If You’re Struggling in Sales, Listen to This! - Bob King

Host: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. We have a tremendous episode for you today, a conversation with Bob King. He's the author of *The Joy of Closing*. Bob is a lifelong salesman and sales coach, as well as being the VP of sales for multiple organizations in solar and insurance, as well as the cosmetics industries.

Host: Bob shares his insights into how we can build an emotional journey for our customers, whether we're selling B2C or B2B, to drive more sales through trust, through openness, through connection, through kind of being a closer, not a poser, as he puts it.

Host: One idea that really caught me, because I do a lot of sales coaching and I've run my own companies, which had sales teams, as well as being a head of sales for multiple companies... many sales professionals struggle. These are Bob's words: they live in their clients' resistance. They live in their prospects' resistance. They're operating from a place of resistance from the jump. We need to overcome that mindset in order to improve our closing ratio, make deeper connections with our clients, and ultimately become that 20% of the sales team that sells 80% of the products for our company.

Host: Wonderful conversation. You're going to love this one. But before we get to Bob, I have a big announcement, a huge announcement for you guys. Master of the Close, my One Call Close System course—the number one inbound closing system that has ever been created. We closed north of 80% of all the qualified leads that came into our business. I have built this process over the course of my 20-year career, implemented it in fitness, in tech, in insurance, and consulted clients from a ton of other industries.

Host: If inbound leads are part of how you grow your business, go to masteroftheclose.com today, get in the course, and learn this system. It is a five-step process. I detail out every line of the script—a battle-tested script. Every word of this script has been tested over thousands and thousands of inbound leads, leading to a north of 80% close ratio. We had new reps coming into our office that were selling day one, 25 to 30% of the qualified leads. Within three months, every single one was north of 80%, closing eight out of every 10 qualified inbound leads.

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Host: All right, let's get on to my guest today, the author of *The Joy of Closing*, Bob King. In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home. All right, Bob, it's tremendous to have you on the show here, man. You wrote this incredible book, and I'm looking forward to digging into your philosophy. I want to start with: why are so many people bad at selling, naturally? Like most people naturally. There are those few, but most of us, myself included—I put myself 100% in this bucket—just out of the rip, terrible. We have to learn all these lessons. What do you think it is about our nature that we have to learn this skill?

Bob King: I think there's a couple of reasons. Number one, being a closer. You say selling, but I'm going to flip over the cards and say what you're really talking about is closing. What you're really asking about is closing. How to earn a customer's trust and give them the confidence to move forward with a decision that is hopefully going to change their life for the better requires commitment. You have to be committed to the idea that moving forward today is the absolute best thing for your customer, for your company, and for you—hopefully in that order. If you're not committed, it's very hard for them to become committed. Nobody runs toward commitment, so it's kind of an unnatural state.

Bob King: I think the other reason is because to get to a yes, you sometimes have to endure a lot of no's. A lot of people don't have the stamina, or they take something personally that isn't personal, and they just don't keep their eyes on the prize of actually earning someone's trust and getting them to commit to something that's going to make their life better—and also put money in your pocket and keep your company in business. To be a change agent is to stand in the crosshairs of people's resistance. That's an unnatural state, but it's one that's incredibly rewarding. I love that question. No one's ever asked me that before.

Host: I love your take around this idea of commitment. In my own sales career, and we talked a little bit about this before we went live, I grew up in the insurance industry. The first three years of my career were horrible. In fact, my father-in-law at the time actually fired me. I talked him out of it, but for a moment, before I got down on my knees in front of him in his office begging him not to fire me, I was fired by my father-in-law for how bad I was.

Host: This is kind of where the question is going. It wasn't until I understood the value of the product that I was providing. I felt this almost physical sensation—I couldn't even bring my hand to the phone to make a cold call. So how do we develop commitment? If I'm sitting here and I've chosen sales as a profession, and this idea of commitment is like, "Yeah, maybe I'm not committed to this," how do we start to become committed to the product, service, et cetera, that we're trying to sell or close?

