I'm joined by author David Hoffeld in today's episode to talk about the topic of science and how it affects the sales process. Today's episode is brought to you by Linode. Linode Provides superfast SSD based Linux servers in the cloud starting at $5 a month. Linode is offering Developer Tea listeners $20 worth of credit if you use the code DEVELOPERTEA2017 at checkout. Head over to spec.fm/linode to learn more about what Linode has to offer to Developer Tea listeners .
I'm joined by author David Hoffeld in today's episode to talk about the topic of science and how it affects the sales process.
Today's episode is brought to you by Linode. Linode Provides superfast SSD based Linux servers in the cloud starting at $5 a month. Linode is offering Developer Tea listeners $20 worth of credit if you use the code DEVELOPERTEA2017 at checkout. Head over to spec.fm/linode to learn more about what Linode has to offer to Developer Tea listeners !
So you're probably not a salesperson if you're listening to the show, but that doesn't mean that you can't learn something from what it means to sell. And really, that's what we're talking about in today's episode. Really, sales is not just about getting somebody to buy something, but rather it's about influence. I'm very excited to have today's guest, David Hoffeld. He wrote the book, The Science of Selling, and we discuss all of these very interesting topics around the science of selling, and more specifically how they can apply to developers. People who are not necessarily tasked with selling to clients in the marketplace, but rather really just getting to the core of this information. Once again, my name is Jonathan Cutrell. What you're listening to Developer Tea, my go on this show is to help you become a better developer. Sometimes that means becoming a better salesman. Sometimes that means diving into research, diving into psychology, a ton of different topics that you can bring as kind of cross topics for your particular area of expertise. You can learn from these topics and employ those learnings in what you do every day. I'm going to get out of the way and we're going to get straight into the end of you with David Hoffeld. Welcome to the show, David. It's great to be in your room today. I'm really excited to talk to you. I'm very blessed to have fantastic guests on this show. It is a show for developers, but we talk about all kinds of topics because really software development is making it away into pretty much every single space in the business world, including selling. Really part of the reason I want to talk to you is because I'm very interested in behavioral science. As an executive kind of role, I've been able to talk about behavioral science for developers. Talk about behavioral science as it relates to pitching. I'm completely hooked on this. The thing that sold me on your book, by the way, was within the first couple of pages you mentioned thinking fast and slow, which has got to be my all-time favorite book on the discussion of behavioral science specifically kind of the Godfather book of all this. Can you kind of give just the general overview of what your book's the science of selling is about? The science of selling really looks at well decades of research in a number of different disciplines like you mentioned from behavioral economics to social neuroscience, social psychology, cognitive psychology, and it looks at how is our brain wired to be influenced? Meaning, why do we accept some ideas and not others? And how can we present ourselves and our ideas in ways that guide people in taking them seriously and then acting on them? And what the research shows is absolutely fascinating in that the way an idea is presented shapes how to be perceived and whether or not it will be acted on. And in my research, I was able to find many examples of great ideas or great products or companies that were just presented poorly and they're not accepted. And it's not because the idea or the company or the product wasn't good, it was the way it's presented. And the exciting news is that because of this wealth of research that we now have access to, it can allow all of us to improve our ability to present ourselves and our ideas in ways that are aligned with how our brain will perceive them. And so whether you consider yourself a salesperson or not or good at selling or not, it doesn't matter because armed with the scientific research, anyone can become more influential. And so it's very, very exciting. That is very exciting. And you know, this is part of the reason why I was so excited about reading about behavioral economics. But then it was kind of difficult to distill that stuff into actionable advice for myself. And that's what this book does. I want to be very clear with listeners that David is not sponsoring this show in any way. I just found the book to be really compelling, really interesting kind of dive. And there's quite a bit of information that is distilling from all different places of research about these principles of behavioral economics and of the research that has been done about the way people make choices. So I want to talk to you really kind of rewind. We're going to go back before you wrote the book. I'm not for you to start out by telling us a story about a moment before you engaged in this research. A moment of failure in sales that you ended up learning from in the long run. But a moment where you saw this very clearly later on, you know, hindsight is 2020, you saw very clearly what that failure was. Do you have a story like that that you can tell? Unfortunately, I have many. But I was always good at selling in that when I started my first sales job, I was always a top performer. And I worked my way up and worked in a number of different fields. And at one point, I sold to about 70% of the Fortune 500 companies. So I was very successful. But I can remember many times where I would lose the sale and I didn't know why, for example, early on in my career. All salespeople need to try to create urgency and really help guide their customers and understanding why it's in the customers' best interest to act now versus waiting. And especially when you have a solution that can really help people in meaningful ways and serve their businesses. And I can recall, you