Sales Without the Pushiness: Rich Isaac on Sandler’s Approach to Qualifying + Budget Talks

Foreign. Welcome to the Turn One Studio podcast. I'm Elide Custodio with Turn One Studio and here we speak with local business professionals. Today's guest, Rich Isaac from Sandler Training of Haupauk. Welcome. Thanks. It's great to be here. Beautiful place you have. We're happy to have you. Sandler Training. We've heard the name for a while. What is a Sandler Training? So interesting you're calling it Sandler Training. When I first started, which was 3:30 years ago, actually it was referred to as the Sandler Sales Institute, which I thought was a pretty cool name. Sales Institute sounds very official. And then over time they decided we needed to broaden that a little bit, so they called it Sandler Training. And now actually it's well enough known that it's just referred to as Sandler. So we do a combination of training, coaching and consulting, predominantly around sales and business development. But we found over the years that there's many folks in organizations we work with that don't have a sales title. They might be in account management, they might be in a customer service role, but they might be leaders or managers, but they have some role in helping the business grow. In the selling aspect, even if they don't call it that, for example, is that because they're public facing? Well, it's a combination of public facing, but also, for example, a lot of what I'll characterize as professionals, attorneys, accountants, architects. They're not salespeople, but they have to bring in their business. They still have to sell. So it's a broad range of a combination of those three things. Training, coaching and consulting. Helping people put the right systems in place, for example, for managing the sales and business development function. Very cool. So what you mentioned, accountants and those business professions, are those the types of businesses that you typically work with? Yeah. It's very interesting that in the 30 years I've. I haven't really counted, I should probably worked across 100 different industries. I just was telling you before I did a talk where there was about almost 50 people on this call and it was from a great diversity of industries, whether it's software or as we mentioned, professionals like accountants or their photographers or their marketing professionals. And one of the questions we always ask is this. There's two schools of thought. Sales is sales, doesn't matter what you sell. And the other thought is, well, my business is different. And in fact, they're both right. Sales is sales. But every business does have its uniqueness. So it's our job to cater the approach to the different industries. When I've spoken to folks about entrepreneurship, very often I'll come across people that started their business because they like doing the thing. They were kind of enchanted by the idea of the perceived autonomy, being able to do the thing that they love. And find out, if you want to say the hard way, that running a business also includes running a business. So with that sometimes again, it's been my experience that sometimes those people are reluctant salespeople. They don't really have an interest in sales, but they understand it's in effect a necessary evil for the viability of their business. Are there certain professions where you see more of that than others? Great question. I think that so many entrepreneurs. There was a famous book from the 1980s called the E. Myth, the entrepreneur Myth, I read that, which made that same point that people who start these businesses doesn't mean they know how to run a business or necessarily grow a business from a selling perspective. So I think it's pretty industry agnostic. But when those folks start those businesses, I think you really hit the nail on the head. They view sales as somewhat of the necessary evil. And the thing that we find most interesting is they don't want to be. They're just. It's not their style to be what I would characterize as the traditional salesperson who they perceive from their experience with salespeople as being somewhat aggressive or pushy. They see that as a negative 100%. Yeah. And then. And then what's interesting is if they don't know what else to do, then that's what they end up being. They end up being or thinking they're supposed to be this way. And one of the things we really spend a lot of time focusing on is allowing people to really be themselves. And that's the best way to sell as long as they have some kind of a selling process. Not a. A script. But I'd be happy to share some of those aspects with you. It's people trying to beat something they're not is very obvious to the person that they're talking to. So in lack with the lack of a sales system, we'll call it, they default to what they see on tv. What they've experienced in real life is what they perceive sales to be. Exactly. Well put. They default because they don't know what else to do. If someone were to say to them, so why should I buy from you? You know, they're just going to go into whatever pitch they think they're supposed to give, which is not what we would recommend. So yeah, exactly Right. They don't know what else to do, so they default. For example, everyone knows, generally speaking, that you're supposed to ask questions. Right. Then if I were to say to them, what questions are you asking? What's your questioning strategies? Of course, they haven't learned that. They've learned their business. But one of the things we like to say, and Sandler was a person, David Sandler, who founded what we did, it's a worldwide franchise. Now, he would say that salespeople are professionals. You know, just as you would hope that your orthopedic surgeon follows a process and doesn't wing it. That's the way it should be if you're in that sales role, whatever title you have within your company. I found when I found success in sales, I