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This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
Glenn Mattson
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the Building Blocks of Success.
We're in season six, episode 10. As we start to take a look at this episode, I wanted to share with you a few things that I found that consistent winners always do, and individuals that just never seem to hit the marker consistently, for some particular reason, never do these things, or they don't do them consistently.
So let's talk about some of the things that you can put in place into your practice, into your business, into action that really can move the needle for you moving forward for next year.
As I go through these, I'm going to share a few with you, tell you some stories, etc.
But I also want you to reflect and not discount what I'm about to tell you, saying that's not me, when reality is it probably is and very well can be.
So I'd like to share with you a few things in different orders, but let's go through them. The first is I really believe from all the people I talked to last year, and this year, one of the big takeaways is talk less, listen more. So talk less, listen more.
Glenn Mattson
Now, you know that Sandler has a rule called 70-30.
70-30 means that whenever you have a conversation with the prospect and or client besides the presentation, that you need to follow a 70-30 rule. 70-30 rule means that you spend 70% of your time listening, and only 30% of your time talking. So instead of being so focused on trying to impart knowledge and saving so much time trying to share how smart you are and what you know, and God, even worse is trying to tell people what they should be doing or why what they’re doing isn't right.
Maybe what you need to do is sit back a little bit in the back of your chair and start trying to prove to everybody that you're smart or you're right and actually start using questioning and questioning skills so that when you actually do have to have a conversation with someone, you don't need to talk more than 30% of the time because you're asking the right questions.
And it's about self-discovery, isn't it? You know, I find it interesting that a lot of the newer individuals and or pros that are going into uncomfortable scenarios, new to them, right? And that could be new product, new level of individual we're talking to, new size of a client, bigger deals. They start to talk way more than they should. I cannot tell you a very simple trick is just to go into a call, and find out on average how much you've been talking.
Now, you may be using Plaid or Fathom or others that can tell you how much you're talking. As a matter of fact, when all our clients use our Sandler AI coach tool, that actually one of the indicators is how much you were talking versus listening and how effective your questionings were. So if you find yourself talking more than you should, first of all, I got to ask yourself, are you really selling? Because selling isn't talking, selling is listening. That's why someone gave you two ears and one mouth. We got to try that for some time.
Glenn Mattson
But if you just think back and ask yourself, we spend so much time on features, benefits, what's our talk track? How do I say it? How do I get them to buy this? That's you doing all the talking and that's not self-discovery. How much time are you spending putting together a series of three or four or five or maybe even 15 set of questions that help people self-discover where they are and self-discover why they have those issues.
And most importantly, self-discover what the impact are of those issues. You got to remember, people buy for their reasons, not yours. So the more that you give someone your reasons to buy, the more you sound like a sales guy. I find it so funny, right? When I talk to certain industries and certain people, especially in the service side or someone that was in a service role, for instance, on a team and their mindset is, well, I don't want to be a salesperson.
I don't want to be that cigar smoking, polyester wearing, cliche salesperson. And I get that. No one wants to be that person. But when you start talking more than you should, when you start pushing product, when you start saying this is what you should do and why you should do it, what the heck do you think you look like?
Glenn Mattson
I find it...I don't know, frustrating, funny, curious, sad, all at the same time on how so many people are trying not to be salesy. I get that. I get it for sure. But at the end of the day, when they say, I don't want to be salesy, then all of a sudden what they do is salesy, right? How they act and what they say and how they do what they do, they themselves are putting themselves in a position that they are the most classic ugly looking salesperson possible.
I always find it funny or sad, I guess, when someone says, I don't want to be a salesperson, but teach me what to say. How do I sell this? What's the best position to do this so they can understand that? Versus I get all that again, right? Your one talk, your value prop. But the second you start sounding like everybody else, you're going to be treated like everybody else.
So I don't care if you're talking to your spouse, your kids, your team, friends. Why is it the fact that when people start to talk, all they want to do is listen until they want to add, listen until they want to jump in? How come when some of your friends tell you about, hey, let me tell you what I did on my weekend, you can't wait just to jump in to tell them what you did.
Why don't we ask questions? Why don't you be curious? Why don't you let the person run with your story versus you waiting to tell your story? I just see people sitting on the front of their chair all the time. When you shouldn't be sitting on the front of your chair, you need to be sitting in the back of your chair.
Glenn Mattson
First thing I want you to take a look at as you look into this year is really a epic, epic thing that I think would help an enormous amount of people is really following that 70-30 rule. Spend most of your time listening. And I guarantee it, most of you right now, if you have young kids, you go home and you ask your little ones, so how was school? And they start to tell you, you sit down with them. You'd be really curious.