Bob King: Well, it's not even a question of that. It's really what your focus is. There are lots of facts in the world, right? There are other options. Let me just start by saying my book, *The Joy of Closing*, works great if you can believe in your product. Especially if you want to sell on value instead of price—if your product or your services are different and better than the competition and maybe a little more expensive, this is a great book for you. That's what I'm good at. If you are the cheapest option but not quite as good, it might work because understanding how to value that and how to make your customer value that is good. If you're just ripping people off, then it's really hard to manufacture the kind of enthusiasm you have to have.

Bob King: Part of the reason I wrote the book is because the companies that are best at training closers often are the worst companies for customers to be in business with, selling overpriced products and things like that. I think that's a loss. When you were selling insurance for your father-in-law, it's very likely you had a great product that was good for your customers. Until you had that come-to-Jesus moment with, "Is this really something I want to do and how can I be successful?" you probably were not in touch with all the great reasons for the customer to move forward. Instead, you were just living in their resistance: "This is a really big decision. How can I go forward? How do I have the confidence to know there isn't something better out there?"

Bob King: The difference between a closer and a salesperson is that a closer gives that customer an emotional experience of understanding the product, understanding the company, and understanding how that scope of work fits into the price you want to charge them. At the end of it, when you say, "Are we doing this?" you want that customer to feel, "Of course, who wouldn't?" or "When can we get started?" You have a product you believe in and all the other things that need to be right. But a lot of times with salespeople, they have all that stuff that's right, but they don't have that commitment to moving forward. They don't know how to make their agenda the customer's idea because it takes certain things.

Bob King: You have to shake up the status quo and make them very uncomfortable with what they're doing now if you want to produce a change. If you're not committed to what you're looking to accomplish, you're not going to make that person uncomfortable. You're not going to have the courage—or even the skills—to know how to do that. But that's what it takes because you're producing change. Salespeople are agents of change. To be an effective agent of change, you have to shake up the status quo, make them fall in love with the idea of working with your company, and give them a sensual experience of your product.

Bob King: If you're selling insurance, you're really selling security. You're selling peace of mind. There's a little bit of tax avoidance and all that stuff, and you need to educate them about it. I know a little bit about this because after I started consulting, the first non-home-improvement, non-solar client was a skincare place, but the second one was an insurance agent. I ended up working for him and his mom and his mom's best friend. It was like insurance sales runs in families. All of them got revamped and changed their approach from, "Okay, here's all the stuff you need to think about," to, "Here's everything you need. Here's all the information you need to make this decision. The first payment is just $114 to get your whatever started."

Bob King: I can tell you their customers were a lot happier being able to make a decision and having the confidence to move forward than they were when they just left them in the misery of their indecision. That's probably what happened to you. You went from someone who was more comfortable leaving that customer in the misery of their indecision to someone who had the confidence to recommend a plan, show them all the great reasons for doing it, make them feel uncomfortable with not moving forward, and then sit there and wait after you ask for a price for their resistance to express itself—usually with a lie. Most objections are lies. Then you work with their resistance, have the intimacy with that customer that allows them to have the confidence to move forward with you and your company. That's really why I wrote the book.

Host: I love this concept. I bet that's what came up in your conversation with your father-in-law. What do you remember from that conversation that made your life different?

Bob King: What I remember from that conversation, first and foremost, was the pure terror of going home to my wife—we're still married, of course—and having to explain to her that her dad just fired me because I couldn't sell.

Host: [Laughs] I don't mean to laugh, but that is hilarious.

Bob King: Literally what I said to him was probably the best sales line I've ever had in my entire life. I got down on one knee next to his desk and said, "Jim, please do not make me go home and tell your little girl that you fired me. You don't want that call, and I don't want that call. So what can we do here?" That was the best sale I've ever had because he literally said, "This isn't working. You can have some time to roll off and find something else, but we can't keep you here."

Bob King: What that drove me to do was two things. One, I didn't have another choice. So this idea of living in their resistance—I love this concept—that's what I was doing. I was imagining all the...

Host: You closed him on not firing you. That's really what you did.

