The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Power of Building Rapport & Qualifying People You Meet Online Or In Person

Episode Date: February 13, 2020

The Power of Building Rapport & Qualifying People You Meet Online Or In Person

Hi folks, it's Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, coming here with another podcast. We're starting to talk about a lot of different topics lately. I've been just trying to find topics maybe that I see kind of something that strikes me or kind of stands out to me or triggers me a little bit in talking about life lessons or sales lessons or business lessons on LinkedIn. I'll kind of cruise LinkedIn and look for stuff. So watch for more of that coming, more conversations coming to the Chris Foss Show, kind of tips and ideas or my take on it, my spin on things.

And maybe we'll still do tech news. We've got to talk about some Samsung thing on a separate thing, but the new G20 phone that they announced, which is pretty cool, but we'll get to that in another episode. So one thing I want to talk about that's close to my heart, because I'm a real purist. Let's talk about sales qualification, okay? Let's talk about sales qualification. Now, I'm a real purist. I like to build an audience. I like to curate an audience.

I like to give an audience a community, build curate an audience. I like to, um, give an audience, a community, build a community with my audience, uh, interact with them in that community. I'm a real people person, extrovert. Um, I like doing that. I like doing that. And honestly, there are certain platforms where I'm doing stuff now on LinkedIn, I'm doing business. Although I do look for personal relationships on LinkedIn, not personal as a boyfriend, girlfriend, I should mention. I'm not cruising for girlfriends on there. But mostly what I'm doing is, you know, I'm looking for personal relationships.

I might meet a CEO who maybe he can't benefit me or whatever, but maybe he's got some really cool ideas. I'm an idea finder. I'm like looking for ideas. I'm looking for stories. I'm looking idea finder. I'm like looking for ideas. I'm looking for stories. I'm looking for life lessons. I'm looking for people who are not necessarily always like me, but maybe people that can challenge what I'm thinking about or what business paradigms that I have, what blind

spots or scotomas I might have. If you've ever heard of Tony Robbins or other people talk about scotomas where you have blind spots, where you have belief systems that don't allow you to see outside of your box that you've created and therefore you can't improve your life or your business so i look for these sort of things and experiences to me what i found is is reaching out to people letting them develop themselves in their own sort of polaroid makes it so that i can create what one would call serendipity. And my good friend Robert Skoll taught me this years ago. Serendipity is kind of where you put yourself in positions or put yourself into scenarios

or put yourself into groups of people where you can meet people and magic happens. Now, I'm not talking about dating. There's probably some people that would take that as a dating thing. But most social events that I go to are very tech-related. They're very kind of tech business, social related. They're not necessarily dating sort of things. Now, if I went to some dating events, that might be maybe my interest. And I think it's important, especially if you're a guy out there, if you're doing this sort of stuff, like trying to date on LinkedIn or stuff, you might want to just check yourself at the door. Go to properties where women are looking to date and hit them up. Or, you might want to just check yourself at the door. Go to properties where women are

looking to date and hit them up. Or maybe you can qualify off of Facebook or whatever. But we'll talk about that some more when I get into what I would call sales qualifications, what that would fall under. But for the most part, I'm looking to build the broadest group of people to find the best people that I can trust, that I can can relate to that have a sincere amount of honesty and integrity that's usually the things that I keep trying to keep around me you are who your friends are you become who your friends are you become your parents could just spend most of your time around them first and you subconsciously learn to be like them and have their same sort of traits and stuff. But outside of that womb, if you will, after you leave the house, even in your youth or

your teenage years, your friends shape you. You become who you are. If you go to the bar all the time, some seedy bar, you're probably going to kind of start mirroring a lot of the people that are there. And I'm not saying they're good or bad. I'm going to leave that to be a judgment that's up to you. That's your evaluation for your life, not me for yours, if you will. So I shouldn't be out shaming people. That's your business. But this is the important thing you need to do. I mean, if you're always hanging out with criminals and thieves in a thieves den or a drug den, you know, you're sitting around

some meth lab or with a bunch of druggies doing drugs, well, your values are probably going to be aligned with theirs and you're going to become like them. You're going to adopt the same sort of thinking that they do. Whatever you're around all the time is what you can become. So I try and keep good quality, high quality people around me, people that, like I say, it's about trust, honesty, and integrity. The one thing I've found about integrity, somebody told me a long time ago about integrity, that if you interact with people that have integrity, whether you date them, it's a good dating thing to have, or whether you're doing business with them,

people that have integrity, if you have conflicts, they will work to resolve those conflicts. They will care. If you have trust, if you have honesty in your relationships, you have a very solid foundation to build on with a relationship. But if you can't trust someone, it's really an unhealthy build to try and build some sort of either relationship or business relationship on top of that because you know that they're going to rip

you off, especially if they ripped you off before and this is the reason you've come to this belief system about them. So moving on, laying kind of that foundation of the conversation of why I friend people, why I'm interested in people. I normally don't reach out to people on LinkedIn. Fortunately, on LinkedIn, I'm swamped with people who hit me up for business connections. And I do reciprocate, full disclosure, I do reciprocate with business qualifications where I ask them what they're doing and how they're doing it and stuff and what they are trying to take and do. So now that we've laid that foundation, here's one of the most important things.

