The Psychology of Selling: Neuroscientist Explains How To Sell Anything to Anyone - Rene Rodriguez

Selling is change. It's a behavior change. He's considered by a lot more than many as one of the leading authorities on leadership and influence. Renee Rodriguez is the bestselling author, keynote speaker, leadership advisor, and transfer speaker coach.

When I was a kid, my mom asked me a question. She said, "Renee, look in this room and what does everybody have in common?" She said, "Renee, they all have a brain." If you understand how the brain works, life becomes just exponentially easier. You're obviously a body language expert as well. Why is body language so important? It's really about the meaning that people associate to it. And you combine tone and body; you have 93% of the impact you make on people has nothing to do with the words. I want to talk about the relationship between body language and your tonality. They both go hand in hand. The research behind that basically says if you're feeling sad, or let's say you're not feeling confident, your posture on that phone call, even though they can't see it, is 100% affecting the tone of your voice. But as you know, Renee, try having a confused tone with a straight face, because your brain is designed to work in a congruent fashion. You know, I've got leaders that will do micro-expression stuff, and they're like, "Well, can you get me to stop doing that?" I'm like, "Well, do you believe in what you're saying?" There he goes, "Well, I..." "No, how about we talk about something you believe in?"

All right, welcome to another episode of Closers or Losers, Jeremy Miner. Our guest today—I, you know, I always geek out on this type of stuff, human behavior, the psychology behind why human beings do anything in their life amazes me. So when I find a guest, you know, I typically will follow them for a while, you know, like, are they real? Do they have legit stuff? Are they an expert, or are they an amateur? Now, this person is an expert; that's why he's here. So I've been following him for about six months. He's considered by, I would say, a lot more than many as one of the leading authorities on leadership and influence. Renee Rodriguez is the bestselling author, keynote speaker, leadership advisor, and transfer speaker coach. And for the last 27 years—he doesn't look that old—Renee has been researching and applying behavioral neuroscience to all of the toughest challenges: leadership, sales, and change. You know, if you follow me for a moment, you know all I talk about is selling. All sales is is change. That's really what CH—human behavior—it's about how good you are at getting the prospect to view, in their mind, that by changing their situation—that means purchasing what you're offering—is far less risky for them than doing nothing at all, staying in the status quo and their problems, state of the Saints. We're going to talk to Renee about that now. As an entrepreneur and CEO, Renee integrates a practical business approach that inspires his audiences to take action. I've heard from many other speakers that he typically gets voted speaker of the event, the number one speaker. And through his keynote boot camps, workshops, and proprietary amplify course, which I'm about to take, he helps us own our backstory to build the frame for not only our unique value propositions but also a beautiful picture of life: greater influence, greater transformation, more sales. He is the author of a bestselling book, Amplify Your Influence, Wall Street Journal bestseller, which was selected as the best business book 2022 by Summary.com. And he shared his stage with, I would say, Ed Mylett, Tony Robbins, and Gary and Ryan Holiday have shared the stage with this guy. Renee, how are you, man?

I'm doing great. What an intro, man. Thank you. It's an honor to be here. Hey, I, you know, I geek out about this stuff, so I want to I want to jump right into it. So let's talk about your book, okay? Amplify Your Influence. Who did you write the book for, and for what reason? You know, it's a good question, and I want to do—before I say—I want to echo back: I've been following you and your stuff, and and I was telling my my team and my wife, I was like, "You finally—a sales trainer is here, and he's arrived." And I get the call all the time: "Who's sales training?" And even though I do it, I'm like, "No, no, no, you got to call Jeremy. Jeremy's the guy. Start following him, and you'll see what I mean." So, one honor to be here. So why did we write the book? You know, the the the—in 30 years now of doing this—and I got to update that—I've come to realize it's the one thing, and you said it right, you nailed it: selling is change. It's a behavior change. If it's spending money over here, you're going to spend it over here now. If it's behaving this way, you're going to behave that way now. Now, and change, we are biologically built to resist—to resist it for good reason, you know, it's just for very good reason. It's just very hard when we're trying to grow, which makes it hard, which is also what makes it valuable. And so influence, to me, is what I found to be at the core of what leadership is and at what selling is. You know, so the way that I talk about influence is to more of a philosophical approach. Let's take it away for a minute. You walk in a room and no one notices you. You tell a joke and no one laughs. You sell a product and no one buys. You share an idea and no one cares. You cast a vision and no one follows. That's a pretty horrifying experience.

Good—some people—yeah. And but then if you really think about it, you'd probably say, okay, well, like, for example, like, okay, it's the the feelings are invisible, but I would say insignificant. And if you were in a meeting and you felt insignificant, you'd say, "Why am I in this meeting?" If you were in a relationship and you felt insignificant, you'd say, "Why am I in this relationship?" If you're at work feeling the same way, "Why am I here?" And so but a lot of people feel that way about life, and they start asking some really tough questions. And so I say, "Okay, so let's bring influence back." I tell a joke, I I I walk in a room, people notice. I tell a joke, people laugh. I sell the product, people are buying. I share an idea, people love it. I cast a vision and people mobilize and take action. Now, all of a sudden, there is no question about why I'm here. I know why I'm in this relationship, in this business. I know why it is that I I'm on the stage or selling this product or whatever it is on life. And so I think the lack of influence is one of the worst of human experiences, and having it is one of the best. And so we look at it from the realization that is your fingerprint on the world. It is the re—the thing that is the Core Essence of what your purpose is. When you can define it and do it, you can live it.

