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Amanda Kramer: Every episode, we have an LBIdea or a key takeaway. And the key takeaway here is that there are plenty of lessons from sales that can be useful for you, even if you're not a sales professional. Welcome to the Leeds Business Insights Podcast, featuring expert analysis to help you stand out from the herd. I'm your host, Amanda Kramer. We are thrilled to be discussing applicable lessons from sales that can be useful for any professional with Brian Higgins, teaching assistant professional at Leeds, and sales and business development executive.
Welcome to Leeds Business Insights, Brian, and thank you so much for being here today.
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Brian Higgins: Hi, Amanda. Good morning. It's good to be with you.
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Kramer: We're so glad to have you here. Well, Brian, let's ground the listeners by starting with a big question, which is, what is sales?
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Higgins: The way that we characterize it for the students in the classroom, and I think it's applicable to our audience, is that, you know, sales is all about helping buyers make informed purchase decisions and giving them the information they need to be able to make those informed decisions. So, at the very basic level, that's what selling is all about.
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Kramer: Absolutely. And I think sometimes, there are misperceptions about sales and sales careers out there. What would you say are the biggest misperceptions that you have noted from working with students and alumni?
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Higgins: Well, I think that sales suffers from the negative stereotype that's been portrayed in television and movies, quite frankly. But it also is the result of some of our experiences with salespeople that conduct themselves in what we would think about as unprofessional ways. So, I think the biggest misperception is that all salespeople are like that. And what the audience needs to understand is that, while those people do exist, there is a reason for the stereotype, that there is the other end of the spectrum that also exists, which is made up of salespeople that are, that are very professional, very intelligent, extremely good business people, wonderful communicators, and they have the buyers' best interests at heart. And that's the profile of the salesperson that we have in mind when we teach students at Leeds what professional selling is all about.
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Kramer: Absolutely. Thank you for peeling back the curtain on that, Brian. And what would you say are the most applicable skills for someone to have who's interested in going into sales?
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Higgins: Well, I think communication skills are really, really important. I think it would be difficult for anyone to go into any kind of a sales job if they weren't a good communicator. But before I get to that, I think what's really important is that people understand that, no matter how well you communicate, if you don't have the ability to develop some kind of a relationship with a person or the people that you're selling to, your ability to communicate is really not going to be very important, very valuable. And so, at the very basic level, your ability to develop some rapport with the people or the person that you are selling to, and then also establish some credibility that you know what it is that you're talking about, are the foundation of a what I would consider to be a trustworthy relationship that you can base all of the communication on going forward. But if you don't have that trustworthy relationship in place, then you're not going to get very far.
And, you know, an example of that, and a very simple example, is when you go into a hardware store and you're stuck, you really don't know what it is that you should be purchasing. And you happen to get somebody that's coming to help you and they're friendly and, you know, you like working with them and they're credible, they know what they're, what they're talking about, you know, good chances are you're going to buy something from that person, right? As opposed to the other example which would be, they're arrogant, they don't really care much at all about you, your problem, you know, what it is that you're trying to accomplish. And it's like, you know, I just want to leave the store at this point in time.
So, the ability to build a relationship is really important. And you can do it very quickly. You can do it in a retail example. Just because of the way that the person says, "Hello, how are you?" Smiles, listens, and then proceeds to try to solve your problem. In the other extreme, a sales cycle that might take six months or 12 months, right, to sell someone or some company something, you know, you have to be someone that they enjoy working with. They want to see you show up. They want to have the conversation with you. They feel like the time they spend with you is productive and that they make progress. And if they don't like you, if they don't feel like there's a chemistry there or some rapport, then they're probably not going to be as receptive to you wanting to come in and meet with them.
And by the same token, if you come in and you don't know what you're talking about, you really aren't listening very well to what it is that they're telling you they need or want, and you're just not very helpful to them. Again, they're going to feel like time with you is not well-spent. And so, this ability to build this relationship, you know, is really, really key. And then, and then once you get there, then you have to be able to take advantage of that relationship in order to affect good communication.
