lower your ego, the higher your self esteem and the more focused and persuasion you'll be on the person that you're communicating with, not just making sure that the person is impressed with what they're seeing here is the question, what's going on inside the minds of top achievers that caused them to make extraordinary breakthroughs both personally and professionally. My name is tim Sure, and I invite you to join me as we take a deep dive into the unconscious mind and discover how to transform your biggest dreams into a reality. Welcome to the how to be mesmerizing podcast, everybody welcome to how to be mesmerizing. It's tim Sure. And oh, I have a very exciting legend in the house with us. Jim Pensiero is here. Jim, welcome to the program. I'm honored to be here. Yes, thank you so much. I'm excited to have you with us. So Jim is a Hall of Fame sales expert, he is a sales leadership superstar. He's been teaching people for decades and we won't say how many but Jim is the go to guy for decades, that's amazing. He is the go to guy for teaching sales and sales expertise.

And so, you know, when we first were talking, he asked me such amazing question, you know, he says, why do you want people to be mesmerizing? And I thought that's a question that I wanted to ask him when I had him on the show. So, jim, my first question for you is why would people want to be mesmerizing and more persuasive, well, tim, I'm excited, I thank you for inviting me to be on your program and what you're talking about to me as I'm a salesperson. So when I look at all of persuasion and stuff, even if it's for people that are not in a sales position, I still apply the tools and processes of selling that I've seen work and more importantly that I've seen work in others. So if we talk about this, how do you become more mesmerizing? How do you become more persuasive for any of those synonymous terms? The first question to ask is, so what's your motivation? Why are you doing this? And too many times we see it in sales, we see it in all sorts of communication. I see it in my peers and professional speaking that they're leaving with their ego, they're not leading with their interests in focusing on others.

So that one of the first questions asked, So why do you want to be more mesmerizing? Is it for you and your ego to say, hey, I'm the star and I'm funny and I get laughs or is it for you to be able to say I've had impact and I was able to communicate with somebody and make a difference. The idea is to lower your ego, the higher your self esteem and the more focused and persuasion you'll be on the person that you're communicating with, not just making sure that the person is impressed with what they're seeing. I think that's just kind of the foundation of this. So I think especially knowing the variety of expertise and skills and jobs and responsibilities that that listen to this, I'd like to offer some ideas in general that are basically persuasive ideas of what you can do, whether your job is selling or whatever it is. Because the reality, if we look, if you're involved in any kind of business, no matter what your job is, your persuasion ist, if you can't persuade others, you won't get the job done. If you're, if you're a manual task person, you've got to be persuasive to have them, want to give you the resources you need.

If you're a leader, you have to have a persuasiveness to get people to do something else. If you're an internal department within a company, you have to be persuasive to the other departments, either to support them or to get the resources that you need and what you do? So as part of this, this, it's this incorporated thing, talking about persuasion is impacting all of our lives, even though most people don't see it as a critical responsibility they have in their job, whatever the job is. Yeah. You know, you got to have influence, you gotta have persuasion if you're going to get what you want and also help other people get what they want right, as a coach, you know, for years, my job was to influence them to achieve the goal that they came in saying they wanted to accomplish, even though they were actively sabotaging themselves and they knew it, right. And so, but even it's like, hey honey, what do you want for dinner tonight? Oh, I was thinking, you know, and then here comes the influence, right? So it's crucial that everybody be more intentional about how to be influential, how to increase your ability to be mesmerizing.

And you said something really powerful, don't make it about you and your ego, you know, make it about serving others. So what would you say are some ideas then to help us be more persuasive? Well, I think it's a great question because selling is not an art. Persuasion is not an art, it's a science when it's done properly, it looks artful, but there's structure and there's a process that allows you to replicate not in a manipulative way, that's just values focused of trying to get something from somebody, but from trying to be persuasive, there's a structure that if there's structures that if you apply them, you can be more persuasive. One of the major themes I have today because of what's happened with the virus is a major theme of a lot of my sales training right now is new rules, but old tools. So even though there's all new rules of how things are going. The tools that we have in our toolbox of selling and all of the processes, structures and things, they're still even more applicable than they were before this happened. In fact, I think it might help, especially for those listening that are in sales.

