Complete flexibility, ruthless accountability.

The idea is we want people to feel they have the freedom to achieve their goals the way they best see fit and with as much autonomy as possible, with the understanding that with that freedom comes the responsibility of meeting goals and expectations.

The environment we’ve created to do that is called R.O.P.E.

The idea is, as an organization, we owe it to our employees to meet all of their needs of:

• Reward – a place that rewards them well for their work and effort.
• Opportunity – a workplace where they can continually grow, be promoted and expand their responsibilities.
• Push – a place where they are challenged, and pushed to go beyond what they are capable of. One where no one gets bored.
• Excitement – a place to have fun, and is exciting to work at.

With this in mind, particularly focusing on reward and excitement, we are thrilled to announce that ASG has just purchased it’s first company vacation cabin available to all ASG employees and their families free of charge.  That’s right, free of charge.

Where? Vail, Colorado

The property is in the heart of Vail Village in Colorado, just next to the famed covered bridge.

I’m super excited about this. It’s one thing to give people vacation, it’s another to give them a place to vacation.

I hope this is the first of many property experiences we offer ASG employees as we grow.  Next, I’m thinking the beach.  Who’s with me?

We’re always looking for super smart, driven, critical thinkers who thrive in making a difference. If this is you and this is the type of company you’d like to work for, hit us up, we’d love to talk.

info@asalesguy.com

The post Not Just Vacation, but a Place to Vacation appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Why?

We’ve been trained to think the buyer’s budget matters.  For years, when a buyer says my budget is X, we assume and operate from the fact that that’s all they have to spend and that if we don’t meet their budget we’ll lose.

In other words, we make the buyer’s budget problem our problem and we need to stop doing that.

In this video, I talk about how letting the buyer’s budget dictate our price is costing us money and how to stop it.

If the buyer didn’t budget enough to solve their problem, that’s not your problem and you don’t owe them a price that works for them.

Trust the value you bring to the table and stand tall.

The post Overcoming Price Objections by: Not Making It Your Problem appeared first on A Sales Guy.

It’s time sales let’s go of the tired and ineffective belief systems if we’re going to truly deliver the value we say we want to in the 21st-century.

The biggest miss and most unsettling issue facing sales today is their brutal and debilitating contradicting view of what’s most important to sales AND the value of the CRM.   Yes, I said the CRM.  Stay with me, it will all make sense when I’m done here.

I took a poll on LinkedIn and asked if a salesperson could be good if they didn’t use the CRM. Here are the results:

On the surface, the results aren’t surprising and seem reasonable. Salespeople are notorious for hating the CRM. Sales management is equally infamous for making the CRM a tool the salespeople hate.  However, if we take a deeper look, the results here highlight a GROSS problem in sales and one that plagues almost every sales organization in the world.

Now, let’s look at a follow-up poll I did asking what the most important sales skill salespeople need to have in order to be successful.

Notice the results? Seventy-six percent of respondents said the most important skill salespeople should have is the ability to diagnose. In fairness, a number of people added “listening” in the comments as the number one sales skill. With that in mind, I believe listening is number two, as you don’t have anything of substance if you can’t ask the right questions at the right time to create the best “listening content.”

For the purposes of the rest of this post, diagnosing a problem is both the ability to ask questions AND the ability to listen.

Look at both polls. Do you see the contradiction? Can you see how these polls are not consistent? Is the contradiction obvious to you?

These two polls highlight a very disturbing understanding of sales and what it takes to be successful. They can’t be mutually exclusive.

You cannot believe that a salesperson can be successful without a CRM AND believe that the ability to diagnose is the most important sales skill.

Why?

Because diagnosis requires documentation. A powerful, robust, complete, specific diagnosis requires a system that allows you to quickly document, store and retrieve what you learned from the diagnosis. If you don’t have documentation, storage and an easy retrieval system, your diagnosis is rendered useless and you might as well not do it at all.

Is the contradiction more clear now?

