Episode Description:
Ugh – why do so many people get scammed? We work so hard for honest sales and building great relationships, yet someone else is constantly closing the deal to get a credit card number for an extended car warranty phone scam! What is it about the con-artist that lets them close the deal?!
Action you can take right now:
- Offer CONFIDENT value!
- Position CONFIDENCE around your competitors!
Episode After-Thoughts:
CONFIDENCE! Be confident. Project confidence. Offer value with confidence. The art of the “Con” is creating a confidence. The difference between building an incredible customer relationship and setting yourself up as a criminal is DELIVERING on your confidence. Where a con-man will steal, you will over-deliver. Where a con-artist has a victim that feels financially violated, YOU will create a customer who feels overwhelmed with value!
I really do have conflating these two things, but the portrayal of the best con-artists in cinema, start with a great setup, a great proposition, and a great promise for a significant return. Imagine if the con-artist actually delivered the promise? It would be a perfect world!
Episode 44 Transcript
I really hate to say it, but is there something we could learn from a con artist?
Maybe there might be just one important take away from this that and more coming up on the marketing and service.com podcast.
Hey! Justin Varuzzo here from the marketing and service.com podcast, the podcast designed to help you build your business by creating incredible customer relationships.
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Today’s word of the day is confidence.
What is confidence?
How do you define confidence and what role does confidence play in a sales and service process?
It might play a much more important role than you might think, and what could we possibly learn from a con man or a con artist?
I think the first thing to think about is con.
Artist is confidence artist.
It’s someone who is taking the skill or the unique set of skills of being con.
And using it.
In a very artistic way to somehow scam someone or a business or people out of personal property, money, possessions, whatever it may be now.
I hate making.
With honest business to dishonest business, as if there’s anything that can really be learned from illegal enterprise, and I’m not going to do that.
But what I do want to do is highlight the importance that confidence plays in the role of being a confidence artist, because the same set.
Of circumstances.
Is what will allow a sales person to close more sales and a service person to better resolve service issues?
I think it’s important upfront to highlight that there is one huge difference between the relationship between a con artist and the person or business being conned versus.
Any legitimate business and that one thing is that generally a con or a scam somehow involves the blind and desperate greed of a willing participant.
Now, of course, this is not always the case we’ve seen.
Cons ranging from someone selling cheap fake jewelry to someone like Bernie Madoff who was able to con really wealthy people out of hundreds of millions of dollars.
But again, it was done by dabbing in front of them this sense of greed that they can get massive returns and make a lot of money.
For doing very little, and that is kind of the fundamental element of a scam or a con.
A promise of some massive easy.
Turn in a typical business relationship.
That dynamic doesn’t exist.
Someone doesn’t buy something from you because they think they’re getting some just so obscene value that you are somehow being completely screwed and they’re going to end up the winner of some massive amount of property or money because of the result.
Of the service or product that you provide.
So just keep that in mind.
That’s what changes the dynamic of the entire relationship.
Now keep in mind the definition of confidence is the feeling or belief that one can rely on someone or something firm.
Think about that.
How often do I talk about marketing and service and the importance of building incredible customer relationships and every relationship in every aspect of life is always built on trust.
And in the case of confidence, it’s firm.
It’s the feeling that you can.
Rely on someone or something.
If you take a minute and you close your eyes and you think of an incredibly confident salesperson, what comes to mind?
What in your head when you envision that shear?
Confidence comes to mind.
What is the personality of the person who is so confident?
What is their posture?
What is their demeanour?
What is their level of enthusiasm?
What are all the things that you think in your mind really exudes that sense of confidence and chances are?
When you put those things together, the one thing that you’re going to find is that somehow confidence tends to put people at ease.
It tends to make things a little bit easier because you are dealing with a client or a customer that will be at ease because of your config.
And I think this goes with everything, not just in this typical business transaction.
But imagine you’re getting a surgery and you would like to see a Doctor Who is confident that they can perform this surgery.
You certainly don’t want to go to an ER and have the mask put over your head for your anesthesia while watching the doctors scratching.
His head in Googling on Wikipedia how to perform the surgery.
With sweat dripping down and shaky hands because he doesn’t really know what he’s doing, that does not exude confidence.
It does not make you feel good, and it’s certainly not going to close the sale.
If you have an opportunity to get the hell out of that or are before that knife comes at you.
