Episode 144: Being Good To Becoming Elite In Selling Takes Practice And A Process With Paul Caffrey
Being good at selling may be great, but becoming elite in selling is much better! Like many entrepreneurs, you also wanted to achieve an elite status in your field. In today's episode, Paul M. Caffrey, Co-Author of The Work Before The Work, shares his journey from being a scientist to a top salesperson. We learn how to use the scientific process during research and experiments to go from good to great in selling to your prospects. Paul reveals the elite sellers' proven preparation techniques, habits, and routines. Whether you're a seasoned salesperson looking to take your skills to the next level or a new professional eager to excel, this episode is for you! Join Paul Caffrey to unleash your sales elite potential today.
---
Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Being Good To Becoming Elite In Selling Takes Practice And A Process With Paul Caffrey
Welcome to this episode where I interview Paul M. Caffrey, who is an international speaker and a seasoned sales expert and co-author of The Work Before the Work: The Hidden Habits Elite Sales Professionals Use to Outperform the Competition, a pivotal book on sales preparation he co-authored with Phil M. Jones, author of Exactly What to Say. Paul's passion is helping ambitious sales professionals, sales leaders, and founders operate at an elite level to drive exceptional sales results.
During my interview with Paul, we talked about his journey from being a scientist to a top salesperson. We learn how to use the scientific process of research for experiments and be able to solve for the outcomes that we're looking for with our prospects and possible clients to become great and elite in selling so that we're able to not only solve for the outcomes of our clients and prospects but also the outcomes that we expect for ourselves as well.
This process that Paul is talking about can be utilized in any way that you sell in any type of business, whether you're in professional services or a professional salesperson. I look forward to you reading this interview with Paul. If you like it, please share it with colleagues that it can be helpful to and also subscribe and like this show.
‐‐‐
I am here with Paul M. Caffrey. Paul and I have met as fellow keynote speakers. He has so impressed me with his knowledge of the sales process and so forth. Before we get started, I would love you to give an intro on what you do and how you help.
Amy, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me on. I help salespeople perform at an elite level. For me, what's crucial is getting you to realize what your potential is and helping you go that bit further and faster. What it all comes down to is preparation. Uncovering the hidden habits elite sales professionals use to outperform the competition is the key. I'm hoping we're going to get into some of that.
We will but before we get there, we always want to know how you got from where you were to here. It's good to start from the beginning of why this has become a passion for you. Where did you grow up, Paul? What did your mother and father do for a living?
The Why Behind Paul’s Passion
I grew up in Dublin, Ireland. You can probably tell from the accent that might sound a little different than some of the others that have been on the show. As a teenager, I was convinced I was going to be a professional footballer and play soccer in England or football as we say over here. That was, I suppose, important to me because it made me quite disciplined and naturally competitive. What I saw was that those who did well in that were able to show up and do the boring stuff a lot.
If you want to be a top footballer, you have to be quite fit. Getting fit is pretty boring. I started early on. There's a little bit of that that is important. My father was a scientist. He worked in the lab for many years. My mother had somewhat of an entrepreneurial spirit, did a few different things, and never stuck with one. I thought we'd do something a little bit different. My football career didn't pan out. I got to a stage where I probably wasn't good enough but I will hide behind the fact that multiple knee injuries stopped me from getting physically not able. I went into science so no surprise there. I went into that field initially.
Let's go back to your father a little bit and get into him. What kind of scientist was your father?
He was a microbiologist/lab technician.
It’s weird. My father is an immunologist.
I've studied immunology. I know what it’s about.
We don't meet a lot of people like that.
We're going to talk science instead of sales. Let’s keep going.
Trust me, I never went the science route. What did he do with it? Where was he working? How did you understand what he did growing up?
Not so much. He worked for a company called Organon. They were a big multinational and he was in charge of making sure that the products that they were producing were working. It was pregnancy testing kits and other diagnostic kits. He was in charge of making sure that they were diagnosing accurately and correctly. If he and his team weren't ready to have the mixtures, batches, and process ready to go, there was a factory of a couple of hundred people who couldn't work.
