331 GUEST: What 20,000 Phone Hours Taught Him About Prospecting and Sales, with Justin Michael

Speaker A: You are listening to the art of sales. Everyone sells every day and this is your source for conversational real world sales and prospecting methods that you are comfortable using and that get results you'll help people buy instead of pushing them into being sold. Here's your host, Art Sobchak.

Speaker B: In a sales environment where there's so much noise that is spread every day, it can be confusing to figure out who or what to believe. And for a while now it's been really pretty easy for anyone with a keyboard and a phone and an Internet connection to become an expert. And there's sure a lot of them out there putting out advice that is questionable at times and sometimes it's just flat out wrong and detrimental to salespeople. Well, today's guest is the total opposite of that. He's not only someone who has been there and uh, done that in the sales world, but he is a student and a scientist in the many disciplines that uh, comprise sales. And a lot of people don't get this because it includes psychology, influence, brain science, communication and even more recently dating as we're probably going to touch on here. And I personally rank him right in the top several great minds in the sales world that I respect and admire. Justin Michael is an internationally renowned outbound sales expert and bestselling author of 10 books. And I don't know how this guy ever sleeps. A former sales leader of Salesforce and LinkedIn, he went on to train teams at global companies including HubSpot, um, creating frameworks now used by top performers across the SAS industry. His methodology has generated over $1 billion in pipeline for more than 200 ventures. While his clients, including elite founders, CROs and consultants, have become seven figure leaders themselves under his guidance. And today he's recognized as one of the premier executive coaches in the world. A strategist whose influence extends from high growth startups to Fortune 500 boardrooms. Justin, welcome.

Speaker A: It's so phenomenal to be here, Art. I am a big Art Sobchak, uh, fan and love smart calling and I feel like you uh, have been a bellwether for the industry and have continued to put out good advice and effective techniques that are evergreen. Um, the human brain is no different than in 1910, than in 2010, than in 3010. The neocortex is what, 200,000 years old and the rest is a million depending on what you believe. So this whole idea that like, oh, people have different attention spans and sales has changed. Same brain, same animal. So the stuff uh, that you're putting out is the stuff people need to read because it's like laws. It's like Newtonian, like gravity.

Speaker B: You see why I like this guy, right?

Speaker A: I'll just start with a bang for a.

Speaker B: Those of you who've been with me for a while, we had Justin present to our inner circle group. Gosh, it's probably about five years ago now, and I've been remiss and not actually having him present to our entire audience here on the podcast. So it's about time and we're going to jump right into it here. Justin, there's a question I ask, uh, all of my guests right at the beginning, and it is this. What was your first sales job? Actually, two part question, I suggest salespeople don't do that. But two part question. What was your first sales job and what did you take from that that you still use and, uh, live by today?

Speaker A: Yeah. So I got into sales when I was 21 doing telemarketing in a little city called Goleta, which is sort of the, the town next to ucsb, Santa Barbara, California. And I sold packets of information vehicle auctions like Miami Vice, like Ferraris for 600 bucks and foreclosed property. And the phone would ring and thousands of calls would hit the call center and you would read the same nine minute script. Um, I ended up becoming probably top 10 out of 10,000 reps. The average tenure of a rep There was about two weeks, and I lasted for four years. I ended up supervising a floor of 3, 300 people. I ended up running a similar business in Costa Rica and Philippines again when I was 29. But the big takeaway in those early years, it influenced everything from tonality to downtones. And I think the biggest lesson ever was how we took credit cards. Uh, we took millions of phone calls. There are 300 million Americans. And the amazing thing about Americans is none of them have a credit card, if you ask them. But the statistics show they each have about three, kind of like with vehicles. So we would get to the end of this, uh, nine minute script and we would say, uh, are you going to use Visa, MasterCard, American Express or Discover? And no one had a credit card. So we a b tested hundreds and hundreds of different ideas. And I kept thinking of that scene in Star Wars. These are not the droids you're looking for in the Jedi mind trick. And you get some say, oh, these, Let them pass. We figured out that if you ask that credit card line and they said, no, I don't have a credit card. And you just said with a Downtone, that's fine. Which credit card do you normally use? Visa. Starts with a four. And it was the strangest quirk. It just worked. I was processing like 100 credit cards a day and they would bring people in from the university to watch me selling. But the script was identical and I couldn't vary. There's like compliance and the uh, FCC listening. Right. Because there's so many laws around continuity building schemes and subscriptions. So when I build all my phone techniques and all my email techniques, I took that lesson with me, is that there is a streak and there is an a B test and there is a way to crack it if you just keep testing different iterations. And so that, that was the nugget that kind of birthed the entire system.

Speaker B: That's fascinating. So again, just to be clear, people were telling you they did not have a credit card and you were pretty much ignoring that. And then you go, yeah, whatever, which one do you normally use?

