Selling Should Be Fun or You Aren't Doing It Right
Blair had fun on a week of sales calls and came up with four reasons why he thinks most people can learn to have fun selling like he did.
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“Coaches Corner: Now This Is Fun”
Transcript
David C. Baker: All right, Blair, I was just over at my home, which is, I don't know, 50 yards away. I talked with my spouse, Julie, and I said, "Here's the topic that Blair wants to talk about today. What do you think of that?" She immediately started twitching. [chuckles] She wouldn't think of herself as a natural seller. She's more of an individual relator kind of person. I said, "What do you mean by that?" She said, "Well, the only way I could think that selling is fun is if I really believed in what I was selling." If that's the whole message, we could just cut this short and save people 31 and a half minutes, or do you have more to say than that?
Blair Enns: Oh, I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard somebody say that.
David: Because you hate it or because it's true?
Blair: I'd have $8 or $10. I even said that myself early in my career. It's a misunderstanding of what it means to sell.
David: Are you criticizing my spouse? Is that what's happening right here?
Blair: No, you know I love your spouse more than I love you. She's got all the brains. She's the total package, and you're just along for the ride. That's why you live 50 yards away and you have to knock on the back door to ask her a question. Sorry, what are we talking about? Oh, selling.
David: You said you've heard that 8 or 10 times and it's a misconception about selling, but I thought t's pretty insightful. You don't think it is.
Blair: It's a common refrain from people who aren't in sales jobs who try it on for the first time because their assumption is most people who are in sales are in the business of talking people into things, and they don't care what it is that they're talking them into. I think it comes from the position of this stereotype view of what it means to sell. I think there are people who are in sales, who hold that stereotyped view of what it means to sell. My impetus for this-- do you want me to jump ahead?
David: Yes. This is me interviewing you, so you feel free to take off.
Blair: You'll come back in 25 minutes when I've done my soliloquy.
David: -and correct everything, yes. I do want you to talk about the impetus, but I also want you to talk about this Twitter poll, which I responded to. If you're sweet to me, I will tell you what my answer was, but go ahead. What's the impetus for this?
Blair: Well, the impetus for this is last week, I found myself in some sales calls and I delegated the role of sales a couple of years ago. I'm in some calls last week, and after every call, I log off the call and I think, "Oh my God, that was so much fun. I love this so much." I mean, clearly, I have loved selling since I founded Win Without Pitching 20 years ago, but early in my agency career and in my agency business development career, I did not like selling at all.
I misunderstood what it meant to sell, and it was always-- these exchanges were uncomfortable for me, but I was really struck after each conversation, how much fun I had, how much I enjoyed it. I took to Twitter and I did a little Twitter poll, and I simply asked the question, "Is selling fun for you?" The three possible responses were, "It's a total blast," "Meh, it's okay," or, "I dread/despise it." 41% of the respondents said they too see selling as fun. It's a total blast, but 59% were neutral or negative on selling. 31% said, "Meh, it's okay," and 28% said, "I dread/despise it." I've been sweet to you. How did you answer that poll?
David: I was really insistent in my own brain that I was going to answer the middle one, "Meh, it's okay," but then right before I clicked it, I thought for a second, "Wait," and I'd just been on two sales calls, and I clicked, "It's a total blast," which surprised me, but then I started to think a little bit deeper. I don't know if this is where you're going with all this, but I realized, "Oh, I love learning about other firms. I love knowing something about what they're talking about, and I love not having any pressure about closing the sale."
I've learned this from you. It's just a conversation, and you don't have any pressure to sell anybody anything. You're just figuring out if you can help them, so I answered yes, I was in that 41%. Were these results what you expected? Did you have a particular expectation about how you think people might have answered this?
Blair: I really didn't. I really didn't have any expectations. Let's make some approximation. It's roughly a third, a third, a third, with a little bit more than a third saying it's a total blast, but I think there's a sample bias in my Twitter feed, where I would assume that I'm followed by a higher proportion of people who see selling as fun. My hypothesis is that most of those 41% who see selling as a blast, most of those people are salespeople first. They love it so much, they got into the business of sales. Most of the 59% who are neutral or negative on the act of selling probably have another primary role, and selling is one of the other things that they have to do in addition to their main role.
