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In this Throwback Thursday edition of the Negotiations Ninja podcast, we jump back to episode #135: Conflict Resolution in Negotiation. In this episode, we talk about Kwame Christian’s newest book: Nobody Will Play With Me. Kwame dissects a psychological aspect of negotiation that is often overlooked, shares how to overcome fear to find confidence, and emphasizes how failure changes the game. If you missed it before, don’t miss it now!

Conflict Resolution in Negotiation with Kwame Christian, Ep #135

 

I Want to Be in Sales When I Grow Up! Ep #187

I Want to Be in Sales When I Grow Up! Is the title of the book John Barrows wrote to teach kids that sales is a legitimate profession—and one to be proud of. I read my boys this book, and they finally understand what I do. It forged a new connection that we’ve never had before. Not only does it serve an amazing educational purpose—but John’s book gives back. 100% of the profits go to the World Wildlife Fund to help them save animals. What other purpose does John hope this book serves? Will he be writing more? What’s the next step in his journey? Listen to this episode of Negotiations Ninja to learn more!

Outline of This Episode

  • [0:34] I Want to Be in Sales When I Grow Up!
  • [2:28] Just who is John Barrows?
  • [5:03] Leverage the technology that’s available to you
  • [9:25] Technology isn’t replacing salespeople—yet
  • [13:14] Why John wrote a children’s book
  • [21:53] There’s a huge difference between sales and manipulation
  • [28:17] Don’t sell what you don’t believe in
  • [35:11] What’s next? Is John writing more?
  • [37:08] The Netflix of sales training
  • [42:35] It always goes back to the “why”

Why John wrote a children’s book

John admits that he doesn’t like reading. It’s just not how he learns. He’s one of those people that fall asleep a few pages in. He learns by doing. He thought he would be writing a book just to write a book and that it wouldn’t be genuine. So how did he end up writing a book?

When his daughter was 6, she started selling girl scout cookies. She knew he had a large social media following and asked him to share her link to buy girl scout cookies. He said, “No!” He told her that he earned that audience. Secondly, why would they buy from her over any other relative selling girl scout cookies?

So she asked him what she needed to do. So he helped her put together a pitch and wrote a blog post about it. The next year, she was selling cookies door-to-door, and they practiced objection handling—and he wrote another blog post. He felt like it was a cool journey. He was seeing it from a different perspective.

When you tell your kid you’re in sales, they don’t understand it. It’s not a concept that is as easy to understand as a doctor or a lawyer. So he decided to write a book for his daughter to introduce the concept of sales. Not only that, but he wanted to help her feel proud of what he did for a living.

Sales IS a profession to be proud of

It’s absurd that sales has become the default when you aren’t successful anywhere else. When you push someone in a position with very little training and force them to hit a quota, you’re telling them they’ll get fired if they don’t hit it. A good person will work the gray line to provide for their families. It gives the world a negative perception of them—and it isn’t even their fault.

If you teach kids that sales is a profession to study and be proud of from the beginning—they might not even have to go to college. John believes a college education is a great social education and a joke as a proper education (unless you know what you want to be at 18, but very few people do).

If you teach your children about sales, you give them the opportunity to start a business and get into sales to generate revenue to go back to school and pay their own way. Or you can remain in sales your entire life because you’re good at it and can provide for your family.

You’re providing a solution that helps someone—not pawning something off. The vast majority of salespeople are looking to help people and provide solutions to meet needs. He’s trying to shape the perception of what a salesperson is. People see things like Wolf of Wall Street and it ruins their perception. But people who are educated can say, “Well I know better.”

How does John define the difference between influence and manipulation? John shares what you should do if you don’t love what you sell, so keep listening.

What’s next? Is John writing more?

They aren’t pushing the book hard, but once John can work more on the business and has more passive income coming in, he’ll start doing more. Why not write “I want to be in procurement when I grow up?” People know nothing about these things as children. It’s such a great opportunity to use the same framework to educate about the professions that aren’t easily understood by kids. It gives them other options to consider than the typical route of a formal four-year education. He hopes to continue on this journey.

He’s also working on what could be the Netflix of sales training. What is it? How will it help sales professionals? Listen to the whole episode to find out!

