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Episode #252
Andy Paul

How To Sell Consulting Services (Without "Selling Out")

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Summary

What kind of sales approach are you implementing? Are you sure you’re building relationships with your buyers the right way? Join your host Michael Zipursky as he talks with Andy Paul about mastering the art of selling consulting services without selling out. Andy is the author of Sell Without Selling Out: A Guide to Success on Your Own Terms, where he shares a guide to success and a proven framework to increase win rates and shorten decision cycles. In this episode, he discusses how you can find a way to make sales work for you and address buyers’ challenges through a sales method that seeks to care for what the buyers want. Tune in to learn how you can progress toward making better decisions, make sales faster, and understand the buyer’s process.

In this episode, we have Andy Paul joining us. Andy, welcome.

Michael, thank you for having me.

You are an author. You have more than one podcast. You’re a speaker, consultant and Founder of The Sales House. You’ve consulted for a whole bunch of well-known organizations around the world, including Square, Phillips, Grubhub and others. Your book, Sell Without Selling Out is all about how to win at sales without the salesy behaviors that buyers hate.

Everybody reading will be disappointed because we all love salesy things. It’s great to have you on. Start us off. We’re going to talk about how to sell without selling and how consultants can master the sales process and win more business consistently. Before we do that, take me back to your early days, Andy. How did you get into sales? Where does this journey for you begin?

It was straight off college. Many people fell into it because I had nothing better to do. I had no real plan. There’s no inkling. It was the first time I worked with Burroughs, which at the time was the second largest computer company in the world. If you had asked me if I was going into sales, I would have looked at you funny. It wasn’t even in my mind. I’m neither positive nor negative.

If our research here is correct, one of your bosses said to you that you weren’t being salesy enough.

It’s in my book Sell Without Selling Out. In my first professional sales training, I was sent by the company to a big regional training center. People were from all over the country there. The trainer’s takeaway was I was too analytical. I wasn’t salesy enough. I wasn’t going to make it in sales. That propelled me on this journey. That’s where I am. No one has to be that way to succeed in sales.

You got this feedback from the sales trainer, “Andy, you’re not being salesy enough.” How did you take that? What did you do at that time? You’ve written the book and done a lot of work in sales. Take us back to that earlier time in your sales career. What happened?

Getting experience and a little more success involves pushing back at various junctures in your career against managers telling you what to do and saying you know there's a better way. Click To Tweet

For me, I’d already determined in the sales training class. I was watching these videos that the company showed about the sales method they wanted us to use. A slick hair con man salesperson was the subject matter expert. I said to myself, “First of all, what human being acts this way? It’s not me. I can’t act that way and I’m not going to. If I wanted to avoid having one of the world’s shortest careers in sales, I have to find a way to make sales work for me.” That was the start of that journey. Otherwise, I would have been out very quickly.

Where does that mindset come from? You accepted that you were not going to leave that job. You’re saying to yourself, “I need to figure out how to make this work for me. I’m not going to do this the way they are.” Where does that come from? A lot of people who are not in the same situation would go, “I’m not going to be successful in this role because the superior or sales trainer is telling me I need to do it this way but that way doesn’t feel right to me.” A lot of people would have exited at that moment. You didn’t. Why?

There’s probably a complex series of reasons. One was not wanting to have to go tell my parents that I spent less than two weeks on my first job. It’s a combination of stubbornness and curiosity. As a very competitive individual, I thought, “There has to be a way to do this that didn’t require me to act in a way that was out of alignment with who I am or was as a person.” It’s that sense of challenge to say, “I can do this.” It’s something you grow into as you get to experience a little more success.

That involves pushing back at various junctures in your career against managers who are saying, “This is what you need to do,” and saying, “There’s a better way.” Hold me accountable for results. Judge me on the results, not on how I get it done. Find a better way that was perceived by the buyers to be a more positive experience and less manipulative, pushy, persuasion-driven salesy behaviors.

When you say that you were competitive, what does that look like? Were you in sports? Where does that come from?