Now, I grew up in the old sales world of selling the sizzle and qualifying your clients and all the old Zig Ziglar stuff. If you haven't read any of the early Zig Ziglar books, Earl Nightingale, a lot of his records my father had and I inherited, thankfully, and got a chance to listen to. And it talked about the old way of selling. And the way I grew up selling was a very one-on-one, personal, face-to-face basis. You went out to someone's business, you shook the hand, you worked the reception so that she would let you into, you know, she was the gatekeeper, as we used to call it back then, who would let you into the buying agent for the corporation,

and you'd try and build a relationship with him. And a lot of what you had to do back in those days was gain rapport. You had to build a relationship and gain rapport. So I couldn't just walk into, you know, some office and be like, hey, man, here's what we're selling. You want to buy? You want to buy? You want to buy? You want to buy? You want to buy? No, I'd have to go in. I'd have to look people in the eye. I'd have to shake their hand.

I'd have to try and gain rapport with them where I'd have to be like, Hey, what do you like? Oh, and you know, Oh, I see that you've got some golf clubs on your or golf balls on your desk, or maybe some golf clubs behind the, behind your desk. You're a golfer. Oh, I like golf. Yeah. Yeah. I tried to take up that sport. So what do you like about golf? You try and always gain rapport before you ever got to the point of selling. It's the same thing in a date. And I love using dates as an analogy because I think everyone's been on a date or at least a lot of women have been on dates where a guy goes out with a date with them and tries to get to what you would call fourth base or home base right away or third base or second base without even, you know,

taking dinner, whining in diner, getting to know her, you know. And there's a reason that we have these sort of interactions either in dating or business or personal relationships where we can't just go right for the money. We can't just go right for, you know, fourth home base. We have to wine and dine. We have to build rapport. We have to let someone get to know us. We have to get to know them. That's always important as well. If you're just trying to hit and run everything you can possibly see, well, you know, you might end up with some, that's all I'm going to say. But, you know. But I grew up in that world of building a rapport. Now, we have a very different world, a very non-personal world now where everything is online.

Our sales are online. Many times, if you're selling stuff through like a cart, you may never meet, see, or interact with the people other than the fact that the transaction happens. They pay you. They receive your wa um, wares and you're done. Maybe that's it. Maybe you do some consulting and stuff on the side where there is a one-on-one interaction, but the still to that matter, you have to have qualifying.

Most people, when they, uh, run their Facebook ads or run any other ads on different paradigms. Now they do qualifying and hopefully you're smart enough to do that. They could do targeting, or technically what is qualifying, where you're targeting to certain people that you want to speak to or certain people that might be in the marketplace for your product.

So that's fine and dandy because that's kind of the relationship of a cart and everything else. But here's the challenge that I have is people that don't qualify and don't, um, and, and, and don't try and build at least a, um, a modicum of rapport, uh, from the get-go in personal interactions online. Um, and I see this a lot and I've been seeing a lot on Facebook. It's kind of driving me crazy, but it's kind of a thing of my a lot and I've been seeing a lot on Facebook. It's been kind of driving me crazy, but it's kind of a thing of my own creation. I've only got about 4,000 friends

years ago. I wiped a whole mess of friends from social media and, um, and I've wiped anybody who's toxic and doesn't believe in decency to other human beings. Those people have also been wiped from my friend circles. Um, And so I had some space. And so I thought, you know, I really need to increase my serendipity quotient, if you will. Increase my quality of friends around me. Because it's really important to me to have a quality group of friends around me. To have people that aren't liars, cheaters, thieves, bad people, criminals. You know, I want good, wholesome people around me to have people that aren't liars, cheaters, thieves, bad people, criminals. You know, I want good, wholesome people around me and hopefully making a good imprint on

and expanding my mind because I'm always looking for that. I know that I don't have, I'm not a statistic believing that I have, you know, I have the golden chest on all the ideas in the world and all the best things to do. And there's a lot of people that they come into my life in serendipity. I'll bump into them. And sometimes they even kind of push me wrong. And I'm like, well, maybe I should get to know who this person is and why they're being such a weirdo. And sometimes I find there's some really interesting people on the planet.

