Podcast Interview – Win Sales Now EP#9 with Rob Brus & Daniel Tolson

Robert Brus 0:08
Welcome, everyone, welcome to Win Sales Now and Go All In. I’m Robert Brus

Daniel Tolson 0:13
and I’m Daniel Tolson

Robert Brus 0:16
Good to have you back good.

Daniel Tolson 0:17
Back amongst the gum trees.

Robert Brus 0:18
something a little bit different, a little bit away from Cronulla and from the ocean, we’re out here at Daniel’s place. And looking forward to bringing you an episode today on social

Daniel Tolson 0:29
intelligence. And we just did one on emotional intelligence, real emotional intelligence, his contributions to 58% of success in all areas of your life. But when it gets to social intelligence, this will predict your level of success in the sales eating business. And social intelligence is your ability to display empathy, right? And it’s also the ability to communicate effectively with people and that contributes to it 5% of your success, and that is what we really need to dig into on this episode.

Robert Brus 1:00
That a word has always been a little bit scary for me if I’m completely honest with you, and in the spirit of sharing a little bit of my life with you, ladies and gentlemen, on this show, empathy has been something that I’ve struggled with a lot. And before I took the journey of becoming a podcaster, and, you know, in, in my journey, I’ve interviewed more than probably 200 people in the last year or so I’ve been on about the same number of interviews myself, and I really had to learn empathy. Because I always knew I wasn’t very empathetic, something would be going wrong in somebody’s life and I’d be like, tell you why it kind of sucks to be you. But that was about as far as my empathy went, but when I started podcasting, and and I heard other people’s storeys, I was really like, taken aback. I think part of it is related. Maybe you can, you can add some add some things to this. It was related to the active listening that I was kind of forced to do. So when you’re sitting with somebody like this face to face for half an hour and you hearing their storey, and they’re telling you Something like really bad that happened in the loft. It connects with you at a deeper level and just hearing those storeys over and over again like that was something that really connected with me that made me realise that hey, I actually am pretty empathetic, I do have more empathy than this outside, tough exterior will show is that go all in go either Patrick to burn all those things that actually is not true underneath everybody has empathy and everybody has that. But I had to develop it

Daniel Tolson 2:24
were 100% emotional. And I’ve worked with a lot of people who are ex military, ex Air Force, ex Navy, all of those people make exploits. And what happens is when you’re prepared for war, they drain the empathy. Adam Yeah. That’s true. Because on the battlefield, you can have empathy for the person who’s trying to kill you. It’s Kill or be killed. And when you are a raffle target drawn at that spot between your eyes. Yeah, you better be the first one to pull the trigger, you know. So in the military, they have to drain this out of you because it stops you from making right decision in that environment. And what happens in the military, it’s a level three environment, call it a values level three environment, and it’s Kill or be killed. And you’ve got to be a bigger, badder son of it than the other person, or you get killed and you don’t come home, they go back home to their family unit. So I pulled this out of you. So when ex military come back, and they become civilians, they have to learn empathy. And all of a sudden, this feeling feelings that never felt before, and they want to block it out, you know, and at that same time, Rob, is the PTSD and all of these ex military people starts to come up at surface. And it’s quite scary to feel these emotions definitely. But in the Australian society as well. Like to toughen up real men don’t cry. I’m honoured to be boy pants on. And we

Robert Brus 3:51
said that many times. It’s not cliche, it’s true.

Daniel Tolson 3:53
It’s driven into the boys is driven into the girls at a young age. And then we get into sales and we’ve got a radio It’ll make up about the people because people make decisions emotionally. They do it in the right brain, not in the analytical left brain.

Robert Brus 4:07
Yeah, they hear you analytically, but they make the decision emotionally, always emotional,

Daniel Tolson 4:10
emotional. And that’s why we need emotional intelligence, and specifically empathy in the sales process.

