EP154: Discover the Power of Discovery

Most sales reps think discovery isn’t sexy: Closing the deal is. But “Deals are won or lost in discovery,” cautions Sales Gravy CEO Jeb Blount, today’s podcast guest. This successful author of 15 sales-related books advises that “80% of your time in the sales process should be in discovery,” especially during a recession, when the discovery call becomes even more important. In this second of two interviews with Jeb, our Market Dominance Guys’ hosts, Corey Frank and Chris Beall, share sales-success nuggets taken from Jeb’s most recent book, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. You’ll want to listen closely as these three like-minded sales gurus explain their own discovery-call practices for establishing trust and how they get prospects to open up to them. All of this and so much more in today’s Market Dominance Guys’ episode, “Discover the Power of Discovery.”

Listen to the first half of this interview here:

Ep153: How to Dominate Your Market in a Crisis with Jeb Blount

About Our Guest

Jeb Blount is CEO at Sales Gravy, Inc., which is a global leader in sales acceleration and customer experience enablement solutions. He is the author of 15 sales-related books, including his most recent release, Selling in a Crisis: 55 Ways to Stay Motivated and Increase Sales in Volatile Times. Jeb is also the host of the Sales Gravy Podcast, the world’s most downloaded sales podcast.

Full episode transcript below:

Corey Frank (01:19):

Getting to discovery is one of the things that we certainly do here at Branch 49 and Chris’s insistence all those years ago is we’re not just a revenue ops agency, top of funnel, but we also do discovery as a service. And Chris has identified that years ago as one of the key frontline bottlenecks in organizations discovery. So I was pleased buttress by the fact Jeb, that you dive quite deeply into this as well, is that if you say that deals are one and lost in discovery, not in a presentation or the closes or even the negotiation, but in you have to learn to increase sales to do discovery better. And so let’s talk a little bit about that, Chris. I know you have some opinions on that too, but what do you mean by we have to learn to discover better and to do discovery calls a little bit better than we’re doing today?

Jeb Blount (02:10):

Well, let’s start with the reason why we don’t do them. Discovery is the weakest link in most sales processes because it’s not sexy, it’s boring, Sexy is closed the deal. Sexy is do the presentation. Walk into any room of salespeople and ask them what would you like to know? And they’ll what to say. They want to know what words should come out of their mouth that are going to suddenly woo everybody and wow everybody into saying yes to them or complying with a request. But the truth is that in sales a question you ask is more important than anything that you will ever say. But that’s boring. It doesn’t make us feel good to ask questions and listen. So discovery has a tendency to get put on the back burner even though 80% of your time that you spend in sales conversations and inside the sales process should be on discovery because what you said, Corey is true. Deals are won and lost based on the questions you ask and the information that you get.

(03:12):

It’s really no different than if you think about attorneys, lawyers going to court. If you’ve ever been in a case, you know that you went into depositions and there was a ton of discovery that was done up front. Pretty much cases are won and lost during that period of time, not in some spark of inspiration in the middle of a courtroom. That happens on TV, it just doesn’t happen in real life. In sales there’s typically not this magical plays where like in a movie scene, you push the pen over to the buyer and say, “Sign here”, and you’ve delivered some amazing message to them and they just comply, sign it and you go out and you celebrate. It doesn’t really work like that.

(03:53):

Typically, the deal is closed somewhere in discovery because you ask a question that provokes their awareness that they need to change and then as you’re listening to them, you’re making them feel important. You’re learning their story. And so as you build your business case, you begin to build these value bridges. You’re connecting the dots between what you learn in discovery about their aspirations, about their pain, about the problems that they have to solve and you’re connecting it to what you can do for them, but you’re using their language. That’s the point where they begin to feel like you get them and they begin to trust you and you begin to close more deals. Now as we move into recessionary period, discovery becomes even more important and it becomes more important because, as we’re in an economic downturn, buyers begin to change their buying behaviors. The most important change that they’re going to make is it going to be much more risk averse.

