Episode 111: Blair Dunkley – “Igniting the Buyer Conversation”

Blair Dunkley  00:00

Making sales on social is humanizing sales. It takes it from being a stat on a salesperson sheet into helping a person discover the best solution for them, even if it’s not making a sale right in that moment. It’s about creating a connection, creating a living, breathing, connection with that person to help them problem solve their situation.

Bob Woods  00:27

Welcome to the Making Sales Social Podcast! Featuring the top voices in sales and marketing. Join hosts Brynne Tillman and Bill McCormick as they discuss the best tips and strategies they are teaching their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. You can also listen to us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Here are your hosts, Brynne Tillman and Bill McCormick.

Bill McCormick  01:05

Welcome back to Making Sales Social Live. I’m Bill McCormick. 

Brynne Tillman 01:09

I’m Brynne Tillman.

Bill McCormick 01:10

And Brynne who’s joining us today?

Brynne Tillman  01:11

We have Blair Dunkley, who I met at a networking meeting for podcasters, and guests and really hit it off. And he talked about a topic that I’m excited he’s going to bring to the table today, which is igniting the buyer conversation. And that is really all we talk about. Not all but a huge piece of what we talk about is how do you start that first conversation? So Blair, welcome to Making Sales Social,  tell everyone a little bit about yourself.

Blair Dunkley  01:40

Thanks so much for having me here, guys. super appreciate it. Well, I’ve been in the field for quite a number of years, like going on 40 plus years but it’s all about this whole idea of a conversation in sales as opposed to selling. And so that’s what it’s really all about. So we all have to know how to ignite that mind conversation and that’s what the name of my program is, that’s what I train on. That’s what I have done a lot of my focus and research on for 25 out of those 40 years. 

A little bit of the background is I had a private, a past president of a college called Life Skills colleges. So what we needed to do is we needed to help people with very small personal issue, well, not very small, very huge personal issues. Actually 80% of our population of our student population was potentially suicidal back at the beginning of doing the college work. And we had up to 1000 students a year. 

So we needed to, we took some basic fundamental research that the government did, and tweaked it and yes, this does come into sales in a second here, so I know I’m leaving you down a rabbit hole, but it’s a very short one but the bottom line here is, is the research that was done, identified these things that eventually morphed into what I call “mind models.” And while I was morphing them, a dear friend of mine, Ray, De Champlain, at the time he was a Xerox sales manager and he said, “I’m having a tough time with my people. I’m making quota and everything else. Can you come in and speak to them?” And I was working through them and this is, you know, back in the 80s, 1980. 

So this is a long time ago, in the beginning, and this was formulative seed of my research for the next 25 years. I asked the question to all of those salespeople, and those salespeople said one simple thing. I just asked them, “How many here like being sold, and these are top salespeople.” Only 40% of them put up their hand. Then I asked another question, “Who here likes or loves to buy?” Almost 100% Everybody, not one person put down their hand. Bottom line here, guys is that the numbers have increased on Who here likes to be sold. I’ve done that right up to 2006. And in 2006, I stopped asking because it was again 98% of the population in the audience. All salespeople did not like being sold. Again 99% wanted to buy, like, they love buying. 

So how are we approaching sales, traditional sales from an effective place. That’s what I started researching. I continued researching and found that people don’t need to be sold. They need to to be guided through a buying conversation. That’s the big issue today because people are trying to manipulate people into buying stuff into sales into doing all this stuff and people have like all these alarm bells going off saying, I don’t need this or I don’t want it or I don’t like you because you’re pushing me, not because I don’t like the product, want the product or need the product. It’s, I don’t  like you.

Bill McCormick  05:29

Yeah, so this is fascinating. I can’t wait to dive in but first Blair, we ask all of our guests the one question right at the beginning, and that is what is making sales social mean to you?

Blair Dunkley  05:41

Well, I think I’ve partially answered that right off the hop, you’re making sales, social is humanizing sales, it takes it from being a stat on a salesperson sheet, into helping a person discover the best solution for them. Even if it’s not making a sale right in that moment, it’s about creating a connection, creating a living, breathing, connection with that person to help them problem solve their situation, because every time somebody is buying, it’s because they have some kind of problem that they need to overcome every time without exception.

Brynne Tillman  06:22

I love that, I have a series of questions running through my head but I love to start with how do you start the conversation? Are you doing this, where are you finding the people? And how are you starting that conversation?

