But the arc, too, I think as a seller, is to do it with a bias. But, I mean, you have to. You're not a therapist, right? No.
And the best example I was taught was if you had a tumor and you went to a surgeon, an oncologist, and a radiologist, they would all diagnose your tumor with their bias. The surgeon would want to cut it out, the oncologist would want to poison it, and the radiologist would want to nuke it. Next, based on what people call it. Hi, friends.
Welcome to the Sales Enablement Podcast. I'm your host, Andy Paul. Now, that was Mike Bosworth. Mike is one of the true legends in the sales profession.
He's the author and the creator of Solutions Selling, and the creator and co-author of customer centric selling, both which a huge impact on the way we sell and continue to this day. And I always learned so much when I talked sales with Mike, and the last time he was on the show, we talked about the problem of discovery resistance. Discovery resistance on the part of the buyers, and why this causes even good sellers to struggle to meet their targets. And our conversation today, Mike and I are talking about two other forms of resistance.
The experience of part of buyers have an impact on you as a seller. One is proposal avoidance and the other is negotiation avoidance. We're also talking about the paramount importance of the buyer's experience with you, individual seller, and how you can avoid becoming the emotional victim of all the bad experiences your buyers had in their life-to-date with other sales people. So we get into all of this and much, much more, but before we get to Mike, I want to remind you to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or every Listen to Podcast.
So thank you for that. Let's jump into it with Mike Bosworth. Mike Bosworth, welcome back to the show. Happy to be here.
I think this is my third trip in the last couple of years. Yeah, maybe one more. You qualify for the blazer. I think that's what they do on Saturday Live, I think, but it's a way of hosts more than five times.
Oh, we're in the blazer. So, yeah, you're one away from the blazer. All right. Yeah, well, good to see you, as always.
So we were going to talk about a couple of interesting topics. We don't actually, I never even heard the term, so you brought them up. And actually, not in a commercial sales perspective. Actually, search online, you can find other things about them.
So last time you were here, we talked about discovery resistance, which on the topic I loved, which was a very interesting topic. Yeah, well, why sell us a hard time getting their questions answered. And that's becoming human. They're not going to answer your questions until they think you're a human being.
Exactly. So you built some credibility and trust. And I said, you earn the right to stick your nose into their business. Right.
I mean, it's discovery is meant to be intrusive. I think, right? I mean, that's how else you learn something unless you're being intrusive. I might argue with you a little bit.
If you've created enough credibility that they're open, they're open to sharing a problem with you. And then you're discovery after that's pretty easy. The big one is getting them to trust you enough to admit a problem to you. Yeah.
And I wasn't using intrusive and sort of the negative sense is more like you have to go beyond the surface, right? It has to be something that goes deep. Otherwise, you're never really going to learn what's really most important to them. But the art, too, I think, as a seller is to do it with a bias.
But I mean, you have to. You're not a therapist, right? No. And the best example I was taught was if you had a tumor and you went to a surgeon, an oncologist, an radiologist, they would all diagnose your tumor with their bias.
The surgeon would want to cut it out. The oncologist would want to poison it. And the radiologist would want to nuke it. Right.
Based on what they're selling. Right. Yeah. No, look.
Yeah. It's hard to eliminate that bias. I mean, there's a great book I've talked about in the show before called Blind Spot. Sometimes the hidden biases of good people, I believe they was.
But it's studied by the scientists at Harvard just so that we all have these biases that we carry with. So if you're talking about the medical profession, my wife teaches medical school at NYU and they have one course. They teach doctors, aspiring doctors about the practice of medicine and about how there's, remember that correctly, I think it was this 24 biases that doctor has to sort of consciously wade through when they're meeting with a patient. Ooh.
That's too much rain, I think, isn't it? Yeah. But it's like, well, it's age, gender, where they live, where they do, how they dress. I mean, there was a list of things.
It's like they all have an impact on how you're listening to someone. Right. Right. Wow.
