Host: This is the Central Valley Business Times audio interview. And now, to today’s interview. Patrick, when you mention sales and you mention marketing, to the average person, they sound the same, but there’s a big difference, isn’t there?

Patrick Valtin: There is a big difference and that difference is actually getting bigger for the main reason that a lot of companies have that experience with their sales team. What has happened over the last five to eight years is the return on investment with the sales force has been going down against the return on investment with marketing efforts. We can talk about the reason about that in a few minutes, but yes, there’s a big difference and then fortunately, that difference is not perceived properly by a lot of small businesses.

Host: Well, let’s see if you will for our listeners, define the differences as you see them.

Patrick: Well, you know, when someone does a marketing campaign, he or she hopes to basically attract potential customers. The purpose of marketing is to create a desire in the eyes of the customers. When you put a piece of promo in a magazine or in a paper, when you put an ad on radio or on TV, the hope is “I hope this customer remembers my product when he thinks of buying it.” Problem with marketing is you may actually create a desire for that kind of product, but they never tell you that it creates the desire for yours. Now, that is where salesmanship comes in, and that’s where the big difference is. The job of a good salesperson is to make sure that the customer having been invited, having been attracted by your great marketing campaign is going to remember that it should be YOU that he chooses when he makes up his mind.

Host: Well, that certainly sounds like the ideal world, but I would imagine many of our listeners say, “That isn’t my business.” What are some of the problems that you see?

How to EDUCATE sales people

Patrick Valtin: I tell you what, the first problem is – and that’s one thing that I’ve personally observed in the US market as well as in Europe – how to educate the salespeople. I understand we’re talking about small businesses, and in many cases, the best salesperson in the business is the business owner, right?

Host: Well, sometimes. At least the owner will tell that.

Patrick Valtin: Yes. Well, when it comes to getting other people do the sales job, the big challenge to do that is to really educate people that selling has nothing to do with your product anymore. I mean, the key to getting the buyer to buy your product – and I want to re-emphasize this – is not related to your product or to your service. Selling has nothing to do with your product. Marketing has everything to do with your product, but selling has everything to do with something else that unfortunately too few people are aware of. I’m guessing you when you ask me the question…

Host: Exactly. What exactly are you talking about here?

The HUMAN FACTOR in selling

Patrick Valtin: Well, you’re going to tell or you’re going to think that what I’m going to say is not really new. But, what is new is the answer is that we need to put on that factor which is the human factor. Whatever people sell today, there’s always someone else on the market who can do it cheaper. Whatever best argument a sales person is going to present to sell his product, you can bet that there’s always someone else who can do the same argument even if it’s not 100% true. Today, the most important buying criteria – I’m not talking about the selling criteria – for customers, the first one, more than ever is, “Can I trust the guy who’s selling me his stuff?” Because of the competition, because of the market being what it is, there’s so much choice today in finding what you need and want. Because of that, the customer, unfortunately, is more and more, I would say, confused or diluted in his choice. He does not know what choice to make. You and I, when we have to buy something, the question is not, “What am I going to buy?” But the question is, “Where am I going to buy it?” The rule tells me that I’m not going to get screwed because I could have found the same kind of product cheaper or with a better guarantee in another place. So, market conditions, competitive conditions basically have developed a state of mind, a frame of mind of the customer that makes the buying decision more and more difficult.

Host: If a small business has to make a choice of allocating its resources between marketing and sales, what is that choice supposed to be in your mind?