Well, I think I think every—I think you hit it right on the head. I think I mean it doesn't matter even if you're in sales or not, like you're you're out trying—like I don't care if you're a school teacher, if you're a stay-at-home parent, if you're a politician, Ian, if you're an attorney, if you're a doctor—like everyone's in sales like every day, even if you don't get paid to make a sale. I call that non-sale selling. You're still out there as you know trying to persuade, influen—and you're trying to move others to your way of thinking every single day, right? So influence, persuasion, and sales—if you master that, it's really hard to be unsuccessful, like really hard. Like, tell me a person that is not extremely talented 'cu they've learned sales, influence, and persuasion that's not successful. Like, I just I don't know anybody. I know lots of people that don't learn that; they're extremely unsuccessful because of that.

Absolutely. It is the core, and and everybody says, "I'm not in sales," are usually the ones that don't realize that they are trying to persuade somebody. Kids are doing that like ever since we're born. It's in our nature to try to align life the way that we feel best serves us. Yeah, if you're trying to, you know, if you're if you're an employee trying to convince your boss to give you a pay raise, you're trying to influence, persuade, move. If you're an entrepreneur and you're trying to get your your your employees to follow your vision of where you want to take your company, you're trying to persuade, you're trying to influence. I mean, if you're, like I said, an attorney trying to convince a judge that your client's innocent, you see everybody's in P—sales and persuasion in some sort. Your parent trying to raise your children, you know, to train them to be adults, you're trying to persuade, influence. So like everybody's doing this all the time, right? It's like one of the skills you have to have.

Now, I wanted to ask you—I've got a bunch of questions for you, man.

Let's do it. Okay, so maybe go over your background in Neuroscience. This is really important because I find a lot of people that are out there talking about persuasion, influence—I don't really have a background with the way the brain makes decisions, and I find that odd because my background's in Behavioral Science, and I'm like, if I didn't know all this stuff, like I couldn't do what I did as a salesperson or as a sales trainer. So tell us your background and and why you really are fascinated in that facet.

Yeah, I—no, this is when I was a kid, my mom asked me a question. She said, "Renee, look in this room and what does everybody have in common?" And I was looking at facial expressions and color, skin, and background. She said, "Renee, they all have a brain." If you understand how the brain works, life becomes just exponentially easier. And so I went and took that advice, and I said, "Okay, I I'm going to learn how the brain works." So I went to school for Behavioral neuroscience, and as I was doing that, I realized that there's two sides to that, and where the frustrating side of science was at the time in Psychology is summed up with one of my favorite psychologists of Martin Seligman. And they said that you—he he has a TED Talk where they asked him, they said, "You know, okay, Mr. Dr. Seligman, you got one word on this interview. I'm going to ask you a question; I just need one word." And and he goes, "Great, let's do it." And he goes, "So what is the state of Psychology today?" And he said, "Good." I go, "Okay, hold on a second. No, no, no, no, we I think we need a little bit more. We'll give you two words." Two words, the whole thing. And goes back and says, "Okay, so Dr. Seligman, what is the state of Psychology today?" And he said, "Not good." "Wait a minute. Okay, hold on." All right, let's give him three words, and does the whole thing. Dr. Seligman, tell us what uh, you know, what's the state of Psychology today? He said, "Not good enough." And I thought that that was so fascinating because at the time, psychology and behavioral neuroscience and all this stuff was about studying what was broken in the brain. You're studying psychosis and disease and issues and trauma and all that stuff. Nothing was done on human potential, and that's where the the whole concept of positive psychology came out was saying, "What are we what what are we capable of?" And that's where I started looking at saying, "Okay, what's the potentiality of this? How do I apply this—this research—to resolve a conflict? To sell. I was selling cookware. So how do I get it to close a deal? I I was 6'3" with a goatee and bald. How do I how do I reduce the stress level of me entering that room so that people feel safer with me?" So I was always on the application side of that, and so right now one of our partners is the co-founder of the Neuro Leadership Institute, and we geek out. He's 30 years in Neuroscience; I'm 30 years in applied neuroscience, and we go, "Okay, how does this work?" And he's like, "Okay, well, this is the research. How do you use that?" And he gives me that, and I give him this, and it's—I love that.

I think he said something important because, you know, when when I was in university, you know, my professors would, you know, they had the the theories and and the research, but not like how to apply it to in a sales situation, like, "Here's the right questions, here's how to use your tone, here's how to get the prospect to let their guard down so they emotionally trust you enough to tell you what's really going on," right? And so that's what I love doing is is taking the research and actually applying it to like real-life sales situations. Um, let's—I want to talk about body language in Persuasion. You know, I I find, you know, salespeople and companies always come to, and they're always like, "Hey, we need to get better at closing," and I'm like, "What do you mean better at closing?" They're like, "Well, we we we need to know how to close at the very end." I'm like, "Well, that's not when the prospect makes a buying decision. They don't make a decision to buy the car at the end when you use an option close and say, 'Do you want the red one or the blue one?'" Right? That's not when they decide to buy. If they say, "I want the blue one," that means that they've already decided before you even ask that question; otherwise, the other PR is like, "Well, I'm still looking around," right? And they give you an objection. The same is made in that conversation from taking that prospect from where they are now, you know, we call it the current state, to where they now see they can be—objective state—and what's the gap is all these new found problems. Your questioning ability, your tone, and your body language—if they can see you—even if they can't see your—as you know, your body language affects your tone, causes them to start to see they have—they didn't understand they had before. So I want you as a—you're obviously a body language expert as well—why is body language so important?