Robert Brus 4:16
There. Nice. Well, ladies and gentlemen, that’s what this show is going to be about today. So if you like what you’re seeing here, make sure you hit that subscribe button, leave us some comments down below because Daniel and I see those and we will reply to that. And make sure you share this episode around because there’s some great value that you’re gonna take away from it and you’re gonna hear something in the next 1015 minutes that you can apply to your business straight away to win more sales

Daniel Tolson 4:39
and sales now. So what do you got for us? So we had the emotional quotient assessments of a high performer in a live performance, somebody who earns $30,000 a year in sales, and somebody who earns $600,000 per year sales, and we’re going to break down the social intelligence of these two people. And before

Robert Brus 5:00
we go into that, if you haven’t seen the breakdown of the emotional intelligence of these two comparisons, please just have a look around here somewhere that video is right there as well. So that’s kind of the first half of this video that if this is the first that you’re watching, that’s okay, as well just make sure you get the emotional side of it as well. So you’ve got the full the full bottle analysis of both of these things,

Daniel Tolson 5:22
you got to have that. So when it comes to the social intelligence of these two salespeople, we can see here on the right hand side, the social intelligence of social awareness and social regulation is really low, compared to quite high on the other person. And we’re going to break these down and as we mentioned in the previous episode, if you have a higher level of emotional intelligence than your competitor, or somebody in your office, on average $39,000 per year more the difference that we know if these two people 20 point difference in emotional intelligence equates to a 500 million $17,000 difference in income, don’t pay lip service to this stuff either. It’s kind of like our world, you know, they’re two completely different people two completely different. Whatever’s The reality is they’ve completed the same test. And the income results show you that they quite they’ve really highlighted significant difference. And it’s really, really important stuff. It’s you got to get to the heart of what’s making you tick as a sales person, because that’s what’s going to help you to be more successful and break through the barriers that you might be feeling and experiencing right now. When you break your arm or your leg, you go to the doctor, and he takes an X ray, when you want to be more successful in selling, or you’re not getting the results that you want. You come to me and I take an X ray of your level of emotional intelligence. And I can look right in and show you exactly what you need to do to create phenomenal success. You know, this is a difference of $570,000 huge this person can work for the next 15 years and might even close that gap. Yeah, but this person is going to do 600 K, here in Europe, but on target earnings $1.2 million, this year,

Robert Brus 7:05
Double, double, double

Daniel Tolson 7:06
by WH there’s always room for improvement. It’s great. So we’ll break down social awareness. social awareness is empathy. It’s your ability to look across at the other person and understand their emotional makeup. People buy for emotional reasons, they do justify it logically, but they buy for emotional reasons. And if you can’t see the reasons why they buy emotionally, you can’t sell. So for the low performer, he, when he looks across at the customer, he has a difficult time seeing things from another’s point of view. So when you’re in sales, you’re proposing an idea you’re putting forward an idea. And then you’re seeking feedback. So when somebody gives him feedback, he’s got no idea how they can possibly say it from that perspective. Yeah. And then what happens? arguments is clash and you buy from people that you feel that you like, but once you become argumentative people say I don’t like this People who are argumentative on your last. But in contrast to the high performer, see others feel that he understands the see when you are sitting across from the sales manager when you say, this person gets me, my wife doesn’t get me my husband doesn’t get me my boss doesn’t get me. My ex lover doesn’t get me. But you understand me? And so these are branding points. Yeah. This is the apple of the eye in the teacher’s classroom. Yep. When you can understand your client, and they feel that they trust you. And this is why they’ll buy from you faster and easier than other people. You can have the worst product in the world. But if you understand them, and they feel that you understand they’ll take your product and service and in their mind, but we have this we have what’s called a halo effect. They look at your inferior product, but because you’re a nice person, they say this has a halo so like you’re the angel, you know, and that want to do business with you, but the other person, Okay, next year, and so that’s the First failure, thinking

Robert Brus 9:01
theatre Be really careful, you don’t end up as a commodity in sales. Absolutely. Because if you don’t have that social intelligence and that emotional, the ability to read what somebody else is doing, you seem like a commodity to the prospect, but to the target, they’ll be like it, like it. Let me connect with next. Someone else can do that next in law that I can block and buy that somewhere else bring me ULI

