"95% of Buying Decisions Are Emotional" — Why Your Sales Team Is Still Selling Logic

00:15 Warren Kucker: Hey there and welcome to another episode of Selling AI. Today we're diving into why your win rate matters more than your pipeline and why almost nobody is actually coaching their sales teams to fix it. I have Sean Weaver on today's call. Sean is an international sales and leadership coach, the author of The Highly Trusted Advisor and a trained therapist who's been coaching sales teams for over 30 years. Here's what makes this conversation interesting. Sean's an engineer by trade, turned sales expert with a background in psychology. So a really fascinating combo. He doesn't just teach reps what they say. He gets into why buyers trust certain people and maybe ignore others. In today's episode with Sean, we dive into why companies think they're coaching their reps, developing them, but the data says they're not. And we're seeing a big drag on overall win rates. Why the promotion process for getting salespeople into managers is kind of broken because we're never training them. And how to shift your expertise to becoming like a trusted advisor that your buyers actually listen to. great. All right, let's get into it. Welcome to the show, Sean.

01:19 Sean Weafer: Great to be here. Warren, thank you for inviting me. It's great to be here.

01:22 Warren Kucker: Awesome. Well, first, give us your background. You're trained as a marine engineer. You are out to sea, which I want to hear more about. And then you kind of built the 30 year career in sales coaching and training. Walk us through that journey and what pulled you towards this career.

01:36 Sean Weafer: Well, as I said, I trained initially as a marine engineer and then went to see as a merchant naval officer for a couple of years. And when I came ashore, I ended up going into the IT industry working as a sales rep and then a sales manager and then a sales director. And then one day a couple of guys from another company came and asked me, would you come and train our guys in how to sell? And I said, I've never trained anyone in my life. I wouldn't know what to do. And they said, no, no, no, no, no, just teach them how you sell. That'd be great. And I went, how do I sell? And having trained as an engineer, obviously I apply my flow charts to my behaviors. I did a half day with her team, absolutely loved it. And within a year, it set up a training and coaching, well, a training company at the time because coaching didn't exist prior to a couple of years after I got into the training business.

02:22 Warren Kucker: That's awesome. That's a really, it's a fun way to think about it. Being a good seller, not really knowing why and then applying kind of like an engineer and process background. Cool. You also kind of got your degree in psychotherapy and you've done some, let's say, hypnotherapy and these types of things. How did this type of training show up in how you coach and how did that show up in your career?

02:45 Sean Weafer: Yeah, think I looked at the, I've got a background as an analytical hypnotherapist, as a psychotherapist and a master of an area known as NLP or non-linguistic programming, which is all basically cognitive psychology. It's how we understand the world, how we engage. And really I learned that predominantly because I wanted to understand what it was that drives people's motivations, what drives people's behaviors, what makes them do what they do. And particularly in a sales environment where, you know, salespeople, as they say, live lives of constant rejection interspersed by moments of blissful triumphs. And I was interested in what motivated salespeople to keep going despite the constant rejection that they kind of had to deal with. And then I was also interested in linguistics and language and how language plays a part in how we engage with people and how we get to influence people, build trust and rapport and relationships with them and how we get them ultimately to make decisions to buy from us which they're fundamentally happy with.

03:43 Warren Kucker: awesome let's dive into both pieces there a little bit deeper tell me you're absolutely right from a motivation standpoint it's tons of rejection and moments of reward that are like fun but quickly glossed over quarter changes or calendar changes till tomorrow and you forget about that closed one what motivates salespeople in between what did you find

04:07 Sean Weafer: I think it's very different. Everybody's individual motivations. We all live with a thing called values, which are like emotional triggers. So certain types of personalities of values that relate around power, ambition, status, and you'll get quite a lot of high performing, ambitious salespeople and leaders who were driven by that. Then you'll get others who are driven by variety, know, social engagement, friendships, networking. Again, they'll have a different style of sales, but it's very much about being focused around people. You'll get people. personalities who are driven by harmony and service and being of support to people. They're very much that advisor type role. And then others who are really just doing the sales, they work on the big sales because they like the complexity. They like the idea of the credibility required, the competence required, the detail required to get things over the line. So there's lots of different kinds of selling and different kinds of personalities are drawn to them based on their, what we call their values, their emotional triggers, what drives them to do what they do, what gives them purpose, if you will.

