Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice - Andy Paul - Author of Sell Without Selling
Episode Date: June 21, 2022Welcome to another episode of The Radcast! This week, Ryan Alford speaks with the author of Sell Without Selling, Andy Paul!In such an impersonal world, Andy Paul shares his wisdom on connecting back ...to the humanness of selling and marketing. Andy give s a synopsis of his 4 Pillars of Selling while discussing the difference between branding vs. performance marketing. You can learn more about Andy Paul at www.andypaul.com and on Twitter @realAndyPaul If you enjoyed this episode of The Radcast, let us know by visiting our website www.theradcast.com. Check out www.theradicalformula.com. Like, Share and Subscribe to our YouTube channel, or leave us a review on Apple Podcast. Be sure to keep up with all that’s radical from @ryanalford @radical_results @the.rad.cast. If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE. Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding. Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Let's just say five million salespeople in the United States.
There are five million distinct, unique ways to sell.
The goal should be for a manager is to say,
how can I help this person that's selling become the best version of themselves?
Here's the reality.
If you're in sales, and there was a study that came out,
82% of buyers will look at a salesperson's LinkedIn profile
before they speak to them the first time.
What are they looking for?
You're listening to the Radcast.
If it's radical, we cover it.
Here's your host, Ryan Alford.
Hey guys, welcome to the listening to Radcast.
Ryan, Offer, your host, talking sales today.
Talking humans, we're talking Andy Paul.
What's up, Andy?
Hey, Ryan, thank you for having me on the show.
Hey, my pleasure.
Sell without selling out.
I love the name.
I'm digging the book.
I know you can help a lot of people today with sales enablement.
Yeah, well, thank you for having me on.
Yeah, it's, yeah, books are a particular passion project.
Mine is somebody asked me once, why did you write this book at this time?
And I said, because based on all the work I do with companies and salespeople
and the conversations I've on my podcast is,
sad fact is we're just not getting any better at this whole business of selling.
And this was, yeah, my book on why that is the case and what we can do about it.
People still want to talk to people.
And they still buy from people, people buy from people.
And I think a lot of that sort of got lost in some of the hollow bloom of this great technology,
admittedly, which we use in sales.
But we saw it too far down this curve of thinking it could replace the human as opposed to helping the human do a better job.
Yes, exactly.
I mean, because I don't know.
It's funny, Andy.
I mean, I consider myself a modern marketer and a modern guy and in technology and all that.
But all the, you know, AI, VR, like, and all the stuff that is interesting.
But, like, I don't know.
It's like sometimes it's helpful in certain ways.
And then in other ways, it seems to dehumanize certain things.
And it makes us kind of forget at the end of the day.
if we think about what impacts us,
there's someone on the other end
and two robots are doing absolutely everything
on the other end of that.
We preach all the time like this B to H thing,
you know, business to human.
Like it's another human on the other end.
Yeah, well, I think one of the lessons
that's sort of gotten lost,
and it's not relating specifically to marketing and sales
and technology, but which is that,
okay, we have these tools that enable us to
send out
Massquanty's email and easily make
more and more calls we made in the past
as like
and the lesson being is just because we
can do more of these things doesn't mean
that we should and
that's
yeah that's a hard lesson people are actually coming to grips
with especially as the economy perhaps slows
down here in the next year or two
that you know the idea
of just serve more more more more
being the answer to marketing at sales
is going to get challenged and it's going to be
doing better, not more.
That's really the key.
Yeah.
And hey, I knew I liked you, but you're already using one of my favorite quotes.
I mean, like three minutes in, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I have some isms and some quotes.
And if my team heard you say that, they'd go, oh, Ryan's going to like this guy.
That is one of my favorite sayings.
It's one of mine, too.
And you just see the damage that's done from it.
And, yeah, it's where we're going to hit for a lot of companies, as times I said,
as we get a little bit leaner perhaps the next couple of years,
and it seems like the building consensus-going economists,
they'll have some form of economic slowdown.
