Stop "smoking hopium" and close more deals with N.E.A.T. Selling! If you are tired of deals stalling and feeling like you're stuck in a cycle of confirmation bias, this episode is for you. Richard Harris, author of The Seller's Journey, joins the show to debunk sales myths and equip you with practical tools. Discover the N.E.A.T. Selling Compass to identify true customer needs, quantify impact, navigate approvals, and create urgency. Learn how to build trust through empathy, address emotional decision-making, and finally close those deals. This conversation is packed with actionable advice to humanize your sales approach and boost your win rate. Tune in and get ready to transform your sales journey!
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N.E.A.T. Selling: Master Sales And Close More Deals With Richard Harris
We've got a great show for you. Our guest is Richard Harris. Richard is the Founder of The Harris Consulting Group, and they help other founders with go-to-market strategies and teach sales reps how to earn and ask the right questions, which questions to ask, and when. Richard is the host of The Surf and Sales Podcast, and he's the author of The Seller's Journey: Your Guidebook to Closing More Deals With NEAT Selling.
We start the episode by talking about The Seller's Journey and NEAT selling. The acronym stands for Need, Economic Impact, Access to Authority, and Timeline. We also get into a lot about sales culture and sales management, a couple of great topics in the book, the respect contract that you're going to engage in with your clients and prospects, listening tactics, and a little bit about negotiations.
In the back half of the episode, we talked about something important, which is the state of mental health in professional sales because Richard and The Harris Group were involved in a report with the Sales Health Alliance. For several years, they've done some research and surveys on around 600 sales professionals in the US.
You're going to find some of the stats interesting. I found it alarming that 70% of salespeople are struggling, and that's an increase of 11% year over year. The good news is that the report also identifies thirteen things that sales leaders can do to help this situation and move these needles in the right direction. I enjoyed my conversation with Richard. He’s a great guy. It's a great read, The Seller's Journey. I'm sure you're going to enjoy it. I hope you enjoy the episode. If you do, please like and subscribe because that helps us find other great guests like Richard. Here's Richard Harris.
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Richard, thanks so much for joining the show. It’s great to have you here.
Mark, I'm excited about this conversation. We've talked offline a couple of times in life. I appreciate you having me.
I’m excited to talk about The Seller's Journey: Your Guidebook to Closing More Deals with NEAT Selling. It’s Page Two. It looks like The Coaching Habit by Michael Bungay Stanier and the Sell Without Selling Out by Andy Paul. I couldn't wait to jump into it.
Andy is the one who introduced me to Page Two. I owe him a lot of credit. He gave me some advice on how to title the book. He's open. If people don't know Andy Paul or his podcast, please listen to this one and finish it. Andy's a good friend of both of ours, and I highly recommend his sales content.
They're fantastic. He's a constant topic on this show and your podcast as well. We heard about it in the intro, but Surf and Sales Team is a great podcast to check out with Richard. Before we jump into the book here, give us a little bit about your short story journey in professional sales.
I'm one of the few who knew they wanted to be in business all along. In high school, my first job, for those of us of a certain generation, was at the mall, working for the Gap, folding and selling clothes. My first job was always in sales. I never looked back. I always knew that's what I wanted to do after college. In my last year in college, I started working for the Gap again. I went into management with them because I knew that's what I wanted to do, and, like many people, I moved around from different sales roles to different sales roles. I can go further, but you and I are both from the last century.
One of the things we don't often hear these days is that you had this intention of going into it. We have many guests of our generation. They say, “I fell into sales. I'm one of those people.” When we had Frank Cespedes on the show from Harvard, his recent book, Sales Management That Works, he says that if you graduate college or university now, you have a 1 in 2 chance of being in a professional sales job at some point in time in your career.
If you check out Richard's LinkedIn, you're going to see he has consulted two or worked for some of the largest SaaS companies in the world, all the big names that everybody knows. Let me ask you this: It feels like a generic question, but it's sincere. With everything you would've studied over the last several years as you were growing up in professional sales, why did you think there was a need for another sales book? What prompted you to write The Seller's Journey?
I'll be one of the more honest people. Selfishly, I wrote it because I needed to write it to continue to build my brand. That was one reason. The other reason was that I felt like there was a disconnect between all the stuff we've been taught and even the stuff I taught early in my career and all those terrible buzzwords and buzz phrases and the reality.