05:08 Warren Kucker: Awesome. I'm very process driven myself and I often try to look at behaviors as a process. So this conversation go great for me. It's also a mini flaw of myself because it's not a linear flowchart sometimes. It's much more fuzzy than that. But let's dive in a little bit deeper. Let's say I'm the sales manager. Do you have any ways that you coach sales managers on how they determine what those like intrinsic motivations are of their salespeople? How do you get to a point where you're kind of leaning into your individual sales team members and what motivates them?

05:38 Sean Weafer: I think the first problem is that when you're with sales managers, often only make the time to work with individuals when the individual is not performing. So there's a fundamental problem with sales management in general, it's a CEO, CSO, CRO, whatever, and sales managers actually getting to spend time with their people, other than to correct errant behaviors. So fixing problems that have already arose are risen. I think really good coaching, which they don't do, is about understanding the drivers as to why a person wants to work in that role and what for them is the value driven by that. Because if you can take time to understand their values, and there's a very simple methodology. In fact, it's a very simple process you would even use with a potential prospect or client to identify what their values are about buying your service or your product. And you use exactly the same process to understand what drives that individual in terms of is over their commitment to the job. If you can find out what they are and then you go line that to their career plan, I guarantee you'll get so much more out of that person.

06:39 Warren Kucker: Yeah, it's fascinating. that process something you distill in two minutes on a podcast or is it, yeah, give me a little bit more, this is great. Yeah.

06:43 Sean Weafer: Yeah, yeah, you can do it. Cool. Well, I mean, if I were sitting behind with somebody on my sales team, one of things I would ask is, look, in terms of the future of your career over the next 12 months, what's most important to you? Right. And then anything else? You know, what else is important? And if there was one more thing, what might that be? So in a series of questions, what they'll do is they'll tell me, A, what's most important to them? So they might say money, right? And then they'll say, well, happiness, maybe freedom or security. And then they'll give me these large, what we call globalized words. Okay, now they're unique to them. You and I might use the same word, but it can be very different for what it means for us emotionally in terms of its resonance. But they'll give whatever these words are, let's assume it's freedom and power and security and whatever, money, right? Then you find the order in which they're important. So once you find out what they are, you put them into the order. And then really all the sales manager or the sales coach or whatever has to do is that, okay, let's explore freedom. What does freedom mean for you in this job? What is it about this job that can help you empower yourself and get more freedom in your life? Right? Is it, is it your working schedules? Is it having flexi time? Like what is it? What can we do to help you if you will make your targets happen? And they might talk about security. Okay. So what does security look like? What would you need to see from us to know that you were secure in the role? and you can make plans about your life based on your commitment to the job. So, you you can deep dive into people's motivations and then align those motivations with their career plan. And you do exactly the same thing if you're working with clients, because if a client talks about whatever price, it talks about convenience, they talk about comfort, you say, okay, talk to me, what specifically do you mean by comfort? How can we help you be more comfortable? What problems specifically would you like us to resolve? So this is a powerful initiation conversation to really map out that relationship, whether you're a manager coaching a team member or whether you're a salesperson or executive or business development person or professional service person like a lawyer or an accountant working in professional practice, working with a client, identifying their real needs and what drives them. And the issue that makes this really important is to understand, and I've said it a couple of times already, that there are emotional triggers. And there was research done in Harvard a number of years ago by guy called Professor Gerald Zaltman, I think his name was, which was fascinating. He was working specifically on buyer decision making and he found that in every situation when a buyer made a decision, 95 % of that decision was based on emotional resonance. 95%. And yet even today we still try to sell stuff because it makes sense or because it's logical. Instead of understanding what's the triggers driving the individual, how do I relate to those?

09:26 Warren Kucker: great. I want to keep track. I want to ask one more question on, let's say, the motivation thread. And I want to come back to that buyer decision emotion because this is a common theme that keeps on coming up in discussions that I'm having, which is fascinating. the first thing, I think your process there, it relies on the people you're working with, your buyers or your, let's say, the people that work for you to be relatively self-aware. Do you feel like that most people kind of understand their own motivations really well and can articulate them? Or do you feel like that from a conversational standpoint, you have to kind of peel back probably an initial, my guess would be an initial response layer that's superficial, that's repetitive. Most people say this. I just want to make more money, right? I want to buy a house, right? But like, I want freedom. Do you feel like you have to pull back the onion? Is it just one layer? Is it 10? Like, yeah.

10:13 Sean Weafer: yeah, you definitely do. I there's no question. In fact, most people aren't really aware of their values until somebody actually has that kind of conversation. I mean,

10:20 Warren Kucker: Yeah, I'm thinking about him now. Yeah.