Daniel Tolson 9:21
in that one of our third episodes on go all in we talked about building rapport and trust, then we say that this is 40% of the sales process. That person has ended up forming here, earning 30,000 a year in emotional intelligence and their empathy. He has a difficult time building trust and respect with others. So he sits there in front of the customer. And in the back of their mind, they go on that bullshit made or famous made is ticking away and says, I don’t trust this person here. And I don’t respect them. And if you can’t trust and respect that person, on the other side of the sales process, haven’t buy from you. So if you’re the customer and you don’t trust and respect this person, You’re not going to sign that check, you’re not going to put money into their account. Yeah. And this is where he’s failing in sales. But for him, this is a blind spot. He didn’t realise this until I brought to his attention. Now that is in his peripheral, he can start to work on it. If we contrast this to the hot performer at he is able to work with others that at times will need help understanding their emotional needs. So although he’s earning $600,000, there’s a bit of room for improvement him and what he needs to do, instead of being so logical in your sales presentation. He needs to take a breath, slow down again, and ask the feeling basically, how do you feel about this product and service? Have you thought about the consequences of inaction and how that would impact your family

Robert Brus 10:48
and that could be quite difficult for somebody that has needs to improve on that particular thing. Really, they really have to be conscious about. I’m not asking those questions. I need to ask those thinking and feeling questions asked. The same time, not just the thinking of questions,

Daniel Tolson 11:02
but we’re going to tennis court over here. And if you’re really strong with your forum, what will happen is you’ll try to favourite game of tennis at the balls always coming to the forum. And if you’re poor on the backhand swing, what will happen is you’ll try to avoid that. So your competitor will keep hitting balls at the back of your back end. And eventually you’ll lose. So what you’ve got to do is you got to work on your strengths, but you also have to work on those improvements, as well. And that’s key to it. So if you’re very good at logical type sales, these are the facts. These are the figures This is the order and that’s the sequence but you’re missing the emotional component, you will lose significant amount of sales, or what will happen is it’ll stretch out and what will happen is it will take you hours and weeks and months to build those relationships. But if you can do it quickly and you can understand the emotional needs shortage shrinks down the South sock Yeah, and people who didn’t even know that on the market can buy today. Gotcha. Looks like a you get me. Yeah. beautiful little bit in the other gentleman who’s underperforming here. He has difficulty with active listening. So he’s asking questions, and when the customers talking, they say to themselves, this person is not even paying attention. Be looking around the room thinking about the next thing to say think he is lunging at the phone. Looking at the zoo, they watch thinking about how much Tom’s on his ticket for his car parking. And what happens here, there’s two states, there’s enough time external state. In an external state, your attention is 100% on your customer. Your eyes are focused on their lips and on their eyes, and you’re fully present in you’re not thinking about anything outside of the sales process. And this is a learned skill. But what he does is he goes into a downtime internal state where he thinks about himself and he stops paying attention to the customer. And you can feel this disconnect is like my theory or cord is connected to your soul as well. And as soon as I start to think about something Well, she can feel that it’s cut.

Robert Brus 13:01
Yeah, he’s not really listening to what I’m saying, or is thinking about something else that just not

Daniel Tolson 13:05
about this exactly what they drift off into the abyss.

Robert Brus 13:10
And you and your brain is so finely tuned to that. It’s actually pretty easy to pick up on when somebody is doing that. Yeah. If you’ve ever been sitting in a restaurant and having a conversation, and somebody like just goes like that at their phone, or looks at their watch or something like that, it’s like, paying attention to me. Not really, it’s an instant loss of report in South circumstance.

Daniel Tolson 13:29
It is I remember going at years ago with a girl and I had a Nokia 3310. And I think she had something similar. And every two minutes, she’s turning it over, looking at it, turning it over looking at it, and I said to her, are you expecting a telephone call? Bruce, if you are, it’s okay. Technical, and she’s like not and I’m not expecting anything. I said, Okay. And then she keeps doing it again. So look, this is quite offensive, where he trying to have a conversation in you turning the phone over, you’re turning back over and see if you’d prefer to be somewhere else. That’s okay, or good or good. And so this went on For about 20 minutes, and I said, Look, excuse me, I’m just gonna go to the bathroom. And I went to the bathroom, wash my hands, hopped in my car,

Robert Brus 14:07
made it a driveway

Daniel Tolson 14:09
and never saw her again. First thing is what happens is, when this happens, it hurts your self esteem and your confidence in what the customers do to you. They leave you and they go to competitor, they have a relationship with somebody else.