Speaker A: Yeah. And then they would be like, well, amex. Because it was exactly what you teach. The first response, buyers are liars. It's a recoil, it's a brush off. And uh, now they're measuring it and going like, well, the greatest gold callers are getting three or four no's to get to the S. Right? And so we know that. And I was just training a team in England and it was the funniest rep, this English guy, he's hilarious. He starts the call and starts asking for time and I'm like, no, no, no, don't do this, this is malpractice. But he gets away with murder because he just basically asks four or five times. And everyone else on the team, uh, they would just sort of wilt like a flower for the first no. So the funny thing is his tone was so good and his principle of asking multiple times was so good that he was still winning. I'm like, this is a bad call and you're succeeding in spite of yourself. Because he was so persistent. It was, it's hilarious. He's like, uh, I just get the time and then I find some value. I'm like, no, you would laugh. It was a dance. You know, I tell people, like your cold calls can look like Kung fu, like Bruce Lee, like fast hands. Or they can look like an aikido master, like that hundred pound girl that's just throwing the 300 pound man right where it's social aikido, where you're running the call through the quality of your listening and your questions. And that's the kind of thing that's in your book and the kind of stuff that I've tried to live for.

Speaker B: You know, it's interesting because so many people get in their own head and they're thinking, oh, my God, what are they going to say next? As opposed to doing what you're talking about there. And that is just listening to what they're actually saying. And. And was. Was that true or not? And you see so much on, um. Oh, these are the five objections you got to overcome. Well, the fact is, right at the beginning of the call, when they, when they, when they tell you I'm not interested or we're all set, that's not an objection, right? I mean, how. How could it possibly be? So using those techniques and, um, I teach something similar. I mean, pretty much ignoring it and getting them talking, they forget about what they just said.

Speaker A: It's true. And I love. Very early in the career I found out there's a difference between the comment and the objection. So one of the great stories that all culminated when I made my consultancy and I remember your book came out and I took pictures with it and I sent it to. I had this Discord with 3,000 people in it. So I would do cold calling on Fridays in my backyard in Santa Barbara. And I had Josh Braun on the phone listening in. And I had like a hundred people in this discord. They're listening. Must have been 4pm in the afternoon. And I'm dialing through, I think a connect and sell dialer or Aurum, and I've got all this data that's been processed in Medellin or something. And, uh, lo and behold, I get a CEO. He picks up the phone, I say his name, because I like to use the full name to open, which is kind of the Dale Carnegie opener, which is unusual. Not a pbo. We'll get into that. And he goes, oh, I'm on my boat. Uh, you know, and I'm looking at Connecticut. I'm like, oh, no, it's gotten the dialer. And I'm. I didn't say I was sorry. I didn't apologize. I said, oh, it looks like you slipped into my data set. Um, and I said, I just have one question for you. He goes, okay. I said, well, how do I get a boat? Because I'm sitting in my backyard making cold calls and you're on a boat. And he laughed and he's like, you gotta get old. And I said, Well, I am 40. And he says, no, really old. And he laughed. And then, like, I basically just Treated it like a comment. I didn't apologize about it. He asked what it was about, I explained and then I gave him, you know, he, he, he basically gave me, he confirmed his email address. I emailed him right there. Everyone's watching me. And about uh, five minutes later from the bow of the boat, he forwarded my information to the head of Demand

Speaker B: Gen. You were, you were just being human. And piggyback on what you just said about objections and comments. It really applies to price objections as well because so often when somebody hears oh wow, that, that's more than I thought or that seems like a lot. That was not, I'm not going to buy it because of the price. Right. It's. No, that seems like a lot. And most people are trained to ask for a better price. So if you just ignore that and then I'll continue with the conversation. Where are we? We're in a conversation with another human. Just kind of like what you did there. So that's a great story. Let's do this. We've got so many areas that we could touch on and I can already tell we're going to have to make this probably a several segment, um, episode.

Speaker A: That's fair.

Speaker B: And we're going to, we're going to pick a few things from um, a few of your. What do you have like 1200 books now?

Speaker A: Too many. Too many.

Speaker B: So a couple of your earliest were sales Superpowers and the Justin Michael Method. So tell us about the premise of those.