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with John Barrows

Connect With Mark

Subscribe to Negotiations Ninja

The Magic that is Human Connection with Tim David, Ep #185

Tim David started his career as a magician. He was traveling and doing up to 350 shows a year. But being a traveling magician and parenting a child wasn’t a great mix. So he sought a career change that could bring about some life balance. But he’d never had a real job—so how could he help people in their real jobs?

He realized that the lessons that he’d learned from a life on stage could be transformed into an occupation. His lesson is simple: it’s all about human connection. It’s not about the magic tricks or the skills—it’s about connecting with people. Learn all about this magical skill in this episode of Negotiations Ninja.

Connection: truly understanding someone else’s perception

Tim’s biggest takeaway from magic was one thing: the ability to see another person’s perspective. You practice magic in front of a mirror so you can see what other people see. Tim requires anyone he’s coaching to record themselves so they can see what the audience sees. Magicians obsess over this. 90% of all tricks he learned, people said “watch your angles.” You have to consider what every person in that auditorium is looking at. It’s a game-changer.

His book “Magic Words” came from seeking to understand what is happening in the brain of the listener. How can you understand that more and intentionally push the buttons? When you are communicating—whether you like it or not—you are manipulating or persuading. So why not do it more intentionally and understand what’s happening in the brains of the people around you?

So many people believe that you can learn by reading something in a book and that’s just not true. You have to practice it. Joan Rivers said, “You need to have a place where you can go and be bad for a while.” In other words, you don’t become great by reading books and studying. This is an interpersonal skill. Skills like that aren’t downloaded into the brain.

To get great you have to get practice in. Create a connection and see where it goes. Then you learn where you can improve. The difficulty of influence is the resistance to try. It feels scary and awkward. Those moments only break down when you have repetition. Tim’s favorite thing to tell magicians is “Get good, get gigs, get great.”

What is Tim’s T.R.U.E. hierarchy? Listen to hear him explain how it influences the sales process!

How to understand someone else’s perception

Julian Treasure—who Tim interviewed for one of his books—gave one of the top 10 most viewed Ted Talks of all time: How to Speak So People Will Want to Listen. His phrase that Tim loves is “You always speak into a listening.” In a sales context, you should do 80–85% listening and 15–20% talking. When you talk, it should include three levels of asking questions:

  • What got you excited about our offer enough to reach out to us?
  • What would that do for you?
  • What would the benefit of the feature be for you? If you had that benefit, what would it mean for you? What would it do for you personally? What would that allow you to stop doing? What would people think?

That third line of questions is when you’re digging deep into the emotional benefits that truly drive buying behavior. You ask, you listen, and then you ask a level deeper. Great salespeople are great askers of questions. If you get to that third level, that’s where you find the goal.

Why salespeople don’t reach an emotional level with prospects

Most salespeople don’t get to the emotional level. When you can connect the emotion to what you’re selling, that’s when conversion rates go up. Are salespeople just lazy? Why do they seem to glaze over the most important part of the process?

Tim’s first reaction is that it can’t be laziness. After all, if you know the right way to do it will result in the outcome you want, you’d do it. But that’s the logical part of Tim’s brain. The truth? He has no idea why salespeople don’t reach that emotional level with prospects.

He notes that the brain is divided into two areas. One small area is your level of consciousness and what you’re aware of. The second larger part of your brain is what happens on an unconscious level. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes that your brain doesn’t tell you about. You can’t access the part of your brain that makes decisions and creates behaviors.

When Tim did a show, he would ask an audience member to think of a number. They would always think of the number 7. How? With influence strategy. He got them to say the number 7 almost 90% of the time. He’d always ask them why they thought of 7 and they’d come up with some BS reason like, “Oh, 7 is my lucky number.” Tim emphasizes that “We make all of our decisions with emotion, but then we justify them with logic.”

The goal must be connection—not persuasion

Tim believes that if you care about the people that you’re serving, you’ll find the best option for them. “If your goal is persuasion, then your outcome will be manipulation. However, if your goal is connection, if your goal is service, then influence follows.” There has to be a goal of making a connection first, then everything follows. Influence—at its core—is communication between two or more people.

Many salespeople don’t engage on that level because it isn’t cut and dry, black and white, or logical. Tim shares that humans are starved for true connection. But when you input genuine connection, magical things happen. Focus on serving first and selling second. Learn more about the science of influence and human connection in this episode of Negotiations Ninja.

Resources & People Mentioned

Connect with Tim David

Tim David’s Books

Connect With Mark

Subscribe to Negotiations Ninja

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