Lessons - The Art of Cerebral Selling | David Priemer - Author, Sales Leadership Coach & Keynote Speaker

In this lessons episode, we dive deep into the modern art of cerebral selling. Discover the key components, messaging, discovery, objection handling, negotiation and leadership. Learn how empathy, science-based tactics, and mindful execution can help you connect with customers and drive sales success. Let's break down what the current modern day iteration of cerebral selling is, because now you have a book out, you have a course that's been broken down in time, pretty sure six different components. What is the full complete cerebral selling when you teach somebody how to sell this way? Well, it's funny. When you start a business like mine, when you're focused on training, it's not just about the content, because there's lots of great content out there. I often times will focus just as much on the delivery mechanism and the retention, because people forget. Actually, as a consumer of sales training over the years, where the sales trainer comes in and does it, the thing for two days, you forget most of it, and this has been proven out. What I do is I focus on a particular topic, like messaging, and we focus on that, and then I leave you to execute those tactics in the field for two, three weeks before I come back and I teach you something else. We focus on the fundamentals, messaging, discovery, objection handling, negotiation, leadership, focus, and in each case, we focus on science-based tactics, executed with the right empathy and tone. It's especially relevant now when you think about the current buying climate, whatever it is you say you do, there's a million people that will say the same thing. At least, now you think you're this delicate snowflake and you're unique from everyone else, maybe you are, but to your customers, you just all sound the same. So, no one really cares what it is you do, and a lot of times when I say, oh, Scott, what are you doing? You're like, oh, we're a platform to it. No one cares about your stupid platform. I'm saying that the best possible. No one cares about your platform. People walk around, caring about their problems and their lives, and not even features and benefits. So speaking the language of pain and enemies, for example, if you say, so David, what do you do at cerebral selling? It's a sales training and thought and practice, and I have a book and then no one cares. So I said, like, I work with sales teams who realize that people have to buy stuff, but they hate talking to salespeople. And now you've had a little amine epiphany of like, oh yeah, I also hate talking to salespeople. Tell me more. When you think about from a messaging perspective, it's not just having empathy for your customers, but like really thinking like, how does my customers brain process this information when I give it to them so that I maximize my chances of creating interest and conversion later on down the road? And none of this is like, this is all completely about board. It's easy stuff. It's stuff that you can execute with passion and conviction, but that's that's how it breaks down in every step messaging discovery objection handling. There's all these like little tips and tricks that you can manifest. I mean, I can give you more examples. No, I think that's so what I wanted to do. So I saw there's messaging discovery objection handling negotiating leading for growth, which I'm not sure what that actually means. And then I don't know what that actually means, but it sounds interesting. And then it sounds great. I like the copy. It's great copy for these little breakdowns and then mindful execution. So five and six, we can we can shell those for a quick second. So messaging discovery objection handling negotiating. These are things that if you sold anything to anybody and put an ounce of effort into researching how to sell something, these will come up again and again and again. So let's break down the cerebral approach, excuse me to the other three. So discovery objection and negotiation. And how do you do that with the cerebral nuance? For sure, well, with discovery, I kind of think about two things and you go, you go into a discovery call of the customer. Well, what is it that you want to know? Like what do you want to talk about with that customer? Because there's like a million things you could talk about, not all the things will be equally important and not all things will have an equally emotional impact on the customer. So we talk about that. The other thing we talk about is the science of self disclosure. How do you get people to tell you things that they don't want to tell you? Like when I come to you and I say to Scott, like, what's your budget for this project? Like even if you walked into a car dealership and the car salesperson is like, so Scott, like, what's your budget? All of a sudden, you're the hamster wheels cranking in your brain. I don't, I don't want to. Yeah, shield up. Why do I ask? And what are we going to do with this information when I give it to them? What should I say? Should I low ball? Right? And so we get into like the science of self disclosure and like how to kind of recognize the kind of pictures that are going on inside people's heads and how to kind of approach those discussions. With objection and handling, it's all about understanding before we even handle the objection, it's understanding what will be the intent. So for example, the most common objection in sales of any kind is too expensive, right? Everything's too expensive. If everything was free, life would be good, but everything's not free. Unfortunately. So when someone says, oh, it's too expensive, it's like, if I, if I ask you out on a date, Scott, and you don't want to go with me and I say, so Scott, hey, let's, what we, we, we mad like Saturday night, I'm free. You want to go out Saturday night and you don't want to go with me. And you say, oh, David, I'm sorry. I'm, I'm busy on Saturday night, right? That's the equivalent of it's too expensive. So I don't know what, what does that mean? Like, you want me to make it cheaper for you? You want to go out, you want to go Sunday? You want to go Friday with that. That's right. So, well, exactly. So now if I, you tell me your busy Saturday, and I say, well, hey, look, I know, Scott, I know I'm springing, uh, uh, spring is on you on the last minute. Hey, look, what, what about next Saturday night? How's that looking? Right? And now if you say, oh, okay, next Saturday night's good. Well, I realized this was just a logistical issue. Like, that was your intent. It was to find a date that you're available. Just like if I say, well, it's too expensive, but I say, well, what if I could show you how we can make it more affordable? You're like, okay, great. But maybe that's not, maybe you never want to go out with me and you say, oh, I'm really busy that Saturday night, too. And so now I'm creating a deeper picture of like, okay, it's not a logistical issue anymore. It could be something else. So it's the same thing when, you know, when someone launches a two expensive. So really, this understanding of like when people have an objection, well, what do they try? What's the intent behind it? And then what I teach, and this is, you know, one of the biggest, I say, mistakes that people make when they think about objection handling is they think about objections as like a two column chart. Customer says this, column A, then I say this, column B, I say this, and the objection goes away. And like, that's not how, you know, that's not objections. Work objections are like anything else. They're conversations. So what we try