10:22 Sean Weafer: you can apply that to any purchase, buying a car, a jacket, a piece of apparel, right? Everybody has drivers and those value drivers, they don't know what they are. just they're unconsciously operating the background when they buy on the basis of that. The benefit is when you go through the process and they explain, many times they're only thinking about this for the very first time, actually thinking about this, because they've been sitting there at an emotional level, they haven't analyzed it, if you will. But yeah, I the whole purpose of getting that first thing is that you deep dive into it through a series of other questions to really understand their motivation and then align their motivation with you as a manager or with the job, with the role, or with the service or solution or product you want to provide to them.

11:10 Warren Kucker: Great. Cool. That's, it's something that I've always like, say, tried to do as a leader. I probably don't spend as much time as I'd like. And I feel like there's, because you don't spend that much time on it, you, it turns into a bit of a guessing game, right? Like, based on this 30 minutes of conversation, I actually don't think your motivation in this, I think it's this. And they either go, and most of time they're like, yeah, you know what, you're right. That's really insightful. Half the time they may actually think that half the time, they probably don't mean it. So like, it's a tough. I think there's probably a repetition that we need to be enforcing. I think that's gonna be a common theme throughout the rest of this conversation. Let's dive into the buyer cycle you talked about. 95 % of a buying process is an emotional decision. 5 % logical. Those are extreme numbers, but I would agree. Why do you think that most salespeople don't then approach their sales process in this way?

12:02 Sean Weafer: because that's how they're taught to do it, right? They're taught to apply it in a mechanistic approach as opposed to human approach. I mean, the work that I do with teams that I mentor, a lot of my work is about helping them manage their own personal emotional state before they even go into a meeting in the first place, or even before they pick up a call or they do a video call like this. mean, because the issue is, mean, to give you a simple example, if you've ever walked into a room or you've been in a room and somebody walks in in their really bad form, like they're angry, they're stressed, they're pissed, whatever's annoyed about the- something's annoyed them, they don't have to say anything when they walk into that room for you to suddenly become anxious and defensive because you're reading their energy as they walk in the room, right? And I think we often forget, you know, we didn't, you know, we lost a sale before we went to our next meeting or we've had something that stressed us or a bit of pressure or somebody said something or looked at us the wrong way. You carry that into a meeting. You're creating your prospect, your client to move into a defensive scenario. where they're nervous, they're anxious, and they're potentially intimidated or threatened. They're already threatened with the idea that a salesperson's coming to call, right? Because they think they're going to get sold something. I mean, that's the way you present yourself. And it is a very common stereotype that still exists out there. So if that person's operating in a deeply anxious state, they are not going to make a positive decision. They're certainly not going to buy. So we really need to come to understand how do we manage our own motivation. how we manage what's normally called our state, our emotional state, long before we ever go in talk to anybody about what we have and how we can help them with their solutions. And from that perspective, I define selling or business development or whatever type you want to give it as the ability to make connections, have great conversations, identify the problems that an individual has, get them to share with you, advise and consult on solutions and be paid for your time and then rinse and repeat. That's selling. We all do it every day. It's the oldest profession in the world.

13:57 Warren Kucker: It's, to bring it back to process as well, the way I've evolved on this is I spent a lot of time like career training sales reps on things like medic or Bant, right? Or how to execute a cold call or a cold email, right? What are the features of our product and some of what are the problems of our customers, which is still at the forefront in my mind, right? But the features matter a lot less. How to demo, right? Like these are all like tactical process things. I feel like as a sales profession, we've really missed the boat. We need to make it, let me compare it to psychotherapy. There's a framework to run a therapy session, I would assume, right? And that works well. There's probably several of them. And it's a process, and it's something that's rote and repetitive, and it's non-behavioral science based, right? But then you go into a therapy session, and your relationship with your patient is what's tantamount to how you have a good therapy session, right? I think in sales, we forgot the second part. We don't ever train on the second part. I actually think what needs to happen is as quickly as possible, we need to take junior salespeople, get them to a point where they understand common sales methodologies and common sales process, and then move on for the rest of their career. The rest of their career is about exactly this, relationship building, evoking emotion, driving the emotional response. I think it's a huge shift that should happen in sales. I don't know that it will. Do you feel like there's a, if I was a VP of sales and I thought this way and I was like, you know what, I have to change how I behave with my team.

15:26 Sean Weafer: Bye.