And even though that’s an unexpected situation, think about how that happens in sales every.
Single day I’m sure that you can come up with a recent example where you were trying to get more product knowledge or questions about a service and you came upon a salesperson that was very not confident in what they were telling you.
They may have been trying to stammer or make things up, or drag out a call because they didn’t want to admit that they didn’t understand the problem you were having, and this is the thing we’ve talked about a lot in this podcast as well.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t understand what someone is asking or if you don’t have the right answer at the right time.
What is important?
And what creates a level of confidence is knowing that you don’t have the answer, and knowing that you don’t understand exactly what’s being asked of you.
Because in that situation you can simply say with confidence.
Listen, this is not my expertise or this is not my wheelhouse or this particular question is something I would like to do a little more research on so I can provide you the best possible information possible when you look at confidence in the role of pulling off a con.
Many of the same factors apply.
A con artist is projecting this sense of.
Confidence, and they’re in a way making you feel almost as if you’re inferior that you’re going to miss out on some big opportunity, or that there’s a million other people lined up and you might be the one that misses out, but there might be all little sorts of cues that establish that confidence.
It could be a really nice set of clothing.
It could be certain accessories.
It could be the car that’s being driven.
All these things that could pass.
Exude wealth, if it’s an investment opportunity like Bernie Madoff, right?
It was this.
This whole expression of wealth, like, hey, I’m a New York City bigwig.
I am a multi billionaire finance year and you should trust me with your money because obviously I’ve demonstrated that I’m good with it and this worked with wealthy rich people.
In New York City, they bought into the.
Confidence of Bernie Madoff.
And sure, they did due diligence.
And he lied and scammed his way through that due diligence, which is what led them to even be more trustworthy, because he had a system in place that would give the information that he knew they needed to see on a regular basis to feel comfortable.
But again to go back to that doctor.
Take it now to a typical retail example.
Maybe you just have a very simple question about your cell phone and you can’t find a single person who can answer that when you go to a local store, it does not create confidence in the product.
Now when you do have a confidence person, when you do have a confident salesperson.
Entire dynamic shifts in that experience, and I don’t know that I can necessarily articulate exactly what happens, but you know it.
You know you feel it.
If you’ve ever purchased something, or maybe you purchased something big and you felt on the fence and the whole thing felt a little shaky and maybe for one reason or another you did it.
You fell for it, and maybe it wasn’t a scam. It was just not a good deal and I think we’ve all been there. We’ve all had buyer’s remorse at.
Some point, and this is.
Where I think confidence plays the most important key in building a customer relationship.
Is having the same level of confidence after the sale and continuing to use verbiage that would create confidence after the sale that you would also use before the sale.
And I’ve talked about this a lot before.
It maybe not using the word confidence, but this idea that when someone purchases something you want.
Confirmation that what you did was right.
Right, and you get that confirmation if you buy a really cool car and your neighbor says, hey man, that’s a cool car and some of the gas stations.
Hey, that’s a cool car.
These are all little confirmations that we made the right decision, right?
What you don’t want to do is buy a car and everyone you know.
And trust says, oh man, you made a really, really big mistake.
That was a really bad idea.
That thing is a complete piece.
Junk and why?
Because that information is not useful for you.
Now you’ve already spent the money, it’s already gone and now you’re stuck with this thing one way or another.
Here the only difference is if everyone just lied to you and said yeah, this thing is great even though it was horrible.
You would feel really good about the purchase and you wouldn’t have any of that guilt or buyers remorse.
So one key here is after the sale confidence equals less buyer remorse.
Now the reality is, if you’re doing your job right as a salesperson.
There shouldn’t be any buyers remorse anyway because you will have already established the problems that they’re having and what tools, products, or services you can provide to eliminate that.
Problem and if what you sold is truthful and honest, it should have alleviated that problem.
So that person shouldn’t be left with buyers remorse if you buy something and it does everything it’s promised to do.
You don’t have buyers remorse when you buy something and doesn’t do half the things you need it to do or.
The things you.
Expected it to do are a million times harder, longer or more expensive.
To do than was intended.
Then you do feel buyers remorse.
Then you feel bad about the thing that you’ve purchased.
So to be very clear, the first and foremost thing in establishing an incredible customer relationship is going to be to ensure that you are delivering the correct product or the correct service at the right time to the right person.
And if your habit is trying to fight objections and try to convince someone who’s on the fence to get something they don’t really need, that is going to lead to buyer’s remorse.
