Don't Bring Facts to a Feelings Fight: The Science of Persuasion and Trust in Sales

Lee Levitt: Today it is my pleasure to have Danny Bobrow join me to have a conversation about selling. Danny is an expert in communications and in persuasion and in how people communicate. So Danny, let me ask you this question—who is Danny Bobrow?

Danny Bobrow: Thank you for the opportunity, Lee. I appreciate it very much. Danny Bobrow is someone who's very passionate about communication, and he didn't become that way overnight by any means.

I think part of the reason that I am where I am today is I was born with a rather serious vision impairment, which is non-correctable, and it led to some challenges. As a youngster, I thought I was smart and athletic, but was a terrible student and a terrible athlete. So there was a little bit of cognitive dissonance, which was tough for my young brain to wrap around.

At the same time, I think that may have given me a deeper empathy for other people that were not maybe the big kids on campus. So what I did have was an ability to connect with people.

When I got older, in his infinite wisdom, my ophthalmologist said, "All right, you're going to college—because you barely graduated high school and are barely able to get into a college—it's time for reading glasses." Those reading glasses probably would have been nice in first grade. But anyway, that's the way it was. And then I excelled academically.

As a sophomore in high school, an epiphany for me was when my high school gym teacher—his name was Mr. Rusk—taught me about the psychological fatigue barrier. That was an epiphany for me. It helped me realize, because the tenet is that our minds tell our bodies to quit long before they need to, and that just made a lot of sense to me.

I'd been pretty much a quitter up until that point. So from that point on, I excelled in athletics—as long as it wasn't involving any kind of a projectile, because I only have one eye and it's not very good. Depth perception was not my forte. But I got involved in endurance sports and other types of activities that helped develop my confidence.

I excelled academically and really had a facility for marketing and sales. That's where I excelled and built my business. I was originally in the healthcare field, learned about selling from some very talented people. Then my brother—because I come from a family of dentists—suggested that I focus in the dental space. This was in 1989.

In his inimitable fashion and capacity for understatement, he said, "Dentists are dying out there." Which is news to people who aren't dentists. But it was and is a competitive field. Dentists need a lot of assistance on the practice management and communications side.

So I became basically a glorified list broker, because in 1989 that's all we knew how to do. The internet commercially was not yet available—wouldn't be for another 10 years. So we developed direct mail programs. With the advent of the internet, we became digital marketing specialists.

We found that we could get the phone to ring, get leads to websites, but what happened after the phone rang was just as important, if not more important, than getting the phone to ring in the first place. Through the telephone tracking technology that we employed, we were able to listen in on how the calls were being handled—or, unfortunately, in the majority of cases, being mishandled.

That led me to create what I called the Art of First Impressions, which was a telephone skills mastery curriculum. I realized people needed guidance on communications not just on the telephone, but in face-to-face communication, and that really was the precursor to the Persuasion Blueprint, which is what I coach people on now.

Lee Levitt: The Art of First Impressions—what's the old saying? First impressions last.

Danny Bobrow: Yep. And a tenet that we live by—which is the watchphrase for the Persuasion Blueprint—is that people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

Zunin wrote a book called The First Four Minutes, and they claimed that people make decisions about who they're going to work with or not work with within the first four minutes of meeting them. I found on the telephone that I could usually tell within the first 10 seconds if somebody was going to have a successful outcome or not, just based on that first impression.

Lee Levitt: Yeah. And we were talking about enterprise sales—multimillion dollar purchases of huge computing systems. Decisions are all based on emotion, not facts.

Danny Bobrow: Right. Which is counterintuitive to a lot of people who think that once you get to a certain level of sales, it's all about the facts. It's still about the feelings. I like to quote Tova Hellerstein, who wrote a book called Don't Bring Facts to a Feelings Fight.

Lee Levitt: I love that. So let's go back to the central governor conversation. Our brain makes our body quit before our body is ready to. Same thing is true in sales.

Danny Bobrow: That's an interesting point. We talk about persuasion and people usually think, "Yeah, I'm going to be taught how to persuade other people." And indeed, that's part of the coaching. But before you can persuade others, you have to persuade yourself.