Speaker A: Yeah, so I really started to see and I, you know, I know you shouldn't drag your competition. And I've gone through an evolution. Let's just say I'm in my Justin Michael 2.0 phase. So I um, I started to notice that there weren't a lot of enterprise techniques um, at the very top of the funnel. It was very transactional. It was very uh, Wolf of Wall Street. So I wanted to make a methodology that was enterprise grade strategic. I was looking at these full cycle systems like Challenger, I call it Chandler Challenger and Sandler. And it's very strategic. It's politically focused. You understand the intentions, the business cases. You study the org chart. Well, how do you bring that ethos to fast moving top of funnel? Because people were spray and pray. And so I decided to build a methodology and say I want to make the most rigorous ever. Opening is the new closing that Ian Areno quote. And I'll just call it the Justin Michael Method. And I'm gonna take concepts from everywhere across strategic selling. But I'm gonna Bring it all into the opening problem. And that's sort of where it all begins. So it kind of says, okay, first we all have a cell phone, a Gmail, a LinkedIn and the two biggest realizations when I started studying the brain is the first thing is the brain really struggles looking at text and that's why the phone is better. And you and Chris Beel have in comments, bits of information anyway, like a real call like this, it's just so much more information. Um, so I started going, well, how. Why don't we send pictures in email? So that was cool, like Venn diagrams. And that became like, you know, GIFs and custom GIFs and building your own little videos. And then I started really tapping into the two regions of the brain that there's this older limbic system and amygdala and then there's this newer neo new cortex and uh, you know, Oren Clough breaks it a few and we've talked a ton. And I even wrote a book called the Frame, an homage to Oren Clafin Goffman, the sociologist who did it. So the problem is when you, when you call a person, you trigger the croc brain, the old brain. Stranger danger, flight, flight, saber tooth, tiger and logicing. An animal that is scared will not work. A horse will just kick you if you scare it, it just turns and bucks you like it just, you don't want to be there, right? Humans the same way, they're not even listening. So all the openers, you're, you're, you have a, a brain in fear that's trying to slow down and catch up to the logic. So I've noticed all the phone techniques were like fear producing and friction producing. It didn't make any sense. And then I noticed the email techniques were very much boring and bouncing off the neocortex. There's no fear and pain. And I think Dave Sandler figured that out with like saying the word challenged. But so in my email techniques I'm trying to trigger fear and pain. They move away from it. And my phone techniques, I'm trying to calm them down so their logical brain can take over and they can finally hear what I have to say. So that's kind of where it's structured. And so I, I brought the whole thing down to pillars. It's like, okay, I'm going to do an advanced cold call technique, email technique, social selling technique, video and visuals. Uh, I'll have something around AI which I call heuristics, which Dave Hoffeld kind of gets that word from science of selling came out of computer programming shortcuts. Because the biggest problem too is everyone had templates. There's actually this hilarious email called Breakthrough email from Brian Kruseberger, who is an influence smart guy. But he said you have to send every email has to say appropriate person. So in 2012, when I got to Silicon Valley, every email was like appropriate person. Like CEO, you get 10 a day. Um, so I wrote this opus of 90,000 words similar to tech powered sales. And we broke it in two, had it edited in England. And there's basically Justin Michael one and Justin Michael Method two. And the first one, I was getting a haircut and I was thinking, I gotta call it like superhuman sales or, you know. But I realized that Peter Parker and Spider man is the most successful comic of all time. Not. Not Superman. It really took off when they hit Spider man because one, it was a human. And the human becomes, is a. Is a boy who becomes endowed with magical superhuman powers. He's not from Krypton. Now that also reflects the Harry Potter narrative of someone in their teens. That's sort of going against society, right? So I realize that people actually don't want to be cyborgs or salesborgs. They just want to be able to have extra sensory perception, get some superhuman techniques. So, you know, read Art's book, read mine. And that would be the goal. Have a third hand or something, walk through Waltz.

Speaker B: Give us something concrete from one of the two books that somebody could use right away. Who's out there? Because I mean, yeah, I know they're great listeners. Let's, let's throw them a bone here that they can use right now.

Speaker A: Yeah, I'll get into utility. So the biggest thing, there's two huge things that I'm controversial for, which is funny because I wrote a book called Illuminati Manifesto and that was like a Citizen Kane, but I never named anyone and they loved it. But the first one is I said for emails that personalization at scale wasn't how you personalize. I said you have to use relevance. And Aaron Ross confirmed this. So if you get right, I know Art, you're a man of many talents. You, you golf, you travel the world, but you're not looking to make a friend. On, um, on LinkedIn. You're trying to get your business done. So people really fell in love with this. Personalize everything and use AI to do it. And it's more about the relevant business context. So it works more like ad units. So I started making my emails look like text messages. Under 50 words. And I started personalizing on the relevant elements, not trying to go into each person, say, oh, you love that sports team and that hiking team. And you were at that company. That can help. It was more a business case relevant to those titles. So, yeah, challenging personalization can't be scaled was big. The other big one is I challenged the traditional permission based opener. And then going back and reading your stuff, I found that too. And now we're going to get into that. But most people use a connection pattern that you would never use on a date. You would never say, hey, can I get 30 seconds to convince you why you should date me? And if it works out well, we'll date several times and then maybe you'll marry me. Huh? Uh, but we do that on LinkedIn. We're like, did I get you at a bad time? Negative connotation. And it was cool. Aaron Ross did that in 2015. Because it would get them to say no, right? Instead of getting to say yes. And it was like, whoa, that's genius. We say, did I catch you at bad time? They say, no instead of trying. Because before the last hundred years, you tried to get as many yeses as you could. And you stacked commitments in the old school, sort of Wolf of Wall Street, Glengarry Glen Ross. Yes. Um, this is a cold called. You want to roll the dice. Um, here's my favorite art, Justin. Uh, Michael from Acme. You've heard my name around there, right? You've been hearing my name? Like, I don't know, like, that's like the jock cocky. Like, huh, let's see if I was like, remember my name.

Speaker B: Tossed around.

