Jeff Molander, founder of Communications Edge and sales conversation trainer, recently sat down with Kushal Saini Kakkar of Wingman, a coaching and note-taking tool for sales reps. Jeff discussed:

- The importance of investing in yourself -- to strengthen outreach sales conversation starting skills.
- Surprisingly, 70-80% of outreach success has nothing to do with quality of message.
- How to get your prospect to get curious by leaving the scent of value when copywriting.
- Uncle Google is not your best friend. He's everyone's best friend. Nothing original there.

You may listen to the full interview here. Or the transcript appears below.

Jeff

In 2019, 2018, 2017, you could do very well by writing an email to someone and in that email saying, I've done my research and here's the research that I've done on you, and I know this about you. And you could have done very well because... Not everybody takes the time. Most people just write a standard template and they send it. These days that what is provoking response more often is not a demonstration of what you know about them, but a suspicion of what you MIGHT know about them.

Kushal

Hi there. Welcome to, On the Flipside, a podcast for anyone who wants to live their best sales life. We're going to be talking to buyers, sales managers, SDRs and AE's about things like what does it take to be a great sales manager or how can you go home happy month after month. So let's dive right in. Hi folks, welcome to another episode of On the Flipside with Wingman and Kushal, and today we're joined by someone who's got bucket loads of advice around sales outreach and how to fast track conversations with your buyers. And he does not shy away from telling it like he sees it. Jeff, welcome to the show and thanks so much for doing this.

Jeff

Great to be here, Kushal. Nice to meet you.

Kushal

You too! To start off, what's maybe the first thing that you ever sold, if you would tell us about that.

Jeff

Wow! All right. Super cool. First thing I ever sold. Well, I was told when I wanted to get into sales, you know, "what have you done in sales?" and I said nothing. I was in marketing and for numerous years and I wanted to go sell for a multimedia company. Back in the days of corporate audiovisual, when we had these things called physical slides that would drop into carousels and you can make a multi... Video was pretty new then. Yes, I'm that old, but I was told, hey, go get floor sales. You got to sell something like, so go to one of these big box retailers in the States. At the time, we had this company called Silo. Now we have what's Best Buy and those kind of ...So go there, do floor sales for home electronics, whatever. And we'll talk to you about, you know, a position to sell a fifty thousand dollar corporate media project to somebody as a service. And so that's what I did, I suppose so...

Kushal

So how did that go?

Jeff

Yeah, so I went and I did floor sales because I thought I wanted to get into sales. I was in marketing and on this marketing track. Yeah, so just selling everyday people face to face basically. And I actually performed very well, mostly because I didn't sell things that people didn't want, didn't try to coerce people into because I  had a commission of course. So I did not just coerce people. So, that's probably a lot about what I'm doing today now that I think about it. So, excellent question.

Kushal

I think that's probably the dream for any salesperson, right? To not be coercing their  buyers or their prospects into something.

Jeff

I think so, yeah.

Kushal

Which kind of brings me to my next question, which is obviously around sales outreach. And what do you think is really broken with the way we do it today? Do you think something is broken at all? With sales outreach and what we do.

Jeff

Loaded question. In one word, automation over automation and over "templatization". I don't know if that's a word, but I'll keep the answer short. Feel free to ask a follow up. Automation, I think, is the biggest problem that we have, reliance on it, I should say.

Kushal

I think it's interesting that you say automation and there's obviously, there is a lot of discussion around automation versus personalization, but then doing it at scale and how that becomes a challenge. So what's your answer? Do you know how you can... what's the balance then between automation and then personalization at scale then?

Jeff

There definitely is a balance. It involves using the automation as a tool to help you keep track of where your non automated conversation is. So if we're in sales or we're in marketing, we use these things called follow up sequences and we need to know and schedule when the next follow up comes. And we need a template of sorts. But the template shouldn't be used (and I try never to speak in absolutes. So, I'd just said should never be used. I'm trying, I'm kind of busting myself .) 