If 76% of salespeople believe that diagnosis is the most important sales skill, yet 66% of salespeople believe they can be successful without a CRM, where is that 66% of salespeople putting all the copious notes they take during discovery. How are they quickly and easily able to retrieve their notes? How do they recall the unique and specific environmental challenges they are helping the customer solve? How are they able to recall the root causes of the problems the prospect is having and how can they know the specific KPI’s and prospect metrics? How do they remember all that information     2 months, 3 months, 6 months, 9 months or a year later? How do they remember all that information across, ten, twenty, thirty opportunities or more?

How?

They don’t! And they can’t!

And therein lies the gravity of the disconnect in these two polls.

Nothing highlights the lack of a true discovery being done by salespeople, and even worse, the lack of influence the discovery is having in the average sales call.

In spite of what salespeople have convinced themselves of, few salespeople are doing an effective and thorough discovery. They are not digging deep enough. They are not doing a proper diagnosis of the buyer’s current situation. They aren’t getting a solid understanding of the problems, impacts, and root causes the buyer is struggling with. They are not uncovering where the buyers want to go. They can’t quantify the gap and that’s why they don’t believe they don’t need a CRM to be successful. Even though they don’t realize it, salespeople unconsciously don’t see value in the information they get in the discovery. Therefore, they don’t feel any need to document it in a fashion that makes it easy to retrieve and easy to leverage as the sale progresses.

Until salespeople and sales organizations come to the realization that the most valuable part of the CRM isn’t the “CRM” but the information about the prospects problems, impacts and root causes stored in it, they will continue to dismiss the value of the CRM and underutilize the discovery process.

To simplify, a salesperson canNOT be a good salesperson unless they use the CRM. Without the CRM, they can’t leverage the power of all the information they uncover during a proper discovery and therefore aren’t a salesperson, just simply an order taker. And that’s a conversation for another day!

The post Why Salespeople Can’t Be Good If They Don’t Use the CRM appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Our 3rd book recommendation? Quiet!!

To start…you may be wondering why the heck would I put Quiet and anything “Keenan” in the same discussion? These two words have probably never been shelved together, until now. With Keenan’s energy, clear extroversion, and boldness, he’s not afraid to yell and cuss on LinkedIn Live. Yet! I still believe if Gap Selling is on your bookshelf, and Keenan is on your playlist, Quiet is another great one to add to your collection. I hope you find they compliment each other well. In fact, if you haven’t read Gap Selling yet, I would recommend starting by reading Quiet as a meditation before the motivation and Red Bull energy of Keenan takes over. (not a sponsored post…)

Being Liked as a Salesperson…

Chapter 5 of Gap Selling starts with: “Ok, people, you’ve heard it your whole career: People buy from people they like. I call bullshit. And if you want to gap sell, you will too. It might not be a surprise to learn that of all the controversial things I’ve ever said in public, that’s the one that’s gotten the most pushback. Still, I stand by it. Stay with me here. I’ll have you agreeing with me over the next few pages.”

Keenan said it well in this video. As a guest on The Salesman Podcast, Keenan discusses that buyers are interested in the ”value” of the sale, not the “likeability” of the salesperson. Keenan says, “If they like you and there is value, they are gonna buy…but if they like you, but there is no value…they don’t buy. I’m not buying you.”

One of ASG’s most popular, and controversial, blog topics debunks the popular Sales Myth of “People Buy from People They Like.”

In Gap Selling Online Training Keenan debunks this myth head-on! It’s an important topic at the heart of Gap Selling. Here he states very clearly again, “You Do not Need to be Liked to Sell,” and the relationship is solely based on Credibility (as opposed to “likeability”) and the Value of the product or service. The most important thing is whether there is a Gap and if your product/service can bridge that gap.

Now for Quiet…

Where did this myth come from? The popular book, Quiet, by Susan Cain, argues that this notion of not being liked, popular, extroverted, overly confident, or the life of the party, being Achilles heel for salespeople, can be attributed heavily to the time when Carnegie grew up and successfully “self-helped” the world into being extroverted.

Did you know that Dale Carnegie changed his name? “Carnagey actually; he changes the spelling later, likely to evoke Andrew, the great industrialist.” If you’ve watched the Gap Sell Keenans, you will know that “likeability,” and “showmanship” aren’t the heart of what sells a product or service in today’s modern world.

