The Scientific Method Of Selling: Stop Closing And Start Selling With Jeremy Miner

 

What’s the best thing to do when your sales are declining? Learn from Jeremy Miner, the CEO of 7th Level Communications, as he breaks down the scientific method of selling to help tune your sales process! In this conversation with Mitch Russo, he explains why every salesperson should practice the ABDS of Selling, helping you to stop closing and start making incredible sales! Don’t miss out on this episode and extract wisdom from Jeremy Miner to help grow your business!

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The Scientific Method Of Selling: Stop Closing And Start Selling With Jeremy Miner

In this episode, I have something special for all my coaches in the audience. In 2018, my business was exploding. My coaching clients were winning, and my time was all but fully booked, but I had a problem. I was wasting more time on pre and post-session admin than I realized. I decided to create a highly efficient time saving, money-making coaching software platform called ClientFol.io. If you’ve read this before, you’ve read my rant about it as well. I’ll skip that part of it. I wanted to share a testimonial I got from one of our clients. His name is Steven Merrill.

Here’s what he said, “I’ve been able to close deals by telling our clients that I’ll be tracking their data points in the areas of life, personal and professional, that they want to develop and enhance during our work together. The ability to then email them homework with a visual graph of their progression is what allows them to see and feel their progress. This is unmatched by any other product I’ve ever seen before. I can’t thank you enough for it. I look forward to my continued use of ClientFol.io.” If you guys want to see for yourself what this is all about, you can do it for $1. Go to ClientFol.io and write me your own testimony. I’d love to get it.

Our guest has been selling all his life. Job after job, he exceeded every target. As he evolved, others were coming to him to learn his process. He did what all great entrepreneurs do. He started a company to help others learn the scientific method of selling and has chained over 380,000 people. Now, he’s here to tune up your sales process. Welcome, Jeremy Miner, to the show.

Mitch, it’s a pleasure being on your show. I’m going to take all that as a compliment because my kids said I’m pretty boring. Thank you very much.

All kids think anyone over 40 is boring anyway. It comes with the territory. I loved to embarrass my daughter when she was little. It was so much fun. In an abbreviated way, I told a little bit about how you got to where you are. Give us a little bit more detail.

I got into sales many years ago. I was a broke and burned-out college student. I got a job selling home security systems, door-to-door. That was the first thing. If anybody has done door-to-door, you know what it can mean, especially if you don’t have the right skills. I remember going out for that job at a straight commission. The company gives you a script. They give you some books by the gurus and are like, “Go make some sales. We’ll pick you up after dark.” I remember I looked back at my sales manager, and he said, “Don’t forget. Be excited when you knock on the door. If you show them how enthusiastic you are about the product, they’re going to be interested in it.”

I was like, “That makes sense.” I’m a 21-year-old kid. I don’t know any better. I started knocking on the door. I was all excited talking about the features, the benefits and how we had the best this and that. It was going to help them. I started noticing from the very first door that I was getting all these objections. They didn’t tell me that, “We don’t need it. Your price is too high. It was too expensive. We already talked with somebody from your company last month. I need to talk with my spouse. I need to think it over. I need to do more research. Can you call me back in a week, a month or a year later?”

I remember this one night, 7 to 8 weeks in, barely making in sales, straight commission sales job. If you don’t make sales, you don’t make any money. I’m sitting on the curb way to be picked up at the end of the week. I’d worked twelve hours that day. I’d made zero sales. I worked for free. That whole week, 0 sales and $0. I remember sitting there. It was the humid July sun, sweat rolling down my chest. If you’ve ever gone door-to-door, your legs feel like jello at the end of the day. I remember sitting there thinking, “I’m not cut out for sales. I don’t have the gift of the gab like all these other guys do.”

I remember the sales manager picked me up and popped in a Tony Robbins CD. Many years ago, people listened to things called CDs. Tony said something like this, I could be butchering it, “You will fail if you don’t learn the right skills that are necessary to succeed.” Here was the very interesting thing. He said, “Everybody’s taught skills, but the ones who fail are the ones who are not taught the right ones.” That did something to me. It was like a light bulb went off in my head. It was like divine intervention from the heavens that maybe what the company was training me and what I was learning from the sales gurus weren’t the right skills. Maybe they were outdated, or they shouldn’t work that well anymore.

