How to Sell with the Tao of Sales Babble – In Just 7 Minutes with Pat Helmers

Resources/Links:

• Want to know how to stop your sales babble and turn conversations into sales? Click here: https://www.salesbabble.com/

Summary

Do you often get the sales jitters whenever you make a sales call?

Selling shouldn’t be complicated and stressful. Get over your fear and stop the sales babble by starting to get clear of your intentions and adopt an attitude of reciprocity.

Pat Helmers is a software engineer turned startup sales manager turned podcaster/influencer dedicated to helping others find success using non-pushy sales by authoring a new book titled, Tao of Sales Babble.

Listen in to Pat’s sales-changing advice on how the power of talking less and listening more can greatly shift your sales game in the market. He also shares the importance of shifting your sales intentions into helping solve people’s problems rather than just extensively marketing your product.

Check out these episode highlights:

• 01:27 – Pat’s ideal client: The podcast is really centered on business-to-business people, people who are selling to other businesses.
• 02:34 – The problem he helps solve: The biggest problem for them is to discover them and kind of coach them, actually to be fully understanding of their problems and their challenges and aspirations. Lots of times people haven’t really fully thought that out.
• 03:34 – The symptoms of the problem: A lot of people in the business space are really good at what they do, especially when it comes to smaller companies, founders, or startups. They know their technology, or they know their skills, but they’re terrible at selling.
• 05:43 – Clients’ common mistakes before consulting Pat: You should be doing probably 40% of the talking and getting them to talk 60%.
• 07:18 – Pat’s Valuable Free Action (VFA): I think if you adopt an attitude of reciprocity, that “I’m here to help them and they’ll be helping you”. If you have reciprocity in your head, then you won’t be thinking that it’s a contest, and it’s a competition. It’s more about partnership.
• 08:06 – Pat’s Valuable Free Resource (VFR): Want to know how to stop your sales babble and turn conversations into sales? Click here: https://www.salesbabble.com/
• 08:50 – Q: Can anybody be a good seller? A: Yes! You may not be the greatest seller in the world, but I believe we have internally, in us, a desire to help others.

Tweetable Takeaways from this Episode:

“The more they talk, the more likely they'll buy.” -Pat Helmers Click To Tweet

Transcript
(Note, this was transcribed using a transcription software and may not reflect the exact words used in the podcast)

Tom Poland 00:10
Greetings, everyone, and a warm welcome to another edition of Marketing the Invisible. I’m Tom Poland beaming out to you from the sunny Sunshine Coast here in Australia, joined today by Pat Helmers. Pat, a warm good day from Down Under. Sir, where are you hanging out?

Pat Helmers 00:22
Well, I’m on the sunny coast of Lake Michigan, near Chicago.

Tom Poland 00:27
And it is sunny on the coast there?

Pat Helmers 00:31
Although it’s November, it’s actually been a nice day today. Well, it did snow last week, but today, it’s in the 60s.

Tom Poland 00:38
Oh, wow! Okay, so well thanks for turning up, Pat. For those of you who don’t know Pat, he’s a software engineer turned startup sales manager. That means he’s gotten the ability for clinical dissection of what’s going on in the sales process. So you can unpack that just the same as a software engineer would be unpacking bugs from a line of code. He’s dedicated himself to helping others find success using non pushy sales. He’s the author of a new book titled, the Tao of Sales Babble. This leads us nicely into the title of this little interview, which is, How to Sell with the Tao of Sales Babble. Pat, let’s get into it! I’m sure we’ll unpack what the tao of sales babble is on the way through, but let’s kick off with question number one. Our seven minutes start now. Who’s your ideal client?

Pat Helmers 01:27
The podcast is really centered on business-to-business people, people who are selling to other businesses. In fact, Tom, you’ve actually been a guest on sales babble.

Tom Poland 01:37
I have! It was a memorable experience too. It was fun!

Pat Helmers 01:40
Yeah, there’s a lot of fun. You know, commonly these are difficult sales. They’re enterprise sales. They’re not one and done. It’s not something you can close on the very first meeting. It takes a while to build a relationship and to figure out the organization that you’re selling to. Commonly, people buy these products and services collectively. So they’ve got a way of doing things and the seller is, more or less, kind of a shepherd. They kind of Shepherd this flock into a direction of making a decision that’s good for them.

Tom Poland 02:09
And so there are some real challenges in selling to those larger corporations. There are multiple stakeholders, perhaps committee meetings and advisory boards. You’ve already alluded to the fact that there might be protocols in place. “This is how we do things around here.” So tell us, is the problem you solve, this is question two, is it negotiating those hurdles? How would you define the problem that you solve for your ideal clients?

Pat Helmers 02:34
I think the biggest problem for them is to discover them and kind of coach them, actually to be fully understanding of their problems and their challenges and their aspirations. Lots of times people haven’t really fully thought that out. What they’ve done is they’ve like, “Oh, there’s a solution. I wonder if that’s it”, and they kind of run towards that. And as a seller, our job is really to, kind of, dig deeper into that. And to truly understand what are the things that they really want to get to. Where do they want to be? And sellers often are poor at doing that, and buyers oftentimes are poor at doing that.

Tom Poland 03:09
Yeah, 100%! It’s going to be a bit of a mess up on both sides.

Pat Helmers 03:13
It is! It’s the blind leading the blind.

Tom Poland 03:18
Your ideal client, what’s going on? So question three is what are the symptoms of people who are selling to larger corporations? How do they know they need what you’ve got? What are the symptoms of their day-to-day selling experiences?

