Lessons - The Psychology Behind High-Converting Sales Conversations | Mara Dorne - Sales Performance Expert

In this lessons episode, discover why most salespeople struggle, not due to lack of talent, but because they fail to commit and avoid the daily grind. Learn how top performers thrive by showing up, staying consistent, and feeding off team energy. Understand how rejection is part of the process, and how authentic human connection can turn a stranger into a customer. What are the things that I mean we sort of spoke about what good sales is? What would be some practices that you see? Like some really bad habits that you see with salespeople that you bring on that doesn't matter if you're selling insurance or if you're selling anything, you just got to kill those habits. They're lazy. What do you mean? The number one reason why people don't succeed is selling insurance is not hard. Maybe mentally but physically, it's not hard. Now these guys, they have everything built out for them. They're not going door-to-door business to business. You guys are literally in an air conditioning nice office with food all the time, all kinds of incentives, and they cannot commit. That's the biggest problem I see across the board with it. They don't want to work. It's a grind. I mean, my sales guys are in there 8 a.m. They're working till 10 p.m. but they do not. It's the lack of commitment. They still have to like call call and it's it's not so much a call call. It's more of a warm call. These people put their name and number online. That's all right. Yeah, so it's not like they're calm, but you know, they're all the people that they're calling are also being blown up by. But they have technology. They can text them. They can email that. I mean, there's these guys have all kinds of advantages, but the number one reason they don't do well is because they cannot commit to a schedule that works. And you have to grind. It's a pipeline business. And if you're not willing to grind your first year and build that pipeline, it's not going to work. But then you start to build. So then how how much money can you really make in sales? Like I mean, you first year or when? I don't know. You tell me I don't I've never worked in insurance sales. I'm curious. So sales is not first of all the insurance insurance sales is one of the leading fields to be in anything like financial services is huge. So that's number one. Sales, what are these that most entrepreneurs are salespeople? So you can make the most amount of money in sales. You can make, I mean, my first year agents that really come out of the gate, taking advantage. There's tons of incentives from the company from us from, I mean, tons of it. You can you can easily make 150 to 200,000 your first year. And that doesn't even count your residual income. So you build a book of business. You build a book of business and you get paid second year on them. So is do you feel? Because I always have this debate as well. Do you feel like sales can be can be trained or is it something that you're just born with? No, I think that's hard. That's very hard. But you can't believe that is like we call it. We say you have like a stick. Like you just have like the chutzpah. That's the word. You either have the chutzpah or you don't, but you can train somebody to do that. Yes, you can teach somebody. You can't and not to create. I think you're born with charisma and the chutzpah. But I think you can train somebody. You can definitely train them how to be a good salesperson. Tactical. But I mean, like is there where you always like just like very outspoken? Well, yes. Okay, it's always been like this. And this is, this is, I've always been like, because I think that's what people struggle with. They struggle in sales, they struggle with it. Like almost a little bit of social anxiety of putting themselves out there, sort of exposing themselves to the customer and being afraid of being shut down. I can't remember. This could have been her mostly. I can't remember who said this, but basically the, the idea was get to a hundred knows or a thousand knows because then you know, yes, this coming for sure. Of course, in the fun, like the best thing I tell my agents this all the time, like, did you ever make prank calls as a kid? Maybe they cause minor young, but did you ever do that as a kid? Yeah, of course. You didn't know the person on the other end, right? You didn't know it's prank all this same thing. Like what's the worst that's going to happen? Person on the other line is going to hang up on you. That's the worst thing that they're going to do. So where's they? Why do you feel like it's so important for you to travel so much for your job? I'm curious. I don't have to. I don't have to. I do it because I feel like I understand the grind and no business. I do not think this is my personal opinion, but a successful business is not going to be successful unless the person is a hundred percent bought in and they're overseeing their business. And that's why I show up in my office. I think it's the reason why you're successful. Actually, there has to be face time. There has to be. And every year, I'm like, I'm not going to travel. I'm not going to do it. I'll do the zoom thing. And you know what? I've incorporated zoom into my business. I have, but there's nothing like going face to face and taking these guys to a dinner or connecting with them outside the office or just sitting next to a new agent. You know, there's it's just no greater feeling. I've thought this a lot. I feel like after COVID, we all got so comfortable with doing things virtually that we like lost a human element of business. And I've just like, I wasn't running a sales team at the end of COVID. I'm curious if you see that. If you see the people just gotten so comfortable with like zoom and text and email. They so we can't require anybody, but we strongly suggest that our sales people are in office. So the majority 99.99% of my sales team is in office. They do not work from home. You know, there's a difference. There's a huge difference. Because sales is about synergy and energy. And if there's no synergy, there's no energy, there's no production. Then think about it for a new agent, right? The new agent is on the phones. They're dialing through. You know, everybody, they're nobody's picking up. Everybody's broke. You know, it's the same. Then all of a sudden, you start getting into your head and then what happens? The downspiring. You self-sabotage. Yeah. So if you don't have a filling for office. It's a hundred purple. If