Transcript
Intro:
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teams…teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered sales teams. Today, from the lands of Southern California, we have with us Wes Schaeffer. Wes, straight away when I jumped online, knew he was a little bit different because you’ll see in his background there behind him, he has pictures of his younger self, but also a couple of nice little swords there. And I think the first part of our conversation was, Ben, don’t mess this up, right? Otherwise I got some great sharp little things behind me and we had a bit of a laugh about that. So. But Wes, straight away, when you meet him, you can see he’s got a level of energy and realness about him that I think will make him give some really practical advice today. He has a title of ‘The Business Fixer’. It’s a registered part of his business, which I really like as well. There’s a little bit of spunk and personality in there, but for me and for Wes’s background here, he’s all about seeing the message that you want to convey but can’t quite find those words to express them. And then he’ll give them to you because if you don’t toot your own horn, then there’s no music. So I love that piece around. You’ve got to communicate to people what they want to know about you or what they need to know about you to be able to get anywhere.
So Wes is a brown belt in Brazilian jiu jitsu. He’s the president of his homeowners association, and as he was telling me, the pool was reopened after Covid, so that’s a big tick for him. But he’s also an Air Force veteran, father of seven. If you don’t mind, I’ve got one and she runs me ragged. So I can’t imagine how Wes goes with seven, and he’s now a grandfather of three, and I imagine there’s many more to come.
So he’s written a couple of books, he’s spoken around the world, he’s 700 plus podcasts. So he makes me look like a rank junior amateur when it comes to podcasting. And we….look, we probably won’t talk about it, but he’s been duct taped to a bar in Korea, no doubt through the Air Force days. So really nice, broad background and I’m looking forward to talking to you, Wes. Welcome aboard today.
Wes Schaeffer:
Hey, Ben, thanks for having me.
Ben Wright:
Please tell me a little bit about yourself before we get into today’s topics.
Wes Schaeffer:
Man, we covered it all. Kids, jiu jitsu, military, H.O.A. What else is there? What else can I tell you? What else would you like to know?
Ben Wright:
I’d love to know what gets you up and going in the morning. That one for me, is such a tell-tale.
Wes Schaeffer:
All of them, they still want to eat and they come visit and they bring their kids and they want to eat. You hear about people downsizing when the kids leave. We’re upsizing. Yeah. We had an extra seven visitors at dinner last night for Sunday dinner.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Wow. I can imagine. If you run the average, I think it’s still 2.2 kids per…might be dropping, actually. But certainly if we run it two per child. You’ve got 14 grandkids, soon to be in the Schaeffer family.
Wes Schaeffer:
We shall see. Two are married, one has one, the other has two. So we’ll see. But yeah, the more the merrier.
Ben Wright:
Well, look, no doubt with that many mouths to feed, you need to be pretty good at what you do. I’ve got a friend here who has five kids and he is elite in his field. So no doubt you do what you do very well. And I think what we’re here to talk about for me is actually around increasing close rates and sales and being really successful in what we do. And you have this saying that you mentioned around making every sale. So I think that is a really good spot to start today if you can share with us what you mean by make every sale.
Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah, so the concept behind that is, you know, to make any sale, you must make every sale. And I think we tend to overlook the nuances and the intricacies and what it takes to really complete a sale. Selling is very predictive, but we’ve let the scoundrels, I guess, trick us into believing it’s this esoteric dark art, you know, that you must pay tens of thousands of dollars and sacrifice one of your kids to learn. At the end of the day, people are people. And if I compliment you, I know it’ll leave a positive impression if I do it right. I mean, if it’s cheesy, yeah. But if I connect with you at a human level, ask good questions, pay sincere compliments, get you really thinking about the issues going on, and listen to your answer. Going to move the sale forward, assuming I can help you.
And so when I say to make any sale, you must make every sale, you really do have to break things down. And we take things for granted. You know, you got a surfboard behind you, and I’ve never surfed. And you can do things, you know, to pop up on a surfboard, I mean, there’s probably 15 to 20 little things you have to get right. You got to look at the swell, you got to look at the angle. Body weight must be centred properly. You know, you must kick off, you know, jump into the beginning or the top of the wave, right? Paddle with your arms, proper balance, you know, where do your hands go? Where do your feet go? Are they even? Are they staggered? You know, like in snowboarding, you know, is it goofy or is it, you know, the way that your hips are down, you know, I mean, all these things that you just take for granted. Oh, I just gotta run into the wave and pop up and surf. But I mean, really, you break that down, both hands, weight distribution, hips, you know, looking at when to enter.