15:26 Warren Kucker: Is there a way, like how would you start approaching that role? Like, hey, I'm coming to the new team, I wanna change. We need to make the process table stakes and behavior at the forefront. Is there a way that you kind of tackle that early on?

15:38 Sean Weafer: Yeah, the work that I do, I don't do things like medic or spin or anything like that. I just consider that that's almost like the exoskeleton, right? The thing

15:47 Warren Kucker: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

15:47 Sean Weafer: that drives it is the emotional resonance, the communications, the engagement, the empathy development. So all the mentoring I do is always based around relationship stuff, mindset and then behavior. They're the fundamental things you need to get right because it doesn't matter if you don't have a system anyway, because you'll make the same on the basis of the quality of the relationship. So I always emphasize. this relationship concept and this idea of moving from being an expert to being an advisor and expertise and expert sales expertise. But that's not what moves the dial anymore. What moves the dial is can you build a close enough relationship with someone where they share with you their challenges and their problems and their pain and then you act as an advisor because they buy advice. They don't buy sales. They don't just buy expertise. They can get that off AI. They can get it off Google. They need you to interpret it and make it work for them. That's what they're buying. Right. And if you're looking at a CSO or CRO and somebody like that taking over a new team, it's exactly the same thing. You have basically got to sell your value to them before you can get things happening. I always say that sales and leadership are two sides of the same coin. Exactly the same communication skills just contextualize differently. So if you're in sales or business development, you're looking to influence expert or external stakeholders who will spend money with you to buy your product, service or whatever to solve their particular problems. But if you're a leader. then you have to motivate and engage internal stakeholders to execute what needs to be done to meet the external stakeholders needs. So it's two sides of the same process. And a really good leader is a really good salesperson because they have mastered relationships and a really good salesperson can be a really good leader because they've mastered relationships. That's the key.

17:25 Warren Kucker: Yeah. That's okay. And let me know you disagree with this point. In the same token, seems like we're promoting with the wrong mindset in mind, right? Like we're taking, that's a great, I'm going to take the person who's quota the most and they're going to become my sales manager, right? Do you agree with that? And then why, how could there be this mismatch if like being great at building relationships is what makes you the person who had to quota the most, but then you become the sales manager and you lose the connection between you and your reps.

17:56 Sean Weafer: Yeah, I think, I think there's a big problem. mean, I think fundamentally the idea of promoting somebody who's really good at sales into a sales management role is with the always unexpressed hope that they're somehow going to model their behavior with their team. Right. But then you load them with their own target on top of that. Right. And so

18:16 Warren Kucker: Okay, yeah.

18:16 Sean Weafer: they're now driven by to do their own target and then, Hey, guess what happens? Your team's not getting mentored and coached and supported. Right. So their performance starts to fall off. They're not closing effectively. They're not retaining business. the guy has just been made or the person just be made sales manager is now working his or their ass off to make up for the lack of what's

18:37 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

18:38 Sean Weafer: going on the team. And often where I commit is where you've got teams, where you've got a couple of superstars. But if you look at them, that drops off then in terms of performance consistency, right down to mediocre. But the reason that never gets changed is that the sales manager is often overworked because he, or they is looking after their... their target and then the sales director of the CSO, CRO, whatever target you want to give, they don't want to get engaged by someone because they don't want to admit the fact that they're being exposed for not having the expertise, the skill sets, or the ability to mentor the team in the first place because they never learn. Right? So

19:10 Warren Kucker: Right? Right.

19:13 Sean Weafer: the worst person where you can try and sell mentoring a sales team to is the head of sales because they feel threatened

19:18 Warren Kucker: Right, yeah.

19:20 Sean Weafer: instead of realizing, well, you know what, here's the deal. Teams that get coached really well coached or mentored as I would do, get an uplift of 22.8 % in their close rates. And

19:31 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right, yeah.

19:32 Sean Weafer: you can focus on your churn, you can focus on your pipeline, you can focus on strategy and hire, do all that stuff. But for God's sake, support your team somehow.

19:40 Warren Kucker: Right.

19:40 Sean Weafer: Get your sales managers trained or use somebody like me to help you with that.

19:45 Warren Kucker: This is definitely a structural problem with companies rather than a sales manager problem, right? it,

19:47 Sean Weafer: It's a leadership problem. It's a leadership problem.