Blair Dunkley  06:38

It depends on where you are out there. You know, I do podcasts and but you know, normally what it is, is I go “hi.” You know? And then that’s how you start the conversation. “Hello, how are you?” And you know, you can ask a simple question, “what seems to be the problem?” Or “what are you looking for?” Or depending on your industry, there’s subtle differences but it’s always a simple opening of greeting and saying, “Tell me a little bit about you, your situation and what you’re looking for.”

Brynne Tillman  07:11

I love the concept but I’m gonna go one deeper on that because often the people that we’re talking to don’t even know they need us yet. So I feel occasionally if we ask that. Now, if they raise their hand and say, “I want to learn about how you can help me,” I love that question. What do you do with the people that you’re having conversations with that don’t even know they have a need? Or and they’re just talking to you because they like you? And you know, we want to determine whether they’re a prospect or not, you know, how do you start that conversation? 

Blair Dunkley  07:45

Well again, it goes back to getting that person to talk not to pry, but to discover, and it’s a discovery process. So again, it comes back to literally, you can guide it to are you in sales? Do you talk about sales, like for me, it’s about that but for me, it’s also I’m, I sort of, I  cheat a bit. I’m a profiler, I listen to language patterns, I tell people all about themselves, takes me about 10 to 30 seconds but so that gives me a cheat sheet into their brain but I also teach elements of that in igniting the bank conversation. So you can literally hear how somebody is thinking in real time.

Bill McCormick  08:29

So that’s fascinating and most of us aren’t profilers, and I immediately went, I immediately went to criminal minds and that, but so I think what I hear you say is as salespeople, we really have to be curious, we have to be curious about the other person, authentically and genuinely, you know, so we live in the LinkedIn world. There’s a lot of inauthentic and disingenuous curiosity out there. You know, love the work you’re doing with ABC when they haven’t even looked at your profile. So, but I think that’s what I hear. We have to authentically be curious about the other person and really care, is that true?

Blair Dunkley  09:09

Oh, very true actually, we get into this whole thing about creating, before we get into that authenticity, we need to do, like I created this whole body of work called “Mind models.” So one of the first things that I trained in mind models and igniting the buying conversation is a thing called safety versus comfort. So people commonly confuse safety and comfort. They think that when they’re uncomfortable, they’re unsafe but when you’re in a buying scenario, like when you’ve got a buyer or a prospect in front of you, do you think that their hackles might be up? That they might be a little bit a few walls between you and them? So do we have to pay attention to the idea that they may be feeling potentially, that they’re about to be attacked. So what we want to do is understand the dynamic between being safe and uncomfortable. Now, how come uncomfortable? People don’t make change when they stay kinda…

Bill McCormick  10:24

Right status quo is our enemy.

Blair Dunkley  10:27

Exactly! So that disingenuous opening is “love, your work, love,” whatever, you know, they haven’t even looked. That’s just trying to pardon me for being blunt here but suck up. And that’s, this is not a process of sucking up. This is a process of discovery. What do you need to understand? How can I help you truly?

Bill McCormick  10:47

And I think it goes back to what you said before you use the word manipulate and I think too many salespeople are trying to use manipulation as a shortcut, in order to start some type of relationship, especially in social and online, so that they can pitch the product or service. So they can check that box to say, “Okay, I did that.” Maybe go back to the boss say, “Yep, I did. I did, you know, five connections today, and pitched it to all five and got nobody in return.” So I think that’s a big part of it. I like the idea of creating safety, but also understanding that we want them to be uncomfortable, because we want them to see the need for change because that’s what people are buying, they’re not buying our product or service, they’re buying the outcome that we produce for them.

Blair Dunkley  11:37

Always and the outcome that we’re producing for them has to be if it’s the value, has to cause change in their life because that’s what they’re like, you know, you can, I’ve heard this so much, we have to, people buy value, and I go, Well, that’s true but people buy value that changes them and without change, you buy value that won’t change you?

Brynne Tillman  12:05

Yeah, we talk a lot about kind of the five things that your content needs to do or things you need to do and its resonate, create curiosity, teach them something new, that gets them thinking differently about their current situation. So to your point, and then the last one is creating a compelling moment but your point is you can teach them all kinds of value, you can bring all kinds of value but if you don’t get them to think differently about their current situation, that value isn’t going to help move them closer to your solution.

Blair Dunkley  12:37

Not at all. And so you have to cause them to connect safely with the discomfort.

Brynne Tillman  12:43

So give us a couple of tips or kind of that dive deeper of how do you create a safe, yet uncomfortable environment?

