Debunking the Myths of Sales with What is Actually True, According to Research, w/Lorenzo Bizzi

You are listening to the art of sales. Everyone sells every day and this is your source for conversational realworld sales and prospecting methods that you are comfortable using and that get results. You'll help people buy instead of pushing them into being sold. Here's your host, Art Subject. My entire sales and training career, I've questioned a lot of the conventional sales advice that has been repeated so many times out there and things that have been widely believed to be factual. And often I went against that advice with common sense. In fact, over the years, I have made fun of and blown up many of the myths of sales. And if you followed me a while, you know the things I'm talking about. Always be closing. You need to love rejection. For every no you hear, you're that much closer to a yes. And all that other garbage. Well, it turns out there's somebody in the academic world who has a similar outlook towards sales and did something about it. So he looked at the common myths of sales, studied them, collected research, and wrote a book, not an academic textbook that would make your eyes glaze over. He wrote a conversational entertaining book full of examples that we as salespeople can relate to. Dr. Lorenzo Busy is author of the book Myths Versus Science of Selling: When Research Reveals the Opposite of Common Belief. And that book's been in the top 10 of Amazon sales and selling techniques category each week for eight months in a row. And that's not easy to do. He is a professor at California State University Fullerton. He's a speaker and a consultant. Dr. Bizzy, welcome. — Thank you very much, Art. It's a pleasure to be here. have this conversation with you and try to get her to dispel some of the popular myths and signals. And I I've got to tell you for the audience out there, I get at least one podcast pitch a day. Most are absolutely horrible. And Lorenzo contacted me somewhere probably 3 4 months ago and I was a little bit intrigued. I didn't respond right away and he was persistent and he followed up with a good message and it was interesting and I finally got back with him and the timing wasn't right and I told him to contact me in a couple months which he did and that's part of the reason why he's here today in addition to having some great content in the book. So, speaking of the book, there's so much in this book that we could probably do an episode on each chapter. But today, we're going to scratch the surface and get you, our listeners, to really hopefully open up your minds to some of the things that you've heard about sales and maybe believe, maybe even use and hopefully get you to question that. So, first a little bit of context. So tell us about you and let's even go back before you became a professor. Tell us about yourself. — Yes, Art. So as the audience probably can tell from my accent, I'm Italian. I was born and raised in Italy. I stayed there for about 25 years and then I moved to Canada where I got my PhD and then eventually I came to United States and I've been here for like 13 years. So as I was born and raised in Italy, I went to a university there in Milan that for the first time exposed me to what academia was. But you see art, academia in Europe and especially in Italy was very different from the way it is here. And professors of business are not only just professors of business but a lot of times they get involved in a lot of consulting activities for large companies for the government as well. So I was approached directly since I was a good student back then. When I was still a student, so very early on I was approached by the university and I was asked do you want to be involved in some consulting activities that we do here at the university very large clients government clients or multinational corporations are really big clients I thought it was fascinating so I started doing it and getting involved so my first career before I became a professor and I still do it because I have advised for perhaps over a hundred companies is related to the consulting part. This I'm going to tell you art really influenced the book and influenced the way in which I see sales. Because if you think about it, a consultant somehow is selling an idea. You're selling a recommendation. You're

still trying to exercise a form of influence. So a lot of the topics discussed in the books actually build on my consulting experience in which when you're making a recommendation, a final presentation, you are doing but trying to influence the final decision of a buyer and you're trying to convince them to take a certain course of action instead of another course of action. Selling, especially in the B2B world, is very similar. You have to build an argument that is very grounded, logical, clear, specific to convince the buyer of a certain course of action. In that case is to purchase a product. But I found a lot of similarities between the way in which consultants work and try to exercise influence sales professionals especially in the B2B world try to sell their products to companies. And that's where I got a lot of ideas for my book. So, as listeners of the show know, and the tagline of the show is everyone sells. You of course are as a professor, you're selling your ideas to students. Hope hopefully they're going to take action on them. You're selling your ideas to