Everybody has taught skills, but the ones who fail are not taught the right ones. Click To Tweet

That got me started on this journey. At the same time, I was going through all that stuff, I was in college. I was studying Behavioral Science and Human Psychology. That was my degree. I was learning from Robert Cialdini and a lot of people you guys might have heard. ehavioral science, if you peel the layers off, it’s, “How does a human being make a decision? How do they go left or right? How do they say no or yes?” which is what selling is. My professors were saying that the most persuasive way to communicate was over here, but all the gurus in their books were saying it was over here.

It’s exactly the opposite. I’m like, “This doesn’t make any sense. I was conflicted.” I decided like, “How can I take this theory of behavioral science and psychology of the brain and bring that into my sales process?” That’s what I started doing. I started learning how to use techniques that work with human behavior to give my prospects to pull me in rather than me push. At that point, selling became very comfortable for me, most importantly, the prospect. It became very easy and very profitable. That’s where it all started for me.

What I’m hearing is that there was a disconnect that the gap was filled when you heard Tony say those words, but your sales manager never taught you that.

Nobody did. None of these books back there did.

Tony and I were in business together. We built Business Breakthroughs International. I know Tony and the way he thinks. I love him, and at every level, the guy is amazing. He has this ability to say the one thing that you need to hear. It’s amazing because he probably recorded that years before, but it came out at exactly the right time. Part of what this is for me is the way the world works. The way the universe works is this universe is built on synchronicity. What you are doing is you are aligning yourself. The synchronicity is already there. You may not see it.

For you, it wasn’t the bus with the word or a sign that went right by your face. You read that sign, and all of a sudden, the world changed for you. It was that statement from Tony Robbins. Here’s the difference between you and everybody else. You took action. You made a decision at that moment in time and said, “I can’t keep doing it this way. I know the boss is older than me. He’s probably richer than me. He’s probably smarter than me and has done this for 30 years, but I can’t keep doing it the way he’s telling me.” That’s a hard decision to make. You did it.

I didn’t have any choice. I was a 21 or 22-year-old kid, broke, and you either change something or you have to get a different type of job. I didn’t have a choice.

I’ve been through this in my life too. I’ve made many of these choices because of what I will call the synchronicity of the universe in my life. When you open your eyes and see it, it shows up. For everybody reading this, maybe this is your synchronicity. Maybe we’re about to do something or say something. I want you to read very carefully because I’m talking to a very smart and successful guy. Clearly, he learned how to sell. Maybe there’s something here for you or not, but let’s find out.

Jeremy, we’re going to shift gears. As I told you in the past, we have a real smattering of professions and hundreds of different types of companies reading this show, but everybody has to sell. Not everybody succeeds. We have coaches. We have plumbers. It doesn’t matter. They may not sell every single time they try to sell, but they have to. Where do we start in the basic resetting of the mindset and maybe giving folks a couple of tools that they could work with within the short time we have together?

Everybody needs to understand this because I get why a lot of people don’t like selling. If you’re forced to learn traditional selling techniques and what I call repackages consultative interrogation techniques, you all are going to trigger a lot of sales resistance from a prospect. You’re going to get smacked in the mouth. That’s no fun. Nobody wants to get punched in the nose. Has everybody heard of the ABCs of closing, the Always Be Closing? It’s been around for 100 gazillion years from the dinosaur ages of selling. I’m going to make a suggestion. I might make some people mad on here, but always be closing is what average salespeople do in our day and age.

If you want to be a top sales professional or a business owner who scales and you’ve got a sales team, you have to get them off of this mantra that selling is adversarial, “You are against the prospect. Try to manipulate them. Win them over so you can make money.” That is what average salespeople do in our time. If you want to be a top 1% owner and want to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in commissions as a rep, manager or business owner to scale, you have to start thinking the selling is collaborative.