When I looked at the happiest and best salespeople and sales leaders, and including what I learned the most, it was about people who were human. We go up and down with this humanity and sales thing. We saw a big spike in it in 2020 with COVID, and now we're moving away from it again, intentional or unintentional. I wanted to put that out there. It's time to bring humanity back into sales again. Those are at the highest level. That was the philosophical stuff.
The other parts are the tactics. There are thirteen tactics that people are never taught or taught differently. One of my favorites is teaching how to deliver pricing and negotiate, specifically negotiating with procurement. I don't know anybody who was taught to negotiate with procurement. I'm trying to give stuff away that is different and helpful. Those are the reasons that I wrote the book.
I appreciate the practical application that we're going to talk about in the chapters in a second. One of the things I pulled out that I thought was helpful is that you craft email follow-ups and give a great template after a first meeting or a second meeting. Whether you're talking about the social contract or the respect contract that you're trying to support, which we'll get into in a second, the verbiage is. I find that people are looking for direct tactical help in many ways, but you start strategically.
You talk about getting a map and the NEAT selling compass, whereas we talk about need, economic impact, access to authority, and timeline. You say, “Is this a philosophy, a process, or methodology? The answer to those three questions is yes. Let's start with this. I love how you say, “This isn't a complete rip-and-replace. This is almost an accelerator to what some people are doing now.” Let's start with the fundamental framework there, if we can, a little bit NEAT.
Is the question, how did I come up with it, or what made me do it?
Let's talk about how you came up with it. Let's spend a little bit of time on each of those things. Bullet points with need, access to authority, economic impact, and timeline.
I came up with something because I felt like, one, there was a big miss, and two, differentiation. I say this all the time, and I say it in the book that not a lot's changed since Mesopotamia in sales. All that's changed are greater insights and different insights. Sometimes, they're not even greater. They're different perspectives. I was trying to do that.
I also knew that I was never going to be a rip-and-replace. Ripping and replacing is often done because someone new comes in, and they need to feel like they're doing something. Why are sales leaders brought in? It’s because they need to make a change. The challenge I have with rip and replace is that sometimes, what was already in place is not because it was the wrong thing. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's not the wrong thing. It's that nobody was coaching to it.
If someone is well-skilled in a medic version, it fits. For me, a medic's bigger sales cycle is at least 60 to 90 days sales cycle. It's not a transactional sales cycle. I get why someone would come in and replace it because that's what they know, and they've been trained on, and they've trained multiple other teams. They can get it as opposed to maybe something else, which is fine. I don't think it's the first thing you need to do. You need to assess first, and you even need to assess before you rip and replace because you have to figure out your exit criteria.
That's the quick version of how I think about it. In terms of the differentiation, the things that I felt were missing were driving the economic impact of the pains. I'm as guilty as anybody else. I still sometimes get stuck on the surface pain. That's normal. I'm a human. I give myself the grace. I want people to give themselves the grace and space to go, “I could have done that better, but we're not driving to economic impact.” The economic impact is specific to what's happening now.
What is it costing you, not in time, the dollars of that time, or the dollars of that revenue, but what can you do when you fix that revenue? What is that growth like? I have a couple of clients who sell to scientists. They sell to scientists in the pharma industry. It's like, “You can do this faster. Does that mean the drug gets to market six months sooner? What's the revenue growth of that new drug?”
What happens is, if you're a startup in the pharma world, if you can get to faster revenue growth in six months, what does that do for your valuation? That's the economic impact. That's what I think of your point earlier about being honest and direct about stuff. There's always a need. What's the pain? There's the economic impact behind that because that economic impact is the only thing, in my opinion, that can drive urgency.
There's always the pain, then there's the economic impact behind that because that economic impact is the only thing that can drive urgency.
If you look at it, we have a similar philosophy. Sales is about helping a client or a prospect achieve desirable business outcomes sometime in the future. We have to understand that outcome. In some cases, we have to guide them in the right direction. Depending upon the level you're working with within a business, somebody has got to see that economic impact. If it isn't the director of sales or the VP of HR, at some point, the CFO goes, “We've got available CapEx of X. Why should they invest in this project versus the 72 other projects we could be spending the money on?”