They might be a business owner, they might be an account manager, they might be a creative director. I can't prove it, but I think most of the people who don't really enjoy selling, they don't enjoy it because it's not their main role. They don't fully understand what it means to sell properly.
David: This is just a side question, and then I want to get right into this stuff you've thought through. When a principal tries to hire somebody else, a non-principal, to lead the sales efforts, is that because they don't have the time or because they don't love it?
Blair: Oh, it could be either. It also depends on what we mean by selling. This has come up before, but if we take the lead generation function away from sales as it has largely been done, lead generation over the last decade has moved from a sales function to a marketing function. If we take that away from salespeople, what does it mean to sell? The sale typically starts with an inbound inquiry or an outbound inquiry to somebody whom through their behavior has identified an interest in the firm.
Back to your question, sometimes principals don't have the time to do the outbound. That's when they hire salespeople when perhaps they should be thinking about building a larger marketing machine. There's always room for some outbound, but I think in the examples where selling means handling inbound inquiries and navigating them to a close, when that's delegated by the principal, it is because the principal does not enjoy that. I think anybody can learn to love selling when selling begins with an inbound inquiry.
David: Oh, I completely agree with that. You're making a distinction here between selling as an honorable, interesting, fun process and pitching. There's a distinction in your mind here. Loving selling is not the same thing as loving pitching.
Blair: I used to hate selling, and therefore, loved pitching. At some point in my career, that flipped. Early in my career, I was in my first agency job, I was 22. I was an account coordinator, then made an account manager, whatever comes after account coordinator after the probationary period. Then my boss said to me, "Hey, you seem to be pretty fearless, we're going to put you in charge of new business," and I thought, "Oh, okay."
I loved getting into pitches. That was really my job, was to do outreach, and most of the scenarios ended up in a pitch. Being a young person in an ad agency, man, pitching was so much fun. I loved it. It didn't take me long, a few years, less than 10 years in my career, I started to have a strong dislike for the pitch because, at some point, it felt like we, the firm I was working at, I thought we were rock stars. We were Hollywood stars being asked to audition against people who didn't have the credibility that we had.
I started to feel insulted by the pitch process, and that's about the same time when I was finally trained in how to sell. I understood that selling when done properly is a more honorable profession where human beings are having conversations with each other. That seemed to me to be far more preferable, having conversations with people and each party discerning whether or not there's a fit here suitable enough to take a next step, than me and my team standing at the front of the room presenting, pitching, transmitting and not receiving, and the client sitting there with arms crossed, and the client dictating to us how our services would be bought and sold. At some point, I misunderstood what it meant to sell, so I defaulted to pitching. As time went by, I started to despise pitching at about the time I learned how to sell.
David: There's something so disrespectful about the pitching process, but it's particularly disrespectful if you are the incumbent [chuckles] and you're asked a pitch, it's even worse. This overlaps a little bit with your diving into the content creation side of things. One of the questions I was curious about is what the connection is. When you began to enjoy selling, how much of that overlaps with the fact that you were doing the right content creation that dropped leads in your lap that already thought some of the right things about you? You weren't trying to convince them of something that they should have already known. Is there a connection there between your foray into content development and your love of selling?
Blair: Absolutely. I was having a conversation with a client of mine in Europe this morning. We're going to do a podcast discussion for The Drum in the UK on the subject of pitching. She runs a firm. That's a global firm that's-- I want to say somewhere around 200 people, that has very publicly said, "We don't pitch." There's been a lot of discussion about her policy. We're going to record a podcast on it.
She was asking about my experience and I was saying, at some point, I just hated pitching so much, I was willing to do the work of writing down what it is that I believed, and put it out into the world in the form of blog posts, in the form of books, et cetera. You and I are both writers, so it's in our nature to do that, but there's a big period in time between when you first start to articulate your point of view on your subject matter and you put it out into the world and it starts to really drive a serious volume of inbound inquiries.
