Episode #098: Advanced Selling with Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale

Jeff: Hey, are you ready to be inspired and to get smart at the same time? We’ve got a great show for you. Stick around for today’s episode of “The Buyer’s Mind.”

Announcer: Welcome to “The Buyer’s Mind,” where we take a closer look deep inside your customers’ decision making mechanism to reverse-engineer the perfect sales presentation. Now, please, welcome your host, Jeff Shore.

Jeff: Well, welcome everyone, once again, to “The Buyer’s Mind.” We have got a great interview today with two really smart and highly entertaining guys, Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale from “The Advanced Selling Podcast.” And we have a great conversation where we’re going to talk about authenticity, about old school versus new school selling. Yes, we will name names and we’ll talk about what super high performance looks like. We’ll get some opinions on some controversial figures in the world out there, and along the way, we’ll try and figure out what we can learn from a rabbi in Seattle. So much to talk about in today’s interview. So without further ado, let’s get right to it.

Well, we’re going to do something a little different today on “The Buyer’s Mind” because we’ve actually got not one but two guests at the same time. And for many of you who are listening and for those of you who are podcast junkies and especially if you are a podcast junkie and in the sales world, well, my guests are going to need absolutely zero introduction at all because they are the hosts of the wildly successful podcast, “The Advanced Selling Podcast.” Thrilled to have them on “The Buyer’s Mind.” Welcome to Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale, or perhaps Bryan Neale and Bill Caskey. I don’t want to start any turf wars over here. But B and B, how’s it going?

Bryan: We like B and B, we respond well with that. It’s alphabetical. We debate. Our agents, you know, hash this out between the two of them. So we landed in a good spot, but that’s fine.

Bill: We’re glad to be here, Jeff.

Jeff: It’s in the contract somewhere. Just take us back to the very beginning because you’ve been doing “The Advanced Selling Podcast” for quite some time now. I mean, just 600 episodes. That’s a rare air for most podcasts today. So many of them come and go. But how did you start the podcast? Can you take us back to the origin here?

Bill: Well, Bryan and I are both radio geeks. And we were driving to Chicago one day and we started to compare notes about when we were in high school. And a lot of our paths were the same, even though I’m 100 years older than he is, and we both loved radio. We both loved music. We both loved just the whole radio scene. And so we thought, well, we should be on radio. So we got a radio show here in Indianapolis on a 10,000-watt station, WXNT. We called it Business 360. It was Saturday at noon, probably the number one drive time, Saturday at noon. And I don’t know if we had five listeners, but we didn’t have very many, but we did it for about a year. And Bryan got…he was a Big Ten football official. And so guess what days Big Ten football is on? It’s on Saturday.

So for about six months of the year, I was kind of winging it alone. And I said, “Yeah.” We both said this is not working. So somebody introduced us to podcasting, said, “You don’t have to worry about timing, you don’t have to worry about all that other stuff.” And so we got into it 13 years ago in 2005, and we’re 650 some episodes in and we love it.

Bryan: And this is proof that you don’t have to be good at anything. You just have to start sooner and just keep doing it over and over. Because if people say, “How did your podcast get so big?” Literally, part of it is we just outlasted everybody. We just continued to do it. Like I said earlier, we’ve got 650 free episodes, and we actually do absolutely love it. We love the process. We love our listeners. It’s a great, great medium.

Jeff: Well, one of the things that you do quite well as I know many of our audience members are familiar with “The Advanced Selling Podcast” is that the tone is…it’s sort of… What’s the old saying, right? We take our business seriously, ourselves less. So we’ve got all of this stress and aggravation and a negative environment that we want in our sales job day after day. Sometimes it’s a breath of fresh air to hear something that’s just a little bit more, “Hey, can we all just sort of like take a chill pill and relax a little bit?” Was that part of your strategy from the very beginning to get your listener to step away from the mayhem and the chaos a little bit and just kind of kick your feet up a little bit?