Through Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking, Cain crafts a well-thought-out and data-driven theory that, while introverts aren’t as common in the business world (and sales profession), they can be the most successful leaders and followers in any business setting and beyond. She argues that personality became the most important aspect of selling and business, popularized by self-help books, like Dale Carnegie’s, in the 1920s. She states “Americans became salesmen who could sell not only their companies latest gismo but also themselves.” (pg 22) And this ever-popular myth haunts us in ASG Facebook comments to this day. 

Self-help books in the roaring 20’s “changed from inner virtue to outer charm,” and favoring not the “deep thinker, but a hearty extrovert with a salesman’s personality.” During this time, “the number of American’s who considered themselves shy, increased from 40% in the 1970s to 50% in the 1990s.” “Social Anxiety disorder – which essentially means pathological shyness – is now thought to affect nearly 1 in 5 of us”. But…as Cain questions throughout the book, as does Gap Selling, “How did we go from character to personality, without realizing that we had sacrificed something meaningful along the way?” I would argue that Keenan also points this out when he demystifies the modern salesperson as not just a personality with a smile and excitement, but a deep thinker, and a better listener who asks good trustworthy questions. Cain points out in the early pages that “If Abraham Lincoln was the embodiment of virtue during the culture of character, then Tony Robbins is his counterpart during the culture of personality.”Your personality has little to do with how well you sell.

In this LinkedIn video, Keenan breaks down why he calls bullshit on salespeople needing to be extroverts. 

Gaining trust isn’t just an extroverted game.

Introverts and those that may not be the ones to speak up first, don’t need change or chameleon to act like Keenan. Instead, introverts can use their quiet listening skills to gap sell well and sell confidently, addressing the problem(s) their product or service solves. Cain points out that “Peer pressure…is not only unpleasant but can change your view of the problem.” If that happens, their ability to Gap Sell is very low. 

Good News! If you find yourself more on the Quiet side, successfully Gap Selling isn’t just an extrovert’s game. As long as you can dig, listen, find the problem, and lead the prospect to water, you can Gap Sell, and should sell better based on character & credibility, rather than personality & likeability. Also read Quiet, because I only scratched the surface. Enjoy!

Written by Reggie Stjernholm

The post Can Quiet Sellers Gap Sell? appeared first on A Sales Guy.

As Gap Selling has crossed the milestone of 50,000 copies sold, we are highlighting some of our favorite books to compliment your Gap Selling journey.

Today’s book highlight goes to The End of Average. Like Execution, this isn’t a sales book at all. Written by Todd Rose, a professor of developmental psychology, this book breaks down the history and failures of boiling life and decisions down to averages.

So you may be wondering what developmental psychology has to do with sales right now…and the answer is simple: it relates to the idea of a value proposition.

One of my favorite slides from Gap Selling Training is about value:

“Value: as a word doesn’t mean anything. It’s a placeholder, a catchphrase for something dynamic, contextual and requires acknowledgement from others. So when we whip around the word value, we’re not offering much insight. Value for one person is different for another. Value changes from product to product, service to service, idea to idea, and offer to offer. Value isn’t a thing; it’s an agreement.” – Keenan, Gap Selling Training

The sales profession has become comfortable with the one-size-fits all value proposition. AKA, the average value.

The End of Average is an incredible read to break away from ideas around average.

Story after story, example after example, this book will help shift your mindset away from the elevator pitch, generic demos, and into the real word of value.

Averaging to Failure

“In the late 1940s, the United States Air Force had a serious problem: its pilots could not keep control of their planes…At first, the military brass pinned the blame on the men in the cockpits, citing ‘pilot error’ as the most common reason in the crash reports…Pilots, too, were baffled. The only thing they knew for sure was that their piloting skills were not the cause of the problem…After multiple inquiries ended with no answers, officials turned their attention to the design of the cockpit itself. Back in 1926, when the army was designing its first-ever cockpit, engineers had measured the physical dimensions of hundreds of male pilots (the possibility of female pilots was never a serious consideration), and used this data to standardize the dimensions of the cockpit. For the next three decades, the size and shape of the seat, the distance to the pedals and stick, the height of the windshield, even the shape of the flight helmets were all built to conform to the average dimensions of a 1926 pilot.”