And they change my life sometimes in those cases. So on Facebook, what I've been doing is I've been, you know, how Facebook suggests friends and it'll say, um, you have 100 mutual friends, you have 200 mutual friends. Well, I felt like I've curate my friends on Facebook pretty well. I've cut away all the different toxicity and, and, different toxicity and non-decent people. And I've said, okay, so I want to just bring in cool friends. And so I'm like, well, since I only have cool friends now, if 100 or 200 people that are my mutual friends that I feel have been properly filtered now and vetted, if they have these people as friends, most likely they're probably good people. Now, it doesn't work 100% of the the time and no one should expect that it would.

It's a numbers game. But what I've been doing is every now and then if I get a little bored or I'm, I'm just, you know, I see some interesting people on the Facebook, I'll, you know, send them a friend request, especially if it's, uh, over 100 people that have suggested them as mutual friends or not suggested, but suggested them as mutual friends. They're not suggested, but, you know, mutual friends. But, you know, if one of my friends like you, I might like you too because most of my friends have also been doing the purge of decency over the past while. But one of the challenges I have, and I have the same problem with LinkedIn,

I don't get too much of it on Twitter. Twitter, you know, I get these plugs or DMs every now and then, but not as much. But it's really prevalent on Facebook where once they approve the friend request, I immediately get sent a like request to their fan page. Like it's, it's almost like, it's almost like bada boom, one step and then the next shoe drops. And I got to tell you, nine times out of 10, I have no idea what they're sending me. I have no idea what the page is. Nine times out of 10, I don't have any interest in it. Uh, it seems like a lot of females do that to me. And so, you know, I'll go to their page and it's like a makeup page or something like

this. You did not qualify me properly. Um, and, um, I'm not sure why that is. I'm not going to try and figure out square that sort of thing, but, uh, um, it does seem like it does seem disingenuous from a friendship basis. I reached out to you on Facebook. I'm not sending you pictures or trying to pick up on you. I'm just trying to add you as a friend and expand, you know, what I've talked about here before. Uh, and you know, I don't hear, here's the other thing about me that's really different. I don't have the normal thirst that guys do. I've dated hundreds of women's all my life. I've owned modeling and talent agencies. I've, I've had my fun in my youth at, uh, at knowing plenty of women and I don't do long distance dating. I don't date you. If you're not local, I gotta, I gotta take you out on a date and see if

you're crazy or, or I'm crazy or, or if we're even a match or we even compatible, I'm not going to spend 500 million hours online talking a bunch of shit that when I meet you, I'm five seconds. I'm going to be like, Oh my God, I've been catfished. You are not who I believe. So I have no interest in long-term dating or any of that on Facebook. I have no fucking interest to that. I want to, I'm all kind of old world romantic on a meet you and see who you are. So that's not even what I'm up to. Um, but to me to look at these things where it's like, Hey, like my page, like my page, like my page, like my page. Uh, honestly, I think I'm, I think I'm, I think I might just start unfriending those

people right away as soon as they do that. Cause I'll be like, you know what? You just crossed the, the, uh, disingenuous matrix, you know, I, now there are people that do reach out to me and they, uh and they give a handshake or a hi. They're like, hey, how are you doing? Someone wrote me the other day, and they said, oh, by the way, I got your friend request. Just curious, do I know you from someplace? And I said, no, I don't.

And I explained to them my little theory of meeting people and reaching out and expanding my thing. And they're like, oh, that's cool. And that's great. That's what you want to do. That's really what you should do with most people. But, know, my attitude is, uh, I let people develop like a Polaroid and part of that I leave up to them. Like I'm not sitting around going, let me crawl under your skin and walk around your life for a while to see if you're a decent person. I just kind of go, you know what? Let's let serendipity happen. If there's some potico, there's some

potico, you're a Polaroid. We're going to take a picture and we're going to see how it develops. And if it develops into some sort of friendship relationship or some way in business that, uh, you know, we do something with our, our lives together. Uh, that's great. And if it doesn't, well then maybe that's just the way it was supposed to be. I don't really believe in destiny, but I do believe that there's, I don't know, kind of what you put out there is what you attract. And so if, if that person is like me, hopefully they have the same sort of interest in interacting with me. And if they don't, they're just kind of like some, just another schlub, send me a friend request, then that's fine. You know, it's a numbers game next. Um, I'm just

moving through the numbers, trying to find serendipity. And people are really smart, brilliant. And people that hopefully I change their life and maybe they change mine. That would be kind of nice. But if it happens, it happens. I'm not looking to. I'm just seeding it, if you will. I'm giving it that seed.

