Mastery Is A Result Of Repetition - Jeff Shore

What is cognitive behavioral therapy… and what on earth does it have to do with sales leadership? In this episode of Sales Lead Dog, host Chris Smith talks with Jeff Shore of Jeff Shore Sales Training about how he uses this powerful psychological technique to help salespeople work through discomfort before they ever speak to a potential customer.

Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, is a technique where you train the mind through practice and repetition to overcome uncomfortable feelings. It’s often used to treat addiction — but Jeff uses it to treat our collective addiction to comfort. As Jeff says, “The destination called mastery is on a road called repetition, and there are no shortcuts to that.” As painful as it can be to spend time practicing and working through discomfort before you ever hit the sales floor, when you build that mind and muscle memory, you are setting yourself up for success.

From looking at CRM like an airplane pilot to trying to make everything just a little bit easier, this episode is chock full of practical, easy to implement techniques that will transform your sales experience, whether you are a sales leader, entrepreneur, or just starting out in the industry.

Watch or listen to this episode:

Transcripts:

Wed, 1/13 3:19PM • 39:29

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
sales, salesperson, leader, customer, coach, crm, lead conversion, question, salespeople, confidence, discomfort, people, emotional, job, easy, book, understand, practice, decision, talking

SPEAKERS
Jeff Shore, Christopher Smith

Intro
Welcome to the Sales Lead Dog Podcast hosted by CRM technology and sales process expert Christopher Smith, talking with sales leaders that have separated themselves from the rest of the pack. Listen to find out how the best of the best achieve success with their team and CRM technology. And remember, unless you are the lead dog, the view never changes.

Christopher Smith
Welcome to Sales Lead Dog. Today, I’m very excited to have on our show Jeff Shore. Jeff, welcome to Sales Lead Dog.

Jeff Shore
Christopher, thank you very much. Pleasure to be here, sir.

Christopher Smith
I’m excited to talk with you. Jeff, tell me about yourself and your company.

Jeff Shore
Yeah. So, 30 plus year, I guess that makes me settle, 30 plus your sales veteran. I was a National Sales Director for a very, very large organization for many years, but for the last 20 years I’ve been on my own with, we have a team of 13, we work with sales organizations around North America. I just have a great time. I’m really interested in the way that salespeople sell, far more interested in the way that buyers buy. And so we just sort of take that approach, figure out the way that somebody wants to buy. You can reverse engineer your sales presentation, make it easy for them to do that. So, so really understand, I really, really love getting inside the customer’s head and just taking a tour and understand the way they think.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, that’s awesome. One of the things that really excited me about having you on the show, and we talked about this in the pre-show, my wife is a therapist.

Jeff Shore
Yeah.

Christopher Smith
And a big part of her world as a therapist is cognitive behavioral therapy. Tell us about your approach with that.

Jeff Shore
Well I stumbled into it as that, actually I was doing some research for a book that I wanted to write. I determined many years ago that I, I dealt with a comfort addiction, as I had labeled it, that I love all things comfortable and I kind of ordered my life accordingly. And I was, as I was thinking about that, I was thinking about the number of sales professionals, because let’s face it, sales can sometimes be an uncomfortable job, right, cause you’re gonna, you’re gonna see, you’re gonna get the objections and the price pushback and, and sometimes people who are just not very nice, they’re going through a tough time, whatever it might be. So I was thinking about that in terms of salespeople who are uncomfortable and what are some of the different discomforts that they face. And so in the research I just asked myself the question. Well, if I labeled discomfort as an, or I’m sorry comfort as an addiction, the desire for comfort as an addiction and it does have addictive properties,

Christopher Smith
Yeah.

Jeff Shore
Well then, what are the number, what’s the number one way that professionals deal with people with addictions. And there you go, that’s what led me to an understanding of cognitive behavioral therapy, and really applying that into the way that I think the way I live my life, the way I run my sales presentation, and now in the way that I coach sales people.

Christopher Smith
Yeah. And it is a you know it’s a big part about like you’re saying earlier about understanding the buying process and understanding that getting that a shift of perspective towards the customer, correct?