It’s you working with your prospects, helping them find and solve problems they didn’t know they had. What we want to show is, instead of the ABCs of closing, because you have to close people, but if you’re always closing all the time with that conversation, people pick up that they feel like you’re trying to sell them, and they emotionally shut down.

Selling is collaborative. It's about working with your prospects, helping them find and solve problems they didn't even know they had. Click To Tweet

You want to practice what we call the ABDs of selling, Always Be Disarming. From the very first words out of your mouth, from the first questions you’re asking, you’re triggering the prospect to let their guard down. If you can’t get them to let their guard down and they stay surface-level with you throughout that entire sales process, what type of objections do you get at the end? “It sounds good. Let me think it over. I need to do more research. I need to look at other vendors. I need to keep looking around for some other folk. I need to talk to my spouse. I need to talk to my CPA. I need to talk to my uncle, who lives in a van down by the river.” It’s all these excuses because they’ve emotionally shut down.

We want to follow what’s called the ABDs of selling. I always say most salespeople have been taught to be what we call product pushers. What do I mean by product pusher? Product pushers are you ask a few questions surface level like, “John, tell me two problems that keep you awake at night. Cindy, what are you looking for in a solution?” Within the first two minutes of a call, “What type of budget do you have set aside for a project like this?” Those are all surface-level questions. That triggers because your prospects are used to every salesperson who’s ever tried to sell them anything and asking the same surface-level questions.

In our day and age, we have to become what we call problem finders. It’s even a lot deeper than problem solvers. There are about 700 books up on my shelves. I have about 1,400 sales books that I went through in the last few years. I read about five books a month. Two on audio while I drive around in my car because what else am I going to do? Listen to Britney Spears? She’s cool, but she doesn’t help me make any money. Rather than listen to CNN or Fox, which isn’t going to make me any money, I need to learn.

I read two books a month, and in my car, I’m reading three books a month as well. Every single book says, “You have to be good. You have to be a problem solver.” That makes sense. However, if you peel the layers back, you can’t be a problem solver until they purchase what you’re offering. How can you solve problems before they buy? You can’t. To get them to buy, solve their problems, and become a problem solver, you now have to be better at problem-finding.

That means asking the right questions at the right time in the conversation, allowing the prospect to find problems they didn’t know they had. When you first start talking to a prospect, most of them don’t even know that they have a problem. Maybe they know they have a problem, but they don’t know how bad the problem is, or they don’t understand the consequences of what happens if they don’t do anything about solving the problem.

When you start learning advanced questioning techniques, not only are you able to help them find one problem, but now you can help them find 2, 3, 4 or 5 problems. When you’re able to do that with your prospect, how do they start to view you? They view you differently than all these other pushy salespeople that are trying to shove their solution down their throats. They start to view you as more of the expert and more of the trusted authority who’s going to help them get where they want to go. It’s a different way of thinking about what selling is. When we start thinking that way and learn the right skills, selling becomes a lot of fun. It’s a lot different experience.

I want to go back to something you said before. You said, “People hate selling.”

It’s because of the way they’ve been taught how to sell.

What they hate is rejection. Everybody loves to sell. If you’re a single guy in your 20s or 30s and you meet somebody you’re attracted to, you’re about to start selling. If you don’t like dates, then you’ll never learn how to do that. The point is it’s the rejection that people are emotionally faced with. What you’re presenting is a way of rejection-free selling. That, to me, became a moment where I said, “That makes a lot of sense.”

When I was in my sales career before I retired, I didn’t view every sales call as me trying to make money. I’m analyzing, “What problems does this individual or company have? What is the root cause of the problem? How are the problems affecting them? How can we help them overcome that to get them where they want to go?” I quite literally believed that selling is collaborative. You can’t have a belief and then not know what to do when they answer the phone and say hello. That’s not going to help you either. There are certain questions that we have to understand, and this is Behavioral Science 101.