Speaker A: Yeah, you heard Taka, roll the dice. Like, the. The new one is like, you know you're gonna hate me, but I'm cold calling you. And so just you're triggering the word hate and a negative connotation. There's this guy named Julia Venena. He's like an Italian guy. Love the Italians, but I'm Bulgarian or something. But he basically plays Jenga in a yellow suit. And he's on LinkedIn. And he hates me, which is fine, because he needs to be taken off LinkedIn. It is malpractice what he's teaching. He calls and he sincerely apologized. Would it be so weird or bizarre? And he basically just, I don't know, sleazily hits people with these openers, which are, uh, almost defaming our profession. I believe in equal business stature. I believe in talking to C levels the way they talk. I open with their full name I ask, I say Art Sobchak. It's okay. Hey, Justin, Michael from Acme, just curious, who's in charge of your API strategy? And I use this thing called Route, Route, Ruin, Multiply. And I started that in 2007 on the phones. Now in Algo, I have these hybrid permission based openers because Jerry Hill at Connect and Sell and all these great coal cars like, hey man, I use PBOs and I'm crushing my numbers. Cool. But the first impression is everything. So, you know, you have some of these too. I just don't think you should apologize or start the relationship as being subservient. And that also came out of Sandler. He had EBS Equal Business stature. So, hey, I think the banana guy's a good entertainer. But, uh, you know, a lot of these folks are teaching pickup artist methods from the 90s. And so I had this rep, Luke Ruffing at Pandadoc, start using the route. He became the number one rep ever in the company. I think he went to club like three years in a row. People swear by this thing. And in the new books I write, I kind of pepper it in so that the, um, I think like visual prospecting with Venn diagrams, personalization at scale not being usable and then challenging the PBO dynamic got me noticed.

Speaker B: I'm just going to get into this later because this is certainly a pet peeve of mine and I know it's something that you and I greatly agree on and it actually drives me nuts, the whole PBO thing and just the fact that they've been given their own name. I think they call them permission based openers, but I rename them permission Begging openers. And yeah, and you've actually mentioned a couple of these and going on LinkedIn drives me crazy anymore because you'll see so many of these and then you'll have people piling on, oohing and ahhing going, oh my gosh, that one is great. And these are people that are probably scrolling LinkedIn and not making calls. But, uh, one I saw in a post and I'm reading these word for word. This was a guy, these were recommended. Okay, so this one I think you just mentioned you're going to hate me, but this is a cold call. Can I tell you in 30 seconds why I called? Or you can prefer to hang up now. Kind of like you. My whole stance on opening is we want to create interest and then move them to questioning right away. Because you said the brain is immediately looking for danger and people already in either a neutral or negative Frame of mind when we call them, right? If they don't recognize the number, they're already there. And I also have a saying, you know the Hippocratic oath, which is what? First. First do no harm, right? So I have the sale, I have the salesperson's oath with it, which is first create no resistance. And to me, permission begging, create resistance. Here's another one. Hey, uh, Justin, I'll be honest with you. This is a sales call. Can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling? And if it's not relevant, you won't hear my weird voice again. And then this is one, I think, from the guy that you just mentioned. Hey, this is in fact a cold call. But I chose to call you specifically for a reason. Can I have 30 seconds of your time or are you about ready to throw your phone in the ocean?

Speaker A: Well, I'm a bit of a sales historian, but no one is more of a historian than Todd Capone, who was my trainer at Salesforce. And he has the four levers and I use his model. Um, I've gone out and I have tried to meet every living great who would speak to me. Um, I've obviously made friends and enemies by being outspoken like Mark Cuban. I really just. I did 20,000 hours on a phone over 20 years and I know what works and what doesn't. And if I see someone using malpractice or teaching reps to do something that's going to lower their success, I kind of feel like a superhero. And I will stick my neck out and tell you about why that won't work. Um, a couple more I wanted to mention is there's this basho technique from John Barrows Forever, which was the reason for my call. It was like, hey, Art, could I get a few seconds? Cool. The reason for my call, Again, logic and reason will not work on a mammalian brain that is in fear. It's fine to say the reason later in the pitch, but you have to prolong the pitch. So Josh Braun is an interesting character. I think he worked for Nickelodeon and he worked for, did some marketing. He's a genius marketer and, uh, I released all these methods and then he started to shorten his emails under 50 words. And then he started moving away from pbos. So, like, the audience is listening and we're seeing other very well known trainers picking this up. But, um, that opening is actually from David sandler from the 1960s. He was the first person to be like, um, hey, this is a cold call. I know you hate getting them And I hate making them Hardy har. And someone would laugh and it had like a kichi cute humor. Remember those were the early days before we had robocalling. So I always tell people that the phone was invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell. And right. The first thing someone did is call Art and try to sell them m a hairbrush. So they try to sell the product and then the email, same curve email came out in 93. Sell the product. Well then Brian Tracy in the 90s, like don't sell the product, sell time. Well, that doesn't work either now because if you call someone and ask for a time on Tuesday or Thursday, they just say, how about neither? Or now they quiet ghost you. They say, I'll meet you at Tuesday at 11. They just don't show up. Like the show rates have gone through the floor. So, um, um. Wow. I w. It was so lucid what you said. Because I like the Hippocratic oath as well and I love friction reduction and I. You know who to control the call is a matter of questions and listen to talk ratio. And if in every human scenario, every neuroscience ever said the person listening is in control, why is our opener in B2B sales? 99% of the time, salesperson talking. And I too see all those lists on LinkedIn. Amazing. I'm almost never on the top sales list. I've sold a lot of books, stadiums of books. And um, because I challenge that and they're like, here are 15 different PBOs. And I look at heuristics, I say, it's all the same. It's all one note. You're lowering your status, you're acting needy and you're seeking permission and they freak out in England about this. Um, I have this technique where I don't use the first name in the DM on LinkedIn. Just ask a question and um, I'll say like, what's your vision for 2026? And they'll be like, my vision is you use my first name when you address me. I'll get this, I'll get this one back. But, um, yeah, man, there's a lot of ways we could go on this. Um, but the technique's been effective. You know, I've had some people really challenge me to hilt on it, but I think most people are coming around. So like the book Cold Calling sucks with Arman and Nick. I think that's sort of the party line. That's the way most people are doing that. So ask yourself this. If that's the 99% wouldn't you want to try something else? Grab Arts book, grab mine. Because just think of it from a pattern interrupt. All day long you hear the same exact PBOs hitting you, these executives who are the prospects. And then someone does something actually radically different and asks open questions and listens to you from the front. It's going to change the game.