Jeff

We tend to see better results when you use a template to help you customize the message faster. Because there is a certain, let's say, 80 percent of the template is going to remain the same and we use it over and over because we know that it's effective, hopefully. But the other 20 percent needs to be customized to some degree, certainly if you're in the enterprise market. But if you're in the mid-market, we have many clients who use a standardized template and still do well with it. Not  as well as they did 10 years ago. But there needs to be a balance using automation, of course. It's hard to say how to achieve that balance. If I could wave a magic wand, I would, but everybody struggles with that, I suppose.

Kushal

So when it comes to customization, by then, folks kind of do it enough or are they doing it enough? And if they aren't, what's holding them back according to you?

Jeff

Time. Right. If you're calling in mid-market, you're selling something for five thousand dollar a month subscription or fifty thousand dollar a month and/or annual commitment that might not be, you know, and you've got 2000 potential clients for the year. It might not be appropriate to be every single, message you have to research before you send and all that. SBut on the other side, you have people who have twenty targets for the whole year and they're calling in the region or they're calling on the fortune, two hundred. So, really in either situation. I think it's less about messaging and more about the research that you do not to research to put into your message. Nut the research that you would do to make sure that you're calling on high probability clients.

Jeff

So let's say you've got two thousand potential clients, but out of those two thousand, maybe there's 200 that are really the high probability people. And you have a list of criteria you'd like. Well, they need eight of the 10 criteria. They're high probability. I'm going to call on those, only and I'm going to leave the other bunch of people, eighteen hundred or whatever and not call on them because they're not high probability. So I think that is a huge amount. I don't think, I know that has a huge amount of influence, so it's not just the message. It really needs to be who you're calling on and what do you know about them that makes them most likely to be interested in what you're selling?

Kushal

From what you're saying, it sounds like the problem is maybe less customization and messaging technology, but more around doing your research and even deciding who to reach out to. Is that correct?

Jeff

I think that, well, there are other sales conversation trainers that I will, you know, the guys like Scott Channel, who does cold outreach, phone outreach. Benjamin Dennehy, they all say the same thing. I mean, 80 percent, some say 70, some say 80 percent, of your success has nothing to do with your message. Now, you might find that interesting coming from me because we spend on our members and our customers are message focused. That's all we do. But I'm forced to tell people the reality is that 80 percent of your success is going to be driven by how well you've researched the bucket of clients. Right,  and maybe they're inbound leads and they're coming in to Wingman. Right. You guys are getting your own inbound leads. Well, what do you know about those people? If we're able to take those inbound leads and categorize them, maybe you guys do much better with a specific kind of client in a specific kind of sector. Then you know that that's where your bread and butter in the business will be. So, that has a lot to do with some say as high as 80 percent. And I agree. I mean, 20, 15, 20 percent is the message.

Kushal

I see, which really resonates with me, because honestly, as a content marketer or if you think about copywriting or writing or even marketing, so much of it is just about research, just about knowing your personas, knowing your buyers, knowing your people copy then comes after that. I mean, great copy's amazing, of course. But the prerequisite for any sort of copy and content is really to understand the buyers and persona well enough and to do all of that research first. I think people are taking too many shortcuts around that.

Jeff

I would agree with that. And that's why I think some marketers get abused by their salespeople that isn't being done to the degree that it could and should be done. I would agree with that.

Kushal

So interestingly, I think I was reading an article around. I think it was one of your articles around why marketing managers really maybe shouldn't be the ones writing outreach sequences or emails, etc. You know, maybe they should maybe stick to their own sub lane and let reps and salespeople who are actually in the front line talking to customers, understanding them, kind of do that. Well, could you explain a little bit more about that? Because I thought that was super interesting, because I've been on both sides. You know, I tend to help my team out, but I tend to say, hey, you know, you're better.