Oh, you did? Did you make a new friend? Oh my gosh, how'd you do that? Oh, really? Yeah. Did you know them beforehand? Oh, man, you must have been a little nervous when you walked over to say hi, were you? No, you weren’t. Oh, you're such a big boy or girl, right? And we do those things. Yet when we talk to one of our friends and say, how was your day today?
Oh, I made a big deal. Yeah, me too. And you can't wait to jump in and take over the conversation. So why don't you practice shutting up? Why don't you practice being curious? Why don't you practice not trying to get your own values met and create value in your mind by talking. If you really want to be a good salesperson, I cannot stress this enough. Salespeople, the best of the best, have massive ears and a little mouth. They understand that by someone telling someone what to do, it's only 10% effective. But if the person does self-discovery, it's 80% effective.
So whatever you want to tell someone, be a master at asking questions so they say it to you.
Let me tell you it to you again. If you really want to be a good master at asking questions, ultimately you want your clients telling you what you wanted to tell them. That's how you know you're doing well with your questioning skills. I realize I'm not going to go into it now because I went into a whole podcast on it earlier; listening skills. Most of us are atrocious at listening. You got to work on it.
Glenn Mattson
Second thing I want to share with you is this. We have to stop the highs and lows of production. We have to minimize the wave, as we call it. The wave is when you do really well and then you kind of slow down a little bit and then you dip down and then you're on the bottom part of it. And it's, oh my gosh, I got to get going again. And you start prospecting and doing all the things you need to do to fill your funnel. And then you spend all your time on the funnel and focused in on what the deals are doing or not doing.
And all of a sudden you get paid on it and you got to turn around and go back to the very beginning. And it just gets craziness. 31 years when I've asked, it doesn't make a difference. One person in the room or 7 or 8,000 people. How many of you here have a wave, a high and a low of your production? And hands go up all over the place. And what happens is, is that most people lack discipline. They have guts, but they lack discipline. What that means is that on the way up to the top of that spectrum, so when you're doing well and things are coming in and business is busy and you’re watching the money go from your sales funnel to being paid to you or you’re watching it to make sure nothing happens, what you're not doing is filling the funnel.
So one of the things I wanna share with you is stop necessarily focusing all your attention on getting paid. What I mean by that is, is you got them in the process and now all you do is stay on that one or two or five clients until from through your pipeline until you get paid, then you go all the way back and start all over again. Salespeople have to start to have inside their DNA that prospecting is, for many, the one and most important piece of their skill sets. Now, what I mean by prospecting, is having the ability to prospect all the time. The best time to prospect is when you don't need the business. It's not when you need business.
Glenn Mattson
You gotta remember the rule. We spent the whole podcast on this one too is the difference between need and nice. Nice is nice to have, need is different. When you're in a position that you need something, you lose 100% control. When you want it, you're in control. So if you have somebody and you have four prospects this whole month or four prospects in the old week, but you need eight, you need those people to have a second appointment. So you have to start asking yourself, are you doing or not doing certain things that you should or shouldn't be doing because you don't have anyone else behind it?
If you truly want to have power, you truly want to have courage, you truly want to have the ability to have control and have choices and not feel like you're under the gun all the time. And here's one of the things I would love for you to tattoo in between your fingers and put in your cubicle. Prospect all the time, not some of the time. Prospect all the time, not some of the time. So if you really get successful, and I've helped probably 32 people this year move upstream. What I mean by move upstream is that their demographics were a certain dollar amount. And that demographics, that certain dollar amount is what's giving them the opportunity to have a certain size deals. So for instance, maybe they're in a household of 200,000 and their average case size is X. Or they're talking to a business owner that does roughly about a million dollars, so therefore their average case size is Y.
So what starts to happen is that we have a consistency of a type of client that we're talking to. And most of those types of clients…again, especially if we're doing sales in living rooms, etc., right, individuals to homes, is that that average household income does dictate an awful lot about your sale. Typically, how much they buy, discounts, etc.
So, man, I would love for each of you to not worry about doing more, not about selling more, not about more lives, more plans, more assets. And I get it's more, more, more, but you can do a greater dollar amount with less people versus volume. In the beginning, I get it. You're trained to do volume so you can sustain yourself and live. But after you've gotten through a certain time period, you have to take that record and change it. Not about volume. It's about quality.
Glenn Mattson
So that if I sit in front of someone making 200 grand, nothing wrong with that. A lot of money. I get it. But many of us, our goals to get to where we have to, we'd have to sell a lot of those people. Yet, if our average case size doubled or tripled, we could do the same amount in half a third of the time. And that's what the bigger fish do. The bigger fish, when they go fishing, they're not bringing in a two-pound fish. They're going out hunting and fishing for the 8, 10, 12, 14-pounders.