I'm going, here's the plant for you. And if it grows into something cool, great. If it doesn't, well, that's awesome. I've got 50 million other plants. And, you know, it's just to find diamonds, you've got to sift a lot of coal, baby. So that's what you've got to do. You've just got to sift the coal. And that comes from my sales background too. Um, for me, sales is, you know, if you, if you've ever gone to school

or gone to Zig Ziglar's books, uh, or any great sales, um, uh, advisor out there, they'll teach you. It's a numbers game. I mean, certainly you do want to be good at what you do so that you don't lose sales because you don't know how to close or because you fumble the ball or you don't build rapport, you don't qualify. But also, I lost my point there. I lost my train of thought. But also you need to be able to have a numbers game, be able to accept no and realize that you're going to get a lot more no's than you're going to get yes's. And it's a numbers game. You just fill up the funnel with yeses or maybes or interesteds. And then hopefully at the bottom,

you get the yeses, if you will. I kind of screwed that up, but I think you get what I'm saying. So, um, and then the bigger the funnel, the more yeses come out the bottom, but the more stuff you got going to shove in the top to hopefully come out. It's kind of like when you, it's kind of like when you make orange juice. You're one of those high-end blender, crusher, mixer things, whatever they are. You end up with a whole lot of orange still left, but you end up with this pure orange juice. So it's kind of like that, if you will. But I see that also on LinkedIn.

I see a lot of my friends are complaining about how bad it's getting, and it is getting pretty bad. People send you messages on LinkedIn, and they'll be selling and pushing. And the big thing is to try and get you on the phone, which is a complete waste of time on their part, as far as I'm concerned. Um, but they're trying to get you on the phone. I've had people send me all sorts of stuff that I am not in the market. I know no in the market for, and some of it is so kind of unique or B2B or enterprise that, you know, I'm just this, I'm an entrepreneur with at best some different employees or maybe some virtual assistants. But I'm not a, you know, some big corporation like IBM where you need to sell me SaaS services. Like I'm not in the market for that. And I get that all the time on fucking LinkedIn.

And there's no, hi, how are you? Sometimes there's just hi, but it just goes right into the sales pitch. There's no rapport building. There's no qualification. Hey, Chris. Hey, thanks for the friend request. Or hey, I reached out to you on my contact.

I'm kind of interested in you as a person. I don't want to get weird and ask you down the phone because that's like grabbing for a breast on the first date. But, uh, can you, um, you know, maybe tell me a little bit more about yourself. One of my favorite things, and I've talked about this before. One of my favorite pitches that I ever got was from, uh, a gentleman named John Ferrara, and he runs Nimble. I think it's nimble.com you can go to. And Nimble is a really cool, innovative, oh, what do they call that? It's a contact database where you can manage your contacts, interact with your contacts.

It keeps all your records, all that good stuff. In fact, recently Microsoft chose to move out of their systems and into theirs, the people they had in some of their workflow systems. So it's a, I forget the term for it, but basically it's a contact database manager, a CRM. There we go. Contact relationship manager. And it keeps track of all that sort of stuff for you. So anyway, one day I get this call out of the blue.

Hey, my name is John Ferrer. Hey, how you doing, Chris? He goes, hey, man, I've been getting to know you online, been seeing your stuff, been seeing your interactions on Facebook and stuff. And I'm just really interested to learn more about you. And he goes, so can you just, you know, tell me more about who you are and what you're doing. And, uh, so I did. And, you know, he, he listened intently for, I don't think 10 or 15 minutes. I went off, you know, on all my bullshit about, you know, who I am and when I am or what I think I am really is what that comes down to. Um, the little, uh, the little, um, the little thing I put out in the

world. Um, who is Chris Voss? Uh, he's this guy, I think, I don't know. Check back next week, see what it's then. Um, so he listened, uh, intently and he shut up and just listened and let me say all my stuff. And then when I pretty much ran myself out, he said, wow, that's really awesome. I mean, you sound like a really cool dude. You've got these really cool aspects. And he's like, you mind if I take a second to tell you about who I am and what we're doing? And I'm like, no. And you know, I was willing to, uh, to give that back to him because he'd given it to me. That's the reciprocation of rapport. That's reciprocation of qualification. He taken an interest in me. That's really what we seek out as people is to have people interested in us, to give us the validation that we're

interesting or that people like us or that people accept us or that, or that, um, people respect who we are. That's kind of what a lot of times we're looking for, especially in this broken world where there's so much disrespect, there's so much hatred, there's so much meanness, there's so many people who don't care about you because they're busy doing their thing. And a lot of us are looking for that validation. And that's part of what this experience is of lead qualification and rapport is building a relationship with that person. Now, the one thing you learn from sales is you can't go into every sale experience looking to make the kill and looking to close. For me, especially in these social networks or these communities I build, I'm looking for several different things. I've had times where I've gone

on a sale situations and met someone I want to date and subsequently dated them. I've gone on a sale situations and instead of making a sale, and instead of making a sale on the other thing, I end up dating them, or both. And sometimes I've gone into sales situations and made one of my best friends I could ever have, but they never bought anything from me, or both. Sometimes they did, and they ended up being a great friend. So you just never know how these are going to work out.