you're around high energy sales, and you know, Bob is making a sale, and then Mary is, and then what do you want to do? It's infectious. You want to make the sale. But you mentioned before, like we don't have to break the point, but you mentioned before, like what sales really is, which is bringing somebody like helping them see the problem that they're dealing with and sort of naturally bringing them towards the solution, as opposed to shoving it down their throat. Yeah. That's the another bad habit is bringing, this doesn't happen a lot because I have young agents that have no sales experience, but a huge bad habit from people that come in that have previous sales experience as they know. They know everything. That's a bad habit. They know. But you work with, so that is your, like your perfect rap is somebody with no sales experience. None. If we like them young, young, this somebody has no wife, no kids, no girlfriend, no pets, no fish, no excuses. That's what we that that's our ideal candidate is. I'm going to go and use her. And but the culture is different. Like I mean, if I look at different sales cultures, you don't even seem like you have like bad aggressive, a sales culture. No, I don't, but it depends so we're broken up into teams. I do have some that are really aggressive. I do like my West Palm team is an aggressive team. They're cool. They're what we call closers. These guys are good. They're going to close you on something, which is a great way. I mean, look, they they're not doing anything wrong, but they know that the person put their name and number online and they're not letting that person off the phone until they sell them something, which is I, I mean, I think that's great. If they can turn that no into a yes or get that person to, but that's great. Is there when somebody puts their name in, are they hitting them up like tactically? Are they hitting them up with calls, texts, emails, sliding into their DMs? All of the above. All of it. People find their everything. People find their so sometimes the sometimes the consumer knows to put their wrong phone number in because they know they're going to get blown up. We can find you. If you put your first and last name, we can find you. We have all we have all the tools for it. But does it turn people off from buying? Of course. Sometimes it does, but you know, sometimes people are really looking for health and I mean, they are obviously really looking for health insurance. Of course, occasionally you get your person that is not really, but for the most part, no, they're not. And if they're turned off, then you know what? Then it's next. That's how we try to teach them, so they don't dwell on it. Yeah, I'm curious if the teams that are closer today out perform, like they do outperform. So there is something to be said for just like being like to persevere. Yeah. So another bad habit you're talking about habits is when the consumer says so people like to be people do not like to be sold. No one, you know, it's a game. I always say it's like a dance. Who's going to, you know, are you going to get sold or am I going to get sold? No, I don't want to get sold, right? That I'm the one that's trying to do the selling. So when somebody says they're not interested for new people that come in, they'll say, okay, no problem. Well, they put their name in number and there you can't just say, or they'll be like, can you call me back later? Yeah, sure. No problem. And I'll look at them, be like, Scott, they're never going to pick the phone back up. You know, you have 30 seconds to make a good impression or you have some way to make sure that you have them committed to picking phone back up. So how do you do that? We solidify, we call it solidify. So you call me, I mean, it's, it's not easy to get me to care about a random stranger in the first 30 seconds. So usually what happens is they do it through tax. That's the number one way that that the corresponding starts is through tax. The goal is to get you on the phone in a bad habit that the salespeople don't like to do is get on the phone. They rather text, it's easier. But what do you, a text is so easy to be like swipe and you're done, right? So, so the whole idea is you want to get somebody on the phone. So what we teach them is you have literally less than 30 seconds to get somebody to find you interesting. It's not that they're not interested. It's you're not interesting. So you have to be catchy. So if I'm calling and like, hey, Scott, I'm not going to call you and be like, hey, Scott, Larry, I wouldn't say that because you would know right away if I was your friend, I wouldn't call you by your first last name. Yeah. I've gotten, I've had some bold, like not and not say bold because that's the wrong word. I've had salespeople just like hit me up via text. I love it. Using my first name. I love it. And it throws me off because I actually for a second, I'm like, but the alternative is, and it actually, like I don't mind having a conversation with someone that's human. Yes, because that's a dinner today. It's humans doing business with other humans. Absolutely. So it throws me off. It doesn't really upset me at all, actually. I don't mind it because I rather, and I also don't like somebody who, like listen, I'm sure that some people are really good at bullshitting, but I don't, I feel like when somebody is using my first last name, God forbid, you put a mister in there. And then it's like, I don't trust a fucking word you're saying. Never. And if you the same thing, if you call me mister, ma'am, I'm done. No, it just feels so, it just feels not personal. Yeah, not personal. So I feel like, you know, I'm like, want to, even though, even though it's so silly, human psychology is wild. Even if you just say Scott, you just call me that. I feel like we're friends are like just like a level of comfort there. That's where my criminal justice degree comes into play because it talks about psychology and criminal justice. I worked out for university, by the way, but you know, I mean, you just said like some simple things, but it all calms down to it. Like that's what sales is about psychology. You know, who's going to bite first? It's understanding people how they, how they move, what you know, different ways to get the entice them, you know, and connecting. You know, we teach them that if you're talking to somebody in California, you know, in Pasadena, maybe like, oh, yeah, you know, whatever it is, it's just some kind of mutual connection. 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.