feel I am in a role of stewardship versus I've got this thing. Give me money for the thing. Right. And I haven't gone through sales training. Is that, at least from a rudimentary level, a correct mindset to pursue? Well, one thing we find, Elliot, is a lot of people like yourself have sort of figured this out through trial and error and do a lot of things that we would recommend. You might not be able to name it within the system, but to answer your question specifically, yeah, I'll even go further than that. And this is really counterintuitive. And I think that's one of the things I feel very fortunate in. Being associated with Sandler is this gentleman who sort of invented this process was way ahead of his time in terms of really looking at the psychology of the buyer and the seller. So here's something very counterintuitive. Most people, when they're in front of a prospective client for whatever they're selling, let's be frank, they want to sell that person. They want that person to buy what they have. Sure. Our philosophy is, yeah, no, we're not really. Okay. And I always like to ask, have you ever had a customer that you wish you never had? This is you telling yourself this. Right. But I'm also telling the people who have that philosophy, yes, of course I want to sell them. Well, wait, hang on a second. Have you ever had a prospect that you or a client you wish you never had? And I was like, oh, yeah? Well, why? Well, they didn't pay their bills. They were a pain in the neck to deal with. My point is, as well then imagine you don't know which one of those they are. Or is this someone you really want to do business with? Even beyond that, is this someone you can really help. Do you really understand what their issues are? For example, I was chatting with. We Sandler people are fortunate that not only are we teaching it, but we're doing it. We're using our own services, we're selling our own services. Chatting with a woman in a marketing capacity, actually, who I met at an HIA function, as a matter of fact, and we were chatting and she clearly has a need, but she has a greater need, which I can't address. And she saw it and I saw it and I was like, you need to go take care of that need first, otherwise it won't be helpful for you to work with me. This is something you discovered through the question and asking process. Correct. And her understanding what we do and us understanding what she needed. And so quite literally, and this is what we teach our folks, if you can be in a mode where you're trying to figure out, are you the best answer for them, do they really need what you have? That's what we would refer to as a really qualified buyer. If you'd even consider, like giving a proposal or presentation to. Do you really. Is it a really good fit? If it's not a good fit? We both want to. Just. One of our expressions, I use it all the time, is Iliad. If it's not a good fit, we shake hands and we part friends, and that's perfectly fine. In fact, in this case, you could tell she was relieved when I said, I agree, I don't think you should do. I don't think you should join our training. Right now you can see she was relieved. And now the chances of her potentially at some point coming back. Imagine if I had tried to convince her otherwise. Right. She wouldn't have joined us and I would have left a bad taste in her mouth. So, you know, again, when I talk about what I might do, I'm just modeling the process that we help people learn. So I have a question. Yeah. This is something that I've experienced multiple times. I'll go through the qualification process and then I'm asking lots of questions, trying to understand their business, trying to understand. Going to say what they're asking for. I'm going to say what they think they're asking for. Right? Because. Well, they're literally asking for it, but they don't necessarily need it. Right. And I'm trying to filter that for them. You know, very often, yes, I need, in our world, I need a website, I need to be on social media. I'd like to run a television commercial. You know, that podcasting Thing sounds cool. Maybe you can produce my podcast. All right. That sounds awesome. Yes. But there's a order in which we should do this stuff based on what you have already, what your foundation looks like, etc. So I know this from the years of doing this, and I try to ask those questions. So we'll go through that and then in my mind, I'll have an idea of what they need. But I'm not the type to let's pretend this is a phone call or a zoom that we're doing or even in person. I'm not typically the type to throw out a quote. I like to kind of digest it and also frame it in a proposal. Right. But as part of the qualifying process, the one thing that I'm challenged with is getting an idea of what their budget can support, especially with what we do. I'm not selling things that are off a shelf. Sure, sky's the limit for what marketing could cost, depending on what you can afford and what makes sense and everything else. So I try to find creative ways to get a sense of, hey, do you have an idea of what your budget is? And I usually disclaim that by saying, because I don't want to propose something that's this six figure monster when you're only looking to spend a few bucks. And that's usually when it gets quiet. I'd like to think at that point I've earned enough of their trust that they're not thinking, well, he just wants a number so that he could make it that number. Right. I want to know what. What's realistic here. But you could see there's a little friction even with me trying to explain that to you. So what do you think someone in my situation would do with that? Yeah. Extremely common across very many industries. So two things I want to. Before I get to the budget question, I just want to note something. See, they say they want X, Y and Z. Now, you're an expert in this and you know that X, Y, and Z might not be ideal. Right. So one of the things