Jeff

Yeah, I could talk for hours on that subject, but I will try to. So, It's always hard when I get this question to put it into thirty seconds or what have you or a minute. The real issue is to be a little bit provocative. Just like anything in life,  most people are not very good at it. There's a very small number of people who are very good at copywriting on the marketing side and on the sales side. The issue that you're pointing out, I guess, is salespeople come and they sit down at their desk, they see the phone and their computer and they're like, OK, what do I write? What do I say? So oftentimes they go to their website or they go to marketing and oftentimes they report to marketing. Now, demand generators, whoever they report to and marketing says "Here, here's what you say."  And they repeat it verbatim. The problem with that, what I've found is what our members find that by the time people come to us, they say "this isn't working." And I explained to them, the psychology behind good copywriting is such that less is more, and that if you're trying to persuade someone to do something, you can just forget it, because the moment that they feel like you're trying, they should be persuading themselves to talk with you and that is a skill set. That is a learnable skill set that doesn't seem to get much air time in sales conversation training. The people who do it really well, we do it really well. But a lot of what we teach has already been taught for decades by Sandler's courses, right. So, a lot of it is tried and true. Back to basics. You know, if you can't instead of offering, hey, I'd like to meet with you. Instead of that, pull back and figure out a way to get invited to the meeting to say something provocative as an example that would provoke their curiosity and go, "Wait I don't understand, but that sounds important. You might be able to help me with something." Now you've got a copywriting skill. I guess that's the best I can do to try to boil it down into just a couple of minutes.

Kushal

Interestingly, when our new team member joined us to speak. One of his questions was around, how much you really do to be really on a website versus how much you paid. And that was sort of my answer to kind of find that balance between revealing and also about how much you know about them, the fact that you understand them, but obviously not putting everything out there because the next step is obviously for them to get in touch with you, whatever your CTA is, and take it from there. And as you say this Jeff, I'm kind of trying to think over all the CTA that I would have written in past times and kind of figuring out where they hit that and that they all ask for a meeting too soon up front, or did I wait long enough?

Jeff

Well, but here's the interesting thing Kushal... is like the last really 12 to 18 months, so covid and then a little bit further back before covid, it wasn't what; you could do very well. Like in 2019, 2018, 2017, you could do very well by writing an email to someone and in that email saying, I've done my research and here's the research that I've done on you and I know this about you. And you could have done very well because not everybody takes the time. Most people just write a standard template and they send it these days that what is provoking response more often is not a demonstration of, I should say, not a demonstration of what you know about them, but a suspicion of what you might know about them. So if you're sending in a note to the CEO, and you said. Three years ago, you say, "I read the annual report" or "I saw you quoted in this magazine" and this is what you said, well, this is why we should talk, because I've done, this is a match. You've told me I've done my homework. This is a match. We should talk. You could do pretty well. These days, those conversations just aren't starting. So, what we teach is a technique and what our members practice is, how can you get them a little suspicious or curious about what might this person know about me? It seems like they know something about me and it seems like they can almost smell this. I call it "The scent of value." Instead of saying, "here's the value", "here's the value", "here's the education", "here's the value." Say just give them a little taste of it and where they would get a little bit curious and send a note back or even confused. You know, "I'm a little bit confused by your note here, it sounds important though." So, I think that's where we are.

Kushal

Yeah, I think I love that. I love the idea of adding suspicion. So, what we're kind of sending out to people and showing them the central value rather than just setting everything upfront. And that kind of brings me to my next question, which is really when it comes to good outreach, what are say, the top three things that you wish reps and teams would do differently?

