S. 1 Ep. 24 – Become A Sales Hunter: Selling With Confidence And Integrity

Taylorr: Welcome to another episode of Technically Speaking, I am so excited that you decided to chime in to today’s episode because we are talking about something very near and dear to our hearts at Speaker Flow. How to sell with confidence and integrity. And on today’s episode, we’ve invited Mark Hunter CSP also known as The Sales Hunter to discuss this very topic with us. Mark is one of the top 50 most influential sales and marketing leaders in the world and he is the author of three bestselling books, High Profit Prospecting, High Profit Selling, and his newest, A Mind for Sales. Mark strategies are used by thousands of salespeople from Fortune 100, just to small startups, to other experts like yourself and it works for anybody. Mark doesn’t view sales as a job. He views it as a lifestyle. He believes that when you live sales in this way, you have the ability to create deep relationships that impact others and that’s why we had to have him on the show. And we are live. Mark, welcome to the show. It is so great to have you here.

Mark: Hey, thank you for having me on, are we talking sales today? I think we are, right?

Taylorr: Oh, we’re talking sales today. How can we not talk about sales today?

Austin: From the Sales Hunter, it’s the only thing appropriate here.

Mark: Well, it is. And yes, that was the name I was born with. No, not Sales, Hunter. That is my real name. I guess I was destined to go in sales. That’s a story for another day.

Taylorr: All right.

Austin: Got it.

Taylorr: The very first question we like to kick off every show with just a bit about your background. How did you get into the world of speaking? Why sales? What was that journey like? And how did you get where you’re at today?

Mark: Well, how I got where I am today, I’ll tell you real quickly, I did not want to be in sales, I was in sales for about 18 years before I began doing this. I’ve been doing this about 20 years and what’s funny is I did not want to get into sales, but I couldn’t afford a car, I couldn’t afford car insurance so that’s actually wound up how I wound up in sales. Long story, I won’t bother to bore you with the details, but after about 18 years in corporate America, I thought, hey, you know what? I can stand on a stage and make big money. Yeah, like everybody does, right? So, I walked out of corporate America and began to realize that’s a hard journey so I actually kind of became a consultant for about 10 years. And then probably about seven or eight years ago, I really kind of began to shift to be speaking and now pretty much that’s what I do. I just speak and when you do have the name, The Sales Hunter, it is pretty obvious what this guy must be speaking on.

Austin: Yeah, makes sense absolutely. It’s clear. I like that. Where did that come from? Why the Sales Hunter? I get the Hunter last name piece, but where did that phrase come from? Why did you pick that? 

Mark: Because the domain name was available.

Austin: Seriously.

Taylorr: That’s how that goes these days, right?

Mark: This is not rock… hey, I made the upper half of my class passable, we’ll put that into context. I was meeting with Bill Marvin, who is known as The Restaurant Doctor. He since retired from the speaking industry, if some of you listening to this have been around the industry a number of years, you’ll remember the name Bill Marvin. He told me Mark, you’ve got your last name, Hunter, it’s great, it’s slick, it works. Sales Hunter. So, we Googled Sales Hunter, it happened to be taken. So, we put a the in front of it, thesaleshunter.com domain was available, we bought it, that’s how I became the Sales Hunter. 

Taylorr: Wow.

Mark: A lot of market research, a lot.

Taylorr: Domain availability.

Austin: That’s kind of how it goes these days. And someday you’ll probably be able to sell that domain for a whole bunch of money.

Mark: Well, what’s funny is when you do have the name Mark Hunter, it’s really a very popular name. There’s a Mark Hunter that’s a hockey player, a Mark Hunter that’s a member of parliament, there’s a Mark Hunter that’s member of a Irish rock band. It’s very, very common so to try to buy the domain name, Mark Hunter, I’ve tried, never been successful so The S Hunter really has worked out very well. And yeah, one day, one day I’ll sell it, put down a microphone and walk away.

Austin: Go out in glory Mark. So, your tagline on your website is sell with confidence and integrity. And both of those things are crucial, I agree with, and I’m curious to have you unpack that. Both of those things I think are misunderstood in sales a lot of those times; why confidence and integrity are both important. I’m hoping you can sort of just elaborate for us why you chose that and why those words are so important to you.