19:50 Warren Kucker: which it always boils down to that, right? Let me see if I could frame this in a way that actually might be helpful for our listeners too. So great. I'd say I'm the VP of sales and I'm promoting someone into a sales manager role. I think the conversation I would have based on this is like, great, I'm promoting you to sales director. You're going to have these eight reps report to you. I am not, I'm promoting you because you're a great rep. You've obviously hit quota a bunch, right? So awesome. I am not making you the sales director so that you could take your eight reps and make them sell like you. That's not what my goal is, right? I'm promoting you because I saw behaviors that showed that you are able to understand your buyers intrinsic motivations, right? You are able to connect with them on a level that had them trust you where you became basically a trusted advisor on the deal, right? You now need to be that person for your eight reps. You need to understand what motivates them, be their trusted advisor, be their manager to be clear, but like, you're going to continue those behaviors throughout your journey with those reps, right? The flip of this that ends up happening is that I would then be like, great, I am not putting a number on you. Like, I don't expect you if we don't hit our revenue targets. But if you do these things and we don't hit our revenue targets, that's my fault. I'm really the I actually think it's this the whole executive team needs to own the revenue number in a way that the VP of sales does now, right? But like your job is to make the have them do like these couple of like emotional buying behaviors. And if they're doing that really well, that's your target. I want to look at calls and know that your people are connecting with their prospects and their their uncovering pain and their invoking an emotional response and getting buyers to work on their behalf. That's it. Instead, what ends up happening? absolutely right. Sales directors end up in the rat race of revenue. Right. Would you again, you're owning a sales team. Is that the type of conversation you'd want to have that kind of like really shifts this paradigm?

21:38 Sean Weafer: I would definitely have that conversation and they would be incentivized on the basis of the collective and cumulative value that the team generates as a result of their engagement. So they get a percentage on everything, which is

21:50 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

21:50 Sean Weafer: right down to their motivation to work with each and every individual to do the job well. I think what you're saying there is a very different kind of sales coaching than what typically happens. A lot of sales coaching was somebody shadowing somebody on a phone call and then telling them the two or three things that they did wrong. That's not necessarily coaching. Coaching is where you understand what the, you you've assessed the individual's competency levels. You've identified where he, she, or they have recognized his weaknesses. You target that as a part of a regular lesson plan for them. And you gradually raise all the boats together. Right. That's

22:22 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

22:23 Sean Weafer: the key. And, and, and, and obviously if you get a guy who's scoring really highly on everything, or I should say self scoring really highly on everything. Well, that's a problem because If he's scoring really, that can't be happening. So you have to have another kind of conversation with them and understand what their concerns are, what their fears are and why they feel they're scoring so highly. If you ever want to make any kind of behavioral change with them, but exactly as you described it there, one of that's exactly what I would love to do, but it requires time. It requires trust. And the reality is in most cases, look, we've also got to look at it then, you know, sales guys raised from the ranks. Why would you take your best sales guy and make him a manager?

23:01 Warren Kucker: shouldn't, right?

23:02 Sean Weafer: I mean, I know why and that why

23:04 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah.

23:05 Sean Weafer: is what's been with salespeople forever is that we still have this ingrained concept that selling is a low status profession, right? As opposed to appreciating what's selling is about service and nothing moves without a sale. Like nothing

23:16 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

23:16 Sean Weafer: happens. You don't become a lawyer, an accountant, an engineer. You can't deliver anything that you create without the capacity of a salesperson to build a relationship, identify a problem, offer that solution. in some, and then the, and then the problem is you take your best guy off the line. personal line and then you don't even train them on how to do the job because they're salespeople

23:36 Warren Kucker: No, agreed. Yeah.

23:38 Sean Weafer: but they're not psychotherapists, they're not behavioral specialists. What they've accomplished, they've accomplished by the seat of their pants. No one's

23:45 Warren Kucker: Yeah.

23:45 Sean Weafer: probably ever educated them consciously in order to model or map their behavior onto the rest of the team. So there has to be some degree of supporters, assistants or coaching for that person to allow them to do the job as well they can.

23:57 Warren Kucker: Right? That's a big gap. Right? And you're absolutely right. Your best salespeople make should make half a mill. Right? Like and enjoy sales. And if they want assuming they want to stay and they're not their motivation to run a sales team, they should they should be where they're at. You should almost have like the person who almost hit quota but does a phenomenal job connecting with the rest. Maybe they're bad at demos. Right? Maybe they're bad at something else. And it just doesn't quite equate because I'd have a hard time believing that if you're again understand your your prospects pain points, you're able to connect, uncover pain. Get them get buyers to do things on your behalf and evoke an emotional response in every call There's no way you're at 40 % of quota and a team where there's a bunch of other people that are crushing their quoting Maybe a 40 % quota because the product is deficient right like so that's hard to find right But it's not necessarily the person who's the highest like quota attainment rate That is the person that you should promote It's the person that connects the most that you think and then convey make that same connection with their team right and then that should trickle up But this is a five, 10 year pivot that companies have to make and they'd have to at some point take some quarterly pain in order to do it. Hey, listen, we didn't make Target this

25:01 Sean Weafer: Yeah. Yeah.