ROI is such a BS. It's used to scare people because nobody believes it. When people bring up my ROI, I will ask them and say something like, “Mark, when was the last time you asked a salesperson about ROI, and/or ever believe them?” They all pause. They're like, “Well.” I'm like, “No, you paused and weld it. You don't believe in ROI.” I say, “This is what is costing you now. I don't know about your other 72 projects. All I know is about this one. If you want me to walk through some exercises about helping you pick a project, I'll give you an honest opinion because I'll talk to you about the economic impact.”
That's why it's important for me. It's the only way that you can help someone, particularly if you have a champion, find a way to articulate the value up the chain and the approval process. Even then, you have to teach them how to say it because if they don't know how to explain the economic impact themselves, they're going to have a problem getting it approved.
You mentioned this in the book. Depending upon what you sell, who you sell it into, what the lifecycle of that solution is, and how often they look at an alternative, they don't make these decisions all the time. When you're going through this process with them, you have to have that value, insight, and expertise to bring to the table because not everybody is ripping and replacing an SAP system for a $300 million implementation. Even a couple of hundred grand worth of implementation, hard and soft costs, it's not something they do all the time.
They're not professional buyers.
Some of them are professional negotiators, but they're not professional buyers.
Even then, I question their ability to be professional negotiators.
At least they've had some training.
They don't practice it. They don't role-play. They don't sit down and talk about how to do this and how to do that. Procurement people go to actual professional negotiation training. In the SaaS world, and even for the big companies, they don't because it's never thought to be taught. It's thought to be understood.
The role-playing is fun. You say, “They don't do role-playing.” I've been an advocate for several years that role-playing is under-leveraged in sales training. Some of the largest enterprise sales software companies in the world think they're above role-playing. Every performance sport in the world uses repetition and rehearsal. Professional sports, acting, trial lawyers, and people who do improv practice the concepts of improv.
Going from economic impact, you go to access to authority. This is one of those things that we're mistaught. We're taught to go, “Who's going to sign the check? Who's going to do this? Who's going to make the decision?” There are things that have changed. One is there are multiple committees, and there's the vendor selection committee. There could be a different vendor approval committee. There's a budgeting committee. Who's going to sign the check committee in terms of timeline? There are all these little committees, and there's never one person. We all know this if you've read Challenger. There are 6.82 times pi r squared decision makers.
There were always lots of people influencing big deals anyway.
We're asking the wrong question. The simple question we should be asking is the skeptic. Who's the skeptic? We should be saying at the end of the first meeting, “Mark, like everybody else, you're going to go back and take this to your team.” Mark is going to go, “Yeah.” I'm going to go, “Out of curiosity, who's the most skeptical person on your team? What are they skeptical about?” You're never going to get to authority until you get through all the skeptics. That gives you way more insight into what's going to delay the deal, pause the deal, or stop the deal.
We've heard it 1,000 times, “IT can't say yes, but they can certainly say no.” Let's ask, what would they say no about? Why would they say no? Is it because they've got 20,000 other projects? Is it because they don't care about sales and don't see it that way? Is there internal political friction between the leaders? I don't know. Let's ask the most important question about what's going to prevent the deal from happening, not what's going to make the deal happen. That's a big piece for me about how you get access to authority.
Let's ask the most important question about what's going to prevent the deal from happening, not what's going to make the deal happen.
Let's round it out with a timeline before we move.
We all know this, and we all have been taught. I taught and did it, which is reverse engineering the timeline. Do you want to implement it by July 1st? That means we need to do this, and that means we need to do that. Before you do that, we want to understand what's the compelling event. For me, it's a fairly simple question. What happens if you don't hit that July 1st timeline?
If you've done economic impact, and you've talked about the skeptics, and you now know what happens if they don't do it, those are the three biggest things that are going to drive urgency. If it doesn't drive enough urgency, we either A, didn't do a good job, which is okay to say, or it's better to say, “We could have done a better job,” or B, there was no real project in the first place.
As much as I don't like to hear that, I'd rather have that and go to bed at night knowing that I don't have to pick up the phone the next day and talk to Mark about this deal and try and bullshit my way through it and fill up my pipeline with nothing. Nothing exhausts the spirit and will of a salesperson more than chasing maybes.
