Shower Your Way to Sales Success

David interviews Blair about his recent article in which he gives us methods to cope with our own natural emotional and physiological responses that can be triggered when unforeseen events unfold within sales conversations.

Links

"Can Improv and Cold Plunges Improve Your Sales?" by Blair Enns for winwithoutpitching.com

Blair's interview on the Undisputed Authority podcast with Liam Curley

What Doesn’t Kill Us by Scott Carney

Transcript

David C. Baker: All right, Blair, shower your way to sales success. It's like you've been getting feedback after your sales calls, there's a strange smell around you, and you decided, "Oh shit, I need to start showering before I have any sales calls."

Blair Enns: That's not what this is about.

David: Oh, okay, well, correct me, then. Shower your way to sales success: go ahead, tell me what this is.

Blair: I wrote a post titled Can Improv and Cold Plunges Improve Your Sales? The inspiration for this was: I was in training, leading a workshop a couple of months ago, and somebody was talking about a scenario where everything was going well until it wasn't. Somebody on the client side did something and just killed the momentum. They said, "It was like cold water had been thrown into my face." I thought, "That's actually a really good metaphor," because physiologically, it's effectively the same thing. That is what happens, and because I'm a big Wim Hof devotee.

David: That means you swim naked, right, in public? Or is that something else?

Blair: I think Wim wears clothes, but breath work, and cold exposure. I thought, "Oh yes, this is the invitation that I've been looking for to channel one of my hobbies into my work writing, so I embraced it.

David: Have you noticed that we are weaving more personal stuff in here? What does that mean?

Blair: I think we had this conversation. I have this fantasy, I have for years, this idea of launching another podcast that is all about the stuff that I'm interested in and has nothing to do with what I do for a living. It'll have no listeners, but I have not ruled out doing this podcast. Then one day, I thought, "You know what? Screw it. I'm just going to start weaving in the stuff that I'm interested in. I'm going to sneak it into my business writing."

David: 2Bobs with no listeners. We are slowly becoming this as we keep doing this.

Blair: We're men of a certain age who have quit caring about certain things.

David: When this person told that story about cold water in their face, they mentioned it as a negative. It's like 'that stopped everything', and you read it as, "Oh no, that can be a good thing. It's a metaphor for something else." Before we go too deep, can you just tell us a little bit more about your weird personal life and the lake you live on, and what happens every day, and all that?

Blair: We're recording this on December 18th, and here, just like in many parts of the world, we do this polar plunge. I think it's January 1st, where this local charity—my wife's on the board—a whole bunch of people come out, and they raise money, and then they jump into the lake. Everybody gets ready on the beach, and somebody else from the bullhorn do the countdown, and they yell, "Go." Then everybody starts screaming and runs into the water, and then they run out screaming. I do this every day, so I watch, and then my swimming buddies and I go for a regular swim, and we go actually swim for 5 or 10 minutes.

It's an interesting contrast. I used to be that person. I remember trying to conquer cold water, and I remember the reaction to it. It's funny, we're all physiology, largely. We're the same people; we're effectively wired the same way. To some people, it's a total shock. Well, here's the truth: to everybody, it's a total shock until you practice. This idea of cold water being thrown in your face, I thought, "Oh, yes, how do you deal with that? I know how you deal with that. You throw cold water in your face every day," but I also know that the physiological response of being in a sale—I don't recall the last time I felt this way—but I have been in sales situations throughout my career multiple times where I could not speak because something happened in the moment where I was like, "Oh, I was not expecting that. Okay, get your shit together, Enns. How do you respond?"

The bigger question: How do you deal with these disruptive moments? often power plays on the part of the client. How do you deal with them in a sales situation? How do you learn to get better at dealing with them over time? The answer is, you just put yourself in that situation repeatedly. It's an idea that comes from chemistry, I think. It's known as hormesis, or hormetic stress. It's the idea that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. A small exposure to certain toxins or things that are harsh for you will actually make you more anti-fragile, more robust. That's a Nassim Taleb idea as well.