Allocating resources between marketing and sales

Patrick Valtin: All right. Now, that question deserves two kinds of answers. First of all, if there’s a wrong marketing, you cannot have a good sales. The best salesperson cannot do anything with the wrong marketing, we all agree with that. What needs to happen though is a much better, much stronger coordination between the marketing message and marketing effort and the salesmanship attached to it. Marketing can attract a lot of leads, Doug, but I know a lot of customers, too many of them, who cry for losing the leads. I don’t know if you have experienced that, but there’s nothing more frustrating than spending a lot of money on good marketing to find that your leads are “unqualified”. Now, one thing that I always say in my lectures, if someone gave you, for example, his mailing address or his e-mail address, he is not unqualified. Nobody today is going to give you his e-mail address or his mailing address if he’s not qualified. Curiosity by itself is a qualification, and a lot of small businesses don’t understand that. Now, the point is, there needs to be much stronger coordination of efforts between marketing, marketing strategy and salesmanship. I can give you some examples, for example, when we help our customers doing their marketing campaigns, they get a lot of leads. They get very few closes, and the first reaction is, “Patrick, those needs were not qualified.” We need to do a better e-mail marketing campaign. So, I started to dig into those bad leads, and what I found out is it was a salesmanship problem. A lot of those small businesses, they are not so savvy with Internet marketing, e-mail campaigns. So, they basically give a lot of money to “experts” who will indeed give them the tools to do a good Internet marketing campaign. Guess what? As long as someone has not sold something, nothing happens in the business. So, I think that we need to give back a little bit on the basics of salesmanship and make sure that those marketing efforts are indeed properly followed up, knowing that there are new rules in the market today. There are rules that did not apply five to eight years ago or they do not apply that much. Now, not only they apply but they are hurting us. They are hurting small businesses because a lot of them still operate their business as they would have about five or eight years ago. I would tend to say, Doug, to give a good word for salespeople, I would tend to say that they need to put some basics on salesmanship and realize that in today’s society where electronic commerce dominates, some salesmanship basics need to be put back in. The most important basic is, even if you do business on the Internet there’s the human touch that needs to be present, and unfortunately, in the current marketing campaigns that I see, people basically, they rely too much on this marketing message. Again, I want to focus on this. Marketing can attract people, it does not close them, it actually sometimes will close your potential customers to buy the product from your competition, and that’s dangerous.

Host: That’s more than dangerous, that’s rather disheartening!

Selling so that you don’t lose customers to the competition

Patrick Valtin: Yes, it is, and when I said that, you know actually, a lot of customers will recognize that they try to follow up on a customer who was reaching through a marketing campaign to learn a couple of weeks later, that the guy has bought the kind of product that they are selling from the competition. When you ask them, “Why did you do that?” Guess what is the first answer that comes out? “I was not properly followed up. I never heard from you, guys, when I needed it.”

Host: So, that’s lesson number one, the biggest lesson that every business should know. But what are some of the others?

Patrick Valtin: The first point is the human contact, the human touch needs to be put back in this age of electronic commerce. And the other thing that needs to really be emphasized, and for small businesses, this is very, very important. What makes the difference between your business and another one? Again, it’s not so much related to your product. It is again related to everything else. Successful businesses today don’t show off so much before the sales is gone, but they show off much more when the sales is done after. What you do after the sales will dictate if you are going to keep that customer or not. And a lot of people tell me, “Patrick, to make the first sale is so hard.” I remember 10-15 years ago, as a sales trainer, I used to say, “Listen, it takes five to eight times more to make new customers than to keep one.” Today, Doug, I tell you. It’s reversed. If you think it’s easy to make a new customer, it is actually pretty easy. But to make it again and to get the guy re-order and come back to you, you’ve got to really, really deserve it. So, in terms of marketing and money, there’s also some marketing money that is needed to keep your customers buying from you, to keep him coming back. Marketing money is not only to attract them, but you need to put marketing money to keep them coming back, to keep deserving them buying from you.

Host: Patrick, I wonder if you would take a move at this point to tell our listeners a little bit about yourself and your company.

About New Era Selling – the company.