Nothing exhaust the spirit and will of a salesperson than chasing babies.
We leave stuff in our pipeline for two reasons. The most important reason we leave stuff in our pipeline is that we don't want leadership to know the deals are dead. All of a sudden, our pipeline looks empty. The second thing is we use it as our tickler file. That's the thing we're going to use to call people back. However, you sit there and stare at it, and you're like, “There's nothing in here. It's like a closet full of nothing to wear.” That's why a timeline is always critical, but those are the philosophies behind why I teach a timeline that way.
All progress starts with the truth. You come across organizations where there's a lot of malarkey in the pipeline, which is the vast majority of them, by the way. When folks like you or I come in to do consulting or training you, it doesn't take too long to go into the pipeline. The first question is, do we have a consistent way of qualifying a deal that gets to be in the pipeline? Does everybody have a consistent definition of what it is?
Nobody is duller than me mentally. I need a tickler file, but it's not in my pipeline. You need a CRM system to remind me to reach out to Richard several months from now, remind me of why I enjoyed the first conversation, and get to the point of interest. All progress starts with the truth. Let's understand where we're at so we can focus on the thing that's most important. Sometimes, that's a culture or management thing where you want to feel like you've got a lot of pipelines. You can get through the next one-on-one because it's all about inspection instead of coaching and motivation.
I'd love to give a tip to the leaders and individual contributors. When you look at your deals, the simplest question to ask is, “Mark, what's the one thing preventing this deal from closing?” It's not that there's one thing. The piece is that it forces you to focus. By asking for one, you determine the three. That's what's important.
To your point earlier, let's get truthful. Let's get real or go home. That's going to help you figure out the truth and eliminate that stuff in the pipeline. My last suggestion is anything that's two X your regular timeline or sales cycle. You kill it because it's not real anymore. There are some deals that you have to do because they're bigger deals. I'll say, “Get me a note from the Pope.” I’m a nice Jewish kid. I'm happy to take note from the Pope.
You'll take the note from the Pope. We appreciate that. Thank you for acknowledging that. Let's have open minds.
Whoever it is. If the Dalai Lama gives me a note, I'll be like, “Okay.” The goal is to examine the truth. Let's examine and understand where we are. I keep ranting. I'll shut up.
There's a key point for reading this, and you've seen it. Sometimes, there's this clean set of eyes that comes in. It's easy to come into an organization and go, “They've got a great culture. They don't have a great culture.” We'll get to a little bit of that theme because we're going to talk about the state of mental health in sales because Richard, with others, has done some work there.
One of the things that's helpful for the folks reading is there has to be that comfort to share where you're at because the forest from the tree syndrome exists. You talk about biases. Daniel Commons has 135 biases in thinking fast and slow. We all are affected by them. When you're working the deal, it's hard to have that clarity that says, “I'm moving down the path. I'm getting lots of nods. I'm looking for positives.” Sometimes, we do need that second set of eyes that says, “Have you thought about this or that?”
I call it smoke and hopium. You're hoping this stuff works out. In a lot of ways, we know. I'm not above making any of the mistakes I'm coaching against. I'm human. There are some deals in my pipeline that I should get rid of. I do it once a quarter, go anyway. That's not real. It still hurts. I don't like it. That's part of the game. You have to get rid of that confirmation bias. It's in the pipeline, and we're looking for all the reasons it should stay as opposed to all the reasons it should leave.
If you get the right organization, you've got that trust where you can disagree with someone, but you can listen to what they're saying. You can hear what they're saying. There are other organizations where, as soon as there's disagreement, a wall goes up. That person can't take anything they can. Those are the things that have a more systemic issue, problem, and challenge. I hate coming into those organizations and trying to forecast because it is hard to get the truth out of anybody. It is hard to understand.
I like them. I call it job security.
It’s not for the person who hired you. It’s not for the VP of Sales, who has eighteen months to live.
That's another topic we could go down.
You said, “Sales haven't changed in so long since Mesopotamia.” What I like about the NEAT compass model is it is a simple way of understanding some of the most important things for your cell cycles now. Richard went through the effort of taking more time to write a short book versus giving us a long book. It is clear and concise, and it'd be applied. I take that away.