In high school and college, I did some sports like running, swimming and soccer. It was the hate to lose. I would have considered that a big loss had I been forced to change careers so quickly. Maybe part of it too is as a History major, I was like, “What am I going to do?” I had a job so keep the job that you had. That was what you could do with a History major.

You have this undersigned that you want to be successful in this sales role. You’re not going to do it the way you’re being told you should because it doesn’t feel right to who you are as a person and how you’d want to operate. Where do you go from there? How do you begin to develop the skills so that you can be successful in this role when the advice you’re getting is not what you want to follow? Where do you take your next steps?

What you do is listen to your customers or buyers.

CSP 252 | Selling Consulting Services

 

How do you know that? You were a young guy. Where did that all come from?

I was fortunate that I had bosses that gave me the leeway to experiment and try things. I did. I looked at what the other people in my branch office were doing that was working for them and cherry-picked the things I thought might align with how I thought I could be best successful. It was a lot of experimentation. Within the experimentation, I was still achieving the results that were expected of me. I was fortunate early on to have a couple of bosses. It gave me enough rope to hang myself. At the same time, that gave me the freedom and the comfort to say, “There is a different way to do this.”

For me, the big influences early on were my customers as much as my bosses. I found that my buyers teach me how to sell to them. I went in with this open mind, curiosity-driven, there to serve, there to help and not to put my interests ahead of theirs and certainly, I want to hit my numbers. Per Zig Ziglar and others, they say, “You get everything you want out of life if you help enough other people get what they want out of life and start there.” I was this young kid who knew nothing about business.

I was 21 but I looked 16. I was selling it to the construction industry, the CEOs and founders of these heavy construction companies. They were giving me their time. If you’re wondering why they are giving me their time, it’s because when I was coming in, I was truly interested in learning about their challenges and what we could do to help them. I was fortunate that a couple of customers mentored me through some complex sales to say, “This is what I need to know. These are the types of things that would help us and provide a little bit of a roadmap for me.”

Do you think that part of that was because you were young? If you were 40 and tried and do the same thing, reaching out to new prospective clients in an industry that you’re not that familiar with and trying to sell to them or at least that’s your role, do you think you would have had the same success in taking you under their wing and teach you and be so open to that? Do you think it was your age that gave you a bit of an advantage?

The age might have been somewhat a factor but I don’t think it was decisive. That was just coming in as an open mind. The way most sellers act, regardless of the product or service you might be selling, you come into the buyers with the assumption that they need what you have. It’s like I’m pitching before I’m understanding. I was always conscious of not getting ahead of myself and not wanting to be exposed in the best way to not represent myself to be more than you are. To some degree, a couple of the customers like the idea that we’re helping to mold this younger person. It’s for anybody that comes into this situation.

At age 40, I was helping start new companies and new situations, selling categories of products that were never sold before. If you go in with that open mind and show that you’re interested first and foremost in what’s important to the buyer, age is not a factor. They want to spend time with you because they think, “Here’s somebody that might give me a perspective or share a perspective that I don’t have.”

I’d love to make this very practical and tangible as possible for everyone. Can you explain to me the difference between consultants who are going out and want to ultimately sell, serve, make an impact, make money and all that stuff? What do you see as the difference between somebody who has the wrong approach, where they’re maybe trying to sell or pitch too quickly? What is the right approach look like? If you are coming in with a curious mind, what is that language? How do you get in front of a prospective ideal client in a way where they’re going to be open enough or want to have a conversation with you if they know that you are a salesperson or are trying to offer them your services?

Understand first before pitching. Click To Tweet

First of all, don’t hide from the fact that you are trying to sell something. As soon as you start doing that, defenses get raised on the part of the buyers. Let’s look at the framework of what I lay out in the book where you can be selling out or selling in. Sell Without Selling Out is the title. Selling out is most succinctly when a person who’s selling puts their interests ahead of those of the buyer.

I’m here to sell you something. I’m going to pitch before I understand. I’m going to default to these persuasion-driven techniques that I’ve learned that have no value for the buyer. We know from research that human beings universally 100% resist being persuaded. In the book, I say that when you default to that, you’re selling out and people put their defenses up.

