Mike Brunel: Selling Is Not Optional

Transcript

[0:00:33] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Mike Brunel, author of Selling Is Not Optional. Do you think that you can’t do sales? Maybe it’s because the idea of cold calling freaks you out or maybe you just don’t want to be thought of as a sleazy sales person? Well, Mike says that it doesn’t have to be that way. Mike believes that we are all in sales. We need to change how we think about it. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a healthier sales mindset that will empower you to get better results for your business and now, here is our conversation with Mike Brunel. If you had to pick a meal to couple with your book, what would you pick?

[0:01:37] Mike Brunel: I’m a big fan of Italian food so any Italian dish I can get my hands on, I kind of you know, being a kiwi, we try to – we like to stick to the lamb and those types of dinners so between Italian and lamb, I’d probably stick to beautiful New Zealand lamb.

[0:01:52] Charlie Hoehn: Yes.

[0:01:54] Mike Brunel: From around here.

[0:01:55] Charlie Hoehn: Excellent choice.

[0:01:56] Mike Brunel: I’m can imagine seeing a few potatoes, nice roasted of potatoes with lots of gravy and you know, lovely vegetables, that would be my comfort. As far as a drink goes, I guess, I’ve got one there for you if you wanted to know that one.

[0:02:11] Charlie Hoehn: yeah, please.

[0:02:13] Mike Brunel: Probably malt scotch, Charlie.

[0:02:14] Charlie Hoehn: Good choice. Which brand?

[0:02:16] Mike Brunel: I don’t really care, as long as it’s good malt scotch you know? But like sales, it takes time to prepare it and you’ve, you know, you’ve got to sometimes sit down and enjoy a good malt scotch, and I only ever have it just in a glass, at least two thumb full, you know, once a week or so, it’s good.

[0:02:34] Charlie Hoehn: Agreed. Mike, take me back to the early days of your career in sales when it wasn’t so easy and when you really had to work to get good enough at it that you are eventually able to write a book.

[0:02:50] Mike Brunel: Okay, I probably started when I was really young in my teenage years and I used to work in a sheering shed or you know, a sheering games in New Zealand. As a young man, my job was to sit near or stand I should say, near the huge man that’s sheering this sheep and my job was to pick up the fleece and throw it on the fleece table and you know, clean around and all those sorts of things. The first thing I learned really was I had to get on with the sheerer you know? I was his aid or his support and the first thing about that taught me really was about you know, in a lot of ways, you got to learn to get on with people and that was a real lesson for me really young and then, when I sort of reach my later teenage years, I left school pretty early, I didn’t have a college degree but I was reasonably good at rugby union so I traveled across to Australia and started to play rugby over the year and that’s when I really got involved in selling. Part of I think my first job was I had to sell stationary to news agents and stationary shops all over Sydney and a lot of that job was really going door to door or you know, shop to shop and introducing myself and trying to build rapport and I’m telling you, some of the shops, I’ve been thrown out of, purely because I just didn’t have my script right or I didn’t have my speech right but over time, I learned that –

[0:04:22] Charlie Hoehn: Were you ever actually physically thrown out? What was the worst time, the worst sales moment that you can remember?

[0:04:30] Mike Brunel: I think there’s this particular area in Sydney which is pretty tough area and a lot of the business owners there probably have their shops closed, their shop doors closed permanently but I remember going into one particular stationary shop and I went in there and I said, “Hi, I’m Mike Brunel” and they said, “Well, look, I’m sorry but you know, what part of no don’t you understand? Don’t come near me, good bye.”

[0:04:52] Charlie Hoehn: Wow.

[0:04:54] Mike Brunel: Having said that, that happened very rarely.

[0:04:56] Charlie Hoehn: So you’ve been burned before?

[0:04:57] Mike Brunel: Yeah, they had you know? “Who are you? I mean, you’re knocking on my door.”

[0:05:01] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah.