Bob King: Yes. So now I had this high incentive to keep going. The other thing it did was force me to dig into the product. I started reading policy forms at night, which is like reading the terms and conditions of whatever product you sell—250 pages of "We give you this, then we take it away when this happens, then we'll give it back to you here, but then we'll take it away again if this..." I dug in. It wasn't until I felt like I knew exactly what this did for the people I was selling for them that I could have a conversation with them that actually pulled out some of the emotional stuff.

Host: My question for you is, I've dealt with my own selling career, I've run sales teams, and I've done a ton of consulting on sales. What I find is most people present themselves as value sellers, yet in practice, they sell on price. How...?

Bob King: I totally agree. Except for the 20% on every sales team that kick ass.

Host: Yes. So once you get below that—whoever is the top salesperson or two or three—everyone below that is going, "Of course I sell on value," yet they actually sell on price. To me, oftentimes there's a lack of awareness in what they're actually doing.

Bob King: It's not awareness. It's focus. They know. By the way, not every product is the best choice for customers, right? So you have to learn how to sell that stuff too. Everything's a mixed bag. There are good reasons for going forward and reasons to be cautious. If your job is to create that change, you cannot be focused on the reasons for being cautious. You have to be focused on and make important the reasons for going forward. Closers know how to do that. Salespeople generally don't.

Host: There's another idea I'd love to get your take on. It's a line I use a lot when I'm talking to people, and I also coach my kids' sports. I use the same concept with them: detaching from the outcome. I use an example from my own life. I ended up playing baseball in college, but up until my junior year of high school, I was not a college-worthy baseball player. I was good—I'd make an all-star team—but I was never at the top.

Bob King: Ever?

Host: Ever. The ball came to me one time and I was asleep. The coach had to come wake me up. It was my father's proudest moment.

Bob King: [Laughs] That does not surprise me. Most of Little League is horrendous.

Host: It was not for me. But coming back to this idea of detaching from the outcome: it wasn't until my junior year that I had my high school baseball coach. Him and I were like oil and water. I was from a town way out in the middle of nowhere that got sucked into this big district, so there was a little bit of "other side of the tracks" stuff. I had a unique style of playing baseball, and he hated me. I had to fight and scrap for every minute of playing time. One day I was like, "You know what? I don't care. I don't care what happens. I'm just going to go up to bat, hit the pitches I can hit, and run. I literally don't care." In my head, I wasn't thinking about it in a positive way. I was thinking, "It doesn't matter what I do. I can hit a home run or a double, and I'm not going to get more playing time from this guy. So I just don't give a shit."

Host: For whatever crazy reason, that changed the course of my baseball career. The same exact thing happened in my sales career. I had so much fear of getting fired that I was like, "I'm just going to call everybody. I'm going to talk to everybody. I'm going to sell everybody. I don't give a shit what happens because caring almost got me fired."

Bob King: That's so funny. It may interest you to know there is a chapter in my book called "Slump, Streaks, and the Cure for Commission Breath." I love it. What that says is, the cure is this: when you get in a slump, it's almost always for the same reason. When you get on a streak, it's because you sold a bunch of deals and you don't really care if you get the next one. You want to make money, but you're like, "Knock yourself out, buddy, whatever you want to do." You have a carefree attitude, and people find that very attractive.

Bob King: When you get in a slump, suddenly you're making a sales call about you. If you want to watch a soufflé fall faster than anything else, make a sales call about you. Talk about yourself instead of them. When you find common interests, talk about it from your perspective instead of theirs, and watch how quickly they become uninterested in you. Part of what I hate about closing culture right now is the advice to stare at the Ferrari you want to buy on the back flap of your car seat and use that to motivate yourself. That is horrible advice. If you're making that sales call about you—which is what happens when you get in a slump—suddenly it's, "I've got to get this deal," instead of, "How can I serve my customer?" It just gets worse and worse.