Patrick Valtin: Sure. As you can hear, I was not born in America, I was born in Belgium. I’ve been a sales trainer with big companies and smaller businesses for the last 23 years, and I’ve been a sales trainer for business owners of very small businesses over the last 15 years in Europe and in America. What I do, I travel all over the world and what I’m trying to do, I’m trying to reconcile the conflict in businesses between the marketing team and the sales team. That has been my motto for the last 15 years. My forte is to really coordinate the efforts between the marketing money and the sales money. How do I do that? I work with sales teams, with business owners and what we do together, we really analyze what is going on in their specific market. My specialty I would say, is not so much on the product side. I’m not a product expert. My expertise is regarding the human relationship between the potential buyer and the salesman, and today, that human relationship has been changing tremendously. I can tell you just one hint about it, people are more motivated to buy something not based on what they want, but mostly based on what they don’t want. You and I, when we are about to buy something, we are looking at what we don’t want more than what we do want. The fear to make a wrong decision drives the buyer much more strongly than the desire to obtain something today. A lot of businesses don’t understand that, and proudly promote and advertise positive aspect of buying their product. Today, with the market conditions, with the competition, I tell you what, the customer is more driven by negative motivation than by positive ones. If you can understand that, you are going to use a lot of potential customers. That’s my specialty.

Host: Where can our listeners get more information about you and your company?

Patrick Valtin: You know, one thing they should do, in a few weeks, I’m going to host a marketing and sales workshop with PostcardMania, located here in Florida, and I work with them. They could go to www.PostcardMania.com. They will see what we’re doing. In two weeks, we are actually hosting in Orlando a marketing boot camp. They would get all the links to me and they would find out what I’m doing and how I’m helping people to make a lot of money and a lot of happy customers.

Host: Now, Patrick, you’ve been very, very generous with your time. But, let me ask this, is there anything that you want to emphasize or bring out that we’ve not talked about?

Patrick Valtin: Well, I tell you one thing. I’m assuming you are addressing small businesses, right?

Host: That is correct.

Patrick Valtin: OK. My advice to all the clients that I have who are business owners, I always tell them, you really have to reconnect with salesmanship. Marketing and new marketing strategies – and there are a lot of marketing gurus our there to give you great marketing tips, and it does work under one condition – don’t give up salesmanship. Put back some basics of relationship because per observation and surveys, everywhere in America where I go, the number one missing factor is the human relationship. You know, there was a survey done by the New York Sales Club a few years ago. They were trying to find out what was the main reason why you lose a customer. In 67% percent of the answers to that survey first reason is, “I got not in touch anymore with my supplier. We lost contact. Once they did the sales, they’ve forgot about me.” Sixty-seven percent, Doug. If you would actually just handle that one, you would actually recover maybe 50% of those you were losing. I actually proved that by working with a customer in Florida here, by just asking the customer to informally, every two weeks, call their existing customers to find out how they are doing. We hired a couple of young ladies, and the only criteria of hiring those people were, “OK, can they talk? Do they have a smile? Can they be nice with the customers on the phone?” By just doing that over six months, that company reduced the loss of existing customers by over 60%.

Host: You’ve been listening to an audio interview on CentralValleyBusinessTimes.com.

Selling becomes a tougher challenge every day because of too much choice, too much competition and not enough prospects. How do you outrace your fiercest competitors is what this radio talkshow is all about.

How do you earn the confidence of professional and/or skeptical buyers? How do you speed up the buying decision process in the customer’s mind? How do you make the difference?

Patrick Valtin reveals that selling has nothing to do with your product or service. You may raise the customer’s interest by talking about your product, but you will never trigger his decision. Find out in this interview what does trigger the buying decision.

Click here to listen to the full interview (56 minutes).

Arte Maren: Welcome to “BusinessWise”, the show that provides you with management technology, effective management technology as developed by Ron Hubbard. Tonight’s guest is all about sales. I’m Arte Maren, your host, and this is a show you don’t want to miss, I promise you.

Arte Maren: Welcome back to “BusinessWise”! And as promised tonight’s show is all about sales. Our guest: Patrick Valtin. Patrick has trained 60,000, that’s 60,000, sales people and sales managers over many, many years. He’s also a certified Hubbard management consultant. I want to welcome Patrick Valtin to the show. Patrick, welcome! Patrick Valtin: Thank you Arte! How are you?