know, somewhat early on in my career, pushing people, pressuring them. And I was trying to convey how important this solution would impact them and how it would help them and how they need better off for it. But oftentimes because I was pushing them, they would willing push back and they say, well, I don't like to be pressured. And I'm like, I'm doing it out of a pure heart. But I didn't know, well, how do you present your ideas without feeling, causing people to feel that they're being pressured? And it was years later, as I began to re-accademic journals, that I came across across a scientific principle that described exactly what was happening. And it also described exactly how to neutralize those feelings of pressure so you can present yourself and your ideas and create a compelling argument for adopting your solution without causing people to feel that you are pressuring them. And when I read that, I remember thinking, if only, if only I would have had that years ago, how many more people could I have helped? How many more people rejected what I was selling or what I was saying because I was so, you know, I wanted it so much for them that they felt that I was pushing them. And if I could have just leveraged the science that I didn't know existed at the time, but if I could have leveraged that, how many more people could I have helped? And so many examples like that, I found that as I got deeper into the research, as I'm again, astunniate, I became addicted to it because I saw, even though I was a top performer, I now knew why I was a top performer. I knew that things worked what I saw, but I never knew why they worked or how you could adapt to the unique person you're talking to. And I learned the science. It gave me clues behind why people were making decisions, why they were creating a preference one way or another, why they decided to make a buying decision or adopt my ideas. And because I knew why I was now able to better serve them and adapt my message, not only that, I was able to find out the things I was doing wrong. And there was a couple. That was just one of them. There was numerous things I found that I was like, it wasn't in spite of that, I was still successful. But if I would have known about the science and known how to align my behaviors with how our brains make choices, I couldn't have been even more successful and helped more people. And so that's when I find any time I teach top performers in sales or even top business leaders are people that are good at communicating. They know now I understand why I'm effective, but I also seen there's always a few things all of us can improve on and the science tells you that you don't have to guess your way to success. You can leverage this powerful wealth of data and align you with how our brains create perceptions and make choices. Yeah, let's let's talk about that a little bit deeper because there's a couple of things here that I want to kind of zoom in on. One of them is this idea that and probably a lot of people who are listening is podcast field this way that sales has this bad rep, right? It has this bad sense that if you're salesman that you have to be slimy in order to accomplish your job. And that's simply not true. And what we're talking about here, one of the things that feels slimy is this idea that you need to pressure someone. And because you feel like they're going to slip to your fingers, they're going to figure you out. It's kind of the unstated reality is that that pressure in the back of their minds that somehow they're going to figure out that they're being tricked or that you're trying to take their money or that you're overpricing something or whatever it is. And the truth about sales is that it's not slimy if you're doing it right. It doesn't have to be that. There are certainly people who are not executing that well. And unfortunately sometimes they do end up succeeding and following down that path because they're creating basically a series of lies that are convincing people. And that's not really where we want to be because that's not sustainable right. Eventually we get caught. Eventually people know who this slimy sales guy is. And that's not that's not what this is about. So I'd love to talk a little bit further about first of all this research that you're referencing. This isn't research that was done necessarily purely about sales right. This is research that was done about kind of core human behavior core the way that people make decisions. This isn't only about the way people make buying decisions, but it's also information about how people make just everyday decisions. How they make economic decisions between one thing or another. Can you talk about kind of the sources of the research that you that you used in some of these epiphanies that you had in writing the book. Yeah, that's an excellent point and you're exactly right. This research is not sales specific. In fact, oftentimes some of the studies did focus on getting people to make an economic decision regarding a product or service. But most of them do not. So these are done by research scientists trying to uncover why we do what we do and why don't we do certain things and what are those certain behaviors that nudge us in one direction or another. So science reveals reality and it gives us and very least a better understanding of how we make choices and something some biases that we might have that we need to focus on. But it also allows us to understand other people and how we create preferences. And so it certainly is not sales specific. It just reveals really it's focused on our brains how our brains are wired to make any kind of choice. So and it's amazing. The science has been applied to so many different disciplines. For example, education education is one of the fields right now that's leveraging it probably more than almost any other looking at how do we foster learner motivation. How do we teach students in the way that our brains are wired to learn how do we increase cognition and retention rates. And they leverage this science that we're talking about. In fact, even our country in the United States as well as 136 other countries are leveraging behavioral science. And so as the UK where they look at how do we present policies that we all agree with, for