And how you ultimately understand what the problem is. So we talked about discovery resistance last time. This time we're having a little different direction. And you've been talking about proposal avoidance and negotiation avoidance.
So let's start with our proposal avoidance. So what is that? Well, both of these came to me when I was a rookie sales rep at Syracuse Computer Services via our CEO at the time, Jim Campbell, who was Ross Perot Sales Manager at IBM. Okay.
And Ross Perot is one of the greatest sales people IBM has ever had. You know why he left? Because he maxed out his account plan by January 30th and IBM put a ceiling on his earnings. He's earning right.
And so he left. So Ross Perot, he hated doing proposals. And so anyway, proposal avoidance was standard operating procedure at your computer services. So after we get credibility, they admit pain.
We do some intelligent discovery. Right. And we get a buying vision. So, you know, if it were possible with a major change in a vendor delivery that you could replan your entire production overnight.
Would that help you improve your service to your customers? And they said, yes. Then, you know, after you create a buying vision, now they want proof. And so now you take them out to a customer, you're going to demo.
So once they've got a vision and proof, now you say to your prospect, well, Andy, if we get down the road and it looks like you're going to want to do business with us, will you want a proposal? I never had a single prospect say no to that question. They all say, oh, yeah, we'll want a proposal. And then this is Ross Perot.
He used to call it the yellow pad. But then we were taught to say, well, I just want you to know out front that at our company, it's our, it's our, that's the word I want policy policy is that you will never learn anything new from a proposal from our perspective that proposal is a vehicle to document and confirm all the elements of our doing business together. If we get to a point in the future, what are both looks like we want to do business together. Does that make sense?
They all said yes to that. And then what Ross Perot would do and he'd say, well, what I'd like to propose to you is one week before I owe you your proposal. I'd like to come in with all my notes because he'd have all his notes on a yellow pad and he'd say, I want to make sure I want to go through all my notes with you a week before I owe you the proposal because I only want to do it once and you don't want any surprises. In fact, then they had to type them up.
So it was a huge. I did some of those. Yeah. And so, so the prospect would say, okay, that makes sense.
So now again, you know, we, we would send out a proposed buying step plan. So on this week, we'll do proof and then go know good with go no go points. And then the next step would be, we'll take you into our headquarters, meet our CEO, go no go. Then the next step is we want to come out and roll our sleeves up and do an ROI that you guys really believe is feasible.
Go no go. We'd like to have your technical people come out to our data center and go no go. And what we'd also like to do, and this is key to negotiate in avoidance later, is at a certain point, we'd like to give the who's liable for what our standard agreement. So your lawyers and our lawyers can agree to who's liable for what now there's no money on the agreement, then, right?
It's just a standard thing. And they and lawyers hate that. The corporate lawyers all want money in there so they can be heroes. Right.
So one of the keys is separate the legal from the business. The lawyers only get to talk about liability and that's about the best, but it has nothing to do with the dollars in a sense. They hate it, but they do it. So now I'm at the last meeting before I owe you a proposal and I say, well, you know, Andy, I owe you a proposal one week from today.
And I just want to go through all my notes and make sure we're together and everything. So, you know, here's where this guy got this proof here and you see I've got this proof here. You know, the lead your our contracts have been through legal and your lawyers and our lawyers have done this and the ROI says it's going to pay for itself and X and that's a dot dot dot dot. Are we good to go?
And they would say, yeah, we're good to go. And then you get up and you start to do a Colombo and say, you know, your lawyers and our lawyers have already agreed to it. We know what the money is. And, you know, you've got the needs.
You've got the training schedule. You've got this. You've got this. You've got this.
If we could go ahead today, we could bump another 25,000. It's the payback. It's 25,000 a week. Whatever the weekly payback is before I came out here today, I checked with my implementation.
And people I said, you know, we're really in good shape here. But they want to go. We're really are you guys ready? They said they can start early.
So, you know, let's say, well, and then they say, so they sign you agreement. Right. And then I say, well, so how much of this do you want me to document? And they say, well, I've got that.
