for your time. I just want to get off the phone with you. So how do you turn it into a conversation that builds that trust to where finally that customer will say, you know, this person seems pretty sincere and I feel comfortable talking to them about my challenges. That's that's the key to discovery. And you know, if you can do it in a sincere way that doesn't come off as salesy or pushy or like some kind of interrogator, you know, you'll have more success than not.

yeah. yeah. In fact, you know, before Berkman, you know, I worked at a company called Priority Management and I was selling you know, corporate training programs for time management, negotiation, project planning, you know, those those soft skills. And I was selling them you know, to Fortune five hundred organizations, oil and gas. Since I'm in Houston, Texas, you know, my customers were oil and gas companies. And and over that, you know, twelve, thirteen years that I worked for priority management, I started noticing that these the principles that were taught in you know these business courses are not too different than some of these principles I was reading you reading about in the Bible at the time. And you know, for example, you know, time management. You know, the the the the Bible says redeem the time for the days are evil. And when I look into that word evil, it it didn't it doesn't mean like, ooh, bad. It meant filled with distractions, you know, that that take you away from your purpose. And I was like, wow, that's exactly what we were teaching in our time management class. This and, you know, just as the the s Solomon said in Proverbs, there's nothing new under the sun. This is just, you know, age old wisdom repackaged as business knowledge. And and so I started taking those principles and saying, Hey, you know what? These workbooks are really you know, d highlighting the source of that knowledge. It's not a Peter Drucker. It's not the, you know, the the the latest business writer, the, you know, the the the CEO of the day. It's not a an Elon Musk or you know, those kind of guys who suddenly had an epiphany. This is wisdom that's been around thousands of years that they've just kind of repackaged and claim as their own. And I was just given the right s you know the right source its credit. And so those faith builder workbooks are those principles and how to really employ biblical principles in a day to day business setting.

Yeah, big Yeah, the AI is the big thing of the day, right? It's gonna it's gonna put everybody out of a job, it's gonna take over the sales role, it's gonna do all of our prospecting for us, it's gonna do all of our sales for us. That's all garbage. You know that. If if you have spent any time working on any of the you know, the large language models, I don't care if it's Gemini or Claude or Chat, you know they're stupid. They are the dumbest things in the world and they have the memory of a goldfish. if that but where they do excel very well is in employing models. So for example, we're actually deploying an AI right now for sales coaching. And so somebody can kind of asynchronously you know take their LinkedIn conversation or their email conversation or their telephone conversations and and after the fact. have the AI graded according to our model and say, okay, this was good or this was bad. we don't want to do it on a real time basis because we have not yet come across a real-time AI sales agent that can build that relationship. You know, in fact it just like every other AI out there, they do stupid things, but it is a resource what we call a resource after the fact where it does great at grading according to the models that we set up and what we feed it. We just we think it will help people do their jobs better and which will help, you know, with the overall outcome and the overall result. but in the world of sales, I do not see it as, you know, displacing or replacing any kind of sales professional who is relationship oriented. I think there was this there was this great Harvard article about a decade ago at the advent of machine learning and when AI was, you know, just that then becoming a thing. And it made a very great distinction b in the empathy economy. You know, people buy from people they like or with whom they have a relationship. And that requires an amount of empathy. And I don't care how many times you you run the large language model A, hey, I get you and I feel your pain. You know That that's not gonna build empathy, especially from an AI that you can tell is, you know, or or is canned or you know, just just not real.

Exactly. And and and let me put that even in a little bit more context. When I first got into sales, when I started my career, every salesperson in the world was saying voicemail is going to be the death of sales. Voicemail is going to kill everything because now I can't get through to buyers. Well, we all live we all survived through that. And then email in the early two th late nineties, early two thousands, email was going to be the death of sales. And then LinkedIn and social media. was going to be the death of sales. The death of sales has been f you know forecasted for decades and decades. And like Mark Twain once said, you know, the stories of my demise have been greatly exaggerated. Sales is not going anywhere because we want relationship. We want to trust in what we're buying. And that is a very strong psychological driver that is in just about every human's brain because we are all buyers at on some level. And that trust has to be there. And the big the best trust doesn't come from artificial conversations. It comes from that one on one connection that, hey, I I understand that you you are you know, you understand my needs and that this solution that you're proposing to me, I I feel like that you have, you know, you're pretty close to the mark on it. And so, yeah, I'll put my money down on that. You know, that's what's needed. And there's a reason that. A is in the AI. It's artificial. It's not real. And I don't care if you rebrand it to super intelligence. It'll just be super artificial, you know. It's just not real. It doesn't have that connection.

Get help, honestly. I mean, and I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, kind of like somebody who's having, you know, maybe going through a bad personal crisis, get help, get through it, right? Sales will not just work itself out. sales, as I like to say, selling has to happen. And if selling isn't happening, your sales aren't gonna go up. And so if you're struggling, if if you're a small business owner and you're wearing those different hats, you know. And selling has become a struggle. Well, you need something that's going to be full-time. and before you start investing in, say, the full-time sales super person, it's best to have a process. No, build a process around how your customers buy from you. Okay, if you try to build the process and force customers through it, you're it's gonna be more difficult than if you build the process around how customers naturally buy. Okay. So build the process around how customers, and that's really why build that process. build the infrastructure around the process. Don't go out and buy a bunch of tools and then try to, you know, a bunch of nice little software and tools and stuff like that and say, okay, well, now we'll figure out how to do it. Buy the tools to fit the work, okay? And then plug people into that system. And if you do it in that order, you're much more likely to be successful. Then if you do it in a different order, you know, if you I go and hire people and then try to figure it out. Or I buy a bunch of tools and then we'll figure out how the the best way to use those and then plug people in. Or the worst way is we'll buy a bunch of tools, buy some people at the same time, let the people try to figure everything out on their own, and then everybody's doing things ten different ways, and you know, it's just like mildly controlled chaos. Systems, tools, people, in that order.

To twenty year old Scott. Okay. So I was still in college at the time. I'd Twenty year old Scott. man, I I I would tell him number one, buy Google, buy NVIDIA. My first career was in my first career was in finance. I was a stockbroker and worked a little while on Wall Street. but most of all I I I would tell him just, you know, persevere. Yeah, buy Bitcoin. my gosh, yes.

man, I rem I remember when that first came out, man. I'm and you know, you're talking pennies under a dollar, you know. Just yeah. Get blockchain. Blockchain. So yeah, those things.

Yeah, so it's kind of the same advice that I'm giving my twenty-three year old son who has started his career. He's he's left, you know, he finished university, he's now in sales. Well, and it is keep sharpening the axe. You know, just just keep on building your skill. Be a master of your trade. If if what you want to do is be in sales, build your craft. Build your trade, keep on building it, keep on building it. There were times where, you know, I I'd I you know focused more on the transaction than on the skill. And, you know, those end up being times that aren't very effective, but keep on building the skill.

Paulson Coaching dot com. You know, reach out to me there. I'm happy to help anybody. You know, we have coaching programs, we give free consults all the time. You know, our our job is to help people. And eventually, you know, we we don't care too much. I don't want to say care too much about the money. We don't care about the money. You know, the money side will always take care of itself. Take care of people. Everything else takes care of itself. And so, yeah, just reach out to us. If if we can be of service, we're happy to be of service. That's what we're here for.

Hey, thanks for having me. It's been a great time. I've appreciated it.