How to Sell Without Selling Out (Part 1) w/ Andy Paul

Outbound Sales Lift

Click here for full episode show notes, transcription, highlights, and more!

#74: Listen as Andy Paul, host of the “Sales Enablement Podcast” and author of the upcoming book, “Sell Without Selling Out,” discusses selling vs. selling out. He covers what makes a good seller, why buyers often resist certain approaches, and why a humanistic sales approach is best.

Don’t feel like listening? Read the Episode Cliff Notes instead below:

Buyer Resistance (0:22)

We need to get a lot better at selling to humans, and part of the problem is that for so many sellers where they’re socialized, trained, and coached to behave in ways that buyers instinctively resist.

They use pushy, sleazy, and intellectually lazy behaviors Andy lumps into as “salesy” behaviors. So why are we still doing those? They don’t work, and the buyers instinctively resist them.

Research shows a majority of the purchase decision, the criteria in the mind of the buyer purchase decision, are based on how they experience you as a seller. Not you as a company and the company you represent, but you as a seller, as an individual.

Connection, curiosity, understanding, and generosity are your ticket to the level of success you want to achieve in the world.

We’re all wired to want to connect with those innate human behaviors. Part of our empathy understands how other people feel and how we can help them.

Automation in Buyer Experience (5:38)

Push back against a process because the established process doesn’t align with who you are. It doesn’t align with your values or how I see the world.

As we’ve become more automated, many people take the easy way and lose sight that they succeed only to the degree to which they help develop their sellers.

If you want a long career in sales, you must learn how to create a memorable buying experience and help buyers achieve the most important things.

A Seller’s Job (10:45)

For many investors, their goals don’t align with those of the management.

If you ask most sellers, what’s your job? The most common answer is that their job is to go out and persuade somebody to buy their product or service.

The job is not to persuade them to buy what you have; it’s to understand the most important thing to them and then help them get that.

If you go in with the idea of needing to connect with a person and earn credibility and trust, you can use your curiosity to ask great questions and surface what’s most important to them.

Ask great follow-up questions to make sure that you understand what’s most important to them. Then, give value to help them achieve the desired outcome.

In sales, we’re not trying to persuade someone to do one thing or another.

We’re trying to connect, pique curiosity, understand their situation, and if there’s an opportunity to help, we help. Otherwise, we move on.

Nailing Down the Selling Process (16:17)

There’s an issue with how we train sellers. Often we give sellers a list of questions that you ask or through listening to your peers and the recordings.

We’re good at gathering information, but we’re not good at really understanding what’s most important to the buyer.

A competitor who understands that they sell and create this experience with a buyer, continually discovering, understanding, and exploring further will always beat you.

Most sellers miss the killer question that comes after: what are we missing?

We think we understand everything. We’re all in agreement. We’ve got it. Okay, but what are we missing?

You make yourself attractive to another person by being interested in them.

Andy’s Bio:

Andy’s hit “Accelerate Your Sales” podcast was acquired by ringDNA in 2020. Since re-named “Sales Enablement with Andy Paul”, the show continues to inspire thousands of sales professionals each week. Andy has also written two award-winning sales books, “Zero-Time Selling” and “Amp Up Your Sales”.

He is ranked #8 on LinkedIn’s list of Top 50 Global Sales Experts. And he has consulted with some of the biggest businesses in the world including Square, Philips, Grubhub and more, making him one of the leading voices in the sales industry today.

Important Links:

AndyPaul.com

Andy’s LinkedIn Profile