I've got that. I've got that. I've got that. And they say, no, we're good because the agreement is the only thing that's really there.
But the other key thing by selling them on the idea of a pre proposal review a week before the proposal is due is when you do the surprise close. They haven't been thinking about risk. And if you leave, if I say, see you next week with your proposal, Andy, you're going to wake up for the next seven nights thinking about all the things that can go wrong. Right.
And so we're avoiding that. And so, as you're on some peer services, I might have done a proposal 25% of the time, just because they wanted it all. And I always offered after they signed, how much you want me to make this pretty so you can send it to your board or whatever. I'll do it.
I already have a contract, right? If you're happy to type it up and make it pretty, if that's what you want. But if you're dealing with the power person, they signed the agreement. They're good.
Yeah. I like that. I love the approach. It's, yeah.
We sort of taught from the same school, some of the same things. It's like, yeah, I see this today. Like you only think that people talk about proposals as proposals at and winning proposals like, Oh, God, I don't want anything on proposal. I mean, if I was going to win on proposal, I was in trouble, right?
I mean, the deal before the proposal. Well, in my sales training business over the years, one of the KPIs, their success metrics, and this isn't just for the company. This is by salesperson. It's what's their proposal to contract ratio.
And some of these companies, they're responding to blind RFPs. They're pumping out 10, 15, 20, 25 proposals for every contract they get. Yeah, no, it's crazy. Nice to say.
Proposals don't sell salespeople sell. Proposals fill columns. And because of the way the corporate America buys, they need to be able to get the money. They need, you know, the buying rules or so many kinds of things.
They need three, three bids, three proposals. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we would use, and we're seeing some big stuff that was, you know, seven figures and more is it was quotes, right?
We'd give people quotes. And if we really got forced into it, let's say, if we got down selected to final two or three and then they wanted a proposal, then you might do it. But even at that point, we often do the proposal unless we really knew we were going to win the business. Absolutely.
It's too much work. It's crazy. Yeah. Yeah.
The big thing, you know, is they always equate proposal with price. And so when I talk about the pre-proposal, about not learning anything new from the proposal, I'd say, you know, if we figure out the price in week three, you're going to know the price in week three. We're not going to make you wait for the proposal to see the price. We're not going to make you wait for the proposal to see the training schedule or any of that because there's nothing new in the proposal.
If you can define it that way. Well, it's such an important lesson for sellers to learn is that this idea of our reliance on a proposal to be like, it's like our reliance on sort of, you know, final bake off presentation. We're going to come in and do that. It's like, yeah, no, in my mind, I was, I never want to be in that position.
I always want to make sure that if there was going to be like a final RFP that when the competitors opened up, they saw this Andy's eyes hole in it, right? Because I wanted to be all about me. And you get to that buying vision milestone early and so on. But yeah, I think it's such a great strategy for sellers to think about is, yeah, how can you avoid giving a proposal and really increase your odds when you're in the process?
And really increase your odds when you're in the business. And you know, you ask a salesperson during the sales cycle, if they're really engaged with you, right? When you call them up, the other thing to track is how long does it take them to return your call? And if they're engaged, they'll call back pretty quickly.
But then I say to them, once you deliver that proposal, how quickly do they call you back? And they don't. Now they're in risk. Now they've got column B column B column C.
You have no leverage. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's a great strategy for sellers to think about.
I think about your milestone, which put together your account plans you talked about before is, yeah, include this proposal step review in it. I mean, I like to do those on whiteboards, right? We're drawing it out for you. It could be your notes and different emails or yeah.
But the real key is any proposal you get from us will contain no information you were exiting for the first time. Right. And I just want to add that then you can avoid it. Right.
And I'm just going to add is when you do that pre-proposal reviews, one thing your competitors won't ask and I write about this in my life's book is when you get everybody's nodding heads. Yes. This is what we talked about. This is what we need.
So and so forth. Ask. So what are we missing? One last question.