Jeff Shore
Yep, it’s really applications on both sides. I think it starts by looking at ourselves and being honest to look at it and say, “What are those moments in the sales presentation sales presentations that sometimes tripped me up that make me uncomfortable.” And, you know, it’s not a contest, we all have different moments of discomfort. So if you look and say you know when it’s time to ask for the sale or to follow up or you know when it’s time to do my prospecting or working with the CRM, it could be any number of different things. What happens here is that if we wait until we are in that moment, and then decide what we’re going to do, we’re going to make the decision out of the emotional core and the brain is trying to keep us alive It’s going to tell us run going a different direction. But if we make the decision before we face the discomfort, that’s where the cognitive behavioral therapy really comes into play. So it’s cognitive thinking, behavioral acting. So how do I think through what I’m going to do before I’m in that moment, so I can decide right literally right now the next time I’m going to face a discomfort how I’m going to respond. If I wait till I’m in that moment, my emotional brain is going to kick in and say get out of this you don’t want anything to do with it. Run away. But if I’m deciding now, then it changes absolutely everything. Now, to your point, if we can also understand how our customer is doing the same thing, then we can prime them for how they’re going to think all throughout the whole process. I’m trying to be manipulative here. I’m trying to give them a mental roadmap for how that buying process is going to go.

Christopher Smith
Right, right, because as humans, we want to avoid the hard we want to go towards what’s easy.

Jeff Shore
True.

Christopher Smith
And that’s true on both like you’re saying you know if I’m selling or if I’m buying.

Jeff Shore
Yeah, right. Yeah. In fact, there’s a hack that I oftentimes will share about this, Christopher, when you’re thinking about the way that your customer makes a purchase decision and that, that little mental hack says, easy equals right. The easier something seems to me the righter it feels to me. And more and more companies today are a lot of startups, they’re asking that question first. They’re looking at traditional industries and then saying, “What would it look like if this were easy, how could we break this down and make this so much more enjoyable for the customer experience?” And then the customers look at it and they go, well that’s easy, and if it’s easy, it feels right, I get that comfort level in me and that it makes it easier to make the decision.

Christopher Smith
And you’re creating a fan there too, by the fact that you say hey you took this, what really sucked, this experience that was not pleasant for me. And now it’s pleasant, I’m your fan. That’s a big transition.

Jeff Shore
Yeah it is. I think you’re right. I think it’s a good point, Christopher, that you will get people to be able to appreciate you to, to lock in with you. You’re on that journey together at that point. So I would just challenge you, you know, if you’re a sales professional listening to this, think about some of those sticking points, maybe it’s describing something technical or or something that’s going to confuse your buyer and ask yourself, what would it look like if that were simple, how do we break that down so that it’s really really easy? I had, for example, I had a mortgage broker say, “Hey listen I deal in mortgages, these are complicated.” And so we crafted a presentation to be able to say to the customer early on, “Look, it’s all gonna seem complicated, there’s a lot of paperwork, a lot of numbers that you’re not going to really understand.” I gotta tell you this, the lender just wants to know three things: How are you going to pay the money back? Do you have a history of paying the money back? What happens if you don’t pay the money back? Everything else is details. And providing that framework that allows the customer to go, “Okay. Alright. Okay, so now I’ve got this, I can accept that I can understand that.” And it becomes much, much easier to make a decision.

Christopher Smith
And you’re creating a framework for them, of, like, here’s, here’s what you need to worry about.

Jeff Shore
Yeah.

Christopher Smith
You know, these three things. There could be other stuff that comes up, but we’re gonna focus on these three things.

Jeff Shore
I think that’s exactly right, and by the way, even going down to the idea of saying three things again is a little mental hack there. The brain loves to sort things out in groups of three, and so if you can look at it especially early on in your presentation, you see there’s a lot that we’re going to cover, but there’s three things should be most important to you. There we go.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, and that, I’m wrapping it up in a nice little bow for you.

Jeff Shore
Yeah. Easy equals right.

Christopher Smith
As a sales leader, how can I leverage this to help my team?

