How to Become the Obvious Choice (Part 2)

Bill Caskey and Bryan Neale continue their series on how to become the Obvious Choice for your prospects and customers — not by closing harder, but by selling smarter throughout the entire process.

In Part 2, they cover four powerful moves:

• Proactively raising problems, concerns, and objections so you're never caught off guard
• Delivering a Statement of Detachment that comforts prospects and skyrockets close rates
• Setting a go/no-go instead of asking for the business
• Warming cold audiences with pre-meeting video pages

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📌 TIMESTAMPS 

0:00 – Intro: 20 years of podcasting & ASP listener meetup in London 
2:15 – Life observation: car alarms and bathroom fans (things that don't work) 
6:50 – Part 2: How to become the Obvious Choice 
7:37 – Tactic 1: Proactively surface problems and objections 
10:08 – Tactic 2: The Statement of Detachment (22% → 45%+ close rate) 
13:08 – Tactic 3: End precisely — the go/no-go and stating your desire 
15:20 – Tactic 4: Warming up cold audiences with a pre-bid video page 
18:22 – Insider promo: June 5th — How to build a conversion event

#SalesTraining #B2BSales #AdvancedSellingPodcast #SalesProcess #ObviousChoice #Detachment #Prospecting #SalesStrategy #Closing #BillCaskey #BryanNeale

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Welcome back to the advanced selling podcast, the longest running sales training podcast and podcast history at 20 years and running. I'm Bill Kaske.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

I'm Brian Neal, 20 years and running. Oh wow. Man. Have we known each other that long? Longer than that.

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Jeez.

SPEAKER_01 0:19

We meant April of 1997. I didn't remember that. That's almost 29 years. Yeah. That's how long we've known each other. Yeah. We've only been podcasting for 20 of those 29 years. Only. Only.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

That's good. That's great. I love it. Um, this uh episode, we're going to take further what we started last week. If you haven't listened to that, go back. You don't have to listen to it before you listen to this one. But we talked are talking about part two of the series of how do you become the obvious choice for your customers. So we shared three or four items last week. I'm going to share three or four more this week, but you have something special to bring.

SPEAKER_01 0:55

I don't know. It's special. I've got uh by the way, join the insider. We always tell you that. We tell you that every week. And you still haven't done it, go do it, manslingpodcast.com live, live coaching with my man Bill. And uh great groups. Oh, we should shout out the international group. Oh, yeah, that's right. Let's shout them out. Right. Right? We have uh three listeners from across the world, across the globe. Uh, we'll put some pictures up on this. Um, who got together. They've been listening to the podcast, well, most of them for a long time, and they've known each other in a little subgroup of the advanced selling podcast, and they all got together in London. Uh, one's from Canada, one's from the United States, and one is from Germany. Karen, Chris, Andy, and Scott. That's it. Those guys, they know who they are. They know who they are. And um, we're gonna put some pictures up on LinkedIn in the group of they got together, sent us a really nice message and text and pictures, and that's just nothing it makes you feel more fulfilled in life than when you think you know, people are together like that and you had a little bit to do with it. Exactly. That's just a cool thing. Really cool thing. I love those people, and they're all just great people, they're just great humans. Yeah, um, so I life observation, Bill. Um, I I've been thinking about uh inventions and things that we still have that are basically meaningless, that are completely meaningless, but we still have them for no reason whatsoever. One of them is car alarms. When is the last time you heard a car alarm go off and anybody did anything other than who the hell's cars at? God, come on, man, turn your car alarm off. That's meant to be go off when someone's breaking in, but all it does is perturb people and get them annoyed. And all you look around, like God, who's the idiot who pushed their key button? No one, no one looks to go, hey, is there someone breaking in over there? Let's go check it out, right? People running over. No one never, ever. Like, I got him, I got him. I saw the guy. I saw no one does that. Car alarm you're like, God, that's annoying. Turn it off. Well, 80% of the time, it's just uh malflip or somebody walks by it, or somebody tap, yeah. Until there's some guy smash and grabbing your backpack, you know, with with uh both your laptops in it.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

And yeah, what do you are you gonna go after him then? Is that right?

SPEAKER_01 2:58

Well, and then you know, it's just it's just funny to me. Like, nobody pays attention to car alarms other than they're annoyed by him. The other thing that's the most worthless thing on the earth is that we run away from it.