And even if it’s not dishonest, if it’s just a little pushy, if it’s a little too pushy then it’s really going to leave a bad taste in their mouth.
They’re not going to be happy.
When they leave, they’re going to feel that they got pushed into it, and they’re probably never going to go back to you for anything ever again.
Now I don’t want to say there’s not instances where sometimes people need a little nudge.
They might be on the fence.
It might be something they want, and it might be something that’s going to solve there.
Problem, but for a litany of other reasons, completely unrelated.
Maybe they’re just a little on the fence about it because they’re not certain that solving that problem will actually be the magic bullet that it needs to be to make their life better, and they’ll never know unless they get that little nudge over that hump where they realize, oh hey, yeah, I’m really glad I did this.
That was a great purchase.
And it made my life a lot better.
So now we’ve kind of discussed confidence and the importance of confidence.
I just want to take a few minutes to talk about some things that you can do to really help boost your own confidence in sales and these things, and these strategies will certainly help.
Build you up to feel more confident and in exchange your customers and clients will feel more confident working with you.
I think one of the 1st and most important things is if you are selling something, whether it’s a product or a service.
Learn everything you can about that product service inside and out seriously.
Read the literature, read the stats, try to memorize it, Google it, find more about it.
Do as much as you can, but learn about the product and service the most that you can.
This is one place where I really see.
The most sales people start to fall apart is they hop into a sales role and immediately they start selling but they don’t even know what they’re selling.
They’re not passionate about what they’re selling, they’re just churning through numbers because they were told in their sales leadership strategy.
It’s all a numbers game.
Just keep dialing.
Keep calling, keep going, and eventually you’ll find someone and that’s not.
Entirely inaccurate, but the goal here is not to just find someone who would be willing to buy what you’re saying.
But to find someone that you can build a long term relationship with you that will come back time and time and time again.
Because I can tell you the very best salespeople aren’t spending a ton of their time cold.
Calling later in their career, they’re fostering relationships that they have built over decades and that is why they are so successful.
And you may not be because you didn’t want to learn the product and you didn’t build the relationship, you just sold it and you left.
And that was done.
And you see this a lot and I brought it up before the automotive industry card.
Dealers this is a big, big place where people just go dealer to dealer to dealer.
They don’t really care about the brand, they don’t care about the models.
They don’t care about the features, they just want to sell.
Cars get their check and get the hell out of there, and that’s why in that business nobody enjoys buying a car and it’s always a miserable experience because it’s almost inherently feels like a scam.
Every single time, every single time it’s this nickel and diming in this greed, and this false information.
And it’s just usually not a pleasant experience.
Compare that to a contractor who’s done work that you’ve been very happy with a dozen times on your home.
That 13th time you’re going to be very confident to just call them.
You may not even get four or five different quotes because you might deal with with two or three yahoos who screw up your whole house.
If you’re confident that someone does a good job, same with the mechanic.
You have an auto mechanic that you’ve used.
People will say, oh, I, I got my.
Guy, you know I I have this woman that I work with every single day for XY or Z.
That’s the person I trust to do this and that’s what you want to do.
You want to be that one person that is the trusted confidant.
The confidence person that people know that they can trust.
Another important thing in establishing this confidence is.
Really understanding and knowing your competition, you should know your competition better than your competition knows themselves, because this is going to allow you to articulate in a very clear way the benefits that you offer.
And the results that you can provide that you know that your competitor cannot, or if your competitor is taking shortcuts in certain areas, you can highlight the areas in which you succeed where you know that they do not.
Because then if that is the comparison in which the customer is going to use when they’re comparing apples to.
Apples, they’re going to see, based on your recommendation, that they are the only one who can solve their problem and not the competition.
So yes, really understand the competition if you are a car dealer and you work at a Chevy dealer, for example, you better know everything that’s going on at Ford and know all the different models and comparable cars.
Because there’s a good chance that when someone leaves your dealer, they’re going to go next door to the other dealer and drive a similar car of a similar class in a similar price point.
But if you can put into their head that there’s already shortcomings to that competition, then they may be reluctant.
Or if they do do it, they may realize that you were right and say, oh, wow, yeah, I wish.
You know this car had this, but this one doesn’t.
But this is really important to me, so these are things that you really want to focus on when you look at the competitive landscape.