your client, your recommendations. Hopefully, they're going to take action. And as you're working with clients, undoubtedly you saw a lot of things that you looked at and said, "That just doesn't make sense. " So I'm making an assumption here and that may have been part of the inspiration to come up with the myths as the main topic. Yeah. So the general idea is that today especially nowadays with AI coming into this world writing a book or generally writing content has become extremely easy. So everybody can go online, everybody can write a book, everybody can create high value content. When the barriers to write content become so low, what is the only way in which people can get attention from an audience to exaggerate? So as I was trying to yes sell my ideas or most importantly look at the work that a lot of researchers have done throughout the years and I was comparing it with what a lot of people say nowadays especially online. I would find that there is a gap and that a lot of times people try to exaggerate claims to say this is the one thing that is going to make you rich after one week. an enormous amount of exaggerations because you know if you want an audience to listen to you well you tell the audience what they want to hear. This sometimes is different from what truth is measured by years and years of rigorous research shows. And so I said I'm going to write a book in which I take all the times in which I read a popular recommendation and it was different from what research was saying and I will try to build a chapter and raise the attention of the reader and hopefully stimulate the reader to understand what really works and in which particular situation. And the goal art I'm gonna tell you right away because it's not just you know this academic arrives things that he can tell us what works and what does not. Actually that's not the point of the book. book is to stimulate the reader's minds. The general idea is that if you tell someone to do something in sales anywhere they're not going to do it. It's not enough to tell someone to do something for these people to actually take action and implement change. It's important that you involve them. stimulate their minds. And that's what the book does. The idea of creating a contrast between popular advice versus research finding is not to say, well, research dominates and tells what's truth is so that you're forced to think. You're first to reflect and then as you're reflecting then you make the recommendation yours and then you're more likely to implement it in real life and that to me is how we can create real change which there I want to comment on. First thing is, wait a minute, you're telling me that there are people online, especially on LinkedIn, that will give sales advice and they might exaggerate it a little bit. And the other is, spoiler alert here, Lorenzo just gave you the last chapter where he said, "Let me give you the secret of sales. " And I'm, of

course, I'm reading it. Okay, what is the secret of sales? and he goes, "The secret is there is no secret. My goal here is to get you to think. " And I think that's where this differs from a lot of sales books and there are so many out there. And I was careful not to do that in mind. But so many will give the impression that this is the only way to do something. And what this book does and what you will if you go in with this attitude, this is how you're going to get the most out of it. You're going to look at everything he says and start questioning like we should any belief. Why do I have this belief? So with that, let me start getting into let's start unpacking some of the material here that I found interesting. So let me reference a fellow academic Robert Shelini wrote what many consider to be the gold standard in influence and persuasion a book called influence. And since then — several follow-up books that he's written and marketers and salespeople have adopted these principles and many including me quote him often. However, you say that using influence principles can actually be detrimental and result in the opposite effect, creating resistance and distrust in a prospect or buyer. She'll talk about that. So, by the way, this is a fantastic book that you mentioned and I cite that book a lot of times as well. The key point is that when we talk about influence tactics, there's many of them. Some of them are very effective and less effective. And what is really important is to understand which ones are more effective in which situations and which ones are not. Rational influence tactics. These are fantastic. These are phenomenal. In the end, it's very important to appeal to the rationality of a buyer to make the buyer feel more comfortable with that decision. You need to help them understand their problems better. This is a point that I always stress and it's so incredibly important. You don't need to show that you understand their problems, but most importantly, you need to help them understand better their own problems. And if they problems, then they're going to want to do business with you. And you need to use rational forms of appeal in order to be able to create a solid, a strong, a structured argument that can create a conducive conversation. So the rational forms of appeal, the rational influence tactics, these are by far the most important and by far the strongest. Now we go into the realm of the emotional influence tactics. Wait, can