Bob King: The cure is to not focus on your closing rate, but to focus on your decision rate. How many of the customers I met with made a decision as a result of the information I gave them and a full understanding of what my product or service or my company can do or not do for them? If you have a high decision rate, your closing rate will be the highest in the company because every indecision is a no. Every indecision reflects as a no on your closing rate. Not everyone is going to say no. If you're in sales, 10% of people are going to say yes anyway. There's almost no salesperson that doesn't have a 10% closing rate, which is probably what you had with your father-in-law.

Bob King: You thought, "Oh, I'm selling 10%. I'm making some money." And he's like, "This guy's killing me. He's taking all these qualified leads and losing the 15% between 10 and 25 that I'm expecting from anybody else." To get from that 10% to 25% or even 30% or 40%, you've got to be committed. You've got to believe in what you're doing. You've got to have some techniques. You've got to be able to take that customer on an emotional journey instead of an analytical journey. A lot of insurance agents are so focused on the analytic brain that they never let the customer aspire to have security and peace of mind.

Host: I want to dig into this because we talked about it a little beforehand. I adore the insurance industry. It's the industry where I cut my teeth, and it's provided me with a lifestyle I could have never dreamed of. I have such a deep value for what we do.

Bob King: If you're in sales, you probably already know this. One thing I figured out when I went from selling tea to solar power is: the more zeros after the period of the product you're selling, the better your job is as a salesperson. The more zeros, the better. There are a lot of zeros before the period in insurance. That's probably the biggest reason why it's a great job. It's also great for customers. You're providing a lot of peace of mind, a lot of financial benefits. There are lots of reasons why insurance helps people financially—taxes, regulation, things like that. There's a lot that insurance people can do for customers if they know how to communicate that. But if you're communicating it analytically, you're not giving most of your customers a good reason to go forward.

Host: Insurance is not unique in this, but it does have this attribute: it's mostly operated by people who are put in sales. It's a sales business, but they come to the industry with more of a service perspective or mentality.

Bob King: That's good. That's not bad.

Host: No, I completely agree. I think it's probably easier to go from a service to a sales mentality than from sales to service. For those individuals in insurance or other industries with a similar dynamic, if I really want to sell more and I know I tend to be more service-oriented, but I know I need to sell more, how do I start to crack that? What do I need to do in my mindset or in how I approach my business to get out of that service mentality and into a more sales-closing mentality?

Bob King: First, let's acknowledge that the reason you're successful, if you're that kind of person in the insurance industry, is that your demeanor conveys trust. You're not panicked about getting a sale. You know you have a product that's good for your customer. Even if you're not the best at communicating why and how and creating urgency and all the other things that get their limbic brain engaged, at least you feel right to them. The trick is to add a little razzle-dazzle, a little urgency, and other reasons for the customer to connect with a bit more emotional appeal—making them feel uncomfortable with what they're doing now without losing what you're bringing. That's great.

Bob King: Let me preface it by saying those people are successful for a reason. You don't want to take away the reason they're successful by making them super salesy. That's not the point. The point is to keep all that. But a lot of times, they don't really have a sales pitch. A lot of insurance people don't know what's going to happen between warm-up and price presentation. They kind of make that part up as they go along. That's like driving your car and not knowing which pedal makes it go forward and which makes it stop. If you have to think about how to make the car go forward or where your wipers are, you are a terrible driver. Everyone is when they start off.

Bob King: You can't look at traffic. You won't know when the customer is nodding their head and agreeing with everything you say or shaking their head or looking at their Apple Watch and taking emails while you're telling them about how to keep their family secure. You need to know what's going to happen between warming up, finding common ground, doing a little discovery and making them like you, to telling them a price and then working with their resistance to close them. That pitch should be an emotional journey that you take every customer on that leads them from chaos to clarity.

Bob King: The clarity is: "This person understands me. They have the exact right product for me. Their company has been around for a hundred years and there's no one better to work with. The price they're charging is but a shadow of the benefits I'm going to receive." That's what you want every customer to feel. It's not going to work with every customer, but it should work with the vast majority. After all that, there are ways I can help people turn into closers. The first "no" is just an opportunity. There's a lot of stuff about that, and there are a lot of books about it too. The truth is, I've never gotten through a book on closing or even sales other than Dale Carnegie's *How to Win Friends and Influence People*, which is a great book that everybody should read as a human being. The rest of them kind of make my skin crawl, which is why I wrote a book.