If we look at, how do you become more persuasive, how do you become more mesmerizing? How do you have more impact? How do you sell more? Any variable? You want to choose their, there's really four sets of skills that are necessary for six deaths and selling and those four skills are universal. If you give me any skill that a salesperson needs to have, it's going to fit in one of these four, the first level, the bottom that the foundation is like building four stories of a building for those of you listening. The first story, the basement the bottom is your attitude and energy. Do you have a positive energy? Are you doing this for the right reasons? Do you want to be effective? Do you want to be successful? Are you a hard worker? Those are all attitude and energy. Zigzag Euler was the famous motivational speaker of our industry and his whole focus was on attitude and energy. If you went to one of his programs, it was phenomenal fact, look them up on youtube, there's still a lot of videos of his presentations available that but it was, you didn't take any notes because it was all make it happen with exceptional energy giving you mesmerizing stories to fire you up to have a stronger attitude and energy.

The second level though is your operational skills which are your personal skills and abilities, your knowledge of how to be persuasive, your knowledge of the steps of a sales call is an operational skill. All of the technical industry expertise you have as part of this operational category because it makes you more persuasive in front of somebody. The next level up is tactical, which deals with process structures or multiple step issues that you're dealing with what you do from the time you identify a new opportunity until the time you close on the sale. What are the steps of your process? That's a tactical discussion. How do you get higher, wider and deeper with a customer? That's a tactical discussion and the final is strategic, which is what is your philosophy, your positioning and how do you communicate your brand? Salespeople need to master all for skills frankly, if no matter what job you're in, there's aspects of all four of these that are still important to you to make you more persuasive, which will make you more mesmerizing. Do you have an impact? Here's the challenge though. How do you feel about sales and sales people? Well even sales people sometimes don't have a positive thing.

I've asked people in big groups, Jim, you know, I'll have, you know, 200 sales people in a room and I'll be like, describes salespeople and they'll be like sleazy, you know, and greedy and all that stuff and then I have to remind them, hey you are sales people right? And they all start laughing you say this. And I think one of the reasons sales people have gotten a bad reputation is because they didn't have the skills to do it right. If you don't have the skills do it right, you're going to make mistakes and it's going to come across as pushy, aggressive, manipulative, all those other things, not as necessarily because that's where your values are, but if you don't have the skills, if you're just intuitive about it, you're gonna make mistakes and that's when things fall apart. You know, you had said something, you had said something before that, I thought was really impressive because I didn't know that right, which is why I was excited to talk with you again. But you said a lot of times, our first experience of someone in sales is like a car, lot a car dealership and it's such an entry level position for sales people that you're being met with people who have not really had any good sales training or that have been taught you go for the sale no matter what, you're always closing.

And so it comes off that way. And so it's really not fair for the consumer and it's definitely not fair for the brand new salesperson either. And it's not that there's any industry that's negative sales. Car sales has gotten a really bad rap and the majority is car sales people have all the values that we're talking about in a positive way. It's the ones that joined the dealership, didn't get any training, tried to push it to close the sale because they had to make some money and then people walk away saying what a slimeball or the lack of skill training that they walked in. I walked into a car dealership recently, could buy a hubcap. I was out of town and I driven up to this job. This was before Covid hit and I popped a hubcap up on the way. So right across from the hotel was the car dealership. I went over to buy a hubcap because I can take care of this. I walked into the car dealership to buy a hubcap sales rep meets me at the door and says hi, interested in buying a car today, 1st, 1st close close. So I said, well, no, should I leave when you didn't think it was funny?

But this idea that so he comes across as pushy and manipulative when I don't know if he's been trained that you really don't want to open with a close because of the resistance it builds. Sure. I think in helping out, if we look at this, I'd like to talk, I think an idea to share and I apologize to anybody that's in sales because everybody's in sales always moans about this, but it's a critical skill, even experienced people need to review and that's the steps of a sales call. Mm Now we can deconstruct the steps of the sales call and talk hours about it. Even if the call itself only takes a few moments like talking about a golf swing, we can talk an hour of how you grip and how you stand and how you shift your weight when you go to hit this, maybe a 2 to 3 second activity. So as we look at it, if we take persuasion to its most fundamental level, persuasion is only two steps. The first step is you lower resistance and then the second step is you actually deliver a message. This is the foundation of selling because if I don't lower your resistance, you won't hear anything. I say if I call you up in the phone and say congratulations, you've won a free car.