The second thing I think was interesting was that there were a couple of topics. You talk about respecting yourself for the respect contract. You lead to some work you share in the book about working with your therapist and therapy. It allows you to respect yourself. You come up with the transaction analysis diagram with the three egos of parent, adult, and child and how some of that influences the emotional responses of your buyers. We know buyers make decisions emotionally and back them up with facts. Do you want to share a little more color about that component? That's one of the second most important things I pulled out of the book. I thought it was interesting.
It's interesting because it's all about emotion. Every purchase we make and every decision we make is emotional at this point. In some cases, we think of them as instinctual because we've done them through repetition. There's a reason that all the candy bars and everything are right by the checkout line. They're playing on a desire of want, not a desire of need. That's a big piece.
I learned this transactional analysis. I didn't create it. Eric Berne did back in the ‘50s. It's ego and superego, but it's way more simple and easy to understand. I had to learn it to understand where my perspectives were coming from. Why was I struggling with this mental health thing? What was going on? Ninety-nine percent out of 100%, it all goes back to mommy and daddy issues and how we were raised. I had to confront and heal things in childhood. Let me be respectful. I did not have a horrible childhood.
You do mention that in the book to make sure that's clear.
I was not abused. I was not hurt. My parents were not alcoholics. My parents weren't drug users. They were parents, and they were a product of that parenting in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It was different. I promise you. There are people who've had far more trauma in their childhood than I have. That being said, we all have our baggage. I had to understand that piece, relearn myself, and learn what mattered to me emotionally and internally so that I could make different decisions going forward.
That plays a role in how we all make decisions and how it comes into sales. That's where I learned it, understood it, and how I approached it, not even sales. I think about it with my kids and my wife. It’s not to manipulate people. I want to understand their perspective, which is what sales is like. Our job is to understand and be empathetic. You can't be empathetic if you don't understand their perspective. Otherwise, it's fake sympathy. I can rant, but I'll stop there unless there's something you want me to do.
There's no rant there. It's clear. We read the consistent theme of this show, where we know people make decisions emotionally. If we can't put ourselves in the shoes of the buyer, how can we help them with that? If we don't understand them, their business, their industry, and some of the trends, and if we don't have insights into what they're up against, how can you have that empathy if you don't have some understanding of it?
The second thing is on the emotional side. We haven't had him as a guest, but there's a guy named Nick Morgan. He's from Harvard, but he wrote a book called Can You Hear Me?. Amongst other things, he has got research in there that he is pulled from other people that says in a show like this, where I can see you, and you can see me, it's milliseconds, or you can sense my intent.
Mark's got a controversial podcast that he's going to try to make me look silly. Does Mark want to have a good conversation about professional sales to help the listeners, or is he looking for clickbait? I believe that the same thing happens these days in a professional sales interaction. For whatever reason, buyers feel the way they feel about us now. As soon as they know they're dealing with a professional salesperson, they're hypersensitive.
I loved some of the verbiage you used, but saying, “I'm going to have a conversation, and let's figure out if there's an opportunity.” Before we dive in, I want to say that I believe we're both here on a fact-finding mission. Let's exchange some ideas and see if it makes sense to continue. If it doesn't, both parts are framed. They get this sense, “Richard is not trying to fit a square pan in a round hole. We're trying to figure out if there's a good fit on both sides. Let's have a conversation.”
They can sense that intent. It might concern a lot these days with what we see, particularly SDRs and BDRs, get thrust into a role. It's a lot of activity. They have nothing else to do but pitch. They don't know anything else. They get no training. It's this churn factory. You've seen that type of thing in what you do.
I've been a part of the churn factory. I've been churned, and I've built a churn factory. You get two days of product training. Here's the big book of objections/. Sit next to Bob, listen, and see what Bob does. Meanwhile, nobody picks up the phone while Bob is calling. Bob is sitting there going, “Richard, don't do what they told you. Do it this way.” I'm from that school mentality of like, “You got two weeks to get him on the phone.” I'm like, “That's terrible.” I've been through that churn and burn.