Bryan: Yeah, no doubt it was on purpose. We always decided that we wanted to be just ourselves, we didn’t want to do a shtick. We didn’t want to yell at people and scream through the mic. It wasn’t going to be a walk on hot coals sort of deal. And we wanted to let them in on our real lives too. And so we just think by just the natural openness, the genuineness of who we are as people, we don’t take ourselves seriously, of all the comments that we’ve gotten over the years, the one that’s consistent the most is, “I feel like I know you, guys. I feel like I can hang out with you.” And so that was on purpose. At the same time, it wasn’t difficult because we’d just be us, and if you came and sat in the office with us and hung out and went to lunch us, you’d be like, “Hey, you guys are kind of like the same thing, you know, when you turn the mics on in the morning.”

Bill: The idea that Bryan and I come into the studio, we meet, let’s just say at 9:00 on Monday, and we say, “What’s happening in your world?” And he says, “Hey, I just had a client who’s really struggling with their message.” And we say, “Okay, let’s do one on messaging.” And he comes up with two or three things, I come up with two or three things, no script. I mean, it’s never scripted. But we do have some bullet points of things that we think it’s important for our audience to hear. So in 15, 20 minutes, we have a podcast outlined, produced, and done, and then we hand it to Travis who takes it from there. So it really is a fun process. And I think the secret there is to not over-analyze it and over-prepare.

Jeff: There’s a direct connection then over to what salespeople should be doing, right? You two talk about just being yourselves and not trying to put on this persona or it’s just two people who are being very, very real. And yet, what do we see? We see salespeople who sometimes think that they have to be somebody else, usually because they learned something bogus in a training session that says, “If you say these words, these words all the time, you know, you’re…” And so we have salespeople that are a different human being. And I’m going to guess I’ve never heard it from you directly, but I’m going to guess the two of you would say, “For God’s sake, no, be yourself. You’re the best at the world of being yourself.”

Bryan: Yeah, absolutely. When I was early on in my dating career, my girlfriend said…I worked for Procter and Gamble right out of college and she used to tell me that I had a P&G voice. I’m like, “What are you talking about?” She goes, “You change your voice when you talk on the phone for work.” I’m like, “No, I don’t.” She goes, “Yeah, you do.” And then I started paying attention to that and I did. I did the whole radio jockey voice like you just did, like the phone would ring in the morning and I like clear it out like, “Oh, this is Bryan. How can I help you today? Bryan, Procter and Gamble, can I sell you some diapers or toilet paper?” You know, and it was so not real. And the whole thing was a shtick because I was taught that I had to be this way, say these things, and people can see right through all that these days. The other thing is that takes effort. It takes no effort to be me. Some are like, “It’s not made up.” But no, it’s effortless, it takes lots of effort to pretend to be somebody else.

Bill: Yeah. Sometimes in class, we will role play with people. And if they’re not familiar with our shtick, the way we start, we say, “Okay, I’m the buyer, you’re the seller, let’s hear it.” And they magically transform, like Bryan said, into somebody else, somebody different. And I would say, “Okay, now just talk to me like I’m Bill.” Just forget about the role play, just talk to me, and they go back to the perfect voice. I call it the perfect voice. The perfect voice is your voice. It’s not the manufactured persona voice, like you said, Jeff. It’s just be who you are. If that’s not good enough, then either maybe you either ought to get out of your sales organization or out of your company or it’s not a prospect.

Jeff: You know, I love the idea of, in a trading session, I’ve seen this happen many, many times where perhaps it’s time to ask for the sale. It’s time to invite somebody to buy. And I always tell salespeople at that point, it’s like, “I don’t know what script you’re trying to memorize right now. It’s certainly not mine. But think about what just happened here. You’ve just spent 60 minutes, 90 minutes, maybe 2 weeks talking to these people. If you don’t like them, and they don’t like you now, you have a fundamental problem that goes far deeper than whether or not you can ask for a close. This is a friend of yours, just ask like you would ask your sister. Come on. It’s not that hard.”

Bryan: Yes. Let’s just do it. Like there’s no reason to dance around it. Like if I like you, let’s go, you know?

