Put the Customer First to Close More Sales Faster w/ Jeff Shore [Episode 410]

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This episode finds us rethinking what it means to truly put the customer first to drive compelling results. Joining me once again on this episode is my guest Jeff Shore, President and CEO of Shore Consulting, and author of multiple books, including Closing 2.0: How to Close More Sales Faster by Putting the Customer First.

Key Takeaways

• Shore Consulting works with companies in the B2C space. They started in real estate, and have branched into other consumer areas, always focusing on the emotion-based sale.
• Jeff explains how his new book, Closing 2.0, answers current questions on serving the customer’s buying journey.
• What are two filters a salesperson applies when reading a sales technique book?
• Jeff explores the meaning of ‘closing.’ What word would he have chosen instead of ‘closing’? What is the buyer’s ‘decision-making rhythm’?
• Jeff discusses aspects of service and respect in the seller-customer relationship.
• On Jeff’s book tour, when he asked audiences to describe ‘a salesperson,’ how did they respond? How did they then describe people they know personally, who sell?
• Can a salesperson apply skills that are contrary to their authentic personality? How does a salesperson align behaviors and skills to core values?
• What does Jeff mean by ‘agreement’? Who makes agreements, and what do the agreements accomplish?
• How would you reverse-engineer your sales process to align with the buyer’s preferences? Jeff makes a suggestion.
• What is the highest predictor of urgency in a buying decision? What is the role of future promise?
• What factors should be evaluated and incorporated into the closing process?
• Should your closing question be well-crafted?

The Sales Enablement Podcast with Andy Paul was formerly Accelerate! with Andy Paul.

Episode Transcript

Andy Paul  2:42  

Hello, and welcome to the Sales Enablement Podcast. I’m excited to welcome back to the show today, Jeff Shore. He is an author of multiple books including closing 2.0 which we’re gonna talk about today, as well as president/CEO of Shore Consulting. Jeff, welcome back to the Sales Enablement Podcast.

 

Jeff Shore  2:58  

Always enjoyable. I’m looking forward to it.

 

Andy Paul  3:01  

Yeah, always looking forward to it. So for people that missed your first appearance on the show a brief introduction of yourself and what your company does.

 

Jeff Shore  3:09  

So there’s nine of us at shore consulting, and we work with companies, largely in the, b2c, the business to consumer space. We love the emotion based sale. It’s what really interests us more than anything else. But we have the opportunity to work with companies large and small, throughout North America, a little bit of international work as well, but it’s been about 17 years for me in short consulting, I was National Sales Director for a very large homebuilding firm before that.

 

Andy Paul  3:43  

So are a lot of your clients in the real estate space?

 

Jeff Shore  3:46  

Yeah, that’s always been our dominant industry, but we spent more and more time in other aspects of the b2c environment. So you know, there’s been a lot of them working with, you know, consumer products, almost proving some automobile sales just anywhere where there is direct sale to a consumer. That’s really where our target market is.

 

Jeff Shore  4:14  

I don’t really think it matters what we’ve done large and small on the price point. Really, it’s more a matter of what goes on in the brain when they’re making the decision. I mean, that’s you and I’ve had this conversation before we shared that mutual interest in the psychology of a purchase decision, and what triggers in people’s brains as they’re going about that process.

 

Andy Paul  4:36  

So you talked about the emotional based sale and their motion based sale. Not necessarily emotional based sale, but the emotion based sale is that different than sort of the emotion that drives a b2b purchase?

 

Jeff Shore  4:50  

Well, you know, there’s no question about it. I know you and I agree on this. Since there is no emotion or emotional factor in every sale. There’s no question about it. But When you are in a b2b environment, it tends to be a far more technical sale, you might find that there’s a longer buying cycle, a longer buying process in that world, and, you know, we are really interested in the shorter cycle, high emotion, I’m more vested in this. And to some extent when the emotional consequences are higher of a decision, then it changes the way you go about the division decision versus say, you know, a purchasing agent for a large corporation who’s buying a bunch of copier machines. Now I’m looking at it, I’m asking, it’s still emotional, but it’s a different set of emotions, it’s emotions of, how do I fit this into the business plan? And what will people think of me if I make a wrong decision on this? And how do I support my stakeholders along those lines, versus the consumer base sale? This is, for me, this is how it’s going to affect my life. This is the problem I’m trying to solve right now.