Robert Brus 14:21
And the interesting thing is that you on that point, it’s, it’s like you only get one chance to make a first impression. You know, we’ve all heard that cliche saying before, but when you’re sitting with somebody and you’re talking with them, and you’re engaging with that person, you better bloody will be listening to them. Because if I if you leave that conversation, you leave that engagement and they go somewhere else. There’s one thing that I know for absolute certainty is that you will never know that. Absolutely, because we all know that I didn’t buy from you but you will never know where they went. And most importantly, you never know why they didn’t buy from you.

Daniel Tolson 14:55
4% of the population will tell you why they didn’t buy from me. It’s just 96% You’ll never hear from somebody from the internet. And again, that becomes a blind spot. Yeah, comes back into emotional intelligence. You don’t know what you don’t know. So this is empathy and social awareness. And you have to be highly attuned to your customer. You have to understand their thoughts. You have to understand their feelings. You have to understand the actions and the consequences of actions and inactions. But most importantly, you have to practice white magic, and white magic is listening. Then you gotta listen with your eyes, you got to listen with your ears, and you’ve got to listen with your body. And 55% of your communication is your physiology. So, when the customer is talking, leaning towards, see what happens is when you lean forward, in their mind, they go, I must be interesting because that person is leaning forward,

Robert Brus 15:46
then people understand body language cues as well. They’re smarter than what you think you are, and they’re like it Whatever, man and I like, like really interested in what I got here. Yeah, but if you’re leaning forward and you’re engaged, and you do that with your jacket, and you’ve got your hands like Yeah, I’m definitely get person’s attention.

Daniel Tolson 16:03
You have to demonstrate that you’re listening. Yep. And on the phone, if you’re not listening correctly, the client will say, Are you still there? Yes. Wow. Excellent. Yes, I recognise that thank you so much for sharing. And really process what they thinking. And when you’re in front of them, take notes on what they’re saying, in focus on them. Don’t Don’t drift away, because if you do, you’ll lose sales now. Yeah, absolutely. Your job is to win. So win more sales. And so that’s empathy. And we could spend two hours on that. Let’s move on to social regulation, social regulation, or your social skills. It’s what you do when you’re meeting people. Either we’re face to face knows to no need to know, it’s when you go out to events. And you got to be very mindful, because, as Rob said, is you don’t get a second chance at making a first impression. And what you have what’s called is a decision bias. We give somebody four seconds to make a first impression and then For the next 30 seconds, we just justify what we saw on the first thing, first four seconds. And so you got to be very mindful. Some of the big mistakes here that this gentleman made is that he’s aware that he cannot please everyone all the time. And he stopped trying. Right? So he looks at you guys what kind of make you happy in the sales process doesn’t even try sophomore

Robert Brus 17:22
LE boy you don’t buy whenever I don’t care. I mean different.

Daniel Tolson 17:27
And this is a huge danger. Customers defect from him consistently. They seek me out for consultation. In his mind, he says I can’t help you. So I’m not even gonna try. Yeah. And that’s it’s a key takeaway, because I speak to a lot of people who want to buy my product and service in if I don’t have something to sell them always make a referral, because I care about their business. Yeah. I always care about it. So you have to help your customer that even if it’s making a recommendation to a competitor, or to a friend in business, you gotta be I think a couple of steps ahead.

So also the other thing that we have to be mindful of and especially with this live performer here is that he can appear distant and aloof upon initial introduction to new people. Yeah, good. Good fish. Not that dead fish again. So what do you do with yourself? Yeah, you know it’s working Tasmania. Okay. Who do you help

Robert Brus 18:36
customers sometimes if I want help, carry on,

Daniel Tolson 18:39
everybody got lost? Yep. So what this looked like was he would show up to meet a customer, but instead of engaging the customer, it was super casual, super relaxed, wasn’t really all that interested in the customer. wasn’t comfortable with the surroundings. really didn’t make the first move waiting for the cast of my The first move wasn’t all that excited painful.

