How To Close More With This Question

Years ago, we hired a sales coach.

Rob Lime.

Rob was trained in the Sandler Sales method; as a result, so are we at K&J.

When we learned to sell, Rob taught us to look for milestones in our conversations.

The most important milestone in a sales conversation, according to Rob and one of the FBI’s best, Chris Voss, is getting a prospect to say, “That’s right”.

Here’s what this looks like in practice - using two questions that have helped us close more leads than any other technique or script:

Prospect: "I need help with my marketing”

Us: “Why don’t you read a few blogs and spend a few hours learning how to do this as opposed to hiring us?”

Prospect: “I don’t have the time and don’t want to be an expert in this area.”

Us: “Great, just so I can say I heard you correctly, you don’t have the time to pull together the skills needed to do this yourself?”

Prospect: “That’s right.”

90% of our closes come from some version of this conversation.

Asking a prospect why they can’t do it themselves illuminates a few things:

• They don’t have the skills

• They don’t have the time

• They vocalise the problem they’re having

Once they’ve shared that reason, you just need them to repeat it back to you.

Sales is essentially a conversation where each party tries to understand the value they bring to the table.

Our job as sellers is to help people realise the value we bring to the table and get them to agree to that.

P.S. If you want to connect with Rob, you can find him here on LinkedIn.
The bloke is cooler than Vanilla Ice.

Capitalism As Communism

The epitome of capitalism, the company, performs best when it acts as a communist.

Not in the political sense, with state ownership or rigid ideology, but in the structural way they operate internally.

At their peak, the best companies behave like tightly-knit collectives.

Resources are shared, not hoarded. Knowledge flows freely. Successes and failures are distributed.

But in our capitalist system, especially by certain political groups, the idea of the individual and individual identities is promoted as best.

The politics of one.

Freedom of speech, freedom of action, no compromises.

Self-assertion over the betterment of all. Right now, it is even supposedly moral to be selfish and foolish to care for the community.

Even those working for communities often care more about how they're perceived in the community, where on the ladder they sit, than how they serve that community.

The individual, particularly recently, in all ways, is encouraged to behave selfishly.

But in high-performing teams, which is what high-performing businesses are.

Collective advancement matters more than individual performances. 10x engineers exist, but not by themselves. No one is bigger than the jersey.

Amazon’s culture of writing documents before meetings ensures everyone is lifted by a shared clarity.

Toyota’s kaizen process draws ideas from workers on the line as much as from executives. These practices and many other celebrated management techniques flatten hierarchies & improve transparency.

Many insiders say Elon has a hard-to-describe magnetism that inspires his teams at Tesla and SpaceX to go way beyond normal efforts, which allows them jointly to achieve new outcomes in this world.

The perfect company has no politics, no hierarchies, perhaps not even titles.

They strip away what David Graeber calls “bullshit jobs” - roles or tasks that exist only to prop up bureaucracy - a legacy of middle management.

Leaving behind work that feels meaningful and contributive.

The most innovative and competitive companies externally are the most cooperative and communistic internally.