Selling From The Heart

Larry Levine is the best-selling author of Selling From The Heart  and the cohost of the Selling From The Heart Podcast . With decades of in-the-field sales experience within the B2B technology space, he knows what it takes to be a successful sales professional. In a post-trust sales world, Larry Levine helps sales teams leverage the power of authenticity to grow revenue, grow themselves and enhance the lives of their clients. He’s coached sales professionals across the world from tenured reps to new Millennials entering the salesforce. They all appreciate the practical, real, raw, relevant, relatable, and street-savvy nature of his coaching. He is not shy when it comes to delivering his message. Welcome, Larry.

John, what’s going on? I can already tell we’re going to have a blast.

Tell me about your story of origin. You can go back to childhood or college, wherever you want to start where you got your first inkling of either being an entrepreneur or the concept of being a heart-centered person.

I hated everything about school. To me, high school was a blur. I didn’t like anything about school. I went to college to appease my parents and I double majored in college. My cumulative GPA by the time I graduated was 2.1 out of a 4.0 scale. The school wasn’t the gig for me but I went because I wanted to make my parents happy.

That’s the thing, growing up with a father who was a rocket scientist. That’s what I did. I’m a big believer in this. You don’t wake up one day and say, “I think I’m going to be a salesperson.” You fall into sales somehow. Here I am with a degree in Marketing and Health Science going, “Now what?” I was getting married. No pressure and no job. I had this little voice inside my head saying, “You got to pull your head out of you-know-what pretty quick because life has been thrust upon you.”

It’s going back to the late ‘80s. I opened up the yellow pages and saw the largest ad in the office technology space because my father had said, “If you could last one-year selling copiers, you’re worth your weight in gold in the sales world.” I took it for what it’s worth. I picked up the yellow pages, the largest ad, called up, asked for the owner of the company and got a job.

A week later, I find myself in a room watching a bunch of videotapes and getting trained and so forth. I’m sharing all this with you because the backstory behind all of this translates into my entire career selling copiers. My first year was 1988. It was the worst year and the best year of my life. I made $18,000 selling copiers in my 1st year.

Was that commission only, I’m guessing?

It was a draw against the salary and it was tough. I had to do 50 cold calls a day. I couldn’t come back until I had 50 cards. Once I came back, I had to start knocking down phone calls. I share all this with everybody because I believed what I learned in my first year carried me my entire career in the office technology space. I’m a big believer in this. We all have five senses and we all know what those are but I have no scientific proof behind the sixth sense, though we all have a sixth sense. My sixth sense when I was 24 years old was I have a keen awareness of bull crap.

It’s the BS meter if somebody’s wasting your time or not when you’re prospecting them.

It’s not only that. I say this for a reason. I had this sixth sense of being keenly aware of what was going on in my surroundings, how salespeople are treating customers and what they were doing. I was going on sales ride-outs and so forth. I saw that the customer and commission were the centers of everything. It took me a while to figure this out because I was mirroring and mimicking everybody in my surroundings. It started to mess with me and I knew that wasn’t me. I remember I made my very first sale. I asked him, “Why did you buy from me? Besides, you felt sorry for me because it was my first sale.”

They said something to me that got me to start thinking, “You did something that completely was the polar opposite of what everybody else did. You made it about me, my company and how you can help. You didn’t make it about your products, your company and yourself.” I still remember that. I went on a very inquisitive rampage throughout my entire career. That curiosity led me to always ask questions. The more questions I asked about what was going on inside their heads, their perception of salespeople and experience, I took all of that and that’s how I marketed myself. For many years, I spent my entire career in one sales channel that was selling copiers.

You talk about in your book, Selling From The Heart, the importance of authenticity and getting trust when trust is low. A lot of people are aware that they have to be curious and ask some questions as opposed to just talking. What I want to have the readers learn from you is how do you earn the right to even ask the questions? The fact that you’re curious, if someone doesn’t trust you or think you have their best interests at heart, they’re like, “Tell me what you’re here for and I’ll make a decision. I don’t need to talk to you or for you to quiz me.”

Doctors can ask patients questions because assumed expertise and trust are going on there. Let’s dig a little deeper because you have so much experience. That’s the table stakes. Don’t be somebody who just talks. Ask questions. Let’s assume that more than half the people reading know that but are looking for another way to earn that trust, to be authentic so that potential buyers are even willing to answer the questions.

I’m going to dance on authenticity for a moment and the equal business stature. There are a couple of key things there. I believe we’re all authentic human beings. First and foremost, John, I’m going to get that out on the table. To me, authenticity is a lifestyle. It’s not a light switch. We’re all authentic human beings. I have no PhD or Doctoral in any of this, neither Master’s in Psychology and so forth. This is street smarts through decades of getting the you-know-what beat out of me, what works and what doesn’t work.

I bring up authenticity for a reason. The best way to define authenticity in the sales world is congruency. Does the walk match the talk? We can say the BS meters are at an all-time high with people. How you build trust and credibility happens in the first five minutes of a conversation with somebody. This is what I know is going on in their head. John is saying to himself, “Does Larry have the goods? Is this somebody that I can trust, open up and share my business secrets with the things that are going on in my office? Can I trust him? Is he credible? Can I believe what he says?”

I bring this up for a reason because that’s what I was keenly aware of. There are two words that I held myself accountable for my entire career. It’s how can I connect and relate to somebody? The faster you can do this and the faster you can make somebody feel comfortable with you, the faster they will become comfortable enough to share uncomfortable things going on in their office. It’s those uncomfortable things that are gold. Those are the things that you will need to help them solve their issues, challenges, goals, initiatives, dreams and aspirations.

I play so much emphasis on how I opened up meetings because I knew if I opened these up correctly and I shared a bit of me, John would share a bit of him. The missing link is we don’t spend enough time on the first five minutes. The first 5 to 10 minutes in most sales situations are product-centric dumps, company-centric dumps, the buyer knows it and the insert name of decision-maker knows it. They know what’s happening and they‘re prepared for it.

I was talking to an optometrist. Salespeople are calling him all day long and he said, “It’s gone from they could bring lunch into we could have a conversation. With the pandemic, you can only talk to me for ten minutes between patients.” What are people doing? He said, “They all say the same thing. ‘Our product is the best. Let us give you all the data and scientific facts to back it up.’” Something he could read on his own.

They’re not saying one thing about themselves or anything that they might have as an idea to help his practice. It’s like, “I only have ten minutes then I got to talk about all this stuff.” There’s no “time” to build rapport or ask a question. He said, “The opposite is true. When you have less time, relationships are even more important to build. Not less.”

I’m a big believer that we all can achieve equal business stature. Let’s say I’m talking to a chief financial officer, chief information officer or human resources. It doesn’t matter. I don’t have to be as highly educated as them but I need to understand the language they speak and bring it to the table in a very quick amount of time that I understand their world.

In other words, in the very beginning, if you want somebody to feel comfortable with you, start speaking their language and sharing like, “John, these past days, I’ve worked with four chief financial officers just like you. These are the three issues that we’ve been working on deeply to help them solve, issues 1, 2 and 3. I’m curious, do any of these hit home with you?” You can roll that out but what it shows somebody is you’re working with people and using verbiage like them. You’re living in their world. Talk about making somebody feel comfortable, they’re going to go, “What just happened?”

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If you want help on how to craft a better story, my The Sale is in the Tale online course  is for you.

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