Robert Brus 19:02
spitefully. He,

Daniel Tolson 19:05
then you’d go to networking events. And instead of getting right into the centre, he just drift around the back. Yeah. And you just look around how these cup didn’t engage. And so everybody says this, everybody says that behaviour. And when they see that in your soul 15 minutes, right, they’ve already made a decision.

Robert Brus 19:23
And if you even if you don’t actively see it, I still say that you see it. Because your intuition as a as an evolved human being that’s been, you know, it’s thousands of years of evolution. You see it, even though you don’t actively recognise it, you’ve seen that and you don’t engage with that person because of those things.

Daniel Tolson 19:42
And this is where it gets interesting is on first introduction, he’s very aloof, he drifts around in the back, but once you get a chance to talk your

Robert Brus 19:51
time, man, I got this great product, this great

Daniel Tolson 19:53
product and change a lot to going to make more money gonna make most how’s it going to be healthier and all of a sudden He’s so persuasive and passionate about the product that freaks people out and they jump, they go, Oh, you haven’t spoken to me for 30 minutes, I’ve opened my mouth. And now you’re trying to pitch to me immediately. Yeah. And just like Rob jumped in, his customers jumped in that would go, this is threatening. This is too much. All of a sudden, they were in the coffin, and they’ve come back to life. Yeah. And so this person that had major problems with social skills, in an impact that he sales that also impacted the company, because people like, Well, I didn’t like your representative. So then I don’t want to talk about your products and services with anybody else. You

just don’t want to deal with it. You feel a bit freaked out. Yeah.

So that’s such a regulation, the $600,000 year high performance things very different like, and the first one is that he tends to use these relationship connections to reach these outcomes. And he’ll always introduce you

Robert Brus 20:54
to somebody else, which is a really nice way to believe in the world. And when you’re on the receiving end of that, that’s a real Nasim, to the Law of Reciprocity applies.

Daniel Tolson 21:02
He does. And he takes the relationship serious. Yeah, he looks at you and says, Yes, I’m going to sell you this product and service it, we’re going to be engaged for three months. But the interesting thing is he wants relationships for life. And he’s still getting referrals from work that he did 20 and 30 years ago, amazing. Incredible. The relationship is there, and they say, this person is my friend. Yeah. And you have to click that friendship factor and we talk about customers for life. Yeah, this person’s thinking about who can I sell to today? This person’s thinking about who can I have a relationship

Robert Brus 21:34
with for life? You know what it comes down to as well it is there’s a lot of people that he that you’re in sales you can’t be friends with people you should just sell to them and it’s like that attack dog mentality like that, and and in some ways are kind of like yeah, I get it. I see your perspective. I see that side. But I think there’s just a lot more to be said for kindness than for being blocked that you know, you supposed to be in sales. The customer is not your friend. You supposed to win the When you do get to the next deal, and it’s the thrill of the chase and all those things, and yeah, maybe, but I think that type of behaviour that you’re talking about there for someone who’s earning 600 grand a year is just a nice way to be in the world. There’s a lot to be said for being kind to somebody and I know that you and I pass each other referrals all the time. And I know that when I pass your referral, your graciously receive that and you attend to that really quickly and there’s nothing attached to it for me, there’s no I don’t want to refer back on and hopefully that turns into some business for you because you do different things to me. And likewise, it comes the other way and I’m like, Damn, another one, another one, another one. And it just feels good to be like that in the world rather than know the customer is not my friend and I’m just gonna win the deal and I don’t care about the customer. I just want to get that commission and go to the next thing and