What are we missing? Yeah. Before we go to press before we bring this proposal back next week, anything else we're missing? Right.
Yeah. And yeah, sometimes you get things that pop up and then I got to run out and share it with the other vendors. This was yours. I mean, so no, it's it's a great strategy.
So so then let's talk about negotiation avoidance. All right. This is one of my favorites and I got my perspective. I'd like to hear yours.
All right. Well, the first thing I try and do when I talk about negotiation to salespeople is get them to really understand the difference between a cost objection and a price objection. And what I do is I say, how many of you have purchased a car for yourself and everybody who's their hand? I said, well, how many of you knew ahead of time, either your friend had one or you read a car review and car and driver or whatever.
How many of you knew ahead of time, pretty much which car you wanted to buy? Most of them are raised hands. And I say, well, how many of you knew what the sticker was, what the list price of that car was ahead of time, no raise their hand. And then I say, how many of you with that knowledge of which car, you know, and the price and everything ahead of time went out with serious intent to buy that car.
And they all raise their hands and I say, how many of you wanted to pay sticker? All their hands go down. I said, well, that's the difference between cost justified and price justified because you knew the cost and the fact that you went out with serious intent to buy in your mind. Whatever they were asking that car was, it was cost justified.
If you can't afford a $225,000 Bentley, you don't go out and drive one. You don't go out with serious intent to buy. So you're there with serious intent to buy. And then I say, so how many of you want to pay sticker now drop their hands?
And I say, well, how is a buyer? Did you convince yourself you were getting the best possible price? And most of them will admit they took it away from them. They say, well, you know, Andy, I think I can do better.
I'm going to put this on hold and stand up and walk out of there. Now, once you do that, they're going to do one two things. They're going to go, wait, wait, wait, wait, let me go talk to my manager. Or they're going to let you go.
Now, if they let you leave, what did you learn? That was the best price. Right? And if you, and I said, so if you walk out on that and I say, you walk out on a brother sales person who's trying to feed his family and send his kids to college and they go, hell, yes, I want the best price.
They all readily admit that they would take it away from a brother sales person. And I say, of course, your prospects are much too stupid to do that to you, aren't they? And then they get to do it in headlights. Because now we're not talking about a $40,000 car.
We're talking about an $800,000 deal. Right? And then I'd say to them, we were using a nice hotel to do the workshop, I say. How many of you guys, I know this is a personal question, but when you're up in your fancy hotel room, how many of you use those nice fluffy white washcloths that give you in the shower?
And you know, if you like it, I'll use the washcloth. They weren't happy about that, but they would volunteer. And I say, so when you're in the shower with that washcloth, what do you do when it gets full of water? And they say, well, I'll bring it out.
And I say, how do you know when to stop squeezing that washcloth? And they say, when it stops dripping? And I say, well, you know, when you're out there, you get the deal in the buyer's mind, you're a washcloth. And they're going to take one squeeze and see if you drip.
And they're going to take another squeeze and see if you drip. And they're not going to stop squeezing until you stop dripping. And so before you even get to a negotiation, I used to have my salespeople fill out a pre-negotiating worksheet, and I'd have them right out two or three polite notes. So when the buyer asks the first time, well, you know, we're going to have a long term thing here.
Can't you take a little bit off? It'll make my boss look good. First polite no is you want service. You want the best people out here.
We need to maintain our prices in order to give you the support you're going to need to make this thing work. That's a polite no. And then they used to say, well, you know, Mike, I looked at this and the amount of profit you're making in this thing is obscene. We only make this much profit in our business.
It looks like you're making that much profit in your business. You know, they're good at squeezing. You're not going to have to buy a school and you give them another polite no. And so we haven't negotiated yet.
And so our rule was until you said no politely at least two or three times, there is no negotiation. And the funny thing is about American buyers is they, it's emotional. They just need to be convinced they're getting the best price. And if you give them two or three really polite notes, business oriented logical polite notes, vast majority of the time, 80% of the time, they say, okay, they sign.