It was always crucially important that they got their part right and it was operating because it would shut down production. As a kid, getting to see your father going off on an airplane because he had to go to Holland to do something in some factory or somewhere else was always pretty cool because then you'd come back with presents. At that point, I was exposed to it. I had a natural curiosity for science. As a teenager, that came through.
What was your curiosity? What were you interested in about it?
It was in deconstructing how things worked and looking to understand why things happen. It was the why behind it that I thought was super interesting. In school, you've got to go through all the different subjects. That was the one that resonated with me. Science is very black or white. You could tell if you did a good job or a bad job. White is also the experiment that you were running. That also appeals to me because a lot of the other subjects were very subjective, particularly English, for example. You think my essay is good or not. I think it's great.
I love that. There's one thing you said about your father that is interesting. I had a very different life from my father being an immunologist. He was a professor. When I went to his lab, it was rats, cockroaches, and smelly stuff.
This was a nice office.
They were doing experiments on gross things. That's a little bit but I love what you said. He must've said this to you, for you to repeat it, that he had a personal purpose behind beyond the science of keeping people employed and that he felt a great responsibility to all of those workers. How did he frame that to you? Why was he saying that to you? Can you remember?
If I think about it and unpack it a little bit more, we're talking about the ‘80s and the ‘90s. It's not today or yesterday. If the factory got shut down and production was stopped, all those people weren't getting paid. Factories closed for 1 day or 1.5 days if something has happened. That's bad luck. It's the way things went. He wouldn't have wanted to see people being affected by that with what he and the team were doing.
We all hold that weight in the work we do and also benefit from that work. We always expand because a lot of times in the work we do, we just think about the thing we do instead of the bigger impact and people that are responsible. That's such an important thing to think about in your work for people reading to use that as an example of what your bigger impact than the output of what you're doing is. The second thing when you talk about this not being subjective with science and there is a process that seems very aligned to what you do was there something in science that clicked. Do you remember a certain experiment or experience where all of a sudden you were like, “This makes more sense to me?”
I went on and studied science at university and became a qualified microbiologist. It was great. I enjoyed it. I entered the industry in 2008 and that's when I found out it wasn't for me. I'm going to answer your question probably in a way that you wouldn't have expected because I remember working for this global animal feed company. I was in their research team and there were eight of us. We all had our bench and project that we were working on.
I floated the idea, “Why don't we get together once a month and share what we're doing, how our research is going, the results that we're getting, and then look to help each other?” I got laughed at. “Nobody wants to help you because it was extremely competitive.” If you managed to get your research to pay off, you would develop an international reputation and you're effectively made for life. It was very big versus if it didn't work, you might get another qualification and you've got an experience. It doesn't mean that your work is bad. You continue.
There is jealousy going on between all the scientists there. Whether you got the results you were looking for, it didn't necessarily mean you were a good or a bad scientist because you were trying to prove something that we didn't know the answer to. The answer could be something groundbreaking or it may not be. You weren't guaranteed either way, which was part of the fun, I suppose but back then, not knowing where you're going to go and not getting the help of people around you got to me. That's when I decided to effectively leave the industry.
What did you start doing? When you were making that decision, what was your process to transition?
My process was going to go into research and looking to work on some incurable diseases with some bigger impact. In 2008, the world economy collapsed. I had the option of going to work on research and figuring something out but for free. I didn't fancy earning any money so I pivoted to sales, left Ireland, went to London, and started working in a global IT provider at that point, a company called Sun Microsystems. They were acquired by Oracle since. My approach was science has a process to follow and you can get a result, positive or negative, so I'm going to apply that to sales. How hard can it be? That was how I got started.
How did you even get that job?
I went down to the local town center of the village that I was living in, outside London, and had to go to a group interview. There we are, this fancy tech company, twelve of us around the table. They put a box of gadgets and gizmos there and said, “Pick something up and sell it to us.” They weren't hiring everybody but it was one of those things where if you didn't sell whatever that thing was, you weren't going to get the role. I went in. It sounds cliché to say but I picked a pen because I figured, “They're expecting me to pick up the fancy computer, laptop, or phone.” I went with the pen and sold the pen to somebody. This was 2008. It was before it became such a widespread joke.
