We've all had that feeling. A prospect call is due but they unexpectedly haven't answered your last few calls. And now it's taking everything you have to not push them to next week.

What do you do to keep your head in the game? To flip your mindset and find the right response, based on reality, rather than following your inference and perceptions.

In the episode Luigi is joined by Catherine Brown, author of How Good Humans Sell. With over 20 years experience in sales, Catherine has earned incredible insights into what to do when things don't go to plan. It's all about looking right at the person you're selling to.

Connect with Catherine on LinkedIn or at extraboldsales.com. Her book can be found on Amazon.

Connect with Luigi https://www.linkedin.com/in/luigiprestinenzi/

Find RingDNA here https://www.ringdna.com/

What do you do when things don't go to plan in sales? There's one thing you can guarantee. That's going to happen to you when working in the world of selling. And that is things don't go to plan. But what do you do when they don't go to plan? It's the relentless focus that high-performers have on mindset that allows them to break through the challenging barriers that exist when selling, and even when things are going to plan it's often, because one is really focused on building the right mindset. Building the mindset of resilience, building the mindset of abundance and not focusing on the scarcity side of selling. And that's what this week's episode is all about. And we have the author of How Good Humans Sell Catherine Brown who is going to talk about some of the things that she's done in her career and how she helps sellers build that mindset of resilience, build that mindset of growth to break down any barrier in any environment, in any economic environment to be the best sales professional you can be.

Revenue operations is much more than words in a job title. It's a movement that is transforming sales, marketing, and customer success teams into high-performing revenue drivers. RingDNA is a recognized Gartner cool vendor that makes rev ops possible by driving improved operational efficiency and revenue capture from sales, marketing, and customer success. Trusted by the top companies across the globe RingDNA offers a complete sales engagement, conversational intelligence and revenue intelligence platform for Salesforce customers. Learn how we can transform your results@ringdna.com. That's ring dna.com.

This is going to be a great episode. Catherine comes not just with a level of expertise from selling, but she also comes to that level of science. And she brings the science component to what creates, you know, what sellers can do to create a really resilient mindset. So this is a great episode for any sales professional, trying to break down the barriers to be the best they can be.

So welcome to the show, Catherine.

So. I came, I graduated university and my first couple of jobs out of college, where as internal recruiter positions, I realized pretty quickly that that was a form of selling because I was looking to make a match and see if this person that we wanted to hire was a fit.

And then I was the first recruiter inside one of those consulting firms to be promoted into an account manager position. Where I then receive more formal training and started to realize the whole sales process and which parts I liked the best and which parts I didn't. And that's kind of how it unfolded.

Yeah, fantastic and tell me what inspired you to write a book on How Good Humans Sell?

Yeah, that's the big part. And it sounds so crazy, but people, whether they pay me $15 for the paperback, you know, $15 US dollars for the paperback book, or they spend thousands of dollars for me to come into a corporation. If everyone would persist a little bit more and stop making up stories in their head, that would be a victory.

I'm married to a research psychologist. And so we use words like data in our house all the time. And that is actually the only real data that we have. What exists up here in our brain is imaginary and stories and, and perception and inference. And it's not always wrong, but it's often wrong. Okay. So then once I have this baseline of, well, what was the, what was the last thing that happened? Let's say, let me see. It's not even just the example with the proposal, although that happens a lot. Maybe we met through something. We met through a virtual networking, or we had an interaction on LinkedIn and you said, contact me. So I follow up. I don't hear from you. I try again. I don't know if I try again.

This has happened to all of us many times. Even in that example, what was the real data you had? Well, it was that they said, contact me, let's get together. So one of the things I have my clients do regularly is when I sense that they're starting to spin out with a story or they start to recognize hopefully themselves.

Part of what we're trying to do is increase our own recognition and notice our own self-talk. So when that happens, what we could do is actually list, take that same piece of paper and list all of the things that it actually could be that are not bad, they just are. So they, they could be on vacation.

That's the time of year when, when we're making this recording. Okay. They could be busy with launching kids to school. They could be unbelievably distracted. So we went to have empathy and they will actually appreciate our follow-up with clear next steps, because that's a gift to them since they actually really do want to do something with us, but they have many competing priorities.