Lee Levitt: Okay, we've gone from a conversation about NLP to a conversation about who am I. And I'm with you.

Danny Bobrow: Wiring your brain, rewiring your brain. And just to get a little bit into brain science before I get myself into trouble—the limbic system, which is comprised of the amygdala and the hippocampus, is responsible for forming patterns based on emotion: fear, excitement, trust, skepticism. Then you've got the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for cognitive, rational thought. And then you've got the anterior cingulate cortex, which mediates between the two.

The key is that you not only need to engage your counterpart in such a way that you don't try to get them to ignore their limbic system, but you try to play nice with it. Get them to feel safe.

This goes back to Maslow. No matter what level you're communicating with people, you've got to make sure that their physical needs, their safety needs, their belonging needs, their self-esteem, and their opportunity to be the best they can be are covered. Then people will begin to allow you to engage with them on a rational basis.

But that doesn't always happen, and it often doesn't happen at the beginning of a conversation. We're often met with resistance, and we coach people on how to identify what type of resistance as well as how to respond to it. Because if you meet resistance with resistance, that's a vortex that you're going to get sucked down into, and the outcome is not going to be pretty.

Lee Levitt: We saw that in The Karate Kid. If they push you, go back. If they don't push, then you can push forward. It's using the other's energy to guide what you do.

Danny Bobrow: Absolutely. That's right.

Lee Levitt: So talk to me, Danny, about the Persuasion Blueprint. A lot of people think that selling is about persuading people to do things they don't want to do, which is why so many people hate salespeople—particularly car salespeople. The perspective is, if I go into a car dealership, they're going to tie me up and force me to sign on the dotted line. That's not usually what happens in a car dealership.

Danny Bobrow: It's also why people bristle at the thought of being asked to sell themselves. And the fact is that every communication is a sale. I'm selling your audience right now.

But let's get back to brass tacks and basic principles. First of all, a sale—or marketing, or anything that you practice—is a tool. As Shane said in the movie Shane, "A gun is just a tool, like a hammer. It's as ethical as the person using it."

My definition of persuasion is various techniques and mindsets intended to influence people to a desired course of action in a non-coercive manner. So it has nothing to do with manipulation.

Sales is the brother in the family of persuasion. I define sales as communication with a purpose, or empowering people to make informed decisions. Because the decision may be that you're not a fit for them. As long as you have integrity and honesty, we're not asking you to persuade anyone to do something they don't want to do.

One other point I'll make is that some people confuse convincing with persuading. For me, convincing is influencing somebody's opinions, attitudes, or beliefs—which is a tall order in itself. But persuading is encouraging people to take action. It's a lot easier to convince someone that they should lose weight than it is for them to actually lose weight.

Lee Levitt: I love those distinctions.

Danny Bobrow: Now, in terms of the framework and structure, it's predicated on the fact that people don't care what you know until they know that you care. I've identified three different components which are sequential in their execution—although that's not to say that once you finish one, you're done with it. But the three components are Caring, Connection, and Collaboration.

Caring sets the stage. It establishes the emotional connection so that people feel safe and are willing to hear what you have to say. And they become open to the connection.

Lee Levitt: Exactly.

Danny Bobrow: And in that sense, it is indeed sequential. Connection is about establishing credibility and earning trust. It has to do with paying very close attention to the signals that your counterpart is sending so that you know what pace to operate at, when it's appropriate to ask open-ended questions that ask them to reveal something about themselves.

That cannot be done at the beginning of a new relationship. You need to earn that, either implicitly or explicitly. Indeed, it's important to establish your credibility by sharing your expertise. But what we have found—there's plenty of literature that backs this up—is that people are far more interested in being shown that you understand and get them, rather than that you know what you're talking about.

Lee Levitt: Sharing expertise and credentializing are not the same.

Danny Bobrow: Well, that's right.

Lee Levitt: A lot of salespeople show up and say, "I'm your account manager from Xerox Corporation or XYZ Corporation. I've been here for five years and I'm here to sell you stuff." And it's like, so what? That's credentializing. That's not sharing expertise.