I see that as the trade-off. If you hate pitching or if you hate cold calling, the outbound part of selling, then do the work. Play the long game of creating content. Take a stand on issues, find your voice, find a point of view, put it out into the world and start to drive inbound inquiries to you where you are in the driver's seat, where the client already knows what you think. You're already ideologically aligned.
Therefore, you've separated yourself from most of your direct competitors right from the first word of hello. There's absolutely a correlation there between a willingness to do that upfront work. You think of many of the listeners, many of the clients that you and I serve, agency owners, they struggle with being seen as different. They struggle with getting a high volume of high-quality leads, and they can never find the time to do the work, to do the content creation work. Those two things are connected.
David: Because of that, they end up in pitches where they have to overinvest in the sale, something you talk about a lot, we've talked about on the podcast, and there's this sense that they can't waste this opportunity even if it's not a great opportunity. Back to why you're discovering again your love for selling and why it's fun, when you step back and you think about your own experience and how that might apply to other people, what are some of the reasons that lead you to remember how much fun this is?
Blair: At the end of my week, last week, I was covering for somebody else and had these great sales conversations. I've decided to insert myself into more sales conversations, but I did a bit of a debrief and wrote a post on this. I identified four reasons why I had so much fun selling. I think there's a lot of learning for the listener in these reasons. The first reason why selling is so much fun for me is I'm really fascinated by our clients. I'm fascinated by who they are as individuals. I love creative people. I love entrepreneurs. I'm fascinated by them, their businesses, and their business challenges. That last part is interesting because I continue to be fascinated by their business challenges, even though I feel like I've seen them all. Do you know what I mean by that?
David: No kidding. In fact, I'll sometimes sheepishly admit to my-- either a prospect or a client, it's like, "Okay, I'm not going to find anything I haven't seen before." Of course, that sounds really arrogant. Then immediately I'll say, "But I'll bet you anything you have combined this dysfunction in your own unique way. I'm going to bring all the same tools, I'll use the same toolbox, but I'm going to use different ones in a different order to fix it." That's another way to state what you've talked about.
Blair: I quote you saying that in this post. You left out a keyword because I've heard you say, "What's unique to you is the dysfunctional way in which you have combined these problems together."
David: In my very motivational way of talking.
Blair: Don't you find it's interesting? This idea of I'm still fascinated by these challenges, but I've seen them all before. I was asking myself, why is that?
David: I'm not sure. I don't think I've been able to figure-- we had a neighbor invite a whole bunch of us. There were 30 of us over at his house for fireworks over the holiday. I'm sitting here meeting most of the people I didn't know before. There's three retired judges, four real estate people. There's way too many real estate people in the world.
Blair: There's way too many retired judges.
David: A couple of medical doctors and so many-- it's like, not a lot of these people are interesting. I won't tell you which ones were, in case anybody listens to this. Then just the week before, I was doing an event with 28 people, all of whom were principals in this field. I can't get enough of these people. They're so weird. They're so interesting. They're so articulate. They're so curious. They've done so many different things. I have no idea why this field is so interesting, but it really is. That's what you're talking about, it's not just loving selling, it's loving selling to this audience too.
Blair: Yes, I think maybe it's back to your wife's point, I really got to believe in what I'm doing well, I really believe in the people I'm helping and I still find these challenges to be fascinating. I remember having a team member who came out after some period of time, was not remotely interested in our clients and what they did. I remember being shocked because I thought these businesses and these people were just innately fascinating and therefore everybody would find them fascinating, but that's not true, and then, after that person moved on, we had a conversation about it at the leadership level, it's like, "Let's never hire somebody again who is not absolutely fascinated by our clients and what they do." It doesn't matter the role. In some ways, this is me eating my own words from 15 years ago, or people talk about "Follow your passion", I'd roll my eyes, it's like go where the market says to go. We're horrible predictors of what we will be passionate about, what we will like, and what we will not like. Let the market dictate what it is that you do, who you serve, and how you help them.