The opposite of that is what I call selling in. It’s based on four innate human behaviors, which are connection, curiosity, understanding and generosity. Let’s say your job is to persuade a potential client to buy your services. Your perspectives and the mindset you should have is, “My job is to go out and listen to that prospective client.”

Understand the things that are most important to them in terms of the challenges they face and the outcomes they want to achieve by addressing those challenges and then helping them get that. One is selling out, “I’m persuading you to buy what I have.” The other one is, “I’m listening to understand what you need and what’s most important to you and I’m going to help you get that.” That mindset difference dictates dramatically different motions or add behaviors on the part of the person selling.

I’ve seen two viewpoints on this. One is if you are selling into an organization. Let’s say it’s somebody in the C-Suite. They’re stretched thin on time. They’re not going to give their time to somebody unless it makes sense for them. If you’re coming in and the positioning is, “I have something important to share with you some unique insights,” they’re more likely to give you their time because they want to hear what you have to say.

The other viewpoint and I want to hear your pushback on how you filter this through is the other side is, “I’m not coming in with a very specific agenda. I’m here to listen and learn from you to be open.” That approach to it to somebody in the C-Suite is like, “I’m not going to just have a conversation because I want to teach you. You need to come in with value for me.” How do you view those two different perspectives?

I’m not sure that’s the right way to split the difference. I’m coming in with questions. I still have a product and service I sell but it’s what I am demonstrating first off. What I’m demonstrating first off is some people say you come in and have this concise pitch. The most effective way to lead off, and I talked about this in the book, is with a question. For instance, we’ve got six different types of questions or more but six I talk about as being core question types to use to deploy with your curiosity. One is called the insight question.

For me, when I’m talking to prospective customers, I lead with an insight question. The insight question is you’re going to ask the buyer something about their business that they reasonably should be expected to know but probably don’t. When I’m talking to CEOs and selling sales consulting, one thing that I’m focused on is productivity. I’ll ask a CEO, “Tell me. How many sales hours on average does it take you to move one of your average customers from the initial point of contact to a close?”

CSP 252 | Selling Consulting Services

 

Mostly can’t answer that. I have no clue.

Somebody will say, “I don’t know that. Should I know that? Why is that important?” We then have that conversation. How do you come up with these insight questions? You’re a little experienced in your business. You’ve talked and worked with our clients. If you’re selling a product, what I find almost 100% of the time is this customer has found a use case for your product or service that they hadn’t thought about during the sales process. Understand what that is so you can then use that as a new perspective or insight to share with the buyer. Leading questions is a good way to get started with a C-level person.

Is there any sales practice that rubs you the wrong way? It’s so outdated and terrible. It makes you cringe. What are 1 or 2 of those that come to mind for you?

Pitch before understanding. It’s people that don’t do any preparation for a meeting or do superficial understanding or not even a meeting for initial outreach. The way I look at it is our buyers have a limited amount of time and attention. When we ask them to consume some of that time and attention, they’re investing in us. They’re investing that time and attention in us. They need an ROI on that investment and a return.

If you do superficial preparation or no preparation and let’s say you’re doing a cold outreach to someone and don’t evince any level of interest in their business or them as individuals, how is it going to strike them? “I’m investing my time and you even reading this email is a complete waste.” Here’s the classic tale I like to tell and this happened to me twice. I have a podcast where we’ve done over 1,050 episodes so far.

Someone reached out to me on a LinkedIn direct message saying, “Andy, I was looking at your profile on LinkedIn. You’d be a great candidate to start a podcast.” I was like, “You said you are on LinkedIn and looked at my profile, which you didn’t do because you couldn’t miss the fact that I have a large podcast.” I don’t tend to reply to people on those things but I couldn’t resist. I wrote back and said, “You’re on LinkedIn. I’m a sales trainer. What are you doing? Why wouldn’t you look at the profile and say, ‘We don’t have time?'”

