High performers take a different approach. Dan’s work over the past 25 years has led him to the conclusion that it begins with how they think. In order to win, your prospects will need to evaluate and debate change objectively. Assessing your solution is easy – generating the courage to do something different (with you) is hard.

To hear the full-length conversation, listen to episode 4: High-Performance Mindset.

Whether the goal is to find common ground or show our merit through raw expertise, salespeople need to meet prospects at their level in order to be successful. As a senior non-profit leader and contributor to Forbes, Dr. Nicole Fisher Roberts knows this well. Nicole is the Executive Director of Feed A Billion, an international nonprofit that feeds girls around the world to prevent food insecurity, exploitation, and trafficking, and the founder of Health & Human Rights Strategies, an international institute that works to promote the advancement of health care and human rights. 

In this two-part one-on-one interview, Dan continues his deep dive into the core attribute of sales—that often vague set of social behaviors we call trust. In this episode, Nicole and Dan discuss the relationship between risk and trust, the power of vulnerability, building trust through questions, and how that old sales pursuit of finding commonalities shouldn’t be your only trust tactic.

People buy from people they like, right? No. They buy from people they trust. In this snippet, Dan explores the different levels of trust that are needed to help your prospect decide on change – doing business with you. The more complex and unexpected the change – the more trust is needed. Not all trust is the same.

To hear the full-length conversation, listen to episode 2: Building Trust.

Trust is at the center of how our society functions, and nobody knows this better than Kent Grayson. Kent is an expert on trust and authenticity in the marketplace who has conducted substantial research on how consumer habits are affected by their perception of a company/industry. In this one-on-one interview, Kent and Dan discuss the origins of trust in early human society, risk tolerance, and how sales professionals can build trust in their clients or potential clients.

In this 180 Conversation, Dan and Pam break down an email outreach that attempts to use buzzwords words that reflect trust, but because of the way they are misused they end up deteriorating trust quickly and create a sleazy email outreach experience. If you have to state that you’re trying to be clear - you’re probable not being clear.

The old adage still holds true, first impressions matter. Poor outreach tells your potential customer everything they need to know about your intent and value. Remember that they’re not looking for a reason to spend time with you, they're looking for a reason not to spend time with you. Poor attention to details and mismanaged automation is the only excuse your recipient needs. Listen in as Dan and Pam debate the impact and relevance of offering gifts and freebies to solicit time with a prospect.

Filler words, rambling questions, and feelings of hesitation are just some of the symptoms you’ll experience by not being in the moment during your conversations. In this snippet, Dan revisits episode 46, where he shares a process to help you intensify your questions, improve your learning, and take your conversations to the next level.

To hear the rest of this conversation, listen to Episode 46: The Power of Being in the Moment.

Your mindset impacts your results. There are a lot of people out there giving “advice” on how to be a better sales professional. But guess what? A lot of their well-intentioned advice is outcomes-based—not mindset-based. In the third and final episode of a three-part series, Dan and Pam build off the previous two episodes and discuss how much time we spend chasing prospects, our ability to compartmentalize, and our ability to manage bias.

Sometimes it’s easy to omit the basics in our conversations with prospects. If our standards aren’t defined, we aren’t setting ourselves up for success. In this snippet, we revisit a few of Dan’s nine conversation standards that will help you gain self-awareness and drive high-performance results.

To hear the rest of the conversation, scroll back to episode 38, Prospect Conversations: How High Performers Do It Better.