25:02 Warren Kucker: quarter. You gotta stick with me for three years. It's like a head coach in the NFL. Can't fire him every year, right? Like you have to give them a longer term plan.

25:10 Sean Weafer: That's hard when you're driven by the numbers every quarter and that's what happens. There is an argument that maybe you don't even promote anybody from within the team, you promote from the outside and pull a sales manager in there because there's all kinds of other dynamics then start kicking in. Well, why did

25:25 Warren Kucker: intro.

25:25 Sean Weafer: Michael get promoted over me? I'm a better sales guy than he is sort of thing. So there's a lack of understanding and there's a whole set of dynamics that needs to be managed around that if that manager is going to set expectations and build trust with a new team.

25:38 Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's a good point, right? Like, and again, if you're separating the performance on a quarter-way basis and the development of your team, you may be able to use that do that pretty well, right? You come in and you talk to a sales manager, you talked about this earlier, and you're like, hey, listen, I'm going to help you coach a bunch of win rates. That's their territory, right? They don't want to do that. And the answer is like, great, you can do one or the other. You could be beholden to a quarter-way number, or you could focus on developing your team. You can't do both. So that's fine. do the coaching piece, but find someone else to do the other, right? Like I think there's a misalignment here that I don't truly think we're gonna fix in the short term. But in a perfect world, this is how I would love to engineer my particular company around this ethos that me as the CEO, it's my job to hit a quarterly revenue target. That's product market fit, right? Like that's product development, it's customer retention. These types of things are all big parts of it, right? I need you to have a, I'm gonna subjectively look to see if you have the best possible team to working with my. market that I'm in and then the numbers will solve themselves. But we won't get there. But it's nice to think about. Cool. Great. Let's talk about. Great. You talk about a framework that's built around, let's say, emotion, psychology of influence. How do you think that, let's say, let's say AI is going to take some table stakes off some admin work off our plate. How can reps spend more time focusing on this part of the buying journey?

27:02 Sean Weafer: You mean the customer relationship piece or the client relationship piece? Yeah.

27:04 Warren Kucker: Yes. Yeah. Let's say I freed up a bunch of rep time and then we're going to really become amazing relationship builders, right? Like how should reps, what's the tactical things they can do to do that?

27:15 Sean Weafer: Well, I think one of the first things every sales team needs to start looking at is their competency levels or their advanced proficiencies in what they do. A lot of people think that salespeople are good conversationalists. Yeah, they're good, but most of their behaviors are driven because that's the way they've been naturally. I think there's an extensive amount of training, competency development that needs to go into things like questioning skills, types of questions, impact of questions and emotional responses. values of dissertation work. Like there's a lot of work. I worked with sales teams all over the world and when I start working with them with my program, it is amazing how much like they're successful, but they're successful more by accident than design. Right? They're happening to be a nice person. People get on with them. They ask the right questions. They've been given a script. They work with that. But when they get deep down into the competency levels, whether it's formating a pitch or a presentation, delivering that, capturing attention, using the psychology audience to get results. There's so much they do not have to be what I call tip of the spear. Right? And I think every salesperson, if they're freed up from CRM and database manager and all that sort of stuff, AI can absolutely do that. Just talk it in. It takes care of it. It's the one thing all sense of people hate all over the world, right?

28:37 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah.

28:39 Sean Weafer: But we have to recommit that time that would have been spent on CRM and database updates and all that sort of stuff into really, really mentoring them and developing them and the fundamental behavioral skill sets needed to build the closest, most intimate and long lasting relationships.

28:56 Warren Kucker: Yeah, that's where we get caught. Does this, these types of competency frameworks, when you advise, let's say someone comes to you like, how should I hire, how should I interview? I know it's not a hundred percent either way. Is there something that you look for more in the interview process that you think is more intrinsic or innate, or if they've learned it, then they're going to be successful and then you can teach them the rest? Do you feel like there's one side of the fence or the other?