And I hate it when I look at software. Just last week, I was trying to do something inside of Google with this, running scripts to pull out contacts from a CSV into a mail merge and the templates, and they show this video and this cute girl, she’s really happy and chipper, but they leave off key steps. If I’m supposed to go to settings and then window and then advanced and then blah, blah, blah. But you leave out one of those steps, I’m dead, I’m stuck. I don’t know where to go. Now your video is literally worthless to me because you left out one critical step. And so in sales, that’s what I mean. To make any sale, you must make every sale. There’s a lot of things. Your voice, your tonality, your email signature, your logo, your cadence. How often do you follow up with them? What does your voicemail sound like? You know, are you engaging with them on social media? Are you doing it as a stalker? You know, are you doing it like you’re kissing their butt? You’re brown nosing to them? Are you adding value? So to make any sale, you must make every sale, including how you negotiate, how you prepare your proposal, how you deliver it. Everything matters. But few people really break it down to be that specific.
Ben Wright:
We spoke at the start about the B2B focus that you have. And I think when we talk about B2B sales, they’re typically, certainly in my experience, higher transaction value than an in-home sale or a B2C sale. But you’re generally going to be dealing with less leads, for example, because you have a higher average sale than you would on a residential sale. So less sales, your $10,000 average sale versus $100 average sale, you’re clearly going to have different number of leads. So in a B2B process, for me, getting each of those steps right is absolutely critical because if you get one wrong, the opportunity cost before you can move to your next lead or prospect is significantly higher than if you get one wrong when you’re doing it over and over and over again. So that’s what I’m hearing from you when you talk about making every sale, it’s about paying attention to the detail of every step in your process and in the engagement you have with your prospect to be able to get it right.
Wes Schaeffer:
Yes. And most people, they wing it. You know, very few salespeople have really had sales training. I was in tech sales for many, many years, had no sales training. We had CRM training. We had marketing would come in and show us the PowerPoint and the literature. Operations would come in and show us the gear, how the roadmap, how this year’s version is better than last year’s version. But none of that is sales training. You were given your quota, given a phone, given a laptop. It said, go get them, tiger. Okay? And, you know, way back in 2006, actually it was 2005, I signed up for a course that didn’t start till early 06, and that’s what changed my life. It was a 12 week program. We got a PDF and 12 conference calls. Changed my life. Ended up partnering with that guy, became his first licensee, and we’re friends to this day, you know, 18 years later. And because he taught me a system, you know, from 98, 99 to 2006, I’d made at least 100 grand in sales every year. And you know, 1988, 100 grand, that’s about 175 grand a day, pretty good for your first full year in sales. I wasn’t satisfied. You know, I was working hard. I had a lot of uncertainties. You know, I was putting in the effort, but I was like, man, there’s gotta be a better way. It’s gotta. It’s like, it can’t be this hard all the time, you know, and it wasn’t. I was right to keep searching, you know, but he taught me a system, taught me a process, and I’ve used it now for almost two decades.
Ben Wright:
Well, I’d love to hear about that system. What does that look like?
Wes Schaeffer:
Well, it’s just the mere fact that there is a system. Having an agenda for meetings. Understanding how prospects perceive me. Not showing up like I’m their best friend. Understanding how to develop trust. Right? You hear about people buy from people they know, like and trust well. Everybody treats that like. Well, I want to be known and liked. So they’ll spend 99% of their time on those two things. And skipping over trust, the reality is 1% knowing, 1% liking, 98% trusting. Trust is the key. I can know you and like you. I have a lot of friends I hang out with. I won’t buy from them. Okay, so how do you establish trust? How do you take control of the conversation? Just today, I took a sales call for a client of mine. I’m helping him as he grows, and he’s got some kind of, let’s just say, weak people. And, you know, I hop on a call and a guy, the prospect, always wants you to talk, okay? Because we all know whoever’s asking questions is in control of the conversation. Okay? And prospects have been abused by salespeople forever. And so they don’t trust us. So they want to show up and ask a lot of questions. They want us to give them a free education, and then they’re going to run off and make their own buying decision on their own, which probably does not include us. And so sure enough, he says, well, yeah, kind of tell me how you all work. You know, for 18 years, 16 years, I’ve sold CRMs, and people always say, well, show me your CRM. Most salespeople just start clicking around, right? This guy asked me, well, how do you all work?