Jeff Shore
Yep. Well, that’s a great question because there is a, there is coaching that goes into play very much like somebody who has an addiction is going to go see a therapist of some kind, that therapist is actually a coach, and the coach’s job is to be able to help you in the time of performance. Right, so it’s one thing to, let’s say somebody has a drinking problem, sitting in the counselor’s office, the counselor’s not going to sit there and say, “Don’t drink. It’s not good,” because the patient can too easily go, “You’re right. But I’m not gonna drink.” What’s the problem with that? Well, there’s no alcohol there in that office, and the factors that would want that would that would trigger that drinking are not there either. So what is the coach going to do? The coach is going to put you in that situation, and then mentally roleplay what that’s going to look like, not just how you’re going to respond but literally how you’re going to feel. Sales coaches can do the same thing. When we identify those uncomfortable moments, let’s just take for example asking for the sale. The reason that we practice is not just to get to scripting right although it’s important that we’re asking in a way that’s clear and clean. But it’s to actually take that salesperson, and put them in that synthetic reality of asking for the sale and having them do it over and over and over again. So now that what’s happening here, the mind is calming down every time that I do it, and also in people don’t love to practice, but when that practice when that repetition kicks in, it puts you into that place. So now by the time you get there next time, you’ve already decided when that voice in the head says this is a good time to ask for the sale, you had already made the decision, and you had practiced not just what you were going to say, you literally practiced how you were going to feel. That’s where the power comes into play, you are training your brain in advance for what’s going to happen in that moment of discomfort.

Christopher Smith
And that’s the key part that having that emotional, that gut feel, you know recreating that environment and those feelings and sensations as real as possible. You made me think about like sports, you know they try to get as close to the game environment as they can when they practice. So it’s just and repeat, repeat, repeat. So when you’re in the game, you’re ready, it’s, it’s you’re not even thinking, you’re just doing.

Jeff Shore
So, so you’ve pointed out something that I think is really important, because we’re, in regards to flaws that we see in sales coaching or sales managing, we tell the salesperson what to do, we don’t show them how to do it, and we don’t hold them accountable for showing us that they can do it right. So for example, I’m going to look at I’m going to say, you tell that customer that that’s it, that’s our bottom line, we’re not going any lower. Go tell them. I told that salesperson what to do, but I did not give the salesperson the opportunity to practice that, to see how we want to do it and to know that they’ve got that confidence when they deliver that message. That’s very much like a coach on the football field telling a wide receiver, “I want you to run the route this way,” but then not actually watching them run the route or tweaking their performance while they’re running the route. And so we’ve got to look at it and carry it all the way down, not just what I want you to do, but how you need to do it, now show me you can do it. Now what happens, the confidence of that salesperson is rising. And when it’s time for the performance, they already know what they’re going to do because they’ve done it so many times.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, yeah. And you’re giving that opportunity to make mistakes where it’s safe.

Jeff Shore
That’s correct. Right. For the sales coach too, by the way, if you want to model that for your salesperson, so you screw up, okay. You could point that out, you can look at it you can say, “So you see how I did, let’s tweak that and let me try it again.” We’re all in this together, right, we’re just trying to make that progress, but we’ve got to get that that down. I think too many salespeople think they’re practicing in front of their customers. You’re not. That’s not practice, that’s game time. If you fail in a coaching environment, you get better. If you fail on the field, it costs you money.

Christopher Smith
That’s right. That’s right. The other thing that made me think, when you were talking before about coaching is you’re giving the sales leader an opportunity to coach and to learn how to coach, and for them to fail as a coach and learn from that as well, correct?

Jeff Shore
Yeah, that’s, that is absolutely right. I look, I kind of look at it, we have a, I have a sales training company, right, but I look at sales training as sort of a three legged stool. There’s the training and instruction, this is what to do. There is the application, that’s the salespersons job. But that third leg of the stool is the coach, whose job it is to take the instruction and put it into play and practice it over and over again. Then what happens by the time we’re done, that confidence level of the sales professional is rising all the time, and that confidence is critical because customers can smell it from a mile away. They gravitate towards confidence, they adopted that confidence, but they also run away from a lack of confidence. So when we’re in that coaching environment, you know it’s progress over perfection. It’s going to take a while to get it perfect, but the worst thing we can ever do as a coach is tell a salesperson to do something one time. They’re going to fail, they’re going to feel bad about it, or they’re never going to do it again. It’s repetition. I often say that the destination called mastery is on a road called repetition, and there are no shortcuts to that. Do it again. Do it again. Do it again, like an actor in a play or, or, Eric Clapton playing the guitar, how much repetition went into that proficiency, right, and we want to shortcut that. That’s our comfort addiction talking, by the way.

