“If your statements and your questions are continuously trying to get them to a yes, that’s actually, it’s not going to be that productive.” – Evan Kelsay in today’s Tip 199
Do you believe in the Power of “No”?
Join the conversation below and share your ideas too!
Seismic Software
Evan Kelsay on LinkedIn
Evan Kelsay on Sales Success Stories Interview
Evan Kelsay on Sales Success Stories Interview (Round 2)
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today over on the Sales Success Stories podcast we just released my latest interview. In that conversation, I circled back with Seismic’s Evan Kelsay. When I first interviewed Evan about a year ago he had closed the largest deal in company history and achieved over 800% of his annual goal. He briefly stepped into a sales leadership role, but quickly made the intentional choice to move back into the field as an intentional individual contributor. Here’s a quick excerpt from that conversation:
Evan Kelsay: You’re trying to formulate your statements and your questions in a way that immediately they kind of hear them in and view you as credible, but it leaves room for them to say no and it gets back to like something that’s Chris Voss who was a great author of the Subject of Negotiation. He gets to, which is the real breakthroughs come when you get people on the other end of the table to say “No” or get them to say “Not your right” but “that’s right.” And you know, if your statements and your questions are continuously trying to get them to a yes, that’s actually, it’s not going to be that productive. You need to get them to say, “No, that’s not quite right. Let me explain it to you, here’s what you’re missing” or “yeah, that’s right.” But here’s the other things that made me that sparked my thinking on these other bullet points of what we’re talking about. It’s a, you have to create the questions that get somebody to a “no let me correct you.”
Scott Ingram: Yeah, yeah. Well, Chris Voss, that’s never split the difference, right?
Evan Kelsay: That’s right. Yeah.
Scott Ingram: So my take away from that book, and I haven’t done this yet, but it’s definitely on my radar was exactly that. Like there was so much power in that book about just the questioning and how you’re asking, questioning. And I’m actually gonna go back and re-listen to that book with the frame of how can I incorporate. This is a book on negotiation, right? And we tend to think that negotiation is something that happens later in the process. But I think if you if you think about that book in the frame of how can I apply this to my initial conversations and into my discovery process, super game-changing. Right? And so I was already sort of seeing that as I was giving that first listen but really decided this is definitely worth it a second go-round with that new perspective.
Evan Kelsay: Yeah, I mean that the way like coaching the Act of Coaching, my reps really kind of doubled down on that concept for me because I know am placing far more emphasis on the quality of the questions, the quality of the statements about somebody’s business. As I’m having initial conversations with them because it’s flat out the difference between, you know, selling the deal for it for a much lower margin and spending the same amount of time on that deal. Then if you could selling to get to your numbers, selling 10 deals of x amount instead of selling one deal of x amount because the value that you’ve built in at the beginning of that process is so it’s great that they see, they see the exponential return immediately in they’re willing to become catalysts for you immediately within a, within a deal context. And it’s so important to be able to get the front of that process right. To be able to actually maintain margin but really can have a transformational deal for both your company and theirs at the end.
Scott Ingram: Yeah, and I think if you think about it from the buyer perspective, if you’re able to lead those kinds of conversations like that is so much more, I don’t know, just like intellectually rewarding. Like, man, it is so fun to talk to Evan because it makes me think different, right? And I have these, these great ideas, and you know they’re going to want to talk to you again, versus you having to like chase them and beat them up so that you can tell them some more stuff.
If you enjoyed that, hopefully, you’re already subscribed to this podcast AND to Sales Success Stories where you can listen to the full interview, and as usual, you’ll find links to all of that at DailySales.Tips/199.
Then be sure to listen in tomorrow for another great sales tip from Chris Ortolano. Thanks for listening!