(04:48):

They’re always risk averse, but in an economic downturn, in a crisis, in a time where they’ve got to be very careful about the decisions that they make because it could impact their job or impact their company, you’ve got to build a much better business case in order to mitigate that risk, in order to lower their fears and show them the value of doing business with you. The only way that you can build that business case, a business case by the way that is laced with math to show them the outcomes that they’re going to get from your business proposition, the only way you do that is through discovery.

(05:24):

So it’s always important, far more important in an economic downturn than in any other time because that business case truly matters. They are not going to give you their money unless they feel like the risk of giving you their money is low relative to the gains that they’ll get from giving you their money and the return on the investment for doing business with you. But otherwise you’re dead in the water and you’re not going to be able to talk your way out of that. There’s not a close or an objection turnaround that’s going to talk a buyer off the cliff if you haven’t demonstrated that the value or the outcomes that they’re going to gain from doing business with you, they’re going to derive from doing business with you, are a lower risk than spending their money with you in an economic downturn. Six months ago, they’re throwing money at you. Today, not going to happen.

Corey Frank (06:18):

Yeah. Chris, we’ve spoken about that several times where a half wounded Jeb, what do you think about this theory, that a half wounded prospect, when they have a poor discovery interview thrust upon them and maybe that sales rep trips over one or two compelling questions that makes that prospect think or two, but then there’s no follow up, there’s no elegance. That prospect is at risk of being taken off that chess board for three years, average life cycle of a SAS deal, 36 months. And so to do poor discovery, does it mean there is a zero sum game there? You lost that opportunity to convert that prospect. Chances are that pain still exists, that prospect is going to get zapped up by somebody who’s much more confident. Did I say that correctly, Chris, from some of the things we’ve been talking about?

Chris Beall (07:10):

Yeah, I mean there’s a reason that some years ago I gently suggested that you put together an agency that would go all the way through discovery because it’s clear to me, has been for quite a while, that discovery actually doesn’t have a lot to do with your product and therefore it can be done generically. Somebody who is great at discovery, could do discovery for anything that any of us sell and do it with very, very little preparation around what that thing is, how it works and blah blah blah. Except they need to know basically what are the classes of problems that it solves, what are the knobs that get turned and what are the outcomes that might happen as a result? And then they should stay away from all of that except to ask the questions that might clue them in as to how this works.

And I think, I love what Jeb said and what language they use in order to talk about their world so that you can talk about your potential to be helpful to them in the language that they know how to reason it. Something that there’s been a lot of research done on how language changes, how we think. I was just talking to somebody the other day who spent some time in part of Africa where in that particular place, people didn’t talk about left or right. They didn’t have words for left or right but they had very, very good words for north, southeast, west, northeast and so forth and so on. So you wouldn’t say, you would get a snake that’s right off your right foot. You’d say you’d have a snake that’s right off your north foot. It changes how your brain works when you use language in a certain way and you have the big problem in sales. If you want to succeed, you have to be able to adapt to somebody else’s language so that your brain works like their brain works.

(09:00):

And the way to do that is to ask questions and get into not just what they say but how they say it, what’s behind it, where they get confused by the question. All that stuff is of huge value to you and is the differentiator between them being willing to part with their risk. I mean, Jeb says their money, but actually I think unless you’re talking to a business owner, you’re never talking about their money, you’re talking about somebody else’s money, but you’re always talking about their risk and their risk is so much higher than the owners. It’s easy to sell value to owners. You cannot sell value to agents, to functionaries. You must sell risk reduction to them.

Jeb Blount (09:40):

And that’s a good point because when people are asking a simple question, “Do you get me”? So there’s five questions that people are asking of you in discovery, “Do I like you? Do you listen to me? Do you make me feel important? Do you get me and my problems when trust and believe you”? And Chris is right, in most cases when you’re in sales, you’re selling to someone who is using someone else’s money to solve their problems. So when we are giving a business case, there’s really three outcomes that we want to be able to demonstrate. There are personal outcomes. So for that individual stakeholder, what do they get from that? What is important to them that’s going to help them and their life be better, their job be better? There are emotional outcomes. That’s things like peace of mind or less stress. What does that look like?