David: Well, I have not discovered that with certain people that really annoy me.

Blair: You're just not getting enough exposure to those people. You need to spend more time with them.

David: What doesn't kill me will kill them, probably. Can you give me some examples of what kinds of things you might hear, or maybe not just oral, maybe it's just things that happen in a sales conversation that would just stop you in your tracks, like this?

Blair: What stops me in my tracks—it's been years since this has happened—is somebody just questioning even my right to be in the room, like, "Have you done this before?"

David: Yes.

Blair: Or like, we hired a consultant one time, and we're really down on this but let's keep talking. It's not so much they stop you in your tracks, it's just like they take the air out of the room—I think that's what it is—you don't feel in control anymore. All of a sudden, some surprise has been handed to you, and you're not sure where to go next. It's just a deflating moment.

David: In the post, I wrote about a hypothetical example of a CFO showing up, the missing senior decision-maker that you did not identify in the qualifying conversation. You're in a closing conversation and there's this new person in the room, and you think, "Who's this person?" It's the person you didn't qualify in the qualifying conversation. You didn't identify. You move to the proposal, start sharing the proposal, and the senior person says, "Wait a minute. Stop. I don't know what anybody told you here, but we're not doing this. This project is not a priority." [laughs] That's an example.

Without the specific details, I've been in lots of moments like that. I remember being a young account person working on a national car dealer group account. I was given the creative. The creative was done in a different city. I was given this creative to present to a room full of car dealers who are on the board of this dealer advertising group.

I show the print ad and I do my little sales job on it. Then I stop and nobody says anything. It's the first time we've worked together, that I've worked with this group. These are car dealers, remember. Somebody says, "Well, there's a lot of white space on that ad." As soon as he said that, the most dominant person in the room—car dealers, they're all dominant— starts yelling, "Exactly. I knew we never should have hired you."

He starts swearing at me, and he is ranting about how beautiful and elegant and brand-like this harsh retail ad-- In his mind, it should have been screaming price, but it was too beautiful and too elegant. At the end of his rant, he said, "If you got to put snakes on the ad, put goddamn snakes on the ad." He sets off. Everybody's yelling. In that moment—I'm in my 20s—I'm physically looking for the exit, "How do I extricate myself from this room?"

My heart was pounding, and I thought, "Okay, I got to meet this head-on." At some point, I let them burn themselves out. Then I said, "You want snakes? You're going to get your goddamn snakes." I grabbed the stuff and I walked out of the room. As I was walking out of the room, the dominant guy goes, "See, that wasn't so bad."

Blair: [laughs]

David: I spent four and a half years with this group. I hadn't thought about this in years. My heart is racing, thinking about it. I was scarred. I used to grind my teeth at night because these people were so hard to deal with.

Blair: Part of it is just that repeated exposure, where you face a very difficult thing in the moment and it doesn't kill you. The next time it happens, you realize, "Okay, I'm not going to die. I figured out a way last time," so it just keeps happening. One of the other things you talk about in this article was how it relates to speaking as well, certain physiological things around deep breathing, and so on. I was listening to the episode that Liam Curley did about your career recently. It's a really good one. What's the name of it? Undisputed Authority?

David: Yes.

Blair: You talked in there about how you were not as comfortable as a speaker in the early days, and it comes very naturally to you now. You didn't talk about this next thing, but I kept thinking, "You know what? When I finally got comfortable speaking, the thing I still wasn't comfortable about was just opening the floor to any question at all," and now I just love any question at all. Talk a little bit about improv and the physiological breathing side of things, and how that relates to these very difficult sales conversations that we were just talking about.