you can I stop there? So what would be some examples of rational tactics? of the rational you're for example helping to break the causes the root causes of a problem down and then create an idea of what could be the potential real causes in your scenario. So that's important. For example, when we go to the problem understanding, typical recommendations is that you listen to what the client is saying. You're repeating saying, you're paraphrasing giving validation to what the client is saying. These are good, but they're very shallow. To really understand the problem, we must break the problem down and to go back into the cause or roots. And that we have to develop a very precise and solid understanding of the problem space. When we are recommending a solution to a problem, we have to be able to link the solution itself to the root causes of the problem and specify the exact conditions in which the solution is likely to transfer to specific effects depending on the conditions. So it is a form of structured decision making. This is something that somehow the consultants do themselves. Hence, that's why I build on my consulting experience to write the book. You need to create clarity by breaking a problem down a very clear problem space. A lot of times when people discuss about problems, there are no clear boundaries. There's a lot of confusion and our goal is to reduce that confusion. A key point that I have in the book. All right. information facts. A lot of times even the use of information is very manipulative in sales and you're not able to actually provide reliable, accurate and solid information that informs each of the points you need to develop in order to provide a solid recommendation. So that's what rationality is really deductive. Yeah. So, so to be clear, the rationality part would be getting them talking about the facts and attaching numbers to those facts. Not just that, breaking the cause of the problem. Logics and facts are important because facts without logic is not going to be effective. So, logic combined by facts

is what makes everything absolutely strong. And I also want to say another point that is absolutely essential. It's not just about information and facts associated with say the benefits of the product versus the costs of the product. It's not about that. The most important point and this I believe is the number one recommendation that I like the most is not much to convince benefits versus costs but it's to reduce the perceived uncertainty by the buyers. See human beings the number one reason why they don't purchase is not because they're not understand that the benefits are superior to the costs but it's because there is high level of uncertainty associated with the benefits versus the cost. That's where rationality is powerful because it reduces uncertainty. But a lot of sales recommendations rather than reducing uncertainty they leverage uncertainty. they don't understand well this well then let's dig on it because there could be a way for us to be able to close no so it's very important to reduce the perceived level of uncertainty and this is where rationality comes in the equation what a lot of emotional influence tactics they perhaps could be effective in the short term but remember that emotions bias the way in which we think okay so even if I have a negative emotion or I have a positive emotion that could somehow distort the buying and the decision making process of a buyer and that could potentially make it less likely to close. I'm not saying that they don't work out. For example, inspiration. Inspiration is a classic form of influence tactic. I try to build on emotions and stories and metaphors to create a connection with the buyers. These can work well when combined with rationality, but when they're used to replace rationality, then their impact can be heavy. So, I'm hereby not saying that rationality and emotion shouldn't be used. They can be used and they should be used when they're combined together. But if I only use the emotional impact, even when you're saying compliments to the buyers or trying to build personal rapport or trying to disclose personal information to the get closer, it can work out whenever it's combined with rational influence tactics. if it is used to replace rational influence tactics because I do not have a rational reason why someone has to purchase the product in this case that they're less effective. — You're really blowing up the myth then that so many preach which is people buy based on emotion sell emotion. — emotions. I'm not saying that they don't, but you if you only leverage that and you try to distort their decision making, that's when it's bad. I'm not saying for instance that the use of stories is not important. It's extremely important. When you're having a sales conversation, you must use stories. You must use stories because you know numbers and facts, they're dry. People forget those things, right? But the important thing is that the story is only to be utilized to raise the attention of an audience. So I get your attention and I build a connection because I use a story. Once I get your attention with the story, then I use it with facts and real information and I build my argument in the most rational possible ways. So use emotions to get ears. attention and then use logic to convince people. And that's when you combine them together that you're going to have the best possible effect. — By the way, listeners, when you get the book, you will notice that the doctor uses a story in every single chapter to start. — Exactly. — And virtually the same point, you use the story at the beginning because they're really powerful to create a connection. But then what do I do after? I go after I say so man let's really talk about the reasons why this works and then I try to convince the audience with the reason also because you see a lot of times beautiful stories are not really representative of what the real buying situation is. So a lot of times very famous the professionals use a very wonderful anecdote and anecdotes are really powerful. that might not really represent what happens in a real situation. So that's where