to do is we try to teach the elements of that conversation and layering in it. There's 10 objection handling tactics I teach, but I also they're in my book. So if you want to, you have my book, you can read about these tactics. And the purpose of these tactics is that they can be combined together. So almost think of it. If you're like a gamer and we were talking about, you know, playing in the arcades as kids grown up, think about this as like buttons on your controller. So the, you wouldn't just like stand there in the hit the A button, just to keep punching and punching and punching. Like, you would have to combine that with a bunch of other tactics. And so that's what we teach. But, you know, at the end of the day, messaging discovery, objection handling, the customer doesn't care what part of the conversation that they're in. It's not like, oh, yes. And I remember as a kid taking karate. And I remember, you know, the instructor would line us up and we'd be, you know, across from someone else. And he would say, hey, great. So Scott, you're going to punch. And then David, you're going to like block like this and then punch back. And I'm like, oh, okay. So we're practicing this thing. And I remember saying, I said, you know, to the instructor, can I just ask a question in real life, if we ever, if we ever in a fight, how, how will we know what the other person's going to do? Right. It's like such a naive question. And like, oh, this is all choreographed, right? And the reality is like sales is the same way. There's a choreographed like the customer doesn't say we are now in the negotiation portion of the conversation, right? It's, it's very free flowing. So, you know, I start with the fundamentals, the messaging and discovery. But once you get objection to handling, you start leaping in discovery and messaging tactics back again. So kind of all hangs together. And that's one thing that I think, um, any sort of, I guess, linear sales, training or sales process really misses the mark on. It's assuming that, uh, that once you finish that one step, it's on to the next. But in reality, a true conversation, you are, you're always doing all of these things almost constantly. And to take it a step further, if, if the, if the messaging and the objection handling, when you have those, when those pieces are injected into a conversation with the customer, if that messaging and that objective handling is not also, uh, built into your marketing messaging and your website copy and everything else that the customer sees, it's like a, it has to be holistic. It has to be, everything has to be feeding into everything else all the time. Because if it isn't, then you're assuming that the customer will move on to the next step and the next step and the next step. And that's not how people buy. That's, that's, that's, that's never how they buy. Absolutely. Um, look, you know, we're all in sales, everyone, right? And it's funny because you sometimes you meet marketing people or people who are in customer success or account management and they say, well, I'm not in sales. I got, first of all, they think sales is a little gross, which is why they ended up, they's like, I'm, I'm in these roles because I don't want to be in sales. But like, guess what? You are in sales. We're all in sales. And in that alignment, I actually call the messaging supply chain. Um, is so important because the worst thing is when sales says, oh, you know, we, we can do a BNC and then they sign and then we, we move them to our support or customer success teams and they say, what sales told you that? No, like, we can't do that. And so it's very important. Not just from that perspective, it also, as you say, like on your website and, and marketing can play a tremendous role as far as arming the sales team, disarming objections, creating the right copy. Like, if you're the most expensive product on the market and the sales team is going to get that objection 90% of the time, marketing can help by creating content, air cover perspectives, you know, to establish that value, even before someone gets to a sales person, say that alignment is super next, next one, negotiation, just a high level of what that looks like from again, from a cerebral perspective. Yeah. So, you know, the way I kind of think about negotiation is also two parts. There's like the preparation part and then there's the execution part. And people, when they think about negotiation, typically what people think about is, how do I minimize concessions? Like, how do I minimize what I give away? But they don't stop to think about oftentimes, like, okay, what's the balance of power? How much power do I want to have going into the negotiation? What can I fall back on? Who am I negotiating with? Like, what is it that I want? When at what point should I stop negotiating? What's important to me versus what's important to them? Because the things that are important to both of us may not be the same, right? Like my organization might be especially in SaaS might be focused on getting like upfront, you know, contracts and multi-year agreements. And the customer might be okay with that. They just need a better price, right? So, that's what negotiation is. We focus a lot on like the preparation, like, what do you want to know going into the negotiation? What are the levers? You know, what are you going to do? Because oftentimes with sales, we just, we don't practice anything. We just go in and get our ass handed to us and in real life, right? So doing some of that preparation and then, you know, the execution pieces. But again, there's a lot of like discovery. For example, if in a negotiation, a customer says, oh, we love your product, but it's too, it's just too expensive. What is that? Are we negotiating now? Are we negotiating for, or I do not have I just not established the value? Maybe I did a bad job of explaining what it is we did. So do I have to go back to the messaging? But to put a bow on it because you asked about the leading for great as well, one of the biggest sources of leverage that we have in our sales organizations is coaching, you know, the reps that get good, proper coaching are statistically and scientifically proven to be more likely to exceed their quotas. And I'll tell you like we would do sales rep surveys all the time and sales force in my companies and we would ask reps who would say like, Scott, what's one thing that you wish? You know, you had more of and Scott would say more time with my manager, I want them to listen to more of my calls, write alums, all that kind of stuff. So sales leadership has a tremendous role to play in the success of the organizations like we all, you know, extensively believe that. But sales leaders actually get one third of the investment and training of their skills as their reps do. And usually it's not how to be a better coach, how to give better feedback, how to create more transparency, how to advocate for your team. But all of these things have, again, scientific principles rooted in that can help us get better. And that's actually one of my favorite leadership books. Actually, my favorite Simon Sinek book, I'm a big Simon Sinek fan, is Leaders E. Last because he gets into kind of like the science and leadership. And so that's, you know, what I do in my my academic background now, I teach sales leadership in my practice as well as at some business schools. But sales leadership is such an under invested in elements of the sales motion, but it has a massive impact if you can get it right and really help these leaders get better at their craft. Thanks for tuning in. 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