The Game with Alex Hormozi - Get People To Agree By Saying NO | Ep 294

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

A cool trick to change your approach to sales questions to increase sales! Today, Alex (@AlexHormozi) talks about how you can effectively sell anything by structuring the way you ask questions to your clients. He also mentions the power of altering the question in such a way that your clients are saying “yes” by answering “no”. Sounds good? Let’s get into it…Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.Timestamps:(0:54) - Get enough agreements, they'll want to work with you.(2:44) - Alex knows sales teachers who are natural salesmen.(3:57) - Phrase questions properly, get people to say yes by saying no.(5:42) - Use psychology to trigger responses, understand how people respond.Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition

And so the reason and the psychology behind this is that people feel safer saying no. Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more per customer, and how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. I hope you enjoy and subscribe. What's going on, everyone? Alex Formosa here, founder of Jim Wanch, Allen, Prestige Labs, and owner of a couple other companies. And today, I'm going to talk to you about how to sell some stuff. All right.

So there's three types of questions. I think I've talked to in other videos about how to structure your sales conversations. But I haven't talked as much about the nature of the questions and the types of responses that you're getting. And so in a sales process, you have some questions that are going to be mining questions that's trying to extract information from the prospect. And the remainder of the questions are questions to get agreement. So you're going to put a proposition out there and ask for agreement. And then if you get enough agreements, it's going to be natural that they're going to want to move forward working with.

you now the way that you structure these questions all right I'd say that you have yes-based questions you have neutral questions and then you have negatively inclined questions all right first time I heard about this from Chris Voss he's the guy who does the he wrote the book never split the difference really interesting stuff and so a yes based question would be like sound great yes that sounds great right a neutral type of question would be like fair enough does that sound fair does that sound reasonable to you right they'd be like well that sounds reasonable now it's still technically a yes based

question but the question that we're asking has a neutral tone to it all right because we're not saying hey is this the most amazing thing you've ever heard of like do you think this is the most amazing program the amazing product like blah blah blah that's asking a lot of someone right for them to agree to that so that would be a harder yes to get it's easier to get something like a a reciprocal yes which i would say someone says you know that's a lot and we say no worries what if we did this fair enough they say well he made a concession that sounds fair or if we did this does that sound reasonable that's not like a fair expectation yes it does great and then you can go to close the sale and if you've heard any of my past sale stuff one of my favorite closes which i got from

jordan belfort um is fair enough right i just love this close so much because it's like fair enough right you make a concession fair enough and so many times we were like well they made a concession and i'm a reciprocal human being it's very hard for me to deny this request and so yes i do believe it's fair and then you say boom then let's move forward right but this is one that I learned very recently that I really like and I when I look back through my actual conversations I do this and that's why I think it's so interesting because I'm gonna be I'm gonna level with you really quickly all the people that I know who teach sales are natural born salesman which is interesting right they're

natural born salesman I don't know a lot of people who who teach sales who weren't naturally very good at it quickly right and so there are some things that people naturally do because they've had a lot of experience doing it and usually you get a lot of experience doing it because when you start doing it you get enough success that you can you can steamroll right and grow and get a lot of volume and then once you do lots of volume then you come a master at it but it's some sort of inclination or proclivity towards the skill all right that being said it doesn't mean that anyone else can't become a great salesman it just

means you might have to have more reps to get there now That being said, no base statements. This is actually where you go in opposition, right? And so the reason and the psychology behind this, per my understanding, and it makes complete sense to me at least, is that people feel safer saying no. People feel like they retain their autonomy. They feel like they're at ease. It's harder, especially if you think about decision fatigue.

At the end of the day, people don't want to be responsible or anything. They don't feel vulnerable to saying yes and agreeing to something, right? Instead, they prefer to say no and stay safe, right? But if you phrased your questions properly, you can get people to say yes by saying no, which is one of the most powerful sales taxes I shared in a different video where Richard Schwartz taught me how to get someone to say yes by saying, no, hey, you don't want anything else to you? No, I don't want anything else. And by doing that, they got 95% of people to take an upsell. All right. Now, no base question. This is something like, would you be opposed to

moving forward today? Would it be completely unreasonable for us to get started at the end of this conversation. Would it be a completely, would it be completely out of left field for me to say that we should start, you know, start working together today? So it's all of these would you be opposed to, would you be against? Would it be unreasonable, right? All of those things are no based kind of antecedents or, I'm sorry, precedents that that lead into a no base question. And so think about this. If I said, and I'm going to give you the same same kind of scenario here, if I'm trying to get my wife to go where I want to go to dinner, right? Because I want to go to Cheesecake Factory, the finest establishment in the land.

All right, count it. Get the Cajun Chicken Little so you can get them half grilled and half, half fried and get the sauces from the Tileitis wraps. Anyways, if I say, hey, babe, you want to go to Cheesecake Factory? She might be like, well, no, I don't want to go to Cheesecake Factory, right? Or like, I'm not really sure. Right? Now, if I switched that and I said, babe, would you be against going to Cheesecake Factory?

you're like, well, I'm not against going to ChCA Factory. I'm like, great, let's go. Mosy Nation, real quick, if you are a business owner that has a big old business and wants to get to a much bigger business, going to $50, $100 million plus, we would love to talk to you. And if you like that, we'd like to hear more about it, go to acquisition.com, you can apply anywhere on the page and talk to one of our team and see if we can help you get there.

And so that's the beauty of a no-based question. See how different it's phrased? Right. And if I say, hey, you excited to move forward today? That's a yes, right? It's harder to get someone to say, yes, I'm excited to move forward today. Would you be opposed to moving forward at the end of the conversation? No, I'm not opposed to moving forward.

Great. And we get the sale. And so this is really interesting because what I find, because there's lots of literature on, you know, getting people to say lots of yeses and trial closeness and things like that throughout the sales process. But in my mind, these are all still ways of getting agreement, which is the goal. So it's simply using psychology in terms of, of how people like to respond to things, how they feel in the moment of, you know, saying

yes makes them feel vulnerable, saying no makes them feel safe, and leveraging that. Now that being said, it doesn't mean every single question you have to ask. It has to be a no-based question. But I think if you can rephrase a couple of the key milestone questions that you have in your sales conversations, or if you feel like you're kind of closer to the edge with someone, leaning towards a no-based question, I think is something that natural salesmen do well automatically. Like, is it unreasonable for us to move forward today? Right. Would you be opposed to moving forward today? Would you be opposed to knocking out the paperwork? You'd be opposed to, are you against XYZ, right? Well, no, I'm not against it. All right,

let's rock and roll. All of these are still ways to get questions. And so I think that in some of my sales scripts right now, we're going to be shifting from fair enough clothes, which is so wired in my brain from doing it so many times, to some no-based phrasing because it's easier to get agreement with prospects, especially even if they're kind of fatigued at the end of the day, which is when people are less likely to want to say yes to things. Counter-example, there could be decision fatigue and they just want to say yes to get done with it, right? Depends on the size of the purchase. But anyways, I hope this is valuable for you in terms of phrasing behind the questions.

Obviously, this is not for mining-based questions where you're trying to extract information from someone. And to better understand, this is really where you're trying to get agreements towards milestones to work together. All right. So I hope this made sense. Keep being awesome. love and I'll kiss you guys soon. Bye.