As we round out a little bit on Richard's amazing book, The Seller's Journey: Your Guidebook to Closing More Deals with NEAT Selling, the table of contents is, 1) Get your map in your compass. 2) The Neat selling compass. 3) The process. 4) Sales is always personal. 5) Respect contracts. I like this one. I highlighted this one. I double-click on the respect contracts. 6) Listening and asking tactics. It’s helpful. 7) Objections and competition tactics. 8) Money pricing in commercial terms. We're getting into a negotiation. 9) Accountability tactics. 10) Everything we believe on this show. It’s a never-ending journey.
Do you know why we put authors on this show? We buy the books. We read the books. If we like the books, we go and find the person. With this one, I'm going to put it in that category. Let's put this on our list, The Seller's Journey by Richard Harris. In the show notes, we're going to have a link to Richard's podcast, Richard's LinkedIn, and the Amazon link to buy the book. It's an Amazon bestseller.
In the last several minutes, one of the other reasons I was excited to have Richard on the show was because he was involved in some research on mental health and professional sales. He has been a part of this research over the last few years. I know you did this sometime back, Richard. It's certainly not a test on any stats, but there are a couple of things I pulled out that pulled me over.
Seventy percent of salespeople are struggling. That's an increase of 11% from 2023. They are struggling from a mental health perspective. There was a tremendous regression in investment in these things to help the salespeople over 2023. During COVID, we peaked and started to pull some money back. Only 28% of salespeople say they work in a supportive environment. That's a tough place to live.
Let me ask for a couple of thoughts. This research was done on around 600 people in professional sales. You've seen all the other research out there on mental health and professional sales. You've done a lot of other people's podcasts. Tell me a couple of key insights. If anything is current, you do get into some tactics about what sales leaders can do to try and move the needle in the right direction, which might be helpful for some people, or at least a couple of them.
The goal of this, as we built the study, in addition to what they were struggling with, but we also asked people at your peak performance, what was your leadership team doing? That's a different question. It's the same question but asked in a different way. We wanted people to think about their best moments, not just, “Woe is me.” Some of this data comes from that.
The top thing was that their leadership wasn't being vulnerable. That was number four. Vulnerable doesn't mean coming in and talking about your emotional childhood. Vulnerable means owning up to it. When was the last time a sales leader recorded a sales conversation, sent it to the team, and said, “Tell me what I could have done better.” Coming in and saying, “I finished buying my first house. I'm going to have the real estate agent come in and talk about this in our sales meeting because I want to make sure people know this stuff. There's a lot of stuff I went through that I didn't know. I want to give you a life skill.” That's what vulnerability means.
Vulnerability, at the tactical sales level, doesn't mean giving people what they need to do. Don't should on people. Here's what you should deal with. It's more about asking, what do you think we should do? Would you like to hear my opinion? If you don't, I won't give it to you. Let them know that you're vulnerable enough to do that. As a leader, in your one-on-ones, what if you said once every three or six months, “Mark, what's one thing I could do better to help manage you?” That's vulnerability.
Meaningful work matters. It needs to have a purpose. Everybody says, “I have to work for a company that I can believe in the product or service.” I'm like, “You do, but what does that mean? What's going to make that meaningful to you?” Digging into what that means. That's what people need, and leaders need to try to suss that out in the interview.
Meaningful work matters. It needs to have purpose.
Job security is one. I don't like that phrase, but salespeople need to think about career security. I want career security. In sales, we're always free agents. What are the things I need to have that piece? That doesn't mean in the role you don't want job security. I get it. Number two is achievable targets. We've all been down that path. 2023 taught us that wasn't true. We're already seeing it again in 2024. That's what I'm seeing.
The most important one for salespeople is the career path. What's my career path? Even if you don't have a career path available, you need to be honest and vulnerable. If you're an early-stage startup, your career path is different if you work at Zoom or Salesforce. Make sure you understand those are the things that people want from their leadership. There are thirteen. Those are five of them.
It's called the State of Mental Health and Sales Report from 2024. We've done it for the last several years. I want people to be able to Google it. You can find it at the SalesHealthAlliance.com. If you haven't had Jeff on, I would encourage you to have him on. He's written books about this. He's the data geek around this stuff. He knows the data of it. We're here to promote me, but I want to help someone else. He has a burnout questionnaire on his website. How close are you to burnout? It's free. You don't have to pay for it.