Yes, I still agree with that, and I think it's easy to fall in love with this segment, and fall in love with the challenges in any business. I've said before there's a guy who sits next to me in a hockey dressing room and owns a garbage business. I'm fascinated by his business, fascinated by his business. I've said to him, "If I didn't do what I'm doing, I would do what you're doing. I'd want your business," and he looks at me like I'm crazy.
I think it's easy to fall in love with business challenges of all different types, but if you don't, if you're not fascinated by the business that you have, if you're in the service business, or in the expertise business, and you're not fascinated by your clients, businesses and challenges, that's going to be a problem. It's going to show-- it shows up when you sell. We spent a lot of time at Win Without Pitching getting people to rein in their passion because you don't want to lean on that passion and enthusiasm too much in the sale.
There's this balance where you don't want to give your power away, but you want to be interested enough, fascinated enough that you're still curious. After 20 years in this business, I'm still curious. I still love asking the questions and learning about the business, and even though I've seen all the challenges before, I've discovered that what's unique or what's really harder to discern is like, "Okay, I know what the problem is, why haven't you been able to fix it?" That's where it gets really interesting.
Back to your point, what are the specific things about this firm and the way they combine these different personalities and other problems that make it difficult? Why are they stuck in this place? Yes, I see lots of people stuck in this place, but they're not all stuck for the same reason. I just continued to be fascinated by our clients, and that's the number one reason why selling is still fun for me.
David: Working with a client right now, we've narrowed down their positioning options to fractional CMO work, horizontal positioning, or vertical one, around manufacturing firms. I gave them all the pros and cons and a bunch of examples of each and said, "All right, pick," and they came back with an unexpected choice to pick the manufacturing. I asked them why. They said the same thing. It's just so fascinating to them. They went into that world kind of open to being excited about it, but not excited yet, and then as they've learned more and more, they love knowing the intricacies and having answers at hand that can really help their clients.
David: That's the first one, fascinated by the field that you're selling to, what's unique about them, what you keep learning. What's the second reason why this can be fun or should be fun?
Blair: I think we've already talked about it. It's basically I'm in a position of authority. I have taken my thinking over 20 years and put it out there into the world for people to kind of judge whether or not this point of view resonates with them or not, and if it resonates, they come to us. Last week, and most of our sales calls, they're inbound, and it's just a night and day difference between being in this position of authority and the sale.
We make this generalization of you're either seen as the expert practitioner or you're seen as a vendor, one in a sea of many with little power in the sale. Just 20 years of putting my thinking out there in the form of blog posts, speeches, books, podcasts like this, has created-- similar to you, I suspect it's one of the main reasons why selling is fun to you, it would be different if you were out there hunting, right?
David: Yes. If we just put a slightly different language here, there's a little bit of a product market fit. Somebody knows a little bit about what you do. They've been impressed by certain things. They may have a bunch of questions or not sure it's a good fit, but you're not sitting there trying to convince them of the value of what you do. The proxy for that is all of the hard work you put into putting your point of view out there in a way that has attracted folks so that the conversation is very different because that's the background of it.
This one really resonates to me because a lot of the folks that aren't comfortable with selling, that comes from the fact that they just don't know what to say. They don't have those ready things that come to mind. They don't have all of the "Drop and give me 20", the things I talk about, the observations that they can make, they don't feel like they have a camera in someone's office. They don't feel like they have a point of differentiation that sets them apart from 95% of the other firms that this client could have talked with.
This may be the most powerful-- we haven't gotten through all of them. The first one is you still love this field. There's something about it. For people listening, who are targeting a different field, that is an important component of it. You love what you're doing. You love the field that you're addressing, and then have you done the hard work of not just thinking of yourself as an authority, but having the positioning or the business strategy that even allows for that? We haven't really talked about positioning or business strategy, but that's a part of this too. It's really hard to have a position of authority without a position. What's the third one?