How many people would hang up on me? Because the resistance is this is another common thing and because they didn't do anything to lower the resistance, even 100% positive message is likely to reach a degree of resistance and how it's received an example of this? Specifically everybody that listens to this makes phone calls, whether it's for business or for your personal life. So an application of this, how do we apply this to just answering the phone, When you call somebody, how do you open it up? The lower resistance so that they'll talk to you. Even if it's only a couple of minutes, I have found a four step process that I've used my entire career. I learned it from my mentor Bill McGrane back in 1970s talking about old and, but this is a process and structure that still works now. I'll show you the steps and then let me give you examples because it's very simple and it's very quick. It's your name, it's your position. It's the reason for your call and then to ask if this is a good time to be calling or if they have a moment to talk on the phone Now.

So I was calling you and say Tim Jim Pan zero from sales and the sales leadership. The reason for my call is I wanted to talk with you to see what your plans are for next year with the sales training routine and if the kind of resources I have might help. Is this a convenient time to be calling Now I have found those four steps generate the lowest resistance of a conversation. In fact, if you want to test this out, make a couple calls and leave one of those steps out. So I called up and said Tim, I'm from Japan cereal sales and sales leadership. Reason for my call is talking about the training, given I want to talk, I have a feeling you're gonna say, well who are you? If I said hi tim, this is Japan Sarah. We want to talk about what you're doing with sales training next year. Well who are you? And this final idea is if you look the pushy salespeople, the slimy salespeople, they're pushing to get to the clothes as fast as possible. So because of that, they will open up and try to get as much information on the customer as they possibly can before the customer says no or ask the question. It's an old high pressure style of selling. So one of the ways we can lower resistance by communicating were not high pressure.

And this is a positive conversation is to give the customer a chance to say no. See I found what I was calling with prospecting in the old days. If I called up a customer and I called you and you didn't have time to talk, you would most likely get rid of me by saying no, I'm not interested in what you're selling. You wouldn't say no, I don't have time. So what we want to do is separate time from selling, asking for something. So what had happened is to ask this office is a convenient time to be calling. If you've done these opening steps most I've not had anybody I ever remember using it as a way just to hang up on me. If they say no, I'm in the middle of a meeting, that's great One would be a more appropriate time to give you a call back and I found this then and I would say, okay, we can talk now. Okay then now you're into the next phase of the conversation. But this is a kind of opening that can significantly lower resistance and set up a call. In fact, it's fun to try try making some calls with people and just leaving out one of these steps and seeing what happens. I think it would be a better idea to leave those steps in and then to memorize it right to lower resistance.

Yeah. I mean if you have a simple strategy and you memorize it, like you said, then you turn the selling process into a science because you're not trying to close, you're trying to build value in a relationship and you know that and it's a lot more fun for you too. It's a lot more when you have a structure, it's easier for you because the number one reason thing that that salespeople haters cold calling. But if you have a strategy for creating new friends, it can change the dynamic. And I think that's what you said, even though you're going through it, you know, nonchalantly, it's very, very powerful. You know, like you said, you've been testing this for 40 years and this is what you find gets you the absolute best results. So for everybody that's watching or listening do not take that lightly. I mean this is a powerful proven strategy that Jim has taught, you know, some of the biggest corporations in the world some of their teams how to grow and grow your profits and increase your market share.

So Alright, awesome. So we lower resistance. What next? Well I think in looking at this, it's understand we're not talking about memorized scripts here, even though if you look at pretty much everything you see on tv, somebody else wrote for the person that's talking, it's memorized or it's read off a teleprompter and they're professionals are doing that. Most amateurs aren't, majority of amateurs aren't so that you can't have a script. What I used to do is I had actually a piece of paper printed that I put right in my cubicle in front of me that just had the terms we had, I didn't have it written out exactly what I was saying, but had those four things. So as I was learning it, I could watch and make sure I hit the steps when I was learning the steps of a sales call, I did the same thing in my cubicle, I would have the steps there. So if I watch them, it would help me learn because the inter connectivity of persuasion is so critical. Yeah, let me, I can show you what I'm talking about, let's talk about the steps of a sales call for a minute. Yeah, let me jump in real quick because that's really powerful. What you said as soon as I hear someone called me up and they're read and I hear them, they're reading a script, I hang up, you know, I'm very nice, but I'm like, I'm sorry because they know that people are going to hang up so they have a script for that too and they go right into reading the next part of their script.