example, saving from retirement or keeping kids from dropping out of school. How do we present these ideas so that people embrace them. We all agree we should say for retirement. We all agree kids shouldn't drop out of high school. But people do people still do these things. So how do we present them. How do we nudge people to do those things that are best for them and for the society and leveraging the science can make a dramatic impact. Because what the research shows is that sometimes very small changes can produce very big results. And one fascinating thing about this is all of us underestimate it. In fact, behavioral science is actually a term for this. In fact, they have a couple they used to describe it. The fact that when we read about behavioral science and we go boy, people are gullible aren't they. Yeah, I can see I'm looking at you phone by this, you know, but not me. And we all have that bias. We vastly underestimate this. But the reality is even myself when I am being presented an idea and I can recognize the science of the principles that are at work. I'm still persuaded by why? Because it's how my brain is wired. It just feels good. And when you have had great experiences with, for example, a salesperson and you go boy, he or she was excellent. I mean, I bought from them. I enjoyed the process. I felt like they listened. They understood my needs. They presented the solutions. I saw value. And boy, it was just an easy decision. It was a wonderful experience. And we refer our friends. What makes that salesperson better than the one you described a few minutes ago, where they're the opposite. It's really how they're presenting. Are they presenting in ways that are aligned with how our brains make choices, meaning are they helping us through the buying process or what happens oftentimes is they get in the way of it. Yeah. And I want to talk about exactly that. You mentioned, and we can get really practical here. You mentioned the idea that we're kind of wired or we think intuitively that we need to rush somebody because we really do believe in our solution. We believe that now is the time for you to buy this. So we need to pressure you in order to buy it quickly. But that's actually not the case. So can you share kind of an antidote for that perspective? What is the right way to present something that does create urgency, but it doesn't make somebody feel like, you know, you're basically watching over their shoulder trying to get them to do something they don't want to do. Yes. There's a couple of answers to that question real quickly. So the first thing is we need to number one. Understand the people that we're trying to influence. So it's very hard to influence someone if you don't know where they're starting. Starting places. So what do they care about, for example, what are they trying to get? What kind of outcomes are they trying to get? Meaning whenever any time I present or I teach a client to present their company or product or service. What I always pop the bubble that they have and I let them know that no one cares about their company product or service. No one cares at all. No one is an atlin curious about your company or what you do. No one cares. But what they care about is the specific outcomes that they want to achieve. So the more you can align your company or your product or service with what they care about, the more interested now they become. And so we need to understand that as our starting place. So what does this person want to achieve? And now how can I help them? How can I help them perceive high levels of value? And that's really a key to value creation. So what kind of brain perceive value when you link up a new idea with an outcome that I want, meaning if I want to newsweight, I want to lose 10 pounds, let's say. And you can show me a way to do that. That'll guide me on that path. Well, now that idea has a lot of value to me. Right? Because you've linked it with something I care about. And oftentimes we present ideas without focusing on the other person. So we call it very seller centric or presenter centric presentation. So it's all about me. Let me tell you about my company, my product, my service, my ideas, no one cares. And I say, understand them and now present to show them how they can achieve their outcomes. Make it always about the person you're talking to and you'll always have a willing audience. Make it about yourself. And people want to disconnect very quickly. So that's just one of the many things we can do is always focus on we say the buyer or the person you're trying to influence. How can I meet their needs? And that's how value is created. And that's how really how you can guide people in wanting now. They see enough value they want to act. And there's many other additional things we can do to create urgency and reduce those feelings of pressure. But the foundation is how do we get them to see value. So in order to push if I can present enough value. Right. I don't have to push you anymore. Why? Because you want it. Right? You know, that's that's what I want. You recognize it. Rather than me, I'm going to try to force it down your throat. Because that just doesn't work. People push back. Let me ask you this because because that totally makes sense to me. Some of the things that I like seeing or or as a buyer that I've seen that have been really effective to me is when somebody tells me about a system that they have in place that creates urgency without them being the ones that did it. Right. So in other words, for example, we have a limited number of tickets. We have a limited number for this is true for this show. We have a limited number of spots that you can sponsor. Right. So the earlier that you choose to sponsor the more likely you are to get a spot number one. And number two, the more likely you are to be able to choose a date that you want that sponsorship to show up on. Right. Very simple principle. And it's something that I don't have to I'm not adding a manufactured pressure. It's a system that that really I don't have much control over. And I'm letting you know. And it's something that you can then evaluate for yourself. Does that work in this in this framework or is that a bad thing? No, yeah, what you're describing is one of we call them heuristics, which