I make, I have a list actually on my website of the 10 lies we tell ourselves. And I'm making fun, a little bit of people about why, why, why not call? So I say, well, I can't call today because it's Friday. I can't call today because it's too early on Monday. I can't call today because it's a holiday. I can't call today because I just called a week ago. Right? These crazy things that salespeople will say, and then I'm poking fun a little bit, but everyone who reads that says, I know I'm there chuckling, but they're saying, I have thought those things. We all do that. So replacing that with viable possibilities based on real examples that we all have turns out.

I tell a story in the book where I talk about sending a proposal to someone. I thought was a complete slam dunk. I mean, I teach qualifying. I knew I qualified them on every front. I knew he was ready. I felt like the price was fair. And I didn't hear, didn't hear, didn't hear. And I walk my readers through what was going through my mind, where until actually attempt number four I was fine. I had no emotional feeling. I was following my own instructions in my CRM. No problem. Time number four is when his name popped up and it was time for me to follow up again in the sequence I had set up for myself and I looked at that and I thought, I don't know if I could do this because I was just starting to make it mean something that I hadn't heard from this person. And I did exactly what I am encouraging your listeners to do, which is to pause, look at what happened and say, there must be an explanation that has nothing to do with me.

I think we do this a lot and, and not just in sales, so. All right. So what I'm hearing is you take a step back, you start to really think about, okay, let's actually look at some real life data that we have. And start to come up with some ideas on what's happening in their world, based on we've learned.

But I think the stories we tell ourselves post that initial engagement, when we've actually earned the right to have a discovery call, learn a bit about our prospect and we start to progress the opportunity. I think there's an opportunity for, from my perspective, I often say, okay, let me think if something is happening and I, I get it, I'm a big believer in the empathy part of the sales process, but often it's an indication for me that have I done enough? Have I asked the right questions early in the process that's allowed me to understand what's happening in the prospect's world. What are some of the other priorities that they focused on right now?

Are there projects, are they transformational initiatives that you know, he or she's working on that could distract them from my conversation? Because often from a seller's perspective, we think, you know, the project that I'm trying to talk to you about, or the product or service it's important to me.

And yes, there's a level of importance from the buyer, but it's one of 30 to 40 things that they're probably thinking about every single day. And so there's only so much mind share that they have to spend on certain things. And if it, and that's where I think this whole premise of the stories we tell ourselves is so important to really just take a step back and remove that a level of emotion that it's not about us, right?

I think about all the hours I spent really not listening carefully because I was trying to talk them into something being more urgent than it actually was in their life. And I think part of it is I didn't have the skill to ask enough open-ended questions and really hear what they're saying.

And part of that truthfully is that I had a lot of pressure on me and I did not have the liberty to really make the right decision at the moment because I was being shortsighted. And it's so ironic. Right. I hear myself telling the story and I think here's the problem. If you drag things out, because you're trying to talk people into things or make something a priority when they are so goal diffused, they have so many things going on.

You actually filling up your time and you have an opportunity costs by not moving on, but you show up to meetings, you have things to share. You feel like you're working and what would it be like for us and with our relationship with sales and marketing. If it were okay to qualify in or out more quickly based on timing and urgency, where you could say this is actually a marketing lead and I'm happy for you go, some other kinds of action will know you kick it back to me. And has that all been. Okay. And maybe even more than, okay. Have it be amazing. This is what smaller businesses can do. An individual sellers can decide for themselves, but the bigger the organization gets, the more, it gets hard to make those kinds of decisions. Ironically, even though you have more tech to help you.

And they needed something to move the needle to improve that and refinish that cost. And then we created the business case actually that you good, old trusted Miller Heiman, blue sheets, a situational appraisal summary. So, and this is where I'm a little bit challenged by the qualification frameworks and yes, I think they're important.

And there's some questions that we need to ask, but I think what I'm loving about what you're saying around the stories we tell ourselves is sometimes, you know, timing can be a barrier and it's a fine line between saying to a prospect. I can see, you know, helping them identify a need for change, but if they're just not ready to change, because that's what great selling is about.

It's about helping somebody change from current state to future state. If they're not exactly ready for change, and we try too hard to move them when they're not ready, right, we're breaking the relationship. Like there's a, there's a relationship barrier that then is put in place because they feel like, Hey, you don't understand where I'm coming from. You're not empathizing with me and my, my situation. And just trying to think, you know, great sellers, what they do differently is, they don't look at the short term is they're thinking long-term and because they have healthy pipelines they can hold certain ops, nurture them, build that relationship until they're ready to make change. Love to hear your thoughts on that.