So how you turn it around on them is the magic, okay? But it is very prescriptive, you know, and so I just turn it around and say, well, you know, we work with businesses like yours, you know, in helping them grow their YouTube channel. There’s a various ways through hands-on versus done with you, workshops. You know, what was it you had in mind? Right? What is it you’re looking for? What’s ideal for you? So answer the question quickly. And then turn it around. And if they are truly interested, if they truly have pain, they’ll start to open up, you know, but you’ve got to give the prospect time to get comfortable with you. You have to know how to sooner rather than later establish trust. It’s by your demeanor, it’s by your tonality, by your pacing. The words that you use, do you talk over them? You use a lot of industry jargon to try to come across as smart. And so all those things you gotta be careful of. But once you know how to control the conversation, get them to open up to you and then get them to quantify their pain. So many of my clients, I work with them and their proposal process is a mess because they’ll never talk price on the call. And then they literally worry about it for a week, up to two weeks before they send a proposal, and then they complain. All my prospects just ghost on me after I send the proposal. You should win 99% of your proposals because they should be just a written confirmation of what you’ve already discussed.
Ben Wright:
Got a couple of things in there to unpack, and I want to come back to the win 99% of what you’ve already discussed. There’s a terrific focus here for salespeople, but I’ve heard you talk about the five proven methods or techniques to close every sale, and are you happy to go through them for those listening? So I think that’ll really help to add some structure to what you’re talking about the last three or four minutes or so.
Wes Schaeffer:
Well, the concept behind that is I get my clients thinking in terms of cycles instead of linearly. Right? A funnel is just top down. A pipeline is just, you know, left to right. It’s good to have stages so you can document things and how are things progressing. Okay? But the funnel in the pipeline works within this cyclical system that, and so it goes around, around like a clock. And so at the top, you’ve got to imagine the letter A. So you’re attracting. How you attract people matters. Okay? And you must be congruent. If your ads are, you know, Neiman Marcus or Target or Walmart. When I show up and engage with you, I need the corresponding actions. Okay? If it’s Neiman Marcus, you greet me at the door with a glass of champagne. You know, if I meet you at Walmart, you, a store greeter greets me with maybe a lemonade or a corn dog, you know, so you’ve got to be congruent. So as you attract them, everything you do attracts or repels. So you attract them into your sphere of influence, then you bond with them, okay? Multimedia, multi step. And that’s a trick. How do I get your cell phone? How do I stay in touch? Can I get your address? Can I use direct mail with you? Phone calls, emails, texting, okay, all of that matters. Multimedia, multi step. And then the C is the halfway point and that’s when you become a customer, okay? Most salespeople that struggle, they think the sale is the goal. And that’s like thinking the wedding is the goal of dating, right? Well, okay, we’re married, that’s it. My job is done. Like really or did your job just now really begin? That’s when the relationship begins. So you attract, you bond, you convert them to a client. Now you deliver, okay? Now you delight. And when you do that, you endear yourself to them. You endear yourself to them. They come back and they buy again. They refer people, okay? Birds of a feather, they tell everyone, now you’re back to the attract stage. So you see that it’s more sustainable than a top down funnel, left to right pipeline. I want you coming back five and six and 10 times, okay? Not just get a deal, take your money and run. So when you think cyclical like that, everything you do changes. You stop discounting, you stop pestering, you stop pressuring because those may get you one sale, they won’t get you a second.
Ben Wright:
Okay, so we’ve got attract, bond, convert, deliver and endear. Perfect, excellent. Five steps. For me, I like that because it’s an approach that we can, that it’s simple. Certainly it takes unnecessary complexity out of the process and it’s a conceptual approach to any type of selling. Doesn’t need technical analysis, doesn’t need a sophisticated process, certainly doesn’t necessarily need the engagement of tech. But there’s a very human side around doing that. Excellent. Now a moment ago we were talking about 99% or 98% of your proposals that you price you should close. And to some listening, the obvious reaction would have been what are you talking about? What are you talking about? Ben and Wes, like you’re off track here. If we’re closing that many, then we’re too cheap or there’s just no way I’m going to get the numbers to be that high. But I suspect I know where you’re going with this from, but I certainly don’t want to jump in. So can you tell me perhaps around closing first, then presenting and that mentality around making sure that you position yourself so that by the time being you’re pricing, the deal’s already done.