And they just wanted, I say your biggest challenge is having the stomach to withstand the squeezing because if they got 90 over body temperature, they're going to squeeze you until you stop dripping. And just think about when you go onto that car, you squeeze that car sales person and the way you squeeze, you got up and left and you'd be very happy to take that call in an hour from you and say, okay, Andy, I've looked around. I agree. That's the best price I'm going to get.
Can I get in? Come in and pick the car up and they'll welcome you with open arms. You know, you made them wait an hour. So it's so the price negotiation thing that am I getting the best prices highly emotional?
And so if on the rare occurrence that the two or three polite notes wouldn't work, okay, now we have to transition to a real negotiation. And again, this all has to be thought out in advance. Then the transition is, well, Andy, the only possible way I could do anything for you is if you could do something for me. Right.
Right. But think about the sequence. Now the buyer says, like what? So you get to put what you want on the table first.
So if there were some way that we could get this deal done before December 31st, so we could get it in this fiscal year, I could do something for you. And if they come back and say, well, that's possible, then you can say, well, if that's possible, I'm willing to put an extra hundred hours of onsite support for the next 90 days onto this project. Now you're negotiating. It's a good gift.
But most of the time with American buyers, the polite knows get up for you. You don't have to do anything except have the stomach to withstand the squeezing. So you're really avoiding a real negotiation. Yeah, no, I like it.
I have sort of different strategies for complex stuff for avoiding negotiations, which was like the draw the analogy of I've seen this game at the Genga tower you build with the blocks and you pull one out of it. You construct your deal that way as you're going through working at the buying committee and the people various stakeholders is through a series of tradeoffs, right? Because it's selling at this point. It's just tradeoffs.
You want to do this or this or this? Yeah. And so you make this puzzle complete based on the needs of everybody. You get the confirmation.
Yeah, we want to do this. We want to do this. Yeah, we don't do that. We'd love to do this and set that and it fits together as a nice little package.
And so then when it goes to a procurement or goes to a final decision maker and they said, you know, we'd like to take 10% off the price. We could, but yeah, we're going to have to, you know, de-scope our deliverable. We're going to have to take something out of it. There's no free 10% off it.
You know, happy to do that, right? If that's what the price is, you want. No, no, no, no, because the business guy that's stakeholder is charged out. No, no, no, we need that.
Okay, great. Well, we'd like to add another two pieces of equipment. You know, if you go to that or change implementation, no, don't we do that? It's going to have an impact over here.
So happy to do that. And what you do is put the ball in their court to make a trade off. Yeah, right. It's not you giving into them.
It's like, sure, here's the package. This is what you want. This solves your pain points, addresses your desired outcomes, helps you get the point you want. You can try and move the pieces around, but it's not going to be the same solution that you want.
Happy to make that's your trade off. And in most cases, my rule was we don't negotiate at all with procurement. Procurement, you know, when they send you to procurement, their whole mission is to squeeze you and get to drop. And if you just say, give them up the plate, nose and walk away, now procurement has to go to the line VP and say, you know, I couldn't get them to drop anything else.
Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, they have their procurement has their own KPIs that they need to get. So no, I know. I was my strategist.
So when something's delivered to procurement, is procurement couldn't pick at it because somebody who's a stakeholder is going to be disadvantaged and I can't get what they want. And they had negotiated with us through how we sell it to the trade offs we made, right? And that's how for me, I found successful in avoiding a real negotiation. We'd have legal points and stuff that had to be negotiated unavoidable.
But we're talking about the business. I used to try and get the legal stuff done in the middle of it. Your lawyers and I will go through the blank. Who's liable for what?
Let's say separate out the who's liable for what, from what we're going to pay for this thing. So let me ask you a question about this because this is something I think companies overlook is I wasn't always a believer in this, but work for a couple companies where it just worked so well, it became a real fast believer in it, which was especially something you think of a complexity. Sales people shouldn't negotiate. Absolutely.