research becomes important because research though sometimes it may be dry if it's not explained well but research is nothing but seeing the experience of thousands and thousands of sale professions combine them together and see really what works and what does not work in any specific situation instead of just looking at one beautiful powerful anecdote that yes I remember it. Yes, it's strong, but it doesn't really reflect what can work in the different situations that we face every day. — Speaking of antidote anecdotes, one that I loved in your book comes when you're talking about the myth of how competition makes sales reps better. And you say, "Forget about that. " You say, here's the anecdote or it's a quote or it's a truth. It is desiring to be better than your previous self that really matters. I love that. Talk about that. — This is a fantastic point because humans have different types of motivations and unfortunately a lot of systems in sales tend to reward comparing yourselves with others. Try to be better here. That's okay. That's normal. You see your sales quarter. You see what the others are doing. But this unfortunately does not create a stronger motivational effect on us and does not make us better. The idea of comparing yourself with others in the long term lowers your motivation. It can be effective in the short term but in the long term always comparing yourself with others it does not make you like sales more. What we really have to consider the problem a lot of times in sales is that people stay there for just a few years and then they leave because they realize that well this is not as fun as I thought. We have to make sure that the job of sales is fun. I mean this sounds a little bit odd but if you think about it the main reasons why people fail at sales is because after a couple of years they say this is not worth it. You got rejected all the time. It's terrible. It's really tough. The grind is really difficult. It is important to sell to the buyers, but it's very important also to nurture the right mindset so that we enjoy our jobs at sales. Because if sales, then we're going to be able to do them better. And a way to enjoy them is not to compare yourself with others, but rather your former self. As long as you see that there's growth, the growth is intrinsically rewarding. You don't make your happiness depends on others. You make it depend only on yourself. And if yourself, then the effort is better. The effort is easier. Doing painful things hurt less. So getting rejected a million times, getting ghosted prospect that they don't reply to you or they're rude sometimes. This hurts a little bit less if we focus of getting better than our former selves. Well, if we focus on getting better than other, guess what? All these activities are going to be painful. And effort increases over time. And as effort increases over time, our motivation goes down. And as motivation goes down, we eventually decide to quit sales and not doubt that anymore. It's — interesting because sports so many times are compared to sales. And of course in sports we have competition. You're competing against somebody else. But actually some of the best coaches out there, the ones who really develop their players the best are the ones that say our goal is to get 1% better every day where they're following your principle which is I want to compare myself to my previous self and my goal is to get better because when I get better within a process then everything else is going to take care of itself. So you mentioned this thing called selling orientation. Talk about that. Yes. So the selling orientation is primarily the idea that people would do anything possible in order to sell versus the customer orientation that people will do anything they want to try to please the consumers to try to create value for the consumers. Okay. So it's interesting that the selling orientations to try to do anything possible in order to close the deal will result in increased revenues in the short term but over time it can result in lower results. So this is interesting. If I approach an orientation in which I have to do everything that I can to close the deal so to sell, this will result to short-term returns, but over time it