[0:05:01] Mike Brunel: “You're probably the 50th person that’s knocked on my door today.” You know, that’s pretty hard to take but then you might go around the next corner and you might visit a client that you’ve already got and that you’ve built a rapport and they welcome you because what used to happen is, you know, every Sunday evening I’d have to take all the products that I was going to sell for the week and I put you know, some prices on the products. Then I put them in a big blue bag and I’d walk around with that big blue bag and I’d have to you know, knock on some businesses and introduce myself and you know, I’d open up the bag and they’d buy out of the bag of all the products that I had and that was fun. Some people there they got to know me, I got to sell more and I got to sell more. I really learned my craft of selling, working for that company and doing that particular job early on. That was sort of the first part of that journey I guess of learning to be a sales person.

[0:05:55] Charlie Hoehn: When did you really feel that you may have had a breakthrough or was it a bit more gradual?

[0:06:03] Mike Brunel: I think it was more gradual. I remember, you know, traveling out of Australia, New Zealanders are well known for traveling the world and you run into them in all sort of strange places so I ended up in United Kingdom and working cleaning carpets but what had happened is because I had these sales skills, they we relooking for someone to help go and present the cleaning company’s rule. That’s you Charlie, sorry mate.

[0:06:31] Charlie Hoehn: It is.

[0:06:33] Mike Brunel: What the hell happened here? Sorry mate.

[0:06:35] Charlie Hoehn: If you have the page on the flow, it’s playing the audio up at the top.

[0:06:42] Mike Brunel: I’m really sorry mate, I was in full flight there.

[0:06:44] Charlie Hoehn: No worries.

[0:06:46] Mike Brunel: I started to talk about – I went to the United Kingdom and I was cleaning carpets there but after a short time, I ended up going out and actually selling the services of the carpet company and this particular cleaning company are really top end so you’d go on and meet some very wealthy people in some of the most amazing homes in London. I really got, even hone my skills even more and even more out there. Eventually, with a broken heart, I ended up in New Zealand and I got a job on a radio station selling radio time and really, that was my moment when I really discovered something that I really love doing and I ended up being in that career for several years until I started my own consultancy company, called NRS Media. We took NRS Media out of New Zealand into Australia, then into the United States up into Canada and after 25 years, we had, 20 years I should say, we had all our consultancy services in over 23 countries and 11 languages and we had pretty close to 200 staff in offices in Atlanta and in Toronto and London and even a little office in Bogota, South America and South Africa. That was sort of the journey and the lights really came on when we started to build NRS Media as a media company.

[0:08:11] Charlie Hoehn: Well, let’s talk about what ultimately made you want to write this book? If you could pick one idea or the one thing that our listeners can take away from your book and either use this week or share with their team, what would it be?

[0:08:29] Mike Brunel: I think I have a saying, who’s afraid of the big bad sales? What I mean by that, I think we’re all in sales but we need to understand that one, we have to have the right mindset around selling and that’s a really important thing to remember, also, you’ve got to sell something that you believe in and you’ve also got to be authentic. If you have a good product and as good service and you believe in it, then you in a way are obligated to go and tell people about it. I guess part of my book is to say, “Look, it’s okay guys, we’re actually all in sales. If we really hung up about sales, we can call it something else. At the end of the day, it’s all about relationships” and so my book really takes people on a journey about how to have the right mindset, how to learn about your product, how the importance of having good questions when you go and see clients, the importance to know that you know, if a client says to you that they’re not interested. You know, what are you going to explore with him to find out why they’re not interested. All those type of tools that you can use are really important and I think the book is that.

[0:09:32] Charlie Hoehn: Mike, can I have you say that again but can you have the point be like, “don’t call it sales, call it relationships.” It has to be one idea that they can immediately jump on because the way that answer started was, don’t be afraid of the big bad sales, call it sales, don’t call it sales, call it a relationship. Here, a bunch of other ideas in the book, I don’t want you to get, tell me anything else about the book. I want you to drill one really solid idea that they can take away that can be a paradigm shift and I like, “don’t call it sales, call it relationships” and you can tell a story about that, you can elaborate on that point but stick with the one thing that you really want to drive home and have it be that.

[0:10:17] Mike Brunel: I think the one key point in the book is that selling is a relationship business. Really is about creating good relationships with your clients and that’s the underlining principle of the book, there’s lots of tools you can use to do that.