And by the way, they don't need to bring in as many, but many of them, when they get really good at it, bring in the same volume, but now the quality's gone up. So here's my 10 cents for many of you. People call us up. You do it on your own. Been doing it for years. We are focused on increasing your competencies, increasing your skill. I could speak for four hours on the fact that getting more skills, learning more knowledge on how to do something with higher net worth individuals doesn't mean you're going to do it.
What does mean you're going to do it is having the ability to make sure that your mindset says, I believe that I deserve to be in front of these people. So when we look at developing your identity, what I mean, spend 30% of your time on developing your self-worth, developing your self-esteem, developing your swagger, if you want to call it that. And what I mean by swagger is those individuals that are going to move upstream that we talked about. When you sit in front of someone who does make, for instance, five, six hundred, a million, three million, whatever the numbers are. That you're not uncomfortable. It's a matter of fact.
And that's because, and you've got to make sure you have this down in your notes someplace, your self-esteem will dictate who you call on inside of an organization. Your self-esteem will dictate what your average case size is. Your self-esteem will dictate how much money you earn every dang year. It's not your skill development. Your skill development will give you the ability to, But your comfort zone is the one that will tell you how far you're going to go.
Glenn Mattson
So I would love you to spend 30% of your development time specifically on increasing your comfort zone. You could do that through a lot of tools that we have, but increase your comfort zone. If you increase your comfort zone just a little bit, your role performance will increase. You got to remember the rules. You will perform one step above or one step below how you see yourself conceptually, period. So if you see yourself as a four and you go to five, your role performance will automatically go up. If you see yourself as a five, for instance, and you perform as a seven, give yourself about a week, you're going to go back down to a five.
It's called adjusting. It happens all the time. You out earned your comfort zone. So please spend 30% of your time focused in on your self-esteem and your comfort zone. There's lots of books in today's world. We have lots of books. We have lots of podcasts that I've done that specifically focus on increasing your self-esteem and your comfort zone. You will grow only as fast as your comfort zone is big. So realize your comfort zone is what pushes you, but it also pulls you back 30% of your time. Next one I want to share with you.
Sing like you're in the shower by yourself. What I mean by that is that so many of us go through life not wanting to do certain things, not wanting to participate in, not wanting to raise your hand and ask a question or jump in and do a role play, because we're embarrassed, because we have fear of being an embarrassment to other people. You know what life would be like if you just didn't care? I would love you, and I don't care if it's even 10% per month, because it's monstrous over the course of a year.
If you just got 10% outside your comfort zone, 10% of doing something that you think would look foolish, doing something that you think you'd be embarrassed about, doing something that makes you almost want to vomit. And sit there and stop worrying about what others think.
It's such a refreshing standpoint. You know, kind of weird. I've had three this year and four last year - internally sick clients and or family members. When someone knows deep down inside, which we all do, we're all going to go in the dirt at some point. And we're all going to pass away. And whatever your belief systems are is your belief systems.
Glenn Mattson
We only have one lap when we're down here. And every single person that knows that time is limited for them, they have a very limited tomorrow. If you ask them, if you can go back in time, what is some of the things that you would tell yourself to do differently? You realize that almost 95% of all those people that are asked that, they all come back with lots of answers, but one of them that's consistent across the board is, does not care as much about what others think.
If you want to get up and dance, go dance. If you want to go up and sing, go sing. Who cares what you sound like? Who cares what you look at? You got to remember half the people in the room are in awe because you had the guts to do it. And if you're up there just having fun, then that's the fun part, across the board again. Those that don't have a long lap left in their lives, will come back and say, man, if I had to do it one more time, if I could tell myself when I was younger, some advice, my advice would be is stop worrying about what others think.
Stop being embarrassed. Just go have fun. Now, of course, you have to be controlled. You have to be, you know, all that fun stuff. But what I'm saying is how many of us, right now you're thinking out loud in your head, right, of all the things, just even this week that you didn't do because you felt embarrassed. So I want you to take a look at these five things that I share with you and ask yourself, how do you start doing small steps? How do you start listening more, being much more focused at asking questions?
Living in the world of want, not need. And that means doing a little bit all the time. Stop spending all your time in getting better as a role performance, your credentials, your criterias, right? All those little numbers and letters you have after your name. I get it all. But you can only be as strong and only as strong as success as your self-esteem, which is your comfort zone. So spend at least 30% of your time focused on your comfort zone. And lastly, it's really taking a hardcore look at stop feeling embarrassed. Stop not doing things because you think you may be embarrassed.
Talk to you soon at Building Blocks of Success. Be well.
This is the Building Blocks of Success with Glenn Mattson.
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