Well, if you think about it, one, you know, and I want to touch on something you said earlier too, which is the work you do. One of the things that's so powerful about it is the language choices that you make that—if to the untrained eye and ear—doesn't seem like it makes a difference, but those emotional responses and the triggers in the brain that are happening based on the choices and the of words that we use. And I watch your videos over and over because you master those those those phrases that are so critical. And the same is true with body language. If you if you go back to Dr. Albert Mehrabian, which is probably the most misquoted, misunderstood study of all time around, you know, words have 7% of impact—oh, 93—38%—yeah, 38 comes from tone of voice, and you know, 55% is body language or nonverbals. And you combine tone and body; you have 93% of the impact you make on people has nothing to do with the words. But it's really about the meaning that people associate to it. And so if if you're looking at what we're communicating when it comes to meaning, we—light travels faster than sound. And so I see you before I hear you. And if you're walking in and your soldiers are hunched, or you're not making eye contact, there's all of these subconscious cues that are being sent to this part of the brain called the reticular activating system that's like this radar and the amygdala that's looking for threat. It's looking at those little little underlying pieces that is constantly seeking congruency, and that's that's the piece that people don't understand, like, you know, we train people to be on stages, and they go, "Well, can you can you can you be effective on stage trembling?" And they say, "No." I said, "Well, hold on a second. Okay, so if I'm trembling and you see my hand tremble and I'm trembling and I say, 'Gosh, I'm so excited to be here. Uh, just the the the 2020 2025 plan is going to be great,' there—my words are saying it's great, but my body language is saying I'm shaking. And so there's an incongruency there. And so and they go, 'Well, you can't shake.' I said, 'No, watch—I'm shaking still.' And I go, 'Guys, as you know—um, talking about this is not easy because—um, I'm shaking because this actually means a lot to me. This means a lot to all of us, and all of you mean a lot to me.' And so now all of a sudden there's a congruency, and I'm okay with the shakes because now—into our conversation earlier—we have framed it, and we have owned the frame that surrounds the shaking, which means this means a lot. If I'm crying on stage, sometimes I get emotional. I say, 'Guys, I'm emotional because this means a lot.'"

Yeah, framing—you're raising—you're raising your status in the prospect's mind. It's so true. The survival part of your brain is uh an interesting creature in it's in itself, you know, because you could be walking across the street at a grocery store, right? And a woman yells like really, really loud, and instantly you're going to like, "Am I safe?" Your survival brain just reacts, right? It doesn't even hear the words she said; it just hears the tonality, right? So you're reacting, "Am I safe?" And then, you know, then our brain starts to like interpret the words, and then, you know, neocortex is like, "Oh, she's just telling her son to be careful crossing the street," you know? But it's interesting, you know, because we train a lot of companies and salespeople how to cold call as well, and and they they think it's like these magical words, which some of it is there, but I'm like, it's really in your tonality because if you sound like, "Hi, my name is—I'm with XYZ company. The reason why I'm calling you is—" well, you sound like everybody else cold calling them, and instantly their brain has a script to what to do to that because they've heard that before, right? So I have to interrupt that pattern because they don't have a script for that. So I quite interesting what you're talking about here. I 100%. And I love that too because you're pointing out there's there's—we can have an emotional response to something 5 to 5 seconds before we're consciously aware of it, and we will show that emotional response on our body before we even are KN—like, "Hey, something wrong." Like, "What do you mean? What's wrong? I'm fine." And then a minute later they're like, "Yeah, well, of course, yeah, something's wrong." It's like, "Well, I was giving it away earlier because there's that"—and this is where it gets really fascinating and scary at the same time—that there's us—like you and I are having a conversation, but there's another part of us that is monitoring constantly, you know? It's at system one and system two concept. And so I'm here with you, but there's another part of me that's just like looking around and, you know, and if we can calm that one that's looking around, that's where sales happen. It's it's keeping the prospect's brain engaged because, you know, most salespeople, especially like they go into a presentation, and the prospect starts to zone out thinking about like, "Oh, I got to pick up my kids today," or, "You know, I got to get this important assignment done by Friday," and all that does is they're not really listening to what you're doing, and then they have uncertainty. So when you try to close in that uncertainty, triggers objections, installs, and it's like, you know, all all these salespeople that come to us and they're just like, "I got to get better objection handling." I'm like, "Well, I can give you Band-Aids, no problem, but what if we talk you how to prevent most of the objections from happening in their brain?" Because to me, that would be a lot—it's a lot easier to sell when I prevent most of the objections from happening. Objection prevention, you know what I mean?

Amen. All right, see—see folks listening, that is a sales trainer talking right there.

Yeah, well, it's more about objection prevention than handling, you know. When I got an objection as a salesperson in the trenches, I I always for a split second I'm like, "Oh, what did I say? What did I not ask that triggered that reaction from the prospect?" 'Cu I'm always thinking like I'm the one causing the objections, not the prospect.

