Ep. 62 The Stern Truth: Close More Sales By Doing This

You’ve already seen the title. This episode is a DOOZY, I promise you. 

We always default back to spending, spending, spending on marketing. Facebook Ads, Google Ads, money on your storefront or your interior. But there’s a huge gap that stops you from closing sales. 

That’s the failure to connect with your prospects. 

Are you connecting with your customers? Let’s even take a step back from that - are you connecting with your team? Are they just a number?

I share a story of going to a Nissan dealership with my friend, looking to purchase a Pathfinder, and immediately being ignored. No greeting. The staff was hanging out, smoking, not paying any attention to us, and we left. A classic example of a business that really doesn’t want to take your money.

A great book that I recommend is “Everyone Communicates Few Connect” by my mentor, John Maxwell. He says that connection is what makes you feel heard, comfortable, and understood. For me, the price of that Pathfinder didn’t matter, but the connection wasn’t there. I wasn’t heard, let alone seen. I was uncomfortable, and I definitely wasn’t understood. So I walked.

Part of connecting is listening. It’s being interested and not interesting. Be curious and connect with your people, be it your clients, your team, or your inner circle.

If you’re looking for your own inner circle with mentorship, coaching, accountability, and encouragement to step up your game and achieve your goals, the ONtrepreneur Inner Circle might be for you. Check out more here: https://marshallstern.net/landing/innercircle

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Transcript

[00:00:00] Marshall Stern: Alright everyone. Before we get into today's episode, I want to remind you about the ONtrepreneur Inner Circle. That's ONtrepreneur with a big ON. If you are finding yourself stuck in the business, in the weeds of your business, and you're finding yourself feeling lonely, isolated, not sure who to turn to, what to do, and you'd love to have a sounding board.

[00:00:20] Why don't you come check out the ONtrepreneur Inner Circle. We meet weekly on Tuesdays, and we love to have you even just as a guest, come in, meet some amazing small business owners, chat about business, check out the details in the show notes, or reach out to me, Marshall@marshallstern.net, and just come as my guest and stop being alone in your business.

[00:00:42] Now, as I always say, grab a pad of paper and pen because today's episode is a doozy. Enjoy.

[00:00:52] Hi, I'm Marshall Stern and I've spent over 35 years leading and growing multiple small businesses. I know firsthand the struggles of entrepreneurship, feeling isolated, lonely, overwhelmed, and feeling like you have to do it all by yourself. I've been through multiple recessions, and I have felt the highs and the lows.

[00:01:11] I've been there, and I get it. This podcast is here to change that. Every week I will bring you straight talking advice, real world strategies, and honest conversations about what it takes to succeed in business without the fluff, the gimmicks, or the sugar-coated. If you're ready to stop spinning your wheels and start making real progress, then you are in the right place.

[00:01:36] This is the Stern Truth. 

[00:01:39] Welcome back everyone, to another episode of the Stern Truth Business Unfiltered, and this episode is really the Stern Truth. What I'm referring to is this. So many business owners, you may actually resonate with this. So many business owners spend so much money on marketing, on advertising.

[00:02:00] Yes. I know I've talked about this. I've gone down this road before, but it's a little bit different this time. So much money on marketing and advertising. So much money on their storefront, even the interior of their store and they bring people in. 

[00:02:12] And then what one of the biggest areas that I think especially small business owners make, not only small business owners, midsize business owners, big corporations, actually even more so, is they fail to connect with their prospect. In fact, I would argue to say the bigger the business, the bigger the failure can be, and it might not just be with the prospect. If you're a leader, a CEO, a founder of an organization, and you have employees, are you treating them like people?

[00:02:46] Are you connecting with them or are they just another number, payroll ID number? So let me give you some examples and one recent story. Perfect. I'll give you two examples. One goes back way back. I might've even talked about this on an earlier episode. Probably think in 19 – I'm dating myself now – 94, 95, somewhere around there.

[00:03:10] I was with one of my friends. We were looking to get a Nissan Pathfinder. So we go to the Nissan dealership, the local Nissan dealership, and we're in our early twenties and we are walking in the car lot. There are three salespeople on the stairs to the showroom – we'll never forget it – and they're smoking cigarettes.

[00:03:31] This is before vaping and all of that. They're smoking cigarettes, chatting amongst themselves. They saw us. They ignored us. We continue to walk. We walk into the dealership past them. They didn't even greet us. We're walking around three or four salespeople inside the dealership. One of them might have been with a client or a customer or prospect.

[00:03:51] The others were just doodling around talking to each other by the coffee cooler, that kind of thing. And we start to walk off the lot. We left the building, we started to walk off the lot. We were mumbling to ourselves on our finger. We were mumbling to ourselves on purpose. Can't believe people don't want to take our money.

[00:04:07] We were both looking to purchase a pathfinder at that time, and I'll never forget, the sales manager comes running at us and he says, boys, boys. Now remember, we're in early twenties. We're wearing shorts in his summertime in Vancouver, but it's calling us boys, when you're in your early twenties now, I'd like to be called boys.

[00:04:26] But when I'm in my early twenties, I didn't want to be called boys, referred to as boys, and comes running as saying, boys, what's the problem? What's the problem? And we turned and said, well, we are, we've been walking around here for like 10 minutes. All your salespeople seem to be too busy smoking or chatting amongst each other.

[00:04:40] We have a checkbook here. We have our credit card here. We're, we are ready to buy a Pathfinder. Nobody wants our business. And he goes, oh, no, no. We want your business.  little bit, a little too late. Okay. I ended up going to a different Nissan dealership, a different part of the city, and I bought the Nissan Pathfinder.