29:20 Sean Weafer: Um, I mean, obviously, I mean, I don't specialize in interview recruitment sort of things, but one thing I would look for, I I do, do a hundred percent agree the old adage that you hire for attitude and train for aptitude. That way that's right. So the attitude of

29:33 Warren Kucker: Okay. Yeah, that works. Yeah.

29:36 Sean Weafer: the person, their focus, their, their general demeanor, their wellbeing, their, their motivation, their enthusiasm for something you can work with that a hundred percent. Right. And

29:43 Warren Kucker: Yeah. Yeah.

29:45 Sean Weafer: you can definitely train them as skills needed, but I work a lot with people who are. technical in nature. There are people who are engineers or lawyers or accountants who very, who aren't normally acknowledged to have huge, wonderful, outgoing personalities. But that's okay, right? Because you can teach them, as I say, on this journey from being an expert where they focus on expertise to get the result to where they realize, actually, I'm an advisor. My job is to take the information that other people have, build a relationship with them, and then interpret that information the way that solves their problems. So they move from that journey being an expert to being an advisor and being able to do that sort of work. So I would hire predominantly for attitude and then develop for aptitude.

30:30 Warren Kucker: good way to look at it, right? Because again, they're hard skills. I mentioned there's like, again, when you come back to sales, do you know medic? Great, cool, understood. Can you connect with your buyers? You're trying to interview for both. What you hope is they have one, right? and then if I say they understand sales methodology, but you feel like the behavioral side, maybe probably hasn't been developed because no one worked with them on it. Do they have the attitude to get there? Right? Because hard work and honestly, it's We think talking quarter-way cycles, I mean, this is a years-long journey in that space, right? Like you can teach someone medic in six months, honestly, right? Like in six months, seems like you should be able to teach them in a month, but that's not how we work, right? But like, how do you connect with your buyers? How do you understand the problems that they're going through? Like, how do you evoke emotional responses throughout the buying cycle? This is a, it's a long time to kind of develop that skill set. I'm still not there. I think I need to work on it harder based on some of the conversations I've had recently. Cool. All right, great. You've written a book, let's say, The Highly Trusted Advisor, and this is just as much about being an advisor in your sense as opposed to being a sales advisor. In particular, you talk about blinding clients with science, and you want to become a trusted advisor as opposed to this expert. Let's dive a little bit deeper into that. If someone wants to be an advisor, let's say an anti-advisor like yours, what's the approach they should be taking that fits this kind of ethos?

31:51 Sean Weafer: I think the first thing is they need to be solution focused rather than sales focused. So they need to put a lot of emphasis on building as close to an intimate relationship with the person as they can, which means they have to do a lot more listening than they do talking, which means that scripts have no place in that kind of process. Unless they're scripts about learning how to use questions to the absolute questions and suggestions as a standard of the guide outcomes. mean, a lot of people aren't aware of the fact there's lots of different types of questions which you need to learn how to use consciously. You've got answers, his questions, tag questions, state and style questions, double binded preferential questions, exploratory questions. Like a really well trained advisor slash salesperson slash advisor is competent. All of those knows what they're doing and knows exactly what the outcome is going to be. So they need to be outcome or solution focus to start off with first. And what they're not doing is they're not telling them all the stuff that we can do. What they're saying is what's the need that you have. What do you currently understand? How do we match this up to give you the best solution? it's really about a simple example. Let me give you a very simple example. If you take a legal firm, example, right, you need to be, and this will be the same for accountants, lawyers, lots of different insurance actuaries, cetera, et cetera. You have to be an expert at the job to get the job, right? And if you take a legal firm, you you've to be good as an associate, a senior associate, legal record, doing the legal stuff. But if you want to be a partner, that's when you're to learn an entirely different set of skills, which is all about client engagement, portfolio management, winning clients, retaining clients, close rates. That stuff doesn't happen. You go to bed one night, you wake up with all that capability. Right. And that is you have to learn how to move from being that expert because your expertise doesn't matter anymore. What matters to me now is can you solve my problems? Can I like you and know you trust efficiently? First of all, shame our problems with you, and then can you guide me on how to make it happen? You see, in the old days, and even now I see it, sales teams used to bring information to people. Like, here's the stuff, here's the brochure, here's all the things we can do. They don't, clients don't care anymore. I've got AI, man. I can ask. I can find out a load of stuff about my problems, right? Where I need you is showing me how what you use can interpret what I have to solve my problems. That's what I want. That's not a salesperson, that's an advisor. And that's a very different type of status. And actually, if I work with sales teams, I'd ask them, what are the stereotypical words you'd associate with a salesperson? What's the typical stereotypical world? And certainly in this part of the world, and I'm sure it might be the same in your part of the world, they'll say things like overly confident, untrustworthy, smarmy. I don't know whether that's a word for where you come from, but you know what mean? We're not talking about the most trustworthy people in the world here. And these are sales teams. I'm saying, no, we'll

34:47 Warren Kucker: right here

34:47 Sean Weafer: be a bit nervous. This is what you're telling me, right? And then they say, well,

34:49 Warren Kucker: Yeah, right, that's funny.