Yes. You know how I'm communicating. Um, and you're taking ownership to it. I love that. That's that's how you get—that's how you become the the the best when you when you figure out like, "Hey, you know, I'm responsible."

For my results, it's not the prospect's fault. It's not like my leads are bad; it's my communication skills. Right? Yes, you know what I mean. Okay. How philosophy? I want to talk about the relationship between body language and your tonality. What's that relationship? Why is it so important?

They, they, they both, both go hand in hand. Yeah, and there's so much, there's so much connection between the—this is the, the, the, the age-old Mind Body Connection, too, right? So then you—we know that how we feel, our mind in essence, affects our body. If we're sad, we're going to look that way. Then it came out that—is it asynchronous? Meaning, can my body affect my mind? And so if I might be feeling sad, but what if I stood confidently? Would that change the neurons firing? And absolutely it does.

And so this is where, where even Amy Cuddy wrote the book "Presence," and she did her great Ted Talk on, you know, instead of "fake it till you make it," "fake it till you become it." And what's happening is the research behind that basically says: if you're feeling sad, or let's say you're not feeling confident, or to your audience here, if you're doing, if you're doing a cold call, if you're in a call center, if you're making phone calls, your posture on that phone call, even though they can't see it, is 100% affecting the tone of your voice. Like we know this. We call somebody, you know, when you woke them up like, "Hey, uh, yeah, what's up? You sleeping? No, no, no, why?" And you know, they are laying in bed, barely have opened their mind yet, and there's no hiding it. We have all of those unconscious pieces that are coming through our tone of voice.

And you know, go back to Sales Training 101: put a mirror in front—why are we smiling? You know, is there something happening there? And if we can do that, all of the idiosyncrasies, all of the little nuances start to align, and the listener hears congruency. Again, that is the word we're trying to create. I'm happy, then look happy, and then you'll sound happy. And there's all of these things that come together to put the piece of the puzzle. When one piece is off, that's where people don't trust, and they might—they're not going to be the ones that go, "Well, his eyebrow moved to the left, and therefore there was an incongruency; therefore, we can't buy." They don't say that. They don't have the categories by which to intellectualize that process; they just feel the process.

It's a subconscious, yeah. It's uh—you—I always say your tone, your tone is how the prospect interprets the intention behind every question and everything you say. That's how they interpret why you're saying what you're saying or why you're asking. Like if I, if I went to, let's say my—I've got a 17-year-old son, right? And let's—do you have kids? I have—we have six. Yeah, between me and my wife. You're beating me, man. I only got five. Well done. Well done. Well done, Rene. So you got the, you got the plus one on the basketball team. So my son's 17, and let's say that he got arrested because he's going 105 in a 45 mph Kid Zone. I don't even know; let's just make something up. And so as a dad, I—let's say I walk into the jail, it's 1 in the morning, sat, I'm pissed. You know, I can walk in and I can communicate—I can get him defensive, but like, "I'm so disappointed in you. I can't believe you did something like that." See my tone and my, my arms are out here, and as you know, what is my son going to do? Defense. He's going to get—well, yeah, you didn't understand. But if I come in and I simply change my tonality into more of a concern tone, a tone that shows EMP—I put my hand on my chest and I say, "I'm so disappointed in you. Why would you do that?" Now what does my son do? Yeah, no, he can't—there's nothing to defend. He lets his guard down. He knows I'm still upset and disappointed, but he knows I love him.

I do this example where I walk the room—uh, another course called Engag—it's more on trust and teamwork—and I'll have a handful of markers, and they're sitting in a circle around me. I said, "So what if I walked in the room and every time I spoke, and I'll just launch a marker at somebody. You watch them," you know, and then I'll launch it over here, and then I pretend to throw the third one, but the whole role goes like this: I didn't even throw it, but your body and your mind was waiting for me to throw something, so you aren't listening to what I'm saying; you're waiting to defend yourself. And if you're that speaker, and this is where it comes down to what you're saying—if we are, have a even a history of being that person, and we walk in the room, they're already defending something that's coming. And part of our job is to be somebody that's easy to listen to, which is really, really hard. It's getting them to let their guard down. Whether you're speaking on stage, it's because there—you know, as you know, as soon as you walk up there, they're picking up on social cues from you based on, based on your, your tonality, your body language, what you're saying, and it causes their brain to either, you know, go into fight or flight mode where they start getting on their phone—just another speaker going to the bathroom, right—or triggers enough curiosity where they want to engage, and they're just like, "What's going on? This is interesting," right? Even as a speaker, especially in sales, if you're selling one-to-one, it doesn't really matter. I always say your, your facial expression, even your facial expressions are like the remote control to your tone, right? So like, you know, my, my second career, I was in B2B Enterprise level sales—something like debt belief Services. I'm calling like large companies, you know, Fortune 1000 to probably the top 5,000 companies, and you know, even on the phone cold calling, you know, I still had to, you know, in certain circumstances, you, you change your fa—look, I'm not—hold on, walk me back. What did you mean when you said you're having issues with like the debt? See, that's a confused tone. My facial expression shows that I'm confused now. They can't see that, right? But as you know, Rene, try having a confused tone with a straight face. Yeah, no. Yeah, it's imposs—it's so like the, the, the—wait, here's an fun example. If you're listening to this and you can try this—like we call it a neuro—create a neurotraffic jam—because your brain is designed to work in a congruent fashion, and you know, I've got leaders that will do micro-expression stuff, and they're like, "Well, can you get me to stop doing that?" I'm like, "Well, do you believe in what you're saying?" There he goes, "Well, then no," that's the response you want. "How about we talk about something you believe in first, and then that'll magically change." But if we say, okay, if we—l—of our eyebrows are curtains, so you can open the curtains, which is really nice things, just like open them up, and you see my eyes, "Hey, how you doing?" But try closing them once, like close your curtains really hard, so that means like scrin your eyes like that, and now try to smile at the same time. It's just weird, and they don't go together. And so, yeah, so there's a lot of—and you don't have to be a body language expert. This is what I hope you guys that are listening—you don't have to be an expert to understand it; you just have to start listening to it and paying attention to what's going on.