It's a full recession or even into a stagflation period.
Companies have been able to say, look, God, we're just really gotten good at filling the top of the funnel.
And we don't have to be that good at sales because we know we're just okay.
We'll win a certain percentage of those opportunities.
they're going to find that's going to get challenged the next couple of years because
it's not going to be as easy to fill the top of the funnel and there's going to be
the same number of competitors that exist today competing for a smaller pool of prospects
how are you going to win we got to learn how to actually sell yeah yeah it's interesting
and you know i see it it's interesting for it to hear you frame it that way is i see the same
challenge being i haven't filled the top and i think i'm going to pull them through
the bottom without any of the what's needed to the marketing that gets them in the top
awareness consideration intent you know what I see is you know in marketing uh there's this battle
brewing or it's been brewing for years of performance marketing versus branding and you know
there's been a push the last five years because again you want to make sales I mean so
buy to ROI and as a lifelong marketer, I understand that. But you do have to build a connection
at the top of the funnel to get the sale at the bottom. A lot of the times, unless you're selling
a highly differentiated product that has no competition and others and what is that these days. I'm
tell me what it is and I'll buy. Yeah, I know. You tell me. And so I have a little bit of this
debate with clients sometimes that, you know, I know you want to make the sale or you
want to make, we've got to make transactions happen, but don't they have to be aware of you and
consider you and want to do business with you first?
Yeah, no, I'm absolutely.
I mean, in my book, I deal not so much with, yeah, heavily, really transactional business.
It's something a little more complex selling, but it's the same thing at the top of the funnel
is, as you talk about, awareness, interest, intent.
And then you start building that connection again, right?
You make a certain level of connection from the market and get somebody in the funnel,
then when they actually talk to a salesperson, I'll start that again.
You've got to build the connection.
You've got to build the trust.
You've got to use your curiosity to really understand what's really important to the buyer
to help them make a good decision.
Yeah.
And I love that.
So I'm going to tee this up for you, Andy.
Oh, sure.
Author of Sell Without Selling, Four Pillars.
I liked these.
Let's talk about them.
What are those four key pillars?
Yeah.
So in the book, I set up this contrast.
selling out and selling in.
So selling out is the way most of us have experienced salespeople at one time or another,
which is a salesperson who's purely focused on their own interests, not yours as a buyer, right?
You know, the legendary expression is, you know, seller with commission breath.
They're just there to persuade you to buy their product.
And they don't really care what's really important to you because their job is just to persuade you to buy their products.
On the other hand, I talk about selling in, which is where your job is not to persuade
so I to buy your product, but just to listen to your buyers.
You really understand what's most important to them in terms of the things they want to accomplish
and then help them get that.
And so it's a very different approach to the whole business.
And it starts with this idea that, yeah, these four pillars of selling in are based on innate
human behaviors.
We want to be connected to people.
So it's connection, curiosity, understanding, generosity of the four pillars.
We are wired to want to connect with other people.
This is who we are, as human beings, right?
We are wired to be curious from the day we're born.
And we, you know, pop into the light and we see all these people around us.
We're learning.
We're using our curiosity to navigate this unfamiliar world that we're in.
We continue to use that as we grow up.
You know, we're wired to want to understand other people.
And we're wired to be generous.
We're wired to want to give.
to help others. It makes us feel good to do that.
So what I write about the book is based on, you know, my own experience, experience of many, many, many others and researches.
You really have to master these four attributes, human attributes.
That's sort of it in order to really be successful at selling.
Yeah. How do you, I'm going to jump around a bit here because I'm going to come back to that.
But I really like the post that you made on Instagram.
Graham yesterday.
It was about the connection points of all of these things and where there were things
that dropped off like the tactics that you take and how things are connected to other things.
How do you, within your kind of your framework, how do you help others kind of know what
all those connection points are, what they are, what they aren't?
Well, I mean, it's the pillars aren't meant to be sequential necessarily, right?