Mark: First of all, there’s a lot of fakeness in this, in this business. This is what I can’t stand. We’ve all run into speakers who say one thing on the stage and off the stage, they do something totally different. That has rubbed me the wrong way from the beginning. This is where I say integrity. I want to be the exact same person in every conversation I have regardless if it’s a conversation with just you two guys, or whether it’s a conversation with a thousand people, it’s the exact same message. That’s integrity. That’s following through and doing what you say you’re going to do. So, if you’re going to tell an audience to do something, guess what? When I talk about sales, that means I better be able to do it. I make prospecting calls; I do every step of the sales process that I tell people to do.

The confidence is because I’m confident at the message I can deliver. Here’s again, one of the big challenges that we have to realize, and this is where I had to go through a journey in sales. Initially in sales, I was successful in making commissions, but a terrible sales person. What do you mean by that? What I mean by that was I was treating customers as if they were bowling pins. My objective was just to knock them down as fast as possible, get their money and run to the next one. And in fact, I got fired from my first two sales jobs. How how’s that for a measurement of success? You’re talking to a guy who got fired. Because that’s all I was doing. I was burning every relationship along the way. And it was my third company, my third job where my boss sat me down and said, wait a minute, sales is about relationships.

Sales is not about what you sell. Sales is about the outcome you create. It’s the outcome you create. That’s what we have to focus in on. You see my whole goal is I want to empower you to be able to do something different. I always say, I want to help you see and achieve what you didn’t think was possible. To me, that’s what sales is. So, sales to me is just the medium that I use to help people see and achieve what they didn’t think was possible. And I used the platform speaking, I use podcasts, I use all the various tools that I can unpack and use to be able to share with you that message of how you can see and achieve what you didn’t think was possible.

Taylorr: I think we should just wrap this episode guys. That’s it.

Austin: I think that’s it. 

Taylorr: That’s the golden nugget, we’re [cross-talk 07:26].

Mark: Hey, see? I’m selling the domain name right now. It’s at its peak.

Taylorr:  I love that. And I think there’s such a negative connotation to sales sometimes for people, like oh, I don’t want to be a used car salesman and I don’t want to be a pest. Well then don’t be a pest, just be a human being, build a relationship. I can see you have some opinions over there, Mark. How do you feel about the subject?

Mark: Well, here’s the thing. If you were driving down the road and you came across an accident and there’s nobody else on the highway, you would stop to help those people. You may not be trained as a medic, but you would still stop to help them. You would help them and then you would try to get some help. This is what sales is all about. If I have the ability to help someone it’s my obligation to do so. I owe it to them. They may not know that I need to help them because they don’t know who I am. I like to say there are 1000 companies, 1000 people that woke up this morning needing what I have to offer, but they won’t know unless I reach out to them. This is what sales… I’m doing you a favor when I help you. That’s what sales is all about. 

Austin: And that is so simple. It’s not creepy. It’s people helping people,

Taylorr: It’s so hard to get that through to people sometimes.

Austin: One of the biggest problems that we have is this, I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve heard people say that selling is just finding a list of people online, getting their phone numbers and email addresses, and then just sending them emails until they tell you yes or no. And obviously, I’m just going to stop there. What would be your response to somebody who said, yeah, sales, I built a list and I sent them a bunch of emails and it didn’t work.

Mark: You’re going to lose everything you have because that’s not going to work. Here’s the whole thing. A bad email sent to one person is stupid. A bad email sent to a thousand people is really stupid. And that’s what you’re going to do. Here’s the whole thing. I want to list. First of all, you have to ask yourself, who’s your ideal customer. Don’t sit there and say, it’s just names. This is what I say. Well, I have this list. No, what you have is you have people with heartbeats. My dog has got a heartbeat. My dog is never going to buy anything from me. You got to focus in, what is your ideal customer? How do you determine what your ideal customer profile is? You go and you figure out what’s the outcome you create. It’s not, well, I stand on the stage and I do this.