As this story continues, the military engineers begin exploring this concept of design decisions based on the average. They give this research question to a young, newly hired 23 year old scientist, Lieutenant Gilbert S. Daniels, where he begins measuring 4,063 pilots on 10 key sizing areas. He also decided to create an average range vs a true average, targeting the middle 30% of the range of values for each dimension. His goal was simple: how many people are actually average across all 10 measurements?

The answer? ZERO!

“Out of 4,063 pilots, not a single airman fit within the average range on all ten dimensions.” Daniels further discovered that even if he went with only 3 of the 10 dimensions, he still only landed at less than 3.5% of pilots fitting within the middle range.

This rather groundbreaking research has led to the technologies we all enjoy today even within our vehicles. If you never wondered about all of the seat controls and telescoping steering wheel lever in your car, it all stems from Daniel’s research, which ultimately did resolve the military’s problem too. The pilots when given the ability to custom fit their controls were suddenly able to keep control of the plane.

The End of Average meets Gap Selling 

Within Gap Selling’s notion of Problem Identification, the methodology challenges salespeople to first understand the customer profiles from a general or average business position (AKA, know what you should measure) and then challenges salespeople to use discovery to then actually measure. As readers push to the demo/presentation content, Gap Selling teaches you to tailor that demo to that buyer. No more averages. No more general. No more “companies like you” or “average customers.” It is the sales version of your telescoping steering wheel.

Similar to the military’s issue of diagnosing why their skilled pilots continued to crash, salespeople face this too in their professional world. They are driving a technically competent process most of the time and they have the foundational piloting skills. The failure is within the approach of average.

Expanding the concept…

Todd Rose walks readers through example after example of how our decisions made on averages are misguided. He demonstrates the impacts across hiring talent, gaining business competitive edge, even understanding and mapping the human brain.

“The goal of this book is to liberate you, once and for all, from the tyranny of the average” – Todd Rose

The post Average Value is No Value appeared first on A Sales Guy.

Now, my favorite all-time sales book isn’t really a sales book. It’s a book on execution.

And funny, it’s aptly called, Execution. 

How is that a book on execution has become my favorite sales book? It doesn’t address topics like closing or overcoming objections or prospecting or email writing. Shit, when it was written in 2002, LinkedIn wasn’t a thing, there was no “social” selling, and your sales stack was the yellow-pages.

So what makes execution a sales book?

It’s all about solving problems.

You see, execution is the hardest part of success. Ideas are important, the strategy is important, but if you don’t know how you’re getting to get done, what you want to get done, the rest doesn’t matter.

The book Execution is about solving the challenges that come with executing, big and difficult projects. Execution is about asking “how.”  How are you going to integrate these two giant organizations? How are you going to roll out the new marketing campaign across 4 continents with 17 different languages? How are you going to innovate on a new product on a new product every year cycle? How are you going to accelerate sales by 25% year over year for 5 years?

What Execution does is push you to answer those questions at a granular level. It makes you break down a problem, by the people, the tools, and the resources available to you to actually be able to execute and that’s why I think it’s a great sales book.

Being a Gap Seller and a great salesperson requires someone to be able to dissect an environment to its core root and simplify what’s happening.

This type of thinking doesn’t rest in traditional selling methods or sales training.

Much of sales training promotes “process” and the process of moving things forward. Think, MEDDIC or BANT, etc. Are we talking to the right person? Does the company have the budget? Do we know the decision criteria? Do we understand the buying process, etc? What’s missing is how to break down a problem in a way to understand how it’s affecting the customer, the impact it’s having on them/the company, AND what’s causing it.

The ability to take a problem-centric approach to the sales process is powerful.

Being able to know what questions to ask when in order to uncover root cause problems, the ability to diagnose clear and definable business problems, and the ability to see how those problems impact the organization is a rare skill. But, a powerful skill in sales if you develop it.

If you want to develop a different skillset in your sales game, go get Execution. It is outdated, and many of the business and company references are old and tired, but the underlying approach and insights are excellent for today’s salesperson.