that I think is important is to. We can't. We really believe. You really can't convince anybody of anything. I mean, think about the political world right now. Try convincing someone of something different. We believe that we have to help people discover things. So let me just give you an example of that. I actually had a meeting with a prospective client who has four or five people who do sales and business development in his company. And what became clear to me was he thinks these people need training. But no one's managing these people. He's a business owner running around doing 100 things. He meets them with him once in a while, but that's a bigger issue. Even if we train them, if someone's not holding them accountable, managing them, keeping track of what they're trying to do, helping them, coach them through deals. So how do I help him discover that he actually needs help developing a management system? Have us manage his people for a while, Help him hire a sales manager, which probably wouldn't be appropriate because he's too small for that. But how do I help him discover that when he doesn't even know he needs it? Right. So I had, in this case, I did it through a series of questions. Who's managing these people, One of whom happens to be a relative of his, which is even more challenging. How's that going? Not very well. Who's holding them accountable? Right. And all of a sudden he's like, oh, gosh, we have a big gap here. Yeah. Can I make a suggestion of something that might make more sense right now than what you think you need? So it's a way of, appropriately, through questions, challenging someone's way of thinking. So they have the aha. So understand that in your world, when someone is saying, I want X, Y and Z, especially with the expertise you have, is to say, do I have permission to push back and share some other thoughts? Right. And that, to me, I think, can really build trust. So that's part A, part B. You're 100% right. And we have an expression which is really hard to. To live up to in many industries. They should never be surprised by the price in your proposal. Okay. Because how many times have we done a proposal and people fall off their chair? Right. You wind up creating sticker shock after a great conversation. Right. And do they call you lack of perspective. Correct. And do they call you back after that? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Right. We call. We kiddingly say they join the witness protection. You can't find. Right. Right. So you're. So two things. One is. Is talking about money too early before you really understand the scope of the issue. In fact, in the case I was just referring to, I started asking this person, let's assume we could get these people through whatever means, training, coaching, consulting, helping manage them. What are you trying to accomplish here? Well, in his business, he was like, I want to add 12 more clients in the next year. Okay. Now, and let's quantify that. And he started talking about X dollars per month would be added. So now we're in a position. When we talk about money, we're scaling it against some value. We call it quantifying the pain, quantifying the issues. So that when you start talking about. That's why you want to talk about that before you talk about money. Yeah, that makes total sense. Now then, you're asking the right question in some way. Like, if you don't mind my asking, do you have a budget for something like this? In all of my years, I usually make a joke of it. Like, I mean, if you opened your book to the budget line, what does it say? One person in 30 years has opened the book to the budget line. It doesn't exist most of the time. And sometimes they'll give you an answer, sometimes they're hesitant, sometimes they don't know. And in that case, our suggestion is provide ranges. Look, and without getting into details, you'll see a proposal eventually. If we get that for. But can I share with you, using your world, that I can see a suite of services here that might run somewhere. I'm going to make up numbers for a minute. Might run anywhere from $1,000 a month to $3,000 a month. And I can see another range which we'll talk about the details that might run more like 2,000 to 5,000amonth. Now, I know those are broad ranges. Two questions. This is one of my favorite questions I ask all the time, should we even keep talking? You know, notice my hands. Right? Should we even keep talking? Right. And if so, would you want to see proposals in each of those ranges? And they might say right away, I can't spend more than $500 a month, which means they might not qualify. But they might say, you know, I probably would lean towards the 1 to 3, but I wouldn't mind seeing the 3 to 5 to see what it says. So now they won't be surprised by the two different options you provide. So if you can't, quote, get them to give you a number, which doesn't always happen, then it's our job to share ranges. And in some cases it might even be that you have to go back and do a little back of the napkin stuff before you can even give them ranges. And you have to call them back a day later and say, let me noodle on this a little bit and I'll come back with some ranges so you can tell me if we should even keep talking. That's excellent. So my takeaway, you're giving them these two options and they don't have to then be the first to disclose this number that they May not be comfortable disclosing. Instead, they're choosing from the two or three options that you're presenting. And then that tells me a lot of what I need to know. Right. And I think it's two things. They might be a little hesitant even if you've built a lot of rapport, or they might not know. They just have no idea how much. And that is often the case. Same thing in our world. They don't necessarily have a feel for it. They've never necessarily bought services like ours before. Yeah. Going back to what you said before when we're talking about. So