I literally hear them jump to the next section if caller says no, thank you, read this. So I think that's smart that you have words and you have bullet points and if you want to memorize a couple of sentences, that's great. But do not read from a script, you're 100 right on target, very good. Okay, and talk about the steps of a sales call the steps of a sales call like an accordion, you can talk about the steps and it could be a one or two minutes sales call or get an elevator where you see somebody and you have a chance to be persuasive or at a party or it could be a two hour presentation where it expands and contracts. Steps don't change, they just expand or contract how much time you spend and focus on the steps. Great metaphor, if we look at the steps of a sales call, the first step is to lower resistance that you're greeting. This is why I'm posting all my videos online. I'm trying to lower resistance so that somebody wants to have a conversation with me so I can move to the next step. So lowering resistance is your branding, it's your positioning, its reputation, it's your efforts of communication ahead of time are all part of that resistance lowering it isn't just your opening of hey, how's your family?

So it's this process first. Lower resistance. Then the next step is you ask questions to understand and to learn what they're wanting and what they need, how you can help what their challenges are based on what you learned from that. The third step then, as you present your solution, saying, okay, here's an idea you might want to consider or here's how I can help. And then the fourth step is to have some kind of closure to ask for the order or ask for some kind of commitment. Here's the problem in selling the majority of people in sales today are in what's called a process sale environment where it's gonna take more than a single sales call to make a sale. Even a lot of retail sales are multiple coal experiences to be able to close the business. Some industries like car sales will be a single call. So of course the closes the finale. But if you're in any kind of process business, we can't have the clothes because that just makes it an event sale. It doesn't make it a process sale and to make it a process sale most critical step is we need to agree and set up our next contact.

So to me, this last step is the most critical of agreeing and setting up not to close itself. So if you and I are talking about something and I'm not concerned if you don't say yes now as long as we can keep talking, so I'm not even ask you to say as part of my clothes is to say that. Does this sound like it might even be relevant for you anytime in the future? And if you say yes to say great, when would you like me to get back to you? When would you like me to follow up? When would you like to talk again? And by asking that? Look at how it's now a process because by that when you go back in, look how you've lowered resistance the next time this is on the steps of of calling somebody on the telephone. If I call you and say is this a convenient time to be calling and you say no, My next question is to go right to the bottom and say So when would you like me to get back to you? When would be a more convenient time. So that way when you call them back the next time you can start off by saying when you and I talked yesterday you're really busy, You asked me to give me a call today? Yeah. Now look how that process loops us around in this effort of being able to now have a lower resistance the next time we talk, even if it's only the second time you've talked because of that this process works.

So let me reinforce how powerful that is. That is really, really good. So so I yeah that's right. So I was talking the other day to a friend of mine and he had made an introduction to somebody and then he asked me did you follow up with him? And I said yes, did you book a call? Yes. Did you talk with him? Yes. Did you schedule another time to talk with him again? And I said well he told me to call him on monday and my friend said so you didn't then I'm like well I'm going to call him on monday. He says if you do not have an appointment with him then it might not happen. So what you need to do. So he gave me a loving slap on the hand and then he said you need to reach back out and do exactly what you just said jim secure a time, are you available at one PM two PM or for four p.m. On monday? And then he replied back to P. M. Great, now I have an appointment with him at two p.m. And so it literally just happened. So I think that's brilliant that you didn't stop at the close, you went to the next step after that.

This is one of the problems The car Industry Ford Motor Company was the first company to ever publish anything about the steps of a sales call in 1927. This was came out of the book, birth of a salesman And what it was defined as it was the first time they saw on any of the research. The first time any of the steps were published in ford motor company published it as a flow chart and it was in the manual for selling model T Fords and it was describing here is the selling process and it went through basically the steps that we talk about. Now. The problem was because it made sense to everybody when they saw it, even though it was a one call sale environment and that's more appropriate with the car industry. Everybody else distribution, manufacturing services, all copied this because this made sense. But what they did was they copied an event process which was assuming a one called sale. And it was hard to apply to a process and when they tried to apply to a process a lot of times it didn't go well or it looked a little pushy because it's a different structure. That's why that final step is so critical, wow.