Host: I agree with you. I haven't written a book on sales, but my favorite sales book of all time is actually not a sales book: *Never Split the Difference* by Chris Voss.

Bob King: I've seen some of his videos, and they're pretty great, I will say.

Host: When you're talking about developing an emotional appeal, is that storytelling?

Bob King: It is storytelling. An emotional journey is telling a story. The story is: "Here's your life without the product. Here's your life with the product. By the way, we're this, that, and the other thing that you have common ground with and tribal allegiances to. Now is the best time to do it. Are we doing it?"

Host: How do you develop those stories? I've had a lot of people ask me this question. They'll say, "There's a guy in my office who's been doing it for 30 years. Fortunately, I just still..." Here's the thing about one-call closing. I was trained by scoundrels to sell a product for more money than people should have paid. I didn't know it. When I figured it out, I left and went to another company that was a little better. A guy from that company started his own company, and I became their VP of sales and trained other people to do it. When you train other people, you master it. The yogis say: if you want to learn something, practice it. If you want to master it, teach it. I really mastered the art of one-call closing by training others how to do it.

Bob King: Then I went to a very reputable company where I couldn't employ those old tricks. I reflected on why I'd been successful at a certain company and realized it was all belief. When I believed in what I was doing, magic happened. Having the ability to do a presentation that takes the customer on that emotional journey and having the skills to work with their resistance put me at the top of a very competitive sales team. I knew it and I loved it. It was really fun.

Bob King: The other thing that happened was, even when I was working for scoundrels before that, I'd been in the film business and was hired five times in 19 years. When I started learning how I was blowing deals by arguing with customers or making stuff about me or a hundred other things, I realized that learning the skill actually made my whole life better. For all those reasons, I really embraced it. Then I realized that if you're working for a modern company with a modern sales presentation, you can't take an hour and a half to get to price, right?

Host: Which is sort of the old school one call closing, you know, throw dirt on the floor and, don't clean it, clean it up with the product, things like all that. So all the techniques I was trained in have been used since the forties or maybe before probably, there's something with cavemen that they did to one call close people. But I needed to distill it even just to work for the company I was working for into a streamlined process. And as I started coaching other people in other industries, I distilled it down to a thing called one call magic, which is seven steps and a forecast. So really eight, but a forecast is a sentence, so I didn't call it a step. And really, if you want your sales pitch to be emotional and persuasive, you really just have to do the things that I'm telling you that are in my book, *The Joy of Closing*. The first part is sort of a work memoir about how I came into the information I came into, which is kind of a crazy story. And then there's a big how-to on how to make, not necessarily earn that customer's business the first day, because a lot of times B2B customers, you're not even meeting with someone who can say yes, but you're always meeting with someone who can say no. And you only ever have the element of surprise with the customer one time, and that's at that first meeting. So if you can make the absolute strongest first impression, there's no sales job where that isn't powerful or profitable. And then the last part, how to create happy customers and get their referrals and five-star reviews, which is also a skill that requires closing because nobody just sits down and writes you a good review. You have to close the customer on that as well. So that's what the book is about, really how to do that. And so far, I have not found an industry that it hasn't been effective for, to some degree, actually to a really crazy degree. So yeah, I wanted to be the conduit from old school one call closing technique into modern ways of selling where you're not trying to get the customer's shackles to warm up or wear them down. You're actually just using your skills and having a pitch. My favorite is coaching teams where they think, "Oh, I don't have a pitch." It's like, no, you have a pitch, it's just terrible. Or a lot of people who say that this is their pitch. A lot of people say they don't have a pitch. Basically the new way, what I've found many times, is they just ask a bunch of discovery questions and then tailor everything that comes after that to whatever they think is the customer's point of vulnerability, which is a pitch, but it's not a great pitch.