Blair: All right. The third reason I found myself loving selling last week is I realized selling is teaching. I just love the teachable moment that is a sale. Now, for me, somebody who sells selling and prices pricing, selling is such a meta moment that I have this big advantage. I think the listener wouldn't have it to the extent that I and my team do, but for them still, if you're selling expertise of any kind, you should see selling as a teachable moment.
When I'm in a sales call with somebody, they understand that if they buy something from me, what they will be buying is on display. It's this meta moment where part of them is engaged in the conversation, and part of them is this removed third party who is observing, watching me, listening to what I say, noting how I behave, and asking questions like, "Is this the way it's done? Could I do this? Would I be able to do this?" It's such a meta moment for me that really gives me license to do anything I want in the sale.
David: This is dangerous. This is not something I want to see you feeling like you can do anything you want.
Blair: Yes. Well, it's not that liberating because one of our core values is do what we say. I have to sell the way that we advocate. To me, I'm modeling it, but even if you don't sell selling as our listeners do not, if you sell any other form of expertise, any form of advisory services-- let's take you as an example, David. People are hiring you as a consultant, as an advisor, to give them advice for this relationship to work, they have to recognize and value your expertise. They have to let you lead.
Therefore, you have to show up in the sale that way. I suspect you feel that you have the same freedom as I do on that front. You can cop an attitude of "take it or leave it" if you're feeling merciless, or you can just be really pragmatic. Correct me if I'm wrong, whether you recognize it or not, you view the sale as the sample of the engagement to follow. The roles are established right here, and you're trying to determine, "Is this client going to let me lead? Are they going to take my advice? Are they going to respect my authority," or are they going to push me around and try to ask me to get me to do a whole bunch of stuff for them? Are they going to be difficult in this moment?" Have you ever thought about that before, this idea that in these exchanges, you're sampling and testing whether or not this will be a good client?
David: Yes. In fact, it can backfire on me sometimes because I'm so interested in seeing if it's a fit because I don't have any interest in working for somebody if it's not a fit, that sometimes I realize, "Oh my goodness, I haven't given them a chance to ask me enough questions." I've been asking them all kinds of questions about their business and where the pain is and where they think the solutions are and so on, but it's absolutely true.
In your case, the sale is the sample. I think the sale is the sample for everybody, but you're "selling" selling, so it's really the case in your world. In my world, it doesn't show up that way, but when we get to talking about the cost and the terms where, in 100% of my engagements, everything is paid upfront, there's this choking sometimes. Then they'll just laugh and say, "Well, I guess if you can teach me how to do that too, then we're good." [chuckles]
Blair: Yes.
David: It's slightly different. I do think that's true. I can see how selling is teaching for you, but I hadn't really thought about the fact that selling is teaching for them too. I need to think about that one, but I think that's worth considering.
Blair: I think if you sell coaching of any kind, you should see selling as a coachable moment. If you sell consulting, you should see selling as a consultative moment. I don't mean you start to give your stuff away for free, but you're modeling the engagement in the sale.
David: When you say, this third thing that you've said here is that selling is teaching and you love teaching, most people are not going to associate selling with teaching, but it's interesting to think of it that way because even if they don't hire you, they're learning something. You're teaching even if you don't get paid for teaching. You and I both love that. We love helping people, even if they're not paying clients. Even if they don't hire you, you're actually teaching them in that process. I don't mean that arrogantly, I mean it helpfully.
Blair: I think the listeners should think of the sale as a moment where you teach the client how to be a good client. Really, just to fall back to this language, the sale is the sample. It's the sample of-- the roles that we will play in the engagement are established here. Let's use this interaction as a testing place to trial the roles that we will play in this engagement to follow if we end up doing business together.
Let's set the rules for how we're going to talk to each other. Are we going to be straightforward, or is one of us going to go into convince mode? Is one of us going to withhold the information, or are both parties going to be open and honest with each other? I just think it's this moment of exploration and back and forth and learning that goes on, on both sides. At the end of this interaction, we both have a better idea of how we're going to work together. I would say view this as a moment when you teach the client how to be a good client in the engagement with you.