No, no, no. What does the audience do differently when you leave? What’s the outcome you create. And you got to get very tight, very specific with that. And then you back up and you say, okay, who is the audience that is going to be best suited to hear that message. Then I can begin to narrow it down to your ICP. Ideal Customer Profile. That’s where I spend my time. And Oh, by the way, those people, I can sit there and I can pick up the phone, I can call it because I owe it to them because I know I can help them. I know I can help their group; I know I can help their company, I know I can help them. When you are zeroed in on knowing who to go after sales takes on a completely different meaning.

Austin: Oh yeah. That makes total sense to me. Do you find that people have misconceptions about what an ICP really looks like? Because we ask people this all the time, who is your ideal client profile and almost always it’s oh, I work in insurance or something that if they have an answer at all. So how would you define an ICP in the real world?

Mark: What you would do is you would, first of all, look at your current list of clients. Look at everybody that you’ve done work for and you make a list, you put them down on the left-hand side of the piece of paper. And then on the right-hand side, you write down what are the outcomes? What were the tangible, specific outcomes that they created? And you’re going to go through that and you’re going to begin to see things that begin to match up. So, we’ll say it’s insurance. Okay, fine. Insurance is huge. That’s like saying business. I deal with business people. No insurance. So, is it casualty and property? Is it the underwriting side? Is it life? Is it home and auto? What segment is it and oh, by the way, are you dealing with just the brokers or are you dealing with the individual agents?

Are you dealing with small agencies? Are you dealing with independence? We increase our value the more specific we become in who we’re going after, because here’s what happens. You get to become very smart. You become very, very knowledgeable when you pick up the phone and you’re talking to somebody. You’re talking to their language. See they don’t see you as a speaker, they don’t see you as someone who’s going to fill a slot. They see you as a peer, they see you as an industry expert. They go, wow, I’ve got to have you in front of my audience.

Austin: So, the specificity is the most important part. Is that what I’m hearing? 

Mark: That is without a doubt, the most important part, because here’s the whole thing. The only good speaking engagement is the one that leads to the next speaking engagement. Here’s what I always pride myself on. I want to be able to… because this is a great business. Let’s see, you’re going to pay me to come speak and really what I’m doing is I’m getting paid to make a sales call because by the time I get done, you’re going to say, Mark, can you do this for me? Can you help me with this? Can you help me with this? I can take this single speaking engagement and turn around and bolt on more and more and more and more things. And that’s even before I began to say, hey, who else do you know in the industry? That’s even before I know the referrals, I create this continuous stream. And here’s, the thing. If you’re not getting referrals, if you’re not getting bolt-on business to what you’re doing, you’re not any good on the platform. I hate to say it, but that is a measurement of the quality of what you’re doing. And you increase your quality by staying very tightly focused against your ICP. You guys were getting kind of emotional on that. 

Austin: I am literally about to cry. 

Mark:  I thought saw a tear there.

Taylorr: Mark, there’s just so much fluff out there as you know, and I don’t know how much… Austin and I have a deep sales background together. This is where we met each other, our entire history is rooted in sales and it’s something we try and portray in the technology, the strategy, the community, we provide speakers. This is a core component to your business. So, to hear you even just mentioned, all the things you just mentioned is right in line with what we try and iterate here at Speaker Flow. But one thing that stood out to me is your beyond the keynote. It’s not about the relationship up until you make the sale, but it’s what you can do after that point to continue nurturing that along to deepen that relationship, to go deeper with them, have a bigger impact. And I’m sure that that impact generates even more business as a result of going that deep with them.

Mark: Oh, it does. Let me share with you a really quick example. And I love doing this. I will be speaking to a group and we’ll say the CEO’s in the room, some other leaders, and I’ll get to know the CEO and of course, everybody always wants to suck up to the CEO and I just get to know. And then what I’ll do is, I’ll just have a conversation. I’m not selling anything. But what I’ll do is a week later, I’ll pick up the phone. I’ll him and say hey, I just got done reading this book. Oh, and it’s not my book, it’s somebody else’s book. Right now, there’s two books that I’m very highly recommending and that is Atomic, Oh, I can’t even think of the last word. Atomic Habits and Ray Dalio’s Principles. And I ask them, hey, have you had a chance to read Atomic Habits?