Blair Dunkley  12:53

Well, in start, like what I constructed here, I give you guys an overview of what I’m all about but now I’ve switched gears, and I’m into asking you guys some questions as well and getting you involved. Because we haven’t dived deeply into this. We did a surface thing where you said we wanted to explore this on air here. And I go, okay, great but now I get to ask you questions, and you get to ask me questions, and figure out where these moments might happen. And it’s discovering these moments, these change moments in our lives, that we see the possibility that this could really work. And it’s possibility thinking, along with curiosity, that we discovered these moments, and in that moment, we go, “I need that”

Brynne Tillman  13:43

I love all of that. I’m going to rewind a little bit, because one of the reasons I was so excited to have you on was the topic of “Igniting the buyer conversation, started starting that conversation.” What are some of your strategies or tactics to actually opening that igniting that opening that conversation up initially?

Blair Dunkley  14:06

it’s always about them. It’s always about them first. So the questions have to be engaging in that we don’t dump and then do this. We already had the preliminary piece where you asked me questions, and I asked you questions, and we do that little dance to see if we’ve got common ground. So we have to do that with curiosity. And curiosity is the fundamental first step of every conversation. 

If I’m not curious, if I don’t want to know you, or you don’t want to know me, we just pass each other in the street. So we have to be open to possibilities and we have to get, when we are igniting the buying conversation and we start with that, we start with “how are we framing our own mind?” So how do we set up ourselves and so it starts with Me. And if I don’t look at this scenario here, from the situation of “how can I assist? How can I share? How can I help?” without being overbearing, but mostly curious, then, if I don’t do that I’m not coming from a genuine place. I’m coming from a place of, “oh, I just got a pump and dump.”

Bill McCormick  15:25

I love this because what it talks to is the fact that we as salespeople, you said it, we have to do the work first on us, because we can’t be curious about them, because we want to manipulate them to buy from us. And sometimes that’s what that’s what some sales training is, you know, it’s like, let’s, let’s teach you this trick. So that person is gonna want to reciprocate to you and, and no, we have to rewind it. So we have to truly listen, not to reply or to react, but listen, so that we can help listen to understand, rather than listen to react, and wait for that buying signal or wait for that. But just listen and just understand that, you know, we say it that the sale will come when the time is right, we have to earn the right for that. And so often we talk to salespeople all the time, and they just don’t know how to do that, because they haven’t done the hard work inside of them to kind of rewind that to understand that, “okay, I’ve got to make it about the other person.”

Blair Dunkley  16:24

First of all, the work isn’t that hard that you have to do. So I want to do that, like in igniting the buying conversation, if you like talking to people to some degree, you know, I’ve worked with so many people that are introverts that are in sales, because there’s so many people that are out there that are self-employed, like myself, who I’m an introvert, and I needed to figure out a way to get myself out there on a more effective way. 

Well, if I park myself, and focus on somebody else, and see how I might be able to assist them, all of a sudden, it’s not about me, it’s about them. And my curiosity, if I go, how do I close? How do I close? How do I close? I’m going to push them away because everybody is doing that to some way, form or fashion. And it’s about doing that but if you just allow yourself to get curious and to seek understanding because what’s the number one thing that everybody needs the most powerful emotion that’s out there, and it’s not love.

Bill McCormick  17:29

It’s to be understood (bingos) it’s to be to be accepted.

Blair Dunkley  17:33

Think about this, if you’re not understood, do you feel loved? No. So guess what? Understanding is more basic, more fundamental. In fact, it’s one of two fundamental emotions that exist when I was doing my research, it became apparent. When you’re born as a baby, you have two emotions, that are really they’re hardwired into you for pure survival. There are others there like that you can get into and I won’t get into the science of this but the bottom line here is the number one thing that a baby has to have in their brain development. And this is way before all of the incubators and everything else that they have now for keeping preemies alive and whatnot but back in the day, they couldn’t always do that, because we didn’t have the technology. 

And the key number one thing in the Apgar test, there’s nine things that you test for with a newborn, and one of them is curiosity. And if the baby won’t route around to suckle and to take nourishment, if the baby just cries due to hunger, but doesn’t route around to latch on, and to be able to find food, they used to die. Okay, and that means their brain wasn’t developed enough to take that discomfort, that hunger pain, and flip it into curiosity and find, they could smell it, they could do it, they could do everything else. They could route around and find the nipple to latch on to but at the end of the day, when their brain wasn’t developed sufficiently, they die. 

And the second thing is understanding they have to understand that connection. So they get the food they have to put those two things together to know “Oh, I get it. I am. Okay, hungry cry food.” Okay, this is how it goes. I get it next understanding and warm, cuddling taken care of by mom.