will not result to longer benefits because it tends to make you look for easy solutions. It tends to transform people into more manipulative individuals which shouldn't be the case and it tends to make people focus more and more in the short term. This is very interesting having a selling orientation. So having this mindset that you have to close at any costs in the long term can risks making you more manipulative and can risk make you become more focused in the immediate result and not in the long-term results. And this is a problem especially in the B2B world where the sales cycles are enormous. They could take years. You have to convince 10 stakeholders. So a selling orientation paradoxically could even work out for small sales for small ticket items and for short sales cycles. But when it starts getting longer when developing a solid relationship with buyers becomes important and this is where the selling orientation actually cannot pay off and they paradoxically result in lower sales. This is a selling orientation. the more I want to sell, the more I will sell. Well, that's the interesting paradox. If you're willing to do anything to close, over time, you become less sensitive to the needs of the consumers. And if consumers, you're less able to satisfy them, eventually resulting in lower sales in the long term. — Cool. probably why you have differentiation between people who are the prospectors who are initiating the relationship getting the first sale and then the more customer oriented account managers who are the nurturers and building up the relationship over time. — Yeah, that is important too. But then there's another a very fundamental issue art which is that even too much customer orientation could be bad. So this is another myth that I debunk in the book and that is important to consider. We tend to believe that those who have the highest customer orientations are those who sell the most and that's not true. Those who have the highest customer orientation tend to sell less. Now those who have also the lowest customer orientation tend to sell less. So how do we explain that? It is those who have intermediate levels of customer orientation that tend to sell more. Because customer orientation is not just about telling customer, oh I care for you, I care for you. Customer orientation requires to show care by spending effort. Now there is an intermediate level of effort what leads to the highest return because unfortunately spending too much effort to follow the customers especially in the B2B world that's time consuming that's extremely draining so paradoxically you need to be able to find a balance between satisfying the consumers but not let the consume the customers customers take too much of your time otherwise you will be able to close fewer deals and this will return into lower results as a whole. So this is an important thing. Even the recommendation of satisfied customers as much as possible. If you do that, the customers will be happy, but you will be able to close fewer deals. So the intermediate levels of customer orientation are the ones that yield the best returns. Anybody that's in my position, my colleagues out there who do a sales training that have been asked to come in and take a traditional customer service department where all they've had to do is to handle customers and nurture customers and not sell and then they want to turn them into salespeople. That's a problem. So my first question absolutely — of the leader is do you have the right people in place that are of the mindset? And that kind of gets into another one of your topics which is this concept of assertive extraversion. Tell us about that. Beautiful. So another myth that needs to be dispelled in research that research in sales is the myth that you need to be an extrovert. Oh man, hear it every time. Sales people are the most extrovert people in this world. And when you look at the evidence, extrovert people do not sell more than introverts.

introverts. How surprising is when you ask sales people, are you an extrovert or an introvert? But 90% say that they're extroverts. So, oh, that would be a signal that extroversion pays. It turns out that it does not. And the reason is because we primarily tend to misunderstand the concept of extroversion. Extroversion doesn't mean that you like people or you don't like to stay with people. But the extent to which social interactions energize you or deplete you. I always say to an extrovert social interaction is like drinking coffee. It wakes you up. To an introvert, social interaction is like going to the gym. It's fun, but at the end you're kind of tired. It doesn't mean that both can be effective in different ways. In fact, introverts are better able to listen. And as we all know, listening is very important to close the deal. So, they have advantages too. But there are actually six forms of extraversion and one of them is extremely powerful and that is assertive extroversion. It's the fact that introverts although they have a lot of benefits but they have one problem. When you ask an introvert a question, the introvert will wait until they have an answer in their mind before they start talking. While an extrovert, you haven't finished a question and they already start talking. Now, sometimes in business, this is perceived mistakenly perceived. But sometimes this in business is perceived as hesitation. And you don't like in sales people to look that they are hesitation because you will not trust people if they're hesitating before answering the question. So this is where introverts need to become stronger. Sometimes they're afraid to speak up when their thoughts are not fully formed in their minds. And this unfortunately by buyers is perceived as a form of agitation. We need to just be aware of it. We need to be aware of it that able to show assertiveness even if we are an