We've got Dave Salter and his rockstar sales trainer, Dennis Collins, joining us on Connect and Convert. They're going to spill the tea on the seven habits of highly ineffective salespeople - yes, you heard that right, they're going to talk about the worst practices out there. Dave and Dennis share some personal stories and anecdotes that will have you in stitches, including one about a car salesman who walked away from a customer who didn't have cash in hand.

But it's not all fun and games, folks. Dave and Dennis also deliver some seriously valuable insights on why empathy, listening, and asking the right questions are key to connecting with customers and making that sale. They also touch on the importance of identifying great prospects and following a sales process. And while they may make it sound easy, they know firsthand that sales is tough but incredibly rewarding. So if you're ready to up your sales game or need to help someone else do so, check out this episode of Connect and Convert.

​ Dave Salter: Hey, I'm Dave Saulter and

where we share some insider secrets for small business sales success.

I'm joined as always by our.

Resident rockstar sales trainer, Dennis Collins, who's got almost

four decades, um, of doing this.

Our specialty is small business owners.

Dennis, say hello.

Hello, Dave.

How are you?

Good to see you this morning.

Hey, we're gonna talk we, we stole this from Steven

Covey, but today we're gonna talk a little bit about the seven habits

of highly ineffective Salespeople.

Yeah.

And, and I wanted, it's not negative.

It, it sounds negative, but, but here's the thing.

There's so many, there's, there's so much, uh, there's books, there's podcasts,

there's, um, interview, all kinds of stuff about what a good salesperson should do.

And I'm gonna tee you up with a story that's gonna, that's gonna illuminate

how we're gonna examine this today.

So I get out now.

Now this was, this is like centuries ago.

I just got outta college.

I'm gonna buy my first new vehicle.

So a buddy of mine was a used car salesman.

He says, I'm gonna go, how about I go along with you and I'll help

you cut through all the jargon and BS and we'll get a good deal.

I said, Hey, that sounds great.

So we finally, we rolled into places.

We roll into this place where I was pretty sure this was the vehicle I wanted to get.

Guy jumps up from the sales desk, gets in, you know, invades my space and he asks

me how I'm doing, what I'm looking for.

And then he says to me, "do you have money to do a deal today?

Like right now?"

Yeah.

And I said, I said, I don't, I was, I was honest with the guy.

I said, listen, I'm looking, I've been to, you know, x, y, z place.

I said, I'm pretty sure this is what I wanna buy, but you know, I'm just looking.

I wanna do a test drive.

He walked away from me and went to a, to a another prospect that

had walked into the sales room.

And I looked at my buddy and I said, what the F is up with that?

And he said, You won't believe this salty, but he's the most successful salesperson

in this dealership and that's why his desk is in the middle of the sales room floor.

And I said, well, I think that's bullshit.

I said he, he just violated, you know, every like, common sensical thing you

would expect out of a salesperson, right?

So sometimes Dennis looking instead of looking at the best stuff, sometimes

looking at opposite, at the, at the worst practices helps inform how we do our job.

Um, how about you jump in on.

On

that.

Yeah.

Somebody told me that once, Dave, um, you know, sometimes you can learn more

from what not to do than from what to do.

So therefore sparked the topic for, for today.

We have all just like your story.

It's funny, I just bought a car and I know the guy, I know the dealer.

I mean, I, and this guy knows me and I push back on a couple things, right?

I said, I don't need this and I don't need that, and I don't need this.

And all of a sudden the switch turned on and he just started

vomiting features and benefits.

Well this but this and that.

I said, dude, do you know who you're talking to here?

He said, oh, I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

I had actually trained him at one time.

I said, boy, my training Phil fell.

Are you untrained?

But uh,

By the way, today is not about any specific person or any specific company.

We've all run into this.

Dave has, I have you have.

Everybody listening has run into this.

Uh, here's my issue.

The sales profession, and I'll call it a profession, already has

somewhat of a sketchy reputation.

Okay.

And that is for a number of reasons that we'll talk about in another podcast.

There are some good reasons for that.

Yep.

So a bad salesperson simply feeds that fire, flames it up,

and it becomes a conflagration.

Okay?

So my goal, one of my goals in light is to stop that.