So for me, I have a real big picture approach to reaching out to people. So if they tell me, no, I don't want to buy your shit, I don't close them off and go, well, fuck you. And I'm not going to feel totally rejected. No, you never know. Explore the serendipity from there. You might make a great friend. You might make a, um, you never know.

I mean, I've had people that have told me no. And six months later to a year later, they'll call me up and they'll be like, hey, Chris, you know how you do that one thing? You pitch me and I told you no. Hey, I have some business to refer to you because you handled that so well and you were so cool. I have some business of some people that want to do. I'm going to refer you to them. That happens to me like I can't tell you how, how much money I made or how often that's happened to me. And it's just the wonderful thing because referrals from, um, from, uh,

business people are great because they're like, Hey, this Chris Vosk, I really made a good impression on me. I didn't buy his products. I was in the market or wasn't, you know, maybe it wasn't my thing, but, uh, Hey, you know, I think you should do business with me. Seems really nice. And, you know, not treating people like, well, you didn't buy from me. So fuck you. I don't want anything to do with you anymore. You know, is this bullshit?

I've actually had this to, to put this in a dating thing. And I use this a lot because it's a great analogy area to work from. I've done the same with dating. Like I've had, I had sometimes where I've asked people out or I've been interested in someone kind of hit on them and you know, I don't feel like it's going anywhere and they're not interested. And so I'll move on. And then sometimes they've called me up and said, Hey, you know, I have a friend who I think would really like you. Um, that's the, that's the thing about being cool. When I see these people that are dicks online, when they don't make a sale or they can't get a date or they can't, you know, they're hitting on some girl privately and

they're being an ass to her because they've been rejected. This is bullshit. You shouldn't be operate that way. And really it comes from a state of what we would call, um, the thing about sales and whether you're dating or selling yourself to people in dating, or you're selling selling yourself in business or you're selling yourself to friendship relationships, trying to build new friends. What are we selling? We're selling who we are and why people should want to hang out with us and why we want to hang out with them and what value we can bring to any of those different variations of a relationship when you really think about it. So we're constantly selling ourselves in who we are and, we're asking those people to do it, but you just never know where serendipity is going to come out the other

side and operating from a, uh, the term is escaping me. If you can't tell that I'm stalling right now a little bit, uh, it's from a, it's from a, uh,

point of, uh, you have to think of things, it's the opposite of abundance is the term I'm trying to come up with, but it's the opposite of abundance. So if you think of abundance, if you think there's like, I remember one time a girl told me there's a million fish in the sea, there's plenty of people that date Chris when I was young. And I remember thinking, wow, that's a lot of people to have to ask phone numbers of. But no, thinking, wow, that's a lot of people to have to ask phone numbers of. But no, it's true. There's a million people in the world you can ask to date, you can ask for business sales, you can ask to be your friend and maybe build relationships if you want to get to know them better as just friends. There's a whole bunch of people. And when you, um, when you operate from this mentality of where a scarcity,

that's the word I was looking for. The opposite of abundance is scarcity. When you operate from mentality of scarcity, where you hit on one chick and if she tells you, no, it's the end of your fricking world, that's scarcity. And that limits your ability for serendipity and everything else. The same is true of business sales. If you're just, you know, hitting on that one business and going, I'm just going to hit this one business. I'm going to get the sale. It's going to be so big. If I can just get this sale, um, you can't do that. You've got to operate from abundance and you've got to operate from, there's plenty of business as a thing and in sales and dating and business and relationships with friendships, it's a numbers game. Still, you've got to shake a lot of hands, meet a lot of people,

sift through a lot of coal to find the diamonds in the rough. And there are other times too, in sales where, uh, I remember, um, I used to work with this company when I was a kid called car company with a K R and we did industrial sales. So we sold screws, bolts, uh, everything that a shop would need. Uh, you know, a lot of steel shops back then, auto shops, a lot of different things that people would need to do that sort of work, you know, wrenches and everything else. So these guys, so we would do this business and we'd have to

build relationships. And there were many times where I would go and and they would already have one of our competitors as their preferred vendor. And they would let me in. And they'd be like, hey, Chris, we like what you're doing. You seem like a good kid. You're real cool, and you built rapport with us and qualified us and everything else. But we really have to do business with these guys. Or sometimes my boss, the owner, says, these are the guys we have to use, and I have to use them,

and I'd buy from you, Chris, if it wasn't for this. But sometimes those relationships change. Sometimes over six months or a year or two years later, I get a call from them and say, hey, Chris, we finally decided to part with that vendor. They started doing a bad job for us, and you've always been trying to earn our business, so we want to try you out. earn our business. So we want to