in your example, the client wants to bring on two 12 additional clients. Right. Are you discussing what that potential revenue looks like to establish that number, to then frame this number 100%. Right. So how much would that cost? You know, how much. How much does that generate in revenue? How about profit, I might ask. Right. Because if they happen to be a low margin services, adding $100,000 a month might be bupkis. Right. It might be very little or it might be tremendous. So, yeah, I mentioned before, the term that we use is. And we use the word pain. Don't take it literally. It just means a gap between where they are and where they want to be. Some people are doing well but want to get better. So it's really more gain. But we want to quantify that. If we can't quantify it and not all industries, is it quantifiable? It might be more quantifiable almost, in some cases, more emotionally. Like, how upset does this make you? Or how excited are you about this? But if we can't get one of my funniest experiences, which became sort of a standard, sort of almost an approach that I use if I'm sitting with someone and they seem like they have no emotion tied to it. No, things are good. Yeah, maybe I'd like to learn. I literally said to this couple who were running a business, I said, can we stop for a sec? They're like, sure. It was Fred and Diane. I said, you know, very often when I'm talking with people, they're practically reaching across the table, grabbing by the shirt collar, like, I need help. And I'm just. I'm not hearing anything like that. Like, it doesn't seem like this is a big deal. And literally Fred stood up, pounded the table and said, let me tell you the problem. And he just launched into it. And I, as I mentioned before, it's not our job to convince them. I literally said to him, fred, you convinced me right? They have to convince you at some level, in our humble opinion, that they're willing to put time and energy and effort into it because it's not just money. Right. It's going to take time. It's going to take effort is whatever you're asking. They're thinking about doing whatever the product or service is important enough to them that they would go through the pain of changing, you know, so this sounds so logical. So it makes me think. It makes me ask myself, well, man, this makes all the sense in the world. Why didn't I just start off thinking that way? Is it maybe this is an impossible question because there's probably not one answer to this question. But I could see it often being, you start a business, you have the quote, unquote desperation of trying to get this thing off the ground, I need dollars coming in. Do you wind up squelching that type of confidence where I don't really need this unless it's the right fit? Because you're chasing the dot? Is that how most of us get into the, quote, unquote, bad habit of not doing that? Yeah. I appreciate you saying that it's logical because I think it really is. But again, it's counterintuitive because quite literally, if you were to ask anyone sitting across from a prospective client, hey, a little side conversation, do you want them to be your client? The answer is going to be yes. And as soon as they're in that mode, what they're doing is either that default, as we talked about, are pretty natural. And it definitely comes at the beginning, from when we are a little bit desperate. David Sandler used to say, if you can position, I want to be careful about how I position, say this. If you can act as if you're financially independent and don't need the business. Now, the reason I say let's be careful, because I don't mean cocky, hey, I don't need your business. But that if you can, if you can come off as confident, you can be selective. Yeah, it'll draw people to you again. But it is one of my clients who's done very well with Sandler, probably the most successful. He's in a very unique financial world and he's literally making a million dollars a year. Unfortunately, I'm not on commission from him. It would be great, but very rare. But any case, he said to me recently, you know that whole thing about being financially independent, not needing the business? It's a lot easier to act that way when you actually are. That's what he said. But yes, to answer your question, I think that logical, yes. Which is one of the things we love about what we teach. Because very often, especially those folks who don't see themselves as classical salespeople, when we share with them our philosophy, they're like, you know what? I could do that. That makes sense to me. They just didn't have another road to drive on. They don't have that map. They didn't know what they didn't know. That's right. Yeah. How'd you get into this? Great question. Well, I started as an engineer, believe it or not. Really my first job, I was an aerodynamics engineer, believe it or not. That's cool. For Grumman Aerospace Corporation, which was the biggest employer on Long island back in the early 80s. Were you out in Calverton? No, right here in Bethpage, under the famous blue ball. If you've ever driven by there, which is still there, I think. But after a years, it became obvious that quite literally, I joked, because my last review, I'm paraphrasing slightly, was Rich is a bright young engineer. If he would just learn to sit down and stop talking to people, it would be great. So I was much more social than sit behind my computer. So I got into actually what's referred to as product management or product marketing in several tech companies. I was with a company called adamco, which made burglary and fire alarms for a few years. In my formative years were with a company called Symbol Technologies. Oh, yeah. Which was down the road, you bet. And it was. I started that. Started with that company. It was like a $30 million company. When I left, it was like 800 million. 