I mean, one of the things that you see in sales training all the time is, look, well, you've got these, this is your sales process,
and it's these linear stages that, you know, the buyer is going to march through with you, which they don't, right?
We know from research, you're Turner and Forster and other analyst firms that, you know, the buying journey is actually a fairly complex, nonlinear process that takes place.
So the vast majority of sales training says, well, hey, you use your discovery, i.e. your curiosity at this point.
And then in the sales process, then you start put it away and then move on to the next stage.
It's like, no, no.
I mean, you need to be discovering and, you know, continue to deepen your connection and you're understanding the buyer up until the point where they sign, right?
Otherwise, you're going to miss something.
So, you know, I think back to the.
this diagram that the Gartner put out in research,
they call it their spaghetti diagram with the buyer's journey
because it's really like this really complex flow chart
that starts and stops and starts over.
And so the connection points are all over.
But to sort of simplify it is to think about it is the reason we start
with connection is is that connection is how we earn the trust of our buyer.
Right.
We've built some level of rapport.
We find some common ground.
and we begin to demonstrate our trustworthiness.
The purpose of that, trust, is at that point,
is not that they'll trust us enough to buy from us,
is that they'll trust us enough to let us stick our noses into their business
to really understand the challenges they face and the outcomes they want to achieve.
And this is a part that sellers sort of skim over it
because they think, oh, if I ask a question of a buyer, they have to answer it.
It's like, no, they don't, right?
I mean, it's like how familiar you have to be with someone before you trust them enough with information that's important to you, that's proprietary to you.
So that trust becomes very important in terms of enabling your curiosity.
It's your curiosity then that gets you to the stage of beginning to really understand support to the buyer, but only if, and this is a really hard part for many sellers, is when you ask a question that you listen to truly understand the buyer.
You're not listening to respond, but you're listening to understand.
And I talk about this in the book.
You have various stages of understanding that buyers go through.
But that becomes a real source of value for your customers.
You know, talking about B to H.
One of the biggest, again, thing you can help your buyer with is make them feel understood.
Right?
If you make the buyer feel like you understand their challenges and their objectives, gosh,
you've got a big leg up in terms of ultimately getting their business.
And then the last pillar is generosity.
It's talk about how do you act in a very intentional way to help the buyer achieve these things that are most important to them.
And so it's a very simple framework.
You listen.
You understand what's most important to them.
You help them get that.
You increase your odds of winning the business.
What's your feeling about today's tactics, whether it's LinkedIn, whether it's email, whether it's calling.
you know, I'm sure they all play a role in all four of those in some way, shape, or form.
But is there any formula in your mind or that you talk about the most, you know, within all of the tactics that are there?
No.
So I think that, and this is one of the key themes of the book, is I think that if there are, let's just say, five million,
salespeople in the United States, there are five million distinct, unique ways to sell that exist.
And the goal should be for a manager or a business owner is to say, how can I help this person
that's selling, or even myself, I can help myself if I'm doing the selling, become the best
version of themselves.
That's what you want.
That may be different than, you know, John will be different than Jennifer be different than Sally and so on.
And that's the goal you're trying to achieve as a sales leader is how can I help people become the best version of themselves?
That's not just, hey, very formulaic because the same formula is not going to work for everybody.
Yeah, in my career, I was, you know, you described yourself as sort of the, you know, non-salesy person.
That was me to a T.
You know, I was a write about in the book as I went to my first sales training class ages ago,
my first professional sales job out of college.
this is a huge tech company
and I thought to myself
after watching videos of training
sales training
I was like
what human being
acts this way
I mean what they were
what they were teaching was just so
foreign to me
in the way that I thought
and the way that I act
and the way that I interacted with people
I thought it's either
going to have the shortest career
in sales possible
or I had to find a way
to make it work for me
and I think this is the
the challenge for the vast majority of people in sales is how do I find a way to make this work for me
that's not so technique-laden, you know, sort of falling into this sort of persuasion,
manipulative type tactics that sellers oftentimes fall into.