We don't have to be bad salespeople, we don't have to be ineffective.

There are ways to be very effective.

So that's what I'd like to talk about today.

Stop using big words like conflagration.

I'm, I, I, I don't even, I I wouldn't even know where to look that up in Websters.

Okay.

It's a big fire, a big, huge fire.

Bigger, bigger than a dumpster fire.

Yeah, it's a dumpster fire.

That's a good way to say it.

So let's get down to business.

You, you've got, uh, you, you've sort of got, uh, uh, seven, uh, tidbits of, uh,

what bad salespeople do that can sort of inform, um, what we should be doing.

I do.

The first on my hit parade, this awful ineffective hit

parade is, lack of empathy.

Okay, what is empathy?

Empathy's not sympathy.

Empathy is feeling, understanding the way another person feels.

Okay?

That is step one to making a connection.

And if you intend to make a connection, which by the way, making a connection is

mandatory today in person to person sales.

You have to show some empathy.

Empathy makes connection possible.

That's, in my opinion, number one and most important.

Doesn't that make you soft though?

I mean, you, you gotta be, you know, you gotta have that

edge to make the sale, right?

That's the old school.

That's right.

You have, it's a battle.

You know, you read the books they used to teach me to read books

about war energizing in war.

To learn how to sell.

Yeah.

It's not a battle today, David.

The customer wants to know that you're on their side, that you have their back.

Empathy.

What's your next point?

There was a song in the sixties.

You talk where he meet that, I mean, I forget who sung it.

It was a one hit wonder.

Don't talk back.

Yeah.

You remember that song?

Uh, guess what?

Win Sales David?

Listening.

Listening.

Win.

Sales not talking.

I was taught to present.

I was taught to talk.

Okay.

Listening.

Win sales.

Talking too much kill sales.

The 70- 30 guideline, the salesperson should be only talking 30% of the time

and most of those should be questions.

The customer should speak 70% of the time.

I just reviewed a tape from a client from one of their sales calls in a state, by

the way, where it's legal to record calls, and guess who did most of the talking?

The salesperson.

70% or more to the salesperson, and 30% to the customer.

That's called a no sale.

That's ab.

You're not getting that sale.

Sorry.

Negative.

Talk about, uh, your next point is, is something that, uh, you know, we,

we talk a lot about listening, um, but talk about, uh, asking the right

questions or the wrong questions.

Well, we talk a lot about listening, but you know,

what are you going to listen to if you don't ask the right questions?

So they kind of work together except obviously asking comes first.

Here's the deal if sales were a language, it would be a language of questions.

Your toolbox needs to be crammed full of questions for every occasion.

There's a different question for every moment in the sales call, and

if you don't know that, you're going to be an ineffective salesperson.

So asking too few, number one, and asking the wrong questions.

There's a right question and a wrong question to ask.

Reach in your toolbox, employ the right question, listen, and

you'll probably win the sale.

And just to expound on that, I, as a customer, I, you also feel

that if they ask the right questions and engage in, uh, active listening

You feel like you're important to that person and it and so you kind of

eliminate or you break down that wall a little bit between the resistance from

the customer and, and the salesperson.

People want to feel important, dave, you just hit

on something and you don't feel important, if somebody is lecturing

to you or doing a monologue mm-hmm.

You feel important when somebody asks your opinion.

How do you feel about that?

How would you like this process to go?

That's when you start to be only important, and we're gonna do

another podcast one day on why so many salespeople knowing that

asking is the key and listening is the key why they feel to do that.

There are some interesting reasons that we'll get into in another version.

I think your next point is, incredibly valuable because we all see

this where the salesperson walks in with an array of brochures and information

and an outline, and you know, they spread it out in your dining room table and

you're exhausted before they even start.

Yeah.

Well, that's the product push.

That's how I was trained.

You gotta be a great presenter.

Mm-hmm.

I'm not gonna say that you don't have to have presentation skills today,

but that is far below asking the right questions and listening to the answers.

Okay?

Mm-hmm.

What the old style selling was is the minute a customer asks a question or makes

an objection, you get a torrent features and benefits and facts and figures

and data, most of which is irrelevant.

Yeah.

An ineffective salesperson is a product pusher.

Yeah.