Jeff: Yeah. Are there particularly interesting interviews that have come up that you look back on and, “Oh, boy, you know, the time we had, so and so.” Sometimes, you know, for me, we’re not as prolific as you are. We’ve been doing “The Buyer’s Mind” now for a year and a half, which I think certainly outlasts a lot of podcasts, but I look back and I go, “Boy, there are certainly guests that are going to, you know, pop out.” You know, we had Seth Godin on the show, he was phenomenal, but then there are people that just totally surprise you and you go, “Wow, I didn’t know who you were but that was amazing.” When you look back on your podcast, are there some interviews that you hung up the phone and went, “My mind was blown right there”?

Bryan: I’ve got two that came to my mind but for different reasons…

Bill: Because I’ve got two as well.

Bryan: Well, one was the rabbi.

Bill: Oh, Rabbi Daniel Lapin.

Bryan: Rabbi Daniel Lapin, yep, from up in Seattle, I think, or off the coast of…he lives on an island, or something like that. And then the other one for me was Grant Cardone. We had Grant Cardone on because he can be a polarizing guy in the sales world. A lot of people think, “Oh, gosh.” But you know what? He was so giving he would have talked to us for another two hours if we had let him. His energy just came through and I said, you know, and a lot of people are like… We had one guy that said, “Hey, I can’t believe you guys had Grant Cardone. How dare you, all this stuff.” Well, I actually called that listener. He had put his phone on mute and I called him, he was shocked that I called him, with one thing in mind.

Jeff: Did you yell at him?

Bryan: I didn’t yell at him.

Jeff: You said, “Come on, man, 10X…”

Bill: This is Grant Cardone.

Bryan: I did not do that.

Bill: My memory is of Jack Canfield. You know who Jack Canfield is, Jeff?

Jeff: Sure, yeah, absolutely.

Bill: He was awesome, and he’s probably what? Seventy five? I mean, he’s just a great guy, and I remember to this day we started the podcast and he said, “Hey, before we go live, I just want to tell you guys that I appreciate you so much having me on. You guys do really good work and I just want to tell you that people are paying attention, so thanks for having me on.” And I thought, “Nobody ever says that to me.” I mean, that’s the gentleman of kind of years gone by and a past that he was so appreciative. Now, was it a move? I don’t know, he probably never listened to us, but it was so genuine that…

Jeff: That’s kind of a lost art.

Bryan: Especially a guy that has sold six billion books in his life, it’s not kind of bad deal. And I will also tell you, this is good because I think this is one of the reasons that this made “The Advanced Selling Podcast” what it is and I’m sure as you’re growing your market too, same deal, is that the interviews we’ve done with our listeners, to me, stand out the most because it gives a voice to the listener where all of a sudden, it’s like, “Wow, you guys are actually connecting with your listeners.” We’ve had multiple listeners on the show. Every time we do that, I feel so good about what we’re doing and what people are doing and the fact that we all need each other. This is a community where we all need to support each other. Those are my favorites, for sure.

Jeff: And I just had on the podcast here a couple of weeks ago, her name is Molly Jacobs. You’ve never heard of her. She’s out of Reno, she’s a frontline sales, but she isn’t actively selling, but her product is cardboard boxes. She sells boxes to companies that ship stuff, and I had to bring her on because she’s nailed…she’s great at what she does. But I had to bring her out and just ask the question, “Is there anything more commoditized than a cardboard box?” That’s it. And to hear the way that she stands out herself was really, really rich. But now you have to go back and connect the dots on something. Hey, we’re going to do this podcast, we’re going to do this “Advanced Selling Podcast,” we’re really going to get into the nitty and gritty about selling, how people make more…make people more effective and so, of course, we need to bring on a rabbi from Seattle. Would you please connect the dots here for me, please?

Bill: I believe his discussion is about money and earning money, right, and commerce and he talks…he puts a little bit of his faith in there and he talks about how in his faith, in the Jewish faith, how they’re taught to attract and keep and collect money for what they do, and they have a really, really unique viewpoint on that subject. And so because making money is in the mix of the sales game, we thought it’d be interesting for our listeners to have Rabbi Lapin come on and just talk about the philosophy that he and the people that share his faith have about earning money.