What did you say? Do you remember? When you look at that pen, how did you make it unique?
I remember the first thing was the internet panelists' viewers were looking on like, “I don't think that's the thing.” I was like, “It's on the table,” and then proceeded to question them about, “Do they have a need? Do you use a pen in your day-to-day at the moment? What's it used for,” and getting into those outcome-based questions and then getting to a point of them saying, “I need a pen because I want to do X, Y, and Z. “This pen's available. It's in that budget but you have to decide to go to that.”
We all laughed about it. It was my first pitch. That's taken into consideration too. It was a few needs-based questions. I was glad I didn't pick up any of the technology because people were asking questions about that and I was sitting there going, “I would not have had a clue and a processing power,” but with the pen, I was like, “That's about it. I can deal with that.”
I love that too because you pick something that you truly understand versus trying to show off in another area and display your craft. Many times, we go for that shiny thing instead of the path of resistance right in front of it.
Stick to what you know in certain respects, for sure
Becoming Elite In Selling: Stick to what you know in certain respects.
Once you started in sales, what did you learn?
The first thing I learned was there is no one right way to do it. There are better ways to do it for sure. This was a floor full of 60 people who were doing outbound so initially as appointment selling and very hard cold calling. I looked at who are the top performers. I went and sat beside each of them for about 3 or 4 hours for the first week. Everyone else was going, “This is a bit strange. Why is he not on the phone? Why is he over there besides such and such?” Altogether, I thought it to be the best practice.
The challenge we had back then, to a large extent that still exists, was you had a limited amount of data. There were some people who were doing 200 or 300 dials a day and they were getting the leads and results but they were quickly heading towards running out of data to contact. I was more the opposite. I was going, “How do I stretch that out?” I was making sure that not I was only contacting 50 people per day but I was getting the same results and getting to be top of the dashboard. For me, the big takeaway was there are better ways to do it but you should have a process. I've taken that with me ever since. We're talking about quite a long time ago.
I was in sales as well at a big company and I had switched. I had been an entrepreneur selling to build my business. When I transferred inside sales and sold my business, I was baffled by the whole thing, “What are they doing here?” To your point, I did very well but I didn't follow their process because it was exactly what you said, the number of calls. There are statistics behind that but that's not the way I go about it. I was doing better and they couldn't figure out why that was working. Everybody's mind goes in a different direction. To be able to capture what works for each person's process is important and not try to fit everybody into the same process and expect the same results.
Preparation Is Key
Therein lies the challenge because the metrics that we speak about, you've got 100 people in front of you. Logically, the more we speak to our customers, the more we've got a chance of getting the result of helping them. The more we follow a process, the better our chances are because we know this process is proven to an extent but when you go through the individual level, to your point, there was a better process than what the company had in place so you are more successful.
The challenge is for everyone, there are probably ten who would be way worse and not get the results. There's a bit of art and science to sales. It's a combination of both of them. How you perform depends on how you do both. If you think about the skills that are needed, you can develop your skills to improve how you sell. For me, preparation is the one skill that is overlooked because there are no barriers to entry. Anybody can prepare.
It's extra work so a lot of people don't like doing it. Good news, people won't do it. Bad news, it's more work but then you get much more effective and better results. A great way to consider it is what's your win rate? If your win rate is 5%, it doesn't matter if you're hitting quota. If you're hitting quota, great but if you have a win rate of 5% versus a win rate of 30%, the 5% is costing you way more time and probably your company way more money versus if you're at an efficient 30% rate. It's all levels and it's about the leveling to get to where you need to go.
I feel those percentages are always hard to look at because if I'm selling a higher ticket item and my 5% win rate is higher than someone at a 30% win rate because they're discounting everything, what is hard about a sales team is they want to be able to go off certain stats but it isn't all equal in the way that you sell. Some people are one-trick ponies and transactional. To your point, if I'm a person who has more and more conversations but I'm building up a long-term sales process, it's going to look different.