(10:22):

We talk about pain a lot. I’m not a really big fan of pain in sales. I know it’s a Sandler thing and I know that everybody likes to get ahold of it because it’s an emotional thing. But pain is not the only reason why people buy. It’s sometimes a reason people buy. And then there are measurable business outcomes. That’s the math. We have to talk about all three of those things. So what discovery does is it helps me understand, it helps me get that person. This is very, very important. And let’s just take the context that Chris said. When you’re dealing with a business owner, it’s one thing. When you’re dealing with people who are typically buying, which is most of the time you’re not dealing with a business owner, you’re dealing with someone else who is using the business owner’s money to solve problems.

(11:06):

This idea of get matters greatly. Think about it like this. The most important, the most valuable relationships you have in your life, you describe like this. This person gets me. Those mean more than anything else. So what Chris was saying about language, which is just brilliant, is that language is a way to demonstrate get. You’ll never have that level, like the level of get that I have with my wife, you’re I’m not going to have that with someone I’m doing business with. But the same psychological blueprint is in play. Does the person feel like I get them or at least that I’m trying to get them? So Corey, let me back you up real quickly. You are a salesperson and you ask a good question, but you’re so focused on the next question that you ask, using your words, Corey, I’m not being eloquent about it.

(11:55):

So rather than ask a follow up probing question that demonstrates that what I just noticed was important to that person and allow them to talk more, which makes them feel important and significant because I’m trying to get them, I just move onto the next question that’s on my list. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt and the tattoo. I was 24 years old, I was just reading questions off of a list. So I don’t demonstrate that. But if I do the follow up question, if I probe, if I listen deeply to what’s being said behind the words and I’m get all that together and I start repeating it back to them, it’s amazing sometimes when I say something back to someone in their words, they just look at me and they go, “Wow, you’re the only person that’s really listening to me”.

(12:37):

And I’m like, I just literally took the words out of your mouth and gave it back to you. And you feel that I get you. Yeah. What you’re doing with language is you’re saying, and when I say outcomes, pain is one of the outcomes, aspiration is an outcome. The chance to capture an opportunity is an outcome. An opportunity to, if you’re a business owner, I want be at the same level as my competitors.

(13:02):

That’s not a pain, that’s an aspiration. It’s something that I want to accomplish. So if I start repeating back to you, we can help you do these things. You told me, Corey, that when you were in this situation, it made you feel this way and that was awful. I can’t even imagine what that was like. What I can do for you in this particular situation is if we deploy these three solutions, it’ll solve that problem for you and it’ll reduce the chance that you’re going to feel that way again. How do you feel about that?

(13:35):

How people respond to that is extraordinary because all I did was use their language. Language matters. It connects us as groups and it taps into the human similarity bias that is always in play. No matter how hard we want it not to be in play, it is in play. We trust in people who are more like us, but because we sell in a diverse economy to people who are not like us, the easiest, fastest way to tap into that is by speaking their language. And their language is their language of their company, their language of their jargon, their language of their team, their language of their aspirations and their pain.

(14:15):

The only way you get there is through great questions in discovery that compel them to tell you things that get them to the point where they stop thinking about hiding stuff from you because you’re the salesperson and they begin opening up and allowing you to get below the surface where they teach you their language and then you bring that back. You don’t get that if you’re doing shallow discovery or you’re so caught up in what you’re going to say next, you only get that organically when you’re in the moment and when they begin to lean into you. And that takes, I love the word eloquence, it takes eloquence, it takes nuance. But the real key to doing it is essentially just being a good human being and stop selling and start just really listening to them and allowing them to express themselves and then coming back with how you’re going to help them achieve their desired outcomes.

Corey Frank (15:09):

Love that. I mean that’s a book right there. What you say, Chris? That’s number 16 right there, we get it. Forget 60 days, you just did it in six minutes.