 

Andy Paul  5:51  

Yeah, my personal money at stake as well.

 

Jeff Shore  5:54  

Yes, absolutely. It’s a huge, huge factor. No question about it.

 

Andy Paul  5:57  

Okay. So you’ve just published a new book, and I loved your last book. And we talked about that in the previous show that you’re on so this one’s called closing 2.0. So why was this book needed? Because I asked this only because, you know, we started going through cycles and sales and cycles was everybody’s writing about sales management, coaching, and then it was all about well, now coaching is certainly coming in what’s one closing? I mean, what’s driving us?

 

Jeff Shore  6:29  

Yeah, well, that’s the question. I had to ask myself and answer myself before I could even start to write the book. And, and I’m not suggesting that there. There isn’t a body of work out there around the area of closing that is very, very good, but I would look at it and say that the sales process continues to evolve. And we’ve seen that Dramatic Evolution over the last 15 years with the access to information being really now the great equalizer, and there was a time when I first started in sales, I could say to the customer, you know, I have all the information, knowledge is power. We all know it. So you can have this and you can have this and I’m gonna listen to this one over here. 

 

Andy Paul  7:08  

I might use it later on, right? Yeah, I used to say that, you know, customers could only buy from me back and start micro, they could only buy from me as fast as I prepared to sell to them.

 

Jeff Shore  7:17  

Yes. Right. And you had all the information. So you sort of held on to the keys. And you have the answers. So now that information is ubiquitous and you’ve got a very, very well educated consumer. That is that and it says that the very job of the salesperson has changed now. It’s not just simply providing information the internet can do that. Now what’s how do we apply the information and how do I make the information relevant to your specific situation? So it really obviously starts with you need to understand your customer well enough to know why the information is going to be relevant, relevant in the first place. But then as you do that, the question is, how do you bring them along now what I have seen is a moving away from closing skills, because it almost seems a little bit achy, a little bit like, well, we’re going to be this, you know, friendly partner trusted advisor type, then I don’t want to be in that situation or being too aggressive or too assertive. And I’m going to be losing that. And so I’m trying to find that line in between something that is respectful and partnership based with our customer, and yet doesn’t give a salesperson a pass to say, well, they’ll let me know when they’re ready to buy. So that’s where I was trying to look at. In fact, one of the things that I said to my editor, throughout the process of writing the book, my editor, it has nothing to do with sales. She’s not a salesperson, but I asked her, I said, I want to write a book that any of the customers of my audience would be comfortable reading. And I’m sure you would agree that when we look at the books on our shelves, about closing, most of them, I wouldn’t want to go anywhere near an actual consumer. But I wanted to write a book that a customer would go Yeah, I’m okay with that. I’m comfortable with that.

 

Andy Paul  9:02  

Yeah. Well, actually, I was thinking about that as I was reading your book,actually your book was the first book I’ve ever read on closing. So think about decades of being in this business, because the same reason that we didn’t like those books, I just thought they were irrelevant. Especially in the business to business space. You know, I tell people, I said, well, that’s interesting. You know, you tried to hire somebody like a client, you’re trying to hire a new sales rep. And the one thing they put in the job description is, we want somebody with a closer. And I said, what’s kind of interesting, how often are you in the room when the customer makes the decision? Well, we’re never in the room.Yeah, it’s like, all these books, really written even though that’s ostensibly for business to business sales are really for this image of the prototypical used car salesman. 

 

Jeff Shore  9:50  

I understand how uncomfortable some of that can be. And of course, the problem is that I think that any salesperson who’s going to read a book or listen to an expert is going to listen through or read through about two filters. One filter is going to ask, does this pertain to my experiences up to this point? And then the other one is, Will I be able to use this in the future? So if you’re looking at a technique that’s being shared, and you when you’re looking to go up, boy, if I try and fit that into any conversation I’ve ever had, it would be so foreign and so bizarre that I would fail at it. And by the way, how they’re asking me to perform this is so inconsistent with my own approach that I can’t use it anyway. So I think there’s the discriminating salesperson appropriately. So that’s going to look at it and say, if I can’t use this isn’t as irrelevant to me that doesn’t matter. And I think that that’s where most of these books fail, they teach techniques that that that are going to be very, very difficult for the average person to be able to pull off/

 

Andy Paul  10:51  

So this may sound simplistic, but what is closing? Because I think people have different definitions of what closure is.