It’s that whole thing. I talk with clients a lot about value over volume or what most people do is volume over value. I’m going to try and automate my way because I can get in front of more people. It’s a numbers game. It’s backwards. That’s fine, maybe if you’re selling to consumers or a whole different approach. If you’re selling higher-valued services, you better make sure that you’re taking some time to understand who you’re trying to build a relationship with.

The other way to think about value too, and I talked about this in the book, is the easiest way for sellers to think about value is it equals progress. It means that as a result of interacting with you or whatever you sent to the buyer like an email, as a result of that, they’re closer to making their decision than they were before that. There was value. If there wasn’t and they’re not, there’s no value. It’s a simple way to think about it. Every time you reach out to ask the buyer to consume some of their time, are they going to be closer as a result of consuming? Are they closer to making a decision?

Your job is not to go persuade a potential client to buy your services. Your perspective and mindset should be centered around listening to that prospective client and understanding them. Click To Tweet

Let’s dive deeper into your book. We’ve maybe hit on some of these already but I want to make sure that we give them what they deserve. You talked about ways to build trust or establish rapport quickly with buyers. What are some of the best practices you’ve found that could help consultants to build a relationship or establish trust faster with a buyer?

The first thing is a rule that everybody should remember, which is to make yourself interesting to someone be interested in them. This gets back to the preparation we talked about. It gets back to me perhaps leading with the informed questions with the buyer. It shows that you’re interested. It’s not admitting that you don’t know the answer, which is what the pitch is saying. We know the answer before we even understand. Deploy your curiosity. Be interested in another person. That’s a great way to start building that connection. You’re saying it’s about you, not about me, even in your conversation that you have with buyers.

Those simple things I talk about in the book, for instance, are very common with salespeople. They may ask a question to the buyer. The buyer says, “We’ve got this problem. This is what the impact of it has been.” The seller has walked on a default, “We have a customer like that who has done this.” What you’ve done is you’ve gone from listening to them to talking about yourself again. Instead, a better thing to say is, “Tell me. What’s been the impact of that problem or challenge you’ve had? From a dollar perspective, what has that meant for you in the way you do your job?”

Keep the focus on them. Dig a little bit deeper on that. When you do the same, it’s like, “You sound like this other client we’ve had.” What you’re doing is shifting. It’s called a shift response. You’re shifting the focus away from them onto you where what you want to do is a support response where you want to understand more. Once you understand what’s important, it can help you.

Where is the appropriate place to bring other clients’ case studies stories and ways of demonstrating that you have helped somebody similar? When’s the right time or the appropriate time to do that?

It’s certainly early on but don’t do it in response when you’ve asked a question to a customer. Instead, you’re going to talk about the lessons you’ve learned from other customers you’re talking to. It’s like, “We’ve been working with several clients in your space. These are some of the common challenges. Maybe you haven’t surfaced everything you think could be the primary challenge yet because you’re their certain first call. How do some of those resonate with you?” It’s more effective to say, “We’ve worked with this one client. They’ve had this issue.” Demonstrate your expertise by talking more broadly, “We’re working with several customers in this space. These are the common things we’ve discovered. Are you encountering any of those challenges yourself?”

Another thing that you talk about in your book is how you can accelerate the sales process, essentially helping buyers to make decisions faster. Could you share with us a couple of those ideas of how consultants can go about making sales and getting to the decision faster?

It takes a little bit of in-depth explanation if you can. There’s a gentleman of Nobel Prize laureate Herbert Simon, back in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s who wrote about decision-making. He came up with what is called the theory of bounded rationality. He said that when people go to make decisions, they have three constraints. We all have three constraints. One is we don’t have unlimited time. We don’t have unlimited access to information. We don’t have an unlimited understanding of the information we see.

CSP 252 | Selling Consulting Services

 

We found that in those situations, which is the common everyday situation, what people do when they have a challenge or problem they’re trying to fix is to research their alternatives until they find a solution that satisfies the requirements and suffices to enable them to achieve their desired outcomes. When they do that, they make their decision. That is the classic good enough decision.