Danny Bobrow: Sometimes translating attributes into benefits gets a bad rap, but I still think that it's a fundamentally important skill—to recognize the difference between an attribute and what the helpful outcome of that attribute is to your counterpart.

I liken the sales call to a sculpture. You're basically chiseling away the marble to reveal the ideal profile of your prospect. So it's there, but you have to reveal it. But you have to be in a position where the prospect is willing to allow you to reveal it.

Lee Levitt: I love that. And it reminds me of a book that Jacques Wirth wrote many years ago called High Probability Selling. His central point of view is: disqualify early. Keep chipping away at that harder outer edge until you see a firm no. And the earlier you find that no, the earlier you can disengage. If you don't find the no, you've got a good prospect.

Danny Bobrow: Yeah, I would agree. I would also submit that people need to learn to embrace no. Because what I've learned is that "no" does not mean no. "No" often means "I'm afraid," "I don't want to lose control," "I want to make sure we don't have a fight on our hands," "You're going to try to make me do something I don't want to do."

Going back to my years in health club sales—membership sales—typically the easiest sale for me was somebody who would walk in and say, "Look, I don't want any of your bullshit. I just want to take a tour and I'm not making a decision today." And I would say, "Wonderful. Thank you for letting me know that. Let's relax and take a tour."

I learned this from one of my fellow salespeople. She was old—I think she was maybe 32 years old at the time, or 35. But when I was 22, I thought she was ancient. She did not take care of herself. She was not a physical specimen. The rest of us were very fit.

I used to look at her and say, "Why is she consistently the top salesperson in this club?" And I committed myself to watching her. Every time I walked by her cubicle, somebody had a pen in their hand signing a contract. I thought, how does she do it?

What I learned was that people are much more concerned and interested in being in control than they are in being impressed by your expertise. If anything, that can intimidate them. She would sit hunched back on her chair, just leaning back, and people would be writing contracts all day long.

It taught me an invaluable lesson: slow down, let the person tell you who they are, let them be who they are, and respond to the buying cues as you receive them. Relax, enjoy the process, and don't feel pressure. Because if you feel pressure, so will they.

Lee Levitt: That's fabulous insight. The challenge for many salespeople is they look at a prospect as though the prospect were a bag of groceries, and they want to put that bag of groceries on their counter now. And many, perhaps most, don't have the awareness that that's not what prospects are.

Danny Bobrow: That's right. And especially if you're getting pressure from management, or depending on where you are in the quarter, people feel the need—they feel that you've got to get through a certain number of nos to get to a yes. Emphatic nos, like "I'm out of here." But it's also a quality thing, not a quantity thing.

I talk to people about phone skills, and some coaches say, "Well, you don't want to stay on the phone too long." They're afraid that the person's going to say something stupid and piss off the caller.

I say, look, in dentistry for instance, we calculated that the average lifetime value of a patient was $7,500—this was several years ago, it's probably higher now. Do you not think that spending 11 minutes instead of four minutes on the phone is worth it? That's a thousand dollars a minute.

Once you become adept at mastering this technique, you're going to become more time efficient. But at the beginning, your employer should definitely not give you any pressure about getting off the phone quickly with somebody that could be worth thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions, depending on the industry.

Lee Levitt: From my perspective with regard to outbound sales, salespeople should never hang up first. Never, ever. If a customer—if I'm talking with a prospect and they say, "I've only got 30 minutes," I am very likely not to say at 25 minutes, "We have five minutes left. What do you want to cover?" I will make sure that we are at a point where, if they have to disconnect, I've gotten commitments. At 35 minutes, I'm not going to remind them, "You were supposed to be somewhere else five minutes ago."

Danny Bobrow: Mind the time, but keep it to yourself. Yeah, because people magically have more time. Because there's no such thing as long conversations—just boring conversations.

Lee Levitt: Right. This is fascinating. So Danny, we've covered the first two Cs already—Caring and Connection. Now the third C is Collaboration.

Danny Bobrow: Correct. Collaboration is all about encouraging your counterpart to be a co-owner, to actually participate in the formulation of the plan. Because if you say it, it's one thing. But when they say it, it's theirs.