Typically, within the first 7 to 12 seconds, sometimes even sooner, of every single sales interaction you will ever be involved in, your prospects subconsciously pick up on social cues from you. You do the same thing. When you’re in a networking event, and somebody comes up and starts talking to you, what do you start doing for the first ten seconds? “Who is this person? What do they want?” That’s normal.

A long time ago, whenever that was, 10,000, 20,000 or 100,000 years ago, when people were on the Earth, we had this part of our brain that when saber two tigers came around us, we’re trying to protect ourselves. It’s the reptilian part of the brain. Now we’re trying to protect ourselves from people trying to sell us something because we’re always being sold to all the time. We have to understand that within that first 7 to 12 seconds, they’re picking up on our social cues, verbal and nonverbal cues, and what we’re saying and asking that triggers their brain to react is scary.

 

If we come across as aggressive in that call, like super salesy or needy, everybody knows what I mean by that because you can feel your neediness on the call. You can tell it in the tone. If you come across attached and you don’t understand the right questions to ask or the right tone, it triggers the brain to go into what’s called fight or flight mode. Everybody’s heard fight or flight mode, but does anybody know how it’s triggered?

It’s not like they came up to you and like, “I’m going into fight mode.” There’s something you say or ask that triggers that reaction from them. We’ll talk a little bit about NEPQ or Neuro-Emotional Persuasion Questioning, and you will learn how to come across as more neutral, like unbiased. You’re not quite sure you can even help yet because you don’t know enough about their situation. You come across as calmer and especially detached. That’s the keyword. You understand the right question to ask with the right tone. It triggers the human brain to become curious enough when they feel like they want to engage. They want to open up because they don’t know what it is yet, but they feel like you might have something important to them.

When we learn how to become more detached from the expectations of even making that sale, and we still focus on whether or not we can help them, it typically causes them to open up themselves when more open to them. Do I mean when you get in sales calls that it’s not your goal to make a sale or if you’re in a B2B complex environment to move the sale forward with micro-commitments? Not. That should be your goal 100%. You have to keep that internally to yourself because the moment the prospect picks up that you are there to sell them is the moment they emotionally shut down. Even in the best questions you ask, you’ll get 2 or 3-word answers and then at the end, “I want to think it over,” and you never hear back from him again.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with Jay Abraham where we were talking about curiosity. I don’t even know if he was trying to make the point, but my antenna is up whenever I speak to Jay. I want to absorb everything. One of the things he said was that, “Sometimes when I meet somebody, it doesn’t even matter what they do. I want to know who they are, what they’re doing, what issues are in their lives, and what problems they’re facing.” Part of being a great salesperson is to have a natural curiosity and helps people share what they need to tell you in a non-aggressive way. That’s another framing for the same thing. I do that.

It’s about getting the prospect to let their guard down because if you can’t get them to let their guard down, it’s pretty much over. We see when companies bring us in to audit their sales, “We even have Fortune 500 companies.” You’re like, “I can’t believe they’re doing this. It’s all a numbers game to them. They could be doing five times what they’re doing.” It’s all about disarming the prospect. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say, in the end, you’re selling something that requires a contractual agreement. This is pretty basic. I find some people, and I’m like, “I can’t believe you didn’t know this.”

They’ll come like, “I need you to sign the contract here.” Those are two words that have a negative connotation with most people because people don’t like to get into contracts that they might regret later on because it didn’t work out. Let’s say I sell business consulting to companies. You help companies with their operations systems. You come in and redo everything so they can scale, “John, I need you to authorize the document here. What that does is it gives us permission for us to come in, build out your operations, and build out your systems to help you scale up to $10 million a month. I need to have you authorize the agreement here.”

Authorizing an agreement is far more neutral than signing the contract. When I post in, the reason why they’re authorizing the agreement at the end result makes it like you’re authorizing the agreement that you can, and you repeat back what they said they wanted, “I’ll have you go into authorized the agreement. This gives us permission to give you access to the virtual training platform to start training you so that you can X, Y, Z.”