Pat Helmers 03:34
Well, you could go through the whole process of sales and see struggles with that. A lot of people in the business space are really good at what they do, especially when it comes to smaller companies, founders, or startups. They know their technology, or they know their skills, but they’re terrible at selling. So they’re afraid to pick up the phone. In business, the phone is still very, very powerful. We don’t use phones very often in private life anymore. But in business, it’s really important. So they’re afraid to pick up the phone. They’re unsure what to say. People tend to vomit about their things, and not really ask a lot of questions about them. It turns up becoming very pushy, and kind of like- a lot of founders have a lot of hubris and think every issue out there, they can solve. And then that’s not the case at all! So then there’s the discovery part. So that was the lead generation part, there’s the discovery part where they don’t ask the right kinds of questions to understand exactly what their issues are. There’s the presentation part where they are not very good at giving the prospects, the buyers, an opportunity to ask all their questions completely. And honestly, be pretty frank about what you can and can’t do. And then, a lot of people struggle with closing and they don’t really know how to ask for the job and business. The buyer is going, “This looks pretty good. That’s pretty good.” And sometimes people expect the buyer to actually say, “Well, I’m going to buy” when in reality maybe it makes more sense for you to ask some closing kinds of questions in there. And if you do all the previous stuff right, these things kind of happen naturally. So the quick seven minutes, I guess that’s about it.

Tom Poland 05:12
Right. So there’s a lot of symptoms there, folks that if you’re listening to this, you’d be able to tick those boxes and go, “Yeah, that sounds like what I’ve been doing, what I’ve been experiencing.” You’ve also itemized some mistakes there. For example, people at the wrong time tell the prospect more about their products, as opposed to discovering what the prospect is after. Do you find one of the common mistakes is also that the person doing the selling is doing too much talking? Is that a big one?

Pat Helmers 05:43
Right! You should be doing probably 40% of the talking and getting them to talk 60%. In fact, the more they talk, the more likely they’ll buy.

Tom Poland 05:51
Right! Do you think, this a bit of a curveball question, but do you think that it’s feeling nervous in the sales conversation is what stimulates people to talk too much?

Pat Helmers 06:05
I think people just don’t empathize enough with their customers, and with their products.

Tom Poland 06:09
Bingo! Right. So it’s more about me, my product, and what I want, as opposed to sitting in the seat of the person who will-

Pat Helmers 06:18
I see this as caregiving. I see that the sales profession is almost like caregiving. We’re like nurses. We’re here to help people walk through. We’re not like social workers or bartenders.

Tom Poland 06:27
So if we truly care, we’re caring about people’s needs. Yeah! We’re caring about people’s needs. We care about what they want. We’re caring about what will work for them, and, if our product or service is a fit, rather than caring more about selling something. Thanks for that! I think that pulls back the lid on and it summarizes what you’ve been saying pretty well. And that is that it’s the empathy, the discovery, the caring. What would you say is- there’s so much to unpack here. And Pat’s going to give you more resources in a second. But right now, Pat, what would you say would be one thing that someone listening to this could do, which would take them a step in the right direction of the tao of sales babble? It’s not going to solve the whole problem, but it might take them a step in the right direction.

Pat Helmers 07:18
I think if you adopt an attitude of reciprocity, that “I’m here to help them and they’ll be helping you”. If you have reciprocity in your head, then you won’t be thinking that it’s a contest, and it’s a competition. It’s more about partnership.

Tom Poland 07:33
So go into it, offering, helping caring, and asking, as opposed to just trying to flog a product. That’s going to open the doors of reciprocity 9x out of 10 with everyone apart from narcissists and sociopaths, and you don’t want them as clients anyway. Let’s give folks that resource. Where can people go to find out more because you’ve got such a terrific podcast? You’re interviewing, with me as the exception, you’re interviewing very interesting, very big people who can get a lot of valuable information. How can people go and sign up for your stuff?

Pat Helmers 08:06
It’s easy peasy to find! If you go to salesbabble.com. I’m on all the podcast apps. I’m on Spotify and iTunes. I’m easy peasy to find. The website’s easy to find, and all the links that we have in there. Currently, I’m working on a book called, The Tao of Sales Babble. I’m using the podcast as a way of commitment device to make me write a little bit about it every week. And that has been really working.

Tom Poland 08:34
That’s the Tao Te Ching of sales, right?

Pat Helmers 08:37
This is the Tao Te Ching. It’s Lao Tzu, where everything is interconnected. Everything is built upon one another.

Tom Poland 08:42
Yeah. I love the Tao. Alright, last question! 25 seconds left. What’s the one question I should have asked you but didn’t and the answer, please?

Pat Helmers 08:50
Can anybody be a good seller?

Tom Poland 08:52
And?

Pat Helmers 08:53
Yes! You may not be the greatest seller in the world, but I believe we have internally, in us, a desire to help others. Think about your family, your friends, and all the people that matter in your life. If some terrible thing happened to them, you’d be quick to ask. You’d be quick to ask, how can I help? So go take that attitude to your prospective buyers, you will find success.

Tom Poland 09:16
It’s got to be and it’s going to help you relax as well during the process because you’re no longer focused on what you want. You’re focused on helping others. Pat Helmers, thank you so much for your wisdom and your insights!

Pat Helmers 09:25
Tom, thanks for having me!

Tom Poland 09:27
Thanks for checking out our Marketing The Invisible podcast. If you like what we’re doing here please head over to iTunes to subscribe, rate us, and leave us a review. It’s very much appreciated. And if you want to generate five fresh leads in just five hours then check out www.fivehourchallenge.com.