 

Jeff Shore  11:03  

So if we start with the definition, and this is interesting, you should ask the question, because when I was researching the book, I tried to find the origin of the very word closing. Why do we use the word closing? And you know, somebody over here said, well, it has to do with it, or it originated in the real estate field, we’re closing the escrow or their closing process, or whatever it is that nobody really knows. I know that if I were writing sales theory from scratch, I wouldn’t actually use the word closing, I would use the word agreement. Because I think that the very term closing can be misconstrued as something that I’m doing to someone if I’m looking at agreement, and it implies a partnership right from the very beginning. So I defined closing as the process of gaining agreements throughout the conversation, culminating in a final agreement to purchase and so there’s this what the author Richard tiller calls a decision making rhythm. It gets established here where the customer can make their decision a little bit at a time. And it’s so much easier to purchase that way than just looking at big old, you know, what’s it going to take to get you to buy my product, that’s just, that’s nuts. That’s crazy. So we got to simplify it, we got to break it down into a series of agreements. And that’s where you start to get into some of the psychological background. That’s the basis of why I wanted to write the book in the first place.

 

Andy Paul  12:25  

Well, right. And I think one of those emotion based factors you talked about, I call sales, a service that you provide to a customer and you reiterate that in your book, as well as that, you know, it’s even closing itself you say as an act of service, you know, what to mean about that understand sales being the service so what did you mean about closing being an actor? 

 

Jeff Shore  12:47  

So look, every now and then you’ll hear, Well, you know, I don’t want to be disrespectful. I am being careful about whether I should ask them if they want to buy it because they don’t want to be disrespectful. And I looked at that and I go, no Just take it back to my early career in real estate sales. And think if you want to be disrespectful to a customer, try this for them to come to you hand in hand and say, Hey, um, so you know, we were just thinking here, if we at some point, if we wanted like to buy, how do we do that you want to talk about disrespect, that’s disrespect is making your customer come to you and ask permission to buy. So there’s the idea here of I believe it’s the job of the salesperson to make it easy for people to do what they want to do anyways, the job of the salesperson to make it easy for them to purchase. And that again violates when you look at what clothing has been taught and violates that very rule. It doesn’t make it easy, because it’s a high pressure environment.

 

Andy Paul  13:50  

Yeah, I agree. I mean, I left off my second book with a quote from Bezos Jeff Bezos founder CEO of Amazon saying, I thought it was a great quote about what you’re talking about sales. He says we don’t make money when we sell things. We make money when we help customers make purchase decisions. And that’s it, that’s what you’re really talking about here. And I think if you do that to it to a point you make in your book, which and others, you know, increasingly are making to that with, we have this, this lingering, you know, perception of salespeople about, negative stereotype stereotypical perceptions of most salespeople, which I think most salespeople, don’t rise to to meeting that stereotype. Right, but it still exists. But, you know, one way that you begin to put that to bed is, as you said, to have a service orientation to your selling and your closing. 

 

Jeff Shore  14:41  

Yeah. You know, it’s interesting, I just finished a 25 city tour around this book. And one of the things that I do on the tour is I asked people to, you know, describe that salesperson that sort of that old school salesperson I think it was Dan pink in to sell us humans where he had done some man on the street interviews, word association I say person you Say what? I think the number one answer was pushy number two was sleazy number three was used cars. And so I asked my audience to describe that person physically, what you’re seeing them in your mind describing, and they all come up with the same thing. product and the cheap suit. You know, chest hair, medallion, bling, white shoes, the smell of Old Spice covering up stale cigarette smoke. Right, right. And then I ask them the question: now think of a salesperson that you know, not appear or somebody in the room but a friend, a family member, somebody you do business with? Does that person look anything at all like the person that we just described? And of course, the answer is no. And yet that image is out there. So we’ve got this battle to face and we got to try and figure out what side we stand on? How do we want to align ourselves even in what closing is and how that can be and must be seen as a service rather than as a manipulation.