To authorize a sales agreement is far more neutral than signing a contract. Click To Tweet

It makes it easier because now they’re authorized agreements so they can have what they said they want. The US government does a good job of this. I’ll give you an example, the term IRS or Internal Revenue Service. If it were an Internal Taxing Service, we’d all be up in arms. Do you see how they re-language that to Internal Revenue Service? There’s a reason why they did that because it sounds less threatening. Internal Revenue, not Internal Taxing.

It’s like the Inflation Reduction Act.

That’s a little bit overboard. Doing that with that triggered more resistance. It triggered more people not to trust them because it had nothing to do with that. When you’re re-languaging Internal Taxing Service to Internal Revenue Service, it’s a little bit more low-key. When you’re doing something like that, you’re going to trigger more mistrust. I would say that was a bad move.

They used the George Orwell guidebook on how to create the Department Of Successful Communication. You know what I’m getting at. The bottom line here, which I love about what you said, is that what you’re doing is you’re entering into a consultative conversation with a client to uncover the problems that they may not know they have or may not realize are as bad as they are. By showing them the possibilities, the pathway to authorizing the agreement is much easier.

I shy away from that consultative word because consultative selling is better than boiler room selling, but typically consultative selling because that came out in the ’80s with books like SPIN Selling by Neil Rackham, a college professor. It was revolutionary at that time because you were coming from boiler room selling days, and they taught you, “You needed to ask questions to find out the needs of the client,” which makes sense. The only problem is when you’re asking surface-level questions, what type of answers is the prospect going to give you back? Logical-based answers.

Do human beings make decisions based on emotion or logic? Emotion 100% There’s no debate in behavioral science on that. Brain studies prove that. It’s more persuasive than trying to slam them into The Wolf On Wall Street, manipulate them, pressure them and assume the sale. You’re starting to play the numbers game because you’re not bringing up very much emotion by simply asking logical-based questions. You have to take them below the surface. How do you do that? Prospects don’t just open up because you have some good questions that they’re going to answer it.

 

There’s a technique we call NEPQ verbal cues. When you ask a question, and the prospects start answering, instead of setting back and nodding your head, letting them talk for five minutes, and in the end, you say, “Got you. I’m curious. Let me ask you,” it sounds like a scripted conversation. In the conversation, you’re sitting there using verbal cues.

It sounds out of your mouth while they’re talking to show them you’re present. “When you said blank, walk that back for me. What did you mean by that?” Verbal cue led me to that question, so I can interject with that verbal cue, “When you said that you didn’t have XYZ, what did you mean by that, so I understand?” Verbal cue leads me to the next question, which makes it sound far more natural, where it’s like a natural conversation, but yet is a very structured skilled conversation. You’re not winging it.

It shows interest instead of if you’re sitting there nodding, but if you are interacting, you’re building a relationship at that point. It’s a small part of how you build and retain trust. Let’s shift gears here for a second. We both had in mind the idea of selling something expensive. What about we employed hundreds of one-call closers? We drove 6,000 phone calls a week into our call center when Tony and Chet were on the radio, and then we had these people trained with a script that they could get a closed deal and a credit card in about 17 to 19 minutes.

That’s more B2C sales. We train thousands of B2C.

If in case there are folks reading that have that as their business model, how would we modify some of the things you already mentioned to fit that?

You are not modifying much at all. Even if it’s a $5 magazine subscription, it’s a little bit different. When you were talking with Tony and Chet, what were the price points they were selling?

We were selling a $239 webinar seat.

That’s probably a 10 to 15-minute conversation. The only difference between B2C and B2B is B2C, for the most part, not all B2C, is more of a one-call close. Sometimes it might be a two-call close. It depends on what it is. B2B is more of a complex sell environment. It’s more of a discovery call. You’re transitioning to micro-commitments to take the next step to get into a demo. That’s what you’re selling. Maybe a proposal is the 3rd or 4th appointment, or maybe you’re meeting with other decision-makers. In the fifth appointment, you’re presenting in front of the board. It depends. B2C is the same thing. You’re still building the gap, but you’re building the gap faster. That’s the only difference.