Christopher Smith
Right, right, because who wants to spend their time, it’s not fun, I’m not out making money.

Jeff Shore
Right. Yeah.

Christopher Smith
But you’re also, you’re not preparing yourself for being in the game.

Jeff Shore
Yes, and you’ve plateaued, right, you’re as good as you’re ever going to be at that point and it’s not a recipe for long term success.

Christopher Smith
So if I’m a new sales leader and, you know, I was a rockstar salesperson, and now I’ve been promoted to sales leader. What, how should I approach my job so I don’t fall on my face?

Jeff Shore
Yeah, well first of all you have to decide what you’re going to be good at, and as a sales leader, one of the things that happens here is that for some reason in that particular role, there’s a lot of stuff that comes our way, admin stuff, meetings all of this, you know, problem solving. But you have to decide what really matters and, and what did Stephen Covey say, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.” Well what’s the main thing? To a sales leader, the main thing is lead conversion. How do I convert as many leads as possible. So if that is the main thing, can I prove that with my time and my energy and my efforts. So it starts by learning what your priorities are. But then, once you’ve determined that, the question is how do you communicate that to your salespeople, so there is that idea to that, and there’s a word that I love for new coaches, new sales leaders, and the word is “let’s.” L-E-T-‘-S. Let’s. It’s, it’s not a dictatorial approach, it’s a partnership approach. Let’s do this. And it takes time. It really does. But when we can prove to our salespeople that you can make them better and therefore more effective, that’s when you’re doing your job right. And by the way, if you can’t make them better and more effective, then you’re probably in the wrong role anyway. So there’s that sense of partnership, we have to come alongside, understand their motivations, and then it’s just repetition. Lean into your discomfort, they don’t want to practice, fine, practice anyway. And after a while it becomes quite normal for them.

Christopher Smith
So, if I am a sales leader I’m listening to you talk, and I’m thinking, crap, I, I totally avoid this. How do I, what should I do what’s that first step I should take to begin embracing what I’m avoiding.

Jeff Shore
Yeah, so I think the first thing is just about. I mean, it’s gonna sound a little odd but I think the first question you have to ask if you’re a sales leader is, “How do I want to be fired?” And let me explain what I mean by that. Okay, so you can get fired because you’re doing, you’re in this meeting or you’re handling that paperwork and this admin stuff and solving these problems over here and you’re doing everything but converting leads, that’s one way you can get fired. Or you can get fired because you ignore all that stuff and you’re focusing in on how to get more leads converted. And I’m going to tell you that the first of those ways is how you get fired a lot quicker, because the reason that sales leaders lose their job is not for lack of sales, it’s that people lose faith and confidence that they know how to get sales. So we’ve got to be able to look at, you have to be able to stand up for yourself and say, “Listen, my job is lead conversion and all this other stuff over here is taking me away from lead conversion. So if you want me to do my job you cannot ask me to do this over here.” We’ve got to stand up for what we believe it. Now, if you decide how you’re going to get fired, because if you just give in to what everybody else wants you to do and you focus no time on lead conversion, you’re gonna get fired anyway, so get fired on your terms.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, I love that, you know, as I, as an entrepreneur. As a business owner, it is so easy for us to get sucked into the weeds or I’m so busy I’m working on this and this and this. I’m not moving the needle. And if you’re not working the needle. You’re gonna get fired, you’re gonna go out of business, you know, but it really.

Jeff Shore
Yeah you know, Dan, sorry about that. Dan Sullivan in the Strategic Coach program. He talks about identifying A, B, and C activities. And the C activities, you hate to do them, you’re not good at them. And the B activities, well I don’t love it, but I understand the important role that it plays. And the A activities, that’s where you shine. As entrepreneurs, for people like you and me Christopher, the more A we do, the more successful we’re going to be, but it’s true for sales coaches as well. As you do less C and more A you will see your, your career rise.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, that’s awesome. So if I have the ambition of becoming a sales leader, what should I be doing to develop that skill set so I can make a successful transition?