When you have somebody, by periodically checking in with the prospect—and really being patient and almost nitpicky to the point where you show deep concern—before I'm getting yeses from you... And they could be commitment yeses, they could be counterfeit yeses or confirmation yeses, as Chris Voss makes the distinction. But even when it's a commitment yes, I don't rush to close the deal, because people can change their minds.

I had an experience last night. People had opened up a new dental practice and they were anxious. We were already doing their website, their digital marketing, and they realized they wanted to do direct mail as well. I had always said, let's get your digital platform, your digital presence on stream and coordinated and consistent, because when people receive direct mailings, the first thing they're going to do is go to your website or search for your reviews. So let's get the digital house in order.

They said, "Yeah, but we really want to get this going." I said, "All right, fine. Let's do it."

So I made my presentation to them and they were ready to sign up for a program. They said, "I want to target everybody within 10 miles of my office. Everybody."

Lee Levitt: Everybody and anybody.

Danny Bobrow: Right. And I knew that was going to be about 100,000 people because they're in a suburb of a large metropolitan area. I thought that would blow their budget. At the beginning, I don't want to cast too broad a net. I'd rather keep it a little tight. If you're getting good experience and good results, then we can broaden the net. That's how you save your money and don't blow it unnecessarily.

So I reality-checked them. They were saying, "Let's get started. Let's just do this." And I was saying, "All right, we can. Let me explain to you how you could do it. We can go a certain radius, and if you don't have the budget to target every household, we can divide it into halves, thirds, or quarters even."

Then I asked, "Would you like to know what I would do if it were me?"

Lee Levitt: And here's where you gave them all the choices.

Danny Bobrow: Because if they said no, you would have walked away, right?

Lee Levitt: Right.

Danny Bobrow: I was pretty confident they weren't going to say no. But of course, this is based on the tenet that confused people don't buy. So I let them know that they had all kinds of choices, so they felt like, "Okay, there's a lot of flexibility here, but I don't know what the hell to do."

I'd already established myself as a credible expert, and I'd already established a connection with them through my cause marketing foundation. We have a foundation that raises money and resources for oral health education and treatment. They knew that and had actually participated in the past. So I had quite a relationship based on trust.

I said, "Would you like to know what I would do in your situation?" They said yes, and I told them. And they said, "Go big or go home." I said, "Fine, let's do it." So I put the contract together, sent it over to them, and they signed it.

It was a lot of fun. It wasn't like I had just met these people. Obviously, sales and success is a marathon, not a sprint. I'd rather go slow, do it right, and not piss anybody off in the process. Because if I overextend, if I get a little too greedy... I could have targeted a 10-mile radius, and then they would have been looking at their bank account and really feeling the pressure—this thing's got to become self-funding fast. In good conscience, with my 36 years of experience with direct mail and dental marketing, I knew that was too broad a net to cast. So I was only too happy to rein it in.

Lee Levitt: Not for them.

Danny Bobrow: Yeah.

Lee Levitt: What we say in racing—and there's a corollary for your downhill skiing—in racing we say, "You have to go slow to go fast." And in downhill skiing, it's "You have to be smooth to go fast." Same thing, right?

Danny Bobrow: Yes, it is. You want to hit that apex just right so you can get that whip, use all that centripetal force. But that's the art of knowing when to hit it.

Lee Levitt: So you put yourself out there. You didn't just listen to what the customer had to say. You brought your pattern-matching skills to bear. And they followed your lead.

Danny Bobrow: Right. And this was on the phone. I met them during a climb, but that was seven years ago.

The fact that I'm on the phone just makes me want to share... We talked a little bit before the recording. There was a professor, Albert Mehrabian, who worked out of UCLA. He was commissioned to conduct a study on identifying the components of effective communication. He was also tasked to calculate, to measure the percent that each of these components contributes to effective communication.

This primarily has to do with first-time communication—not exclusively, but primarily first contact. He identified the verbal, vocal, and visual components. You may have heard about these.

The verbal component is just the words that you use. The vocal component is the manner in which you use the words that you choose—the tone, the inflection, the resonance of the words. The visual component is the facial expression, hand gestures, what's generally termed body language.