It's an important topic. It's not talked about enough. It's shied away from because people don't know how to talk about it. To a certain extent, there's this whole legal issue. We shouldn't talk about these things. This is why I like startups. I like big companies because they pay well, but in startups, you can have a different conversation. Even when you go to the big companies, they like someone like you or me, helping them get real. We can say the things they've wanted to say. For whatever reason, they can't make space for it. We help them create some space and grace to have those conversations.
Richard, thanks for the overview. Team, we'll have the link to that report. It's a short and easy-to-read summary. If nothing else, there are a couple of takeaways for everybody reading. We've had a couple of people on the show, Richard, talk about security or the lack of job security being a trigger for mental health issues. A lot of the answers from people a lot smarter than me come back with, “You have to future-proof your career in sales.” The people who are reading a blog like this one are already doing that because we're talking to some of the best authors in the world, like yourself.
You talk about the never-ending journey in the final chapter of the book. That's the path we're on. We're in a place where there's no formal education or single source of certification to be a professional salesperson, even though it's the most important profession there is. You have to future-proof your own career. The average spent on sales training in the US now is 5,000 per person. That's from Frank Cespedes's book.
I'd question most of the footnotes in my book, but don't question the footnotes and hit, “They're right.” From sales management, it's under $5,000. It's a $70 billion industry sales training. If you are with an organization that's not making that investment, I encourage you to invest in yourself. Learn, develop, and keep training yourself because it's critical.
When we had the leaders of Pavilion, they liked the idea of keeping a side hack. Thinking about those ways that you can continue to invest in yourself gives you some comfort. If you're a leader, I like that authenticity. Try to get to that place where you feel comfortable admitting when you're right or if you're wrong. That's okay. Nobody is perfect. Richard, I have a feeling we'd talk for hours about these topics, but we can't now. First of all, thank you so much for joining.
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I always enjoy our conversations, Mark.
Richard, for those who are going to pick up The Seller's Journey or learn more about you, where can we go to learn more about you in The Harris Group?
N.E.A.T. Selling: The Seller’s Journey: Your Guidebook to Closing More Deals with N.E.A.T. Selling
It’s Richard Harris on LinkedIn. I'm the one with the goofy trademark by my name. I know you can't do that. I was doing emoticons for everybody else. Certainly, TheHarrisConsultingGroup.com. This is the crazy part, Mark. 415-596-9149 is my legit cell phone number because it's the one my kids ignore whenever I call them. I will gladly chat with you. I'll answer questions whether it's about sales, mental health, life, or career. I try to be supportive and put Karma in the world. Do me a favor and maybe text me saying you heard me on Selling Well. Otherwise, I won't answer unknown calls, but I’m always happy to chat with people.
I highly encourage you to pick up The Seller's Journey. It’s a fantastic book. Thank you to Richard and the team. Thank you very much for joining the show. The reason we do this is we love learning. We want to run a show that enables everybody in professional sales to one-up their skills, knowledge, and capabilities within an hour of reading this blog post. I hope you enjoyed the show, but we also know we're not perfect. We're growth-oriented.
The reason we do this is because we've received some great constructive feedback from people like you. If there are other things that we can do with this show to make it more valuable to you, please email me directly at MarkCox@InTheFunnel.com. We respond to every idea we get. We love constructive criticism. If you like this, please like and subscribe. Tell your friends because that's how we get great guests like Richard. They look at the viewership, and they come on to the show. Thanks for doing that. We'll see everybody next time on the Selling Wealth.
Thanks, Mark.
Important links:
The Seller's Journey: Your Guidebook to Closing More Deals With NEAT Selling.
Richard Harris - LinkedIn
Andy Paul – Past Episode
Frank Cespedes - Past Episode
Pavilion - Past Episode
About RICHARD HARRIS
Richard has more than 20 years of SaaS experience and teaches revenue teams how to earn the right to ask questions, which questions to ask, and when to do it. Richard’s clients include Zoom, Salesforce, Google Cloud, PagerDuty, DoorDash, Salesloft, and Gainsight. He’s also the co-founder of Surf & Sales. Learn more at theharrisconsultinggroup.com.