intuitive. We must not allow our buyers to perceive that we have hesitation otherwise agitation hesitation will be interpreted as this person doesn't know very well the products that they're selling and this will negatively influence the perception that we have about our sellers. — Interesting. So, we're almost out of time here, but you know what? I think time we're not going to pay attention to because we really haven't even gotten into a lot of the myths of sales conversations. I can already tell that we're going to need another show here at some point. — Well, I'm very happy to come again. These are beautiful conversations, by the way. I think it's nice and we want the audience to reflect on these things. They're they're beautiful. They're fascinating. — Yes. — We're not done yet. we we do want to get into some of the real myths of sales conversations themselves that sales people can identify with. So let's start with what is one of the most commonly held and repeated beliefs about just sales conversations or sales calls themselves that you found in your research is just wrong and why. So in the book I the book is broken down into two parts. One is the actual sales conversation and one is called the sales experience. The sales conversation is any action that results in the buyer liking your product versus the sales experience is any action that will result in the buyer liking the salesperson. Okay. So there's two things we need that they need to be aligned together. One is of course the buyer needs to like the product but salesperson too. Now a very crucial point that I have in the book and I'd like to discuss is the idea that these two are not separate but they interact with each other. But important point is that the sales experience only raises the attention so that the sales conversation can become more effective in the sense that making a buyer like a seller paradoxically will not lead to any sales or that is surprising. How is that possible? I'm going to repeat it. If a buyer likes a

seller, that alone is not enough to make the sale. Because if a buyer likes a seller, the buyer will reward the seller with more attention. What does that mean, though? It means that if your product is good, then I'll be convinced. But if the product is bad and I'm paying more attention to what you're saying, that is not going to make me buy the product. So this is interesting. We need to be liked not because liking will directly lead to a sale. We'll need to be liked so that our sales conversation is going to be more effective. So that they'll remember more of the things that we say. so that we'll listen more when we discuss about the argument, the advantages and the disadvantages and we reduce the uncertainty or the advantages and disadvantages. Only then through the interaction between the sales conversation and the sales experience, we will have the optimal conditions to sell more. — The liking like storytelling is another tool. It's something else that's going to help us enable the entire process and complicated process. — So, Lorenzo, you make a solid case for conscientiousness as we talked about being the predictor of success. And I love also in the book that you do filter for buyer sophistication, which is as different selling to a homeowner than it does to a committee at a B2B huge level. But it it seems to me that with all the data in the world, there's this context gap between a high volume say BTOC environment and a high stakes businessto business sales. So, and you cite a number of studies and when you're looking at these studies, how did you account for the skill and experience of sales reps? I mean, it feels like uh I mean, science is certainly important. It's a baseline, but there's an art, as I always say, no pun intended, and there we need to have a mix of the two. So, how does your research take that into account as far as these studies and the different levels, skill levels of sales reps in different types of industries and B2B versus B toc? So there's two issues that you raise with this question. One is B2B versus B TOC and the other one is the skill level and the exper or the experience of the sales people. I'll answer to both. So first of all, my book is entirely focused on the B2B world because the recommendations for the B2B and the B TOC are completely different. So whatever works in the B2B context does not work in the B2B B TOC context. And this is also now a powerful warning for readers because if you read a book on how to increase sales in general, then you have got to be careful because depending on the audience, the same recommendation might work or completely lead to the opposite results. In the BTOC world, the consumer world is a realm of emotions. There it's fine. there it's perfectly okay to utilize emotional appeals of the try to build report because emotions are important utility is completely different consumption but the world of the B2B is the world of ROI I need to understand how if I buy a product that product is going to be integrated in my company and eventually result in an impact in the bottom line if that product does not have an impact in my bottom line I don't listen. So that's why again the rational arguments become powerful because I need to be able to understand very well the impact that a product has in the profit or losses of a company and this is where experience becomes essential. You see, experience in the B TOC world matters yet, but it matters less than it does in the B2B world. Because in the B2B world first and foremost you have to be able to understand well again how its product does not just create benefits and costs for the organization but how these benefits and cost get inside the organization inside the function inside the value chain processes of the organization eventually resulting in profit for the company. And only experience and skill will be able to translate the benefits of a product into the actual profit implication for a company and the ROI. You see nowadays especially benefits and cost consumer