Arte Maren: How did you get involved or start in the whole sales process in the first place? Was there something that particularly appealed to you about sales? I mean, some people become engineers, some people do other… What was the appeal to the selling?

Patrick Valtin: Well, the appeal… I think it’s the same for most sales people, is to be in touch with people. If you like people you’ll try to find a job where you can have fun and, as a sales person, if you don’t know how to deal with people and if you don’t like to deal with people, you don’t choose that job. So the appeal is: relationship. Arte Maren: OK. That’s an interesting point, coming from somebody who has an MBA in international marketing. So the striving towards education and all of that was also a part of being connected to people?

Patrick Valtin: That’s a very good point! Because, you know, if you look over the last twenty years focus has been put on marketing. Because if you can see what’s happening in America, and all over the world actually, the population is oversold. People are oversold and the way the corporate world is trying to handle that is by applying an effective marketing. But guess what: as long as someone hasn’t sold something to someone, nothing happens! And after my MBA I actually decided to take a sales job, which was pretty much a challenge. You know, usually after an MBA you get on to a management position, and I took the challenge to take back a sales position basically to find out what was the best way and the most effective way to reach out to people and sell them something.

Arte Maren: So you did that, you took a corporate position in sales after the MBA…

Patrick Valtin: Yeah, absolutely.

Arte Maren: What happened then?

Patrick Valtin: Then, of course, obviously I was lucky enough to be a good sales person and having a lot of fun with the job. I was offered a sales management position pretty soon and I just decided by myself: “OK, I’m going to take that job under one condition: I’m really going to help my sales guys to bloom their sales.” So I started to do a lot of research, besides doing the sales job myself, on: what will make the difference? What is the missing ingredient that I need to find in order to make a big difference? Whether I sell in France, in Italy, in Russia, or in America.

Arte Maren: Yeah, we should mention then that your company, which I think is headquartered in Europe, trains managers all over the world.

Patrick Valtin: Yes, that’s true. That’s true. And, again, my challenge was, you know: if you don’t know how to sell something, whether you’re a salesman, a sales manager, a corporate executive, a business owner, you’re in trouble. So I really wanted to find out: “OK, what will make the difference? In a world where people are oversold, what will make the difference that someone wants to give you his money?” And that was a big challenge.

Arte Maren: Now, on that very same subject… Selling I think has also gotten a sort of a bad reputation over the years.

Patrick Valtin: That’s a good point.

Arte Maren: It’s been redefined! You know, selling means forcing something on somebody they don’t want, can’t afford, didn’t need… You know, that’s a sale.

Patrick Valtin: Yeah, so much that it does affect the position of a sales person. Selling does not have a good reputation and I tell you it does not depend on which country you are looking at. But my observation was: “Good sales people sell better than others because they do something that others don’t.” And you know, Arte, I’ve been in so many sales training myself over the last thirty years, I could not detect what would really make the big difference, and I still could not understand why is it that those top sales people where different? And then I did some research, and I did find the difference.

Arte Maren: And we have millions of people out there who would like to know what that is.

Patrick Valtin: You know, those millions of people, if they are involved in sales, I’m pretty sure that they have themselves been in so many sales seminars, they have read so many books on sales… And don’t get me wrong, there are very good sales people and very good sales trainers out there, great people. But you know what? The problem is, when you are a good, natural sales person you can talk about it but then it’s not so easy to duplicate it.

Arte Maren: Meaning some have a flair and they’re a good sales person because of that, but how do you get the fundamentals that’ll work for everybody.

Patrick Valtin: Yeah, exactly. That’s the big challenge. Because once you get that, you can duplicate it. And you can change, I promise you, almost anybody into a great sales person. So what is that missing ingredient that needs to be there so that someone who doesn’t know what do in life or someone who is not really successful as a business owner or as a sales person… What does it take for that person to make a customer not only willing but wanting to give their money to you? That’s the point and, you know, I don’t want to keep the secrets any longer, but one day I read a book and the book was “Dianetics” which was basically explaining everything about what’s going on there. [points to own head] What’s going on there?