Wes Schaeffer:
Yeah. And it doesn’t mean you’re priced too low, but it means you, those that come in with unrealistic expectations, you just let them go. You can’t quote and hope, you know, on this call today, the prospect pre qualified himself. He’s doing the legwork for the owner, you know, and he said, yeah, the owner was hoping, you know, it would be around $1,000 a month for this kind of support. And he told the owner, he says, there’s going to be more than that. You know, I said, you’re right. You know, I said, if you start talking 2 grand a month, you know, 24, 25 grand a year, you know, we can start to help you in that range. So if they were to come in and go, hey, we have $500, you know, be, look, we have an on demand course you could buy, but that’s about it for 500 bucks. So there’s no reason for me to give you a quote, okay? And that’s why I say we have to get the prospect to trust us so they share with us. What is the financial impact? What is the quantifiable pain that you’re trying to alleviate? This guy wanted to double his YouTube subscribers from 45,000 up to 100,000 in the next year. Okay, what does that look like monetarily if you can get to $100,000? So now we start talking what percentage turn into paid subscribers. So now we can put a dollar figure on that. You know, he’s looking at $200,000 a year extra income if he can get that. So I’m like, okay, if we can get you there for 25 to $40,000 in a year, what would prevent you from moving forward? You know, you give me 40,000, I give you back 200,000. What would stop you from pulling the trigger on absolutely nothing? Now, obviously, I got to know like, and trust us. Okay? But so I can outline the steps, what that looks like. I’m like, you know, look, this is, this is gonna be 40 grand for you, for everything you say that you need. Do you want to move forward with that? Well, send us a proposal. Like, what’s the proposal going to say? We already covered it. We can do this for 40 grand. Do you want to start it up? Well, we’re shopping. You can shop around when you’re ready, you know, let me know. We can send you everything over in writing to get started. But I’ve just told you what this looks like, so I don’t spend a lot of time sending over quotes. Okay? And that’s what I mean by close first, then present.
Most salespeople will avoid talking money till the very end and that’s all wrong. Studies have already shown, and not even studies by actual using AI, using recording transcripts from and leveraging AI to monitor and evaluate literally millions of phone calls. On the closing call, when the customer closes and buys from you, the hard questions were already addressed on the first call. This is assuming two or three call close when things like pricing, availability, terms of service and warranties, all that good stuff. When the hard questions are answered early, the prospect can relax. They can evaluate the offering now on its merits. They’re not worried about the price. They know the key things are already met. Pricing, you can deliver by the end of the year, blah blah blah. Okay, now they can relax and buy. So that’s what I mean by close first, then present. Close on the important things. Are you the decision maker? Do you have budget, right? Do you have a true pain that we help solve? If we do okay, then it’s an easy conversation after that. People make this too hard.
Ben Wright:
So anyone listening, that’s multitasking. This is the time to stop, pause, come back to us and write something down here. And it’s rare I will say this. I am unequivocally aligned with what Wes is saying here around closing or talking price or dealing with objections or doing the hard stuff early. Because if we wait until the end, all that hard work can be thrown out the door if there’s an issue with one of the essentially non-negotiables and terms and key objections and pricing. They are serious non-negotiables for a lot of people. Some people simply don’t have the money to spend. Some people simply don’t want the money, no matter how good you are at your role. But I’m a huge believer in getting that out early and then you can work out the value pie as you go. So really, really enjoy that. I’ve heard you mention the term sales dog before. We’ve spoken about know, like and trust. We’ve spoken about close before. You’re presenting. We’ve spoken about making every sale. You know, today’s a couple little buzzwords in here. Please tell me about sales dog. What does that mean to you?
Wes Schaeffer:
So are you a golfer by chance?
Ben Wright:
I am the worst golfer in the world. But let’s assume plenty listening are.
Wes Schaeffer:
So like in golf, there’s a thousand ways to describe one thing. At the end of the day, golf, you just hit the ball with a square club face the downward impact as you accelerate through the ball. That’s all golf is.
Meanwhile, it’s a bazillion dollar industry. Hit it with the back of your hand, hit it with your watch. Okay, fine, whatever. So, sales dog is another way of me trying to help people understand close first, then present.
So you’ve been on a roller coaster before, right?
Ben Wright:
Absolutely.
Wes Schaeffer:
And you know, like the very beginning, the clank, clank, clank, clank, clank. It’s going up that steep hill.
Ben Wright:
Yeah.
