Lessons - Forget Everything You Know About Sales | Ari Galper - Founder & CEO of Unlock The Game

In this episode, we dive deep into the art of building trust on a cold call. We challenge the conventional sales approach and discuss how to create genuine connections without pressure. You'll learn why traditional techniques like follow-ups and pushing for the next step by killing your deals and how shifting your mindset can lead to deeper conversations, higher conversion rates and a one-call close. So say you're cold calling somebody and you don't have the decision maker, you don't have the information, you don't even know who it is, you're trying to get to that person. How do you establish trust if somebody who doesn't even have that problem? Yeah, so how do you establish trust on a cold call? So here's how it goes, okay? The typical way is like this. Hi, my name is I'm with we are a how are you today? Or do you have a couple minutes? That's that when you start out to someone with a typical sales approach, it's over and hello. It's over right there because they associate you immediately with the stereotype. You should, you know, that's why it's so painful. Here's how we handle a call like that with our mindset, our language and it goes like this. So let's say the guy at the piece of the phone says his name's Scott. I Scott, my name's Ari and I'm hoping you can help me out for a moment and you're going to ask what look there? Like now, now I'm triggered to say like what? Of course, that's called a two-way dialogue and hello. That's how you create a connection because they're going to, they don't know who you are. It could be the president. It could be the tax op. You could be a client, the human nature when you ask for help is to say how can I help you? As long as you deliver it with that tonality and that relax to the calmness, if you say hi, I'm hoping you can help me out for a moment. You're dead. Cut the energy out. Remove the pressure. Remove momentum from your sales process. Is that the secret? Is that, is that, that seems to be like a theme to come back to, remove the momentum? Well, one of our core principles is the idea of always removing pressure from the process and pressure is created by us that inadvertently puts momentum on them to move them where? Toward our whole. Our mindset shift is your goal is not to sell. Your goal is a truth and trust a weatherman where help them or not. It's different directories. So when you shift your mindset, you let go of your goal, move them forward and you focus on bringing president with them to create a human connection with them around their problem. That creates this bubble of vulnerability with you where they feel comfortable opening up to you and building real trust. Real trust is when they feel comfortable telling you their truth. Real trust is when they feel comfortable telling you their truth and that's what you got it. That's what you got to get to in it. That's what I told you. Bottom of the iceberg. That's what you got to get to on every sales call you have. Otherwise, you're skimming the top. Play what I call the numbers game. You know the numbers game concept. I know the numbers game content. The volume of velocity. Diled for dollars. The more contacts you make, the more sales you're going to make. That's like so in 1980s, man. We discovered some of how many contacts you make anymore. It's about how deep you go on each conversation. Now, how many calls do you make? A couple other classic ones. Remember this one? The sales always lost at the end of the process. You know, you had a deal pending. It all looked good. It just fell through. What happened? It was like the perfect sale. We discovered this economy now. The sales now lost at a more at the end of the process. It's now lost at the beginning of the process at hello. Why is that? Why is that? Because we think our job is to pull them from A to Z down our path as fast as possible because we think the sales being made at the end. But what we don't realize is if you're not really in trust with them in the beginning, the sales lost right there. I'll give you an example. I'll give you an example. We use your approach. Let's say you're having a first call with someone over the farm, okay? Either inbound, lay whatever referral, great conversation, a good chemistry. It looks like a good fit. All that they're interested in the call kind of comes to a close after your first call. What do we normally say to someone? It'll call like that. We say in sales. We say things like, hey, how about we set up a call for another like set up the next call, whatever? I said, yeah, we're in a really big condition all the years to move things forward. What happens if you attempt to move someone forward and they aren't ready yet in the beginning? What do you break with them right there early on? You're going to push back. They're going to lie about jumping on the next call saying, yeah, sure, whatever because they feel pressure to do that and they'll either jump on it and then have no and then goes to after that or they'll just they'll just not show up to the next call. Correct. That's the cycle of pain begins right there because they feel pressure for you that breaks the trust. So same scenario, but our mindset and our language, okay? Calls going well, good chemistry, could be a fit, call coming through close, right? It's saying, hey, how about we move forward? What we say is said is this we say, where do you think we should go from here? Very, very clever. You just throw back to them. You always throw back to them. You're letting them set their own pace. It's not about me. It's about them. And when you say to somebody, where do you think we should go from here? They're usually in a state of shock. They can't believe somebody in business as you ask them what they want to do. They're so used to being pulled down the process. They know a mile away. It's over right there. We're like, man, sales odds is such so painful. It's so hard because you're so selling from the old conditioning that you believe the goal is the next step. That's not the goal. The goal is for them to say, for them to say themselves, man, he just gets me. He understands my issue. I feel something about, just, you know, you meet someone and they just totally get you like, man, he just had it. That's what you, I got you, but whoever listen to this has to learn how to do is a new skill set. You don't know it now because if you're still selling