Corey Frank (16:01):

But Chris, a lot of things that Jeb’s talking about, we’re in a different world than maybe five, 10 years ago where I jump on a plane and I go see a client. Right now a lot of clients don’t even turn their Zoom on because they’re afraid that the Zoom gods will steer their soul or something like that. But they don’t turn their camera on or we have the cold call. Chris, how do we, and Jeb, how do we deal with that extrasensory perception that we have to have on the pauses or listening for the typing in the background. What do we do to awaken that empathy, that great amount of empathy that you talk about? And Chris you’ve talked about for years.

Chris Beall (16:35):

I do discovery in a funny way. That’s all I got to say, because to me everything in sales is always about the other person’s emotional journey. And my favorite book of Jeb is Sales EQ. And Sales EQ has to do with, it’s not so much our emotions, it’s their emotions. And it’s the same. Jeb works with animals, he works with horses. I grew up in a world of all animals. It was, I didn’t have any people, I just had animals. And when you’re working with animals, especially animals bigger than you are, you realize the only thing that counts as their emotions, that’s it. They have their capabilities which tend to be substantial and multidimensional in ways we don’t understand and every once in a while they surprise you. I didn’t know that one could bite so hard, for instance is a good one.

(17:24):

But when you come right down to it, it’s the emotions. The emotions move fast when they move. They tend to be stable islands. And then when they move, they move fast. To me, what Jeff just said is you want somebody in discovery. Your only goal, in my opinion, is you get to the point where they start opening up to you. That’s it. If there were another goal in discovery, I think I would’ve found it by now. The goal is, and we have a whole episode on this somewhere in the archives called The Confessional is now open. You want to get into the confessional, you want them to tell you their truth. And what I’ve found is oddly easy. It’s just like cold calling. Cold calling’s very easy in one way because you know where they start emotionally. They’re afraid of you. You’ve got to build trust. You got seven seconds to do it. Great. There’s a lot of ways to do it, but you better do it otherwise the emotional journey towards curiosity and commitment just ain’t going to happen right, until they trust you that little bit.

(18:20):

I think the emotional journey and discovery starts with apprehension. They’re apprehensive. They’re pretty sure you’re going to try to sell them something. They’re pretty sure you’re an expert, may aren’t. And they’re pretty sure that they don’t want to have you have the better of them. So they’re apprehensive. They don’t want to go into the room, they don’t want to go into the confessional. How do you get them out of apprehension? You have to replace it with another emotion. I mean emotions are always there. So the question is, well what’s the replacement emotion? The one I choose is pride. Because everybody, if you think about it, it’s impossible to be apprehensive and proud at the same time.

(18:54):

It’s actually like they’re incompatible emotions. You can’t have both. So it’s very easy to provoke pride in somebody in a very innocent question. Mine sounds funny. People think like Anthony and Arena would laugh at me for this and think I’m a total idiot. But when you see the results, you might think otherwise. I just ask a simple question. So Corey, it always helps me to know where somebody is in the physical world. Where are you right now on the face of our blue whirling planet? And I ask it exactly like that. And then I wait and I can go 25 minutes listening to your answer and I’m happy because you’re in a place of pride of place. And pride of place is a universal for human beings. Every human being has pride of place. I don’t care where you live, you’re proud of it. And then I want to go from pride of place to pride of mission.

(19:48):

Because until I know why they’re doing their job, why they get up every day and go and do that job, I really am going to have a hard time getting underneath all of that to the confessional. Why are they even doing this? It can’t be for the money. Nobody does anything for money very long. They give it up. I don’t want to deal with them anyway, so then I ask this other question which is, “Hey, when everything goes great and it goes great, it’s fantastic, product is right, timing is right, the budget is there, everything’s great. Your people do what they have to do, other guy does what they have to do. How does your product change that person’s life”? And then I sit back and wait.

(20:24):

A lot of people think that’s two stupid discovery questions, right? Oh Chris, you’re trying to get empathy, blah blah blah blah blah. The fact is, most of the time after that second question, somebody after they’ve confessed their mission, pride of mission is there, they will start to talk about what’s in the way of them accomplishing that mission. And that’s where you want to be because that’s where you want to be. You don’t know is it economic, is it emotional, is it strategic? It’s something, because everybody is frustrated that they can’t do their job as well as they hold themselves accountable for.