is a term from behavioral economics, which is very simple. Our rule our brains have mental shortcuts. We all do intuitively. It's kind of almost wired into us. And these rules are how we make rapid decisions. Our brain uses it to be able to discern if we should do something or not. If something is a good decision or a very high risk decision and these heuristics these rules of the mental shortcuts are very powerful. And the great news is scientists have catalog them and one of them you just described, which is the heuristic of scarcity, which says that when something isn't scarce supply, it's perceived as higher levels of value. So I actually want it more. And so there's been a number of studies, many great studies on this that have shown how powerful of a principle that is when something isn't scarce supply. We want it more. And there's so many examples from rare paintings to rare toys around Christmas time where parents will, you know, scavenger through stores trying to find that one toy that is most stores are sold out of for their kids. That's really popular for the year. So many examples of scarcity increases value. So that's simply leveraging or allowing to be made known a principle that is true. It's authentic. It's not unethical because it's it's real in the situation. But it also helps our brain perceive higher levels of value and it naturally creates urgency. And that's that's a great thing about this science. This allows us to naturally influence. We don't have to conjure up anything or do anything on ethical. We can just allow how the brain is wired and we just when it's appropriate, present in those ways and people naturally see value. They naturally create urgency in their mind. And so we don't have to resort to any kind of high pressure or sales tactics because it's just not mean and or warranted because now we're leveraging science. Yeah, this is so good because what we're doing is we're relying on something that is totally ethical, even if you were to peel back all the layers, even if you were to look at my private notebooks and all of my sales strategies, I'm not afraid of that. I'm not afraid of somebody asking me, hey, how do you, how do you present this? How do you sell this? Because I can tell you very honestly that I'm not trying to trick anybody. I'm not trying to to explode the value of something beyond what it really is. I'm not trying to lie to you. And this is what developers generally speaking, I would say the average developer tries to think very logically about things and they try to uncover a lot of the facade. The layers of, you know, of makeup really. And this is a very common trait that developers have. We try to remove all of the fluff and try to get to the core point. And this is why a lot of developers reject the concept of selling on his face because for so many years, once again, it's been presented as this, you know, very manipulative thing. And it's really not manipulative in this sense. The good and sustainable sales are not manipulative. So I actually want to talk to you, talk to you a little bit more about how this can apply to developers. We've got a couple of different audiences of developers who listen to this show. And I want to speak to their, their situations directly with you and ask you a few questions around their situations. The first question that I want to discuss, you know, in software development, one of the things we find over and over and over is that the predictability of project completion is incredibly difficult to nail down in Daniel Condomans book. He talks about the book that he wrote with a couple of colleagues that took him about four or five times as long as they had predicted it would take. So in other words, the amount of time and resources necessary to complete a project, it's incredibly difficult, if not impossible to predict. And basically across the board, people overestimate their capacity to complete work. And they underestimate the variability and the unpredictable factors. These are things that are usually difficult or impossible to control. Like for example, somebody getting sick or, you know, another company that you didn't even know was going to enter the market entering right when you're about to launch something like that. So from your perspective and with your knowledge of this research, I'd love to know how would you recommend approaching selling something when you have that high of a level of uncertainty about, for example, the budget or the timeline without being, you know, without lying or otherwise promising something that you really shouldn't be promising, promising something that is very unlikely to happen. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, that's an interesting question because you're dealing with a lot of things there. The first part of your statement deals with something called the overconfidence effect, which is fascinating that we vastly overestimate so many things. My favorite example of this is when you ask people to rate themselves, for example, even highly educated people like college professors, one survey found that 96% of the college professors that were surveyed rated themselves as above average. So 96% so that's an example and just one of many examples that of the overconfidence effect. And there's some things you can do to make sure that doesn't happen to you because that can often. Kinder, you're building to make good decisions if you estimate things will take three months, but in reality, it's going to take a year and you don't know that so you get to that three months, the six month and nine month mark that can, that can mess a lot of things up. So there's some science back strategies to use there, but when it comes to answering your question, when it comes to sales, when you don't know how long something will take in the sales scenario, number one is we want to gather a lot of information. So in a sales world, oftentimes when we misrepresent things unintentionally, it's because of ignorance to some things that we should not be ignorant to. And so what we want to do is begin by focusing on their client. So if I'm going to deploy a solution, which is you described in your question, that I don't know exactly how long it will take. There's so many variables, let's say. Then I want to talk