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Kramer: Tell us more about what it means to be an effective communicator.
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Higgins: What so many people think about when they hear good communication skills is the ability to speak eloquently, right? And to present. You know, the silver-tongued devil, right? We've heard salespeople refer to as the silver-tongued devils. And there is no question that you need to be able to describe a product or a service in a pretty powerful way. And you need to be able to articulate the value of that product based on what it is that the buyer is hoping to do with the product, right?
But more than anything else, we have to be really good listeners. And I would say that the people that are really good at what we do will tell you that the most important skill is listening, and understanding, and then responding to what it is that we heard with a solution that we think is going to make a lot of sense. And so, listening skills are really important. And then I'll trump listening with one more idea, which is, it's great to be a good listener, but it's even more important to be a good questioner.
Do you ask the questions that allow you to really understand the buyer, the situation they find themselves in, the problems that they're struggling with, any other circumstance so that when you do get to where you become that silver-tongued devil, if we want to talk about it that way, you're doing it in such a way that it's relevant, right, to what it is that they want or need. And sometimes, people don't know what they want or need. And so, our ability to ask questions, it's helpful to them understanding that they have a problem that they're not solving, or an opportunity that they're not taking advantage of, and it helps us understand, "Okay, here's where we need to focus our attention when we start talking about how our products or our services can serve as solutions."
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Kramer: I think that is fantastic. Tell us more about the concept, Brian, that to sell is human.
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Higgins: I believe that that was a book that was written by a gentleman named Daniel Pink, and the whole concept of the book is that, whether you know it or not, you know, you are always selling yourself, you're always selling your ideas to other people, right? And so, even though you may not be employed to sell, understanding how to sell, understanding what's important in order to sell yourself or to sell your ideas can be very, very helpful in your life. And what comes out of the surveys that our students take at the end of, you know, any of the courses that we teach is that, "Well, I learned a lot of life lessons in this course, and I don't plan to go into sales. I'm gonna do something else. But what you taught us, I can see myself using to advance my career in, probably, bigger ways than anything else I've learned."
You know, I'm going to, I'm going to pat ourselves on the back here a little bit and say, I mean, these are really important life lessons that we're teaching, even though it's under the banner of professional salesmanship. And so, that's what we mean when we talk about to sell is human. It's important that you understand, you know, how to sell yourself. It's important that you understand how to sell your ideas. I mean, and we use this example in the class a lot, think about marriage. How much better would we be at marriage, as a country or as a society, if we understand how to communicate with one another a little bit better? If we understood how to share our ideas with one another a little bit better, right? Is that a life lesson that's learned in the classroom? Maybe. We let them know that there's something here that they might be able to use in a relationship.
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Kramer: And as we think of, Brian, about some of these applicable life lessons, are there other lessons that come to mind that you could share with our listeners that your students have said, "Wow, didn't think I was going to learn this in a sales class."
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Higgins: I'm thinking about the things that we get at the end of the semester when they say, "Didn't think this was gonna happen." So, you know, how to build relationships, that is something that we do focus on in the classroom. You know, what's kind of interesting, Amanda, is that we suffer from this illusion that we have good personalities and bad personalities. Well, there really is no such thing as a good personality and a bad personality. It's that I have a certain kind of a personality and you have a certain kind of a personality. And if we're going to get along, we're probably going to need to flex a little bit so that, you know, we can come together in the middle, right?
And we teach the kids that. We have them take personality profiles. We say, "This is... These are your traits. These are your strengths. These are your weaknesses." And, you know, they may be exactly the same as mine, in which case, we probably don't have to flex very much at all. Or it could be exactly the opposite. And in that case, if we're going to get along, if we're going to have a good relationship, that's going to require us to flex a little bit. So, that comes to mind, you know, as something that we teach that isn't necessarily, you know, part of the sales process or the sales discipline. We teach an awful lot about planning and preparation.