Oh no, I haven’t. Hey, you know what? Great book. I’ll send you a copy. And I just go to Amazon and send them a copy. And suddenly that CEO goes, wait a minute. This guy was in talking about sales. He’s got his own book, but he shared with me and talk to me and he sent me this copy. This guy is a pretty good guy. It is amazing how that conversation suddenly shifts the next time I pick up the phone and call. I’m now seen as a peer. I’m now seen as, hey, let’s grab some time together. Let’s talk. I had this happen to me just the other day. I had a CEO call me and [inaudible 16:04] I’d done an engagement with them about eight months ago, virtual and I’ve been trying to reach out to hem and, and we just couldn’t get it set up but I really wanted to, and I had sent him a copy of a book last call. We had a meeting, had a conversation, 30-minute meeting and he said, hey, Mark, what would you mind? I have a peer group of some other CEOs. My ears are perking up. We kind of get together, every month or two. Could I set up a zoom call for you? Just to kind of share with them? I think we can make that happen. Yes, of course I could. He was seeing me as a peer. This is what happens when we do our job correctly.

Austin: And it goes back to the relationship.

Mark: It is.

 Austin: Taylor was pointing this, but he says the lifetime value of a relationship is always greater than that of a client. And what you just said, totally attests to that.

Mark: Huge, huge. It’s an old line. Your net worth is the sum of your network. That’s an old line it’s been around forever, but here’s what I tell speakers. This again is one of those easy things. And again, so many speakers are afraid to pick up their phone, afraid to pick up the phone and call. They’re afraid to make… what I say, I say call somebody up and ask, hey, did you get a chance to read this book, read a book. Atomic Habits, that’s a book I’m [inaudible 17:41] mentioned three times. But it’s amazing to have a conversation with anybody, anytime. It’s picking up the phone and engaging them of something of interest to them. And what does that do? It keeps the conversation going, because now what I have is I love nurturing CEOs and VPs of sales and those types of people, you know what happens?

They talk to other VPs of sales. They talked to other CEOs because you’re top of mind so guess what? Gets the phone ringing. And Oh, by the way, I’m connected with these people on LinkedIn, by the way, here’s something I can’t stand social media because I won’t go down this path, but here’s the whole thing. Your reputation does arrive right before you do so you better have a very good, robust LinkedIn profile. Oh, by the way, Facebook is not where our business is found. Period. Now there’s maybe 10% of speakers out there. Then it’s LinkedIn. It’s LinkedIn. We as the community have got to get serious about. I’ve been serious on LinkedIn for years. LinkedIn is not about clicks and likes because you can’t take clicks and likes to the bank. I don’t know where you bank, but I bank. I pulled up the other day with a hundred clicks and 55 likes and they rejected the deposit. Doesn’t work.

Austin: Weird.

Mark: What you got to do is you nurture your online presence for years. It is a long tail. Don’t sit there and think that you’re going to spend, I’m going to spend two hours a day on LinkedIn and within a week, the phone is going to be ringing. It’s not, your mother is not even a call you.

Taylorr: I think I’m just going to end the episode right there. Just…

Mark: Hold it. But wait, there’s more. A long-time listener, first time caller, what do you think Mark of social selling? Well, here’s what I think of social selling.

Taylorr: I was just going to ask.

Mark: Selling is neither social nor selling. Boom, drop the mic. You two have the Ginsu knives coming at ya.

Taylorr: Wow. 

 Austin: Yeah. It’s so true. There’s so much misconception around this topic too.

Mark: You see, this is another thing. Speakers are busy, but they’re not productive. 

Taylorr: Right.

Mark: Here’s what I tell people. And I tell this to salespeople, in fact, I was doing a program today for a company and I say your time has to be focused against two things. And one of them begins with the letter R and one of them begins with the letter G. Your objective is to have at least 80% of your day focused against R or G. The R stands for revenue. It’s got to be revenue producing. That means you’re talking to a customer, you’re sending an email to a customer you’re prospecting, you’re doing something that’s creating revenue. That’s the R. The G is goal. Is it helping you achieve your goals? And oh, by the way, your goals have better be aligned to your revenue. Oh, gee. Guess what? See, what you’re doing is I got to spend my time very focused. That’s the difference between busy and productive. I see a lot of people that are busy and I’m sorry, spending three hours a day on social media is not productive because…especially on Facebook, because all you’re doing is communicating with your peers. All you’re doing. Oh, please, people got more important thing to do. 