Jeff: And talk he does.

Bryan: He did talk, that was the other thing. We had a…

Bill: He’s a one-question interviewer. You ask him 1 question and 20 minutes later…

Bryan: Right. You just take a nap, go get your coffee, and…

Bill: You just take a nap. Yeah, but his topic was really good because we think of money as income, he thinks of it as tied to value. He says the reason that the Jewish population is so good at it is that we’re taught or they’re taught early that this is all about how much value can you deliver to your customers, and the more value you deliver, the more money you will make. But don’t look at it that way. Look at what can I give, and he wrote a whole book, I can’t remember the name of it, but he was really good. And I like it when people come on and they can reframe things, maybe your salesperson for the box company did that too, is let’s reframe how we think about things. And when you do that, then new vistas kind of open up to you.

Jeff: You know, you mentioned having Grant Cardone on the show, and I agree, he can be very polarizing. I don’t think that would be a newsflash to Grant Cardone. But, you know, there are some people that are going to look at it and say that there are two schools of thought, there’s sort of an old school/new school thing going on there, and do you subscribe to that idea that there is this, you know, old close at all cost, and, you know, we’re going to pound them until we beat our customers into submission? And then there are others over here who were like, “No, no, no, let’s come alongside and, you know, we’re going to make a friend,” and both are going to take potshots at the other. Right? Where do you guys fall on that continuum?

Bryan: You just answered it with your last word, is continuum. I don’t see it as a binary answer. You’re not an old school or new school. It’s a sliding continuum. And I’m also not a fan that there’s one way to do something. I think the pros that I’ve been around in sales and in my football life are constantly looking for a slight edge at the margin for super high performance. And so whether that means my behavior goes up like old school, like I’m going to rent my behavior up and do more pushups and I’m going to make more calls and that’s one thing, or if I want to really dial in on my messaging and make it as exquisite and really crafted. That’s another more of a new school thing, and I think they all go together. Personally, I’m trying to find the best of all of those and put them together for maximum performance in the middle.

Bill: Yeah, I think what Grant talks about a lot, at least on the podcast, was that interaction with a customer, and that’s what you’re talking about, Jeff, is how do I interact with a customer, either aggressively or subtly or passively? And I feel like today, if you’re going to take your income from, let’s just say, 100,000 to 300,000 a year, you’re going to triple your output, I don’t think it’s a game…I don’t think all the game is played you in front of the customer. I think the game is played through you getting right mentally, through you getting fit, through, as Bryan said, you crafting your message, you testing your message out, you practice speaking, you practice video, you do podcasting, you get interviews, you write. All those things together and the sum of those things are what takes your income and triples it. I don’t think it’s all customer interaction yet that’s where we typically go when someone asks a question. They usually go to, “Okay, I’ve got this customer and they said this and I said that and they said this and I said that. What should I say next?” And I feel like…I think there’s a bigger game at play here than just customer interaction, don’t you? I mean, you talk about the mindset, and as do we.

Jeff: You know what’s really interesting, is that just as I asked that question, and then you both jumped in on it. And I want to point out that for both of you, your voice tone changed a little bit. You both got really serious about this. And I’m not suggesting that it was out of character by any stretch or that you became a different person. But clearly, you take this stuff really seriously and you’ve got this sort of fun, loving, “Hey, we don’t have to take ourselves too seriously.” But you clearly take this very, very seriously. And that was actually kind of inspiring to me and I do feel like when I’m getting into this, when I’m peeling back the layers and trying to figure out what goes on in a customer’s mind when they’re making a decision, I get really, really walked out about that in a wonderful way. It’s almost stepping into this zone where it’s like, “Feed me, feed me, feed me. I want it more and more and more.”

Bryan: That’s really good. That’s a good catch, very observant here.

Bill: So you tricked us there.

Bryan: Yeah. No. That was great. I’m sweating now. I’m like so fired up.