Execution has played a major role in my ability to see problems from the vantage point of execution, which lends itself to being able to ask powerful discovery questions and break down a problem in a way that gets buyers to see their purchasing process completely different.

Go get Execution and read it with an open mind.

Side note: In Execution, Larry Bossidy (the author) talks about how cheap money was at the time and how over-leveraged many companies and people were and states that he’s concerned about that. See if you can see that. Remember, he published the book in 2002, 6 years before the Great Recession. He, for all intents and purposes, predicts it. See if you can find it. It’s powerful.

The post The Best Sales Book, That Isn’t a Sales Book appeared first on A Sales Guy.

I’m blown away that I’m writing this. The idea that Gap Selling would have ever reached 50K books was inconceivable.

In spite of years of social media exposure, an internationally acclaimed, award-winning blog and a large and growing social following, every publisher turned me down.  It was infuriating. So I said, “Fuck it, I’ll do it myself.”

I published Gap Selling with the belief that salespeople wanted a better, less intrusive, respectful way to sell that actually worked and was better than traditional selling approaches.

It’s working. We will pass the 50K books sold mark in the next few weeks and so I wanted to celebrate the occasion with you, the readers, and the community.

To do that, the team here at A Sale Guy is going to be celebrating for the next month starting today. And that celebration is all about you.

We’re going to be giving away a slew of dope prizes.  Check ’em out.

• Free t-shirts (See them here: Keenan Shirts.com)
• Free Gap Selling Online Course subscriptions
• Free Signed Books
• Free Team/Company Speaking Engagement
• The Grand Prize: Free 3-months of one-on-one Gap Selling coaching with me!

How do you enter and win?

Simple –

Post a picture or video on LinkedIn sharing your experience with Gap Selling, how it helped you and what you got out of reading Gap Selling. Then simply use the hashtag #gap50k and tag me @keenan. (don’t forget the dot).  We will draw the winners at the end of the month.

So tell me, what did you get out of Gap Selling? How did it help you and why do you like it so much?

In addition to the giveaways, we’re doing a number of events where we can hang and talk.

• A Clubhouse on Gap Selling execution
• A LinkedIn Live Gap Selling Book Club
• and more (tbd).

If you want to participate in the book club or in the Clubhouse event, text me at: 720-455-8510

Stay tuned for dates and be the first to know what’s coming. Text me here: 720-455-8510

Can’t thank this community enough!  None of this would be possible without YOU!

Here’s to the Gap Selling community! We’re changing the way the world sells.

P.S. – because we like to share the wealth for everyone all month, we’re giving everyone $100 dollars towards Gap Selling Online Training. Go here: www.gapsellingonlinetraining and use the promo code: 50kbooks.

The post 50K and Counting Celebration appeared first on A Sales Guy.

We’ve just launched the Gap Selling Certification program and I couldn’t be any more excited. Now anyone with the Gap Selling acumen and charisma can build their own Gap Selling Training Business.

As readers of this blog and of Gap Selling, you know how powerful the Gap Selling methodology is. The industry has been ripe for a progressive, forward-thinking selling methodology for years. Most sales methods and trainings are 30-40- and 50 years old. They are stale, tired, and out of date. Gap Selling is filling the void.

Our goal here at A Sales Guy has ALWAYS been to change the way people sell, and in order to do that, we need a lot more people on the street. We need more than just the book. We need more than just me out there training. We need a team of excited, fanatical, brilliant, entertaining trainers taking the sales world to the next level.

We’re now taking inquiries for the certification process. We have limited spots in the first round of certification.

If you’ve been considering investing in your own sales training and consulting business and didn’t know where to start or if you are a current sales consultant and want to invest in something that could substantially to augment your existing business offerings, hit us up, and let’s talk.

Gap Selling is growing quickly as more and more companies become familiar with the powerful approach Gap Selling can have on their sales teams and more importantly on their growth goals.

To inquire and get more information go here and we’ll get back to you ASAP!

The post Become a Certified Gap Selling Trainer appeared first on A Sales Guy.

What do you think?

Do you think it paints many of today’s sales people accurately?

We had fun putting this together.

The post Don’t Be A Smelly Sales Person appeared first on A Sales Guy.