 

Andy Paul  16:04  

Wow. But you make it pretty clear. You’ll have a quote in the book which relates to that, which I thought was an interesting quote, which you said it’s impossible to continue to act in a manner that is inconsistent with your values and your character. 

 

Andy Paul  16:17  

I think what you’re saying is that salespeople feel forced, oftentimes to adopt behaviors that aren’t consistent with who they are.  And what is that the case?

 

Jeff Shore  16:29  

Well, look at this, I know we’re getting into some of your expertise here to where you’re looking to say, here’s the scale, here’s the skill. And if you have a salesperson who’s looking and saying, Okay, well, that’s the skill and I’m trying to fit it into somebody that I am not. I might try it for a little bit, but my mind is going to shut that off. So it’s just look at it and just think about goal setting and, you know, I want to lose 10 pounds, okay, well, that’s fine, but if you’re 190, you want to get to 180 But in your mind, you’re 190, and you can’t get off of that 190 image, you’re going to eat like your 190 you’re going to work out like your 190. And you’re never going to weigh 180 until your brain changes, that’s not gonna work. So if we look at it, and we say this is the skill of closing, and we throw it at somebody who has a different perception of what closing is and who they are as a human being serving other human beings, you got to get that paradigm, if you think that you’re going to make any progress in in changing the behaviors in any way. 

 

Andy Paul  17:29  

Well, you talk then back to a comment you’ve made before if you talk about closing not being this one epic event, you know, yeah. I like to say from my early days press hard there are three copies, which is a reference that most young people don’t understand. probably do it from the real estate business you do but it’s a series of smaller decisions. Right. And our agreements, let’s say yes, that you’re talking about honestly decisions, that sort of, I guess made me suddenly think about okay, well, how is that different from you know, sales people always talk about the trial close into trial closes and so on? How’s that different from what you’re talking about?

 

Jeff Shore  18:12  

Well, there’s two things here. First of all, what is the motive behind the closing? So if I’m talking about the series of agreements here, the most important perspective or paradigm for a salesperson to carry into that definition, is to understand that I’m not talking about an agreement that a customer makes with me, that’s not the important agreement. The important agreement is the agreement that a customer makes with herself or with himself. That’s the agreement that really makes a difference because it’s going to happen through this process that is, you know, our brains if you get into the psychology of closing a little bit, you know, our brains are making decisions whether we know it or not. The question is, and you could look at this boy, this whole, you know, dual process theory, I mean, a lot has been written about this, but they’re really a very simple level. You can look at the roof afflictive brain, and you can look at the reflexive brain. And that reflective brain is that brain, I’m taking all of the component parts, I’m putting it all together, I’m making a rational, reasoned decision. But the reflective brain is making all of those many decisions all throughout the process. Do I like you? Do I trust you? Is it cold in here? What do I think? And I’m doing it subconsciously all throughout the process. So here’s the problem, if I am not gaining agreements, and again, not for me, but that is not helping the customer to gain agreements with themselves. When they get to the very end, I say, Well, what do you think, would you like to make this yours? And now your customer is going to come back and say something like, I need to think about it. Now that frustrates salespeople. But you know what they’re really saying, what they’re really saying is, they need to think about it. So we teach them the skill and sales training. Well, what do you need to think about? And if they’re going to be honest, they’re gonna look at you and go, Well, I need to think about what I need to think about and that’s true. They’re not being smart. That’s really where they’re at. On the other hand, if we can help them to make agreements with themselves and what happens, they’re making a series of reflective agreements. And those reflective agreements take a much more prominent view in their brain. So now when they get to the end of they’re trying to lump it all together, they can look back at all of those reflective agreements. They’re big, they’re bold, they’re right there, and they can sum all those up and say, boy, it sure seems to make sense based on the component parts that got me to this place.

 

Andy Paul  20:31  

So when people start making these series of agreements with themselves when they get to the point of making the final decision, you know, they have a psychological need almost to be coherent with those and to be consistent with the decisions that they made already. 