That's really, I've never heard that distinction before between a one event call and a process selling process selling process. Okay, how many calls does it take you from the time you identify a new opportunity until the time you close on the sale. This is one of the tactical structures of selling is to define most sales reps I joke about are like the Hillary Bird ever hear? The Hillary Bird? No, the three ft bird lives in four ft grasp. And that's what I'm saying. Where the hell are way up. It's this process that they only tend to think one move ahead. And if we look at selling, if humans are playing chess and I only think one move, but you think two moves games, you're going to win all of them, it's gonna be all of them. So if we look at this, this is the multiple levels of persuasion. Now, if we just talk about how do you become mesmerizing and it's not necessarily on the sales context. These tools and structures still apply there, just applied and maybe a softer manner. But there's some challenges with this structure as an example without control of this process.

If you don't have control of the steps of a sale skull, the knee jerk, immediate response or reaction is you're gonna talk too much, you'll do the majority of the call talking anytime there's silence. You'll fill it in with something that needs to be said as a part of the problem. So this is one of the reasons we need structure and stalling and in persuasion and, and being mesmerizing is because when you follow the structures, you'll do this as an example. We're not going to answer out loud because they might be listening on your call, but who are the slimiest people you've sales people you've ever met. And if you think about anybody in that there's an easy structure to define why they come across this so slimy. If we look at this, this came from a good friend of mine, sales trainer Jeff Slutsky and he talked about this. He said, here's the challenge, the slime balls and the most ethical professional salesperson who are using the exact same steps of a sales call. The difference isn't in the steps, it's in how they apply the steps. Here's what the slime balls do. They'll spend less than 25% of the time lowering resistance and asking questions and 75% presenting and closing.

They open with a close the A. B. CS of selling always be selling, always be closing. I mean all of these. So if we don't want to be like the slime balls and we want to be more persuasive, what do we got to do? That's pretty simple. I just got to reverse the process because if we reverse the process and we spent 75% of our time lowering resistance and asking questions and only 25% presenting. That's considered more like a doctor that's considered more like a diagnosis you're giving that then comes across as much more customer focused. So a key thing, I would say that we really want to take it down to the basics? How do you become more mesmerizing? One of the first steps is don't talk so much the second and all right, go ahead, finish the second. The second step is to focus on lowering resistance to be able to get the answers that you need, whether it's in your personal life, your social life or your business life. Yeah, I think a lot of times people it's brilliant. A lot of times people think that when they're talking, they're educating, you know, but the best way to educate is to share a point and then ask a question and even if this makes sense to you, what part of this you like, what part of this is a little bit sketchy for you and then get quiet and let them talk because if you're talking all the time and you're not listening, like you said, even if it's really high quality information, you've got to remember a lot of sales are built on emotion and if they feel like you're lecturing to them, then, you know, that's not going to produce the results that you want.

But if you get them asking questions or doing most of the talking, you know, they'll feel like, wow, you really get me. You really understand me. This is different from what I'm used to and it allows you to stand out and then you appear more mesmerizing. I used to not been doing this a long time. And a lot of my clients have been in depth process work of long term, not just coming in and giving a speech and leaving a variety of stuff that I do. So I would usually, when I was having a long term client, I would spend time researching the client in the old days. I used to ride with the sales rep for a day or two just to watch them sell and to learn their customers in the industry and their environment of how they sell. That's awesome. Whether they leaning across the truck in the, in the farmer's parking lot of their house or sitting around a kitchen table or whether it's in a corporate office or whether it's on a construction site. And one of the things I used to do when I wrote with a sales rep, but I didn't tell him I did it, but I used to carry a stopwatch. Now the stopwatch was simple. All it did was start stopping clearer and it made no noise.