Host: Why does that style break down? Because I do think you're right. I think that's a very common way of going about it.

Bob King: Because you're not taking the customer on an emotional journey. You're sort of picking at a pain point and that produces some emotion and some customers will go forward because they're just in so much pain, but you're not building trust. The trust comes from the stories and that kind of stuff. The trust comes from the fact that I did not take a job working for scoundrels to become a trustworthy person, but it turns out that becoming trustworthy is the best way to earn someone's trust. And that has made my whole life better. So that's the other thing about going from a salesperson to a closer: my experiences. Inevitably, it will make the rest of your life better. And I'm absolutely certain that your whole life was better after that conversation with your father-in-law, when you had to go from someone who was just presenting to someone who could earn someone's business. There's no way to get to that point without it improving the rest of your life. But please correct me if I'm wrong. What's your thought on that?

Host: No, I think you're a hundred percent right. I mean, one of the things that it drove me towards was open-ended questions. I had no idea the difference between a closed question and an open question. And I think a lot of times an even more systemic issue beyond just discovery questions is those discovery questions are not open-ended. It's just like, "How much revenue do you do? What has been your three-year revenue?" If it's a sales tool, it's "What has been your three-year revenue trajectory?" These very tactical closed-ended questions, and that person's just regurgitating facts back to them.

Bob King: Well, the other thing that people don't do when they ask those kinds of discovery questions—the essential thing that these people who I'll now call it like the discovery close, where they just discover some stuff and then beat the customer's head with it—the other thing they don't do, which is vital when you ask a discovery question, and they can be open ended or not, but especially if they're open ended. It's usually like, "Let's look at your bill," or "Let's look at your skin," or "Let's look at your finance. How much money do you make? Your insurance," things like that. When a customer divulges anything to you, or when a human being divulges anything to you, it is essential to respond. And you can respond in one of two ways. If you're in a sales situation, the best way to respond is to use your expertise to benefit them. Give them information they did not have when they disclosed that information to you. So if they're telling you their revenue, you have to tell them something about that that influences. You're basically, when your customer is expecting two things from you on a sales presentation—a scope of work and a price—if they give you some discovery information, it's essential that you immediately respond by telling them how that affects your recommended scope of work. In other words, you're helping them with the decision they're about to make and you're lending your expertise to them. That will build trust. It will also empower them to make an informed decision when the time comes. And you're just a decent human being by not just sucking in information from them and then using it against them. You are building a rapport by them disclosing information and you making their life better. That's the first thing. The other thing you can do if you're in a personal situation is respond by disclosing something of a similar nature about your own life. So if someone tells you about some traumatic incident from their life, it's important to give them a little blood as well so that they don't just feel naked and stared at.

Host: I've gotten pushback from sales professionals on the adding value in the discovery portion, and they'll say, "Well, I don't want to give them the solution to their problem before they've done business with me." How do you overcome that objection from sales professionals where they feel like their solution or their information, like they're a gatekeeper to it?