try you out. Oh, wow. Now, if you're ugly with those people and go, Oh, you rejected me because whatever, and fuck you. And I'll never talk to you again or re-approach you again. Never have an open mind to those people. You cut off the ability to have those sorts of experiences. Um, same thing with dating. You might meet someone and maybe they're in a relationship and then when they get out, they're open to new people. So I kind of like the analogy of dating and really this comes into a lot of different things. This process of qualifying, of finding out what people are interested in, building rapport with people before you just start, you know, going right for the breast on the first date, third base, you know, that sort of, so I like those analogies, but this is true in every relationship you do, whatever you're selling, we're always selling ourselves. I think

that's one important thing most people can learn because it helps self-actualize them and understand the process of what they're trying to do and the mechanisms behind it to make it successful so they can have a better ratio of success. So qualification is real important. So my advice to you would be whatever you're doing online, if you're doing an interpersonal relationship, if you're reaching out, you're talking to people over email, you're talking to people over messaging on LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever it is, take some time to get to

know those people before you pitch them. You don't have to spend a lot of time. Hi, how are you? Oh, I noticed some interesting things about you. Would you be in the market for this? Or, hey, I looked over your profile and noticed that we have some simpatico sort of interest or business experience. And, yeah, how are you? How are you today?

Sometimes just the simple point of saying, how are you? I got to tell you, we used to, uh, in sales, one of the most important things I learned to ask is once you build some rapport, once you qualify with some people ask, what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to accomplish? How can I help you do what you're trying to accomplish? It's not, would you like to accomplish? What are you trying to accomplish? How can I help you do what you're trying to accomplish? It's not, would you like to buy my shit? Hi, Bob. How's it going? I just friended you on LinkedIn or Facebook.

Would you like to buy my shit? No, it's about, it's about, hey man, who are you? How are you? What are you doing? I care about you. Part of the thing about building rapport is meaning that you take an interest in the other person. That's when sales really happens because no one likes to buy from someone who doesn't care about them. Unless, I guess, you have to.

Like, if you go to the store, you know, I don't know, whoever's making the charm and probably doesn't really care necessarily about you as a person. They're just selling you stuff to, you know, clean yourself. Um, but, uh, you know, and, and if they're a large enough corporation, they just care about investor shareholder value and, and sales. Um, but you know, I mean, they can't throw care to the wind. I mean, they certainly can't start putting broken glass into, in their thing. So I guess they care in a small sort of way and a broken glass and toilet paper. That doesn't sound fun at all, does it? Um, so how do we go cringe in the middle of the podcast? Chris, make sure they're awake.

That's the shock value. So anyway, it's like when, it's like when David Letterman and Carson used to keep the, uh, keep the theater like below normal temperature. So people would stay awake cause they're freezing to death. So anyway, moving on. You know, build relationships. It's not that hard to do. All you've got to do is spend sometimes just a few minutes just asking questions and getting to know people.

But asking questions is real powerful. And I used to teach all my salespeople, the most important question I wanted them to start off with was not trying to push the product of what they're trying to sell, but ask the question, what are you trying to accomplish? What are you trying to accomplish in your interest in our product? What are you trying to accomplish? What's important to you? Because not everyone who's buying your product sees it the same way.

We all buy products for different reasons. Sometimes we're buying a product for security because we want to feel more secure or it will help our life feel more secure. Sometimes we're buying something out of fear. Sometimes we're buying something out of pleasure. You know, if I buy a nice set of headphones, I'm clearly not buying out of fear. I might have some FOMO maybe because my friend's got a really nice set of headphones and I want to have the same exact. That might be fear.

But for the most part, I'm looking for the enjoyment part. So I'm looking like, oh, I want to hear great music and really enjoy stuff. But you may have someone that buys a set of headphones because they're not really concerned about the quality of the sound but because maybe the color. A lot of people buy Beats headphones that way because they like the personalization of the color. They like the representation of how it looks to their sort of persona that they put forth into the world. And so these are the different ways that we approach stuff. And so one of the things you do

in qualifying as a salesperson is you find out what their motivations are, what people are trying to do. And there's really no way to do that without asking questions and gaining rapport. You can tell them and try and roughshod over and over. Here's what you want, honey. I even see people that date that way. You want me? You know, and they just overwhelm them. You see that with a lot of narcissists. But to me, I'm more interested in getting knowing to people and also interested in the value that you're trying to seek in accomplishing getting a product like mine from my competitors or whatever. Here's how my product can help you make your life better. Because that's really all we're doing. Any great entrepreneur has basically come up with some sort of thing that maybe he came with a product or service because he wanted to resolve an issue he had,

and he couldn't find a comparable product that did that, and so he made one. And now he makes money off of it. That's the beauty of being an entrepreneur. If you can help people, if you can prove the quality of their lives, that's what you're doing as an entrepreneur, and you'll get paid in direct effect. And I think this came from Earl Nightingale or probably thinking you're rich. If you help people, they will pay you almost in direct effect in the amount of value that gives to their lives in the amount of value that they will pay you for, if that makes any sense. The more valuable it is, the more they'll pay you for it. You know, certainly people pay a lot to go to the hospital, but somehow keeping alive seems like it's a pretty