Speaker B: The thing is, and you know this very well, is that high level decision makers want to speak with somebody that they perceive as being at their status level or higher, especially in whatever product or service area that this person is talking about. And when somebody calls up and we've used the term status several times and immediately lowers their status by saying, you're going to hate me, or you could decide if you want to throw your phone out the window, window and all these things, it's kind of like what's going through this person's mind. They're thinking, here's somebody for apologizing for existing. Why in the world would I want to talk to them or put any trust in what it is that supposedly they or their organization might be able to do?

Speaker A: Yeah, so, so I moved away from trying to sell products on phones or trying to get people's time. And I figured out this third vector, which I call route, which is lost in the city. So I found that humans are actually quite kind. If you're lost in a city and you ask her, where's Grand Central Station? You know, in New York, they may be like, what do I look like, a phone book? You know, my fan, Swan Island? But they'll probably point and have the courtesy. So if you call a super busy executive, you use their full name and you ask simply like, hey, I'm curious, who heads up API manager over there who does your, you know, who heads up your mobile strategy? And so this is where the mind trick comes going all the way back, art, uh, to 2001. When I was 21, I created this technique. So I would call these VPs of mobile all the time. And I would call someone up and their title on LinkedIn was VP of mobile. And I would say, hey, Art, Justin, Michael from tune, just curious, who heads up your mobile strategy? And they didn't say, you moron, it says VP of Mobile. They'd say, oh, actually I handle the web and our agency does the mobile. And uh, that even that question. Or they would say, I am. And so the word I am M is the first word in the Bible. It's a very strong thing for affirmations, however you look at it. So like, I Was traveling in Italy and you go, hey, who's the manager? And the guy comes outta the back. I am. And I was like, whoa, this even works like traveling. So I really want to get people to pattern interrupt also by stepping into power and identifying they're them. And here's the cool thing, like right now, you dial a hundred numbers, you might get three. You get Titan X, you get all these elite data providers. Maybe you can get 3 out of 10. Like in the golden age when we were coming up, 7 out of 10 picked up the phone. So the cool thing about the route technique is say, Art Sapcheck. Yes. Hey Art, curious who hits up your API management? And he just goes, susan. Susan Williams.

Speaker B: Cool.

Speaker A: Can I have your permission to reach out to Susan? Well, tell her we talk, but don't say my name. Boom. Um, so I'm getting all these referrals out of my top scripts and kind of triangulating these matrix enterprise orgs. And that was the other cool about route. And I came from a lot of enterprise sales where there would be 11 decision makers. So if you have an account, you're calling it all over the world to try to find it. So yeah, I just wanted to share the origin story. That's where it started. And I started dismantling the other channels. I got this crazy around LinkedIn DM flows and around, you know, video prospecting and I have kind of backflip freakish techniques.

Speaker B: We could probably spend several episodes talking about all those things. But I do have a few other questions I want to ask you about your other books because you don't see things like this typically in the sales training world. I'm talking specifically about attraction selling. Definitely not your typical sales book, but it should be read by every salesperson because it pretty much contradicts everything about traditional chase based selling. So what does attraction actually mean in a B2B prospecting and sales context?