[0:10:33] Charlie Hoehn: How can we create better relationships with our clients, what are things that the average sales person is doing now that can take them to the next level?

[0:10:47] Mike Brunel: I’ve probably got three. The first one is, keep your agreements. For me, that’s one of the biggest things I notice when I go around the world and train sales people is that they say they’re going to do something and then they don’t do it. If you say you’re going to be, going to see a client or talking to a client at a specific time, then be on time. My dad always used to say to me, “being on time is being early.” So be on time is the key one for me, the other one also is that you don’t always get the sale but always try and keep the relationship going. Often, when I go and see clients, I take my book with me so that’s a way of giving something to them for free. Secondly, if I have a good relationship with that person or I have a good discussion regardless of that, I’ll often send them a thank you note. A hand written thank you note that I put in the mail and I send it to them because no one does it. I don’t do five or six a week, I do two or three times a month. Sometimes I’ll even go back to clients that I haven’t had for a while and I’ll send them a how are you doing note. Those are a couple of things that I do. The final one is, if you have a good product, you’ve got to learn to be authentic. You got to be yourself. People buy people, simple as that.

[0:12:05] Charlie Hoehn: Being authentic is advice we hear all the time but authenticity is pliable, right? Depending on who you’re talking to. Can you explain what you mean by being authentic as a sales person?

[0:12:23] Mike Brunel: I think you have to be true to yourself more than anything and what I mean by that is that you’ve got to learn to be comfortable in your own skin, that to me, that’s about being authentic and so therefore, if you know your product and you know that you believe in that product then that authenticity will actually come through. I think that that’s one of the key things that I believe makes a sales person better than most.

[0:12:48] Charlie Hoehn: You know, I’ve heard Mike that actually, this may be Devil’s advocate or this may be real out there. I can’t remember, I’ve actually heard that being confident is not necessarily equated or correlated with being a good sales person that you can be vulnerable, a little bit weaker or insecure in the sales process and still get good results. Is being authentic in that particular case of being kind of weak or less confident is that still being authentic?

[0:13:28] Mike Brunel: Yeah, I think it is, I think it’s being human, I mean, it’s being human and I think in reality is that the more mistakes you make in that journey, I guess the more you learn and I know that everybody says, “the more mistakes you make, the more you learn.” It is true, some of the biggest mistakes that I’ve made have given me such learnings. I think it gets back to just being human and you know, so many sales people will try and bluff their way through. If you don’t know something, just say it and clients get that and your clients will get that really quickly. Therefore, that’s a chance, there’s a connection when that happens, I don’t know what it is but there’s a connection if you say, “Hey look, I don’t know the answer but I’ll go and find out for you” as opposed to trying to bluff your way through, that just doesn’t work.

[0:14:10] Charlie Hoehn: yeah.

[0:14:11] Mike Brunel: Clients pick that up.

[0:14:12] Charlie Hoehn: All right. Mike, I want you to give me a little bit of a tutorial because I don’t feel like a sales person and I’ve been put in sales roles because like you said, selling is not optional, I completely agree with it. But, every now and then, I find myself just – it’s almost imperceptible, transitioning into feeling tense because I feel like I have to guide the person into a purchase now and I’m not exactly sure how to turn that off because when I just lay back and I don’t have any expectation of a result and I just try to be helpful to the person, it ends up going well, but I still struggle with keeping that relaxed attitude and not letting the salesiness creep in. How do I get out of that?

[0:15:04] Mike Brunel: One thing that I often teach sales people is don’t listen to sell, listen to hear. Therefore, if you’re presenting a product or a service to a client, you’ve got to be present and you got to actually hear what they’re saying to you. If for example that you went into every sale and you knew, no matter what happens, as long as I can add some value to this client, be myself in front of them and if I happen to get a sale at the end of it, fantastic. If you have that attitude, you would be able to sell much better. Because at the end of the day, you’re selling a product you believe in, you love what you’re doing and if you do that properly and you know your product, it will come through.