it out, but talking about today, you're still in the old mindset. What other parts of the traditional sales cycle are broken? So I don't know if it's negotiation, it's closing, if it's demo, like, what else? And also like, what else do you work on? Are you redefining like the whole process? Is that your thing? Is that like what you're working on right now? And that's what you help clients with? Or is there a certain thing you specialize in? Eyes, everything broken. I fundamentally, yes, but I specialize in one specific area. And that is sales conversion only. Okay. How to convert the currently that you have in one single conversation, no multiple steps, no follow up, no next steps. It's called the one call sale system. I'm running a book on that right now. And I'm teaching this to my private clients and they're loving it. I set the bar for my private clients at a 100% conversion on every call if the person's qualified. If it's plain that explain that though, because I think if there's other steps, they're like, you have to have PO, if there's a PO issue, yeah, I don't feel like a sign contract. I mean, the verbal, yeah, we're going to move forward. Okay. Okay. Okay. On the first, not 20 steps later. Yeah, because like, I'm just thinking like I'm traditional enterprise B2B sales, like, yes, you have all your steps. You have all your steps mapped out, you know, every step is the act of the buyer is like, that's very normal. So what is this one one call closed? This seems like it's it's insane for somebody comes from an enterprise space to think like I could ever close a deal in one call. So how do you get through all those steps? Psychologically, you built the trust and then how do you get them through to close? So that means you're hitting, you're hitting discovery, demo, negotiation and closing, like, no, no, no demo. No, no, I'm just saying that you're you're, I'm going through all the steps that I use. I know. I know, because you, those steps, our steps, we think we have to do to build trust. I'm for a bond here in saying that all those long sales cycles, the reason for a long sales cycle is because of a lack of trust. If you had built not you, but if if you can build enough trust with some a decision maker on our first conversation, there is no long sales cycle. The reason we're in those cycles right now is because we've messed it up early on. We did a whole relationship thing. We did a demo early on. We didn't we were the doctor. We are the sales guy. Hence why we're now stuck in a long sales cycle chasing ghosts. If I tell this for fun, I'm going to ask your listeners and viewers right now to take a verbal oath of me to not legal or verbal one to remove one key phrase forever from the vocabulary as of this recording and never used ever again in the world of sales. Now, this might hurt just a bit for those folks who've been in sales for a long time. Is that all right? Yeah, do it. I love it. I love it. Listen, if it works, I don't think anyone's going to push back. You just got to challenge people. They got to fit. For anybody who's listening to this, a lot of stuff that Ari's talking about, it's some of it makes sense immediately, like the fact that you're going with your five wise and getting people to open up and you're not just taking surface level information and you're pushing them into it, almost like an uncomfortable but very candid conversation about the praying points. I think that's very important. I think that this one call closed to me. If somebody can try it out, and I'm going to try it out, I'm going to try some of these steps, probably read more into the book and see if I can deal with some of my clients. It's an uncomfortable thing to think about because obviously, if you ever done large ticket deals, this is something that has never been discussed ever. It's not something that is normally ever taught in any sales book ever, the one call anything. I can see it for a smaller deal. That's pretty standard, but for larger, it doesn't make a lot of sense, so I've got to try it out. But the point is, you don't try it out, you never know. So I am a firm believer in experimenting and trying different things. So if you have one line that you think everybody's here at a right away, like let's do it, let's try it, let's see what the results are. I'm just a data guy, like if it works, it works, I'm fine. Here it is. I'm going to ask everyone to never again use this phrase after this recording for the rest of their lives. Here it is. Never again use the phrase follow up ever again in your sales career. All right. If I had them all in the room, I asked to raise their hand. How many of you used to follow up the last few weeks? I have every hand going up. Who's running an email? That I run you to follow up. Hi, I'm calling a follow up. What's the only industry in the world to use the word follow up? Sales sales. Hi, I'm just calling a follow up, but I'll count it. It's like you're killing your own sale. They're associating you with the negative sales for the stereotype. Because follow up says I'm trying to move things where. Follow up where it's my goal. This is the commission in my sale. You're losing the sale right there. There's a few more classics of the 80s. Remember those classic ones? I'm giving you call to touch base. Touch base follow up. Checking in. Like what are next steps? Oh my god, it's so 80s and we're so stuck in that old conditioning with that old language in which kills the trust. If we say instead, let's just write for our materials. You say I'm just giving me a call to see if you have any feedback from our previous conversation and a feedback from our last meeting, any feedback for repulsal. See, feedback's not going forward. It's going where? I'm at words away from the sale. When you move forward, you create momentum. When you create momentum, you put pressure on them. When you put pressure on them, you're chasing your ghost. Plendid Embers Game. If you were living that world and chased that painful situation, all the power to you. But there'll be certain people on this call who go holy crap. Where was all each 20 years ago? 10 years ago. Why am I still stuck in playing the numbers game when I could just shift with the whole thing and play in a lower volume, higher conversion rate model and not chasing ghosts anymore and it's totally doable. I'm doing it right down my private quies and they're kicking ass. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.