The mid-market is a great place where this shows itself. If you're selling to the mid-market, you could run that consultative enterprise-style large deals with longer sales cycles to hit your number or you can do that transactional with lots of different widgets and have a high volume. It falls under either/or. That's a great place to start if you're trying to figure out which one you are.
The key thing is industry stats or the metrics that your company wants you to follow are one thing but you should personally know what your metrics are as well. To your point, if you're working in a territory, in which you've got the perfect product-market fit and there are a lot of companies in that territory that suit what you sell, you can be much more successful than if you got asked to work in a different town or state, even though everything else could be the same. There are so many different parameters.
How did you apply your scientific mentality and think of this with a greater purpose to doing this? That's a big difference going from, “I'm going to research and solve diseases,” to, “I'm going to sell IT products.” How did you get your head around that?
Applying Science Into Your Work
The key piece was I put together a process, which was a number of steps to take. In science, a great researcher is always testing things. I ran the experiment this way. Next time I'm going to run it and change one of the parameters itself. I look to do that in sales. I follow up 3 times or 6 times. Should I mix in phone calls? Should I try a different platform? If I'm pitching it, should I look to pitch it this way? In science, I'd be looking at the literature. What has changed? What new techniques are coming out that I could be considering?
In sales, I'm looking at, “What skills do I have? What skills am I good at? What are people saying that I should look to develop?” Back then, NLP was quite a big thing. I was looking into NLP and understanding that people will interact with you in different ways. Some people like to hear something and others like to see it. Others want to get their hands on it, start demoing, and figure out what language they use early in the conversation.
Also, which book would they fall into, and then develop the skillset to be able to adapt my pitch, whether it's in a meeting or a longer engagement to meet that person where they are. Sometimes you realize quickly, “There's a lot of different types of people here.” This is getting a little bit advanced but that's the piece of you're never finished improving and then looking to always see how you can get better. That was a big thing I took from science into sales.
Being part of many sales teams, they want a prescription way to sell. I love what you're saying, which is to assess the prospect of the way that they learn or communicate and then have a different sales process, depending on how the client is going to take in information or product.
The key thing is we have a process to follow because that gives us the most likelihood of success but if we establish that this person does not want to see the proof of a demo, that's not so important to them and it is something else, then let's not demo but be able to call out to leadership, we're purposely not doing a demo because of X, Y, and Z. It will improve our chances of getting this across the line versus, “No, I'm going to make them follow our process and sit through the demo,” even though it's a waste of their time and it's not going to be useful.
CAPTION 2
Becoming Elite In Selling: The key is following the process that gives us the most likelihood of success.
It’s hard to do because it's going to put you in a situation where you need to justify what you're doing but ultimately, the more experience you build up and the more times you're there, you'll realize, “I don't want to lose this because I'm following something that maybe isn't going to help me get there.” A second part of what you mentioned that comes along is always looking at the outcome that people are getting.
When I was working in the UK, I was selling Microsoft technology. It's Microsoft cloud. Everyone was afraid of the cloud back then. The key thing for me was if I sold to a company with 200 or 500 people, it meant that their team and employees had the option to work from home a long time ago. That was quite a big deal. Connecting to that, although maybe isn't the driver behind a company going ahead for it but from a personal perspective, I did have that piece of, I'm delivering value, which has been proven but also to end users, I'm giving them a new way to work. That was something that I always appreciated in life, particularly back then.
That's a lot of times where you begin in the sales process, understanding their pain points. Why are you talking in the first place? What are the outcomes that they're looking for and designing your conversation to align with that? A lot of people do make the mistake of, “I'm going to tell you what I do, see if you like it, and buy it,” versus listening and then massaging what you say to align to the pain points.
It's one of these things where you need to put the other person first. One of the things I speak about in the book is what is the other person looking to achieve and how are they going to achieve that. Depending on how big or small an opportunity is, it’s going into that a bit deeper or staying at that surface level. Even if you bring that into all of your conversations, even the unexpected conversations, then you end up in a position where you've got an idea of how you could serve this person.