34:51 Sean Weafer: give me the words you associate with being an advisor. And immediately they'll say trusted, they'll say guide, they'll say knowledgeable. So I think we need to change the perception our salespeople have about what they do and remind them the fundamental meaning of sales is to be of service. That's the fundamental job. That's the bloop word of selling is it means to be of service to people. And to be of service, you got to listen to find out what the problem is and then provide the right kind of a solution.

35:23 Warren Kucker: That's good observation on the self-perception of salespeople. It probably fundamentally creates a disconnection between what should actually happen. So this is you feel. And it's a good juxtaposition to the advisor side of things. You wouldn't speak about an advisor that way. Again, I feel like teams know this. Salespeople know that the way I've kind of framed it to salespeople is you can't convince anybody to do anything. I can't convince my four year old son or my wife to do to change their mind. No one's changed my mind in several years. Maybe this podcast did. But I don't change anyone's mind. Right. Like I don't know what to tell you. Right. Like you're not there to convince them of something. You're there to figure out if they have really their biggest problem maybe their second biggest problem. If you guys can work work together to help them solve that somewhat. Right. And if you can do well make money and be happy and have anger issues. And if you don't you should move on. right, like to somebody else that you can help, right?

36:18 Sean Weafer: Right. Absolutely.

36:20 Warren Kucker: That's, I think one more question here that I'd love to dive into. Let's talk about NLP a little bit, the linguistic programming. Tell me a little bit more about that and tell me how you use that in training or how a sales rep should use that kind of mindset when they're developing themselves.

36:35 Sean Weafer: Well, I think the first thing I should say, I don't train people in hypnosis and I don't train people in NLP, but I use elements of those particular branches in order to help people. So for example, NLP means neuro-linguistic programming. So linguistics is language impacting on the neurology, which is the way we think and feel and impacting on the programming, the outcome that we have as a result of that particular process, right? And as a field of study, it came originally from a vaster field of hypnosis. or the understanding of engaging, working with the unconscious side of the mind. So the areas that I apply, I build it into my mentoring programs and team mentoring programs would be, for example, the importance of using language, right? So, and making teams aware of the language they can use and should use and language they shouldn't choose. Okay, I'll give you a simple example of that. There are things called modal operators of necessity. These are words that cause instant cortisol injections. Right. We're talking about stress kicks in straight away. You must do this. You have to do this. You need to do this. You can even feel it already. Your stress levels are going up. Right. And a large job of an advisor is to minimize threat levels or perceive threat levels in a sales meeting. Right. So you have to learn what we call soft language or influential language, language that that de-threatens the suggestion you might be making. And those words will be if and suppose maybe perhaps might So if you were to go this way, would you be comfortable with that? Might that be the ideal way for us? Perhaps if we consider this, might be worth looking at. You understand that you can hear how much softer my word is, how much more plausible it is, and therefore you tend to get people moving in that direction because they don't feel threatened. So this is the kind of stuff we're talking about. It's building this understanding of language and cadence and the way people think and feel that's built into the program that if you use these words, this impact will happen.

38:30 Warren Kucker: That's awesome. That's fascinating. Okay, great. Well, Sean, this has been a great conversation. To wrap up, where can people find you? If they wanted to work with you, if they want to hear, read more about the way you kind of work, where would they find you?

38:44 Sean Weafer: Cool, well if they're interested in our team mentoring services or my team mentoring services, just go to expert2advisoror.pro and if they want to look at my own personal website, just look at seanwefer.com or connect with me LinkedIn.

38:58 Warren Kucker: Cool, I'll drop that link in the podcast description there. So Sean, it's been a great conversation. Really appreciate this deep dive. I often find that these end up being, so I say 40 minutes of free consulting for myself. So I appreciate it. I've learned a lot. I hope our listeners did as well.

39:12 Sean Weafer: Thanks for the opportunity.

39:14 Warren Kucker: Take care.