Taylorr: Incredible. Thanks for sharing all of that wisdom, Mark so far, it’s not nuggets…

Mark: It’s not wisdom, it’s rants.

Taylorr: Yeah, it’s rants but hey, its tried-and-true methods of what works here. 

Mark: Here’s the best tried and true method and this is why I like what you guys are doing. The key is it’s not about having a thousand leads. Hey, I’d love to have a thousand leads. I want to have 25 leads that I’m nurturing and working very well. It’s the consistency of the follow up and follow through. I always say the best sales advice you’re ever going to get is found in your shower. It’s found on a bottle of shampoo, three words, rinse and repeat and rinse and repeat. When I’m dialed in on my ICP, and maybe I’ve got 25 really hot prospects, I am rinsing and repeating the rinses. I’m delivering them a different message every other week or whatever my cadence is. I’m sending them another message; I might be calling them but I’m continuing the process.

We have to create the frequency of the message in order for them to demonstrate and see the competence that we can bring to them. And that isn’t that, hi, hire me. Nobody wants to hire a speaker period, get over it. What they want is they want solutions to their problems. And that’s even to the meeting planner. The meeting planner doesn’t want to hire a speaker. They want to have a meeting that is well run, they want to have a meeting, that’s going to go smooth, they want to achieve the right accolades after the meetings or whatever it is. Focus on the outcomes. That’s where you need to be with all of your time.

Taylorr: Man, I love that. And one thing though, that we struggle with occasionally in conversations with speakers is the I don’t have enough time complex. Okay, so you’re not prospecting, you’re not selling, you’re working out of a spreadsheet, which you’re not using, but you don’t have time. So, Mark, I know you get booked a lot. I know you help lead a busy life. You create a lot of content. You have a family. You people around you, a network friends, how do you maintain the sales process in your week to week, let’s call it. How do you structure your time to make that as effective as possible?

Mark: You’re getting me warmed up here. You have to carve your day into segments and pick up a two by four and hit yourself across the head. No, no, no. Don’t, but what do you want to do is you want to break your day into four two-hour segments, four two-hour segments. You’re going to spend two hours a day doing nothing but prospecting. You’re going to spend two hours a day just working on existing client work. You’re going to spend two hours a day, maybe recording or writing. You’re going to spend two hours a day doing email, social media, all that other stuff but you segment your time. I absolutely segment my time. I do not create a list of to-dos. I literally put on my calendar. In fact, this is creepy, this is really weird, this is like way too much information. I needed to drain my hot water heater.

I literally put it in my calendar to drain my hot water heater at 8:30 on Tuesday night. And sure enough, there it is. I went down to the basement and I drained my hot water heater because it was on my… see we all have the same amount of time; it’s how you choose to use your time. So, what I do is I have a very concise process. I don’t sit here and look for a thousand leads. I have a list right here of about 20 prospects that I’m actively engaged with. And I have notes on all of them, I use my system, I use it and I use it well. You’ve got to stay focused. Here’s the thing. Focus and discipline is going to do more to help you grow your business than anything else. Again, that’s why I like Speaker Flow because it helps you be focused and it helps you be disciplined. But here’s the problem. Too many people will buy Speaker Flow, you have seen this, and then they call up a few months later. Well, it’s not working. You know what? It’s like the gym membership. You could buy a gym membership that does not get you in shape.

Taylorr: I want to put that on our website.

Mark: You got to walk through the door. You got to go do something.

Taylorr: Yeah. That’s so true. It’s the same keeps popping up. It’s just, what’s so funny about this topic is like, everything is so overly complicated. There is a, a method to absolutely everything, and look, I’m all about process, I’m all about method, I’m all about having a structured way of doing things. At the end of the day, if we’re just talking about sales, just as a whole, like you said, focused discipline and relationships, it’s just easy. And then if you just apply that to life. It’s just focus and discipline every area of life and it’s not any harder than that. It doesn’t need to be over complicated. And I love how simple you make such a complex topic seem to people who may be struggling with sale.