You ask yourself the same questions, “What am I looking to achieve? How am I going to achieve that?” For example, I'm at a conference. I'll be speaking and I'm looking forward to meeting a lot of people. Would I like to bring on a couple of new clients? I certainly would. Will I be letting people know that I speak at keynotes? For sure. I'm not expecting the people I mentioned it to, to be the people who will turn around and go, “Come on in and do this for our company.”
If I've served them in that conversation and helped them get value from the day and they get an opportunity to chat with somebody and that topic comes up, there's a much higher chance of them recommending me versus not if I haven't had that value-driven conversation for them. This is what a lot of elite people do across the board, particularly from a networking standpoint. It's so powerful because they're always connecting and that means they get connected.
I'm hearing a theme over and over again with this practice and being prepared. You did it as a football player and scientist. You're doing it as a salesperson. What was the path to you moving from selling to what you do now?
I went through a period of real success and it was a lot of work. It was long hours. It was jumping on an airplane at 5:00 in the morning in a rental car and doing a lot of meetings at 12:00 at night, sometimes sitting in a hotel bar, having a drink, doing quotes, sending it off, and then getting ready to go again the next day. I focused on how I could improve. Performance was key.
I came across Todd Herman. You may know Todd. He's big in the performance space. He wrote the book The Alter Ego Effect. I was fortunate to get some coaching in one of his online programs years ago. That's where it drew into elite high performance. From that point, I ended up coaching, not only the CEOs and the founders that I was providing solutions to but also a lot of peers as well and leaders in the space. I realized that a lot of people need help with this to reach their potential. I decided to take a step away from industry and then look to share these skills with others so they can go on and thrive.
Becoming Elite In Selling: The Alter Ego Effect
When you talk to organizations or leaders, what do you think is the number one thing you hear over and over again about where people are going wrong or what they're struggling with the most?
The first thing is they don't have a preparation plan, routine, or sometimes even a checklist. They may expect their whole organization to run a demo and discovery process but they haven't provided even a single checklist of, “What do I need to do to prepare for this to make it successful?” The outcome as well is never as clear as it should be. What makes this a successful discovery call?
It’s great if they buy super but that's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to help people make a confident yes-no decision. They are the two things which I see a lot of ambiguity around. There's a focus on the metrics or something that's happened. They think that's the big thing that needs to be solved. It's a step back in building in a preparation framework, being clear on the outcome, and sharing that with the customers.
What would you suggest as a way to evaluate a sales organization?
The first thing I'd look at is, have you got a process at the moment? I'm hoping that you do see what that process is.
How would you define a process? A lot of people would say they have it but maybe it's not in the way that you think of it.
A process is there are a certain number of steps that we expect to bring a customer on to make a confident yes-no decision. Those steps are captured in a CRM. It's essential. That is one part of it. Looking at, where do people fall off? Where do people get stuck and spend a huge amount in the process? Sometimes, it’s step 2 or step 3. After we qualify them, they get stuck for a long period.
We're looking at that going, “There's something gone wrong here. Should this person have made it to the next step or is it that that meeting wasn't effective and didn't meet the outcome that was needed?” We didn't sell the next step to the prospect. They didn't see the value in doing it so soon. We didn't sell the value of what we're doing perhaps. Why did we not get that? We didn't know the outcome we were trying to go towards and we didn't spend a little bit of time preparing so we missed something. They're the fundamentals that I'd be looking at helping with in the work or looking to get started.
The Work Before The Work
This is very similar to doing a science experiment. You're trying to get to a result and then you've got to test different processes to get there. When you decided to go out and speak, you also wrote a book and you've collaborated with a number of people. How did that come to be?
I remember being at a number of conferences. I would have gone to a lot of conferences and I realized this is a great way to spread a message and have a lot of people at once. I realized that a lot of these people have books and I looked a bit more. Pretty much everyone had organized their thoughts in a book or something quite similar. I realized if I want to go and help as many people as I can, I need to do that.
Coincidentally, I was working in Salesforce at this point and running some events. I met Phil Jones, who co-authored the book with me. He’s the bestselling author of Exactly What to Say. Check out his stuff. It's brilliant. Amy, you know him well. We met up with him in New York at that time. I brought him in to do some events with customers and we had some side conversations.