to my client and I want to ask them about their product or service parameters, their time frames, their financing, their budget. And that way I can understand if there's any, so if they say to me, we have to have this in three months, this solution must be done in three months. We have a drop dead date. It has to happen. Then I can with that, with that buying parameter, now I can say, okay, what can I do? What, what kind of solution do I need to create or can I even create one? That'll hit that three month mark and two things will happen. I might say, you know, there's impossible with our solution. It's going to take nine months. There's no way around that you try to pull strings, make things happen. Nothing can happen. So then you would disqualify that person. I wouldn't try to sell them something that's not a good fit for them. Or us. I don't want to spend my time selling someone, something that will be terribly unhappy with. So then I would, I would pull back and just let them know honestly. And often that preserves a relationship and can open up for later on. We respect that honesty. Second though is if I know that timeframe, now I can say, okay, our regular solution takes nine months. But let me put together some options to be able to do that three month mark. And maybe we get you what you need in that three month timeframe. You know, I find out one of the bare minimums they need and then we look at the staggering this project. So now I get creative, but I do that based on the information I have from my clients. So when there's uncertainty, I need to create some level of certainty regarding some very specific things. Yeah, yeah, that's really fantastic. And this is so the common answer that we provide at the company that I work for whiteboard. We've shifted a lot of our services model to a more what's called agile and you can call it whatever you want to. But basically, we're going to promise you that we're going to work on the most valuable thing first. And this is this is our new brand promise, right? We don't promise that we're going to meet some specific arbitrary deadline, especially if it's arbitrary. Instead, we're going to tell you that we're we're going to put every effort into the most important things first. So that when that deadline does arrive, the most important stuff is done. Right. So so typically, you know, in software development, what you find is most of the time, a finished, a quote finished project has a series of features rather than just one big feature. Right. In other words, it's a lot of things that are composed together to create the product rather than, you know, one large, kind of single thing. And the reality is that you can probably focus on about half of those features to begin with or even a third or a tenth of those features. What are the core things, the most important things and really what this does, what we found that it does, especially with clients that do buy into this approach and are willing to accept the reality of the uncertainty. What it allows us to do is sell them on the ROI, right. They're actually going to get the best return for their money if they follow this approach because what we don't want to do is lie to them and tell them that we have certainty when we don't. Right. And being honest with the client wins their trust. This is such an important part of what we do. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, I think that is and this comes up a lot is what is really the difference between influence persuasion and manipulation. And there's a number of core things that we talk about. One of them is withholding truth. And so anytime you're not telling someone something you're not being transparent, you're withholding something that you know what matter to them that you know when influencer decision. And yet I hold it back because it's, you know, I want to get this deal or I want them to adopt my idea. That's pure and simple. That's unethical. And so that's one of the key differences between persuasion manipulation is manipulation. Usually is withholding truth. It's not giving people all the information they need. It's being very selective. And so I think especially in our society, transparency in all areas is very much esteemed and valued people respected. And so when you're very transparent upfront, it also creates high levels of trust. And so to be upfront and and guide people and understanding what you can and what you can't do. And you know, there's all kind of ways. There's really in some interesting science back strategies that you can use to do this. But it's it's powerful and people where much more likely to trust someone that is transparent with us than someone who's presenting things in ways that sounds too good to be true. Like really, we say that nothing's that perfect. And we know when someone presents in ways that sound too good to be true. We know that there's something they're not telling us that creates distrust. It increases the perception of risk. We associate with the decision. And oftentimes all of us can experience this where we'll say I don't have a reason. But I just don't want to do this. And I don't know why I just don't feel right about it. And oftentimes that's because of a variety of things. But oftentimes people oversell. They they present only the good and they're so non transparent that it seems gimmicky. And it's not that the product or services and great or their idea wouldn't be valuable. It's the way they're presenting it is bringing distrust is doing the exact opposite of what they intend and oftentimes it calls us to lose out on some great things that we reject just because of how it was presented. Right. Yeah. I mean, recognizing that your product isn't the solution to every single problem. Right. And realizing that, hey, you know what? Not everything that you are going through at your business. I'm not going to be able to solve every one of your problems with with my solution. That would be insanity. Right. And it is if it seems too good to be true. This is, you know, your grandparents wisdom. If it seems too good to be true, probably is that that is so ingrained in the way that people think that we need to identify that and not try to oversell. So, so this is really interesting stuff. I do want to shift gears and