My role was if you're ahead of quota, the only time I would let a sales rep negotiate is if one, they're ahead of quota and two, they filled out their pre-negotiation worksheet, which had the two or three plate notes written in and the given get written in. I was going actually by a different record from that, which was in these companies, we had professional contract negotiators. That was their job. Wow.
And these are small companies, right? But it became such a critical role because as a seller, you got the buyers buy in, right? They want to do business. We're going to do it.
They say we're in agreement. Now it's like sellers on to the next thing, right? And so you take the emotion out of it because the seller doesn't have that. And you put in the hands of professional negotiators and it works so well.
That was my job as their salesmen. Oh, yeah. But this was a contract person, right? Sometimes a lawyer.
Let them talk to lawyers, right? Because we're in the Gucci. I used to love to go out and negotiate the deals and separate my salespeople from it because I knew they couldn't do it anyway. Well, what was the worst negotiation story you have?
Well, I only really in my career ever hard-closed once. And I was a manager. Xerox said, movie, these ghosts, it was New Jersey. It was December 31st.
And we were selling a manufacturing system to this family owned business. And the old guy, he didn't, he wasn't ready to do it yet. I think his name was Abe. And I find I said, Abe, I'm not leaving here without it.
You know, it's the right thing to do. And my salesman, Don Schumaker, if you don't do this deal today, you're going to cost him a trip to Hawaii. So I'm not leaving. Hard-closed up?
And that's the only time I was really an asshole hard-closing salesman. But I still remember it very vividly. And finally, he said, well, if I signed today, Don's got to send me a postcard from Hawaii. And I said, Don, can you commit to that?
And he said, yeah. And then even as he was signing, he says, I didn't want to do this today. I didn't want to do this today. I didn't want to do this today.
But I didn't like so on that way. But I did it. Yeah, I did it. I had an instance, like my first year in sales, working for Burrows.
And the Burrows had their branch managers have their big bonus contest of the year. It was in the middle of the year. It was like May, June. So basically anything that wasn't nailed to the floor, got shipped to a customer at the end of June.
And yeah, I had this one customer, my first big customer as a construction company. And I spent a lot of time closing, winning the deal, learning how to sell basically on the customer's dime as one of my first big deals. And my branch manager decided, no, they need to buy this upsell this. Additional disk storage space, right?
Which back in those days was incredibly expensive. Right? It was very, very, very, yeah. It was a $65,000 piece of equipment you got.
You get 64 megabytes of storage for $65,000. Oh, which? Yeah, you know what's on the phone? It's a matte lap.
This thing was size of refrigerator, right? Right. But it was on the branch manager's inventory. He had to get it out by the end of the month and already get his bonus.
So he said, yeah, go sell this to this construction company. This is the last day of the period. I was like, Hey, but not particularly happy with us right now. We were having some implementation issues and be there.
But yeah, this is my store I feel really bad about. And he sent me out there. I went talk to CEO of the company, the founder of the company said, No, get out here. What are you talking about?
I said, Okay. So drive back to my branch office, which was half a mile from those guys office. Tell the branch manager. Yeah, just not happen as I thought.
He said, get out there again. And get that deal. I'm like, I went back and forth three or four times that day and branch manager finally, this was on Friday, obviously, the last day of the month in a quarter. He's just yelling.
He says, Yeah, you get that or don't come back Monday. You ever had that happen? It's like, yeah, I'm happy. I knew he wasn't serious.
I didn't think. So I did though, go lean against the guy's car. He'd already thrown me off his office twice. So I just lean against his car and I'm parking a lot.
And I was like, I think it was finally gave him just pity on his part. He could see that I was too. I was pretty, I was pretty. I was pretty.
Hard space. Yeah, the branch manager was going to basically give it away at cost practically just to get it off his inventory. But yeah, that was like early in my career. But one of those memorable days because I was like, just acting like such a dick.
Way ahead. Hey, hey, hey to doing it. I think that made me in part what I'm saying. My germination is like, I'm never going to do that again.