SPEAKER_00 3:07

Actually, we do the parking lot of car alarms.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Like, I don't want any parking. Oh my god, you like walk by holding your ear, walking out of Walmart or Target, you're like, Oh my god, someone who is that idiot with this car alarm going off? Meanwhile, yeah, his uh yeah, his uh work laptop just got yanked out of the backseat. The other one is the bathroom fan. What's the point of the bathroom fan? It doesn't do anything, it's just so useless. It makes a little noise and all, and then it gets clogged up with you know, it makes a noise when it gets dusty. But every bathroom, we gotta have a fan in there, gotta have ventilation, it doesn't do anything that it's supposed to do whatsoever. So, can we just do away with car alarms and bathroom fans? That's my rant for today. There's gotta be others, there've got to be other inventions that are worthless that we still have around.

SPEAKER_00 3:51

I I know that sometimes we'll be sitting in you know the living room or something in the evening, or as we used to say, oven evening. Yeah, and uh and I'll hear I'll hear something like what is that noise? Jane's like, I don't know, is the fan on down in the bathroom? I'm like, I haven't been down there. She's like, I haven't been down there, and we go down and it's on. I'm like, how did it how did it get on? It was this on from a week ago when everybody was over, and uh and but we just heard it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

It's it's worthless, it's just it's so worthless, and it doesn't do anything like it's supposed to do, which is a whole other subject. But anyway, those are there've gotta be more. I'll be thinking of some more just things that we all have we take for granted that just don't do at all what they're supposed to do anymore.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

There's gotta be more or they did do something, and then technology has yeah has surpassed it, and but we still hang on to the old thing, yes, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Great idea going in. Like, here's what like you know, when they go to Jiffy Lube to get your oil change and they bring your internal air filter in. Show it to you, so it's it's it's like the the air that comes from the AC, where they're like, Hey, there's your air internal air filter. It's like, okay, am I like getting like lung cancer from this? Like, what do I really need that thing? You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_00 5:03

It's pretty dirty in here. And the external air filter is always about 20 bucks. The internal air filter is like 350 totally, it's exactly.

SPEAKER_01 5:12

And I'm always thinking, like, does that thing really do anything? You know, and I know that all the mechanics can be like, Oh, hang on a second, it does something. But the internal air filter, I'm like, okay, I'll just get my one's little, little, little uh pine trees and hanging up on the dashboard there, just fine totally.

SPEAKER_00 5:26

You're like, yeah, you used to light incense in your car. I remember that. I I missed that part, I didn't do that. Uh it's like I took my uh I was um backed out the other day, and my wife saw that it was uh some kind of leakage or something underneath the car, and she takes a picture of it and sends it to me. And so I take it in. I'm like, uh, I don't know what it is. I I felt that it it it was it was not water, but I don't know what it was, it could have been oil. So I took it in to the Acura dealership and um he inspects it, and he comes out goes, Kimara, I want to I want to show you something. Like, oh God, what is it? Like a cracked head or something. And he comes back, and there was a little uh Asian gentleman who was the mechanic, and and uh he's sitting there with his arms crossed, looking at the car. There's nothing like it's perfectly dry. And I felt like he was looking at me like these cars don't leak. Why why are you bothering me with this? And I was I was like, Oh, great. He goes, Yeah, these cars, these cars don't leak. Okay, thank you. So um, anyway, that was it.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

It was yeah, they said you're on your way. I love it. That's a very accurate thing. I love it, I loved my accurate. Oh my god, I loved it.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

Oh man, they're they're so great. And it's true. They don't go to the dealership, you can count on spending a hundred to two hundred, not two thousand to five thousand. Always have a BMW with a hundred thousand miles.

SPEAKER_01 6:45

Okay, you want to tee us off today? Let's do it. Yeah, part two of the uh episode here. We talked about how to become the obvious choice. We're just gonna carry on down our list. We did two or three-ish last uh time. Remember, we're talking about how to become the obvious choice, not just wait till the end and figure out how we can close and win the deal at the very end. We're talking about how do we become the obvious choice all the way through. Yeah, and uh, we talked about some things up front, some mentality things, then we did some more tactical things. We're gonna carry on, kind of working our way through the sales process. So good. I've got one. Do you want me to start? Yeah, you go ahead and start. I'll come in. I think one of the elements that will make you become more of the obvious choice is your ability and desire to outwardly handle issues or problems or concerns or objections up front all the way through and not hide from them. And so, what what what this would be like or sound like is to have some place in your sales process where you're going to bring your concerns for the new vendor-seller relationship to your customer who's still hasn't bought from you, and have them bring theirs and just go through and just hit them one by one. And the old way to do this is to just hope they never bring anything bad up. Yeah. And then if or when they do, we flip into this manipulative objection handling process that's more art than science, and also is intended to overcome everything, which means you should be able to get every sale, which we know isn't true, and just talk about them. Because even in the obvious choices, there are concerns. There should be. Should be. And I think one thing that'll make you an obvious choice is when someone says they're not afraid to talk about things that could go wrong or negative and how we're going to handle them. So that's one of my uh one of my recommendations for how to become an obvious choice.