Jeff

That's a good question. Have a sense of awareness about what you're sending and the fact that it might read like a radio advertisement and that it's very biased. So have an awareness of the words that you're writing, being clearly transparent and biased. You're sending the education because you're biased to sell them something. And just the act of giving that education shows them that you have bias. You're not fooling everybody, anybody by sharing the value and saying here,  I have something to offer you without anything and they see through that, which I guess would lead to number two, which is stop educating people, stop sharing value, because the more that you educate, the more that you share value, the more they understand. I mean, and this is an area, a body of behavioral science called transactional analysis. This was invented or discovered by a guy named Eric Byrne. I won't get into all the details. You should Google it. Learn about it. Again, Sandler sales training. They've been training this for years. But what it involves is a basic concept. When you start educating people out of the blue, they distrust you because they know there's the ulterior motive behind all of your education. So that's the gist of it. So what would number three be, I suppose, invest in yourself? We see so few people willing to invest in themselves. I can bring someone if they're ready for it, for twenty dollars into a transformation. And so if you don't have twenty dollars to invest in yourself or you refuse to invest in yourself at all, then I can't help you and then you can't help yourself. I know online you think Uncle Google is your friend and you should be able to go on LinkedIn and get all the tips and tricks for free. Truth is that those are the tips and tricks that most of the time everybody is recycling and using those and that isn't going to serve you nearly as well as learning something completely new. I've learned this from Sandler. I've learned this from studying transactional analysis. I learn from the creativity of our members. I operate a member community and they teach me and that helps me teach others, which is really kind of a cool part of what I do. But yeah, so, those would be the three things.

Kushal

It sounds like, you know, you have to put in the work. That's the main thing, right? If you want to excel at something, if you want to do things differently, you need to put in the work, I guess. You've also written this book, which is "Off the Hook Marketing: How to Make Social Media Sell for You." Why should someone read this book?

Jeff

Yeah, it was written a while ago, but it's still timely because it was written mainly with direct marketing concepts in mind and again, back to basics. And in the early days, you know, guys like Marcus Sheridan, who is now relatively famous for at that time when I wrote the book and interviewed him, he was relatively not famous for doing very simple things that get back to this idea of answering customers' questions. So, if you're a small business owner, mostly that book was written for small business owners, quite candidly, and it deals with a lot of the very simple idea of answering customers questions, being a wonderful way, as stupid as it sounds, very, very basic questions. Even I can do a better job at that. On our blog, people have basic questions and it's striking how if you just answered basic questions on LinkedIn or wherever in your content that those people actually need the answers to the basic questions. So, if you're looking to turn that into an actionable strategy for yourself, it's a great way to do it.

Kushal

Jeff, you've written about how social selling is weakening your hunters and you talk about marketers as farmers and sellers as hunters. Would you explain that a little more, what's the difference and how does that work out? Because I know salespeople do a lot of social selling.

Jeff

Yeah, yeah, poking the bear a little bit. All right Kushal, no problem. So, yeah, I mean, I feel pretty strongly that, and I'm not the only one, of course, but that you do run the risk of aggravating your sales force by mandating that they go on social media and annoy people and post press releases and stalk people in comments and things like that. It's less to do with how I feel about it. It's more again, I'm a reporter. I'm going to report the news. Most people, I got up on a stage in Spain once in front of IBM's sales for... IBM Europe's sales force. I told a short story similarly about how this really creates an irritation and anger and refusal of the salespeople sometimes. They don't want to do these, which is basically these things, because it's basically just using a bullhorn and shouting at people. They see it as marketing and they don't want to do marketing. They want to do sales. So anyway, I told a short story up on stage in front of fifteen hundred people. It was a little bit dramatic. I didn't expect it. Half of the room was silent and the other half jumped out of their seats and stood up and clapped. And I thought, oh boy, I really dug myself into a hole now. But, you know, I was just validating that they were fed up with what management wanted them to do because they knew it wasn't effective. But management felt that, you know, using the megaphone on social media was effective. So, yeah, that's just the reality of it. Again, I'm a reporter kind of just reporting the news that sellers let sellers sell. And it's a very individual person to person craft. It's not something where they're just pushing information out and sharing content just for the sake of sharing content. And that's a lot of what happens with social selling.

Kushal

Talking about social selling, there is a lot of criticism for those who share feedback openly on places like LinkedIn, especially when the recipient is named. And I know that you received some of that criticism recently as well. How do you respond to that now that you think back, would you do things any differently?

Jeff

Would I? Well, I'm not sure I understand the question because there's like maybe two questions or three in there.