What Simon found was he created a new word that can join satisfies and suffices called satisficers and said people satisfice because they make a rational calculation like, “I could spend another 30, 60 or 90 days investigating potential solutions to those challenges we have. I’m not going to come back with anything that’s so markedly better that it’s worth the additional investment in my time and attention. What I have is good enough. We’re going to do it.” The key to being able to reach a good enough decision, as I lay out in the book, is there are these various milestones. Being first helps in those cases.

If you can be the first to form that trust-based connection with the buyer and reach the level of understanding of what’s truly most important to the buyer, you can be the first to work with them to create this vision of success. When customers make a decision to purchase your consulting services, a product or a service of other sorts, what are they buying? They’re not buying the service. They’re buying the vision of what that service is going to do for them. If you’re the first to get to that, you co-create the vision of success with the buyer.

Forrester Research did a study a couple of years ago at this point about this. They were doing a study in the IT space. They said, “If you are the seller that gets the buyer to buy into your vision of success first, your odds of winning the business standard is 65%.” It’s pretty huge. You have these milestones like, “If I can be the first to connect, to understanding and vision of success, chances are I’m going to help the buyer get to that point where they make the good enough decision.” Where this becomes more compelling than many years ago when Simon was stalled in this theory or philosophy is that increasingly, whether products and services, the differences between them are perceived to be razor thin by most of our buyers.

If there’s 1 sales consultant, there are 1 million sales consultants. If there’s 1 sales trainer, there are 1 million sales trainers. If there’s 1 piece of software for 1 CRM system, there are 1 million CRM systems. In the mind of the buyer, the differences are so thin between these products. What then becomes the tie-breaker? The tie-breaker becomes their experience with you as a seller. It’s the quality of their buying experience as they judge it. This idea of making sure you’re the first to connect, deploy your curiosity and ask these great questions is they start becoming the substance of tie-breaker. It’s about you at the end of the day. It’s less about what you sell. It’s about you.

The first to connect could seem a bit scary to many people because it feels like you have to rush to get in front of your ideal clients. What I heard you say as a follow-on to that is that even if you’re dealing with a client that has an existing consulting firm, where there’s an incumbent that’s serving them, if you can be the first to help them to connect new dots, see things, experience things and help create that vision of success as you talked about, that’s a vast opportunity for everybody out there. It’s to figure out how you can show up and create that experience, add new value and provide new insights, perspectives and ideas. It ultimately serves that buyer at a level they haven’t been served before and makes that whole experience so valuable.

That’s what they’re looking for. That’s one thing that makes this a good enough decision so powerful. I had experienced that so many times in my career before I had read about Simon where I had the words to put to it. I was winning deals before I thought I should have. It’s like, “We have a couple more months to go.” It wasn’t that I was getting the order from the customer.

I was getting their buy-in that this was the direction they were going to go. I called it winning the sale before I won the order. I had won. What I discovered was, because I consciously tried to start front-load the value in my selling process, is the ultra response to the customer when they had questions and concerns or if there was an inbound lead, be ultra-super responsive to that.

If you help other people achieve what's important to them, you achieve what's important to you. Click To Tweet

Make sure to be truly responsive in the sense that, “I’m not just getting back to you quickly. I’m getting back to you with the information you need.” I was being the classic definition of responsive. What I found is people were making these decisions. Our small company is working with a lot of startups competing with big tech companies and we were winning these deals that didn’t seem like we should be winning. It was all based on that. We were helping them. We’re giving value to them by helping them make progress through their buying process that the others weren’t. That gave us a lot of trust and credibility.

It sounds like, on one side, you have this best practice or the place that people should be focused on, which is how you can create that experience that truly adds value for the buyer where you’re giving even more than you might initially plan or expect. You’re fully serving them. You’re being responsive and detailed in your responses. You’re showing up. The opposite to that is the firm, company or the person appears and maybe tries to hold back some information. Their focus is much more on a transaction where they’re just trying to get the yes. They’re trying to move things forward. They’re not giving as much as they can.