So in a previous lifetime I had my real estate license the first task

that my lead realtor gave me was to call all the expired listings of other.

Oh o o of other realtors and see if they would sign up with us.

Yeah.

And I had a tremendous, um, avoidance of rejection.

So talk about your next bullet point.

I'm sorry you had to go through that.

Uh, rejection hurts.

Point blank period.

End of sentence.

No one is looking to be rejected, but here is the deal.

An objection in sales is not personal.

It's not really a rejection.

It's basically a question, a request for more information.

So what we train effective salespeople to do is to not look at it as a

personal rejection of them as a person or, um, their personality.

It's just a request for information.

So it's not personal, it stings.

We teach people how to be rejection proof.

An ineffective salesperson doesn't know how to do that.

And I think this leads into your next point, which is that

to me, I think inherently when I was doing those cold calls for expired

listings, it, I, I felt like we were chasing bad, bad prospects.

Talk about that a little bit.

Well, again, a moral sin of ineffective salespeople and

sometimes it's their ineffective manager who, like you referenced a,

uh, a manager who put you on that task.

Uh, you wanna talk about somebody getting totally upset and pissed off at sales.

Let them handle anybody and consider them a prospect.

No, no, no, no, no.

Qualify your prospects.

That's the new way.

Not everybody is a fit for what we do.

Let's go and find the right fit for what we do.

Everybody is not a prospect.

Ineffective salespeople don't get that.

I'm, I'm sensing that there may be an episode

about identifying great prospects.

I feel that one's coming.

Yes.

Yeah.

And, and finally, you, um, this is your, your mantra and, and I, I think because

of your experience and your success, it's a, it's an accurate one, but talk,

talk about not following a sales process.

It would be like a pilot, Dave, you know, getting in a, uh, a jet

liner you're gonna take from, uh, Orlando to Boston and they had no game plan.

Okay.

How are we gonna get there?

I don't know.

We're just gonna get up and head north and we'll, we'll find a way to get there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Would you get on that plane?

Negative.

No.

Would you, would you trust a salesperson who doesn't have a process or a plan?

I wouldn't.

Okay.

No.

Ineffective salespeople think they're just spontaneous and they're gonna

come up with the answer sitting there on the spur of the moment.

It's just gonna happen.

Okay.

It's just gonna happen.

Let it happen.

I don't need a process.

They're ineffective.

Mm-hmm.

So if I sum this up in, in two points, I would say, The

two issues that, that underlying issues of what you're talking about.

One is the salesperson has a bad attitude.

Yeah.

And two, that they don't have the proper training and to compound

the lack of training is they don't practice what little training or

knowledge they may have gained.

Would that be accurate?

Yeah.

Those are the two reasons that ineffective salespeople will continue

to be ineffective and the one I can do something about is number two.

Yeah.

If, if you haven't been trained properly, and if you haven't practiced

properly, I can help you with that.

And sales is a tough, but it's rewarding.

But you have to have an attitude that you wanna learn and grow.

Okay?

Mm-hmm.

From the outside looking in, it looks easy to be in sales,

let me assure you, it's not.

No, I don't, I, I think it'd be foolish to think that I, I ha

having, uh, minimal personal experience, uh, I, I have enough personal experience

to know that that is not the case.

Right.

Um, Dennis, I think we covered everything today.

Is there anything I forgot to ask?

Well, we, at least, at least we covered the seven.

Uh, there's a lot more, but I tried to get it down to seven, but I hope

that's useful for our listeners.

If, if you are that person.

Please get some training and do some practice.

If you employ that person, please help them.

Please help them.

Yeah.

And I think, uh, the, the other key today was looking, you know, we so

often, fall, romantically into , reading all the things on what we should be

doing when sometimes , it's as simple as looking at what's not working and,

and then do the opposite of that.

Yeah.

Well, again, that's the purpose of today.

I hope that sparked some thoughts.

Maybe you come up looking really good.

That would be good, but if not, Get help.

That sounds good, Dennis.

Thanks for your wisdom and insight today, folks, that is a wrap on another

episode of Connect and Convert, the podcast that lets you behind the

curtains with some insider strategies for small business sales success.

This is Dave Salter and Dennis Collins.

Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next time you next time.