Speaker A: Yeah, so it was pointed out by Zig Ziglar. If you can help enough people get what they want, you'll get what you want. And it was pointed out by so many masters and greats like Martin Luther King. Like if you want to be great, anyone can be great because anyone can serve. So to me, selling a service, and that's not a sycophantic bow down weakness. I treat everybody I run into as if they're already my customer. And if they are, that means I'm not an empty suit. You're already paying me. I'll start advising you right off the bat. I'll start um, diagnosing and understanding you right off the bat, which normally people are kind of trying to get the meeting, trying to sell the product. So I had this term in attraction selling called pronoia, which is the opposite of paranoia. Albert Einstein said, there's one fundamental decision as a human being, everything is a miracle or nothing's a miracle. So pronoia would be, the universe is plotting to do you good. Now, sales is hard. You eat glass for years and imagine baseball where 99 out of 100 times you get like brutally rejected. Um, but we have to be so optimistic and use positive mindset to be antifragile to that negativity. But we also have to be very paranoid and to pressure test deals because you can't. Hope's not a strategy. You can't sitting around, oh, I'm just on Twitter tweeting all day, I'm going to make my number. You're not going to help me.

Speaker B: You're not.

Speaker A: Right. That's too optimistic. So the traction selling is like. I would join companies and I had this amazing manager I talk about, Jim Mangello. A lot of my techniques are inspired. He'd always say, germinate the seed. Say, visualize the goal. Germinate the seed and plan for success. And we would meet and the company would say, who do we want to close? Let's work with Facebook. Let's get. We create crazy names that we. No one's going to get. The CEOs like, you're not going to get. And we would go get meetings at these impossible companies and we would visualize it and we would just kind of call it into existence. So if you've seen the Secret and the dvd, Ask, Believe, Receive. And then I wrote another one challenge that called Rewriting the Law of Attraction, which was more about having faith and surrendering the outcome. But yeah, attraction selling was this crazy jazz fusion of, um, Law of Attraction, visualization, affirmations, and combining that with selling,

Speaker B: which some people might look at and go, oh, that's kind of woo, woo motivational. But in fact it's not. I mean, it's, it's based on brain science. And, uh, that stuff works. And what you've done is that, uh, you've made it more understandable, more real world, and actually applied it to the sales world. And I've been certainly a lot into this myself, even just over the past five years, because over my past 35 years up to that point, what always bugged me is that you'd have certain people go through training who would Crush it. Then you'd have other people who wouldn't. And I'm trying to figure out, what's the difference there. Well, you know, same training, right? Same product, same organization, same management. But it was always up here, right? Always up here and what's in here. And those people did not have the identity of the person who was the type of person that was going to do the work to get the results that they wanted. And, uh, almost no sales training touches on that. And your book touches on that. I have an entire course that touches on that. But so many salespeople are being done, uh, a disservice because they're just handed a script or some training saying, hey, use these openers, right? Make more calls.

Speaker A: Yeah. So I say, this is kind of my new thing. If we put a human being on a polygraph on a lie detector, and we say, okay, Justin, you make 200,000 a year, you make 400,000 a year, you make a million a year, a lot of people are going to fall down around 200,000. No. 3% of Americans make over 300 grand. 2% in England make over 200 grand. Now, I'm not making a socioeconomic statement, but how on earth can you win president's club and do million dollar deals if on that polygraph you believe that's a lie in your core, in your DNA? So we have to shift that. And you can do that like, um, Bob Proctor talks about, with spaced repetition affirmations. You can do that by reading testimonials and getting social proof. I kind of started to cross. I did these months where I would hit a hundred grand in a month doing advisory. And it blew my mind because I reached a level of cash flow and earnings that I just never thought possible before. But by this time, I'd read the Go Giver, I'd really committed to service. And, uh, like what you're doing, what we do is so amazing because, you know, we've made millions doing this, but our clients have made tens of millions. I mean, with you, probably hundreds of millions on your phone techniques. And in the original Law of Attraction, Science of Getting Rich, it's based on Wallace Wattles, 1910. It says you have to give more in use value than cash value. It's the ultimate roi. So if your job is to help other people and serve other people, which is the basis of all economics, you, you will get rich by helping other people get rich. And so those, those are like really cool concepts that come out of OG Mandino and the richest man in Babylon and go all the way back to the beginning of all this stuff, you know, like Babylonian times. Let's take it. Let's take it way back. But, yeah, man, it's, um, wonderful talking with you. We have a lot of alignment, and, um, I'm a person that's quite infamous in this space. And as I'm getting older now, I'm 46. I'll be 50 in 20, 30. I'm looking at the legacy. I'm looking at, you know, JMM 2.0. And I'm out there, you know, shaking hands, kissing babies, and trying to kind of smooth over the Pax Romana. Here, have a piece a day. Taunt. It's hard, though, because you have a new generation that are pushing bad malpractice techniques, which is, like, not aligned with the brain. And it's gonna make reps, be mediocre and struggle. And So I wonder. 80% are missing the target. They blame the VCs, they blame AI. But if you're using sales techniques that don't align with neuroscience, quantum physics, the human brain, you're gonna create friction, and you're gonna repel the prospects. And that's just like dating. Everybody's out there, like, I'm a millionaire, and I got the car and the hair and everything. It's like, yeah, you're creepy. You're. You're saying, pick up nice shoes. You know, stuff like this. You open your LinkedIn and it's like the amount of sleeves hitting. It's like these bots start hitting me, and they seem nice, and I'm talking to. And it's like, Justin, comma, and it starts waterboarding me, like. And I don't answer. It's like, justin. So all that stuff is funny.