 

Jeff Shore  20:53  

That’s the idea. They might argue with you, the salesperson, but they’re not going to argue with themselves. So if we get them into that decision making rhythm, and they are making those agreements with themselves, then yeah, it becomes illogical. Now look, there’s nothing manipulative about this because at any time, you can ask them a question that they’re going to disagree with. And they certainly have that right. But if you’re, if you want to make it easy for them to purchase, if you want to reduce the cognitive strain, the best way to do that is to help your customer purchase a little bit at a time but to make sure that’s reflective, or well reasoned a logical process rather than just the sort of from the gut type of thing.

 

Andy Paul  21:38  

So give an example of how you help them do that. So people understand that they are listening.

 

Jeff Shore  21:42  

Well, I think the best way to do that is to determine if you understand the way that a buyer wants to buy, then you can go back and you can reverse engineer your sales process accordingly. So if you look at what you say for example, you know, a customer is going to buy anything . Let’s just say a car, okay? So if I’m looking at and saying, here’s a consumer, they’re thinking about buying a car, what are the most important decisions that they’re going to be making about buying a car, they’re going to have to decide on, you know, whether they want an SUV or a sedan, they’re gonna have to decide on what the features that are most important, they’re going to decide on their price point. So there so if we look at it, we say, these are the most important decisions that our customer is going to make, then I can build my sales process just to be able to help them to make each of those key decisions, those milestone decisions separately, that will roll up into a final decision because all of the small decisions were made first. So obviously, this requires a deep knowledge of your customer, their motivation or their experience or their background. This will never stand alone. You can’t just look at it and say, Well, I’m not going to do anything else, but I’m going to close. It’s not the way it works. But if you know your customer well and you can take them through those processes, then you can figure out how they want to buy Then reverse engineer your sales presentation according to your customers buying milestones.

 

Andy Paul  23:04  

Right? And it’s to me, I want the first decision point, though, that a customer makes is this. And there’s been research done on this is the binary decision. Am I gonna do this or not? I mean, that at least I had my own experience to show him and I know there’s research that shows this as well as that proceeds all other agreements are the first. Yes, no. Yeah. And I think so often salespeople don’t pay attention to that. And that’s why they end up getting these no decision decisions with such high frequency if they just make the assumption that the customer since they’re engaging in the process that they must want to buy. So they think it’s a good idea. And so they don’t get that agreement at first. Am I gonna do this or not? 

 

Jeff Shore  23:51  

So my take on that is to think that the highest predictor of urgency in a buying decision is dissatisfaction. It’s not promotion, it’s not you know, your take away clothes, it’s what’s wrong with your life. And the higher the dissatisfaction, the greater the need to satisfy that dissatisfaction. So, you know, look if you’ve ever been to the point where you were so hungry that you were surprised at what you were willing to eat, you know, and you go to the refrigerator, you open the door, nothing to eat, close the door, wait five minutes, lower your standards, open the door again, there it is, it’s a jar of pickles for shelf in the back has been open since the Reagan administration. But if you’re hungry enough, you’re gonna eat it. The single greatest predictor of urgency is dissatisfaction. So, even when we’re looking at closing, as we’re looking at gaining agreements, there’s the question of saying, why is this customer standing here in the first place? And that is going to give you I think, the truest sign as to whether you’ve conquered that first hurdle does this person even want to purchase it? Is that why they are here?

 

Andy Paul  25:01  

Yeah, but then people could still want to purchase but make the decision not to at that point in time. And they could have dissatisfaction but to your point is it? There are other factors they have to take into account whether it rises to the level of dissatisfaction, and it’s worth the investment of time and money to fix it.

 

Jeff Shore  25:19  

Yeah, so yes, but that dissatisfaction can be scaled, you can put it on a scale, you show me something with a low dissatisfaction, I’ll show you somebody who’s got a much less probability of mine. The higher the dissatisfaction, the greater the chance that they’re going to have to solve it, because that dissatisfaction correlates to some sort of pain. So if I can understand what’s going on, what is wrong with their life right now. So for example, again, let’s go back to the car sales example. If I’m a car salesperson, and I asked somebody you know, so what do you think about buying a car? Oh, well, you know, we’re just looking and we’re just, you know, are they real? I don’t know yet. But if somebody says, Well, yesterday, I parked at the wrong spot, and a crane fell on my car, and the insurance company called this one morning. Instead it’s totaled, go buy a new car. Well guess what? That’s a buyer based on not your deal, not your special about your promotion, not your price. I’m not even how good you are based on their dissatisfaction. So if you can think about the dissatisfaction scale of your own customers, high dissatisfaction equals high urgency, they’re gonna buy somewhere. So the question is when they’re gonna buy from you?