But I do recognize that I think the ideal scenario that we want to move toward though, is that we, if we really think that selling is something we do for somebody, and that selling really is helping, then we have to listen to how they want to be helped right now and what they're telling us. Make sure and confirm this the case and then do what is the next right thing.

And what I don't like is definitions of selling that say that the definition of selling is to take them through a process that will always lead to closure. That's just not true now. Maybe, maybe, eventually it's true for most of them, depending on how long have you, you have, but that type of thinking, it feeds desperate behavior.

It keeps you from listening. It puts you in this fight or flight. People can tell. And what I talk about in the book is that it feeds this negative stereotype, which is one of the reasons that we have a global shortage of amazing salespeople.

Because again, it's not about us. And I'd argue this with any guru professional, you know, I, I I'm, I'm on, I'm still on my journey. I've put some, some, some significant deals together and all of those deals came together because my primary focus was on my customer. My customer, my prospect was at the center of everything that I did.

And that's what I love about the message that you're putting out, because it's about saying, Hey, it's okay if they don't buy from me. Right. Some of the best referrals I've got was from people that didn't buy from me because they enjoyed the experience. Right. They learned through the process, they were educated, they discovered more about what they needed. And they discovered that they learnt stuff. I created value for them. Yes. Before they even purchased anything.

Yeah, and they can have have confidence in that. And I think that could be true for any of us. And that's a benefit of doing things for a long time. When you're in these professions for a long time, you do develop such an extensive network that you can ask. If not me, who? I think that this amazing thing about technology, the conversation we're having, the fact that we would even meet this, this is, this is an example where people can even be friendly competitors or complimentary services, and there is plenty for everyone and I'm not right for everyone. And that is great.

I think the pandemic you know, is, is, has been a huge global issue that I don't think anybody would have ever anticipated going through what we've gone through. We're still in lockdown where I am. Right. But over, over the course of our life, there are times, you know, when you're really up and there are times of crisis.

And I think in selling you experienced times of crisis, if you're selling a long time, very hard to be the top every single month, quarter, year. Yes. So what, what are some things sellers can do to reframe some things in their mind from a mindset perspective, that'll help them flip from the negative to a positive.

Like all mindset and kind of getting even into some of the [inaudible] stuff. I was pretty suspicious of a lot of the benefit of affirmations, for example, or the benefit of visualization or the benefit of journaling. And I have completely changed my mind on all of those things, because I see the time I spend in writing my reframing and my affirmations about the value I provide people, which I do every day. The journaling that I do, as I read every morning to continue to be learning and activate my creativity about how to serve people even better. As I do that every day, I do it seven days a week. I don't even take off during the weekend because then I have trouble getting on board Monday if I stopped. So I, I have a routine seven days a week. That is a deep time investment in me for me. So I can then go out and serve and you know, the very tired analogy of the oxygen mask when you're flying. I remember the first time I was told that and I had little kids and I remember hearing that and thinking I don't, I still don't understand why I would put the oxygen mask on myself and then my child, I think I would want to put it on my child at first.

Like I did not understand what they were saying. And I think now I go, oh, okay. Because I really have to have something to pour out and give. And so I would say a faithful commitment to that personal and professional development that you stick with regardless of your emotion, because here's the thing. I think you'll like this, this acronym, I got this from Mary Hyatt. Mary Hyatt is an executive coach. I like her podcast. And she talks about this. This acronym called B E A R. So like a bear B E A R. It says beliefs lead to emotions, emotions lead to action and action leads to results.

So isn't that great. So she said B E A R beliefs lead to emotions, emotions lead to actions, actually, as a result, if you wonder what you believe you work backwards. What results did I get from the actions I took, which was probably fueled by the emotions I had, which were held up or harmed by my beliefs. And, and so I think that because we know that emotion really has too much power in our life. We want to notice when we feel like we're being taken away. By our emotions or feel particularly low and recognize this is, this is a physiological response, this will pass. And I doubled down on my routine that is helping me get reframed about why I serve. That's what I do.

Catherine, I just want to say, I really appreciate you sharing your ideas on mindset and creating the right level, the right story to be the best you can be. So I want to say thank you for coming on the podcast just before we let you go. Where can our listeners It's behind you and, and where can they buy your book? And we'll put that in the show notes.