Daniel Tolson 22:48
that that’s, that’s a way of existing in the world. But the coin way what this guy he is just a nicer way to bring the world because what this does is it generates free sales and referrals. immune cells. Now the book we talk about marriage material, when you show up in your nice, it’s like with your partner, you want to introduce them to everybody in the kindest thing you can do for your customer is refer them to somebody who can do business with him. Definitely. And if you’re always building those relationships, and we’re going to have Mario Becker’s on the show shortly, and he’s going to talk about social engineering, yeah, and networking, so this person really enjoys the uniqueness of each human being genuinely likes, it is not one of those people who say, I do this job because of the people. Yeah, he really enjoys people’s company. Yeah, you can see it. It’s great, isn’t it? So he does that really well. And the other thing is that he’s able to establish relationships very quickly. So some people, like this person is aloof. He can’t create a relationship with somebody who’s aloof and distant, but he is genuinely interested in you. Yeah. What do you do? Yeah, what’s your family setup? Beautiful. You got kids, how old are your kids and so on and so forth. And he’s actually wants to build a friendship and he will never talk about business. He feels that he has a friendship,

Robert Brus 24:02
to build on that relationship. It’s really interesting how a couple of things it just above it says active listening. And then it says, develop relationships quickly. Those two things are intimately tied together. And he on the other side has trouble listening has trouble with the interaction with people. And then you have the negative side of life that you can see that those two things are definitely tied together. So,

Daniel Tolson 24:23
so if you’re having problems listening to people, imagine having a boyfriend or girlfriend, a husband or wife who can’t listen to you, pays no attention, these relationships, they break up, did they do that? It’s all the same thing. In business relationships. I said, this person doesn’t listen to me. I’m gonna go find somebody who cares about me. Yeah. You know, this person here. He’s a great collaborator, and he understands the dynamics of a team environment. When you’re selling a product and service and you truly care about your customer. You are now part of the business. You are part of their business, you’re part of their success. You have to want success for this person. You’re now in bedded, like that embedded link on those videos, you’re embedded into their business. And in team dynamics, you’re going to go through four key stages. One is you go through the forming stage, and then the forming stage. This is like the honeymoon phase. Hey, man, how you doing? Everything’s happy, and there’s no complex. But after we have a forming stage, we go into what’s called a storming stage. And it’s where we have disagreements. Just we have a disagreement doesn’t mean we dislike the person. It just means we think differently. Yeah. And this is where emotional intelligence is important. And this person here can understand other people’s point of view, where this person says, Hey, we got a difference of opinion. Let’s negotiate. Let’s find a common ground. Let’s make it work for you. Let’s make it work for me as well. Yep. So you guys for that. Then he moves into the third stage, which is everything normalises and this is called the normal phase and the dust settles and you start to do business, but there’s nothing extraordinary. That what he does here as he moves everybody into performing and this is where he’s clients get better returns on all the money invested. into each product and service, and he knows this is coming, we’re going to form, we’re gonna have a honeymoon period, we’re going to have disagreements and we’re not going to see eye to eye, then everything’s going to settle down. But we’re just getting good results. And then he’ll step it up to get phenomenal results. And this is why he makes 600 K, you know, because it gets people up to that performing,

Robert Brus 26:20
and really understands through relationships, that that’s actually going to happen. And it’s got the social awareness in the emotional intelligence to recognise that that’s happened to him previously, and kind of keep applying it and seeing seen it all before. Everything happens twice that in the past, in my mind, and then he

Daniel Tolson 26:38
doesn’t do it. And this is the difference. And if you want to be incredibly successful in sales, then emotional intelligence is the single biggest predictor of your success. So you have learned what you need to do to earn 600,000 a year. You’ve also learned, you know, my brother, he’s very smart guy. He said, when we started our first business, he said, Daniel, I don’t know what Do to become successful? That’s okay. He said, but I know what we shouldn’t do to become a failure. Just don’t do what that guy does and we won’t fail. So for you understand the baseline for failure or struggling sales. Yeah. If you want to learn more about emotional intelligence, and if you’d like to take a test for yourself, drop a message Dr. Robin all sorted in will get you onto it so you can start to develop and grow and win sales right now

Robert Brus 27:26
by media right now. And if you haven’t seen the other companion video to this one on emotional intelligence, check it out over there. I’ll put a link right there. So check that one out as well. Don’t forget to hit that subscribe button. Give some thumbs up as well and let us know what you think of the video and we’ll drop a link in there as well to actually do that test. Absolutely. All right, we’ll see in the next video. Bye for now.