555 I'm staying alive. It's January the 5th, and I'm sat on my guy.

Wow, tight rhymes for a white guy. thank you, my guy, sit carefully.

Okay, let all your efforts be directed to something. Let it keep that end in view. It's not activity that disturbs people, but false conceptions of things that drive them mad. Seneca on Tranquility of Mind, wow, don't mind if I do. Don't mind if I cynica.

Okay, I want to talk to you about a little thing called expectations. So, the happiness equation is expectations meets reality. So when we go into a lot of sales calls or meetings, a lot of the time people are left disappointed because it didn't meet their expectations. So, one of the things that we do when we're sitting down on a new discovery call, so somebody comes in from a cold call or an inbound or whatever it is, a referral, my favorite question before we get started, before we do it, I sit down with you and I say, "Zach, great to see you. Just so this isn't a waste of your time, what are your expectations for this call? What would you like to have happened by the end?" Beautiful, clarify my intention. So, why is that important? Because what you want is a sales process that's prospect-led.

Okay, so what can happen is we can take on ourselves as salespeople, objections are my responsibility. It's my responsibility to guide the call where it needs to go. But if you ever try to convince someone against their own will, it's actually very, very hard to do. If I just suddenly said to you now, "Let's sack this off and go and have 10 pounds," you'd be like, "No." And if I really tried my hardest to try and convince you, I probably couldn't do it. Maybe, but carry on.

So often times what we should be thinking of is people are going to do much better when they feel in control, when they feel in the driver's seat. So, like you just said then, if I start off the call by saying to someone, "What are your expectations for this call?" or "What needs to happen by the end of the call?" and they give me that checklist, okay, well I've got those notes here, we'll go through those now. I suppose once all those things are ticked off, what would happen then? And I'm already starting to talk about next steps and closing, but I'm not telling someone what those next steps are. I'm not forcing, Jordan Belfort-ing the conversation straight line, straight line. I'm just, I think he was into a few of them actually.

What I'm actually doing is letting the prospect steer the ship for me, and that's often going to result in people who don't drop out of the sales process, people who actually follow through, and certainly people who don't feel pressured. Yeah, 'cause often when someone's pressured, they can give that counterfeit yes. Yeah, fake. If you watch a police interrogation drama, how many times have people admitted to crimes they haven't done just to make the interrogation stop? So what makes you think that someone would lie to a salesperson just to get out of the sales call?

You kind of sparked a thought there as well with the cold call opener that we love. We'll tell people it's a sales call, and some people find that madness or counterintuitive, but actually, you're clarifying your intentions. You're saying, "I'm honest, I'm upfront, it's a sales call, I'm trying to sell to you," rather than somebody knocked on my door the other day, and they had like a something about a liaison officer and that we're a lead generator for broadband, but they're like trying to dress up, and I'm like, I can see right through you, you're trying to sell to me. Just say, "I'm here to try and sell you something, can I see if it's a fit?" And I'll be like, "Alright, okay, there are your intentions." So, it's good.

So then the other thing when it comes to selling is I think about commission breath. Okay, so clarifying, so that's kind of what we're on there. What are your thoughts about fake people when it comes to it being all about them, it's all about those snake-oil salespeople, you're talking about people like, "If you can help me, I'll help you." Yeah, a little bit like that. Yeah, I don't buy. I mean, I always think about what's true in real life is true in sales. And we're big believers in a good sales conversation, a good sales process should probably feel a little bit like therapy, which might sound, is that a bit cheesy what they're saying there? But if you were sat down with your therapist and they said, "Look, if I can stop you being an alcoholic, I'm going to get promoted here," you'd be like, "What? What's that?" Suddenly, you wouldn't feel like the most important person there. And all people go into interactions in life from being six years old and onwards with a big invisible sign that says, "Make me feel heard." Someone's favorite subject in a sales conversation is always themselves. It's never you. So, get out of your own way. That's what I'd say for salespeople, it's not about you. You're just a vessel to let someone come to a hard yes or a hard no.

And then on the flip, there's another thing just to tag in there of it being 50/50. So think of it like job interviews. So many people go to job interviews petrified because they think, "My job, I've got to impress them. I've got to make them think that I've done x, y, and z and I'm really, really good at it and I'm the right person for the job." It's like dating. You're both seeing if you're a match for each other. And also, that's the sales process. So when we sit down with people, it's a case of, "Are they the right fit for us? Can I help them?" I don't want to sign everyone, and I know that I can't sign everyone up as a client. You're just trying to see, do they have the problems that I solve? Are they motivated to solve that? Are we a good fit for each other? And then if you are a good fit, that's when you can say, "Okay, well based on your problems and your motivation, we do x, y, and z to solve it." Does that make sense? Yeah, cool. Okay, there we go.

Yeah, exactly. And you don't have to just think of it in the actual initial call or the initial meeting, but there might be next steps. I mean, nine times out of ten, you're going to leave a sales conversation with a "Let me go away and think about this," or "I'm doing a bit of shopping around," and you'll try your best to not end up there, but you probably are going to end up there. So what I like to do is give people very, very clear, we can get on and off the process, and it's comfortable. I'm not forcing you in any direction.

So what I say at the end of a call is, "Well, I'm a bit of a sucker for a next step. When's a good time to give you a call or catch up about even if it's going to be a no?" So we pop some time in the diary. They said, "Oh well, next Tuesday." Okay, and look, if you see that pop up in your diary and you think, "We've gone in a different direction," actually, "I didn't really want to talk to Zach again, I was just being polite," you can just email me the word "no" or you can cancel the meeting, whatever it may be. But then there's clear expectations and next steps, but they're without pressure. There's also that ability to pull away if you need to, to go in a different direction.

And I can't think of the last deal that someone disappeared, and I didn't know why. They always let me know because everything was managed, expectations were really, really clear throughout, and a lot of them come back because you've handled the process so nicely. A lot of the time, you say, "Go and use someone else, go and do something else because it's not right for you right now, try this and then come back." So well done. Do you think so? Yeah, wow, okay. Anything I could have done better?

I've been Jack Frimston, I've been Zach Thompson. Remember, you will die. It's the 836, straight to Gloucester.