10 years later. It was a really great ride. And I'd done a lot of training on behalf of the company, product training, trade shows, and I really enjoyed it. Here's a little secret. I had never sold anything. I was brought out as the expert, you know, to talk about products. I would do the product demonstrations with the sales folks and didn't really know what I was doing, to be honest. But I loved people and I loved training. And I said. And I was a little tired of the bureaucracy of a fairly big company. And I had what one book we just talked about, the E Myth calls an entrepreneurial seizure, and went to zero income on purpose with three little kids. Thanks to my wife for helping support us during those first couple of years and bought a Sandler franchise, which is sort of a blank piece of paper. And, you know, and I've grown. I have a business partner, Rob Fishman, who's Been with me now for almost 20 years and a team of other folks. In fact, a few of them do what we call outsourced sales management because we find a lot of those companies I was mentioning that have a small sales team and no one's really managing them. So we handle that on the side. In any case, it was a circuitous route to get there, but. But it's been a great, great joy. That's cool. I have to ask, because of what you do and what I do, how do you see the relationship between sales and marketing? Yeah, well, we do know in a lot of companies, they're especially larger organizations, there seems to be some conflict between them. Like the sales folks saying, like, where are my leads? Right? And the marketing people saying, like, I'm giving you leads, you just don't know how to close. Right. And I think really when it comes to the messaging that getting alignment between the two, for example, in marketing and in sales, we find that there's a lot of focus on what we refer to as features and benefits. You know, this cup is beautiful because it's the prettiest white you've ever seen. Right. But the real question is, why does someone need this cup? Of course, I'm using it as a terrible example, but what's the issue that they're having? And how does this solve it? And how does this solve it? And can we get the marketing messaging to match the sales messaging so that, for example, the marketing might include different pain points, issues that people might be having? Versus we're the best company in the world, you should buy from us. So I think that getting them to coordinate together and recognizing that marketing from a broad perspective is a combination of brand awareness and lead generation. And which are we trying to do in. In Sandler, there's a corporate entity, you know, that. That, you know, sort of formed all the franchises over time. And for a long time they were. They were confused about which they were, and they spent a lot of time really helping the brand awareness side. So we franchisees didn't expect many leads and weren't getting them. And we were okay with that because. Because we knew building the brand, the name was more important. Perhaps. As I think I mentioned to you, I just did a talk recently here when I asked how many of you have heard of Sandler in the training capacity, you know, not Adam Sandler, the actor. And about 75% of the hands are now up. When I first started, very few hands were up. So I think working closely, you know, we have a marketing team both in the corporate offices that help us, but also within our franchises, that coordinating those things are really important. Nice. Yeah. That sounds to me like you're using marketing less as a feeder system and more as a way to strengthen the sales team, which requires the two departments to work in lockstep here. Here. Yeah, absolutely. And I think sometimes in small companies, there's a little bit of a, you know, where do we put the dollars into the sales of the marketing side? And, you know, in theory, both are obviously very, very important. Yeah. Yeah. We could talk at length about attribution and all the other challenges that come with that. True. More importantly, what do you like to do for fun? So my. My son Steve says that my hobby is hobbies. Okay. So I happen to have developed a woodworking hobby. You can find me on Instagram. That's the only place I. I put my woodworking stuff because I give it away. Mostly 90% of it, more than 95% for. Just for fun. So furniture and cutting boards and something. Okay. Yeah. I have. I have a workshop in my garage. Only started about five years ago. It's really fun. I golf a little bit. I sing in a local choir in Huntington. I volunteer at Huntington Hospital. So I have quite a few different things going on. And I travel. I travel. My wife and I travel quite a bit. Oh, that's very cool. Yeah. The woodworking. How'd you get into that? There was another Sandler colleague of mine who was a really good at it, and I just got enamored with it. And I was like, tell me about that, Brad. And he told me what equipment to buy. And my. Fortunately, I was able to buy the. The table saw that won't cut off your fingers. Oh, that's an important one, especially. Oh, I play the guitar, too. So that's another one. I have my fingers. Exactly. So. So, yeah. And it's been a lot of fun. And. And if you people will look at it and say, wow, you're so talented. I'm like, yeah, I think I've developed skill, which I think is different. You practice things, you can develop skill. But, you know, I copy a lot of ideas from different people, and if there's an original one here and there, it's a exception. But you're doing it. That's the key. Having a great time. Yeah. Before we wrap up, how can folks get a hold of you? Sure, they can send an email to me, which is just very straightforward. Rich Isaac. That's I s a A C. Often spelled wrong, by the way. People want to double something. Richisaacandler.com My cell phone is probably best to reach me these days. 516-707-7400 and our website is www.legend.sandler.com. there you have it. This is fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. My pleasure. Thank.