Wes Schaeffer:
Okay. That clank is a metal bar attached to the car that’s going over all these gears. Okay. And so what you’re hearing is literally clank. It’s a rollback bar. So if the chain were to break, the car would lock in place and not slide back down where it’s not supposed to go.
Ben Wright:
Yeah, yeah.
Wes Schaeffer:
It’s called a chain dog. Okay. I don’t know why it’s called that, but you can Google it. And so the concept behind a sales dog is kind of the same idea of close first did present. I don’t want the sale to fall back. Okay. I don’t want to get into a presentation, a proposal. Everybody’s happy. Then I send the quote over, and you tell me, well, okay, let me talk to my partner. I’ll get back to you. On my call today, I asked the guy, and I kind of knew the answer because I looked at their website and I saw all their titles. But how you ask matters. If I said, hey, are you the decision maker or are you just a chump, you know, being tasked with going out and doing a bunch of legwork and. And you have no say in this? I mean, if I say that, that’s not good.
Ben Wright:
Not ideal.
Wes Schaeffer:
Right? So how I say, hey, you know, what is your role in this? Are you going to be implementing this, you know, or, you know, does Matt or Jim, you know, they ask you to kind of compile some options for them, and then y’all will decide? Yep. I’m doing the leg work. Okay? So now I know I can’t go hard on presenting him and closing him. He’s not the decision maker. Okay? Now, if he said, yeah, they’ve handed this off to me, this is my project. This is a priority to end the year. We want to start the year with this in place. This is my baby. They’ll sign off on it, but it’s my decision to make. Okay? So now if I were to give him a proposal tomorrow, next week, next month, and he goes, well, okay, let me get back to you. I got to run it by Matt and Jim. I can say, whoa, whoa, whoa. You know, October 28th, you know, 4:35pm we were talking and you said this was yours to decide. What changed? Okay, I can’t have these things going back on me. I need to understand. And it’s okay if he’s not the decision maker, but now he lied to me, so now something’s going on. So being a sales dog is knowing each of the steps. Hey, when do you want this to be done? This month, this quarter. Okay, done. You know, do you have budget for this? You know, this starts at $25,000, goes up to 50. Oh, no, we don’t have that kind of money. Hey, that’s what we thought. We’re changing from a vendor. We’ve been paying 40, and they’ve let us down. Okay, 25 to 50, no sweat. Boom. And you just start chipping away at all the key things. Okay, but again, how? You ask them.
What I do with prospects, I’ll give them a little promotion. Okay. I’ll say, hey, Ben, you know, when you’re considering bringing in a sales trainer, kicking off a new initiative, we’re talking sales cadences, sales enablement, pipeline stages, refining each of the steps. You know, who on your team do you assign things like this to? Or is this something you run with yourself? So I’ll give them a promotion. Oh, I wish I had a team. No, it’s just me, you know. Oh, okay. Or, you know, I wish I had the team. I am the team. I’ve got to assemble this, I’ve got to get the bids, and I’ve got to present it to the team. Oh, who’s the team? Oh, it’s the CEO. It’s the VP of sales. VP of marketing. Okay. Now I start finding out these answers. Okay. Now I know how to start to navigate and how to bring you in. So that’s the concept behind the sales dog.
Ben Wright:
I like that. Making sure we’re always progressing forward with the handbrake there, in essence, to stop us going backwards. And that handbrake is essentially the process we’re following to make it work. Okay, fantastic. So we’ve talked about making every sale and how it’s important to be really process driven to make sure each of those sales happen and that we’re focused on every little element to get it right. We’ve spoken about closing before you presenting. So that’s the, You know, it’s a process as well in itself to make sure that we’re getting through the hard questions and the hard roadblocks early rather than waiting to the end. And then the pace around Sales Dog, which I think supports that to say essentially, hey, make sure we’re stepping forward one little chain or one clunk in the roller coaster at a time. So Wes, I’ve enjoyed today, thank you very much. Can you share with people where they can find more about you if they’d like to get in touch?
Wes Schaeffer:
FixerWes.com it’s all there. So yeah, links to my book, my inner circle free reports, my CRM quiz. It’s all there for the taking.
Ben Wright:
Excellent. FixerWes.com that’s where you’ll find more about Wes Schaeffer. Thank you, Wes. Been fantastic today. For everyone listening, please keep living in a world of possibility and you’ll be amazed by what you can achieve. Bye for now.
E91 Close First Then Present with Wes Schaeffer