[0:24:49] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. Listen to hear and not to sell.

[0:16:35] Mike Brunel: Great.

[0:16:37] Charlie Hoehn: Just focus on helping. It’s true, now that I think about it, I mean, I think part of the reason that problem creeps in is because I feel a little pressure to get the sale, to be 100% because I’m used to having a high percentage of success in a lot of things. But the reality is, most people are not the right fit or I shouldn’t say most but a lot of people that you talk to won’t be ready right at that moment and that’s okay, and you can still help them.

[0:17:17] Mike Brunel: The stats coming out these days for sales people is that you got to touch people at least eight times these days before you even get in front of them. Most people give up after four. The reality is, sometimes we just have to ask for the business as well and not be afraid of it. For me, you know, what stops us is that fear of rejection.

[0:17:35] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:17:36] Mike Brunel: If you don’t ask, the answers don’t know. I have a saying and I often use it, “It’s no is actually spelled know.” If someone says no to me, I go, okay, I haven’t answered everything that they need to know or do I need to ask more question to be – you know, get some more clarity, do I need to say, “Hey look, I understand that you’re saying no, but can you tell me a little bit more about why you’re saying no to me.” Just a couple of points, that’s all, I just would be really keen to know.

[0:18:05] Charlie Hoehn: At what point do you realize that the person saying no to you doesn’t need more information about the product or I should say the person who’s hesitating to buy from you. At what point do you know, it’s not the information that they’re lacking, it’s something else.

[0:18:23] Mike Brunel: I think the key thing is that you have to qualify the client before you see them so you have to get a bit of a sense of, this is the right client, this is the right client that can buy my product or service and so you don’t go in blind and just you know, like I used to in those old days and knock on the doors, you have to do a little more research. I think that you have to be really clear on is this the right person that’s going to buy my product? If it is, I’ve got a better chance than someone that is completely cold. That’s an important element to remember these days and we can all do it. We can research them, we can find out on LinkedIn, we can find out on their websites, we can find that all about and then as we build a profile of them, we can be asking ourselves the question, “Is Charlie the right person for me to go and present my product to?” “Is Amanda the right person,” whoever it is, you got to be really clear on this, is this the right person?

[0:19:19] Charlie Hoehn: Right.

[0:19:20] Mike Brunel: Because you have a bit of chance of being successful then.

[0:19:24] Charlie Hoehn: You said the number eight at least eight touch points before you get somebody to take action. I’ve heard from other salesmen, it’s up to 17 if you really want to be world class because sometimes a big sale might take two years. How do you – it’s hard for me to emotionally be okay with that sometimes because I’m just like, look, I don’t have the patience to continually follow up. Is it just not in my makeup to be that type of person? Are there other people who are better suited for this role of being a sales person or do I just need to suck it up and be more resilient and figure out a way to stay in touch up to 15 to 17 times until I get a hard yes or a hard no?

[0:20:18] Mike Brunel: I think from my perspective, 17 is a lot and there is certainly particular contracts and deals that I have done when I owned in NRS Media that we will have a two year waiting for a particular opportunity and so we would make sure that we communicate with them once very quarter, add some value to their business because ultimately people will change their mind from buying one product off you than buying a new product off someone else and it usually happens because A, they’ve had a bad experience. All right, so they will go and check out somebody else or two, it’s time for a change and they’ll go and search out another vendor or another person to purchase from. So the key thing for any sales person, if you believe that that client should buy your product or service you have to continually talk to them in some form over a set period and that can be done by sending them information. You know sending them my book for example or even just sending them things that you’ve found. You know I have often seen clients out of the blue things I have found in LinkedIn, just information that all of a sudden the client that you are prospecting goes, “You know what? I’m going to give Mike Burnel a try” because it’s that theory around, I’m not sure where this concept came from but 6% of your buying, your opportunities are above the water, bit like an iceberg and you know 94% is below the ocean like an iceberg. So you’ve got to keep talking to those people that are under the iceberg on a regular basis because sooner or later they’re going to surface and I use the analogy of a car. If you and I want to go buy a new car tomorrow, all of a sudden we see that car everywhere. I don’t know what it is but we will have all of a sudden we see that car everywhere we drive and so it’s just you’ve just got to create that awareness of your service over a longer period. But if you have done the qualifications right and you are working with a particular client, you should be able to get that client after the seventh to eighth time at least in front of them.