[00:04:58] I knew exactly what I wanted and I bought it. Now recently, a more relevant story with the connecting and one of my favorite books. I highly recommend you read it if this is to do with not just your clients or prospects. This is also to do with your employees if you're a leader, if you're a CEO, A founder, the book is called Everyone Communicates Few Connect by my mentor John Maxwell.

[00:05:25] So one of his a hundred books or so he has written, but it is one of my favourite all about connecting with others. See, my friends, that's where the magic is. It's not always about the price. We make it and we believe it to be so much about the price or maybe even about the value.

[00:05:45] Value's important, that we are giving or offering, but we're not connecting. With our audience, if we're not connecting with our prospects, it does not matter what the price is unless you're selling widgets on Amazon and it's based on price alone. Connection is critical, especially in a service based business.

[00:06:07] So a few months back. I was in a sales conversation with a lead gen marketing team. I was looking to hire them, okay, possibly for myself, but I was also researching it for some of my other clients, and I got into this Zoom presentation with this sales person, account manager, whatever you want to call them, for this very well known lead generation company.

[00:06:32] I still see all their ads in my Facebook and Instagram feeds because that's the way the algorithms work because I had a call, because I clicked on something and on YouTube as well. In any case, we go through, he goes through the presentation and the price is actually pretty good. The price was lower than I thought.

[00:06:50] The presentation looked pretty good. It was clean, it was simple. He pretty much gave the information I needed to know. The price was right. So why didn't I buy? He didn't connect with me. There was zero connection. He was just going through the motions. It, it felt like I was his 50th call of the day, and I probably was at the end of the call, he said, so how does this sound?

[00:07:16] Any questions? And I went, uh, no, not right now. I don't think right now. He goes, okay, thanks. Bye. Just like that, he didn't really ask me any questions. He didn't connect with me. If he had connected and dug deeper, I may not have actually hired that company, but I would've referred them. Because I have many clients who could have used their service and the price was right.

[00:07:39] What was missing was this, what was missing was the human connection. AI, you can have AI all you want. It has its place, it's a tool. But when it comes to really delivering value and connecting, human to human, my friends, human to human. So as you go forward this week, when you are in a networking event, when you are in a sales conversation, when you're with your family.

[00:08:11] When you're with your employees, ask yourself, are you really connecting? And part of connecting, and we'll talk about this in future episodes, it's listening, it's being interested, but interesting. This guy from this company, I'm not going to mention the company name. This lead gen company was neither. I guess you could kind of say.

[00:08:33] He was interesting because he was talking about what the company does and that kind of stuff, but honestly, it was not interesting. The presentation showed everything, the price, how it works, the system. Very well done presentation from a slide deck point of view, but where he lost the sale was the connection.

[00:08:53] And where he made it even worse was, he didn't follow up for a good month. So my friends, if you are going to spend time. If you're going to spend resources and put money out there and you're going to spend time on social media, you're going to go to networking events, you're going to hire staff, you're going to try to build something.

[00:09:14] Automation, AI, can only get you so far. You want to build a kick ass business. You want to bring people on your team to actually help you achieve the vision of your business. Connect with them. You want to enroll people. Clients to work with you so you can give them value and help them on their journey.

[00:09:36] Connect with them, listen to them, ask questions. Be interested, not just interesting. There's too much noise out there. We know that everyone's blabbing their mouth off. Everyone's telling you what to do. Everyone's saying how wonderful they are. Ever since I started this podcast, I cannot tell you how many people I've had in my inbox or my DMs saying they can help me.

[00:09:58] If they can help me increase the influence and the impact and you know, was, through my YouTube channel or the on Spotify or Amazon or whatever, my authority, they can help me. They can help me do this, they can help me do that. If they ever once asked, asked me what I want. Have they ever once asked me if I want the help?

[00:10:20] Have they ever once asked me, am I working with someone? Is that part of my plan to grow this YouTube channel or to grow this podcast on different platforms and to be on stages and to do this and to, no, it's always an email or a message or in my DM all about them without asking the proper questions. Be curious.

[00:10:42] Be curious, ask questions, connect with your people. Again, it could be your potential clients, it could be your staff, your employees. It could be your family. Be interested. A challenge for you this week and every day and every week is to go out into the world and connect with as many people but connect on a deeper level.

[00:11:05] Be seriously interested in them, authentically interested in them. Again, AI is great. It's a great tool. Use it to your advantage. Use it to, to, as a tool to help support you and your business. But it will not, I repeat, it will not replace a connection. Maybe AI will replace these podcasts and then I don't have to sit here and record it.

[00:11:27] It'll be AI Marshall talking maybe one day. That's where it goes, I don't know about in a sales conversation, in a conversation where you are looking or your client or prospect is looking for some value for you to help them through something. Whether you're a bookkeeper, digital marketer, you own a retail store, a restaurant, a coach, you have to connect with your people and only real people will connect with people.

[00:11:55] So that's my challenge for you. Be curious, be interested, not interesting. I'd love to hear your comments, your feedback, and we'll see you again next week in another episode of The Stern Truth. Business Unfiltered. Bye for now.

[00:12:10] Thank you so much for tuning in to the Stern Truth. If you found today's episode helpful, we would love to hear from you. Please like, share and leave us a review. Also, if you'd like to be a guest in an upcoming episode or join us in one of our Moment Accountability Group sessions, simply email me to marshall@marshallstern.net.

[00:12:29] That's marshall@marshallstern.net. And don't forget to hit the subscribe button so you never miss an episode. Until next time, keep pushing forward and leading with confidence.