There's a puppet over your head, but there's also a puppeteer. And he's making that little puppet dance. Can you feel it? I'm in the mood for dancing. Bang. I've just cut the strings. It's over. Yeah. One and four. What does it make 14? It's the 14th of January. I'm going hit you with a little Marcus. Horrelius. Yeah, thanks. We'll put his Instagram handle in the bio. Understand at last.

you have something in you more powerful and divine than what causes the bodily passions and pulls you like a mare puppet. What thoughts now occupy my mind? Is it not fear, suspicion, desire or something like that?

Like that one. Yeah. Now, when I think about this, there's lots of different ways that we can take this. But often we've talked a little bit about the narrative in the previous days, the stories that we tell ourselves. I think what this is saying is what are those strings that put that narrative in place in the first place? What is the root cause? And let's let's flip this a little bit. We've talked about salespeople for the last few days. Let's talk about the prospect side of things. OK, so let's say I'm speaking to a prospect.

And they say, this just wouldn't work for us. It's not the sort of thing that would work for us. You're some new fancy software company. They're a 30 year old construction business. Yeah. That just wouldn't work for us. And you accept that as the story. Okay. They're closed off to the idea. All right. Thanks very much. See you later. What really should they be doing there? I like to think of it as the, the Russian doll analogy. You know, Russian dolls.

And you open one up, there's another little Russian doll. You open it up, there's another one. You want to go deeper, deeper, deeper, deeper. Why? You know what don't like about Russian dolls? What? They're of themselves. Silly. But yeah, you want to go deeper. You want to find out what's the why. Sometimes I think I've heard that you need to ask why seven times until you get to the actual truth, the root cause. So actually finding out why that's a problem.

Dealfront (02:17.95) More often than not, if they're saying, that wouldn't work for us, there's probably the biggest objection in all of sales is change is the status quo. Why would people want to change when things could remain the same? Imagine a future where things are worse, whereas better the devil I know. Yeah, exactly. And I think questions around rather than just accepting that. Right. So let's say I've said to you, you know, I get it. We probably should be using a bit more software, but actually I'm closed off to the idea. I just don't think it'd work for us.

Acceptance first makes sense. This isn't the sort of thing that's going to work for everyone. Do you mind if I ask you something before you go? Yeah. It sounds like something happened that got you to that conclusion. What was it? Yeah. It sounds like it feels like something's happened before. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I'm talking to the person there, not just some prescribed business principles. And when I get into that, that's then when the real story will start unfolding.

Well, I've definitely seen like some of my friends businesses put this sort of thing in place and yeah, it's worked for a few of them. A lot of them are saying it's quite expensive and it's okay. Yeah, that makes it. When did you try though yourself? It sounds like you've had an experience. No, we've never done it before. Hmm. So then what is that story then built on? Yeah, it's not built on fact, is it? It's built on I've seen my friends businesses do something and come up with a bias. Yeah. And come up with my own story. And a lot of salespeople

Going back to like the puppeteer, a lot of salespeople are people pleasers and they don't want to ask those squirmy questions. They don't want to stick in it a bit longer because they don't want to upset people. Do you know what mean? I'm just a humble salesperson interrupting people's day. I don't want to upset people, but the people that ask a few more challenging questions, you're sticking it for a little bit longer. That's where the good stuff is. But what I hear sometimes with new salespeople is they hear stuff like that and go,

I'm barking up the wrong tree. Okay, well I'll let you go then. And they just accept it for what it is rather than trying to understand why. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of things, hopefully what people are getting from what we've talked about so far in stoicism is a lot of these things are habits. You can cultivate good habits. And what you're saying there is curiosity and curiosity is a habit. The longer I can stay curious in the day, curious in the conversation, that can be my immediate go-to almost being like,

Dealfront (04:44.588) I've got a four year old and all he ever asks me is why. Yeah. Every question he asked me, why did you do that? What did you do that for? Why did that happen? He constantly asking me why about everything. And we lose that as we get older, we make, start to make assumptions and think we know best. Really, you should get yourself into that four year old mindset of what they've just said them. Why is that? Why do they believe that's the way it is? And there's, there's probably like a little, a mini sales lesson that we could, we could give here the word why.

can feel quite intrusive, can't it? It feels like an interrogation. So one of the things we say is if I said, Zach, what did you do on the weekend? I built a little shoe I could live in. OK. And why did you do that? my God. Stop pressuring me. Yeah. But earlier on when you were doing it, you were labeling. So it feels like it sounds like it looks like we're labeling it. We're kind of making their emotions heard and we're trying to extract it rather than say, why did you do that? Why did you do that?

people are gonna get frustrated with that. So it's about learning how to ask the right questions and get to the root cause. I think one of the big things when it comes to root cause that you should always be looking for is a lot of the time, sadly, if you are ringing at C-suite level or managing directors, the root cause is typically them. Like we say, a fish rocks from the head down. And that might involve some difficult questioning. So not being afraid to ask those difficult questions is definitely gonna put you...

in a better position as a salesperson. Yeah, exactly. I think just to round off your thought there, why, so why, um, let's say someone says this wouldn't work for us. I'll use that example here. Oh, this wouldn't work for us. Why do you think that feels quite fighting? But it was like, okay, so sounds like there's a reason behind that. That feels much softer. Yeah. Um, so that's what I would swap it to. I like it. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zach Thompson. Remember you would die.

Ooh, that's a big one.