David: That's really powerful. That was the third. The first was, you love selling because you're fascinated by the clients you serve. Second is that you have done the hard work, which has led to being in a position of authority, which makes it easier to have those fun selling moments. The third is that selling is teaching, you love to teach. What's the last one?
Blair: The last one is, I had this realization-
David: Oh, we got some confession coming here, I think.
Blair: Yes, maybe not as big as you think. I was selling custom tailoring and not off-the-rack solutions. The calls that I was taking last week were for customized private training. We have training products and then we have customized private training, and the business is changing right now with more of that customized private training. It's been a long time since I've been in a conversation about a customized engagement.
When you are selling, I know this intellectually, but I experienced it again last week, when you're selling a productized service, one of the challenges you face as a salesperson is engagement. You're only engaged to the point where you can match the client's situation, and you're only as deeply interested in the client's situation until you figure out which product to sell. You're in conversation, and behind you on the shelves, you have all of these products. In our world, it would be productized services if our listeners have productized their services.
Clients start talking about their problem, you're asking the questions. Part of your mind is always asking, "Which of these is the right product? Which of these is the right product?" Then you see the pattern and you go, "Oh, okay, got it. You need X." That's when you stop being interested in the client. Now, when you sell a customized solution, when you don't have anything on the shelf behind you and you have to actually build the solution, then you need more information.
This is where the first point of being fascinated by our clients, and this last point of selling customized solutions work hand in hand because even if you are fascinated by our clients, as I have been for 20 years, when I'm selling productized services and I have a finite number of things that I can sell them, I'm not as deeply interested. I don't behave in the conversation the way I was behaving last week, where it's like, "I want to learn more. I want to drill down more. Well, what about this? Why is this happening?"
You're almost in diagnostic mode because you need the information to go away and customize an engagement. I'm set off the top. It's like custom tailoring versus off-the-rack solutions and both of those are viable business models, but when you think of your experience as a buyer, going into a store to buy a suit versus going into a tailor to buy a custom-made bespoke suit, those are entirely different experiences. You develop a relationship with your tailor, that you do not develop with the salesperson who is selling you an off-the-rack solution. That salesperson needs higher volume of sales, they need to move quicker, they only spend enough time with you so that they can determine what size you are, et cetera. It just goes on and on.
David: Your expectation as a buyer is very different. It's almost like if they don't have something hanging on the rack that works almost irritated. If it's going to take 10 days to modify something, if there's nothing that fits you, but you go into a custom data situation, you're prepared to spend more money. You're more patient answering questions.
Blair: More time.
David: In fact, if it doesn't take a while to do it, you think you're getting cheated. It just feels like it needs to be more substantial. Just to clarify, almost everybody that's listening to this podcast is selling customized solutions.
Blair: Or probably should be. Many have gone down this path of systematizing elements of their business, and that path has led them to systemize and package and productize some of their services. My experience is that many firms go too far on the productization front without thinking of the trade-offs, and the trade-offs are, you don't get the price. The relevant trade-off for this conversation is I see the difference. Somebody who's selling productized services versus customized services that they're not as engaged as a salesperson.
It was just so clear to me at the end of last week, that one of the reasons I was so fascinated by these conversations I was having was that there was no set solution. I had to get the information that would allow us to craft a solution that is bespoke to this organization. This was the last point of my list of four reasons why selling was fun for me, but it was the one that crystallized everything for me.
It is a night and day experience. I've sold both. I've sold both in my business, and for years at the beginning of the business Win Without Pitching was a solo consulting practice, I was stuck in the middle of a quasi-productize, so I've been out at both ends of the spectrum, and I've been in the middle. It's just so clear that when you don't have a product to sell, you become a better salesperson. I've said to our clients for years now, "I could make you a better salesperson by taking away everything that you have to sell because if you had nothing to sell, all you have left is this framework of finding out what does the client want? How's value going to be created? What are the KPIs? How much value is going to be created? What would they be willing to pay for that value creation?"