[0:22:27] Charlie Hoehn: Right, well that’s good to know. I think it makes it easier because you can just say, “All right, got to count to seven. Seven touch points here we go” one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

[0:22:39] Mike Brunel: Absolutely and I remember under the NRS Media model we used to talk about clients at least seven times before they came to our seminars, that was our model. That was going back a few years now but we still do it and I understand the owners of NRS Media are still using that same model since we’ve sold the company but that worked. That actually worked.

[0:23:02] Charlie Hoehn: I believe it. So tell me about your readers. Tell me what have been some of the feedback from people who’ve read Selling is Not Optional?

[0:23:13] Mike Brunel: I’ve got one particular client that I’ve worked with was it was a mind didn’t change around the fate that selling is actually about building a relationship. That was one of the big messages that I’ve tried to get across to my clients and there’s four types of buyers so a lot of clients have realized that we all just thought everybody bought on price but there are –

[0:23:33] Charlie Hoehn: No, no, no yeah.

[0:23:35] Mike Brunel: Okay, so a lot of people think oh well, my clients only buy in price and I said, “Well there is actually three more, they’re in the book” but I think my clients –

[0:23:45] Charlie Hoehn: Tell us what they are.

[0:23:47] Mike Brunel: I just slip the phone in there, just a minute. I got it in my book.

[0:23:50] Charlie Hoehn: I would guess, while you are looking, I would guess that at least one of them is convenience and ease of use.

[0:23:58] Mike Brunel: It is also about value. About what value you can add to your clients as well and often the other one is people by people and so if you’re just selling price, they look at the price but if you’re selling yourself, there’s a space between them listening to you and you asking questions of them and they’re not thinking across the table. You know what? “I actually like this person. I think I can do business with him or her because I am getting to know them and I’m not just on price. “

[0:24:30] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, you know Mike something just clicked for me. So I want to share a quick story and then we’ll go back to what your readers have been saying but early on in my career, I was trying over and over and over to get interviews with companies and none of them were responding and I figured hey, it’s the recession. It’s 2008, nobody is responding. It’s still that way today for people who are hunting for jobs for the most part and what started doing was I just said, “I am just going to help people that I admire who are doing great work”. And I am going to do it for free because I didn’t want there to be any barriers and I was young and inexperienced. So I just wanted things for my portfolio to talk about. So I would help them over a dozen times with numerous tasks all of them ended up hiring me and I am not just talking about like local people these were people, I was living in my parents basement in Colorado and I was working with some of the top people in Silicon Valley and that will ultimately led to my dream job of working with Tim Ferriss and getting to help him on his The 4-Hour Book Series and it’s really clicking now. That the reciprocity kicks in after a certain point certainly but really it’s the trust, the buildup of understanding that, “Okay I am getting a feel for who this person is.” There is now a relationship there.

[0:26:11] Mike Brunel: Absolutely, I think that is one of the biggest mistake sales people make is to focus on the price because I think they are always selling to the price buyer but getting back to those four buyers, you know there’s the value buyer. It’s someone that values information. There’s the relationship buyers so they want actually to have a relationship with that particular person. So they want to be able to trust them and once they trust them like you said, then they will give them their business. And there’s a combination of relationship value buyer and I think for sales people, they don’t really have any sort of relationship with the client that’s why they get into price because I think that’s what it’s about. Great sales people I know it’s all about relationships and that lore of reciprocity is so true. The more that you give in some way more comes back. We could talk about that for hours but that’s certainly one of the strategies that if you, in my case is I add value. Next week, I’m talking to 60 teenagers in that environment and I am giving every one of them a book because one or two of them might just say, “You know what? I’m going to read that book” and if I can read that book like I read all of those books when I was younger, it might just give me one little seed that’s going to help me perhaps give me some clarity about what I want to offer the world and my life. So that’s part of that giving away that type of information because you’re not always going to get the sale and that’s okay.