Mark: We overcomplicate it because we’re afraid of picking up the phone and making the call. 

Taylorr: That’s right. 

Austin: That’s why. There’s a new app. Oh, there’s a new thing. Oh, wow see, that person has this phone, I should buy that. I should buy this. I should buy this. Right here on my desk right now, I have my laptop, I have a monitor, so my CRM system and I have two yellow pads. Oh gee, I’ve complicated myself because they have two yellow pants. Oh no, that’s my system. That’s it. It does not have to be complicated. It’s simple. It’s people talking to people. Here’s what I want you to do. I want every person who’s listening to this. I want you to write down three letters, CFT. Customer Facing Time. 

And I talked a little bit about it earlier in a different context, but I’m saying your objective is to say, how much CFT do you have every day. CFT customer facing time. In other words, how many phone calls are you making? How many conversations are you having? I have in my business, five. My magic number is five. I know some very successful speakers that is two, I know others that are 10. Mine is five. I want to have five conversations a day. If I have five good conversations a day, you know what? I know my calendar is full and things work. It’s not rocket science.

Taylorr; And it’s predictable. You have a repeatable process. You don’t need to stress about it. You know, if you just do the thing every day, the way you should, it’s going to get done and you can elevate. It’s like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs in a way. You’re not fighting for revenue; you know it’s coming. You can elevate your thought process, your ideas, your creativity. I don’t know about you, I become a better human being when I have more money in the pipeline. I don’t know if that’s just materialism or if that’s just comfort or if that’s just me taking care of my needs but when there’s money in the pipeline, you get comfort and then the creative energy really starts to flow. You’re not doing yourself a service, you’re not doing your clients a service, you’re not doing anybody around you, a service by not selling.

Mark: And you avoid the pa… if you only have one deal in the pipeline, then you panic. Yes, I’ll do it. I’ll do it for free but can you give me a couple of Big Mac coupons? 

Taylorr: That’s right. The scarcity [cross-talk 28:43].

Mark: It’s amazing when the pipeline is full, when you’ve got deals coming through and it’s amazing how much more confident you are on the telephone. It’s amazing.

Taylorr: Yeah, you have conviction.

Mark: You have conviction and here’s the whole thing. People sit there and say, well, how can I charge this for 30 minutes speech? It’s not the speech idiot, it’s the outcome you create. It’s the outcome, you create. Some of my biggest… I just did a seriously, it was a 12-minute engagement earlier this week. 12 minutes. That was it. And I booked a pretty nice fee off of that. Let me tell you something, that was a nice fee. 12 minutes. That’s all the client wanted, but you know what? It moved, it happened and we delivered the outcome and oh, by the way, am I getting more work off of it? Yes, I am.

Austin: Brush that dirt off your shoulder real quick. 

Mark: And I don’t mean that egotistically…

Taylorr: Of course, no, but it’s proof of concept.

Mark: Proof of concept.

Taylorr: You practice what you preach, you know? 

Mark: Yes, you have to practice what you preach. 

Taylorr: And that’s where the integrity comes from.

Mark: You follow through… that is where integrity comes here. And let’s not kid ourselves. We’ve all had miserable failures. We’ve all had miserable outcomes. It’s not the failure, it’s how you pick yourself up after it. I had a situation last fall. I did an engagement and it just didn’t go well and I came back to the client. I said, hey, I’m going to do some other things. Oh, great, great, great. And wow, we have hit it off and it’s been fantastic. And I go, hmm, I’m glad I kind of botched it because it sure allowed for a lot more conversations.

Taylorr: Yeah. 

Austin: Yeah, people get so hung up on, especially with sales, because it’s so easy to take rejection and failure personally and have it hurt you, but the reality is, is that in anything that you do in life, I guess this is just my personal opinion, we’ll see if you agree with this Mark, but anything that you do in life, that’s meaningful, almost certainly it’s going to start badly and you’re going to do a bad job. And that’s part of it because through the failure you learn what works and you get better at it. And nobody ever died from hopping on a phone call and being told no, and getting told no is just going to help you figure out the right way to package that outcome in a way where people say yes. It’s a data point. It’s not meant to hurt you. I don’t know, I think people let that fear get in the way of doing some really amazing things when really, it’s not that hard. You just have to be willing to get the no’s and be rejected sometimes and screw up and fail and fall on your face and then have the courage to stand up and do it again. And if you do that long enough, it will work. I know that in my bones.