Speaker B: Uh, and I wonder sometimes, how did we reach this point? And I. I call it the wussification of sales. Because there's so many out there, when they are posting all of these PBOs that are just goofy and creepy and weird and apologetic, you have people piling on, going, ooh, ah. Uh, I'm going to have to try that. Um, I think they themselves, they're afraid to make the call. So it really isn't about the prospect. It's making them feel better because they're apologizing for showing up. And I think it kind of softens the blow when they get the no. Which they are inducing, in fact, by themselves.

Speaker A: Yeah, so they have this expression that, like, weak generations crumble and then the world goes to hell, and then the generation comes and saves it. Like, think of World War II. And we basically saved the world. The Allies saved the world from. From fascism. So that was a good thing. But I actually have a lot of belief in the millennial and Gen Z, and I've trained them. They're hungry. They're hungry for the power and the knowledge, and they get written off a lot. But the greatest virtue is courage. And selling is uncomfortable. It's awkward. It's getting in front of people and challenging them, helping push them out of their comfort zone. Because every human being has family and people they love. And when you love someone, you tell it straight. When your uncle at Thanksgiving says, hey, I found land in Costa Rica, and, uh, I'm going to make millions, and it's 200 bucks, you're like, yeah, no, you know, you. You don't. Don't sink your life savings in that lakefront Costa Rica property or wherever it is. Costa Rica is a cool place. What I'm saying is you don't mind being real tough on the people you love. But then you get in front of a prospect. Ooh, now your movie phone voice and your, Your. Your sweetness and light and your Casper and milk toast, and you're careful, and you're so polite. Like, who's polite anymore? Like, just tell it straight. Like, commit to helping the human on the other side of the phone, and you will naturally have courage, chutzpah, uh, power. And that's kind of why I'm in so much trouble. Because I get on the LinkedIn and someone's like, hey, bang your head against the wall, and if it doesn't work, bang it faster. I'm like, that's not what we want to tell the perhaps. And I see you doing that too. And people cling to it. I don't know. Like, because if you have the script and the picket lines, the pickup lines and the templates, it's comforting. It's like Bob Ross, paint by number. It's like, all I do is I just say, hey, this is a cold call. Wanna roll the dice? And then you just have a pat script. And there's real. No creativity or active listening or thinking. There's no awkwardness or courage because you're just gonna read the line. So it's kind of an easy button. It's a lazy way to do outbound.

Speaker B: And, um, I. I don't get the beating your head against the wall, because at some point you're thinking, or you should be thinking that this hurts. So I might try a different way, but. And actually, I don't. I don't I don't get into the conversations on LinkedIn because there's an old saying about, um, don't. Don't roll them up with a pig because you'll get dirty and the pig likes it. Right? Uh, I refuse to get into those conversations.

Speaker A: That's good.

Speaker B: Um, matter of fact, I saw somebody make a comment and they were saying that, oh, yeah, there's some alpha males out there, sales trainers who make fun of PBOs. And I think they were probably either talking about you or me. I'm not sure, probably you, because my, my post get like six views, so.

Speaker A: Well, yeah, I mean, it's, uh, it's weird. Like I'm. I'm the kid in the high school. Even when I was in high school, I got along with the, with the druggies and the, and the jazz kids and the band kids and the jocks. I was a friend of everyone. I was like the, the everyman. And um. Yeah, I mean, this isn't really about, um, whether or not you're being emotionally high, EQ or sensitive to the person on the other line. It's a factor of what they actually prefer that they really don't want empty suit. They want someone who immediately brings value, immediately brings insight. They want curiosity. They complain. When you look at The Gartner and CEB data, uh, they. Most people say, I would. 75% of Forrester would rather just talk to a bot. Why? Because the reverse complaint is that the majority of reps I work with don't understand me and don't understand my business. Well, if your technique of sales is to talk at people from templates and scripts, how will you ever understand? And that's why I love Jeff Tull. Mastering the Complex Sale. He had three archetypes. The doctor, the therapist, and, um, the detective, the Columbo. Right. And so I love doing that on the phones. Yeah, you know it all. And so this guy named Rich Chiarello, who wrote this, selling technology the Sandler way. And, um, he told the story. He joined this big company, one of these hardware engineers, SAP or Oracle. And the first year he would get on phones and get into calls and they'd ask him a hard question, say, hey, I just started here, I'll write this down and tell the engineer and I'll get back to you. He's very humble. Well, he got rookie of the year. He just kept writing it down and he would look for it. Three years later, he hits this horrible slump. And, uh, you know, he basically figured out that no one wants to talk to the know it all who's condescending and knows every speed and feed. So like this became the dummy curve in Sandler. But I'm always playing cool. And that's why I was on those exhibitions. I must have been 40, 41. And this imperious executive gets on the phone real high dominance and he's like, well, you know, you're young, you'll learn. And I didn't correct him. I was like, oh yeah. Because when I talk I have like a light voice just to rest my vocal cords. Um, so I don't need to be the smartest person, I just need to be the best listener and I need to create patterns over real time communication. Kind of like in the Matrix when Neo's getting the bullets and he's moving faster than the bullets. I'm at a point now where I can be on a cold call and my brain is fully engaged. I'm listening and I'm in real time and I'm planning. And I'm not even like following the script because I'm just sitting there taking the live fire and running. It's like a flight simulator, the Ooda loop. Like right when you're flying a MiG fighter jet or an F16, if you think for one second you're dead, you hit the mountain. So, uh, the other thing about guys like you and me is you become dead inside. After like 5000 hours of doing this, the scripts melt away and you're just kind of dancing with the human on the line.