Corey Frank (20:58):

That’s beautiful. Can you teach that curiosity, Jeb? Can you teach that or is it what you had said earlier about prospecting that the way to do it is just to do it and to say the questions and eventually you’ll start meaning the questions. Or is there another bio life hack that you’d suggest to engender that level of curiosity and empathy?

Jeb Blount (21:22):

Yeah, you can teach it. I mean there are people who shouldn’t be in sales. Let me get clear about that. There are people who should not be in sales, but people who have a core set of talent, you can teach that. The problem for younger salespeople is they haven’t developed the emotional intelligence yet to have the patience that Chris does to allow the answer to begin to build. They step on it. You can teach people how to control their emotions. A lot of cases what’ll happen is the person’s in the middle of telling you where they live, are telling you what’s important to them. And you blurt out what’s important to you too. Because when you’re talking, it makes you feel important. And when you’re not talking, it makes you feel unimportant. So with salespeople, you can teach that. You can teach the patients. I learned it. I learned it from masters like Chris who taught me these things and sometimes through a kick in the rear end. But I learned it.

(22:11):

You learn it through trial and error, but you mostly learn it by just learning human skills. One of the ways I teach people this is just through science. So Chris did two things there in those questions. One is he recognized something called the negativity bias, which is when people start telling you about something that’s good, they’ll almost always tell you what something is bad. So if I say, “Tell me what you love about your competitor”, they’ll go blah, blah, blah blah blah, but they don’t do these things. I know it’s going to happen every single time. I don’t got to worry about it. It’s always a pattern. He also stumbled into the self-disclosure loop. And this is pure science. When a person is talking, they are getting a dopamine hit to the pleasure centers of the brain. It makes them feel good. Some people, it’s harder to get them into that state than others, but you can get every single person to that state because it’s science.

(23:02):

They talk about themselves and they get the dopamine hit. They talk about themselves, they get a dopamine hit. So what I teach young salespeople is if you will learn to have the patience to pause, to allow them the space to talk, in most cases they’ll continue talking, continue talking, continue talking until they cross over what I call the TMI zone. But they move into this place and Chris describe this, where they begin pouring out their soul. And even when their brain consciously says, you shouldn’t be saying all these things, they can’t help themselves, but because they’re so hopped up on brain crack that it’s like they’re almost uninhibited. And so when you get them doing that, they start telling you all these things. And then Chris left out one little part of this, which is pre-framing or framing. When he initiated the conversation, where on this great blue planet world are you?

(23:58):

They knew why he was there. They made the meeting with them. They know he is from ConnectAndSell. They know it’s a conversation about their salespeople. They know it’s a conversation about software. So Chris is right, I don’t have to talk about any of that stuff. They’ll do the work for me. All I got to do is ask them an open-ended easy question that they have pride in, like they enjoy answering. And I get out of the way because they are pre-frame to talk about ConnectAndSell, talk about more meetings, talk about prospecting, talk about their sales results. If he just waits long enough, they’ll bring it full circle and start telling him all the reasons why they need him and their business. So it’s almost a game. And Chris, I don’t know if you play this game, but the game that I play is how few questions can I ask to get the most information from a prospect?

(24:48):

And it’s like a symphony plan. When I see it happening, I see them starting to roll downhill, sometimes on a virtual call where in situations where I can do it, I just look at my salesperson and go. “It’s coming, you can see it’s happening”. And so the art of doing this, and this is really is an art. There’s science in it, but it is an art to be organic in the moment. You can absolutely, totally teach salespeople that. And by the way, you asked about virtual selling. I did write an entire book on this on how do you leverage empathy in a virtual call. It’s the same thing. Once everybody gets over, “I’m on a camera”, look at us, we’re all having a conversation. I’m not even thinking, gosh, I’m on a camera. Once we get over that process and we start paying attention to those emotional cues and all the probing questions we ask around those cues, it gets brutally simple because science does all the work for us.