Mark: I got three things I want to say on that because you’re right. That first call you make is going to be lousy. But it’s just like a little baby when they’re learning to walk. oh, they fell down the first time. Does that mean they never walk again? No, they get up and try it again. They get up and try it again. Eventually they get up and they stay up and that’s the same thing you have to do. Don’t worry about your first hundred calls. Don’t worry about your first thousand calls. Those are just butt drops as a baby. It’s okay, it will come. Second piece is this. You have to realize that when somebody rejects you on the phone, somebody comes unglued. You have no idea what was going on in their life before you called.

You may have caught them at just an absolute wrong time and they’re just taking out their bad day on you. This is like driving down the road and you drive through an intersection. You’ve got green light, you’re where you’re supposed to be and you get hit broadside. It was just that car and you guys just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. So, don’t take it personally. And I [inaudible 32:37] nobody’s ever been hurt from rejected. I get to see somebody that they’ve lost an arm, they bled to death. No, it just doesn’t happen. It’s okay. I get rejected all the time. I’m still married.

Taylorr: The last question that I have for you, Mark, is if somebody’s struggling with sales right now, what is the number one thing that they should consider? What’s the number one thing they should fix based on that?

Mark: Zero in on be your ideal customer profile, and start having conversations just to ask them what’s going on in their industry. You want to become confident in that space. Just have conversations. Your objective is to treat that other person as if they’re a bobble head doll and you’re just getting their head moving, just getting their head moving. Just practice with that for a week or two or three weeks. Don’t worry about… I coach a lot of newer salespeople and this is a process that we go through. It’s just getting them comfortable. And then what’s very interesting is you can begin having a conversation with, hey, you know what? I’ve got some ideas. I’ve got some, some things that I can share with you. 

Have you got a couple minutes? Let me just share with you. And the whole idea is not to present, the idea is to ask questions. I say this, the best sales call you’ll ever make is the one where you’re just asking questions. And I don’t care what the question is. Just let them keep talking and whatever they share with you, you ask them a follow up question. Ask people their opinion. It’s amazing. They’ll share it with you. Just as we’ve been doing here for the last half hour or so. We’ve been sharing opinions. I don’t know if we’re doing anything, but [inaudible 34:10].

Taylorr: We’ll just call this episode very opinionated and, and rounded out. Mark, this has been an amazing episode. Thank you so much for coming on and hanging out with us for a minute. As you know, we’re all about providing value to our audience so what are some of the things that you’re working on right now that our listeners can benefit?

Mark: Well, I think one of the big things is to pick up a copy of the book A mind For Sales that came out right at the beginning of the pandemic and I’ll tell you what, it walks you through my sales journey, so many stories in there, but that’s really the best way. Hey, jump out to my website, thesaleshunter.com. There’s a ton of free stuff that you can download, ton of free stuff that you can get. And my YouTube cha… find me on social media. Yeah, I’m there, but go to the website, get the book A Mind for Sales.

Taylorr: I will have a link in the show notes directly to that book. Personally, endorsed by the way, it’s a wonderful read and if you’re just starting out trying to get your mindset, right, this is the most wonderful place to start. Mark, thank you so much for being on the show and hey, if you liked this, don’t forget to rate it, subscribe to it. And if you want more awesome resources like this, go to speakerflow.com/resources. Thank you so much for chiming in. I just wanted to take a second to thank our sponsor Auxbus. Auxbus is the all-in-one suite of tools you need to run your podcast and it’s actually what we run here Speaker Flow for Technically Speaking, it makes planning, podcasts simple; it makes recording podcasts simple; it even makes publishing podcasts to the masses simple and quite honestly, Technically Speaking, wouldn’t be up as soon as it is without Auxbus. Thank you so much Auxbus. And if you are interested in checking Auxbus out, whether you’re starting a podcast or you have one currently get our special offer auxbus.com/speakerflow, or click the link below in our show notes.