What Mehrabian determined was that the verbal component—that is, the words that you choose—is responsible for only 7% of effective communication.

Lee Levitt: Well, there we go. I've always told people, "You create your world with your words," and I've been wrong all this time.

Danny Bobrow: Not exactly. You're not exactly wrong, because in order to use the vocal component, you need to have the words that you choose. The vocal component is responsible for 38%. And that leaves the visual component, which is responsible for 55%.

That alone explains why a lot of caring people are having challenges conveying caring over the telephone, because they lack the visual component. They're basically dealing with less than a full deck, so to speak.

Now, that's not to say that people don't have a mind's eye and visualize the person on the other end of the phone. That's why I hasten to remind people that people can hear you smile. When you're on the phone with someone, it's nice to be well dressed, to sit upright, maybe even have a mirror and look in the mirror and smile while you're talking. People can pick up on that.

Lee Levitt: Yep. Whenever I'm on the phone with someone, I stand up. I have more energy when I'm standing than when I'm sitting.

Danny Bobrow: Absolutely. I often do that too.

Lee Levitt: And so for the visual—is the vast majority of that eye contact?

Danny Bobrow: Eye contact is a big part of it. Here's what I say: when you're in a sales situation, eye contact is good as long as you don't make it creepy.

And I think even better is taking notes. Letting people know, "I hope you don't mind if I'm jotting down some notes, because I want to make sure I don't miss anything that you're sharing. And when I'm done, would you mind if I confirm that I'm duplicating everything accurately?" That's a very flattering thing for most people.

Lee Levitt: And when you say taking notes, you mean with a pen and a piece of paper, not typing?

Danny Bobrow: Well, ideally I think so, but it depends on your situation. Taking notes on screen is good too. The key is what you do with the information anyway. I mean, it's irritating to hear somebody clicking away, tapping away. Honestly, I haven't given a lot of thought to the relative benefit of writing in front of someone versus typing in front of them. It might be that the more traditional form of taking notes has a calming influence on the person. I hadn't really thought about it.

Lee Levitt: I hadn't thought about it from the external standpoint. From an internal standpoint, my understanding is the note-taker remembers stuff better—the information gets implanted more deeply than if we just transfer.

Danny Bobrow: That's true. These are just notes right here that I took in part in preparation for our talk today, just to get some key points down. So that absolutely works for me, and I bet it is a fact.

Lee Levitt: So let's review the notes. Danny, how well have we done so far against your preparation? You're my first guest that has actually shown written preparation notes. I did have Gemini run three pages of preparation for my episode with Ted McKenna, and it was great, down to the minute. And I didn't use any of it. We just had a conversation.

Danny Bobrow: Is he the man behind Jolt in Adamson?

Lee Levitt: Yeah, behind The Jolt Effect. And then more recently, The Activator Advantage.

Danny Bobrow: Very smart man.

One thing—you asked me who Danny Bobrow is. Part of my development... I've made some mistakes in my life—I've made a lot—and I've burned bridges. For quite some time in my life, I dwelled on that, and it held me back because it's not very productive to live in the past.

What I came to realize was that as long as I viewed these as teachable moments—where I took valuable lessons and did not repeat those mistakes—it was actually something to look back on fondly. That took quite some time for me to have that shift.

What I learned was that... I've already shared that I am a persistent, tenacious, resilient individual, as evidenced by... we haven't really talked about it, but I've spent some time in the mountains and I've done adventure races and ultra-endurance events and summited three of the seven summits.

Lee Levitt: You understand the central governor.

Danny Bobrow: I do. That psychological fatigue barrier—the knowledge of that sort of allowed me to run amok a bit, and I've had a lot of fun.

But what I realized was—here's another cliché you may have heard that I like to share—"If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together."

As long as I was climbing by myself or doing triathlons or marathons or ultra-endurance events—these solo activities—being blindly persistent and ungoverned resilience was fine. Because you're not beholden to anybody else, you're not dealing with a team dynamic.

When I got involved in team activities like mountaineering expeditions and adventure races, it was a rude awakening for me at first. Because I felt that—and I got into trouble in business and nonprofit too—when I thought that the righteousness of my cause was self-evident, and everybody else should hop to and get in line and work at my pace. Because, dammit, I was doing the right thing for the right reason.