SPEAKER_00 8:33

There's a lot of ways to do that. You can do it the way you talked about it. You can also introduce frequently asked questions, which are really objections that you hear from people, like, I don't have the time. Well, introduce that. You be the one that talks about that. You know, at this point, I know sometimes people feel like, geez, isn't this going to take a lot of time? And do I really have the time to invest in this? Let me share with you kind of how we look at that. So you can preempt these objections by framing them as questions. And then, but you still could do the end thing, like you talked about, Brian. So it just might be there's fewer of them because you've handled them preemptively. But I like that. I like the uh and and it's like the willingness to address these is where the action is. That's it. It's it's the fearlessness and courage that you have and they see it. They I'm convinced they want to be with someone who has that kind of courage. They don't want to be with a wimp. They don't want to be with somebody who waits until the end and start does all the fancy, clever footwork for closing. They want to be with somebody who's who's got the you know what's to bring stuff up on both sides and introduce it and have a conversation. People just people eat that up, but we're still afraid of doing it because, like, oh, I don't want to put anything in the water that'll you know be toxic here.

unknown 9:52

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

That is the lesson. The lesson is to have the courage, the fortitude, and the objectivity to just deal with life in real life as it's bravo.

SPEAKER_00 10:03

Okay, here's a one that I actually uh taught teach, and I think you do too, but I've got a client who's taken this to the uh next level, nth level, and that is detachment. And they have and and they're a large company, and they have increased their closing percentage from 22% to 40, 45 to 50, depending upon the advisor, depending on the person. And they start every call with a statement of detachment. And they wrote it based on what was in the book and what some of the work we've done. But it's a very simple statement of how they are unattached to the outcome of this sales process. And it sounds, as you can imagine, we've talked about it here on the podcast a lot, but it's really just very simple. It's a statement, it's probably four or five sentences, that comforts the prospects so they know they're not going to be sold and persuaded and convinced and chased all around the world. And their closing rate has gone from 22 to 40, 45 plus percent. Now, are they better at what they do during the process? Yeah, it's not just that, but that sets the tone for the rest of the process. Because when a when a prospect feels like they are not going to be chased and, you know, harassed, they will share more. They will share more of what the real issue is, what they're trying to accomplish, where the issues are, what the transformation that they want. They're going to share a whole lot more when they feel comfortable doing so. And the statement of detachment, I would suggest you all write one out based on, you know, you can go back and search on some of our past episodes, but it's basically, hey, I appreciate you inviting me in. We're going to work like crazy to see if I can understand your problem, what you're trying to accomplish. I will propose a solution to you at some point, maybe not today, but some point. And at the end of that time, you're welcome to say yes or no. If it's no, I fully understand. One thing we do not do, we do not chase people for business. That's not our nature. And so just something like that, something simple like that. Especially if you're in a large ticket sale. If you're selling, you know, popcorn at a you know retail stand, you're probably not going to go through that. But if you're selling a significant high-ticket item, it's a great thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

It's awesome. And I love that it's written out. And it can't be read, it's not like a script, but it's written out. It's got to be both. You gotta read it, you gotta write it and then read it, uh, or then say it off the off the page. It's really, really great.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

And all the people who come who come into this organization who have been with companies where this is like heretical, you would never tell a customer this. It takes them a while. They've got fact, I had one guy the other day, he goes, I got PTSD from my prior client. Because we would never say this. We would, but he says, I've used it and I see how powerful it is. And so it, if you're not used to it and bring if you're VP of sales, you're bringing new people in, make sure that they don't go make a call without understanding this and how it works and being able to articulate it.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