Bob King: I guess people think that really great closers are liked by everybody. And that is not the truth. The truth is a really great closer—a huge 80% of people, once they get to know you, would not do business with anybody else. But there's also 20% that will just hate you because you're paying too much attention to them or whatever reason. When I was going into homes two and three times a day, if I didn't get kicked out of a house at least every couple of months, I would think I must be holding back. I'm not letting myself get out there for people to fall in love with. So I would jazz it up a little bit and pay whatever I do. So I think with that type of person where they're just sucking information, there are customers that are just okay doing that. But the vast majority of people, when you take in a bunch of information and don't reciprocate in one way or another, they will hate you and they will not want to do business with you. And they also don't know why. Why is that? People just aren't that self-aware. They just have a visceral reaction to you. "Oh, this guy just asked me 16 questions and I just told him all these things about my business, and he's just taking notes. He's not giving me any—" You're also missing a great opportunity. You can establish your expertise and give your customer—you're not giving them information about your scope of work or your price necessarily. You're giving them information about how you use their information in order to best serve their needs. And if you don't have enough expertise to lend them some information about that without telling them the whole story, without ruining the ending, then you need to work on your skills and figure out how to do that. Because storytelling is revealing certain facts that the facts put together take that customer on an emotional journey that reveals the truth. You can't say, "Oh, I'm going to reveal no truth to you until five minutes before the end." Think about my backgrounds in filmmaking. When you tell a story about a character, 99% of feature films are an emotional journey about one character and the most important time in their life so far. Well, 99% of sales calls are about the emotional journey of your customer making a decision. That's the most important decision that they're going to make so far about whatever it is that you're talking about. Maybe it's not, maybe they have things going on in their life that's more important, but in terms of their business or whatever you're influencing them about, you need to take it really seriously and empower them with all the information they need to make a decision, not piece out little stuff and not own a lot of thought. A lot of salespeople think, "Oh, you just have to tell them the parts that make them want to do it." If there's some reason that working with you or your company or making this decision is difficult or going to impact them in a negative way, I love talking about that stuff because it builds trust. I don't focus on it, but I want them to have the feeling that if there's any reason they're not going to do it, I'm going to tell them that as well. That's a huge advantage when you have the guts to do that. It really makes people trust you, even if they don't like you. And I don't really care if they like me. I care if they trust me.

Host: Yeah. I'm sure you've found this in your career at different times as well, but one of the most high value referral partners I ever had early in my insurance sales career was someone that I told I couldn't—that we shouldn't do business together. Worked through their whole process, saw what they had. And when I got to the end, I said, "I'm going to give you to this agency down the street because they do this thing as well as anybody, and I don't do it. I would be doing you a disservice." There were some other reasons, but it was just a better fit. Referred them over, had a great experience. They sent people to me, not the agency they ended up doing business with. And a lot of that came out of what you're talking about. These follow-up questions. The other thing that drives me nuts that salespeople do is they have their seven things they have to ask, right? They'll ask those seven things, but they'll never ask a follow-up question. So even if you don't have a story to that question that you can apply, you can ask a simple follow-up question just to validate that you've heard them and that you're not just some robot. The other thing that I think really separates salespeople from close people is that closers tend to be curious people. Sales is a hard job in a lot of ways. And if you're not interested in people and how they make decisions, it's going to be a hard job. But it's so easy to become interested in that stuff. And once you do it, it's hard not to do it because people are awesome and wonderful. Even if I don't sell to them, if I met an interesting human being and saw how they lived and got to see an up-close idea of who that person is and how they live their life, if that's not interesting to you, maybe sales isn't the best career for you. If you have that mindset, you're naturally going to ask follow-up questions that maybe have nothing to do with the scope of work. Maybe me asking that question is why 20% of the people are going to kick me out of their house, but it's also why 80% of the people are going to fall in love with the idea of working together.

Bob King: Curiosity is a good life skill for improving just about your entire life. I heard a guy interviewed on Fresh Air once, and he was like in his hundreds, and Terry Gross asked him what his secret is. And he said, "I think it's just, I'm still really curious about how all this is going to turn out." I adopted that attitude. I probably heard that in my thirties or something. And I still have that attitude.

Host: Yeah. So I want to pivot just slightly to, we live in social media, internet world now. When it comes to building your own personal brand on social—you're asking the wrong question. I struggle with that so mightily, but I have figured out a way that I want to launch my online presence. So I'm literally hiring someone to help me do something in that regard. So stay tuned. Joyofclosing.com is my website. I'm putting a quiz on there, "Are You a Closer?" quiz. That will be launched in the next week or two. And I'm going to learn how to do this like every other schmo who wrote a book. But I am so not the expert. If you want to see me hiking through Scotland, you can look on my Instagram account. I've done nothing. I'm a failure so far at that, but I'm not done. I'm ready to take it on.