I learned I had to slow down. Nobody cares about your vision unless they know you care about theirs. That's been probably the biggest lesson.

What I coach people on practicing—those who can at least relate to my experience and my constitution—is to be patiently persistent and respectfully resilient. Be cognizant of the people around you.

One thing I learned in the mountains is that when you're suffering—because everyone suffers in the mountains if you're out there long enough—everybody on the team is going to take turns needing help.

Lee Levitt: You're not the only one in the pain cave. You may not be there at the same time as someone else.

Danny Bobrow: That's right. What I learned is, if you want to get out of your own pain, the best thing you can do is focus on somebody else's challenges. The very act of helping somebody else makes you feel better and stronger about yourself. It raises all boats. It just turns the environment into positivity.

The other thing is that very seldom was I the strongest team member. But what I did have was a good attitude and—with all modesty—a great sense of humor. I could find humor in any situation. Boy, does that help move the action forward, especially when things are dark.

Lee Levitt: The original Boys in the Boat book plays to that same theme. And then more recently, Will It Make the Boat Go Faster? also plays to that same theme of "Together we win." Oh shit, that's the name of my book. Sorry. Didn't mean to put that plug in. Anyway—Together We Win, coming soon. It's the team that supports one another.

As you were talking just a minute ago, Danny, it reminded me of improv. Have you ever done any improv? You're not far from Chicago, the birthplace of improv.

Danny Bobrow: You're looking at a graduate of the Players Workshop of Second City.

Lee Levitt: Oh, there we go. So what are the two rules of improv?

Danny Bobrow: Yes, and... Always agree with your partner.

Lee Levitt: Partner. Right. Take care of your partner. I was in the middle of writing a letter to the customer, and I threw in a hashtag "screw you." My partner looked at me with dagger eyes, essentially, and all of a sudden I heard, "What am I going to do with that?"

Danny Bobrow: It's nice to challenge our partners once in a while just to keep it interesting.

Lee Levitt: The one other golden rule of improv is: be present, right?

Danny Bobrow: That's right. I'm into yoga too, and my instructor just said that if you're depressed, you're living in the past, and if you're anxious, you're living in the future. And as you've heard, the gift is the present.

Lee Levitt: What's the best model of living in the present? What can you point to that is the epitome of living in the present?

Danny Bobrow: For me, it's being in the mountains. Climbing. Because when the stakes are high, things get very simple, very real, and you don't have time to screw around or worry about the past or the future. It's a real focusing exercise.

Lee Levitt: I was going to say a golden retriever, because they're pretty good about living in the present too.

Danny Bobrow: Oh, dogs are great. I'm a bird man. We had parakeets, which—people don't have them, don't realize—they're really as affectionate as dogs. Definitely more so than cats.

Lee Levitt: Yeah.

Danny Bobrow: That's the quintessential living in the present. Because it's like when you see them, they're so happy to see you. It's like they're seeing you for the first time every time. And all they do is, "Hey, what are we going to do? Let's have some fun. Let's play."

Lee Levitt: Dogs do the same. Let's get back to being in the mountains. It's no different than being on a sales call, right? I frequently watch salespeople with an agenda, with a script, with "I need to say this next." And invariably it doesn't go as well as if they are just present. If they just listen to what the customer says and they pivot with the customer, and they ask the question of, "Why is that important to you?" Or—"Is this rock going to come out of its place? Should I put my foot on that rock or should I find a different perch?"

You can't be thinking about, "Okay, 50 feet up, I'm going to have lunch. I can't wait for that salami sandwich." No, you'll think about the salami sandwich when you get to that ledge and can take a minute.

Danny Bobrow: Sometimes you have to remind yourself, "Hey, I paid to be here," when you're suffering and you've got that rock in your shoe burning a hole in it.

That's absolutely right. You've got to be present, and you've got to prepare. Preparation is critical. The higher the stakes, the more important.

Look at Alex Honnold. Did you see him climb the tower? I think it was in Bahrain or Abu Dhabi. It was a Netflix live event last month. It was insane.