Kushal

So, it's really about, you know, the fact that there is criticism for when feedback is shared openly on LinkedIn, especially when the recipient is named. Right. So how do you respond to that sort of feedback that people and the kind of criticism that people receive for sharing feedback in the first place? What's your response to that? And if you had to do things differently, then, would you do things differently or?

Jeff

Yeah, well, I certainly wouldn't do what I have done when, on the weekend and when I was having some turmoil in my life. Just posting on LinkedIn naming names where there was someone who annoyed me, at the same time, that caused an uproar that I was being critical of someone. And I said that their skill level was not very good and it was counter to what I do for a living, which is if I'm critical of someone publicly, that I would at least offer them, you know, some tips as to how to make this better. But yeah, this caused an explosion of people who were militantly against me, attempting to, many people attempting to get me banned from LinkedIn. Would I do things differently? Yes, but not because of what resulted. What resulted actually got me a lot of attention, actually got the person who I posted about lots of attention as well. So I did apologize for doing that in my apology to the person who I had done this to and his reaction was "whatever." So, would I have done things differently? Yes, on a Saturday, I wouldn't have posted flippantly. I would have been a little more thoughtful, which is usually what I do if I'm going to pick apart and break down an email, I would have been a little bit more thoughtful about it. But I think it is important. I think there are a lot of people who are pushing back against the criticism of the poor quality of outreach that's out there. So, that's, I think a sign I think we risk being tone deaf if we don't look at all the people who are on the receiving end complaining basically into LinkedIn, which is basically what I was doing. I was on the receiving end as a small business owner and I was complaining into LinkedIn. If we don't listen to that, we missed the point that, this is not appreciated. So, and that's an ongoing debate, of course. Is that, how do we which is the nature of your questions today? How do we use automation respectfully and in that kind of thing?

Kushal

Yeah, I guess the thing with feedback is that it always, it can come to you in different shapes and sizes and forms and because we deal with the public, some of it is very public as well. So, I think there's lessons there and sharing feedback, receiving feedback and really responding to all of it as well. Definitely takes some thick skin to be in the public eye, right,  and do that.

Jeff

Yeah, and not be reactive as well. I felt it was on the weekend, so I had time, but I didn't feel like I needed, everybody was demanding an apology and I thought, well, if I'm going to apologize to someone, I'll apologize to the guy who I supposedly attacked. Once he showed me he didn't really care. He's like, well, you're just a guy who is angry with my outreach. I get it. I get it all the time. I didn't feel the need to apologize to anybody. He didn't, he didn't really want my apology. So, yeah, this online is a very reactionary place right now. It always has been. We are willing to put things in writing on the screen that we otherwise wouldn't be willing to stand in front of someone and say, all right. So it's not just... That used to be Email 15-20 years ago right? Never send an email with words in it that you wouldn't say to someone's face while that went out the window, because now we've got Twitter and we've got LinkedIn and all these. Well, not so much LinkedIn, but certainly Facebook where it's rough, it's difficult too. And now we're all shacked up in our home offices and, or with being without work, looking for work, not able to pay the bills. It's really a tough time right now. So, we all try to keep our cool and do the best.

Kushal

Yeah, I think there's a lot to be said for really trying to be respectful of where other people might be at some point in their lives and then the fact that we're just trying, yeah. We just don't know and we're also just trying to do our job, right? So yes, I think there's so many sides to it.

Jeff

Or not, or like in my case, I had a death in the family that day. So, and nobody knew that and I didn't feel like sharing that at that moment as it was. I shared it later. But yeah, we don't know.

Kushal

Sorry to hear that.

Jeff

We just don't know. Thank you. We just don't know what's going on, on the other side. My wife does that to me all the time. I'm trying to get a hold of a customer that has had the contract, right? We've all been there. For two weeks now and they're like, "what happened?" We have no idea what is going on over there. They could be getting divorce papers served to them. One of their kids could have been in a car wreck, God forbid. So it's hard to be patient in sales.