Brynne Tillman  19:48

Nurturing yeah, nurturing so all great stuff. And, you know, I mean, I’m sure we could really relate that all back into sales in some way. I do want to get to the understanding piece for moment, some of the challenge, I think for some salespeople is we sit there. And if we, if we start the whole conversation with, “you know, Blair, really great to be talking with you, you know, I’d love to hear what’s keeping you up at night.” And sometimes that’s like the worst thing you can do, right? Like, right? It’s dangerous. They don’t even have a direction yet. So I just want some clarity around the questions that are just coming in there and saying, “How can I help you?” without anything in advance? Is that like, kind of give us some clarity around that conversation and have a start that.

Blair Dunkley  20:39

I don’t want to jump in there and ask “how can I help you?”  What I want to do is I want to ask a question that is adapted to each scenario, but it goes, “what seems to be the problem?” Now, I stress “seems” because I don’t want to say “what is the problem?” Because I confront them and I go whack in their face. And I go, No, because the problem, we have to understand, as the person who is guiding a conversation, their problem is between their head, like, between their ears, that’s where their problem is, it’s in their mind. 

They think it’s outside of themselves 99% of the time, but it’s actually between their ears, because it’s a perceived problem. If it’s a perceived problem, then what seems to be the problem helps hold it between their ears. When it’s like that, they don’t get overwhelmed as easily. And if they get overwhelmed, they’ll probably shut down because they go, this guy’s trying to sell me something I’m out of here. So tell me your problem. Now don’t need it. So what seems to be the problem? Yeah, and if we’re back up here is yeah, we can go one earlier, or different depending on that we can back up to is, “Wow, you look like you’ve got everything under control. If this is true, it looks like you’re here. “ So, you know, not necessarily what’s keeping you up at night but what would you like your life to look like to get beyond where it is right now? Where would you like this to go?

Brynne Tillman  22:21

Yeah, we often will start a conversation with, you know, after some rapport building, you know, when you scheduled this time with me, what were you hoping you were gonna get? In our 30 minutes together?

Blair Dunkley  22:32

Yeah but the thing here that you stated, it was after rapport building. So that’s the critical piece, you have to have, you know, I always say that you have to have a relationship sufficient to do business. So that’s not a lot but that is that person have to has to perceive you has honest, as sincere and as curious.

Brynne Tillman  22:55

I love that. Awesome.

Bill McCormick  22:57

Well, wow. So unfortunately, we are already coming to the end of our time together. This has been fascinating. So Blair, just tell our listeners, how can they connect with you and stay in touch with you?

Blair Dunkley  23:09

Well, one of the things is, is because this is a social network and keeping sales social, I like being social with people too. So if people would like to find out more about igniting the buying conversation, I give people a 30-minute free call with me to see if taking the training would be useful for them, and to see if that would be in alignment. So I do profile and coaching and position that to help people make breakthroughs. If I can help them make a breakthrough right there on that 30-minute call I do that. If not, maybe more training might be an appropriate way for them to move forward.

Brynne Tillman  23:48

So where do they find that? What’s the?

Blair Dunkley  23:51

I give you a link. So it’s just simply a Calendly. Link, they’ll have your podcast. And yeah, you can just post it along with this. So it’ll be there and people can just get a 30-minute free call to see if it’s aligned to them.

Bill McCormick  24:07

Fantastic, well, well, thank you for that very generous offer. So listeners, we’ll put that in the show notes. Did you have something else?

Blair Dunkley  24:13

Yeah, just something else if they want to find out more about mind models, and all of the mind models that I teach in this book called “Ultimate mind hacking.” The book ultimate mind hacking is on Amazon. So if they want to look it up, and do that they can do that. And there are 16 Fundamental mind models. 16 of the big ones. I teach more than that in ultimate mind. Sorry, igniting the buying conversation but in ultimate mind hacking, there’s 16 that you’ll learn

Brynne Tillman  24:43

and rewiringthemind.com Yes, your site.

Bill McCormick  24:46

Fantastic. So make sure you check out Blair’s site and also we’ll put the in the show notes, a link to the book and also a link for Calendly if you’d like to book that free session, Blair Thank you, that was very generous of you. So thank you listeners for listening on another week. And don’t forget as you’re out and about this week to make yourselves social. We’ll see you next time. Bye bye, everyone.

Bob Woods  25:09

Thanks for watching, and join us again for more special guest instructors bringing you marketing, sales, training and social selling strategy that will set you apart. Hit the subscribe button below to get the latest episodes from the Making Sales Social podcast. Give this video a thumbs up and comment down below on what you want to hear from us next. You can also listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Play. Visit our website socialsaleslink.com for more information.