I let him know that I was doing this book. It was based on preparation and this was what was happening. We've done a few events together so we decided to release the book together. It's how Phil got involved. It's about sharing and looking to speak with others. It is a key thing. It was serendipitous. It was never planned for me to co-author. I always planned to do it on my own.
I've got a question for you, thinking about a lot of salespeople I've known over time and organizations. When you're talking about practicing and doing a process, the personality type of a salesperson isn't always to do that like taking the time to do that research. They want to move on to the next sale. Many that I've worked with, not all. How do you break through where this doesn't seem so daunting to someone where this doesn't come naturally to them?
Beoming Elite In Sales
I've done this 100 times. I don't need to practice. The reality is you can have a good sales meeting and do a good demo without putting in that preparation up front. If you want to go from being good to being elite, that is the difference. If you look at anybody who's elite in any field, they put in a huge amount of work that is unseen. I've seen sales professionals who've got fifteen years of experience and know the product that they're selling inside out are exceptional operators who will have a team of people with them when they're delivering a demo, insist on practicing that 4 or 5 times, having the wider team driven the mentored.
They don't want to go through another dry run because they're all very experienced as well but what happens is there are little moments that will come along in your sales meeting. If you've done the work before the work, you'll be in a position to 1) Spot them because you're not going to be worried about what you're saying or what's coming next but all that's going to be natural.
2) You're going to be at your best possible opportunity of being able to confront that and get past it, as opposed to relying on what you make up on the spot if you even notice at all. That is the key difference. The top salespeople will work a lot fewer deals but their deal values and success rate will be much higher. Ultimately, the volume will only take you so far. If you're tired of doing way too much, that's where you make the switch to being more prepared.
Becoming Elite In Selling: The volume will only take you so far, so be more prepared because the top salespeople will work fewer deals with higher values. Their success rate is much higher.
What percentage of time do you think, in a normal work week, should be spent doing preparation?
There are two aspects to this. One is what is the outcome going to mean for you and your year? If you work in enterprise sales, you might only sell to 2 or 4 customers throughout the whole year. It makes sense to spend 1 week, maybe even 2 weeks preparing for some of those meetings and getting everything bang on because you will not have many chances. If you work in SMB and you are selling something every day, you're going to have a lot more opportunities to sell. The amount of preparation you want to put in there should be a lot less. You factor that in.
A good rule of thumb is if it's a 1-long meeting, put aside 10 to 15 minutes to prepare for that. If it's a 30-minute meeting, maybe 5 to 10 minutes. You can even do this for internal meetings as well. What does it mean? It means the meeting will probably be shorter for internal meetings because you'll be able to get to what's important. Sometimes you can send an email and circumvent that. I'm going off point because that's internal meetings are generally away from sales. That is the key piece.
Even if you prepare for five minutes before you go into a meeting and you're able to research customer pain points to have you speak and you're able to call out something about them that they didn't expect you to know, you can get that meeting started in a positive, interesting way. That means the rest of your meeting and content would be the same.
The only difference is you've framed it as somebody who has done the work, is interested, and wants to get their business. Once you're delivering that outcome, that makes the difference versus showing everyone, “How's it going? I'm going to ask you questions. Go to Google but didn't bother. I don't respect your time. Let's get through this.”
Also, getting present for that experience is important because we have so many things that are on our plate all day long, making sure that at each instance, people know you showed up to be there with them. It's so critical in sales. There are so many great tips that you've said. I could talk to you all day about this stuff but I'd like to end with some rapid-fire questions. We get to pick a category. It’s either family and friends, money, spiritual, or health.
Let's go health.
“Things or actions I don't have that I want with my health.”
More consistency. What I mean by that is I do personal training classes twice a week. I would like to do it maybe 3 or 4 times a week and that's something I'm working up to but what I've noted before is if I go in for four sessions straight away, I start missing them. It's annoying when you've taken this. It's a small group. If I book in a spot, someone else is missing out. I don't like booking something and then maybe not fulfilling that obligation.
“Things or actions I do have that I want to keep.”