So true. I always say, listen to what the prospect means, not just what they say. Those are—it can be two different things. Like if I lean in and ask like a commitment question, like to CL, "Do you feel like this could be the answer for you?" And they're like, "Yeah," well, a lot of say people like, "Okay, great," and they're ready to, you know, assume the close here, but what I just heard is uncertainty. What I heard is, "You seem a bit uncertain when I asked that. What's, what's behind that?" Well, "I'm not sure about—" See, I, I'm hearing uncertainty. I'm listening to what they mean, not just what they say, because I'm reading their tone, right? Gold, absolute gold. And that's such a great example, too, that if they're so stuck on making a sale, they're losing sight of all of the cues that are going to guide them there or guide them away. That's the other piece, too—like sometimes we shouldn't be closing a deal, and that's totally fine. Like I remember I was told two big lessons when I, when I got cut for my basketball team going in, uh, in college, my sophomore year. I asked an executive, "What's the one thing I need, need to do, do to be in their shoes when I get older?" And he looked at me and smiled, and he said, "You learn how to sell. If you learn how to sell, you'll always be employed." And I was like—and this guy ran a $25 billion company. And then the other piece was, you know, "Build a career, don't make a sale." And that's what you're talking about there—is that piece of really listening to what's going on. 100%, because you, you make sales because you listen to what they mean, not just what they say. You lose sales because you don't listen to what they mean; you assume that you, you want it to mean something when, in reality, you can tell by their tone they're not on board. So I need to learn what their concern is, help them overcome it, and then loop back around and close the deal.

Now you talk a lot about hand and arm movements, um, and how that affects how people perceive you. Maybe elaborate on that.

Yeah, so there—if you look at—and one of our videos went crazy viral—26 million views—of just making one movement where you get somebody on stage, and their, their hands will be by their sides, and I then I'll stand next to them and I say, "Okay, so notice who I'm paying—who are you paying attention to?" And I'll put my hands in the position you have them—right there, right? You're right above your belly button, and in this sort of ready position, and but between your belly button and your eyes is what we call the influence zone. You had another great name for that, uh, place. And so it's just Z—the trust zone, right? And so you're in there—what it shows and it tells the brain, "Oh, this person is about to do something. They're confident; they're ready for the game. I can throw them a pass; I can ask them a question; they're engaged," versus hands down—you're not—and the brain is following those different elements. And so then you look at even the studies that they did on Ted Talks, and they looked at the top quartile tops TED Talks and the bottom ones, and the, uh, bottom ones got an average of 131,000 views, and they used about 250, some 237, I believe the number was, hand gestures. And the top TED Talks had an average of 4.3 million views. So look at the difference—131,000 to 4.3 million—that's a massive difference, and they used 465 hand gestures. And so when you look at the science—I did a whole podcast on hand gestures—and there's several different things: one is we paint pictures with our hands, and so we're watching—people are watching us doing—even how you and I use them right now, with whether it's sequencing or looking back, whatever it is that we do, we're painting pictures for them. So when we remove our hands, a couple things happens: comprehension goes way down, engagement goes way down. But now the way hand gestures serve us is that we use them as cues for memory. And so we're using our own hand gestures to even draw upon our own memory. And so it's like, "Man, what was that one thing?" And we're, we're using, you know, you know, even scratching our head—like there's all sorts of things that are causing us to use memory. So hand gestures are huge.

Yeah, I always say, you know, to sales or companies that you're—you're like a conductor at the orchestra, right? So your hand gestures can control thought processes; it can control how they perceive you, as, as you talk about it, controls your tone and pacing out a long-winded question. You know, a lot of people always ask me like, "Why do you always have a pen in your hand?" And so what I always tell the, the story of is when I got into sales, my, my first job was door-to-door sales and what—college—21, 22, and I hired this tonality, uh, coach from Hollywood, uh, that trains a lot of well-speakers, uh, Matthew McConaughey is one of his clients, Leonardo DiCaprio, Julie Roberts, all—and he's like, "You got to slow down. You ask your questions too fast; you don't, you don't give your, you don't give them enough time to internalize what you're asking." And so he gave me a pen. He's like, "I want you literally like imagine you're, you're a conductor and you're leading an orchestra, right? So you're going to pace out your questions with this pen to kind of control your, your sequencing." So when I ask a question, I learn how to like slow down my tone—more verbal pausing, more verbal pacing—like, "Okay, why is this so important to you now, though, right?" See, I'm now—I'm emphasizing now, like it's now, right now—timing issue—and I verbal pause right before that word because I want their brain to think about now, not why is this, or I could be like, "Why is this so important to you now? Now," I just forced their brain to focus on whatever this is, you know. But a lot of times you can, you, you can use a pen, you can use your hand to kind of as a salesperson, help you kind of pace out and slow down.