What that means is you’re still finding out what their current situation is. What’s their current state? What are the problems they have? Even if you’re selling something small, no product or service was ever made that didn’t solve a problem and/or an emotional need or both. Even Ferrari solves an emotional need, which is not a problem. If you want to drive from point A to point B, you can drive a used Honda, but for a Ferrari, you don’t have to do that, but it solves an emotional need. Everything that’s ever been made solves something.

You’re building that gap. You’re helping them see what problems they have, not by telling them because that goes in one ear out the other. You’re biased. You’re the salesperson. Your questions allow them to see what their real problems are. Once they see that gap, you’re now focused on where they want to go. What is their objective? We call that their objective state. What is their future going to look like once all these newfound problems are solved? B2C is a shorter conversation.

 

Before we move on, have you ever heard of this book called The New Model of Selling? Does that ring a bell?

Yes. We have a book that is available. It’s called The New Model of Selling: Selling to an Unsellable Generation. I wrote that with a good friend of mine, Jerry Acuff. He’s the CEO of Delta Point Consulting, a very large sales consulting firm on the East Coast. If you want to wait until it gets into a bookstore like Barnes & Noble or the major bookstores, it will be all-major bookstores on March 15, 2023. That’s when our publishers release it in any bookstore. You are welcome to get that.

Let’s get to the point here because I know you have something very interesting and exciting to give to readers.

If they want to learn more about what we do, we’ll give them a few nibbles. They’re welcome to join our free Facebook Group. It’s called SalesRevolution.pro. We got about 40,000 some members in that. We started it out in 2021. Salespeople, B2B and B2C, it’s all a mixture of entrepreneurs, coaches, and business owners. Right when you join, check your Facebook messenger. We’ll have somebody on my team message over to your free training called the NEPQ 101 mini course.

We didn’t have time to get into NEPQ questions, but it will give you a list of different NEPQ questions that you can use for different sales situations you’re going to find yourself in that will help you. We go live in that group 3 or 4 times a week with different Q&As and training. We give them nibbles out. If they want more advanced training than our clients are in for their industry, they’re welcome to reach out. They can email or call that Facebook Group and reach out to find more details.

Another great resource is your amazing podcast. What’s the name of that show?

You can go to a podcast and listen to that. It’s called Closers Are Losers. We have two episodes per week. We started out in 2021. They’re welcome to be on that. The Facebook Group will give them the biggest hors d’oeuvres for sure.

Do you have anything you’d like to add before we wrap this up? This has been such a fun session for me. I always learn a lot whenever I speak to you. I want to thank you for being on the show. What do you have to say?

I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on the show. If you want to describe what selling or selling is in one word, it’s change. All selling is change. It’s about how good you are at getting your prospect to view in their mind. Changing their situation means purchasing your solution. That them doing that is far less risky for them than them doing nothing at all. Staying in the status quo, their problems stay the same, which is risky. Selling is about change. That’s how I leave it there.

All selling is change. It's about how good you are at getting your prospect to view in your client's mind that changing their situation means purchasing your solution. Click To Tweet

That was a great tip. Thank you. Readers, get into that Facebook Group as soon as you can and start learning. I’m going to pre-order your book, and others should too because if you shared what’s in that book, that alone would be worth it, but I have a feeling it’s going to be a lot more.

It’s a lot more than that for stuff. We went over some basic stuff.

Thank you for being on, and we’ll talk again soon.

Thanks, Mitch. I appreciate you.

 

Important Links

• ClientFol.io
• Jeremy Miner
• SPIN Selling
• The New Model of Selling: Selling to an Unsellable Generation
• SalesRevolution.pro
• Closers Are Losers

 

About Jeremy Miner

Jeremy Miner, the CEO of 7th Level Communications teaches students a model of selling that Jeremy created from years of researching human psychology. He says that there are three forms of salespeople should use to communicate and persuade, these forms are different from how people have been taught in the past. The third form works as a ‘golden rules’ when approaching conversations with any person or prospect you are engaging. The key is to be placing the emphasis on their needs and engaging rather than pitching. You’ll find that these forms of communication are far more effective than the old mode of selling.

 

 

 

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