So as we would go into a call, I look at what the time was they had to watch in my pocket every time the customers started talking, I turned it on and when they shut up I turned it off. So if we left a 30 minute a call, I could tell you the sales rep how many total minutes you talked on a call exactly because I timed it cause I was an observer. I wasn't participating so I could deal with this and they never knew I was doing it until the end. The average professional experienced salesperson talks over 90% of the time on a sales call. It was a universal truth across all industries. The numbers were always 80 to 90%. This assumption, if you're not telling you're not selling is just the opposite of what being persuasive and mesmerizing is. Now, I know we only have a couple of minutes, a couple final comments and I'd like to offer the first is we have gone through this dramatic change this last year in all of our lives because of what's happened. But I think the thing that a couple of things I would offer to remember the first is the more things change, the more opportunities are going to be for you to increase your competitive edge, most positive thing as negative.

And I don't mean to be downplaying this and I hope that in your life everybody is healthy and is able to stay that way. But one of the most positive things existing in this last year through this pandemic is that it's a level playing field, Even though business within an industry might have gotten crushed, it got crushed for everybody equally. So it's still a level competitive playing field. So if your business is down 30%, like a lot of my distributor customers are, it's still a level playing field because so are your competitors. So it's still a relative competitive process that you have a chance that you can increase your competitive edge and increase your effectiveness even when times are tough, it's still a level playing field and I think that's the most critical thing going on. I have some resources I would offer. The first is I have some products. If you go to advance sales university dot com, I have two video products. Each of them are under an hour. The one is called the no B. S guide to selling in under an hour and it talks about the five major selling skills or structures that you need to have if you want to be a persuasive salesperson.

The second thing I have is a video series. It's under an hour, 10 modules also called your prices to I seven steps to defending price when a customer says your price is too high. What do you say? How do you deal with it? What's the structures to handle that? Have that as a resource. Have some free stuff for you. March 13 of this year was when of 2020 was when the White House identified that we were in a pandemic and we're calling an emergency. So me Friday the 13th in March was the start of all this. I've been posting for several years three videos a week. I changed to make sure that all the videos after March 13th we're all focused on the virus and what do you do about it. So you, if you want to see sales tips, they're all under four minutes and they come out three times a week. But their accumulated in this pan zero dot com, P A N C E R O pan zero dot com forward slash virus. I also have a posting a lot of stuff on Youtube and on linkedin that you might want to follow or check me out to the sea of the stuff that we have.

And if you really want to track my three videos a week on every friday, it's free. There's no charge. I don't. There's no other mailings you're gonna get from me except on Fridays. I send an email out that lists links to all the videos I posted for the week as a way for you to be able to receive and see what's happening with this. The reality of this process is that we're going through dramatic change right now. But it is also resetting the competitive field. To me, this is some of the most exciting times to my career because it's a restart and when you restart, you have a chance to actually get ahead where you might not have been able to before because there was just so much inertia in place. One of the key questions I ask and all my programs is we know you're good. Now. The only question is, are you ready to get even better and to do something about this as a positive opportunity to increase your persuasiveness if you're in sales to increase your sales, but to become more mesmerizing and by the way, if you're in sales, are you ready to get even better and to sell your way out of this?

So tim I thank you for letting me be a part of this Jim. This was amazing. I've got an outstanding sales course here in, you know, in 30 minutes. This is really incredible. You gave us the structure the steps exactly what to go through. I recommend that everybody check out the resources that you have, will have those links in the show notes as well and check out pan Siro dot com forward slash virus for the free training. That's very generous of you and check out all the programs and follow jim on social media because obviously he gives you the best tools there are for serving through selling. So jim, thank you so much for being a part of this program today. It was amazing. I wanted to be on your show because you're so mesmerizing right back at you buddy, thank you so much. All right. Hey, everybody that was awesome. Go check out his resources and apply what you've learned, share this with your friends who are in the sales profession and make your life mesmerizing and we'll talk to you next time. Bye everybody. Hey, it's tim you ever wonder why so many talented hardworking entrepreneurs and business owners struggle with inconsistent self believe for high stress or procrastination or self sabotage?

Well, the answer may surprise you, and the solution is already inside of you. I've been searching for the answers to this for decades and I found them and I put it into a new program called the power of your unconscious mind, mental secrets for accelerating success. And because you're a listener, I want to give you a free V. I. P copy head over to power mindset program dot com. That's power mindset program dot com and grab your copy today.