I’d be interested in your perspective on this because people in that latter scenario who aren’t giving as much and are not providing as much detail fear that if they give too much, the buyer won’t need them. There’s fear that if they wait too long and don’t try to “close the deal,” they might miss that opportunity. What advice would you have in terms of how you show up? Is there ever a time to try and push that sale forward to get a decision faster? Do you give and give and when the time is right, the buyer will say, “I’m ready to move forward?” How do you balance those two?

It’s not give and give. It’s giving with an agenda. I talked about this in the book. Generosity is one of the four pillars of selling in. It starts with this premise which Zig Ziglar said, “If you help enough other people achieve what’s important to them, you achieve what’s important to you.” Buyers aren’t under any illusion about the fact that you’re there to sell something to them. People want to try to hide behind that. One of the ways they do that is by being what I call an unrestrained giver. Meaning that I’m not going to give everything to you.

I’m going to have to give everything and hope something sticks. You see this all the time. Instead, you want to be able to ask an answer to questions about every opportunity working on the qualified opportunities you’re working on, which are, 1) What does the buyer need from me to make progress toward making their decision? 2) As a result of having received that from me, what are the next steps they’ll commit to take? You should be able to answer that about every opportunity you’re working on at every point in time, “What does the buyer need for me next to make progress toward making a decision?”

It puts the onus on you as a seller, whether you’re a consultant, CEO or salesperson. You are very intentional in the way you interact with your buyers. It’s not just give and give. It’s what you need from me based on your current situation. Based on my level of understanding of you and your level of understanding of me, what do you need to help you make progress toward making a decision? It’s operating with that level of intent. That separates sellers from those who are helping the buyers achieve the things that are important to them. Those are pushing their products.

How much of this process, if any, are you mapping out with the buyer? Is the best practice to say, “Here’s the process that we’re going to go through together,” at some point in that conversation so that you know what those milestones are that you’re going to be helping them to get clarity on? Are you keeping that agenda more to yourself as the seller where you’re trying to go through things and know that things won’t line up? How much of that is a collaborative, intentional dialogue between you and the buyer?

It should be collaborative. You should be able to paint out an account plan or a mutual action plan. The thing is sometimes sellers gravitate to those and get too hamstrung by what they’ve laid out thinking, “This is the process the buyers are going through. That’s not the process the buyer is going through.” While you have something that you sell, sell repeatedly and sell throughout the selling process, you might be selling something buyers buy once every five years. They don’t have a documented process for that.

CSP 252 | Selling Consulting Services

 

It’s good to map out with a buyer what you think, based on your experience, working with other buyers of the product or service where this is what typically happens but don’t get locked into that. It’s important that this whole level of intentionality is you stay in touch with exactly what the buyer does need based on your conversations with them as opposed to this process plan you’ve mapped out because, at some point, they may diverge.

In my mind, one of the biggest causes of this crisis of performance or having B2B sales is that people still make everything in lockstep in this process. The process is important but it rarely maps the reality. It’s a framework, not a recipe. You need to have that flexibility and the intellectual humility to say, “This is diverging. If it’s diverging, do I understand what the buyer is trying to accomplish? Do I just assume I do? I need to figure it out. I need to ask more questions. I should get to that level of understanding.”

You can then stay on track. Make sure you’re still aligned with where they’re going. Gardner put up a famous flow chart about buyer enablement and the buyer journey. It’s this hugely complex flow chart that starts, stops and starts all over again. It’s like this is generally what they do but it’s made up as they go along.

You’ve put out a lot of content over the years. You have a massive following on LinkedIn. You have almost 200,000 people that follow you there. How did you do that? What were the steps? If you’re LinkedIn platform or profile was a book, what did the chapters look like that you’ve gone through to get to 200,000 followers?

It starts with this commitment to being a creator. I don’t think anybody builds a following if they’re not a creator on LinkedIn. That means you’re creating content of one type or another on a very consistent basis and sharing it with the people on the platform. For me, that got started with my podcast back in 2015. It’s a pretty small number of followers at that point. I hadn’t focused on it but I started this podcast. We quickly grew to five episodes a week and started putting a LinkedIn post on every podcast episode. They were good episodes. People enjoyed the content. It started building from there. We typically post as I create the content. My son is my business partner. He’s the LinkedIn expert. He posts 2 or 3 times a day.