Kushal

Sounds like the world could do with some more empathy and tolerance and patience, right?

Jeff

Yeah, agreed. But it's hard. It's really hard when you get paid based on commission. Right. And you're trying to pay your bills. It's a very emotional place to be, which is, if you don't follow Benjamin Dennehy, you should because he's great with that. Another Sandler guy teaching just how to divorce yourself from the outcome to not need the deals so much and to just like a doctor, like a good doctor, distance yourself from the patient a little bit to keep your own sanity. Same thing in sales, I think.

Kushal

Yeah, there's a very famous saying in India, which is basically from the Bhagavad Gita, which is one of our holy scriptures, which is, do your work and don't get attached to the results of it. That's obviously much easier to lead and to decide, but it's obviously much more difficult to follow, I guess for everyone.

Jeff

Yeah, it is.

Kushal

Okay, Jeff so while we're talking about the fact that sales does kind of live on commissions and people do have a job to do no matter what the times, may be personally, professionally for them or the recipient, what are some of the things that maybe you'd kind of include for your own, your own group, and maybe even tell us a little bit more about your work as well and how you kind of work with clients, etc. and teams and maybe, what are some tips for people to kind of do a better job of this overall, right now, given that selling is a very social, or very visible sort of activity today?

Jeff

Yeah, we see a big movement right now, Kushal, into communities, which makes a lot of sense because we're all stuck inside from time to time. Maybe there's a month or two or three or whatever we get locked down. So, we can't go out and do meet ups and those kind of things anymore. So, it's all online right now. So there's been a huge explosion of free groups, low cost groups. We operate like I said, for twenty dollars a month.

Jeff

We have higher levels, of course, where there's more education, more coaching involved. So, I think getting involved in a group is smart. I just simply encourage the smaller private groups, again, that usually charge. So like Justin Michaels operates one, we operate one. There's lots of people who operate these closed groups where frankly, we all tend to keep to ourselves and invent together these new ideas to get people curious to earn better, earn more conversations, using our voice mails, using our emails, using LinkedIn and increasing our skill level. So, I know, I mentioned Benjamin Dennehy a few times. He runs online bootcamps. 

So, again, it's back to this, "invest in yourself", but invest it with the people who check their references, right? And make sure that, because there's a lot of what I call charlatans out there that really don't have much to offer in comparison to people who have more developed their skills. And I think the point is, why would you limit yourself to the teachings of one sales conversation trainer versus a community of people? So, I think the movement towards communities is extremely smart. Trouble is that, if it's an open community, I see I've gone into these and I had one myself, and we all tend to share the same stuff that you can find Googling and LinkedIn. The really good tactical know-how and the good coaching, like peer coaching, my customers coach my customers because they subscribe to a certain way of thinking to provoke customers' curiosity. So, how can we do that? If you're selling accounting software or if you're selling professional services or whatever it is, then we have these little special interest groups. So, I think that's the best thing to do: is get involved with other people like you who maybe even compete with you in a different geography and compare notes with what's working to start conversations lately and what isn't. Am I answering your question? I don't know if that's...

Kushal

I have one more question for you, which is really around, why should someone, for instance, join your group and what sorts of things can they look forward to? For what sort of person would it be to like fit?

Jeff

Yeah, we have a bronze, silver and gold level membership. It's monthly. If you only want one month, you pay for the month and you cancel immediately. You get 30 days. But for bronze level, I feel really good about our new bronze level. We have a course, run you through the course. I think it's six lessons if you're up for it. I'm waiting to release an actual testimonial from someone who took the bronze course and was in our community forum after he upgraded to Silver and he was saying that I put a dagger in his heart ... He was watching the lessons and that his goal this year is to remove the dagger from his heart that I placed in his heart. So there is some amount of pain in transforming and change, as I'm sure you can appreciate Kushal. If any of us have ever challenged yourself to break habits and do something new, you know, it's great, our academy is a great place to start. You can run through the first course, see if it's for you. It's definitely different in terms of sparking customers' curiosity and getting rid of your old habits of pushing education on people, pushing all the value on people. So it's a great start. And then at silver and gold level, we have more and more levels of coaching where you have time access to me. And of course, we have mentors in our community at the silver and gold level. So friendly people all over the world are really super cool. I never expected to have people in New Zealand and Australia and India and Singapore and China and the US, of course, and Canada and few in South America. So, it's super cool and the best way to get started with that would be just visit joinsparkacademy.com and you can check out the different levels of investment and invest in yourself.