Jeff Shore
Right. So I would argue that the very first thing you have to do is master your own craft, you need to make sure that you can not only perform well as a sales professional, but that you know how you perform well, you know why you perform well. So the first step is to become a sales theorist. You need to be able to understand not just what your technique is, but why your technique is and why it works. So study it, learn as much as you can about your own presentation. I think that that’s the starting point. Then after that, you got to figure out what great coaching looks like, and there are plenty of ways to be able to do that, there are plenty of resources online on how to learn really, really good coaching skills. But you’ve got to try and figure out what are you going to do, and I think a lot of sales leaders think it’s all about the sales meeting. And I would argue it’s far more important to get the one-on-ones right. So if you have not really honed that, one of the ways that you can do that is that if you want to be a sales leader, you’re probably already an informal leader of your team now. So ask your organization for the ability to mentor, three or four of the newer people on the team to start up a cohort, where you have the opportunity to mentor them and bring them along and hone your skills that way, that will not only teach you how to do that before you got the entire team, but it will dramatically raise your confidence when you are called to step into that sales leadership role.

Christopher Smith
That is some of the best advice I’ve heard. That, I love that. And it’s also, you’re demonstrating the initiative that hey, I want to contribute, I want to make everybody better, it’s not just about me.

Jeff Shore
Yes, that is correct. Yeah.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, that’s awesome. So, shifting gears here but as a sales leader, I also have to worry about CRM technology and how I’m going to leverage that toolset. A lot of sales guys, frontline guys, do not, you know they look at it as kind of the albatross or the block, it’s blocking me from doing what I should be doing as a sales leader. How do I tackle those issues leveraging some of the skills that you teach your clients.

Jeff Shore
Yeah, so it’s a, it’s such an important question because I’m right with you, I mean there are a lot of a lot of sales leaders came up through the sales ranks and, and when we look at sales leaders, what do we ask of them. Well we want them to be outgoing and gregarious and motivating and creative. And, and then we want it to be technical and organized and you know we’re asking them to work out of both sides of their brain. It’s actually not easy to do, and, and that’s why great sales leaders are so hard to find. As it relates to the CRM though, I think one of the ways, one of the best mindsets, and by the way, I’m that way, I am not a detail guy, I understand these things but, but I don’t like being owned by them, right. So I think the way that I coach sales leaders is to think like an airplane pilot. If you get into the cockpit of a 747, a friend of mine flew 747s for United for many years and, you know, how many dials and buttons and gauges and pieces of information are in a 747 cockpit? I mean they are literally surrounding you everywhere you look. But there are only about four things that really matter, right. How fast am I going, is the plane level? You know, you got to try and figure out with your CRM what really matters, because similarly, there are 500 different gauges that you could be looking, but only four of them matter. That’s the starting point for your CRM. What matters most to you, and break that all out. You don’t need a detailed analysis about all of these details. just figure out what matters the most to you. That’s, that’s the advice that I would give.

Christopher Smith
I love that. That, that’s really important to understand to have that, that insight into your business, because it’s, I mean, just looking at, you know, again talking about as an entrepreneur, there’s usually three or four numbers that you need to know that you’re checking on a daily basis that drive your whole business.

Jeff Shore
Right.

Christopher Smith
It’s the same with CRM. I completely agree. I think a lot of times people think like, we need to use every bell and whistle available to us because it’s going to solve all our problems. And they end up very frustrated.

Jeff Shore
Right. There’s one other piece of advice I would give on the CRM. And that is not to hang out on it all day long. It, to the extent that you can, you’re going to be much better off with moments or times of intense focus on the CRM, and then ignoring it altogether. So one of the recommendations that I make to sales leaders is the concept called the lead conversion hour, where you’re scheduling early on in your day. This is the one solid hour that I’m working with lead conversion and there are just three components: you, a salesperson, probably by phone, and your CRM. That’s it. I’m intensely focused in. I’m not taking any other calls, I’m not checking my emails, my door is closed. This is laser-focused on lead conversion for that solid hour, then I’m shutting it down. So, you know, if you try to sort of keep updated on CRM all day long, you’re never going to be as effective as you can be. You’re just going to give yourself a headache.

Christopher Smith
Right. If I’m a sales leader and I have members of my team that just do, you know, they’re not going to embrace CRM or they’re really struggling to embrace CRM, what advice do you have for them?