There are periods where it’s just 1 but there’s always at least 1, oftentimes more. It’s having that commitment to creating content that people engage with. That’s the other part as you get into it and start doing that. Do you need to use a tool like Shield or some others that track analytics? If there’s a certain type of content people are engaging with, write more of that.

I love that answer because so often, people will say, “What’s the strategy to get a great response on LinkedIn?” What essentially I’m hearing you say is you try a lot of stuff. You see what works and do more of the stuff that works and less of the stuff that doesn’t work. Most people are looking for that one silver bullet. They try something and it doesn’t work and then they stop doing it. They haven’t even given it a real shot.

I think of Seth Godin when we’re talking about putting something out every single day. If you’re being consistent, you know that a lot of it is not going to stick and make as big of an impact but some things will. With venture capital or angel investing, most of the things you invest in are not going to work out but for those that do, you’re going to have 100% that account for everything plus them.

One of the biggest causes of the crisis of performance or having B2B sales is that people still make everything in a lockstep process, instead of saying, process is important, but almost never maps to reality. Click To Tweet

We’ve got posts that have 600,000 interactions. Most don’t. We try to be deliberate about what we’re doing and try to stay on the brand because we’re promoting a book. The lessons behind the book are important. Between the podcast and other posts, it’s about being consistent on it. You could even make an argument that I should be posting more frequently. Consistency is the key.

I want to ask you about this because you mentioned the podcast a couple of times. You had a podcast that was called Selling With Purpose. That lasted for about six months, according to LinkedIn. I’m interested because you have two podcasts that you’re still active with according to LinkedIn. Is that correct?

No. I started my podcast in 2015 called Accelerate With Andy Paul. In early 2020, that podcast was acquired by a company called Revenue.io. It was renamed Sales Enablement with Andy Paul. That’s the continuation of that first one. Selling With Purpose was a limited series we did from June to July of 2020, talking to sales leaders about how the pandemic affected them and their sales efforts. It was a single six-episode arc.

I’m glad that you clarify that. What was it like selling a podcast or having a podcast being acquired? What did that look like?

It was unexpected for one. For the acquiring company Revenue.io, they saw a lot of value in the thought leadership and aligning it with the product they were selling and the philosophy of the CEO. There’s also a huge archive of content that we went back and optimized for search. It’s a great traffic driver as well for Revenue.io on their website. It’s the mix of those two things.

In that case, are they purchasing the podcasts as an asset? Are they also purchasing you delivering the podcasts? If you said, “I’m not going to run that podcast anymore,” does that deal still hold? Are you bundled in that where you still need to be active in that podcast to get whatever they were paying for?

They would like me to stay longer for sure. In podcasts, the relationship is with the host. It’s not with the show. I do a lot of mentoring people that are starting podcasts and are new to podcasting. I said, “Remember, you’re the star of the show. People are going to come back because they form a relationship with you or you and a co-host if it’s you and the co-host. It’s not because of the show.” There’s a reason it’s called Jimmy Kimmel Live! or Late Night With Stephen Colbert because that’s what people tune in to see. In general, a podcast is a host. We’ve been very fortunate. We’ve formed a strong relationship with lots of people. They keep coming back and listening.

There are a couple of questions here before we wrap up and then we’ll make sure that people can learn more about you and the book. You have podcasts of over 1,000 plus episodes. You have the work that you do and the books you’ve written. What are 1 or 2 habits that you have daily that you find are critical to your productivity, performance, focus and being able to be successful? Are there 1 or 2 things that come to mind that you do regularly?

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Part of it is personal. It’s exercise and discipline basis. I stay healthy as much as I can. That’s important. I love to bicycle, run and swim. I haven’t so much in the last few years. It’s fitness in that regard. That’s important. From a business standpoint, there are two things. One is I read a lot all the time. I don’t think I can overestimate how important that is.