Chris Beall (25:45):

Yeah, it’s like a boulder rolling down a hill. All you have to do is get it started. You don’t have to figure out which ones it’s going to hit if something’s going to happen and you’re going to get to the bottom of the hill.

Jeb Blount (25:56):

And that’s what we call a self-disclosure loop. Because then that boulder’s rolling down the hill, the only thing is going to stop it is you throw yourself in front of it.

Chris Beall (26:02):

Right.

Corey Frank (26:04):

Well yeah. Was it Uncle Zieg? I think Ziegler said, “Feed your family or feed your ego. You can’t do both in sales”. And I think as your point, Jeb, as a lot of us as young pops coming up, we want to, “Hey, my managers gave me all this stuff. I got to say my marketing people gave me all these decks and I want to showcase how much I know about the industry even though I’m a 23 and a half year old person and I step in the way of the prospect way too much and I can’t build that trust or that empathy”, it sounds like. So man, great tips galore. Got to ask, of the 55, I think we only went over one right? One tip so far. But of the 55, two, there’s got to be one that has a greater atomic weight than the others. I mean, we love all our children as parents certainly and certainly all 15 of your books. But of the 55 ways to stay motivated and increase sales in a time of crisis, what’s the favorite?

Jeb Blount (26:59):

Let’s ask Chris that first because he’s read the book twice.

Chris Beall (27:05):

Here’s my favorite. It’s the opening chapter of part two. “The pipe is life. Talk with people”. And here’s why it’s my favorite. In a crisis, we tend to clam up, we tend to clam up, we tend to go internal, we tend to, companies, to have internal conversations in a crisis instead of external conversations. You only have so many hours in the day. You only have so much emotional juice you. You’ve got to actually deal with a lot more stuff in a crisis. One thing we didn’t really talk about is everybody goes home to something that wasn’t as good as before the crisis. And so they gave it the office, but they got to give it a home too. It’s going to be challenging. So I love that the simplicity of chapter 14, the opening, I think it’s 14 if I remember correctly, the opening of this entire section, and by the way, “The Pipe is Life” is a mathematical statement actually.

(27:58):

It basically is a statement that everybody who’s an investor understands. You have two things you can do as an investor and all you’re doing when in sales or businesses you’re investing. You’re investing time in order to hope to get some sort of a return. As an investor, everybody knows when risk is high, portfolios must be broad. That’s just a truth of every market back until the beginning of life. I mean, way before there are humans investing, if you are in a high risk situation, high fundamental risk, high external objective risk, you must have a broad portfolio because you don’t control outcomes and you don’t control timing. But you need outcomes within the amount of time you have available to cover your overhead so you don’t starve to death.

(28:50):

That equation’s running at all times. And so in really great times, you can sometimes narrow your portfolio and go for some big thing, whatever it happens to be that you really believe in. But in tough times you got to talk to people because that’s step 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 million to broadening your portfolio and otherwise you are living in fantasy land. You’re going to walk into that risk buzz saw and observe your parts all over the place and look at the blood on the floor and then realize, maybe I should have been talking to more people.

Corey Frank (29:25):

If there was only a weapon out there on the market that allowed you to talk to more people, Chris maybe should-

Chris Beall (29:32):

If only. I wouldn’t use it. Sounds like shocking to me. Sounds like [inaudible 00:29:39]-

Corey Frank (29:38):

Like grouch marks, you would never belong to a club that would accept yourself as a member. [inaudible 00:29:42]

Jeb Blount (29:42):

But what Chris does at ConnectAndSell is he facilitates conversations. The more people you have conversations with, the more you were going to sell. It is just that simple. It truly is a mathematical equation. My favorite chapter, by the way, following up from that is “Be the squirrel”. I think that in a downturn in a crisis, I’d look in my own pecan trees in my backyard and look at the squirrels in the trees. They’re relentless, they’re unstoppable, nothing holds them back. They fall on the ground, they hit their back, they get back up, they do it again. They 24/7, 24/7, all they think about is prospecting for nuts and seeds and stacking them up for winter. And the great sales people during a crisis are going to be focused 24/7, dialed in. They’re going to broaden their pipe, they’re going to fill it up and they’re going to be relentless, unstoppable prospectors because when all is said and done, no matter what we say, all of the noise around sales, in sales, persistence always, always finds a way to win.