Jeff Shore
Well I look, it’s a, it’s a tough one. First of all, I would go back the same way, right, if you’re looking at it and saying what are the four dials that really matter, you got to ask them to be able to look at it the same way. But I would look at it and say there, with every single job, there are things that you have to do. And so, you know, this is the question here. And it sort of baffles my mind, quite frankly, that we bring sales people on. And then we show them this is what you were supposed to do, then the salesperson doesn’t want to do it. So they don’t do it. And then what do we do we get frustrated and we nag them. Well hold on. It’s the standard of doing business, or it’s not. So you’ve got to decide as a sales leader. Is this a job requirement, or is it not. Going to tell you right now, if it’s optional, it’s not a requirement.

Christopher Smith
Right.

Jeff Shore
So we have to look at it and say, for sure, these things right here are necessary requirements to do this job. Should you choose not to do these things, you don’t get to keep the job. That’s a conversation that gets had in the interview process right from the very beginning, so that everybody is very clear. But I do think that managers are sometimes guilty of calling things requirements, but treating them as optionals. Now, from the salesperson’s perspective, they are human beings. And the human brain follows a really interesting little hack, Daniel Kahneman coined it, the Law of Least Effort. We are always looking for the easiest way to do anything at all. So if I find the CRM difficult, and I have the option of not keeping it up to date, that’s exactly what I’m going to do. So, this is the question. I’ve said to sales managers for years, your standards are not what you desire, your standards are would you accept. So if you accept that lower level of performance, then that is acceptable. Don’t get confused on this when you can’t call something a requirement and treat it as an option.

Christopher Smith
That’s right. Right. It’s music to my ears. I’ve never understood that why, you know, you’re spending all this money and time on your CRM platform. And you’re not making it clear to the people using that you’re relying on the information in that system to make key decisions for the business. And you’re not saying hey, you know, I always tell people look you you lead with the carrot but you better have a stick ready for those people that aren’t gonna cooperate, because there will be some, and it has to come from the top, it has to be clear.

Jeff Shore
Yes.

Christopher Smith
So, if things are going great with CRM and the sales team is doing great, you know, life is happy, should I be happy or should I be afraid?

Jeff Shore
Well, look, I am of the opinion that you’ll always have issues, concerns, negative impacts on your day, on your week, on your month, on your year. It’s just always gonna happen. It’s the nature of the beast and the sales will always be complex and sometimes difficult. I mean, whenever you’re dealing with buyers, you’re dealing with emotions. It’s going to have, I don’t care what the product is, B2C, B2B, doesn’t matter, you’re always going to have buyers and therefore you’re going to have emotions. So I argue that you have to celebrate the victory. And one of the reasons that we do that is that it’s very easy in the world of sales to get caught up in, oh, why can’t we get this right, this isn’t that hard, why can’t, it’s very easy to beat ourselves up over these things. So, we get out of balance, we start feeling after a while that our confidence is down we can’t do anything right. I say when things are going well, celebrate that. Use that time to build up your confidence, because whatever you’re doing right right now, you conquered something difficult. If I celebrate that, it gives you more confidence to be able to raise the bar and conquer even more difficult things into the future.

Christopher Smith
Right, let’s talk about when things are going bad. And, you know, you’ve lost that big deal, or a member of your team has lost that big deal, which I mean that’s what, that’s sales. It’s an integral part. As a sales leader, what should I be doing to use that or create that learning environment around failure?

Jeff Shore
Yeah, well let’s let’s talk about the threat here that you’re bringing up, because it’s very, very significant. Right I, I recently wrote this book over my shoulder, “Follow Up and Win the Sale” and alright, “Follow Up and Close the Sale.” And when I wrote that book, I did it with this premise that buyers buy a times of high what I call emotional altitude. So buyers are buyers and they make emotion-based decisions and they make those decisions when the emotional altitude is high, that sense of positive emotion. And the reason we do follow up by the way is to sustain that emotional altitude for a longer period of time. Without follow up, then the emotional altitude tends to plummet. Well, the question then gets asked, well, where does that emotional altitude come from? Now, in some cases it comes from a beautiful product. It comes from a strong need that is fulfilled in the customer’s mind. But we must never underestimate the salesperson’s own emotional energy as contributing to the emotional altitude. So when you ask the question when things go bad, the number one problem when things go wrong is that it drains the emotional energy, the positive emotional energy of the salesperson. The customer now adopts that lower level of energy, and it serves as a governor or a hindrance to high emotional altitude. So if we’re going to look at it from that side then, there is that motivational aspect that pick me up cheerleader aspect of sales coaches, that a lot of sales coaches go, oh I don’t want to get into that, I’m not, you know, I’m, I’m not I’m not Zig Ziglar. Well I would argue you better learn to be, because that sales person’s emotional energy is going to get adopted whether you want it to or not. So I one of the things that I look for in great salespeople, is that they have that strong positive energy that they carry around just as a, as a way of life. So, when things are going wrong, look at the energy levels first. We’ve got to protect that and that means you pull your salesperson aside, you take them out for a cup of coffee, you do what you need to do to monitor, measure that, and build that back up,