Interesting.
The talk with Andy Paul, host of the Sales Enablement podcast and author of Sell without selling out.
Andy like Andy paul.com by the way if you're listening we'll hit all these at the end but
I like to give all the plugs midstream.
Hey it's the marketer in me and the sales guy I guess I don't know.
I don't know if it's marketing or sales but yeah I like to be a good host of nothing else.
Andy what's what inspires you today?
Where's your source of inspiration?
You know like obviously you've done it a long time but what?
what formulated this journey for you and this knowledge?
Sort of at one level is just this continuous learning, right?
Yeah, I never really set my career goals based on, geez, I want to have this job or make this amount of money.
I had to scarper early on that I was really more motivated by doing something that was interesting and something where I'd learn something new.
So I look at my own career and I've got sort of divided into these chapters.
Right.
You know, my first four years in my career, I was selling, you know, good size, big computer equipment, you know, roomfuls of computer equipment.
To, you know, big companies.
And then sort of I went to work for Apple in pretty early days of Apple and I was doing channel sales.
So that was a new challenge for me.
You know, I'd never worked with retail distribution and so on.
And then got into large.
enterprise sales selling satellite communication systems, which was completely brand new to me.
But it was the challenge. So for me, and then later in my career, I started my own company,
which I've had for 20 plus years, and then about 10 years ago got the bug to write a book.
It's something, again, a new chapter, I thought.
Pun intended.
What's that?
Pun intended.
Yeah.
And, yeah, I mean, it's something that opened a whole new avenue of things for me in terms of the book was popular.
And I hadn't really considered the possibility that it could be.
And started, you know, building a following online, started my podcast back of 2015.
You know, 1,100 episodes later, we're still, or close to 1,100, we're still at it.
And it led to a couple more books.
So it's just, for me, it's always like, what can I learn new, right?
and dive into it in a way that, you know, I think helps my clients and helps customers
and helps right now in the last 10 years.
Well, I just trying to help the sales profession in general.
What's your perspective on I'm going to lead the witness?
As I like to say, you build the court case.
You lead the witness.
You're heavy into podcasting.
You've invested whether you call it.
at this and a lot of people like roll their eyes when I say personal branding.
But obviously you've,
you know,
embrace that. What role do you see
those types of
things that are marketing activities,
I would probably argue. I mean,
marketing in sales as much as I do divide the line between them.
One feeds the other.
How do you coach people on
those channels for,
you know,
authority and other ways with which to kind of grow and sell.
Yeah, actually, it's a growing part of our business to work with people on that.
Because I think it's so important, this idea of personal branding.
And I understand why people cringe at it, but here's the reality.
If you're in sales, and there was a study that came out about a year ago,
that found that 82% of buyers will look at a sales per seals.
person's LinkedIn profile before they speak to them first time.
So at 82%, let's just assume it's 100%, right?
Because it's close enough.
What are they looking for?
They want to see what you have to offer.
They want to see who you are.
They want to see if you're going to be able to add value to them.
They want to see if you have a point of view about anything having to do with the conversation
they want to have with you, right, about the industry you serve, the products you sell, whatever.
Not to say you have to be an authority as a salesperson, but people are.
want to know, is this person going to be worth my time?
I think this is a part that eludes a lot of people, but you have to think about it, especially
when your sale, wasn't just some degree in marketing to is you're asking for somebody's time.
I'm asking, you know, if I'm talking to a potential buyer, I'm asking for their time.
And so they're going to invest their time in me.
So when people make an investment, what do they want?
They want a return on that investment.
So anytime as a seller that you're talking to a prospective buyer, you have to look at from those perspectives, they've just invested some of their time and attention in me.
Am I able to give them a return on that?
And if not, they're not going to give me any more time.
Well, part of their decision-making starts with looking at, in case of sales, it's going to be your LinkedIn profile.
What's this person care about?
What this person think about?
How can they add value to the conversation we're about to have?
And if you're just a cipher, then that's not going to work in your favor.