Bill: I’m not going to say, I’m done. Go ahead. You guys…

Bryan: Really good stuff. That was really, really good. Very accurate too because we do…I think if you’re going to put yourself out in our world, you have to take a stand for something, you don’t have to stand for the middle or whatever that is, you got to have some answers and still be open to new ideas at the same time. I think living in that sphere is really important.

Bill: Yeah, I think I listen to a guy’s podcast named Michael Gervais, “Finding Mastery,” and he was talking…he’s a performance coach and, of course, everybody’s a performance coach today. But I actually think he really is a performance coach because he studies a doctor, PhD, and all that. But he talked the other day about, are you playing a part or are you the parts? And I think a lot of times, salespeople were playing the parts and we’re not really in it. We’ve kind of memorized our lines and we have all the good responses and we have memorized some technique and mechanics, but we’re not really into it. We’re not. We’re not the part of the problem finder and the problem solver and the representative. That’s a weird thing, and I don’t know how to explain it other than I think great actors aren’t playing a part, they are the part. Right? And I think we can all learn from that.

Jeff: You know, but I think with great actors is that they’ve studied their craft so well that they know how to be the part. And there’s a great scene from “Midnight Cowboy” with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight, walking across the street in New York City. And Dustin Hoffman almost gets hit by a cab and now, you know, the famous line, it’s ubiquitous, “I’m walking here. I’m walking.” And totally…well, the fact is, most people don’t know, Dustin Hoffman almost got hit by a cab. That was not in the script, that was not supposed to happen, and he did not step out of character for a second, he was that guy. And I think that’s the idea, if we’re trying to be somebody that we’re not, then what happens when you get a curveball? There’s no way that you know how to be able to adjust right there.

Bill: The difference between you and us, Jeff, is that you talk about classic movies like Dustin Hoffman and we talk about movies like “The Jerk” with Steve Martin.

Jeff: “Dumb and Dumber.”

Bill: “Dumb and Dumber.” We just had a whole thing today where we talked about “The Jerk” because Navin…

Bryan: Navin R. Johnson. I would also guess all three of us have run into this in the classroom in front of an audience when you say a line from an ’80s movies, and the audience is all 27 and they stare at you like you got four heads. Like I was born in ’89, man. I’m sorry, dude.

Bill: We do some music trivia sometimes on the podcast and Bryan is always telling me, “You know, Bill, you can’t go back to the ’70s all the time. You gotta come back to the current millennium.”

Jeff: Yeah. We talked about Grant Cardone, let’s talk about another guy who can be at least to some people polarizing in the sales world. Let’s talk about Gitomer. I don’t know if you’ve ever had him on the podcast. I have. I’ve met him a few times through events at the National Speakers Association. What’s your take on Gitomer?

Bryan: Yeah. I don’t know him super well, his stuff. I love…I believe he is who he is. That’s why I like him so much. I mean, I just…actually it’s funny you bring him up because I quoted him this morning in our meeting, if you watch when he promotes things on LinkedIn, he’ll say, you know, “This is coming to the town near you and tell both your friends.” He just has that fun kind of edge. I’m a big fan of how he is. I don’t know about his tactical material. I think he’s done a brilliant job marketing himself. He owns an entire MCAP in, you know, Barnes and Noble when there used to be Barnes and Nobles, but you know what I mean? He’s done a really, really great job with that. I think he’s the real deal.

Bill: There’s still a Barnes and Nobles, aren’t there?

Bryan: Barely. Amazon is the new…

Jeff: You got an MCAP in Amazon?

Bryan: You know what I did for the first time last night? Sorry, Jeff. Excuse us. I bought a book on Amazon. When’s the last time you bought a book on Amazon? Well, that’s where they started with, and last night, my son needs a book for high school, and I thought, “Oh my God, I haven’t bought a book on Amazon for like 10 years.” Anyway.