high value to most people and they are willing to pay a lot of money for that whole staying alive part and, you know, keeping everything working internally. Or if you have kids, you know, et cetera, et cetera, taking them to the hospital so they can, you want to keep your kids alive because you value them. That's important. But, you know, I mean, if I'm buying paperclips, paperclips don't provide a high amount of value in my life. And, uh, especially nowadays because everything's digital. Uh, but, uh, you know, so the, the, the appropriate amount of what those costs is in direct proportion to the value they can provide to you in your life. Basically it. So there you go. Um, and, uh, that's how things are priced and things. So what you've got to be able to do is qualify the client, qualify them, what they're doing, build relationships, um, seed serendipity, if you will, uh, and see what happens. So, uh, these are some of the ideas that I want to spouse to you about

how I approach things, uh, through all my years of business and everything else. I mean, I'm a person who I always joke because people are like, Hey, you have like 400,000 followers across all your social media accounts. Do you know this person? You know that person? I go, I go, look, here's where I'm at. Everyone knows me and I pretty much know no one. Some of my close friends, you can count on one to two hands of people that I trust beyond a shadow of a doubt. And and improving their trust to me and they're good friends. They have a lot of integrity. They have a lot of trust. improving their trust to me. And they're good friends.

They have a lot of integrity. They have a lot of trust. They have a lot of honesty and they're good people. And those are the diamonds that I keep out of all the cold that I sift. Uh, so therefore the, that is what makes up your life. And of course, hopefully those people contribute to me being a better person, which they do. They actually do make me a better person because usually they're better. I'm a horrible person. So that's why I need better people. My life is to go, Chris, stop being such a dupe or a dick or, you know, whatever you get

the message. So anyway, uh, that's the thing. So look at life from a big picture. Also take and qualify your clients, build some rapport, shake some hands, take five minutes to say hello to somebody, take a genuine integral interest in who they are and what they're about. And you may never know where that path may take you. Maybe you find the love of your life. Maybe you find really good people who can build your business or maybe contribute your business or future employees or future board of directors or future CEOs or people that can just consult with you, advise you on your journey or coach you. Maybe you find people that are your huge buyers of your product and they're going to make so much money for you. It's crazy. I mean, I've seen so much serendipity from my attitude towards these relationships over the years.

I can't even put a figure on the value, but it's probably in the millions. Um, so there you go. Yeah. You just never know. And all it takes is extending your hand, uh, whether it's in person or whether extending your hand, uh, your hand virtually across Messenger and stuff. I mean, really think about it from that. You wouldn't walk up to somebody face-to-face and be like all up in their face like, hey, you want to buy my stuff? Hey, you want to buy? You just walk up to people on the street.

Hey, you want to buy my stuff? Hey, you want to buy? You want to buy? You want to buy? You want to buy? You wouldn't do that in person. So why are you doing that virtually? You know, think of when you reach

out to people on Messenger, on LinkedIn or Facebook or Twitter or any of these social platforms in a community. Think of it as you're extending your hand, you're asking them to meet you halfway and you're taking interest in a person. This is you reaching out. This is on you. You're the one reaching out. They're the one going, who's this person? Why are they entering my life? And why do I need to be with them? Or why do I need to talk to them? And what the fuck do they want? And why are they selling me shit? No one wants to be on the other end of that. People want to feel appreciated. They want to feel liked. They want to have rapport. They want to know why they should be talking to you.

Just because you're talking to them doesn't, just because you're up banging on my door at Saturday night, Saturday morning going, Hey, do you want to learn more about whatever Jesus? Um, that doesn't mean that I want to listen to your pitch. Now, a lot of times some of these pitches are made for suckers. Like the Nigerian princes always misspell stuff. And when you read the, um, the delivery of their text, you can kind of tell they're speaking with some sort of South African accent or whatever. But they do that on purpose because it's a qualifier.

Because if you fall for that, you'll fall for most anything. And you don't notice those sort of things. So most likely they have a better chance of getting your money. It's actually a filter, if you will, for people like me that are going to call bullshit right away. So anyway, and that way they don't waste their time with people that are just jerking around. They waste their time with just pure amount of suckers that will get over that filter. Anyway, uh, that's my story I'm sticking to, and I hope you get that. Uh, look for qualifications, sales qualification in what you're doing when you're trying to pitch stuff, Build rapport, shake hands, get to know people, build the rapport. And if you haven't,

go get a good book on it. Zig Ziglar, of course, has a lot of good books on building rapport. Sometimes it's just about asking about stuff. And in the old days, I would walk into your office or I'd walk into the gatekeeper secretary's office and I started looking at what she was wearing or what she had on or what was on her desk or what was in the background of her desk or what she was doing. You know, maybe she was on the phone and you could tell she was, uh, you know, somebody was upsetting her or him on the phone and, you know, they get off and you're like, Oh, what are those people? Huh? And they're like, Oh yeah. And you know, just simple things like that to gain rapport that say, hey, I'm like you and you seem interesting.