Christopher Smith
That’s tremendous. And, and I mentioned empathy is a key component to that. What role does empathy play as a sales leader?

Jeff Shore
Yeah, it really really does and, and here’s the watch out for sales leaders. Sales leaders get pulled in so many different directions that after a while, talking to a salesperson is just another task in the day. It’s just another thing that I have to do. That’s a real problem, because pretty soon you’re gonna be talking to a salesperson, who’s gonna call you’re gonna go, “Hey Jack, how’s it going,” and Jack is gonna go, “You know, it’s alright.” “Alright, what do you got for me.” And we’re gonna wax, Jack was trying to tell you something right there, he was almost begging you to please ask what’s really going on, but you got so busy that you waxed over the top of that. And now, Jack in his funk, goes further in his book. Why? Because his own sales manager doesn’t seem to care. So there is that sense of empathy, of, of really wanting to know on every single call of getting into that habit of talking to your salespeople, and, and asking the question, early on or late, “Hey how you doing? How you feeling, and how you holding up?” But really meaning it when you ask that question, because if you miss that, you won’t even know it. The next thing you know, you got a salesperson who was off the rails, and it catches you by surprise.

Christopher Smith
Right. And never accepting, “It’s fine” as an answer. “Oh it’s fine. It’s good.” Cuz when is ever anything totally fine or good?

Jeff Shore
Right. Exactly.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, we’re coming up on our time here with Sales Lead Dog. Can you talk about your book a little bit before we shut things down?

Jeff Shore
Yeah, it was really fun to write, you know, and and I had done it because it was actually a couple of years ago, I did an Amazon search for books on sales follow up. Crickets. And I just had to look at it and say so much has been said and written about follow up, but I wanted to really put it together into one book. But it really does, it’s a customer-centric view of follow up. It’s not the do it because your job depends on it thing. It’s here’s why your customer needs you to do this. And to me, follow-up is about serving. It’s not about just, so did you make a decision yet or just checking in, it’s serving your customer to enhance their journey all throughout the process. This should, this should be really fun. Follow ups should be fun. I don’t think it is for most salespeople because they’re doing it wrong. Their or their motives are wrong. They think it’s about harassing the customer until the customer agrees to buy. That’s not fun. But when follow up is all about serving it’s actually really, really fun.

Christopher Smith
Yeah, you’re building a relationship. And, you know, those are always, you can never have too many as far as I’m concerned.

Jeff Shore
Right, well and you’re solving problems right you’re, you’re solving problems that maybe the customer doesn’t even know they have. I focus a lot in the book about creativity, about the way that you can creatively think through the customer’s journey, to think through what might they need to be thinking about that they’re not even thinking about right now. How about that value add to throw on top of it. How do I serve, how do I serve, how do I serve?

Christopher Smith
That’s awesome. Well thank you for coming on Sales Lead Dog. It has been a joy for me to sit here and listen to you, it’s been great.

Jeff Shore
I enjoyed the conversation, Christopher, very very much.

Christopher Smith
Awesome. Thank you very much.

Outro
As we end this discussion on Sales Lead Dog, be sure to subscribe to catch all our episodes on social media. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Watch the videos on YouTube, and you can also find our episodes on our website at Empellorcrm.com/salesleaddog. Sales Lead Dog is supported by Empellor CRM, delivering objectively better CRM for business guaranteed.

Quotes:

“If you fail in a coaching environment, you get better. If you fail on the field, that’s costing you money.” (13:35-13:39)
“The destination called mastery is on a road called repetition, and there are no shortcuts to that.” (14:53-15:01)