Being mindful of what I'm doing when it comes to my health. That is something pretty key. As we all get a bit older, we can feel when we have eaten poorly or made some bad decisions and get a bit sore as a result of it. Thankfully, I'm in a position where I'm able to make choices that prevent that to a certain extent. A few years ago, I gave up alcohol altogether.
I remember I was with my friends. We'd been to a football game. Afterward, I was like, “I don't like this anymore. It doesn't make me feel good.” Everyone laughed about it. Being an Irish person, particularly, not drinking can be a conversation killer but it doesn't make me feel as good as it used to, particularly hangovers and all that stuff. I don't even need to worry or think about that.
What the outcome is and what you're focused on. “Things or actions I don't have that I don't want.”
I don't want to be going elite when it comes to health. When COVID hit, gyms closed for 12 to 18 months in Ireland. We had quite a severe lockdown. It was pretty crazy. I started running. I got to the point of being able to do 20-plus miles and enjoying it but being gone for 2, 3, or 4 hours at a time. I don't want to get to that point of being elite in a sport or fitness endeavor that takes me away from other things such as family, work, and that but I'd like to.
Is it an obsession or health? You want to make sure your family and the things that you enjoy are balanced with it. This is the last one. “Things or actions that I do have that I don't want.”
Actions I do have that I don't want. I would like to push myself. I'm quite resilient. From a health perspective, I can jump all in and I wish I wasn't like that. For example, I'll get very regimented and require 160 grams of protein. I'm having ice baths. I'm focused on recovery and it's 100 miles an hour for say 3 or 6 months. The next day, I stop and it's gone. I would like not to have that because when I switch into that mode, I want to keep going. Being able to switch in and out of would be better but it's not there, which probably leads back to my previous answer of why I don't want to get into a new sport.
With everything we talked about, there are so many takeaways for people but is there anything you want to emphasize or that we missed that you want to bring up to the audience before we close out?
Even a little preparation can take you way further than you would have expected. If you're working in sales and doing anything else, take the time and be ready. Watch what happens to those opportunities and the work you do. It's going to take you way further. For me, that would be the one message I implore people to build into their lives.
CAPTION 5
Becoming Elite In Selling: Even just a little preparation can take you way further than you would have expected. Take the time and just be ready. Watch what happens to those opportunities and the work you do. It's going to take you much further.
Thank you so much for joining us from the UK and this being the end of your day. I appreciate it. I'm sure our readers are going to be so happy they read this as well.
I'm going to call out. I'm in Ireland. We're not in the UK.
Sorry. I thought you said you moved to the UK.
No. I was in London and Manchester. We're back. Thank you so much for having me on. Amy, I appreciate it. Until we connect again. I look forward to the next time we speak.
Thank you. Me too.
‐‐‐
For my mindful moments with this interview with Paul M. Caffrey. It was so interesting to hear about his background with his father being a scientist and microbiologist. That first stopping point for me was that his father saw beyond the work that he was doing into another purpose of making sure that people's jobs and occupations were protected by the work that he did. Sometimes we can feel like our work might be monotonous or that we don't think we're contributing until we start looking outside of ourselves and what is the greater good that we are providing.
It's important that in your mindful moment after reading this episode, you think about what are the things that you impact, whether that be your family, others, or a greater purpose in the work that you do and the effect that you have on others. It can be small or large but it's important that we ground ourselves in that, that we can feel satisfied with the work that we're doing each day.
We talked about how Paul went into this field as well. It was after he saw the example of his father and also loved science, going through school, and realizing that science was very objective as far as whether something worked or didn't work. It wasn't something subjective of someone's opinion of whether they like it or not and that he appreciated from doing it.
We can find this in any profession and it's important that we note it but one thing he was finding as a scientist is that it was very competitive and there wasn't collaboration. Instead, there was jealousy among scientists and not sharing what they were doing because everyone was trying to get to the finish line faster. When we expand that conversation to the greater good, the greater good is collaboration and what each person is learning so that we can solve the outcome that we're trying to solve. How do we share in that?