Bill: Yeah. I don’t know Jeff Gitomer. I respect him a lot though based on what he’s done from a marketing standpoint, building a great business, and I’ve heard him interviewed a couple times. He’s okay. I don’t see him as polarizing though as Grant, but I bet…

Bryan: But I’ll tell you that you definitely nailed the idea that he is who he is. It doesn’t matter when you talk to him and what setting, he is who he is. There is an authentic…and I think he would gonna go, “I am who I am. If you don’t like it, that’s fine. I’m not going to lose any sleep over that.”

Jeff: Yeah. We had a good friend of ours, a friend of our show who worked for a very well-known, I’ll leave the names out, person who does a big business and actually had him at one of the events, had Jeff Gitomer at one of the events, and she said, “Yeah, he is who he is and sometimes it doesn’t play well, but, you know, for me, I like the guy that…”

Bryan: He is who he is.

Jeff: Yeah. What non-sales experts do to follow that you revere that you would…and perhaps that you would love to have on the podcast or perhaps already have, but who are some of the non-sales experts out there that you think are worth listening to?

Bryan: I was going to say Jeff Shore but you’re a sales expert, so let’s scratch that.

Bill: I had him on my list too.

Bryan: Exactly. Serious. It’s going to sound a little cliché but it just is, Gary Vee, Gary Vaynerchuk, I’m just a huge fan of how he rolls his business. More than anything, I love the fact that he has a company, an actual company, a nine-figure revenue company that does business with big businesses, that’s his deal, while he’s doing this kind of independent brand promoting thing, where I feel like a lot of internet marketing people just kind of…it’s quite closed loop. You know, they teach you how to do internet marketing, internet marketers, where Gary Vee’s got a real freestanding company with growth plan, and I just love how he rolls and love his approach to things. I also think he is who he is, same deal.

Bill: I’ll have to go back and listen to your Seth interview. I never heard…I didn’t hear that. But I really like Seth Godin. I heard him interviewed…Tim Ferriss had him on the other day and he’s got a brand new book out on marketing, and I’ve always felt like he looks at the world at a level slightly beneath everybody else or above. He carves out a layer that’s just a little bit below and beyond where we think, and that’s really inspiring. I think everybody ought to read and listen to Seth, so that would be mine.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. What do you think people get wrong about selling today? When you look at…let’s just face it. There’s the continuum of presentation levels from horrific to stellar, what drives you a little nuts when you see this taking place in a sales presentation?

Bryan: With all of the available coaching, training, the modernization of sales, it drives me crazy when I see people still load their entire future behind a 58-slide PowerPoint slide deck and do a demo for someone on a phone call that’s a 60-minute meeting and they talk for 58 minutes. And I see that all the time especially in tech companies and SaaS companies, they’re so product and marketing-driven that the product and marketing own the slide deck and they just load it, load it with platitudes and data and things and there’s just no interaction and I’m just going, “Where…?” You know, I just don’t understand where that comes from, the lack of interaction sometimes especially in a demo/presentation format.

Bill: Yeah, yeah. I would say for me it’s…and Bryan and I have both been in a lot of companies where the owner or the VP of sales will bring us into work and he’ll say, “You know, my people are pretty good. You know, they’re really good.” And then we hear them and this is…I guess it is very…I just want to say this not judgmental, actually, it’s very judgmental. No, they’re really not, and it’s not because they’re not good people but it’s the little tiny things, it’s, you know, something little like when someone asks a question to acknowledge the asking of the question, not by saying, “Oh, that’s a good question. Let me answer that. But, you know, that’s really good. Tell me a little bit more about what you mean.” Just that back and forth, which is so simple. And it’s such a minor thing that people pass over these minor things. And so we look at, well, how many slides does your slide deck have and what’s the color scheme? And we say, those are major things. I think how we treat people how we ask questions, how we answer questions, how we keep them psychologically okay in the process is really important, and very few people pay much attention to it.