I think it's, you know, what I like about your use of pens, too, is—so I don't use PowerPoint either—and so I've always have an easel pad, a whiteboard, or something on stage with me, and they're like, "Well, they—there, there's 3,000 people." I'm like, "I just need to sometimes just draw a line in a circle." But I love the pen—like you're ready to show, you're ready to train me on something; you're ready to show me an illustration, and the—it's going to—and the beautiful thing about pen is that it's custom for me in that moment, and it's not something like the—if, if you were to draw the same picture, but one have a PowerPoint image ready versus having a pen and draw a napkin presentation, the napkin is so much more effective because there's zero sales resistance to that. You know, it's like I give the example of you're at a dinner table, and somebody says, "So what do you do?" And you pull out a laptop? No. Yeah, no. Or even you pull out a prospectus—remember those things, right?—start flipping through that prospectus, or you pull out a napkin. You say, "Well, it's kind of like this," and you drew this a couple, couple drawings, and all of a sudden it's—there's no sales resistance to it; it goes right past the parts of the brain that, that wouldn't want to hear it, and there's engagement, and it's custom—you're creating brand new for me.

Well, it's authentic, right? So I always tell salespeople like when you're building out your presentations like you, you have to keep the prospect engag—you can't just like talk for five or 10 minutes straight and show a bunch of slides because when they start to see slides, as you say, it's almost like the guard goes up because they have a script for about, about what's about to happen—like the prospect already knows what that means, right? They're not—they've been around the block. So it's almost like, you know, taking your PowerPoint that's, you know, 60 slides and woodl it down to like three or four or, or whatever—drawn on the napkin. And even when you ask questions, you know, I always tell salespeople like, "Look, you can't—you've got your, you know, you've got your NPQ questions on your script, but you're never going to stick to that 100%—you're going to stick to each stage because you understand the psychology of what you're trying to draw out of the prospect and help them, and you understand—but I have to be flexible enough to be able to change the next question based on the answers my prospects are giving me. And when I include their answers in my questions, they, you know, they start to trust me a lot more that I understand their unique situation." And I always say, "Prospects always buy from the salesperson or company who they feel they trust can get them the best result, not just because they like you. That's like a secondary thing—you love Grandma, but you're not necessarily buying from Grandma. If a complete stranger—you feel that sales—sell the same thing—can get you a better result, you're buying from the stranger."

It's so true. It's so true. I love it. I—and I think your brand—I look—I like it for your brand; it's like you're holding a pen. I'm not talking to Jeremy—you got, got the pen now. I got, I got another question for you because I, I, uh, Brad, Brad was talking about you a couple, couple months ago, and I was up at the, the offices and, and LightSpeed, and then I saw what he wrote on your website. How did you take Bradley—who's the founder of, of LightSpeed Virtual Training—who's, who's a speaker as well—and turn him from a talker to a speaker? What did you do? I have to know.

So, so Brad—Brad's first—got an incredible brand, and I, I—and I don't even think his brand captures the power of who he is—in the sense of one, he's such a smart businessman, right? He, he gets business; he gets selling; he understands packaging; he was a, he was one of the first—if he—I'd say he's the first person to really take the greats and put them on video and video training and created LightSpeed with that. And when I first met Brad, we did an event in New York, and, uh, we got on a Zoom, and he's like, "So tell me, tell me what you do." And 12 hours later on Zoom—that was our first meeting—and we're talking about storytelling and the concept of what we call a TI—down, and tie-down is really the—so the model we train on is what we call frame, message, tie-down, and that, that sequence is what we drill over and over and over again. What the book covers in detail—each, each of those has a chapter—and then we go into application of each one of those. And so storytelling is a great framing device because we can, you know, like one of my favorite, you know, if I want to, if I want to preempt the price objection, I will inter—I will sprinkle in this story all the time. May—and I'll just give it to you right now: have you ever heard of Alan Shepard? Uh, his name sounds familiar. He was the first American to enter space—was an astronaut. Okay, maybe I, maybe I haven't heard—unless I've been, you know, I used to watch Jeopardy as a kid—maybe it's coming back—it might have been on there, right? So it's May 15th, 1961, and imagine him sitting on top of this massive rocket called the, the, uh, the Redstone Rocket, going on the Freedom Seven mission. And so as the first American—which means he's sitting on a hunk of this big hunk of metal—hunk of metal full of rocket fuel—with engineers going, "We think it's going to work this time." And so a reporter gets to go up to him and say, "Mr. Shepard, you're about to be launched off into space—like the world is watching; we want to know what's going through your mind." And his answer will forever go down in history when he says, "The fact that every part of this rocket was built by the lowest bidder." And—and so such a beautiful story of history to be able to remind people of two points in the transaction: one is the moment of purchase—I call it a moment because it's a fleeting moment—and in that moment to purchase, we're thinking about interest rates; we're thinking about payments; we're thinking about how do we cut corners and lower costs. What we forget about is the time of performance—it's in the future—when that product has to do everything that we need it to do. And I guarantee you that he was not thinking, "Did we buy the cheapest material? Were we on budget?" He was saying, "You better have bought the best for me because I need to get back"—he's thinking about the result rather than price or cost. Yeah, and in

The moment of performance, right? And because if you, in that moment of performance, we go, and what we'll do is the close. We'll say, "You know, you know, Mr. Prospect, right now you're in that moment of purchase, just like Mr. Shepard, you know, when they, when the whole team was building it, right? And before that, but my job is to get us thinking of time of performance. And is this product, service, whatever we're selling, going to do what you need it to do? And from what you told me, these things were really important to you. And now here's the best part: to do those things, for working with my team. If I wanted to be that person to be the lowest, I'd have to hire different people, and they'd be a lot less expensive than the ones that I have right now. But I think it's a lot easier to explain my price one time than to have to apologize in that moment of performance, that time of performance, to you forever. And so there's, I mean, you said it right, it's it's all about reframing the prospect's way of thinking.