Lee Levitt: Yeah, it was insane.

Danny Bobrow: What's insane about it is—I don't know Alex personally, but he's free-soloed El Capitan. This building was child's play for him because it's totally predictable. But he spent two months mapping out every step. Because to climb... they've likened summiting El Capitan solo, no protection, like performing Rachmaninoff's most difficult piano concerto, where if you miss a single note, you die.

Lee Levitt: I'm staying away from the piano, Danny.

Danny Bobrow: And that doesn't even count the physical fitness aspect of it.

Lee Levitt: Right.

Danny Bobrow: He's the quintessential example of someone who's in the moment and enjoying the moment.

And sales calls—back to your point about being similar to climbing—I think if I get your meaning, you can prepare all you want, but things are not going to go as planned. They never do. And you've got to be ready for it and embrace it when it happens.

Lee Levitt: I used to run power hours with inside salespeople at Oracle. We would sit and prepare for an hour, and then one person at a time would make calls.

One young lad made a dial and actually got someone on the phone—which, you know, we would get someone on the phone maybe one in ten dials. And this woman picked up, and he started with, "I'm interested in talking with you about the project that you're working on. I see that you've been working on this for a while."

And she stopped him and said, "Well, I appreciate you having done your research. I've wrapped up that project. I've moved on to something else."

And this poor young lad who didn't have enough practice pivoting said, "Okay. Thank you. Goodbye."

Danny Bobrow: "I guess our work is done here."

Lee Levitt: Everybody else in the room just sighed. It's like—he missed the "Oh, interesting. Tell me."

Danny Bobrow: "Congratulations. How did that go for you?"

Lee Levitt: "How did that go for you, and what are you working on now?" Because she rewarded him by saying, "I noticed you've done your homework." She saw that on LinkedIn. And so she was willing to spend another few minutes with him.

Danny Bobrow: She was halfway there on the caring, the connection.

Lee Levitt: Yeah, except that he was following the script rather than being in the moment.

Danny Bobrow: I had somebody work for me who was a dentist who wanted to work on selling our services to other dentists, and he was on the phone all the time. He would give a very nice presentation, and at the end of the presentation it was, "Okay. Thank you. Goodbye."

It was like, "Jay, you've made a really good connection. What happened?" He goes, "I was done talking, and they didn't say anything, so I hung up."

He just didn't understand how to bridge, get to the next phase, which was asking questions. He was very articulate, but he talked at people. And he was clearly a nice guy who everybody on the other end of the phone, I can only imagine, found him to be pleasant. But he didn't have the means to engage the person to find out what was important to them, so he could translate these attributes that he was throwing at people into benefits.

That process—I talked about the sculpture analogy. Each attribute and benefit you translate, you're chipping away something. It may wind up on the shop floor if the person doesn't respond with, "Oh, that's interesting," instead of just "Uh-huh." Well then you still learn something valuable. You're saying, "All right, this benefit is not particularly important to this person." So you keep going till you find out what it is.

Lee Levitt: There are different levels of selling from a value standpoint. A lot of salespeople—we say salespeople are coin-operated. They'll do whatever maximizes their revenue. So the standard perspective is selling is all about making money.

Then my friend Jeff Thull says, "The purpose of selling is not selling—it's buying." I get that.

And then I take it one step further: the purpose of selling is to provide the resources that customers need to achieve their objectives. If I'm buying a car, am I buying a car to spend weekends on the racetrack, or am I buying a minivan to take the kids to school, or am I buying an SUV to pull an Airstream through the woods? Three very different situations, and my goals are different. So the salesperson better know what I'm looking to do. Otherwise, I'm going to end up with a Miata with a trailer hitch.

Danny Bobrow: Right. And you want to paint the picture in the mind's eye of your prospect so they can... Tom Hopkins talked about this—you transport people into the future by painting a picture of the wonderful benefits that they're going to experience, how their life will be transformed by what you're offering them.

It has to truly be able to do that. That's the key. Otherwise, it remains external to them. They have to internalize it.

Lee Levitt: Danny, this has been a fascinating conversation about selling and about the three Cs of selling—showing that you care, and connecting. And then the third one is...