Bryan: I think the core problem, and Bill and I talk about it on the podcast lot, is the intention of the salesperson and, unfortunately, most salespeople carry an intention to get in all these scenarios or an intention to hope to be chosen, that sort of thing. And so their energy is created from that point of view, and then all their words and actions follow suit. And everyone can tell when you’re there to try to get something, when you flip the intention around and your attention is there to serve and to learn and be curious and collaborate and things like that, it changes everything that comes out of your mouth and every action that you engage in. So that to me is the problem of having proper intention.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s one of the things we talk about on “The Buyer’s Mind” all the time, the idea that if you know your customer well enough, that sale begins to roll out right in front of you. And too many salespeople want to roll out the sale first. “Let me show you how easy it is for you to buy my amazing product,” and they have no idea who they’re talking to. It just drives me nuts, drives me nuts.

Bryan: That’s a great way to say it.

Jeff: We just ran out of time. Before we go here, we’re going to put you both on the hot seat. So rapid fire questions, rapid fire answers. And listeners, just you know, Bill’s going to answer first, and then Bryan’s going to answer each of these questions. Here we go.

Bill: Oh, love it.

Jeff: All right, Bill, you’re leading off here. Your very first job was what?

Bill: Paper boy, 12 years old.

Bryan: Forklift driver, 17.

Jeff: Love it. When you were 10, you thought you would be what, Bill?

Bill: FBI agent because I love the show “The FBI.”

Bryan: Fighter pilot.

Jeff: Fighter pilot, okay. The most beautiful place you’ve ever stood.

Bill: Wow. I think it’s the Grand Canyon, the lip of the Grand Canyon.

Bryan: Mine, Zion National Park, 6:00 a.m. in the morning.

Jeff: There you go, okay. Any book that you read that made a profound impact on your life? Any book, Bill?

Bill: Other than mine?

Jeff: Or mine. Or yours. Did I say mine? I meant yours.

Bill: Profound effect, man, that’s really good. I think it’s James Allen, “As a Man Thinketh.”

Jeff: Profound.

Bill: You probably have never read that, Bryan?

Bryan: No, I’ve skimmed it. I’m going to go with “Scary Close,” “Scary Close.”

Jeff: “Scary Close.”

Bryan: About relationship. It is Donald Miller who wrote it.

Jeff: Yeah, Donald Miller.

Bryan: Yeah, “Scary Close.” So how many people who answer that question, “Choose the Bible”?

Jeff: No, I rarely hear it. I usually hear “Think and Grow Rich” or “See You at the Top” or something like that. Yeah.

Bryan: Yeah. There’s a part of me, like, “I need to answer the Bible.” That would be the politically correct thing to do, but…

Jeff: Sure. Sure, sure. A movie you’ve seen multiple times, but you can’t help it, you have to watch it again when it comes on. Bill?

Bill: “The Jerk.” Yeah, there you go. I was wondering, if not recently, but I’ve seen it a dozen times probably.

Bryan: Yeah, I’m going to get murdered from my answer. It’s “Can’t Buy Me Love.” It’s a ’80s chick flick. Ronald Miller, the Ronald Miller story, it’s brilliant.

Jeff: I have one more question but I don’t know how we can top that. All right, here is last question. The name of your first celebrity crush.

Bill: Well, I suppose it was Roger Brown who played basketball for the Indiana Pacers and I just loved him. And I know that you may be thinking a female crush but everything I did, I did like Roger Brown. He was an awesome player and so that’s my initial celebrity…just I wanted to be like him.

Bryan: It’s great. Good answer. Mine’s easy, Tatum O’Neal in “Bad News Bears.” Couldn’t get enough of that. Fantastic.

Jeff: That’s good. That is awesome. That is awesome. All right, you’re off the hot seat. Bryan and Bill, just fantastic. Thanks so much for giving your very, very valuable time. That was really, really a lot of fun. But thanks even more so for what you’re doing and have been doing for a long time. I know there are so many thousands of sales professionals around the world who…they give and they give and they give. That’s what they do for a living. But you can only give that what you have inside, and I think that’s what you guys do. You fuel people, you give people that energy that they need in order to do something very, very valuable for the rest of society. So thanks for all you do. Thanks for being on the show. Really appreciate it.

Bill: Thank you, Jeff. That was awesome. I appreciate you too.