talk about another question related to the developer audience. Because we have a couple of different types of developers who listen to the show and not specific to the software necessarily, but more in terms of their role. So we have freelance developers who kind of run their own business. They're they're like business owners slash developers, right. And then we have people who are working for major tech companies. We have people who are working in client services. That's what I do. We have people who are working in startup situations. But everyone can learn from these principles, right. Because not this stuff isn't just about convincing somebody to exchange money for something that you do. So first for freelancers. I would love to talk to you a bit about how a freelancer can use science to help them obtain leads and close more contracts. But specifically, you discuss neutralizing competition in your book. And as a freelancer, I'm competing with really the rest of the world of freelancers. It's a very large pool of people that are competing for this for developer freelancer positions. So even if there is plenty of work to go around, which there is right now, how can I convince my potential client that I'm the right choice for them. Very important question and there's many answers for that. Let's go with the foundational one. How do you get attention? How do you get someone to even look at you to put enough trusting you to to want to begin to talk to you and then make that decision? One of the foundational principles that we teach is a powerful rule that our brains follow. We call it reciprocity and reciprocity basically says we should repay others for what they have done. And we we utilize this in my business and we have many clients do this extremely successfully. And it's the idea that you give first a second too often when we're trying to present ourselves or our services. We we try to get people to give us their time. So we'll contact people and say things like you know we have some great options. I love to share with you what I do. If you have a few minutes, if I can share those with you asking some questions, see if we could possibly help you. And so we ask first we ask for time and people say no I'm busy. I'm not interested. I'll let you know what we need to always do is focus on giving. In fact, we have a rule at my firm. We never if we send out, for example, a proposal. I sent out a proposal for a large piece of business. A week ago and we instantion the meeting. It wasn't able to happen. So I sent out an email just to follow up and we have a rule. We never just send on email or make calls saying hey, check an in one to see if you let a chance and look at our proposal. Instead, we always first give something of value at every single client interaction. White paper, article, blog post, idea, some insight. We might have created it. We might not have. We're scouring the marketplace for things that are applicable to our clients within our context, of course, increasing their sales. So I would recommend that anytime you want to position yourself as a trusted advisor and that's what you want to do. You want to, if not create content, you want to curate content. Meaning you want to know what else is out there and be able to give people things. So anytime you before you ask. Give something now when you do that, you give something someone something of value that's relevant to them in their context. Let's say it's just an article or a blog post that someone you know created who's not a competitor and they go, this is actually really helpful. Thank you. And now they are far more likely to want to talk to you. They're far more likely to reciprocate and give you their time. The problem is, and that is a buyer centric approach where we're focusing on the buyer first and we're leveraging a very simple science of principle that's been proven. And so many studies reciprocating one study, for example, in focused on sales done by behavioral scientist Dennis Reagan, probably one of the most famous. Studies in this area because he found that even giving people something a very small gift before you ask them to make a purchase. And so we, we vastly underestimate this people say, well, that sounds too simple. It seems really it is simple and easy to do. Do not underestimate it. So before you ask. Give and you'll find people are far more likely than the comply with your request. Not only that, but as you give people things of value, you become valuable. Right. And every time this person emails me, he gives me something I can use. This is awesome. You're creating what we call a social norm or a standard of behavior, meaning when you and I talk, I get something of value. So when you call me, oh, hey, you know, I'm excited instead of most sales people. Then again, or I'm trying to sell my services. They're like, oh, no, no, I don't want to take that call. Right. So always be a value creator. If you do this, even if they don't do business with you right now, you're memorable. Why? Because you're not focused on you. You're focused on them. And most of your competitors, who are they focused on them? I want to sell you my service. Don't do that. Start with I want to give value to you so that I become such a value creator that six months later, when you say, boy, I need something who's going to pop in your mind? The guy called calling you blasting you with emails or the person that's giving you value at every interaction. We all know the answer. So be a someone that gives value relentlessly. Like I said, that's a principle at my firm. If you send the email or make a call and you don't have something of value to give, that's a problem. It can never be about us. It always must be about the client. And that's what'll get you a lot of wins and create a deep level of loyalty and referrals. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Teathe first part of my interview with David Hoffeld. Make sure you go and check out his book, Science of Selling. Don't forget to subscribe if you don't want to sell on the second part of the interview with David Hoffeld. You can subscribe in whatever podcasting app you use. It takes usually just a button click. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode and until next time, enjoy your tea. you