And increasingly so, because increasing percentage of sellers are committing themselves,
it's still a small percentage, but are committing themselves to become more sort of frequent content creators on the platform.
And that's, I think, is just essential.
And you're starting to see some divide.
We do see, at least in our business with those people that have embraced that are beginning to see the benefits of it.
in terms of just results for themselves, right?
Yeah.
Versus those who aren't.
Yeah.
So it's just start small.
Platforms out there.
Yeah, it could be just going to, initially you're just going to comment on other people's posts.
Great.
You know, do that.
Find out who your prospective buyers are going to be.
Start before you need something from them.
Start commenting.
But then what do you care about?
You know, you're in this business.
What's your opinions on things?
Put it out there.
So I think it's just really essential.
And it doesn't have to be this all-consuming thing
that many leaders worry about,
oh, this person spends too much time on LinkedIn.
I would make the argument that within a few years,
it may be you spend most of your day on LinkedIn
because that's where your prospects are.
Yeah.
So not TikTok yet for your Andy Paul.
we're looking at it
I was going to lead you there if you didn't
and there's a growing number of
sort of sales
people in the sales community
who are investing in TikTok
sales talk
is what sort of people are calling it
and yeah we'll probably
do some of that for sure
I saw a stat
and I talked about it I spoke at a FedEx
e-commerce event
50% of U.S.
active users are over 30.
Yeah.
Not surprising at all.
Not the tany bopper platform anymore.
Well, no.
Then there'll be the same dynamic that that's happening with Facebook as the kids are going
start saying, well, just my parents are on TikTok.
We'll find something new to do.
Yeah, I totally agree.
I think it will definitely run the kids off.
But it's a fascinating platform.
And the one thing that I find real about it is our,
we're so ADD now and our attention is so diverted.
I do think that's where it's going to be interesting to see.
You've seen it impact, you know, Instagram moving to reels.
You see, I think the way people cut content in certain things,
it's like get to the point quicker.
So it's been, I think it'll be fascinating kind of the impact on,
on content and our attention spans.
As much as I hate it, I just think we have fleeting attention, don't we?
well yeah i think we're training generations to have shorter attention spans yeah i mean it's
been just if you look you know movies and tv shows you know the average you know time between cuts
between perspectives as dropped over the years i forget what the exact number is but now it's like
the number of cuts is like three times what it was 20 years ago or whatever so yeah we need that
stimulation apparently yeah i think i think the maybe the bigger insight here is
The reality is these digital natives are getting in leadership positions and making decisions.
And, you know, that the 20, I don't know where it happens, sometimes the decision maker could be a 25 year old now.
I mean, you never know with some of these entrepreneurs.
But let's call it 25 to 40, you know, have grown up with digital and social media and these channels.
And now they're becoming decision makers.
pretty large corporations.
So, you know, I think, I guess just going where they've, where they are and where
they're used to being communicated with, maybe.
Yeah.
Well, I think the challenge for a lot of people, especially, let's be on the sales world
we're most familiar with, coming into sales is that for a lot of the digital natives,
it's just, to your point, just grew up differently, right?
different environment.
And so when they're thrust into environments,
particularly in sales,
where they need to build this connection through a asynchronous form of communications
like telephone call,
that's something they don't have a ton of experience in
because they've grown up in environment.
It's primarily asynchronous messaging based.
And so, yeah, one of our challenges in sales is how do we help teach people
to be comfortable in this environment
where they have to communicate
not their abandoning
asynchronous messaging at all, but
in addition to messaging, have to learn how to
build a rapport with another human
being in a sort of face-to-face,
whether it's virtual or in person,
way that perhaps they're not real comfortable with.
Yeah. How do you feel about
you know, I saw this and I kind of chuckled?
I mean, it's been a while, I know a year or two ago,
but like sales over the phone is dead.
and nothing, let's be honest, right?
It's kind of like TV's dead.
Okay, well, TV's not dead.
It's just changed.
But I don't know about that.