So first of all, like from the very first questions I would ask, my whole job is, I have to get them to let their guard down. A, B, I have to immediately get them into results-based things, away from price or cost-based thinking. I don't want to be commoditized, right? Let's say a prospect comes back and says, "Well, can you give us a cheaper price?" I might then say, "Well, is is price the most important thing to you, or actually getting XYZ result?" And see, now I'm like trying to, like, like a comparative frame, like it's either going to be price or the end result, so they have to pick the end result. But even for my very first questions, like if I'm a marketing agency and let's say I have an inbound lead, right, and they're they want to grow their business and and get get a higher quality lead, the first questions I'm asking: "Okay, so it looks like you booked on the calendar about looking at getting, you know, possible help and and getting a higher quality lead to scale the company, right?" Well, if I'm a marketing agency, I'm not selling leads or branding; I'm selling them the results of what the leads and branding does for them, which is to scale the company. So immediately I'm getting him into that result-based thinking, away from price or cost-based thinking. I'm always doing that, you know what I mean? Love that. And so that the framing is what a lot of people are good at—storytelling, like—and Brad had so many stories; I mean, he was storytelling, storytelling. And so I said you have to add what's called the tie-down to the end of that, which is answers the question of what this means to you. And I'll give you an example.

So one example that we use is uh the story of Janice. And Janice was an executive that I worked with, and she worked for a $200 billion privately held company—you can imagine the largest privately held company in the world—and they were coming to have be uh become president of one of the business units; they had about 84 business units at the time. And the interview is about 9 hours. I said, "Renee, can you help her?" I said, "Absolutely." Now Janice is an MBA, PhD, overall badass, carries herself beautifully; I mean, she is incredible executive. So we set her up in a mock panel, and I put three people in front of her, put her in a chair, I sat off to the side to watch facial expression, timing, sequencing, all the things that you and I would look for. And first question we asked her was, "Tell us something you're proud of." And she looked at us, or she looked and hitched her coat, and she answered like most Executives were taught, which were short, concise, and to the point, and she said, "I got straight A's my last year in school—one of my proudest moments." So now, well, they looked at me, "What'd you think?" I said, "Well, there was no frame." So now when no frame is provided, my brain biologically and neurologically has to create one to understand what was going on. So I started framing her. I said, "Oh, so you're straight A's your last year in school, so you're a procrastinator? Are you going to procrastinate for us as well?" She looks at me like I'm crazy. I said, "Oh, I'm sorry, did Mommy and Daddy pay for school, so you didn't have to work that hard?" Yeah, you you you're without framing it, you can you can interpret it any way you want to; your brain's gonna, everybody in the room is going to interpret it a different way. Absolutely. So now she's got a tear in her eye, and I said, "Janice, I didn't mean those things," I go, "But you didn't frame it, so I have no idea. I do know it was important to you, wasn't it?" And she nodded her head. I said, "Why?" And watch what happens when the frame comes in. And she takes her a minute and a half to compose herself, and she looks at me and she says, "When you've been told you're stupid your entire life by adults, you tend to believe them. And something happened my last year in school where I said, 'Either I'm going to believe them forever, or I'm going to do something about it,' and I did something about it." It's so true. No, it's totally different. Yeah, it's framing. It's even, you know, like, I mean, you know, as a speaker, you can't just go up there and and just like talk about your story, because then you're more focused on you than them, but you still kind of got to take them down your hero's journey, so they can hero's journey, so they can relate to you, right? They don't look like, "Oh, Renee was born with these skills," right? So just the way to frame it, you know, the way I frame it is like, you know, I'll tell you, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my story, because my background relates to what is necessary if you want to take your sales ability to a level most people don't believe they can, never dream about. Now I framed why I'm telling the story. Absolutely. And you claim and own that frame. So now the tie-down is where the magic happens. And so here the frame is that I was told I was stupid, and then so people are what that creates—the frame creates emotion, and it creates that peace. And I'll ask people, "Have I influenced them?" They're like, "Yeah." I'm like, "You haven't influenced them yet; you have moved them emotionally, which is the precursor to influence." The influence happens at the tie-down. And so I'll give you all three. So if I, I'll break them up one more time: "Tell us something you're proud of." Start with with, I'll start with the the message in the here and now: "Got straight A's my last year in school." Your audience has to create the frames; we don't know; it's a crapshoot; hopefully maybe they agree with you, maybe they don't. If I start with a frame and I say, "Well, I was told I was stupid," and I tell the whole thing, people are going to be left with, "Wow, that was powerful. Who's next? Who's Next?" The interview, and so no actions taken. And so we have to have a clear IO, which would be an influence objective, like a commitment objective in sales, right? But an influence objective, and the influence objective in an interview is to get the job. So I have to add that tie-down at the end. And here's all three when they come together: "Tell us something you're proud of." Start with frame: "Well, unfortunately, growing up I was surrounded by a lot of adults that told me I wasn't real smart, and when adults speak to you that way, you tend to act that way, and I didn't do real well in school. But something happened my last year in school where I looked myself in the mirror and I said, 'Either I'm going to believe them forever, or I'm going to do something about it.' So I went out and got the help that I needed, put my nose to the grindstone, and I'm I'm proud to tell you," message: "I got straight A's my last year in school." Now it closes it, tied down: "Now Jeremy, I'm assuming if I get do get a chance to work with you and your team, there's going to be times where our backs should be against the wall, we're going to be facing some pretty big pressures, maybe seemingly insurmountable challenges, but I promise you this: if I get a chance to be on your team, I will be out there next to you, if not in front, overcoming those challenges in the same way I overcame them in my own personal life." Frame, except this time for you and for your team. Yeah, you're tying it down to to, you know, make sense in the prospect's mind why you just said what you said. There it has to loop back around, because at the end of what I do, after I tell, go through the hero's journey, like I started here and then went here, then I'm like, "Now why did I tell you my story? Because no none of you in here care about my story; you only care about whose story—your story, right? We're humans, right? Behavior science 101. The reason why I told you that is, you know, I'm not like a, you know, an influencer that has millions of, you know, tens of millions of followers, and in fact, I'm just like you, you know, and I touch somebody on the site because I want to connect emotionally with the audience, right? And then I then I go over like, you know, I I wasn't born out of my mother's womb with advanced questions. Goes, 'Raise your hand if you're born out your mother's womb with advanced questions.' Goes, 'Oh, nobody.' I wasn't born with advanced tone, I wasn't born with advanced objection-preventing handling. Raise your hand. So what does that mean to you? If a kid who grew up in the middle of Missouri, you know, can learn those skills, then you know what does that mean for you? So it's it's all the tie-down. So good, man. Love that. It's so good. And you hit and you hit the right phrase where you said, "What that means to you is," and the reason I share that with you is, yeah, dude. Hey, man, I'm, you know me, dude, I'm I'm always trying to learn from you guys up there on stage. I just I watch people just their whole stage thing and I'm like, "Oh, I wonder wonder why I put his hand on his chest there." That makes sense; he was trying to connect, you know. I'm like, I'm probably like, yeah, geek. That's what makes that's what makes you such a good trainer, man. You be a good student; that's that's rare these days, by the way. So I I really commend you on that. You and I both, man, we're I'm like a sponge, you know, trying to soak up knowledge. Okay, so where can where can our where can our community, which is sales, business owners, entrepreneurs, sales leaders, where can they learn more about what you do?

