Lessons - From Nobody to Closing $2 Billion in Deals | Oren Klaff - Pitch Anything Author

In this lessons episode, explore why control and sales is essential to building trust and closing deals without pressure. Discover how predictable behavior weakens influence and invites buyer dominance. Understand why traditional discovery calls frustrate prospects and waste opportunities and uncover strategies to frame conversations that create autonomy while keeping control of the process. Now, I love the way you switch the mindset when you go into the sales conversation, but a lot of people, I think, have an issue trusting. It's trusting the process, right? A lot of people have an issue trusting the process. So, I guess, do you have advice for someone who's selling who doesn't want to blow the deal? That's the constant thing that's stuck in everyone's head and that's why people default to the other way, the traditional way, the not good way of selling. Yeah, I haven't thought about this before, but it'll be great. I know you have a very sophisticated listener base. Maybe they could memorize this line and try and it's sort of when you have the customer who's trying to take control, the sense is, hey Scott, just when you think you know the answer, I change the question. And by that, I mean the predictable nature of your behavior as a salesperson is the thing that works against you. People come to meetings, not to hear the features and the benefits and the price. You get that on the internet, get that on a Zoom call, right? People come to a meeting to meet new, interesting, colorful people with real insight about their business, who's an expert in their kind of problem, who they can work with to really get a solution to the problem they have. And so that person has to be you. They spend time with that person when that person offers insight and novel solutions to what the buyer already knows. So if you are just diligently giving a buyer what it is you have, the features, the benefits, the solution, or your customers are, it is putting the buyer in total control. And so when you feel like you don't want to put any pressure on the buyer or blow up your sale, you're doing the exact opposite. By not pressuring the buyer in any way and just following the stamp of sale plan, you're actually jeopardizing the sale, right? The buyer will chase you and be interested and start to invest time when he knows you're an expert, you have a great product, you're the best in the world, right? And that you're not just allowing him to buy and be in total control. When you take that control away, it raises the stakes and makes the buyer interested. You cannot end a sales presentation by insane. So what do you think? Would you be interested in this? Do you have any questions? The buyer gets control because I don't have any questions right now. Similar to the material, you don't mind sending a proposal. We'll take a look at it. I got a show to the committee. I meet with the Sasquatch and the Loch Ness Monster. Every 30th of the month, they tell me when I'm allowed to budget. I got to check budgeting. I'll get back to you. If we have any more questions, and then they're going to go look for another version of what it is, you sell cheaper, better from China. So to answer your question, when you don't go for control, because you're scared of it, you're actually harming yourself more than you ever could by going for control. The issue is control. By not attempting to take control at all, you end up being controlled by the buyer. So I love that. Thank you. Because I think a lot of people have to hear that again and again and again and beat it into their heads because I fully agree that if you can't control that, you can't offer anything besides the points that are listed on the website. You're taking this further obviously and I'm putting it very simply, but if you're just offering the points on the website, what good are you? You're a walking brochure and that's not going to help anybody, right? That's not helping the customer. If you actually care about the customer, you're actually doing them to service. So let's talk about, and at any point, I don't know where the good kickoff point to flip the script is. So you tell me, but control flip the script sounds like a control thing. I know you spoke a lot about control and pitch anything about framing about, and I don't know is that is control something that you always have to fight for or does it come naturally? How do you there's so many techniques and strategies? How do you know when you have to think about control and when it's just the way you conduct yourself? And then we can go and flip this script. The reason it's a scary word is you can control people. It's not possible, right? So now you have an orange laugh, Scotch Larry talking about control, right? And so you're confused and understand, you should be. So because you cannot tell people what to do, you cannot force anybody to do something. Can I corner anybody into a position? You can't ask, uh, by the way, this is sales on gladiator, you know, how do we corner somebody? How do we force to eat all the time when people say, hey, everybody, you having a good time? You know, everybody here ready to learn something? Yeah, motherfucker, I came to the conference, you know, it's nine in the morning, I had a cup of coffee, nothing can go wrong. Something, those are rhetorical questions. It's a setup, right? Hey, Mr. Jones, you know, if I could get you the air conditioning unit, you know, the could air conditioning your whole building and lower your price, and we could take away your old unit and wouldn't cost you anything, is that something you'd be interested in? Yeah, asshole. Of course, I'd be interested in it, but that's not how the world works, right? So, so when you, now, the buyer's not going to probably call you a motherfucker, right? But he will think it, okay? Depends, depends on the buyer, but yeah, I'll do it for you. Oh, but, but the rhetorical questions, or asking, doing sort of explore to our discovery calls, the discovery calls are very popular today with young people. I don't know how you are, you're like 23 years old, but, you know, these 22, 23 year old millennials have sort of, uh, glomed on to this idea of the discovery call. I think they've been so smart and clever, and so, you know, how long have you felt