David: To your point about why are we thrown in these moments, we're thrown because we weren't expecting it. After that first meeting with the car dealers, I knew to expect the worst, so I went in prepared, and I was never in that situation again. I was in difficult situations, but I was never caught off guard. It happens when everything is proceeding swimmingly, and then out of nowhere, out of the blue, you get this response.

What happens is we all have enough basic working knowledge of the brain that we understand that the amygdala is the fight or flight center of the brain, often called the reptile brain. It's part of the limbic system. We tend to live in our neocortex or the outer part of the more evolved outer part of the brain that's responsible for rational thought. We're living in this rational thought part of our brain. Then somebody on the other side of the table does something that triggers this fight or flight response. You have the sense to run or to fight back. That's exactly what's going on. The reason why cold exposure and breath work help with this is that they help you override your autonomic nervous system.

The autonomic nervous system is composed primarily of your sympathetic nervous system, which is all about mobilization, getting you to do things. There's some stress involved, like dialing up your sympathetic nervous system will increase stress hormones and all these, and your heart rate goes up and your breathing quickens, et cetera. The second major component of the autonomic nervous system is the parasympathetic nervous system. That's all about calming you down. We think of it as a switch, but it's really dials on both systems. We can generalize and say we're operating in one or the other. It's actually a little bit more complicated than that.

In that moment, when we're hit with something unexpected that we perceive to be dangerous to us, our autonomic nervous system—so autonomic—it takes over. It's not now about rational thought, it's about saving ourselves, in particular, the sympathetic nervous system. What we want to do in any stressful situation like that, whether it's sales or dealing with danger in the wild or in the streets or whatever it is, we want to be able to calm ourselves down. How do we calm ourselves down? It starts with breath work. We can get into the details of that. I cover it more in the post.

The way I was taught first aid, the first rule of first aid is to take control. Take control means first take control of yourself, and then take control of others. I've talked about this before. The woman who taught me would mime this coming up on a bloody scene. She would turn around so she wasn't looking at it. She would take a moment, she would compose herself, and then she would turn back to the scene and point to somebody and say, "You, call 911." "You, do this," et cetera. That idea of taking control starts with taking control of yourself. In that situation where you realize you are in fight-or-flight mode, how do you get yourself out of fight-or-flight mode? You have to take control of yourself. How do you take control of yourself? It always starts with your breath.

There's a guy named Scott Carney who wrote a book called What Doesn't Kill Us. He describes breathwork, controlling your breathing as jamming the thin edge of a wedge into your autonomic nervous system. The more you practice breathing, the deeper you can get that wedge in and you can override these functions that your autonomic nervous system are responsible for. You take control of your breathing, you will control your heart rate, you can start to control other things.

I've done all kinds of experiments in my own life where I was able to override things like nausea from car sickness. I went two years without shivering because I decided that I could override shivering. I now shiver again because I don't practice to the extent that I used to.

Blair: Your mind is weaker. [laughs]

David: My mind is weaker, but it's incredible, and it's a little bit addictive. Once you start practicing this, and it all begins with your breath, you will start to imagine all kinds of things about your body and your autonomic nervous system in particular that you can override.

Blair: When I was reading this article, I was struck by the breath thing because I really feel that I don't think I got to be a better speaker. I am not an exceptional speaker even now, but I'm a better speaker than I was. I don't think that improvement came. It had nothing to do with preparation. It was actually the breathing thing and the confidence thing, and welcoming questions.

In a speaking setting, somebody asks a question; they really do want to know the answer, but in an improv setting, the person asking the question is not curious; they're trying to get the person up front off their game. In that moment, before the person up front answers, the audience is saying, "Who am I going to put money on here? Did this throw this guy off, or is he going to come back with something really good and funny and relax the crowd again?"

Anyways, I was thinking about this breath thing. What struck me so useful about it is—obviously, just the deeper breathing is useful—the deeper breathing—this is something that you've talked a lot about here—creates this pause in which the other party might say something that would be very useful for you to hear. You've talked about there needs to be silence. Just stop and wait, and just endure the silence. That's a time for you to breathe, but it's also a time for somebody else to say something that will help you regain some of that control.