consumers customers in the B2B world they can see them by themselves. They go online they see the cases they get all the information that they need to understand the benefits and the costs. Marketing can be fantastic at displaying the benefits and the cost. What I need to know is to have a very specific arguments to understand when those cost and when those benefit when those benefits are activated in the specific case of my company eventually translating into ROI. The ROI language is the most powerful language that we can master in the B2B world and experience and skill are necessary for us to be able to speak this language. But that all the recommendations of the book help you get knowledge so that the experience is faster to acquire and it doesn't take 15 20 years. So there's an important point that I like to say with the book is that since experience is skill are fundamental and experience is not built through a book then doesn't mean that the book is useless. No the opposite because the book will allow you to acquire experience at a much faster rate. So if we combine knowledge that is provided through books that provide insights with experience that we don't need to wait for 20 years before we're able to get the level of skill that we need in order to close the sale. But knowledge from books and direct experience are not two different things. They need to be combined together for the effect to be the strongest. Well, let's put that into practice and build on that. And by the way, I kind of chuckled at the beginning of the book. You say that salespeople will never learn or never get better by reading a book. I'm kind of paraphrasing there because you still have to have the conscientiousness to be able to put that into practice. So, let's end with this. Let's say you have somebody fairly new to sales, fairly new in their career. They are conscientious and they have this burning desire to be the best they possibly can. and they're going to compare themselves to the best version of themselves. What advice would you have them when we're inundated every day with all of this sales advice and books and videos and LinkedIn posts from influencers and gurus? How do they take this and actually use it to become better? — So yeah, it the main challenge if I'm young and I'm starting now, the main challenge nowadays is not access to information. We have overload of information. There's so many things. The problem becomes the reliability of the information. And that's the very reason why I wrote the book. I was impressed by the amount of information that is outside that is not grounded that is very speculative that is not serious. So I say whether this book or whatever sources you want the reliability of a source for the information that you get on the tactics is the most important thing nowadays even more important because there's so many sources of information and many of these are not grounded. But another important point we started art by saying that is that unfortunately it's constant learning. The only way in which we can get ahead of sales because a lot of recommendations will have an impact on your sales but the impact might be 10%. 20%. We cannot believe those who come to us and say that is the one little secret that alone is going to make you become rich 10 times more than everybody else. Everybody says that and anytime anyone tells you this, don't believe it. See, even if I talk about truths in my book, I always say we try to get as close as possible to the truth. I never say this is the actual truth and this is the real thing that is going to make you rich. I never say it. I always try to have a more moderate turn. An advice I give to the younger people. Whoever tell you whoever tells you that they have the truth to make you successful in sales, never believe that. Always be skeptical to those who say they own the truth and always believe those who tell they see the truth. Because those who have the truth that I found the truth, I don't know if I want to believe them. But those who seek the truth and they constantly understand the importance of learning because every month things change. There cannot be a one single process that leads to