Danny Bobrow: Collaboration.

Lee Levitt: Collaboration. Thank you. Getting onto the same side of the table—or in the boat—with your prospect.

Danny Bobrow: Yeah, exactly.

Lee Levitt: Walk me through briefly the Persuasion Blueprint. What is it? How did you come up with it? How do people benefit from it?

Danny Bobrow: Absolutely. I created it with busy people in mind, and I like to think of myself as a busy person.

What it consists of—the core offering is seven modules. Video modules with yours truly delivering the material. They average about 15 minutes in length. You do them at your own pace. At the end of each module is one to three exercises that I ask you to complete.

The whole process begins by having you complete a Persuasion Scorecard that gives us a baseline for where you're at in terms of Caring, Connection, and Collaboration.

Then we have you go through the process, and I ask you to think of me as your Persuasion Blueprint Sherpa. I've worked with Sherpas on several occasions, and the Sherpa-client relationship is different than a client-consultant relationship in that it's a bond based on trust.

The ideal consultant should adopt a Sherpa's mindset. He doesn't just drag you up the mountain or say, "We're going to go this way." He gauges your progress and works accordingly. I've had guys get involved in telling me I'm not eating the right food on the mountain, and they introduced me to dal bhat, this combination of rice and lentils. It's like super food—high calories, low fat, really good energy food. And they run the race at your pace. They know when you need to stop.

So I offer my services in that regard. While you're doing the modules, you can reach out to me at any time. I prefer an initial chat with you to find out: who are you, what communication opportunities and challenges are you facing?

I'll share that this transcends business. I'm working with people who want to do a better job communicating with their teenage daughter, with their spouse, with their nonprofit team.

Lee Levitt: It gets people on the same side of the table.

Danny Bobrow: Exactly. You really need to know where people are at.

I mentioned Hellerstein's book, Don't Bring Facts to a Feelings Fight. Her book is largely about identifying where people are. If they're steeped in dogma, then the best you can do is communicate with them with dignity and hope that you maintain some form of open dialogue—hope that they might be open to reconsidering their position at some point in the future.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who are openly curious but just unaware. To tailor your presentation, your communication, it's really important to understand where people are on a given subject.

Lee Levitt: Otherwise you're just talking at them.

Danny Bobrow: Otherwise you're talking at them and just reinforcing it. A person who's dogmatic—their entire identity is bound up in their beliefs. For you to question their beliefs is to question their worth. That triggers their amygdala. That's a fight-or-flight impulse that you're triggering, and that's not going to get you very far.

Lee Levitt: And by the way, that's how most tech sales conversations go. "Oh, I see you've got our competitor's product installed. Well, that was a bad decision. We can help you fix that."

Danny Bobrow: Right.

Lee Levitt: Usually it's not quite that blatant, but that's what salespeople are implying.

Danny Bobrow: That's exactly right. It plugs in defense mechanisms, and then you've got resistance meeting resistance.

In terms of how to get ahold of me, it's pretty easy. My name—DannyBobrow.com—will get you to my website. And again, the Persuasion Scorecard is complimentary.

Speaking of complimentary, if after you go through my program you don't feel that you got your money's worth, I will refund your investment 100%, no questions asked. I haven't had to do that yet. I don't know that I—you know, if I do, I will. But no one's asked me so far, so I'm pretty pleased with that.

Lee Levitt: That's awesome. Danny, this has been a fabulous conversation. You've already indicated where people can find you and offered the Persuasion Blueprint and that initial evaluation.

Let's keep on fighting the good fight, because when people are on the same side of the table, good things happen.

Danny Bobrow: Exactly. Now, this is a real cause. I enjoy digital marketing, but I found my true passion when I decided to coach people on the Persuasion Blueprint. Because every interaction is an opportunity to make the world a better place.

Lee Levitt: I'm in awe of what you've taken on, and I'm in agreement with the mission.

Danny Bobrow: I know you are. Yeah. Thank you for fighting the good fight.

Lee Levitt: Thanks, Danny. This has been fabulous.

Danny Bobrow: You're welcome. Thank you, Lee. It was a pleasure.

Lee Levitt: Thanks.