Bob King: Well, I think what the good news is from that comment is that you don't have to have built some dynamic—

Host: No, you do. Listen, your podcast is great. And I'm really loving our conversation. I've been on dozens of podcasts now and I've sold dozens of books as a result. The good thing is it's great for my consulting career. It's paid for itself. It's awesome. I love that. But I want to sell some books. I think I wrote a book that's a force for good in the world. I think when someone takes a job as a salesperson, they should get this book so that they are not trained as a salesperson. They're trained as a closer. They connect with all the great reasons for it—not just for your company and your success and supporting your family, but how your own personal growth is affected because everybody is a closer. Everybody has that skill, whether it's the book your book club reads or the movie you go see on a Saturday night or getting your kids to clean their room or go to college. You have successfully made your agenda another person's idea. And the only thing more satisfying than finding what we want and knowing it is helping someone else do that. This is a skill that makes your whole life better. Learning how to sell and present also can do that, but not in the way that learning how to work with people's resistance and close them does. I wrote this book because it's a force for good. I want people to be able to—you should get my book and Dale Carnegie and go out and be turned into a closer. Don't waste time being a salesperson. That's my opinion. So I want to sell some books. So I'm going to create a social media presence. And hopefully I found a clever way to do that by putting a quiz on my website. And I thought of something I want to do in my videos that you'll see when I do it. When I start doing it, you'll know it because it's going to be cool.

Bob King: Well, Bob, this has been a tremendous conversation. You've mentioned the website a couple of times, but just share one more time where—and guys, every link that Bob talks about, I will make sure I have in the show notes, whether you're watching on YouTube or wherever you listen, just scroll down or go direct. But where can they get the book? Where can they get into your world so as you come out with more stuff there, they know about it?

Host: My book is on Amazon, and it's just *The Joy of Closing*, Bob King. There's an audiobook that I recorded as well as Kindle and paperback. That's the best way to get the book, even internationally. It's pretty much everywhere. And then my website is joyofclosing.com. I'm going to put a quiz on there, the "Are You a Closer?" quiz. So if you want to know if you're a closer or a salesperson or even a potential closer, you'll be able to assess that in the days and weeks to come. And based on where you come out of the quiz, I will send you a chapter of the book so you can focus on whatever that lands. If you have a sales job now, there's no chance that reading my book will not bring tons of success you wouldn't otherwise have, just because I'm not you and I don't think of the world the way you think of the world. Having a new perspective on how to get a customer forward will be beneficial to you. Closers already know that. Salespeople think they're doing it right already. But trust me, if you're not in the 20% of people that do 80% of your company's sales, there's something in here that will push you closer to that, if not get you over that hurdle. I'd like to say that it'll get you over that hurdle. In fact, I'll say it: it'll get you over that hurdle. So that's my book. My website's joyofclosing.com. I'm also on LinkedIn, Instagram. I have a TikTok account, joyful closer, that I posted like no videos on because, like I said, I'm going to learn how to do this too. When I started coaching people, one of the real things that came as a shock is that it's not enough to have the best idea. You'd think that because I was coaching individuals at first, and individuals, they're coming to me, so of course they're going to listen to what I have to say. But when I started coaching teams, I realized that I needed to close the team on what I was coaching them on. I had to do all the things that I tell people to do. I had to shake up their status quo. I had to show them and make them feel the pleasure of my solution. I had to take them on an emotional journey just to adopt the best idea that I had crafted for them. So that was a fun thing. And now I feel like I have the same opportunity in terms of being influential in the world of sales. So I'm getting ready to close the world on the idea that this book will help them. And that's going to all launch from my website and social media. I'll go on Threads and I'll go on Blue Sky and X and everywhere else to get people to come to a greater understanding of what their pitch is and how it can be improved and how to close instead of just being a salesperson or what I call a great presenter. There's a lot of great presenters out there now, which may be the most harmful to customers because they make their customer want what they have, but they don't work with their resistance to get it for them. And now they're at the mercy of anyone with a lower price or better skills.

Bob King: Well, Bob, I'm glad you wrote the book. I'm glad you joined our show. I love your methodology. I encourage everyone to visit your website, get the book, and I wish you nothing but the best, my friend.

Host: Great speaking with you, Ryan. Thank you.

[Closing music begins to play]

Host: In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home... We'll be right back.