Know where is your customer going to go when they hang up the phone with you?
Where is your prospect going to go next right and where are you in that line?
Maybe they already called someone else they said.
Hey, I already called XY and Z but I wanted to give you a call.
You need to know XYZ business platform.
You need to know what they’re good at, what they’re bad at, what they excel at, what they’re beyond at behind at, and you want to make sure that you can create a perfect solution for their.
Precise problem.
And do it with confidence because you know for certain that that other solution is not going to be the best fit for them and you can’t be confident if you don’t know what the competition is offering.
Is that fair?
You cannot be confident selling something if you don’t know what the competitive offers are.
You just can’t do it, so it’s super super important to know your competition.
I mentioned it once already.
Know what you don’t know, be confident in what you don’t know, that is OK.
There’s for some reason this intrinsic thing that I think everyone has.
I’m not excluded from this either.
Where you, for some reason if you get into this sales mode, you’re in this flow.
You’re working with people.
And it’s really hard to say.
I don’t know.
Because you have just listened to this podcast that talks about confidence and the importance of confidence and I had you picture that whole situation in your head and I don’t know was not something that you really want to hear from your doctor, right?
If you go in and say, hey, you know how?
How long is this surgery going to take?
And the doctor says I don’t know.
Oh, how many incisions are you going to make?
I don’t.
I don’t really know.
Well, am I going to make it I I don’t know.
I have no idea like those are not things that you want to hear, but it is OK if you are in a situation that’s not an ER and it’s not an emergency.
It is OK to admit that you want to get better information for the customer.
I think most people will respect that.
Than you making something up or babbling on some incoherent thing that doesn’t actually answer the question.
And I bring this up because I’ve been there many times myself where I ask a question.
And and I get an answer to a question I didn’t ask and I ask the question again and I get another answer to a different question that I didn’t ask, and it’s clear that that person doesn’t actually know what they’re talking about.
But instead of just saying hey, you know what, let me grab someone who knows all about that.
Let me grab my resident expert in XY or Z and they will definitely let you know what’s going on here that would.
Be the right thing to do.
But instead they just keep babbling nonsense, and then I get more and more frustrated.
I think we’ve all been there.
We can all relate to that.
I’m not really big in neuro linguistic programming.
I know NLP is a big thing in sales, and if you’re someone who reads a lot of sales books, you’ve certainly come up with NLP examples before.
And you’ve probably heard a lot of situations, but one form of NLP and I don’t even know exactly where it fits in, because again, I’m not an expert in NLP.
But one thing that does come up.
Is posture posture the way you stand the way you present yourself?
That is a huge visual indicator in that sense.
Of confidence, right?
You look at a someone like a Bernie Madoff.
I’m sure when he was at a lavish cocktail party, he looked professional.
And he looked confident, and he exuded a sense of achievement and success.
And that was important for him, because if he didn’t, he would not have gotten other millionaires.
Give him.
Money and I think that’s a really important thing to keep in mind, and I I think that does fall somewhere in the NLP landscape, but nonetheless I do think it’s really important to consider your posture when you consider that person and you picture that person who’s like the ultimate leader, the ultimate salesperson, right?
You’re picturing a.
Confident, professional person who’s standing up straight, sitting up straight, talking with confidence, and it makes a huge difference in that sense of true.
Just since I brought up the really knowing and understanding your competition, I also think it’s super important to remember not to be negative.
Never be negative because when you’re negative, there’s just a general sense of negativity, right?
Notice I said, don’t highlight.
What your competition does?
Wrong highlight where you excel in the area.
Your competition does poorly in.
Do you see the difference there?
Do you see what’s happen?
In there, you’re not going to tell the customer.
Don’t go to this company because they can’t do this or this or this.
Instead, you say one thing that we do that’s unique to us is this this and this.
Naturally, if you’ve highlighted those three things is really important when that prospect goes to the next business.
The first thing they’re going to ask is, well, do you do this this and this?
Because I know that other company does, and they’re going to say no, we don’t.
And if they’re not prepared, they’re not going to have a good alternative now.
If they are avid and professional salespeople, they will know the things that you don’t do well and say, Oh yeah, I understand they do XY and Z great, but keep in mind that we excel in ABCD, so you’re keeping it positive you’re keeping it supportive.
You’re not making the prospect feel bad.
For gaining a second opinion or looking for a better price or trying to find some product information or shopping around, this is something I’ve seen a lot too, like oh, why did you go to that other place?