[0:27:45] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s great. So tell me one other piece of feedback that you’ve gotten from a reader?

[0:27:52] Mike Brunel: I think one of the chapters in my book talks a little bit about mindset and the difference between what I call a growth mindset and a fixed mindset and there’s a great book by Carol Dweck called Mindset and she talks about the fact that there’s obviously two types of mindset, growth mindset and fixed mindset. So fixed mindset is just being set in your ways, I’ve always done it that way and I don’t care what you say but that’s the way it is. Whereas the growth mindset really is looking at some particular situation and saying, “Okay I went and presented it to client, I got some really good feedback like a no, what did I learn? What did I learn from that?” and that’s the distinction that I like to tell sales people and business owners that if you go into a situation and you want to sell a product or service and you actually don’t get the sale what did you learn and what would you do next time and that’s the message that a lot of clients are saying to me. That’s one of the key things I get out of the book that it’s okay when I might get the sale or I might get that piece of business at the moment but what did I learn and what could I do to improve next time?

[0:28:59] Charlie Hoehn: Perfect. So Mike tell me what does the rest of this year look like for you? What are you going to be doing with the book? You are speaking to a group of teenagers about the principles in the book, what else?

[0:29:14] Mike Brunel: I’m getting a lot of inquiry now from clients that want to work with me. I’ve also joined quite a few networks her in New Zealand that really my skills are sales training. You know I can get sales people in a room and give them really good systems and ideas so they can go out and be more confident and so that’s really what my goals is for the years and working with groups and also working with young people, that’s part of my giving back and that is part of my process next week. Because when you’re presenting to teenagers, you have to like most sales situations you have to read the audience, all right? So when you are presenting to young people, you actually are going to talk about all of the things that you failed in and all of the things that you didn’t get quite right and I was very lucky to meet lots of teenagers over the years that say, “Look I don’t really care how well you’ve done. I want to know where you failed and where you’ve learned and what someone like me need to do” so that’s another area I enjoy doing?

[0:30:18] Charlie Hoehn: Cool and if you are going to write a follow up book what would that be?

[0:30:22] Mike Brunel: I think my follow up book would be how to be better at presenting yourself, how to be a better presenter in an authentic way and what I mean by that is that learning to craft a genuine story about yourself and when you’re standing in front of your clients, learning to be yourself and there’s a lot of skills that you can learn by figuring out what needs to happen as far as presenting yourself in the way that you present tour product better than many other people do so that is probably the next book I’d write.

[0:30:56] Charlie Hoehn: Mike do you have a parting piece of advice for aspiring authors?

[0:31:02] Mike Brunel: Well I think there’s a saying, “there’s a book in all of us”. I think if you’re an author and you’ve got a story to tell you’re obligated to tell it. You’ve got to learn and there’s lots of companies that can help you. You know I was lucky enough to have Book in the Box to help me, Zach and his team were just amazing but there are ways for you to get that information out there that you know into a book and so just go for it. Give it a try and don’t be afraid that we’re all in sales and we all got a story to tell in some form.

[0:31:38] Charlie Hoehn: How can our listeners connect with you and follow you?

[0:31:42] Mike Brunel: Okay, so I’ve got a website called mikebrunel.com so anyone can come down there and go onto that website and register. I am just launching a new product through the website in the next few weeks which is pretty exciting which is challenging your sales mindset. So it is a seven day process that you get a lesson every day and at the end of that seven days, you pretty much have enough information to go out there with a bit more confidence and a bit more knowledge about how to be better at sales. So that’s obviously the base place to come and talk to me at mikebrunel.com and obviously my books are on Amazon and also if you are near Australia and the New Zealand market, you can get them off of me direct down here.

[0:32:24] Charlie Hoehn: Fantastic. Well Mike thank you so much for being on and enjoy Wellington.

[0:32:30] Mike Brunel: Thank you. Good to talk to you.

[0:32:33] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Mike Brunel for being on the show. You can buy his book, Selling is not Optional on amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about book with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.