Arte Maren: Meaning the connection between selling and the mental process about the customer.

Patrick Valtin: Exactly. You see selling — and this is not new by the way — selling is 90% the ability to understand and to manage what’s going on in the customer’s mind. You know, it’s the ability to manage his emotional position and reaction towards the act of buying. And that’s the point! So if you master the emotional side of the buying process you increase by a hundred, two hundred percent, your chances of closing the deal.

Arte Maren: And that emotional mastering comes about how?

Patrick Valtin: Well, it comes about… I’ll tell you one thing: most sales people have been taught to give the best argument about the product or about the service. And again, they are good arguments for good products. The problem today is: you take your product or your service, chances that you are the only one on the planet to sell that product or service are none. And the best argument that you are using today, I guess maybe 10 to 20 to 30 competitors are using the same argument.

Arte Maren: There’s a lot of noise in the marketplace.

Patrick Valtin: There is a lot of noise and the way companies are trying to handle that is by being more effective on the marketing side, which is correct. I mean, you have to be more effective on marketing but at the end of the day, if the customer doesn’t trust you he’s not going to buy. And the other point is: today the customer will buy not because he needs something, he will buy because he wants to buy from you. And what I found out 20… well, almost 17 years ago with the Hubbard technology is that if you master that emotional side of the buying process you definitely hit the target.

Arte Maren: So you’re referring now to Hubbard’s discoveries on the emotional tone scale.

Patrick Valtin: Yeah, I believe you have a book on that. It’s called the “Tone Scale Book” and that book explains exactly what’s going on in the customer’s mind, why he makes a decision. Actually right prior to when he has to make a decision.

Arte Maren: I should mention at this juncture that there’s a booklet that we’re providing from BusinessWise on the emotional tone scale which goes into great detail on everything that Mr. Valtin is going to be covering on this fascinating subject of the creation of understanding or the achievement of understanding with that customer, which you’re saying is the fundamental for selling. Those viewers who’d like to have a copy of the booklet, it is complimentary from the show, just call the number that’s on the screen. Patrick, I guess this is kind of a very simple question but, you know, there’s all this technology of selling, all this “Do this, do that and do this!” You seem to be undercutting it by saying that the Hubbard system simply is built on this “liking factor” or this understanding of the customer.

Patrick Valtin: Yeah, I didn’t say the on this “liking factor”, I said the understanding factor. The fact that the customer, or the prospect, is going to like you is not so much important. What is important is that the sales person understands the fundamental motivations of a customer to buy. The buying process responds to emotional factors much more than to rational factors. So, if you’re asking me, the key difference between those technologies that are in the market and the Hubbard technology regarding salesmanship is exactly that. How can I understand and manage better the fundamental motivations of my prospect, of my customer? On the phone or a face to face meeting you must be able quickly to understand, find out, detect what’s going on. I give you an example. A prospect who tells you: “You know, I’m very interested. Let me think about it. It’s a great product, it’s cheap.” He never buys. What went wrong? What did the sales person miss? Now, the Hubbard technology, and specifically the tone scale technology, is allowing you to find out before it’s too late: what’s going on here?

Arte Maren: So this is very different from the scripts that say: “When the customer says ‘I’ll think about it’ then you say this and then they say that.” The Hubbard emotional tone scale is a scale of emotional tones that you could recognize.

Patrick Valtin: You could recognize and it will allow you to decode what the customer is saying. When the customer is saying, you know: “I need to think about it.” Or “Let me talk to my wife.” Or “Let me talk to my partner.” Or he just says: “I like it. I need to sleep on it.” If you don’t know how to decode that you have a 90% chance of loosing the sale.

Arte Maren: And this decoding is simple to learn?

Patrick Valtin: Yeah, it’s very, very simple to learn. Absolutely.

Arte Maren: We’re going to take that up after out break. I want our viewers to get the scope and, again, understanding of the scope and effectiveness of Hubbard management technology around the world and you’re going to see that in a moment. [commercial break]