Chris Beall (30:46):

Yes. And creativity. When I read that chapter at Jeb, I was beyond smiling. So here’s a blog that I wrote in on May 16th, 2017. Here it is.

Jeb Blount (30:57):

Oh really? Look, there’s [inaudible 00:30:59]-

Chris Beall (31:00):

Go nuts. Think like a squirrel. And it came about from watching squirrels get to our bird feeders in the backyard. And I would devise extremely diabolical means to keep them from doing it. Now, I have unfair advantages. I have a degree in physics. I know some stuff other people don’t know, but guess what? I don’t know anything a squirrel doesn’t know. They can get by everything,

Jeb Blount (31:24):

Anything. And that’s wonderful, wonderful videos on YouTube of like you said, diabolical ways of keeping them out. The problem is that you would think about the way and then you would go to work, and you were thinking about something else. The squirrels, the only thing they thought of all day long, all night long is how am I going to get past this thing that Chris erected to keep me out of the bird seed? And that’s how they beat you because they just figured out a way around it and they would work at it until they would. And that’s the problem for a lot of salespeople right now is that they have been living large, they’ve been doing so well. We always talk about how hard sales is. I mean, every time somebody says to me that selling now was harder than it’s ever been before. I just laugh at them. I’m like, “You got to be kidding me”.

(32:14):

For the last 18 months, if you showed up at work and you could fog a mirror, you were probably going to make your quota. You were probably going to be able to survive. Right now, that is not going to happen because folks, nobody is going to call you and the sales people who have been living in that fantasy land of everything is good, suddenly they’re going to start hitting those obstacles. If they pack up and go home, if they complain about it, if they whine about it, they’re going to fail.

(:

But if they become the squirrel and they say, “Okay, I hit that obstacle, I got to figure out a way around it, under it, through it over it, or I’m going to tear it up. Well I’m getting to the other side of this obstacle”. Those are the folks that are going to make it rain during this terrible time that we are moving into and we’re going to go through. They’re going to win. And by the way, if you’re a salesperson and you’re listening to this, look around you on your sales floor. Half of the people that are there with you right now aren’t going to make it because they’re not squirrels.

Corey Frank (33:13):

So instead of Sales Gravy, I think it should be Squirrel Gravy for the next 1824 years. Squirrel. Gravy, I think [inaudible 00:33:21]-

Jeb Blount (33:20):

Well, I’m from the south Corey, so let’s just be careful. I’ve actually had Squirrel and Gravy. It’s one of my favorite things, like with some homemade biscuits in the middle of it. Down here where I’m from, we call them tree chickens.

Corey Frank (33:34):

I love it. Well, beautiful. Listen Jeb-

Chris Beall (33:37):

We got a… You got a title now for this episode?

Corey Frank (33:41):

Yeah, I do. [inaudible 00:33:42]

Chris Beall (33:42):

Be a Tree Chicken.

Jeb Blount (33:42):

That’s right. Be a tree chicken.

Corey Frank (33:44):

Be a tree chicken. Right. We’ll give that to Austin when you hear it. We’ll give it, Be a tree chicken. I love it. Jeb, it’s an absolute pleasure to finally get you on the podcast here with Market Dominance Crew here. I think we got to have you back and talk about the other 51, 52 we didn’t talk about yet.

Jeb Blount (34:03):

That’s right.

Corey Frank (34:04):

But by then you’ll probably be ready for your book number 16. So for all that want to get ahold of Jeb, obviously best selling author, Fanatical Prospecting, in Sales EQ, Objection Selling in a Crisis, and 10 others. So go to salesgravy.com, jebblount.com. For the esteemed Chris Beall, this is Corey Frank from Branch 49. Until next time.