Well, I would have loved to go back and when he says, don't come in on Monday, is that would have come in on Tuesday? You're better than I could have. Because I know he doesn't want to lose a good real. You told me not to come in Monday if I couldn't get the deal.
So yeah, it's a personal day. I was so broke at that point. Yeah, no, I wasn't standing up to him on that, unfortunately. But well, it's a choice people have to make, right?
This is who for me that was part of again, my evolution as a seller to say, who do I want to be? How do I present myself to my customers and myself? And that set me on this path or I'm today other influences along the way. But yeah, you don't have to.
I had the good fortune to be working for an organization run by Ross Perot sales manager and he was brilliant. And I even took him out on a couple of closets because he liked to go out. And you know, after a while, I was selling so much so quickly, he run in the hall and he said, how much money you make this month, Mike? And you know, when you're the top sales rep, life is wonderful.
Still is. But you know, back then, I know about Perot's, but on every bulletin board in the company was a monthly current year to date ranking of all the sales people in the company and all the managers. And so if you're in the bottom of that list and you needed an admin to stay late and do a proposal, they laugh at you. Because they knew, well, you talk about public pressure, you know, but if you're at top of that list, they say it was an o'clock at night.
No, we just had a whiteboard or not. I think it was a chalkboard in front of the office. Just for our bullpen, right? So, this was an all every person in the company, all the admins, everybody knew who the shitbirds were and who the stars were.
I think they put out a report for the district or the region. So we knew, but yeah, not the company. I knew when I made club as a manager, like I knew I was number four in the country, you know, as a manager, because I announced it when we were there at that club. Yeah, outside of that, you're sort of, you know, I knew who your competition was at local level.
Well, one of my clients in the 80s, MSA, they were selling mainframe management software. They did a monthly ranking in a year to date ranking on what percentage of lists were the contracts coming in by manager. So they could see which managers were good negotiators, and which ones were terrible, given everything away. And this last guy who was in Detroit and his nickname was Moon Over Detroit, because he would drop his drawers to get a deal.
Yeah, it's different environment, but I still think that salespeople in general, lousy negotiators, we don't train them to be negotiators. We don't train to be good for masters. Yeah, I think that this idea that companies, I think, should think more deeply about is like everything. We have specialized salesrooms.
We have SDR. See people are trained or good at outreach and connecting and making initial contacts with buyers, setting up meetings, or ease or specialized, or success people are specialized. Have specialized contract people. They'll save you so much time and energy and margin and margin, because most times they're not comped on the sales price is specialized.
Even car dealers, once the salesmen gets you, you go to the finance guys, we close this. Yeah, you need undercoating with that, don't you? No, I don't. Especially in California.
Why are you trying to sell me undercoating in California? I know. But that way the salesperson didn't have to ruin their relationship with you. Well, but that's what happens though.
As soon as you get into negotiations, you're adversarial, right? And especially if you're a lifecycle rep, right? If you're there for the duration, you're not handing over success. For my mind, it's worth preserving that relationship for the sellers.
Absolutely. Excellent. Well, hey, Mike, pleasure is always to talk with you. Yeah, it's fun.
Great. Great advice for people today. Avoiding proposals, avoiding negotiation. Yeah, think about how you can incorporate that into your own selling.
So if people want to connect with you, what's the best way to do that? Go into LinkedIn. Go into LinkedIn. Connect with me.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent.
All right. Mike, until next time, when you earn the blazer. All right. Oh, yeah.
Number four. All right. We'll have to think about the juicy topic. All right.
Excellent. All right. Thank you, sir. Okay, friends, that's it for this episode.
First of all, I want to thank you for taking the time to listen as always. I'm so grateful for your support of the show. And I want to thank our guest, Mike Bosworth, for sharing his insights with us today. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast to sales enablement with Andy Paul on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
So thank you for your help. And thank you so much for investing your time with me today. Until next time, I'm your host, Andy Paul. Good selling everyone.