Blair: If you are terrified of the idea of shutting up in that moment and focusing on your breathing, which is what you should do, then it's helpful for you to recall this Win Without Pitching principle of embrace silence. I've said before that I think learning to be comfortable with silence is the single biggest little thing that you can do to become a better salesperson. If you tie these two ideas together, focus on your breath, then to your point, what does your silence say to the room?

It says you're not reacting. You're thinking about it. You're behaving like a professional. Instead of coming back with some sort of emotional response, you're not throwing off your game. It's actually a little bit of a power play yourself to just focus on your breathing and be comfortable with the silence that you create. When you create that silence, you invite the client to step into that silence. Nature does abhor a vacuum; people aren't comfortable with silence. When you are comfortable, you're inviting the client to fill the void. They keep talking. That gives you more time to control your breath.

David: This is just a small part of it, not the whole thing. I think at the core of what makes an entrepreneur, is they love control, and they can be naturally defensive. Both of those instincts can be wrong. The instincts that we're born with, this fight or flight thing, some of them are really useful. You can see what happens in certain very difficult circumstances where somebody needs rescuing, and so on.

There's also times when success means we need to fight. We need to defeat some of our natural instincts. We talked about this when we were doing that episode on motorcycle racing. You see some danger ahead, your natural instinct is to tighten up and stare at it. Both of those things will kill you. If you just take a bicycle with nothing on it and you just push it down the hill, it's going to stay upright until it runs into something.

If you tape the handlebars in a position, it'll fall over immediately. You've got to relax in these kinds of things. In that moment in this sales conversation you're talking about, you have this instinct to tighten up and control things and be defensive. What you're saying is, "No, pause, take a breath. Let somebody else fill the silence." It's just a beautiful metaphor for me to just think through.

Blair: Yes, I think so, too. The reality is, the only way to get better at this is to practice being in that situation. I don't have any data to support this, but I'm absolutely convinced that you don't have to practice being in that exact situation. Although it's probably helpful, it doesn't have to be a sales situation. I think it's any fight or flight moment, where you're triggered, and the amygdala is taking over, and you—or the rational part of you, the neocortex—wants to take control back.

I think these situations, whether it's diving into cold water or hearing something you didn't expect in a high-stakes sales conversation, it's all the same. It's all the same response, and we're trying to override the response. Whatever the scenario is, daily cold exposure, daily breath work, improv classes, all of these things are beneficial.

David: I have a lot of clients who do improv. I just wonder what is it about this field that interests people about improv? What makes them better at it in this field? Have you ever thought about that?

Blair: Yes. I, too, have seen the patterns over the years. Improv and stand-up. More improv than stand-up. I'm fond of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's definition of creativity, which is: Creativity is the ability to see. I know, from testing hundreds of people, that people who are highly creative, directly linked to creativity, is the ability to think on your feet. I don't fully understand why, but that's one of the reasons why the pitch and presenting persists in our business, because creative people are addicted to presenting. They love presenting so much, as I say in The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, they're willing to do it for free in the pitch.

There's this sense of mastery. They're in a flow state when they're at the front of the room, and they know anything could go wrong, and they're waiting for things to go wrong, and they're relishing the opportunity to address whatever goes wrong. That is improv. I've never done improv, but when you're up there with your troop mates, and you're in this binding contract with a very small number of rules that basically you have to accept whatever is given to you, and you just have to go with the flow and make something up on the spot. Improv is a lot like presenting. Now that we're talking about this, I think a good way to wean yourself off of pitching might be to join an improv group, get that need met somewhere else.

David: I think of it as diving into an empty concrete pool and inventing water on the way down and not being terrified of that.

Blair: Yes, I love that metaphor.

David: All right, thank you, Blair. This has been fun.

Blair: Thanks, David.