I'm a feeling you don't either.
Yeah, no, it's, I mean, anytime anybody says cold calling's dead.
Yeah, shows just how false it really is, right?
Yeah.
And the way we're doing it isn't necessarily.
great, right? But it doesn't mean it's dead. I mean, you still have this obligation to reach out.
And as a seller, it would be great. It'd be fantastic of every opportunity you had was the result of an inbound lead that's fully qualified. And you just pick up the phone. You're talking to somebody that's expecting to hear from you. It just doesn't work that way. Right? It's just not the way of the world. And, you know, that'd be a utopian environment. I wrote about that in my second book. It'd be utopia.
If you're a seller for me, it would have been, oh, all these highly qualified leads inbound, perfect.
But in the absence of Utopia, we have to do what we have to do.
And that involves reaching out to people and, yeah, sort of interrupting them in the flow of their day, whether it's, you know, phone or a message or an email.
Yeah.
How do you?
So it's just how we do that is, you know, makes the difference.
But anyway, go ahead.
I'm sorry.
Let's, I'd love to give.
And for everybody, listening, again, authoring.
Randy Paul's sell without selling out the give as we as we kind of close out a bit here.
What are some practical like let's give some people some real meat here.
You know, obviously reading the book is going to help lead them completely to the water and
maybe drink a little.
But what are some practical ways maybe for cold calling and warming up cold prospect is just
difficult, you know, and in and in seeming.
overwhelming. What are some practical ways, whether calling, whether emailing, whether LinkedIn,
what are some practical ways that people can do that? Well, you've got to find what works for you,
right? There's some people who are just perfectly comfortable, pick up the phone and calling
people cold. And some develop a fair amount of expertise at that. What they typically do is they
tend to lead with questions rather than, hey, you know, hey, to pick you, get you in a bad time.
The red flag for every every prospect out there is like, yeah, of course you have.
But they become good at leading with questions and starting conversations that are not pitch-driven.
And that's really your goal, right?
When you're reaching out of us, you know, how can I start a conversation with you that doesn't put you on the defensive?
Now, some people say, I want to warm this person up with an email or I'm going to,
connect with this person, hey, maybe months in advance
or I actually want to reach out to him on LinkedIn.
I don't want to fall into this trap that people do on LinkedIn.
It's like, send a connection request,
then I'm going to send you a pitch, right?
That's nothing more off-putting than that.
But being strategic about how you build your network
and your territory, let's say, quote-unquote territory
because it's not often geographic,
but the list of accounts that you're dealing with
is, are you going to be strategic?
I can start building those relationships before you need to call on them.
So that when you do reach out, maybe somebody's familiar with your name.
You know, they've seen you, the connection requests.
They've seen maybe you've comment on some of their posts.
And they looked at your profile and thought, yeah, when this person calls,
this could be an interesting conversation to have.
So a couple of things.
Yeah, just boiling it down.
One is lead with questions.
Lead with curiosity.
How do you make yourself interesting to someone else be interested in them?
The number one way.
So if you want to sort of commanding someone's attention, be interested in what they're interested in.
And the best way to start that is ask questions.
In my book, I talk about a chapter on curiosity, the curiosity of pillars, have six types of questions you can use that are conversation starters or conversation triggers, let's say.
You know, one of them is what I call an insight question.
and that is a question you're going to ask a prospective buyer about their business that they
reasonably should be expected to know but possibly don't.
And that's a great conversation starter.
You know, for me, when I was, when I do still, but when I was more selling more consulting
services I do now is talking with CEOs.
Yeah, my question usually was something along the lines of, well, tell me.
So how many hours of selling time?
does it take you to take a prospect from initial point of contact to an order?
Probably a lot of blank stairs.
A lot of blank stairs.
But what they get from that question is, oh, I should probably know that.
Why is that important?
Let's have a conversation.
Then you get into the conversation.
So it's just one example.
And then numerous ones in the book about questions you can use to help people sort of stop and think.
