The next business article features a transcript taken from a Thrive15.com training, one of the best business schools in Florida, with business coach Clay Clark (US Small Business Administration Entrepreneur of the Year & America’s Palest Man) and Mickey Michalec (top regional pharmaceutical sales rep) talking about fact-based selling!
Clay Clark: Hola! My name is Clay Clark. I’m the COO and lead business coach of Thrive15.com. I’m also — you’ve seen in me such features films as — there’s too many to name really, but today I’m joined with Mickey Michalec. This is a guy who’s seven feet tall. He use to play college basketball, and now he’s one of the top pharmaceuticals sales people in the country.
He’s here to teach us about puffery versus fact-based selling as a business coach. The idea is he’s going to teach us specifically how to sell using facts instead of using trickery, smoke and mirrors, and BS to sell. He’s going to teach us specifically what we need to do to become an efficient, effective, and ethical sales person.
As you’re watching today’s episode, it could be worth millions to you and your business coach, because most people do not know how to sell. Most people just kind of talk at people and get rejected and then go home with small paychecks, but we don’t want small paychecks. We want to have big paychecks so pay attention to today’s episode. I promise you it’s going to bless you.
All right, Mickey, we’re here with you, one of the nation’s top pharmaceuticals sales reps. You have gone from the bottom to the top. You’ve over come some financial tough situations, some tough family situations with your — growing up, and we’re here to talk to you about sales and specifically puffery versus fact-based selling. We’re going to go ahead and hop right into it here.
When building a sales presentation and marketing materials, you must use fact-based selling if you want to close deals and be viewed as a professional. Now, if you use puffery, you’ll be viewed as an amateur and won’t be taken seriously. How often do you spot people in your profession or other professions using puffery or let’s say it without puffery, just random claims that are not backed by facts? How often do you see people using puffery to sell?
Mickey Michalec: Unfortunately more often than not, and I think the problem with a business coach is that most people just accept the information that they’ve been given and they’re not willing to go look up the information for themselves.
Clay Clark: Now this seems like … I don’t know, this might seem like a ridiculous chart I’m making here, but I want to … This right here is this world of false claims, and this is right here is the world of truth. I almost never see a sales presentation filled with anything true. I’ve seen almost all — I’m going to say I bet you it’s about 95% false and then over here it’s like 5% truth according to a popular business coach
Let me give you an example of false versus truth. I’m not going to get into this conspiracy theorist on food. We’re not going to talk about Monsanto. We’re not going to talk about those, and here we go. There’s a lot of companies that will put in their product 33% more or 100% natural. Well, when you look into the words 100% natural — if you look it up and go just look it up, you’ll realize that for food you can pretty much say 100% that just means I guess if you get it from a different planet, it can be natural.
Mickey Michalec: Sure.
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Clay Clark: See sales people say on their brochures, we’re the best. I see it all the time. We’re the best entertainment company. We’re the best photographer. I’m the best doctor in town. What does it mean? That’s totally not fact-based, it’s puffery. Why in your mind do people say puffery so much? Is it because it’s so easy to say? What do you think causes people to use puffery all the time to sell?
Mickey Michalec: It starts with effort. I think the consumer that’s out there right now is filled with so much of that fluff that you’re talking about, that people accept it. It’s so bogged down and cloudy with non-truth that nobody wants to take the time, because somebody said, “Ah, let’s just jump in this party of non-truth and we’ll see where we fair out.” The guys that start from the beginning — let’s get a base line and let’s find out our own information and then give that and do it the right way, the building blocks to get you there, excel through the top, because when other people get dismissed based on what their saying, the guys that have done the work will shine through.
Clay Clark: Why does using puffery to sell always seem to fall apart in the end?
Mickey Michalec: I think because the truth will always come out. Gimmicks work. Let’s be honest about that. They work for the first 10% they’re out there, all right? In the long run, a gimmick goes away, because it’s replaced by what? Another gimmick. If you want to stand the test of time, don’t be a gimmick, be a hard truth and drive that truth until you can believe what you’re saying.
Clay Clark: How important is it for everyone whose in sales to truly know the facts and the provable benefits about the products they sell?
Mickey Michalec: If you don’t have product knowledge, you don’t deserve to be in sales. If you can’t know how your product works, why it works, and why the consumer should choose you over another one, you shouldn’t even leave the office that day.
Clay Clark: I’m going to give some examples of some truth based sales. My partner and I, Braxton Fears, and I’m going to draw — I’m going to put the numbers up here. Don’t get all freaked out, these aren’t 100% accurate, because I don’t have my sales sheets in front of me like I use to have there.
We’d go out and do real estate and we would tell people, “Hey,” to the property owner, we’d say, “hey, there are three things that Fears and Clark does that nobody else does. One, we are top in Google. What does that mean? It means your property is going to be seen by more people.” I have a laptop, I’m going to go ahead and type in ‘Tulsa commercial real estate’ and you will see batta bing batta boom, here we go — boom. I would do it in front of them, and the commercial guy would always say — I was a 29-year-old person with no commercial real estate experience. Braxton was the old guy at 30, and we out sold a ton of commercial real estate companies Tulsa, and we ended up actually commanding — we were actually in charge of one-third of all the commercial real estate in downtown Tulsa. It was unbelievable.
We would show people that, and they would go, “Wow, you guys are top in Google for the term business coach.” Yeah, it generates more calls. Then we’d say, “Second thing we do is we do unbelievable branding. We do top-notch branding. Let me show you some photos and videos of our recent commercial listings.” The properties we have for sale, and people would look at the pictures. We’d show it to them right there and they’d go, “Wow, that’s awesome.” It’s very difficult to be top in google for the term business coach.
Then we’d say, “Third thing we do is that we take a fresh approach, because he’s 30, I’m 29. I have no experience in this industry. We’re breaking every sacred cow, we’re destroying them, and this guy has been in his industry for seven years, he teamed up with me. I do marketing, he does commercial real estate. We have a fresh approach. We’re doing all the things that nobody else is doing. What we’re going to do is we’re going to list your property without a long-term agreement and you only have to pay us if a deal comes through.” People were like, “What in the world was that?” We could sell every time.
I know with your company, you like to show a lot of facts about what’s included in the product, and the purity of the product, and what’s coming and what’s included in the pharmaceutical products. How do you use facts to sell? What do you do? How do you incorporate fact into your presentation?
Mickey Michalec: I use my facts to set the expectation. If I do not use a fact, I am leaving the expectation up to that person to create it in their own mind. If I tell you that the reason that this product works is because 70% of the time the response is in less than an hour and I want you to talk to your patient the next time they come in and ask is this true, and that becomes true when they say, “yeah, actually it was 15 minutes.” Excuse me, under promise, over deliver with a hard fact, therefore the expectation was set before so they didn’t have to guess. The guess work was taken out based on my facts.