Lot of sales people unfortunately show up and just wing it and that's a mistake, particularly when you're involved in the big enterprise class sales situations where every meeting is important and there's a lot riding on every meeting. You need to show up at that meeting well-prepared. And so, we do a lot to help the students understand how to prepare. We actually put them into situations where they have to have five or six meetings throughout the semester where they have to have a plan for the meeting, you know, a sales call plan is kind of what it is.
We touch a little bit on the art of conversation, the psychology of conversation. And we've done a little bit to get ourselves as instructors familiarized with that work so that we can turn around and talk to our students about it. And here's what you should be reminded of, is that most sales calls are not formal presentations using PowerPoint slides, they're just conversations, right? And so, the ability to have a good conversation is pretty important to most sales people. And so, we share with them a little bit about what's involved in having a successful conversation. We use some work that was done by a professor at Harvard that's very interesting, and we turn that around and we use this acronym called TALK, T-A-L-K.
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Kramer: I was just thinking this sounds really interesting. Would you be able to dive into it?
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Higgins: We teach the psychology of conversation to our students, and we borrow from some information that we've gathered from a, I think, her name is Alison Brooks. She's made the psychology of conversation one of her research topics. She actually teaches a course called How to Talk Gooder in Business, I can't remember. It's How To Talk Gooder, which is very clever title for the course. And I think she's written a few papers and she does a lot of public speaking on the topic, and she's very, very good. And she gives a very simple framework, which is the TALK framework.
The T in TALK stands for topics, and the A stands for asking, and the L stands for levity, and the K stands for kindness. And what this professor has found is that in the really successful conversations, the person that is having the conversation is really, really good at showing up prepared to talk about topics that are relevant or interesting. And even mothers that get together with one another on the playground while their children are playing around, they spend some amount of time, maybe subconsciously, thinking about topics that they're going to talk about when they get together with the other mothers.
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Kramer: Yes, right.
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Higgins: And so, throughout the week, you know, “I know that Amanda really likes this sitcom, and I'm going to watch it, and I'm going to come and I'm going to be prepared to tell Amanda I watched that sitcom. I enjoyed it so much, what was going on with this particular character and thing.” So, there was some time spent in advance thinking about the topics that we are going to make the subject of our conversation once we get there. And then the other half of this topic idea is to know when to switch topics, to know when, "Okay, Amanda's tired now of talking about that sitcom. We probably should go pursue another topic. Maybe it's where we're gonna put our children in school." But we need to know when we're, sort of, getting tired of that topic and know how to switch topics.
So, the T is topics. Topic selection, being prepared to talk about the topic, and then switching topics when it's appropriate. And then the A is all about asking. And what we find in the course, Amanda, and in life is questions are so powerful. The ability to ask questions that are purposeful, that are meaningful, that put the focus on the other person. It's not about us, it's more about you. Tell me about this, tell me about that, right? So, the ability to ask questions in a conversation is incredibly powerful, incredibly. And you and your listeners, the next time you're at a cocktail party, just see how long you can meet someone for the first time and never say anything about yourself, always ask questions. See how long you can go. See, you can go for two minutes, four minutes, five minutes.
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Kramer: Quite the challenge.
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Higgins: And at the end, ask yourself, "Was that a pretty good conversation or not?" And what this professor at Harvard has discovered is that there's a magic question. Here's the magic question. It's the follow-on question. It's not the initial question. It's not, "Amanda, what do you do for a living?" It's, "Oh, wow. That sounds very interesting. Tell me what the day in the life of a person that does what you do for a living is all about." Or, "What's the biggest challenge you have doing that for a living?" Right? So, the follow-on question is the magical question when it comes to having a successful conversation.
And then the L is levity. You don't want to make it so serious that it's... Lots of these conversations are not, you know, solving world hunger or finding the cure to cancer. I mean, we're just having a conversation. Let's make it fun. Let's make it lighthearted. Let's laugh. Let's smile while we're doing it. And if we can introduce some levity into the conversation, then that's great.