Taking interest in people. We love it when someone takes interest in us because it makes us feel valued. And that's what our customers want. They want to feel like they're valued, like we genuinely care about them. And some of the best salesmen in the world that I've ever known that make a ton of money, they're incredible relationship builders. They make sure that when they touch people from a sales aspect of just reaching out to them, talking to them, shaking hands, sitting down with them, giving them a look straight in the eye where

they talk to them, where they're going, you are of value to me. And not necessarily in a thing where, well, if you don't buy my product, well then fuck you. They communicate that value and that person is always left with that experience, that impression of you. And that's all the more important. And what they do with that in the future can be the serendipity for what it becomes if you kind of been following along all this time. So that's what we need to communicate when we do.

And your approach should be hopefully to acquire the same sort of potential for serendipity that I am when I'm approaching you. So take a look at that. If you're getting people that friend request you, you know, obviously you want to evaluate what their interests are. I know being a woman online is kind of really awful nowadays. There's a lot of guys that are just definitely weird and sending awful pictures and stuff like that. So my apologies for those guys. There's a lot of ugliness in the world, sadly, and all the ugly people. But you've got to sift through the things.

So I would find out maybe what people's interests are in there. The last thing I'd do is just send them my Facebook page. I didn't even know Facebook pages were still a thing. A lot of them, when I go to them, just seem dead. You go to their like page and you're like, you have five people that have followed you or liked your page. Maybe this is the reason you should just quit sending out likes every time someone friend requests you.

So anyway, that's my thought on it. So if you're selling yourself personally, you're virtually personally, if you will, try and build rapport. Try and qualify your clients. See if they're even interested. I mean, certainly if you spend five minutes talking to me, you don't have to spend five minutes,

maybe just two lines and two minutes on LinkedIn. Hey, Chris, do you use SaaS services? No, I don't use SaaS services. I have no need for them. I'm just me. Oh, okay. Well, then you probably won't be interested in our SaaS services. Do you know anyone else who might be interested in our SaaS services?

And I'd be like, you know, you who might be interested in our SAS services? And I'd be like, you know, you're really cool because you can report with me and you qualified and you took an interest in me as a person. So I'm going to give you a referral where if you're just like, Hey, you want to get on the phone with me for my SAS services right now and talk about something you don't need that I haven't qualified for you. And I've taken the zero interest in you. So fuck you. But give me your money. And I'm like, no, I have no interest in you. And I defriend you or block you or whatever the case may be. I pulled the contact off of LinkedIn. That's what's going to happen to you. People are just going to tune you out and cut you off when you try to be an overbearing, overloading asshole that way. And you don't take any interest

in them whatsoever. That's how people are going to most times react to you you might get a sale every now and then off that sort of thing suppose if you send five million messages you might get that to work it's often said that if you put what is it 100 monkeys or a thousand monkeys in a typewriter room with typewriters and somewhere in 10 000 years they probably will accidentally type the Bible. There's some analogy I heard down there once, and it's probably true. So, you know, you can run the numbers game, but if you really want to get a higher return on a higher ROI, you want to get a high conversion of sales, put in the extra time to do sales qualification, build rapport with your potential salespeople. And don't look at everything as a sale. Don't look at everything as a relationship. Don't look at everything as a date.

You never know where serendipity can come from. There's women that I've actually asked out or I've dated, and it didn't seem to go anywhere either from my part or theirs in interest. But later on, they gave me some business referrals. I've actually had that happen. I've gotten money in business from dates that didn't work out because I was just cool. And I didn't work from this paradigm of scarcity where I'm like, oh, my God, there's only one woman left in the world. I must convert her to love me.

If you're doing that as a guy, knock that shit off. Same thing for everyone else. But it seems like guys do it a lot. They operate from scarcity. And when they get rejected, they just get really fucking ugly and toxic. And that's just so horrible. You just never know what you can do. And so for me, put forth that hand, build some rapport, do some qualification.

Don't just treat people like they're a business experience, especially on platforms like Twitter or Facebook. Facebook is much more personal. I kind of expect some of that on a business platform like LinkedIn. But even then, you're going to save yourself a lot of time if you do just a little bit of qualification first and take it from there. Anyway, guys, thanks for tuning in. We certainly appreciate you guys.

Watch for more of these. I'm going to have more of these sort of my take on things conversations conversations so i hope you'll subscribe i hope you'll refer the show to your friends neighbors relatives you go to these cvpn.com see there are eight different podcasts over there and subscribe to them give them a listen they're pretty great and appreciate you being here on the show with me once again thanks for coming by we'll see you next time bye be well