My next question is going to be, “In the last few months or so, what’s one book, fiction or nonfiction, that you enjoyed and would recommend?” That’s my question for you. I’m interested to know. Are you always reading nonfiction? Business? Sales? Philosophy? Give us a sense of what you’re reading.

It’s a mix. I make a commitment. If an author comes on my podcast, I read their book. Depending on the year, I may read 50 to 100 sales/marketing/business books. Some are good. There’s a book called A Minute To Think by Juliet Funt, which was a great book about time management. It’s about setting aside time in your day, which is what I call white space, to think, which doesn’t get enough focus from business people in general. It talks about how to manage email more effectively. It was a very interesting book. There have been several people who have written interesting books I’ve interviewed on the show.

I try to scan lots of different news sources during the day. I’ve done this in my entire professional career. It used to be in print form and then it’s all online. I’d always be subscribing to three newspapers I always had, which are Wall Street Journal and local newspapers on either one like New York Times or LA Times that I would scan. I do the same thing, except I do it online. In my sales career, I was always able to talk to people about things that might be important to them. I was maybe more well-informed than average but nonetheless. I was selling to people around the world. I spent fifteen years of my career traveling extensively and internationally. That came from just being curious about other things. Reading is hugely important.

There’s something I read when I was in Hawaii for a few days. I read volume one of Rick Atkinson’s trilogy on the American Revolution. He had written the trilogy about World War II, which was fantastic a few years ago. The first volume was called The British Are Coming. I love political history and military history so I try to read about them. I sprinkle in some detective novels and stuff like that in between. I love mystery fiction.

I want to make sure that people can learn more about you and your book. Is AndyPaul.com the best place for people to go to learn more? Is there a dedicated website? Where should we send them?

AndyPaul.com is great. LinkedIn is great too. I encourage people to go there first and foremost. Connect with me there and follow my content. If you have any questions, feel free to message me. AndyPaul.com has information about the book. You can download a free chapter. Take a little fun assessment we have. There’s a spectrum between selling out on one end and selling it on the other. It’s good to see where you sit on that spectrum between the two. Listen to my podcast, Sales Enablement With Andy Paul or buy my book anywhere the book is sold online like Amazon or other places.

Andy, thank you again so much for coming on. I appreciate you sharing some of this with us. Congratulations on your book.

Thank you, Michael. It’s been fun. I appreciate it.

 

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About Andy Paul

CSP 252 | Selling Consulting ServicesI’ve been in sales for over four decades. My first sales job was selling women’s shoes at JC Penney. In my professional career I’ve sold everything from computers to small businesses to complex communications systems that sold for tens of millions of dollars to some of the world’s largest enterprises. I closed hundreds of millions of dollars in products and services before starting my own company.

I was not a typical salesperson. I’m a bit of an introvert. My first employer didn’t think I’d ever succeed because they believed I was “too analytical.” I was a history major in college yet I spent most of my career flying around the world selling complex technical products to enterprises on every continent but Antarctica.

I’ve grown and managed large sales teams from scratch. I’ve coached average performers into being top producers.

And, yet, every new position I took on in my career presented a challenge and required that I re-invent myself. I had to educate myself about new technologies, new solutions, new products, new customers and their unique requirements. Every single day I had to take the responsibility to make myself smarter and better. There was no training that would do that.

It was this experience of assuming responsibility for my own career education; of using day to day learning to power my way to whatever successes I achieved, that inspired me to start my own company in 2000. Since then I’ve been on a mission to educate sales leaders and sales professionals about the power of continuous learning to transform how they perform.

I’m #8 on LinkedIn’s list of the Top 50 Global Sales Experts to follow. More than 170,000 people have signed up to follow the advice I share there. My podcast, Accelerate Your Sales!, is on the top of every list of the best sales podcasts with over 2 million downloads to date, and was on INC Magazine’s list of the top leadership podcasts. My two award-winning books, Zero-Time Selling and Amp Up Your Sales, were both Amazon best-sellers.

And, you know what? Even today, with all my experience, I’ll be the first to admit that I still don’t know everything I need to know about sales. I’m still learning and perfecting my craft every single day.

 

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