It's important that whatever we do, we realize that we can multiply by working together as a team rather than trying to think that we can always do it ourselves or alone. That happens in the sales process as well, whether we are a professional salesperson or we are selling for our firm or an organization. Sometimes we get so focused on our outcome that we don't think about if we brought in collaboration or other expertise, how much better we could solve the outcome, or the pain point that someone is explaining to us.
It is important to not try to do everything alone and look to the outside to see who can help and collaborate. You can create the best outcome for the person that you're solving for but also for yourself and your organization as well. The one thing that he has noticed with sales is there is no one way to do it. In my experience, we can have a framework of how we go about a sales process. When we try to prescribe that there are certain things to say or do, that's where some people thrive and don't thrive.
Depending on our style and what the outcome is that we are trying to create, it's important that we don't box people into a script if people need a script. That is how they best work. We should have a script ready for people. For people who like to have some flexibility and be able to bring in their personality so that they can get the best outcome for themselves, a framework is important.
Mostly what we talked about from this interview is what that framework looks like. How do we test these frameworks and processes to get the best result? That part is testing every stage of that sales process and seeing what is working or not working with different clients. Not all clients are going to be the same. What is that client's personality type? That was a great point that Paul made. Does the client want to hear it, see it, touch it, or demo it, whatever that is for them to get comfortable in the purchasing process?
Listen to your prospects and clients if you are in an ongoing sale of how they best like to make a decision. Too many times, we force things. I remember a few years ago, I was trying to build a sunroom. I knew exactly what I wanted. I was very clear about what I wanted. I would tell the salespeople, “Don't go through your whole sales pitch. There are specific things I want to do.”
The ones that would still go through everything and bore me are things I didn't want to know, nor did I care about. If I want to go look it up, you can give me the reference of where it's at. If they wasted my time, I cut it out. I couldn't be sure that what I was going to get when I bought this was what I needed because they weren't listening. They were following their process and weren't listening to what I needed and how I wanted to make my purchasing decision.
It's important when we think about ourselves as salespeople. We are allowing that space for someone to tell you what it is exactly they need. How do they want to receive it? How do they want to hear it? By that, we can have a greater success rate and help more people. What’s important is practice. A lot of people don't want to hear this because as Paul said, so many people feel, “I got this. I know how to sell or do this.” This can be anything that you do in business.
We are always continuous learners. Every year, I take some courses, classes, or conferences to keep expanding my knowledge in the field that I am in so that I don't get stale. There's always something that I can pull away and maybe update in my current process. Don't close yourself off from the learning process and for practicing and preparation. If we do those things, we are caring how someone else feels in that process that we are creating the best experience possible for a potential prospect or a client who wants to work with us. It is important that we look at what the other person is looking to achieve, not just what we are trying to achieve.
To be elite, as Paul puts it, it takes work and practice. The best elite athletes practice the drills every single day, the boring stuff. When you’re in a symphony, you're practicing one measure over and over again. You never hear that in the concert. You hear this beautiful piece of music but not the practice that went into it. To get that outcome, it takes that constant performance of the boring stuff as well to continuously get better and not forget about the basics.
One of the things that was a great way to leave it, as Paul said, was even a little preparation can take you further than you expect it. If you can even add in 10 or 15 minutes before your meetings and before running right into a sales call or a meeting to get present to make sure that you're grounded in what they need can make a world of difference. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Paul's got the book and work that you can go and purchase.
It is so important that if this resonated with you, learning the process outside your profession can help you inside your profession as well. If you like this episode, please share it with the people around you. We so appreciate the comments and feedback from those of you who even let me know how much an episode has meant to you, what you've learned, or how it's impacted your life. I appreciate your support so that we can continue to do this every single year. Thank you very much.
Important links:
About Paul Caffrey
Paul M. Caffrey is an international speaker, seasoned sales expert, and co-author of “The Work Before the Work, The Hidden Habits Elite Sales Professionals Use to Outperform the Competition” a pivotal book on sales preparation he co-authored with Phil M. Jones, author of "Exactly What to Say".
Paul’s passion is helping ambitious sales professionals, sales leaders and founders operate at an elite level to drive exceptional sales results.