And when they stop and think, then they're not going to.
could be as defensive in talking to you than if you just unload a pitch, you know,
the show up and throw up approach to sales.
Everybody's favorite radio station, WIFM, what's in it for me?
It for me.
Yeah.
And unfortunately, that's, you know, the guiding philosophy for many sellers says, yeah, what's in
it for me as opposed to how can I help you get what's important to you?
Now, is this too generic?
Pete, you know, I'm reaching out to somebody.
Pete, what keeps you up at night with your business?
Worst question, worst question in the world.
No offense, but it's absolutely.
I'm leading the witness.
The usual answer is, well, my kids.
My business doesn't keep me up at night.
Yeah.
Yeah, unfortunately, it's hard to kill that old chestnut.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's very similar to the crush about, you know, what are your pain points?
What is the pain you're feeling?
It's like, yeah, same thing.
People aren't feeling pain.
I mean, they've got challenges.
What are the challenges you're facing?
How can I help you with that?
Yeah, is, you know, we boil it down.
I believe the key to success and sales, if there is one, there are several, but one real key is being intentional.
Right?
Don't be robotic.
Don't.
You've got a script.
You've got a playbook.
Just don't follow it.
Yeah.
To the letter of the law, what works for you?
Why?
You're talking to a human being and they've got concerns.
They've got challenges.
They've got aspirations.
What are they?
What are they?
Ask.
The only way you find out is by asking.
Unfortunately, and this is not a ding against marketing.
But, yeah, marketing does a pretty good job these days saying, look, here's your ICP,
your ideal client profile.
And you're going to call them to this enterprise account and there's, you know, five key stakeholders
we need to talk to.
here's the personas for each of those five.
Here are the questions you ask.
Here are the answers you should receive when you ask those questions.
It's like, sure.
You can turn a salesperson loose and it's robotically follow the script.
And it's like, great.
But now what do you really understand about the buyer when you've done that?
You don't understand a lot.
You might have some information, but you don't understand why that information is important.
So you have to, it said, develop your own style and be guided by its philosophy is,
how can I put myself in a position to help this buyer achieve what's most important to them?
Do you think, you know, maybe making it topical, like the talk of slowdown, talk of recession,
and you mentioned this at the beginning, that I would think that's going to change the approach
because I would think, especially the larger corporations, they're starting to see here and feel that maybe a bit.
I mean, is that negative bringing up negatives you don't need to do that, don't need to go there,
Or is it like, or is it you're being observational and you understand what they're thinking about?
Yeah.
I mean, I think you can help the buyer understand that you have a sense of what they're going through.
And you might even have a way to be able to help them navigate going forward.
Then that's, that's important to bring up.
Andy, I can pick your brain all day.
You've been very generous with your time.
And I know everyone will.
Yeah.
Tell everybody, I've tried to notate it.
a few times, but let's give everybody, you know, where to keep up with you, where to get the book,
all those things.
All right.
Yeah, to keep up with me, LinkedIn is the best place.
So I post once or twice a day on LinkedIn.
So that's real Andy Paul.
This is my profile name.
If you want to find that, you come down my website, antipal.com.
You can download a free chapter of my book.
And if you want to buy the book, then Amazon Barnes & Noble anywhere.
You buy online or in stores.
Actually, real bookstores.
You can buy the book.
Awesome.
Yeah, listen to my podcast.
Sales enablement with Andy Paul.
Sales enablement.
Andy, been very gracious and very insightful.
I love your approach.
It may be a blast to the past and may seem whatever,
but I think it's modern to me because I think people need to be more human and there's a lot of truce there.
Thank you, Ryan.
Really appreciate it.
Hey, guys.
You know where to find us, the radcast.com.
Search for sales enablement.
You'll find every highlight clip from today's episode with Andy Paul.
Go to Andy Paul.com.
Find out all that 80 has going on and orders book.
You know what if you find me.
I'm at Ryan Alford on all the platforms.
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We'll see you next time on the Radcast.