The K is kindness, which is, kind of, the result of the polarization we're seeing in our society right now. And what this person has found is that if you cannot be so focused on your own agenda, that you're kind in accepting other people's views, other people's opinions, maybe other people's information, or lack of information, that's going to make for a much better conversation than if you impose your own views, your own information on the other individuals.
So, that's the TALK acronym. We spend an hour of lecture time in one of our courses talking about that with our students, so that when they go out and they meet with the people that they're assigned to meet with in their sales calls, they can think a little bit about that.
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Kramer: Yes. That's incredibly helpful. A great framework. How has working with mentors shifted the learning within your classroom?
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Higgins: A lot of people will tell you that you can't teach sales if you haven't done sales, which is a big challenge for instructors and professors in university. All of the instructors that we have teaching the courses at Leeds have previous experience as either individual contributors or as leaders of sales organizations. So, we don't happen to have that issue in front of us at Leeds. However, the more you can share experience with people, the more they're going to learn about sales. And so, we've made a conscious decision that we would like for our students to interact with working sales professionals as much as they can in order to understand how what we're talking about in the classroom is actually applied in the field by them.
And so, every one of our students is assigned a professional salesperson to work with as their mentor during the semester. They have assignments to meet with these mentors in order to discuss an assigned topic. And in order for them to receive credit for having done that work, they have to prepare a plan for their call. So, it goes back to some of the things that we think are very important for them to learn in the course. And they have to share that plan with both their instructor and their mentor before they actually get to the meeting, so that the mentor has an opportunity to understand, "Okay, here's the topic that we're going to discuss. Here's the way that it's been framed out for you in the classroom. And here's where it is that we're gonna go explore with one another," right?
And then the student spends 45 minutes to an hour, sometimes it's an hour and a half to two hours, depending on the relationship, depending on the topic, depending on the availability of time. And then after the fact, they have responsibility for reporting back to the instructor what was discussed and what was learned. And so, it's analogous to a sales call, right? I met with a really big, important prospect that we're selling to, here's what was learned, here's what was discussed, here's what we need to be aware of, here's where we're going next, right? So, it's very analogous to the call planning and call reporting process that a salesperson would have. It is probably the most impactful part of the course, without question, the most impactful part of the course.
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Kramer: Absolutely. And a follow-up question, if someone listening is interested in becoming involved in the course and serving in this mentorship role, is there an opportunity for them to get involved?
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Higgins: Absolutely. So, we're now to the point where some of the students that we taught eight years ago now have the requisite number of years in sales in order to come back and be a mentor, which is great to see. I mean, coming back full circle is just so gratifying, right? But we love to have other people join the program. If they have five years of experience managing a territory, carrying a quota, employing a sales process with good results, we would love to have them. Reach out. Let us know that they're interested.
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Kramer: Great. Thank you, Brian, for that information. Every episode, we have an LBIdea or a key takeaway. And the key takeaway here is that there are plenty of lessons from sales that can be useful for you even if you're not a sales professional.
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Higgins: You know, full circle from where we started, sales is not how it's portrayed on television and in movies, and it's not, as you've experienced it, by some heavy-handed salespeople. It's not that, And the second thing is you would do well to become a good listener and a good questioner. If you could just do that in your life, I think it would have a tremendous impact on your success, on your happiness. Be a good listener. Learn how to ask good questions.
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Kramer: Thank you, Brian, so much for joining us today.
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Higgins: Welcome, Amanda. I've enjoyed the conversation. I hope your listeners enjoy the conversation.
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Kramer: Thank you, again, for listening to Leeds Business Insights. Don't miss a single episode, subscribe to Leeds Business Insights wherever you get your podcasts. You can also find more information about our podcast series at leeds.ly/LBIpodcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, you may also enjoy Creative Distillation, an entrepreneurship research podcast from the Leeds School of Business. Check it out at pod.link/creativedistillation. Leeds Business Insights Podcast is a production of the Leeds School of Business and is produced by University FM. We'll see you next time.
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