Do you believe in life after love? Do you believe in life after love? No. No. And I'd like you to start thinking before you believe. Do see how I did that? Nope. But let's go. All right. Let's do it. So today, it's your friend and mine. It's Epictetus. Epictetus. And you know what? You should have been a salesman with this one. You'll see exactly why. When it comes to money. Money. Money.

Where we feel our clear interest, have an entire art where the tester uses many means to discover the worst, just as we give great attention to judging things that might steer us badly. But when it comes to our own ruling principle, we yawn and doze off, accepting any appearance that flashes by without counting the cost. Mmm, that's good. Very, very good. So is this all about the difference between what you feel

compared to what's true. I think as sales people, there's many different ways to take this, but when we sit down with businesses and we just do like an audit of their sales process, their sales teams, and you go into their CRM or you look at their pipeline, you look at the opportunities, what's the first thing that we always spot? We had a really good chat with them. This feels like it's a goer. I think that this one is going to happen in September. Now let's just do a both select a rewind there.

Cool. Insert cool graphic there. But the language there, we're big lovers of language and the words that you say. Think, maybe, feel. Sounds like a Lewis Capaldi song, but it's not. It's all a little bit wishy washy. There's no actual concrete evidence to it. And people go into these conversations and a lot of the time with salespeople, I think, I think.

Are you going into a conversation and trying to get to an outcome that you could both agree on? Or are you going into a conversation saying, please validate me and like me? Yeah. And I want to give people like a couple of practical tips on this that should help. we've got a rule where nothing can go into our CRM without a follow up task. We've discussed this, but what a follow up task like, okay, anyone can do that. No, it's got to be a diarized follow up that's accepted by the party. So when you say to someone like,

When's your next conversation with this big opportunity? They've got to able to say it's a Thursday at four o'clock. It's already been accepted and the other decision makes going to be involved in the tracks. Got to be like that. Yeah. Feel into it. I've worked in many, many a business where you do these pipeline reviews once a month with your sales director and the, that opportunity that's been there the whole time you've worked here for the last 10 years is still there. I that's going to close this month. No, it's looking really good for next month though. Just nudging things along and nudging things along. That's one thing. The other thing is

the stoic principle I've talked about in previous episodes, but describing events as they actually are with no colour. Just objectively, just talk through what happened in that meeting without muddying it with your own thoughts and feelings. Just A to B, what happened and what's happening next. That's it. Take all the emotion out of it. And what you'll find is, maybe I'm adding a few details here that didn't really occur. Yeah, that's really, really good. And I think...

something that we've started doing or something that I feel like I'm doing is, well, let's say you see, no, I think that you're on my page. Something we do, but actually it's something I do. Can I talk about my idea for a moment? Trying to protect my future self. So one thing that I've tried to implement this year is I've said to you a few times, when we get to that point, can you challenge me? So it's like, I'm giving you the permission now, because actually if we get to that point and I haven't given you the permission,

challenging someone is a great place to be because then it gets you thinking on your feet. So what I would say to salespeople is go to your sales leader or go to a colleague and say, we do pipeline reviews on the last day of the month or every week. Can you actually challenge me? Can you make sure that you're asking me difficult questions so that I can defend them? And if I can't defend them, well, actually that helps open it up. So it should be like a sales call from a sales leader or a colleague to the person that's kind of defending the pipeline.

But getting that permission is so important because the worst thing that's going to happen, like say you're a sales leader and I've got this and you start challenging me, my ego is going to flare up and I'm going to say, no, you bet your bloody bottom dollar, Annie, that Tesco is coming in next week. Yeah. And lo and behold, Tesco, every little helps. Yeah. Try not to be too married to your ideas to be challenged. Yeah. I agree with that. getting that permission to lock horns, as they might say in the industry. I've been Jack Frimston. I've been Zack Thompson. Remember you would die locking my horns.