Kushal

Sounds like a good thing to do, I think, any day of the week to reinvest in yourself. Just to go back a little bit to where you mentioned that you kind of have members from all over the globe, right? Do you see any cultural differences in the way that we sell, in our behaviors, or do you think, there aren't really any?

Jeff

At the moment, there is a difference with regard to looking for meetings in Japan, some parts of China and Arabic speaking nations, in particular, the Mideast. But also, North Africa, where sparking their curiosity is a little bit indirect and not appreciated. You can still get, I'm told there are places in India as well, some sections of India. I'm told it's easier to get a meeting if you're calling into India. But we have seen definitely, over the last five years, an evolution. A very westernized revolution. So in UK and in France, you know, five years ago, they flat out refused to do things like remove the salutation, like I was advising, don't use "Dear Khushal" at the beginning of your email for some very specific reasons. They had nothing, they would have nothing to do with it. But, after some time, I convinced some people in UK and in Paris to remove the salutation and to do things that they otherwise wouldn't dare doing, and they have better results. So I think a lot of this has to do with, everybody's on their mobile device. Fewer words, less people always say "that's not polite." Well, you know. Catching somebody's attention in a few seconds doesn't leave a lot of time for politeness. If you're selling to someone who's  going through their device and they're hitting delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, spam, spam, spam, spam. If you remove your salutation, you get to the point a little bit faster, right? So, even if they don't open it, they can see in their mobile device, the first few words and those few words matter. So, if you say "I'm just following up from my previous e-mail", delete, delete, spam, not a problem, right? So there's definitely some cultural differences still today, but it's becoming very, very westernized in terms of the less formal. Business emails has become much less formal, effective business emails, I should say.

Kushal

Right, yeah, I think that's interesting. I think it makes for a really interesting training/webinar/ talk another day because now I think with so many businesses really going global, everyone is selling from everywhere to everywhere. So, they're  obviously a lot of connections being made and kind of waiting to be made as well. Great Jeff, thanks so much. Is there anything else that you'd like to share with us and with the audience?

Jeff

Invest in yourself. That is the big one. No matter what it is, it doesn't have to be 20 dollars a month, it can be zero. But make sure that you're making your time investment with people who know what they're talking about. And you should really investigate and consider if it sounds familiar to you, if what you're studying sounds familiar in terms of conventional wisdom. It might not be what you need to get the job done if you look at something and it doesn't, well as an example, I think it was Darryl Praill from Vanillasoft. When he first met me, we did an interview and he said, "I thought you were crazy. I thought, who is this idiot with all these, you know, attacking conventional wisdom?" Well, he says, "As it turns out, I thought about it for a moment and it made sense that the conventional wisdom doesn't always hold the best advice." So look for people who are saying different things and try to invite them onto your podcasts and go look at these people who have. My best teachers are teachers who are like, "What are you talking about?" And really get into the behavioral science of sales. There's not a lot of attention in  sales to really understanding the psychology of it.

Kushal

Thanks so much Jeff, I think that was incredibly useful. And I think the last part we talked about and I was just thinking about familiarity, bias and how we tend to kind of want to talk and bond only, more with people who we think are familiar, right? I think, like you said, there is more growth to be done when you're actually challenged by people and talking to people you don't agree with. So yes, a great conversation. Thank you so much, Jeff. I really appreciate your time today.

Jeff

My pleasure, Kushal. It was a lot of fun.