 

Andy Paul  26:22  

Yeah, that’s interesting. I’m not sure I’m in complete agreement about the dissatisfaction driven. Yeah, I know that triggers sort of have to do with that. And I understand trigger theory, but, but at least in the business to business space. I mean, what I found over time is that, ultimately, people are going through the decision making process which scientists have shown as an integral part of every buying process, is what they call this mental test drive. And this test drive tends to be more aspirational, right. I mean, if I walk into a BMW dealership thinking I want to buy a car, you know, I sit behind the wheel in the showroom, and suddenly I’m taking a test drive down, one on one in California or co highway, one in California. You know, the wind blowing through my hair and the sun on my face and the top down and so on and, and that tends to be more aspirational. So I’m interested in what’s in about this mix between aspiration and pain because I, I tend to come down more on that people are motivated more by how things are gonna be different for them, which to me as aspirational as opposed to, I can fix the pain, but then I’m sort of maybe it’s same place I was before I just gotten rid of the pain. It’s a fair point.

 

Jeff Shore  27:27  

So if we look at, from my perspective, the single greatest predictor of urgency is dissatisfaction. But the dissatisfaction has to be joined with what I refer to in the book as future promise or the hope of what my life is going to look like. So it is true that you might have somebody who comes into well let’s use you know, let’s use real estate as an example you use home sale so somebody’s going out there looking at model or you’re walking into a show show home because they had nothing better to do on Sunday afternoon, right so satisfaction in their home right now. Not particularly high. This is very different from the customer. Is it because their house burned down, right? Or it’s a job below or whatever. So they’re looking around, they’re walking around the home and they’re going, Oh, man, look at this. It’s really cool over here. Well, you don’t have that. And I’ll look at this kitchen. It’s got all the latest and greatest and we don’t have that and what’s happening, that future promise is actually raising current dissatisfaction. It’s sort of like if you if you get an A, a brand new car that a friend of yours just bought, and now you’re looking at, you know, here’s the the, the front view camera and here’s the, you know, the air conditioned seats on a hot day, and here’s all this stuff and just a new car smell. Then you get back into your old car and no, what do you do? What is that smell? You know what it’s like, why is my day I have to turn around when I’m backing up. So what happens that to your point here that future promise that idea of as Daniel Kahneman puts it anticipated memory, it will create that dissatisfaction and in fact, it has to That dissatisfaction, something about my future has to separate me from my past in order to get at least a rationalization to be able to move forward along those lines.

 

Andy Paul  29:10  

Yeah, well, I think we’re doing somewhat the same thing. But it’s, the dissatisfaction becomes something that is an anchor weighing you down from reaching where you want to go as opposed to fixing a pain point. And then resolving a pain point, right? I mean, I could have, I could have a broken arm and we need to fix the broken arm. But when it’s fixed, I’m still living the same life I did, as opposed to living a new life. So yeah, I think there’s sort of similar things. It’s just what the motivation ultimately is. 

 

Jeff Shore  29:44  

Can I just jump in?

 

Andy Paul  29:45  

Go ahead. 

 

Jeff Shore  29:47  

I was gonna suggest that whether you’re talking about what’s wrong with your life now or what your customer wants to live their life once I like to look like moving forward. One of the things that often gets missed in closing is that we don’t pull those factors very effectively into the closing process is that we isolate them, we understand what’s wrong with your life, we understand what you want your life to look like. But they’re just even drawing that back into the recap of saying, you had said this was what was wrong here. You had said, This is what you want it to be right. Now let’s evaluate what we’ve got right here, according to your standards, not according to my product, but according to your standards. Now, there’s an opportunity to really have you’re putting your product on trial, but appropriately so. Because if it doesn’t match what the customer wanted to match in the first place, then we’re all just wasting our time and our breath.