That's a really creative far-ranging, sometimes deep-diving conversation that has nothing to do with solutions. It's more interesting because it's more creative because what you can sell is infinite. It's infinite. You are not constrained by the products on the shelf behind you, but if you go into a situation thinking, "Okay, we got three different packages. Is it going to be gold, silver, or bronze?" as soon as you discern which package the client needs, you don't go deeper into their situation. The client feels it, the salesperson feels it, it's just not the same thing as a custom tailoring conversation.
David: This is why I think if you outsource internally, you're selling to somebody else, and that person that's taking it over comes from a transactional sales background, the most difficult thing for them is the fact that they don't have the same specific things on the shelves to sell. When you're on a racetrack, you have breaking markers that say, "All right, you're 200 yards, you're 150 yards, you're 100 yards." All of those markers are missing on the track for them and they just feel a little bit lost. There's not stuff dragging them forward. There's not specific things they can sell. It's a very different process, which is why I don't see many salespeople with transactional backgrounds be all that effective in a consultative world.
Blair: Right. We've had this conversation over the years, people who come from that transactional high-volume product sales almost never do well in agency sales. It's just a different type of sale altogether. I think the lesson for the listener here is, once again, I'm trying to drive home this point of like, be aware of where you are on the productized versus customized spectrum, and make sure that you are at the place on that spectrum that you've arrived at it with your eyes open and you know the trade-offs that are inherent in that position on the spectrum.
Both of these are viable business models. Being a custom tailor or owning a massive suit store where you sell off-the-rack solutions, but there are trade-offs. There are different cultures. There are different types of salespeople where the sales conversations feel different. The margins are different. All of these things are different. Make sure that you are at the place on that spectrum, where you have knowingly decided to arrive, and you are aware of the trade-offs. Again, back to this point, the one big trade-off here that was reinforced again to me last week was it is so much more fun to sell customized solutions than it is to sell off-the-rack solutions.
David: These four, fascination with the clients that you're trying to help, being in a position of authority, teaching and loving that process of teaching, and then selling customized tailored solutions rather than off-the-rack solutions. Do you want to throw any last tips in to make this fun?
Blair: First, I want to say about these four reasons why I had so much fun. I'm not saying everybody should take these four lessons and make them work for themselves. Just try them on and see if there are some learning in them for you. My situation is my situation. There are aspects of my personality and elements of my business that makes selling fun for me. They might not be the same reasons why somebody else would find selling fun.
I would say, if selling is not fun, then you are doing it wrong. You're absolutely doing it wrong because it should not be a chore. It should not be something that you'd dread or despise, but some final pointers, I wrote an article a few years ago called This Should Be Fun. I've got this new post coming out. I think it's called Are We Having Fun Yet? Then one of our former coaches wrote a post, I just tripped over it the other day. It's a few years old as well, him talking about having fun selling.
We'll post links to all three of these, but in the one that I wrote a few years ago, This Should Be Fun, I offer three tips. I'll just recap them here. Number one, remember it's a game. This point, if it's not fun, you're not doing it right. It's a game. I call it the polite battle for control. It's this polite jostling for the power position in the relationship. Keep it fun. Number two, focus on the objective and the frameworks and just let go of the outcome. Let's not have the stakes be so high, and all these are related to each other, and the third one is no sunk cost.
I've said many times on this podcast, you want to become a better salesperson, three words, no sunk costs. Don't over-invest in the sale. Don't over-invest in time, in hard costs, whatever they may be, travel, et cetera, and certainly in emotions. Even if you're fascinated by or even passionate about your clients, don't get too carried away, and don't talk yourself into spending too long on a sale that it doesn't make sense for you to spend on.
David: Yes, carrying more than they do.
Blair: Was that a coherent sentence?
David: It was, especially for 35 minutes into this where the fact that we're still being coherent surprises me. This is good, Blair. Thank you.
Blair: Thanks, David.