So Instagram is learnwithRenee, L E A R N, Renee is one E, um, and we do a new video a day; it's all educational microlearning content, um, and so you can follow a lot of these principles on, obviously the book is Amplify Your Influence, website is meetRenee.com, not me a—that's a whole another business, I'm assuming—but meetRenee.com, and uh those would be the best places, and and uh soon something I, yeah, so yes, perfect. Everybody go buy his book right now. Look, if you if you want to learn more about sales, persuasion, influence, you really want to study body language, tonality, all these frames that we just barely started mentioning here, so just go to amplifybook.com, right there, uh buy the book. Look, if you can't if you don't have the funding for the 20-some dollars, let me and Renee know; we'll give you like a GoFundMe page or something so you can sell more. We're just joking; they know I'm sarcastic, but go get that book. Look, if you want to sell more, you you got to learn more, right? You know, Renee, I'll end on this: salespeople, the number one question ask me: "How do how do I gain more confidence in sales?" Well, I'm like, "Easy: you want to gain more confidence in sales, you got to gain more skill level, because your confidence level will always go down to where your current skill level is, right? How can you have a high confidence level in anything with a low skill level? Makes no sense." I love that. Can I add something to that on that, just to to the other piece too, is because you're absolutely right, the skill set, the skill level is number one, but the other side to that too is you have to let go of confidence being a precursor, because you're never confident at first. Confidence is a reward given to you for showing the courage to try it anyways, even without it. And you go out and you try this new close, you go out and you do some new scripting, and you go out there and you ask for the deal, you do the body language, all the stuff that Jeremy's training you on, and you do it, and life comes along afterwards and goes, "Nice job. Here's an ounce of confidence," and then you go do it again, you get another ounce of it, and by the time you have all this confidence built up, you don't need it anymore because you've been doing the work, you've been doing the stuff, and the results are there, and then magically people like, "Wow, you're so lucky." You worked for it, like you said; they're not born; we are made. How does a neurosurgeon gain confidence in brain surgery? Because they freaking learn how to do it before they even did their first brain surgery. That's how it is. It's like, it's like, get—how does an engineer be confident in the bridge he builds or she builds? Because they learned how to do it; they learned how to build the bridge, you know. All right, this was awesome. Uh, definitely want you to be back on here. Let's hook you, kind of hook up five, six months from now; next time you're in the Phoenix area, let us know; we'll bring you in; we'll have like a live interview. This is an amazing conversation. All right. All right, everybody stay out of trouble; go get that book; we'll see you soon.