Bryan: Thanks, man. Likewise.

Jeff: So there you have it, Murph. That was that was really a lot of fun, wasn’t it?

Murph: A lot of energy from those guys, right? And, you know, lots of knowledge, the 650 some episodes, good people to have on the podcast.

Jeff: Right. And you and I, you know, we hear 650 episodes, you and I are like in awe because we know we’ve done a fair number of podcasts but, man, that’s longevity right there, and then they jokingly said that they’ve outlasted other people. But the fact of the matter is it’s one thing to do something for a while because it’s fun and it’s cool and it’s interesting, but it’s the fortitude to do it over and over again that tells you about not just that they have a good show, which clearly they do if they’re doing it as long as they have, but also it tells you a little bit about their hearts, right? It tells you that they are absolutely driven to try and give and feed and fuel and do the things that they do so well.

Murph: And I’m hoping that we have that same kind of effect on the people that listen to us and that we continue with the passion that we have for doing “The Buyer’s Mind.”

Jeff: There you go, there you go. I’m in if you’re in, Murph. I have no intention of stepping aside.

Murph: A hundred percent.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah. I really found it really interesting and I felt like I needed to call them on and I thought they responded quite well. When I suggested that their tone changed a little bit when we were talking about super high performance and the seriousness of dedication to being the best that you can be, did you hear that, Murph, or was that just me?

Murph: No, it wasn’t just you. I absolutely heard it in their voices.

Jeff: And to me, it speaks to the sales professionals and the mindset of the top pros in our business because when we think about what it is that we do, it is, it can be tough, it can be grueling. We know this. We’ve seen this happen. We know that that world of sales where you’ve got a lot of, at times, negative energy that’s coming at you, that you have to deal with, it can take its toll after a while and you have to step aside and relax, right? You want to step aside and refresh the brain and have a little fun. And that’s why I enjoy podcasts like “The Advanced Selling Podcast” because…and what we’ve tried to do here in “The Buyer’s Mind,” we want to let people know that you can get a breath of fresh air, but I also love the idea that top sales professionals, and this was modeled just now by Bill and Bryan, top sales professionals, they take their craft seriously. And when they talk about super high performance, it’s a serious thing to them. So when they’re looking at training, it’s not, “Oh, I have to go to training.”

If they’re looking at coaching, it’s not, “Oh, I got to go to a coaching.” It’s, “What do I get out of this?” It’s embracing podcasts. It’s embracing the books. It’s embracing the experts, even embracing the people around you to say, “How can I get better? What makes me better?” And that’s what I want to just challenge all of you who are listening right now to ask the question, how serious are you about mastering your presentation?

Now, it’s one thing for you to look at it, and you sort of casually nod your head and say, “Oh, no, I’m definitely serious.” But I would suggest to you that that’s something you better show me. Don’t tell me, show me. You have to prove this by your action, by your dedication, and by your time. How much time do you spend in performance improvement? How much time do you spend dedicated to getting better? Because you don’t get better because you just think about getting better. Sales is a skill development exercise. You don’t just sit there and say, “I’m going to be better at asking for the sale. I’m going to be better at discovery.” I mean, the mindset is important, but a mindset without a skill set is going to get you absolutely nowhere. So how much time do you spend in that? How much effort do you put in overcoming your own discomfort in order to embrace those opportunities to substantially improve to boost your performance?

And oftentimes, over and over again, I see salespeople who…I don’t want to say they’re going through the motions because it sounds a little bit glib and probably unfair. But they get so caught up and so busy with just handling their business that they are working in their business, but they’re not working on their business. Your business as a sales professional is to be the best sales professional you can be. What does that look like? How can you dedicate yourself to super high performance and you will show that with your time?

Well, as always, thanks so much for listening to “The Buyer’s Mind,” so much for subscribing to “The Buyer’s Mind” as well. We really, really appreciate when you subscribe to our podcast and then you tell other people about it, post it on your social media. Let people know. At the end of the day, we all want to do the same thing in this world. We all want to change somebody’s world. We’ll talk to you next time.