this pain? Where do you see yourself on five years? Scott, um, you know, if you could solve this problem, what would that mean for you? You know, um, the, you know, how long have you been dealing with this? You know, what would be the ideal solution in your mind? Hey, hey, listen to asshole, right? I came to his cell call for you to solve my problems. Not for me to solve my solve my problems. I've already tried to solve them. You know, the buyer, I've tried to solve my problem that I failed. I ordered some stuff online. It didn't work. I hired a local consultant. That failed. I hired my, my, uh, niece, you know, just got an MBA to set up the website and she screwed it up. Now we have holes in our data system. So I've failed at this. Okay. I cannot teach you, but, but anything, just look at my problem, right? I understand the basics of it. And give me your insight on where a solution can come from. I don't want to spend half an hour telling you, I have a very common problem. My firewall doesn't work. Right? You tell me what you know about firewalls, but this is not a diss, I don't want to spend 15, 20 minutes sharing with you all of my problems. You should be able to recognize my problems and be familiar with it. So, um, the, the, by doing a discovery call, by being nice, by being looking for rapport, by doing all the things that you sort of see other, other salespeople do, you are, um, not only you're losing control, but you're, you are not controlling the sale in a way that's frustrating for the buyer. The buyer wants to see you controlling it. Okay. He wants you to ask very specific questions. Hey, it looks like your firewall is, you know, causing a couple data security hacks. They're coming over the TCP IP 11. It looks like you've got, you know, 17 breaches in the last 60 days, you know, five of those involved the real data loss. You know, we see this pretty often, this happens in, you know, 58 to 80 person organizations as they start to crest through eight petabytes of data. Is that about, I don't like, I'm not even in this business, right? But is that about right? You know, they want to see you starting to control the set of ideas and the conversation controlling the frame. Yeah. Around which the conversation is happening. So pitch anything was about frame control. How to focus the buyer on certain things that matter and get their focus away from things that don't matter. How to control, you know, how to frame time, how to frame power, how to frame scarcity. And these are the things that can be done. And it gives some ideas on how to do it. Flip the script gives the script to control the presentation and the conversation and the sales process with the buyer. You have the, so, so the real outcome was flip the script. It lets you create a sandbox. And that's where the control is. It lets you create a sandbox that the buyer can then play in and do anything you want. Have autonomy. That's what could, that's a problem with control, right? When you really try and control somebody, so Scott, what do you think? Is this something to be interested in? If I can get you the price that you were looking for, you know, is this something we could sign up for today? Take a wet. I have a special discount. It expires in a week. I'll talk to my manager and if he'll approve you, I can get this for just $900 a month. Does that something we can go forward with? Right? That is aggressive and it's controlling. The reason you don't like that is because it takes away your autonomy. Mm-hmm. In autonomy, you can have Maslow's hierarchy and needs. What he forgot to put on it is autonomy, food, water, shelter, love, safety, above all of that stuff is autonomy. I would rather die on my feet than live on my knees. Every human has that built into their DNA, right? Autonomy and self-governance is the highest emotional, highest survival need. So when you as a salesperson start to take away autonomy, self-governance, self-decision making ability, then you're losing the sale. So you work so hard as a salesperson to all be nice and prepare a presentation of the features and benefits, then towards the end of the sale, start to take the buyers autonomy away when they're tired. They want to leave. They really don't want to see face anymore. And now you're going for control, take their autonomy away. That creates a failure state. So flip the script. Let's you create a sandbox where you set all the parameters and then you back away and you give total autonomy to the buyer at the time that he wants it. And that's why when we close, like you say, oh, you know, hey, ornclap, so the million copies of pitch anything. Number one, most interviewed sales, you know, trainer, sales guy, pitch guy, finance guy, you know, on the internet. And what's your best clothes? And my best clothes is this. So that's anything else we should do here. I think we're wrapping up. You know, if you don't have anything else, we're probably going to pack up our stuff and leave. That's my clothes. Because you can't close at the end. There's nothing you can do at the end of the sale to push somebody into making a purchase. Now, if you do most of the time, it just falls apart. Like it'll fall apart of contract and fall apart of finance, follow it. So yeah, maybe you can get a signature. You can get it. Yes. But in a deal, and remember, I don't sell TVs. You know, I raised $10 million dollars or sell a million dollar contracts or five or a thousand other things. You know, maybe you could sell a TV that way. I don't know, an iPhone, maybe a car. But when you're really getting to enterprise sales or services, the end of the sale is not when you consider to control someone to put some in the deal, even if you get it, it will fall apart. So what you can do is set the whole thing up. Big idea, problem, the solution, why do it now? The value proposition, what you get, how it works, the social proof, or the reputation, you know, who else we work with, what we think the solution is. And then you could say, but I need to get more, I need to know more about you, as I said before, before we sort of agree to work with you. Right. And so when you set it up in that way, you set up the sandbox where they are pitching you to become of, of, of, you know, how to work with you as opposed to you pitching the idea that they should, you know, sign an agreement or give you a yes. you