success. There's constant evaluation, constant reflection, reflecting on 30 little tactics and select these 15, these other 10. selecting a lot of small little pieces are able to have a strong impact in your results and there is not one single recommendation that is likely to transform you into the rich person you want to become love that is something that I repeat so often and something else that I say which kind of summarizes that is that you're never going to graduate from the school of sales you will be learning and the most successful salespeople I've ever been around are the ones who have a personal development learning plan. And for all of you who are in that category, you need to grab the book Myths Versus Science of Selling. When research reveals the opposite of common belief is holding that up right now. You can get that on Amazon. And Lorenzo, before we go, all of our regular listeners know that we have a regular feature. So everybody, you know what time it is. — Your attitude will be every quote of the day. — That's right. It's time for the quote of the day. So Lorenzo, I always ask our guests, what is one quote that is especially meaningful for you and why? So I'm a professor. So I got to choose a quote that is somehow aligned with who I am. And I think about Albert Einstein who's an inspiration for me. And he always used to say this powerful point which is education is not the learning of the facts but it's the training of the mind to think. And in my point of view that's really truly what inspired why I wanted to write my book. The general idea is that if I tell someone and in sales it applies a lot. If I tell someone anyone do this, the immediate reaction is resistance. Just telling someone even with the children for example, just tell anyone you have to do this, the immediate reaction is distance. But if you make people reflect and stimulate them why they have to do it and make them feel good, make them feel smarter about it, that's the best way for people to embrace change and get things done. I say it in the book and that's important that most of the times we know what we have to do, but we still don't do that. it every time. and the New Year's Eve resolution. This year I'm going to do this and then we never do that. We know what we have to do, but we never do that. And the reason is because we're told to do things. And the moment we find intellectual curiosity, something that is stimulating for your mind, that is the moment in which we're going to be able to activate change. So for me, that's important. It's not about learning of the facts. It's about learning to stimulate your mind. You talk about this a little bit in the book as well and I've done an entire training session on this and that is to me one of the most important characteristics is being curious and being curious about not only why somebody would buy, why would somebody be interested, but being curious just in general because that's going to help you in all areas of your life. And by the way, I want to touch on something else you just mentioned there because that quote applies also directly to objections. And I know in your chapter, one of your myths was, I forget how you worded it, but we believe the same thing about objections. Oh, telling somebody they're wrong. Because most objections training out there tells people that you need to come back with a rebuttal or you need to overcome objections. And when you try to do that, essentially, you're telling somebody they're wrong. And as you just mentioned, the natural human reaction of being told you're wrong is or tell them what to do is the opposite. Right. — Yes. Exactly. — And as you know, and I've entire free master class on this, the first thing we have to do is find out why did somebody say what they did? Because when we hear the objection, we're only getting the symptom. We're not getting the problem. And we got to figure out the symptom. Then we can try to question that further. So anyway, doctor, thank you so much for being here today. Let people know how they can contact you. What else you have available? How can they get more of you? — Well, the easiest thing is Laur, if you remember my name, Lorenzo Busy, that's also so lorenbusy. com is the website. So that'll be the easiest way. You can just

find a way to reach out to me through that website. My university too, but still the easiest way. I am a professor so very easy to identify my contact information but my lame first name and last name runsy. com it'll be the easiest way to reach out to me if need be. — I have to ask you one more thing. People that listen to the show and know me know that I'm also a cook and probably Italian food is one of my favorite food. So are I'm sure you probably love Italian food. Do you also cook? Do I do? Of course. Here I've got to do it because there's only a few restaurants that I trust. the only few Italian So, I got to do it at my pal. Yes. — Okay. So, your red sauce, oregano, yes or no? — Oh, depends where you're putting it. I'm generally I would say no, though. I don't use it that much. — Okay. Little bit of sugar. Sugar in the red sauce. — No. Every time I say every I'm okay with a little bit of this, but Well, it's not red sauce. It depends. If you're talking about the ragu, the classic ragu, then I wouldn't the bolognz ragu then no ore. I wouldn't definitely not put the sugar, but I put some good red wine that I put it for sure. Yes. And you let it simmer for like 5 hours. — Perfect. It's like — this sounds like another show. We may do that too. — Thank you so much for being on. I know we need to have you back on again. So, anybody else? So again, the book myths of myth versus science of selling when research reveals the opposite of common belief. Dr. Lorenzo Busy, go out and get it and read it and question things that you believe in right now. You're going to be a better person and a better salesperson for it. Thank you so much for investing your valuable sales time with us today. Until next time, go out and make it your best sales day ever. I'm Art Subject.