 

Andy Paul  30:38  

Yeah, I think to that point, exactly. And I think that an effective way to do that, when you have that conversation is through a series of questions, which basically recap what you’ve been talking about to those points. So you’re recapping the agreements that you’ve reached already, and getting them to agree again, that yes, this is what we agreed to, or yes, this is what’s important to me or whatever that internal agreement is. And yeah, then you’re left with the last question, which is not a good time to make a change, sir.

 

Jeff Shore  31:07  

Yeah. And it speaks to the idea that if your final closing question has to be really super sophisticated, something probably went wrong in that process. And that’s why, when I even wrote close to 2.0, I wanted to break it down. And even the book itself is broken down into, it’s a really easy read, because it’s actually written in 30 chapters. And each chapter is only five minutes long. Because the point about closing is to look at it and say, Here’s five minutes of some thoughts on closing. But now the question is, how do I apply it? His closing is not a theory closing is an action. When I’m looking at the way that I’m gaining agreements, these are behaviors that have to be that well, it’s a behavior which means it has to be behaved on not just read about. So the idea here is to take 30 days on a journey to be able to break down all the small components and to be able to look at and say, Okay, how am I doing in this area? How comfortable am I, but I do think that there are a lot of salespeople who think so much about that final close and, and making sure that it’s, you know, extremely well crafted and important. I’ll tell you what I think if you’re doing your job, right, you gotta be looking at your customer and go, Yeah, what do you think?

 

Andy Paul  32:21  

No, exactly, exactly. So back to Daniel Kahneman. I mean, one of the things he’s famous for is what he calls the peak end rule that people have an experience and I look back at the experience, I basically factor in two items into their decision. One is the peak event during that experience, and when’s the last event? And so in my boot camp after sales, I translated that into sales are called peak and selling. And so you look at your various touch points during a sales process. If the close is considered a peak event, you’re in trouble. So your peak event needs to be how responsive you are up front the quality of your discovery questions. Yes, that happened before them as a part of the Leading up to those parents’ series of agreements. So to your point, exactly.

 

Jeff Shore  33:07  

Yes, if there is a peak moment or an end moment, it’s not actually their question. It’s in my mind, it should be the little mini celebration that takes place after they say yes, that somehow memorializes what just happened? It makes them feel good about that purchase. Now, maybe that’s a legitimate piquant. But if you’re putting all of your weight into the question itself, yeah, you’re doing a service.

 

Andy Paul  33:28  

Yeah, peak event that comes before the decision. I said, I always try to coach people. Let’s make discovery, the peak event. Know that or the first the first contact you have with them makes that that peak event, when unless that everything else is is more performer from that standpoint. So, Jeff, now we’re coming to the last segment of the show . I have some standard questions. I asked all my guests and they’ve been through this before as I had to change the questions for you. And so we got some new ones here. And so the first one, this is sort of an interesting question. We get a lot of controversy about this one. So In your mind, is it easier to teach a technical non salesperson how to sell or teach a salesperson how to sell a technical product?

 

Jeff Shore  34:10  

That’s a great question.

 

Jeff Shore  34:15  

More, there’s a lot of clarification that could go into that. But I would suggest that it’s probably easier to teach a salesperson how to sell a technical product. And the reason is because of that belief thing that we were talking about earlier. So many people believe that they can’t sell because their experience is trying to sell calendars or candles as part of a school fundraiser in the seventh grade. And they were so miserable, that they have this visceral reaction that says I can so hey, if you don’t believe that you can sell but I’m not sure that I can teach you how to sell anything at all. But if you have a core belief that you can sell in the first place, I’m not sure that the level of technical expertise that is required is the key factor there.

 

Andy Paul  34:59  

Okay. All right. Right. So the next question is what’s one book non business non sales book that you think every salesperson should read?

 

Jeff Shore  35:10  

For Non business non sales, I think I would probably go with David McCall’s biography of John Adams. But it is a great book just to really understand what really happened, right in what almost this grand experiment that almost didn’t happen in the first place. But when you look at the sales skills involved in trying to launch a country and trying to get people unified, it is an absolutely fascinating, fascinating work on how you apply, such as on a grand scale. Once you look at that, then you’re gonna look at it and go, and maybe the sales thing isn’t as hard as we thought it was.