Then your business.
Why I went?
I mean, what kind of thing is that for a salesperson to say like questioning why I would shop around?
So now you’re basically saying I’m, I’m not good, I’m a bad person because I don’t blindly trust you.
I mean, that’s that’s really what that is.
So be positive and that positivity again.
Gives that sense of confidence because a confident person is a happy person.
Is a positive person and is someone who makes the people around them feel better when they are in their presence.
I could go on all day with different things, but I’ll leave with the last one that I think is important.
Love what you’re selling.
That’s it, love what you’re selling.
If you don’t have passion of the product.
If you don’t have love for the service.
You’re not going to be able to sell it.
You’re never going to have the confidence.
Yeah, you could play the numbers game and you’ll dupe someone here and there, but you’re not going to build long term relationships.
You’ll never feel happy.
You want to sell something that you enjoy.
You want to sell something you believe.
Even, and I remember this would sound really weird as a kid when I was young when I was like 15 or 16, I wanted to sell different things and people would say, well, you know, do you have a passion for that?
And I think to myself, no, but who cares?
I, you know, it seems like a cool opportunity and I could enjoy that.
But what I quickly realized is that when it was something I was passionate about, it was so much easier.
And honestly, there were things that I had no passion when I got started, but I was someone who really enjoyed learning about the product and in a very short time I would learn all sorts of things about a bunch of products and I’d actually become genuinely passionate about something that I had known nothing about.
When I’d started that.
Bob, I think to myself, one of my first jobs was at GNC selling vitamins.
I knew nothing about vitamins.
I was certainly not a model of health as a as a high schooler.
Not that I’m any better now, but it was a experience to work in a store where every single thing on those shelves I had never heard of before, but I engulfed myself.
In all of the magazines, the literature, the pamphlets, the backs of the bottles, and in you know two or three months.
I had a really good understanding of everything that was in that store and I also had a real appreciation for it and I began to develop a passion for all of these supplements.
And protein shakes, and all these things that can help people in certain instances.
So I think that passion is really the most important part of creating a sense of confidence.
Because if you’re super passionate about something, you are automatically confident about it.
Can you picture someone who’s so?
Incredibly passionate about a certain thing and then picture them just being completely not confident and looking like confused like they have no idea what they’re talking about.
No, of course not.
I mean, it’s like there are two ideas that don’t go together.
Whatsoever a confident person is a passionate person.
It’s almost one in the same, so keep that in the back of your mind and make sure that if you’re not passionate, find out why.
Is it because a lack of knowledge?
Maybe you can become passionate.
Maybe you can become confident and start to believe in a product that you are not familiar in.
If you’re in a new sales job and that is exactly what I would try to do and give yourself an ample amount of time.
It depends.
Might not be three weeks.
Maybe it’s three months.
Maybe it’s six months.
If it’s if it’s a complicated service process or some large enterprise type product that you’re selling or service that you’re selling has a lot of components, it might take you a while to get on board.
But if you feel a sense of progression and you start to recognize all these little areas where your product or service can help people and you start to become more and more passionate about it, that confidence will come naturally.
Listen, that’s all I got for today.
Thank you so much for listening.
I really appreciate this.
I hope you enjoyed this conversation about confidence.
And I hope that you can be a confidence artist without the criminal element and without the scam and without the desire of stealing something or not giving the promised return.
I think that’s really the epitome.
Of a con or a scam is 1.
It’s the blind greed of the second party, but it’s also the fact that you never actually deliver whatever it is you promised.
You were going to deliver, so you want to be the perfect con artist, except that you want to make sure that you do deliver what you promise you’re going to deliver, but you want to do it in a confident.
Way that makes people feel good about what they’re going to do. If you enjoyed the episode, definitely please. Like, subscribe, follow, shoot me an email
You can always go to the website marketingandservice.com. I have some extra show notes for each episode. Links to things that I talk about in disk.
Options and some afterthoughts that I have for each episode that I usually go back a few weeks later after I listen to an episode again to see if anything changed, or to see if anything else came to mind after.
The fact because sometimes.
I’m recording these and I I go through all of this and then tomorrow or a week later I say, ah man, I I should have.
I should have mentioned this or that so this or that is on the website, so definitely check.
At marketingandservice.com and again, if you have any questions, if n. Have a great day and I will catch you on the next one.