Speaker B: Script's becoming internalized if you think about it, because we are still working from a script. But it's all up here all natural. If you look at what, it's just a plan and it's knowing what you're going to say in whatever situation. And you used a bunch of analogies there. What I like to use is a sports one, which is when somebody has really reached the peak level of mastery in any sport. They say that the game has really slowed down for them. Yeah. And they're letting the game come to them. So now they're not thinking about what they're going to do next, they're just doing it instinctively. And that really is the key to being strong, smooth on the phone, which is what everybody's looking for. Right.

Speaker A: Unconscious, uh, competence. Right. Is the height of that scale. And people have, people have said like, they're like, damn, you are so dead calm as like the biathlete. Like when I'm getting really heavy fire and rejections on a phone, my body gets calm, my heart Slows down because I've done this so many years that it doesn't affect me. So I tell people, keep going, get reps. And the hardest thing now is to get reps because the connect rates are so low.

Speaker B: Yeah, I agree. And I think so many people want the instant gratification and satisfaction that they're not willing to put in the reps and continually hone their craft to, to get to that point. And there is not an easy button. But if you do the right things and you don't create your own resistance, you're going to get there faster. So, uh, Justin, we are running out of time here and I know that we have a lot of things we did not even get to. So we're definitely going to uh, do this again. I don't have repeat guests on too often, but we're going to definitely do that before we end today. And you tell people how they can contact you. We have a regular feature on the show. Everybody you know what time it is.

Speaker A: Your attitude will be. I am everywhere.

Speaker B: You never feel what they say.

Speaker A: It's the art of the sales school.

Speaker B: Quote of the day. That's right. It's time for the quote of the day. So just one of our regular features is the quote of the day. And what is one of your favorite quotes? And I know you probably have hundreds of them, but give us one and why it's important to you.

Speaker A: Wow. Um, I'm, I'm going to say it's, it's courage is not made in a crisis, it's only exhibited. Oh. It's character is not made in a crisis, it's only exhibited. So I love this because who someone is under pressure tells a lot about the person. Like money is a magnifying glass. And I think it might be Robert Freeman. I gotta remember who said this quote, but this is what's hitting me right now. Um, so being amazing at selling is about putting people into a crisis mode. You catch them off guard, you challenge them with a big number, you help them change their behavior, you push them out of your comfort zone. Selling is there for leadership and guiding and it takes courage. You have to have so much conviction in yourself and your own product and have faith in how you can help them. And they gotta feel that you care about their well being and the roi. So that's how I'll tie those together

Speaker B: there, There's a lot there. I would suggest you go back, rewind that and, and pick it apart.

Speaker A: Thanks.

Speaker B: Share anything about you, yourself, your books, anything else that uh, that you have contact with you. Where do they get your books?

Speaker A: So I have books selling as little as 99 cents. There's no excuse. There's nowhere to hide. I've. I've put out a ton of books on. On Kindle and, And Amazon and. And just go check me out on Amazon. Justin Michael. Or on LinkedIn. Justin Michael. I'll put out content. And, um, yeah, like you, I. I poured my heart and soul into those books. They often take me about a hundred hours to do one of them. And, uh, start there. And I'd love to hear how it is, you know, reviews save lives. Go read Art's book. Leave a review. If you've never left Art a review, leave him a review. It is the best thing you can do for authors. That's how I would close.

Speaker B: That's right. All right, Justin, thanks again for sharing so much here today. We'll definitely do this again. Go out there, check out Justin on the LinkedIn, and definitely pick up, uh, some of his books. The other ones we haven't even mentioned, which we'll probably talk about next time, are the frame and the most recent one, which is, I believe dating equals prospecting. Did I get that right?

Speaker A: Yeah, P equals D, which is prospecting. It was dating, if you can believe it. In the last hundred years, no one has written a book on that except some random guy who I think has five reviews. But, yeah, it's kind of insane that no one has grabbed the third rail, so. So we did it, and the principles

Speaker B: really are the same. So I think they

Speaker A: go out and.

Speaker B: Go out and get the books. All right, everybody, thank you so much for investing your valuable sales time with us today. Until next time, go out and make it your best sales day ever. I'm Art Sobchak.