 

Andy Paul  36:00  

Right, and especially when you take somebody like Adams, who was considered not to be a great person at a personal level, right, but was so influential in the Constitutional Convention in the shaping constitution. That, yeah, sort of interesting how somebody with very little personal attractiveness from a personality standpoint, was able to be so influential.

 

Jeff Shore  36:23  

But it certainly speaks to the idea of drive or perseverance of conviction. But he had a lot going against him originally. And to stand in the shadow of George Washington, you had Thomas Jefferson, who basically owned him. It was a really, really tough uphill battle. But again, if you feel to yourself to be any type of underdog in any area of your life, this is a great book to be able to look at and say, hey, how does the power of drive and conviction carry you through to do an amazing thing there’s some pretty amazing things.

 

Andy Paul  36:55  

I agree it was a great book. So here’s a tough one, if you could change one thing about your business self, what would that be?

 

Jeff Shore  37:07  

How authentic I am. I love to be here and you want to be open there. I am a basically insecure person. I remember the first time on an airplane I was reading about a phenomenon called the imposter syndrome, right? This irrational fear that people are going to figure out that you’re basically just making stuff up. I remember sitting on that plane, it is hiding behind the document going Kahoot, who told and it was my counselor who had seen a business coach for a long time who said, Jeff, let’s just recap your career and look at the stuff that you’ve done in the people view she she had to actually dial it back and say it’s an irrational fear that people are going to figure out it’s irrational. And so but I think if that’s one thing I do, struggle sometimes with that insecurity and on the other hand, maybe it keeps me motivated or challenged. Always want to try and exceed my own expectations.

 

Andy Paul  38:03  

Yeah, I think any of us who write for a living speak for a living podcast. Yeah, we all have that at some level or another. All right. Last question. So do you have a favorite quotation or words of wisdom that you live by?

 

Jeff Shore  38:19  

Yeah, it’s something that I have always taught my kids. It’s something that I try to live by. And it has to do with the idea. And I think it’s particularly timely right now, because I believe that we live in a society that really thinks very little about consequences. And so the quotation is, and I am going to cite it to Howard Hendricks, but I’m not sure about that. You’re free to make choices, you’re not free to escape the consequences of those choices. And so if we look at it we say that it works both ways. I’m free to make any choice that I want, but I’m not free to escape the consequences. If I make a bad choice, I have to accept the bad consequences as I make good choices that I’m entitled to. So we are free to make our choices however we want to, but we’re not free to escape the consequences. It is something that I really tried to raise my children by and even to look at it and say, all right, you know, high school, see what this kid did over here? You’re looking at the consequences. What was the choice? What happened over here? Right. And so, you know, I think we would be a better people if we were a little bit more conscious about how our choices lead to consequences. 

 

Andy Paul  39:28  

Excellent. I love it. All right. Well, Jeff, thanks for joining me again, really enjoyed the conversation. So tell folks how they can find out more about closing 2.0 and connect with you.

 

Jeff Shore  39:36 

Sure, everything is available on Jeffshore.com. We put out a Saturday morning newsletter. It’s absolutely free. It’s a video newsletter just a few minutes, especially for those of you weekend warriors who were out there doing your work on the weekend. It’s a Saturday morning sort of three minutes to sort of get your head on straight. So that’s available at Jeffshore.com as well as any of the other resources that we have out there.

 

Andy Paul  39:59  

Okay, excellent. Thanks for joining me and friends. Thank you for taking your time to join us today. And remember, as I always say, make it a part of your day every day to deliberately learn something new to help you accelerate your success and easy way to do that is to join my conversations with top business experts like my guest today, Jeff shore, who shared his expertise about how to accelerate the growth of your business. And if you enjoy accelerating and the value we’re delivering, then please take a quick minute right now to leave your feedback on iTunes, Stitcher, wherever you listen, be very much appreciated. So thanks again for joining. And until next time, this is Andy Paul. Good selling everyone. Thanks for listening to the show. If you like what you heard, and want to make sure you don’t miss any upcoming episodes, please subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or Stitcher comm for more information about today’s guests, visit my website at AndyPaul.com