It's fantastic. Statement of detachment. Um okay, here's one. It's gonna sound like the opposite, but it's not. So you gotta really tune into this one. I think one of the things that uh will make you the obvious choice is how succinctly and precisely you end the process if you get that far. What I mean by that is to get to a an agreed to time, in our world we call it a go-no-go, and that is a calendared event. And and I think if you if you've if they've passed the test through these multiple steps of process and they've passed the are they the obvious choice for me as the seller, then we get to the end. I'm going to express a desire to say it's time, we're in. And that's not a closing move. That's not an ask for the business. No, I'm stating my side of the fence. And my side of the fence is I want to work with you. And I feel beyond confident that if we did, we'd get the things we've talked about in the last 18 meetings. That's where I'm at. A very specific yes. Your side of it though, not the ask for the business. Hey, can we work together? Not that. It is the statement instead. I want to work together. I want to be, I want to be a partner of yours in this thing. I love that. That's it. And that's different. You gotta listen through that because people will hear that as a closing move and they'll hear it as ask for the order that is not asking anything.

SPEAKER_00 14:32

You're you're leveling the relationship. So it's not you and the one down and them and the one up because they have the money and you're just a poor, you know. Yes, no, it's not that. And I would even say you put that in the statement of detachment up front. You tell people up front, this is what's going to happen. As we go through this, there's going to be a time where I have to decide, are you the right fit for me? And you have to decide the same thing. And so at some point, I will say to you, yep, this feels like something we can help, or no, this doesn't. You could put that in so that way when it comes, it's not a surprise. They're kind of expecting it.

SPEAKER_01 15:05

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 15:05

Yes, and yes. Love that. All right. I've got one more here to finish up. And and we want to hear from you. Uh let us know in the excuse me, ASP group on LinkedIn. If you want to hear more of these, we we probably could come do another couple episodes on it, but uh let us know. And again, as I said last week, if you have something you've done that really separates you, we'd love to hear that too. The last one I have is if you are a cold audience, if you're selling to a cold audience, meaning somebody finds you on the web, they're not really, they've really they've never done business with you in the past, but it's but they seem to be a prospect, you've got to figure out a way to warm them up quickly. And the traditional way to do it is to uh is to just during the call talk about, well, here's all the things we do, and here's how we started, you know, personal story and all that, which I'm I'm not I'm okay with. But I had a client the other day who was got um solicited for a bid, which we don't we don't like this client, but but they they were they were hot because it was a brand new area, and if they got the business. And so I said, look, how many people from your company are going to be in this on this? He said, Three, me and two others. I said, Well, you need to you need to put up a website, shoot, have each of those people who are going to be involved in the account shoot a video, have them talk about their background, who they've worked with, how they work, what the ideal client is for them. You have the top video because you're the lead person on it, and send that to them prior to even bidding. Um I wouldn't send it with the bid, I would say, look, before we go into the bid, we want you to be comfortable with who we are and the people that we would put on the uh project. So here's a link to that. Now they just did it on late last week, so I don't know yet what happened, but they were all excited because they they did the videos. The guy, the lead guy, actually scripted out the videos for the other two people, so they weren't using the excuse of, I don't know what to say. Um, but it was a masterful uh and they he went to Claude Code and had a web page bill, a very simple web page, doesn't have to be fancy, but now uh he has sent that to them, and we'll see what happens. It's beautiful, just beautiful positioning. Yeah, how it is how how do I get the customer to feel like they kind of know me before I show up and work my magic?

SPEAKER_01 17:17

Yes, and the main theme of all these, and by the way, shout out to radio legends, Bob and Tom. You know, Bob Kavoyan just passed away, but uh one of um lifelong Hall of Fame radio people here based in our hometown of Indianapolis. But they had a character called Mr. Obvious, it was played by Chick McGee if I'm who's still on their show. But if you want to have some fun outside of this, these two episodes, Google Mr. Obvious episodes, and they're absolutely hilarious, at least they are to me. Yeah um, but uh you know, the threat of all these things is all these things to me are a little bit more or a little bit different than ever what everybody else is doing. They're not monumental, but that video you just talked about that's a little bit more, you know, and uh bringing up problems, it's a little bit more than most people are doing. So sorry pulling up a Mr. Obvious episode there.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

So no, no, no, I'm pulling up the insider. Uh oh, great. Sorry, sorry about that. You're good. That was rude. Okay, not at all. Travis, you might have to pull that out. Uh so uh yes, Mr. Obvious is funny. It it's I think a lot of people have stolen that or or they stole it or something. Absolutely fantastic. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. So uh next month's Insider, it happens on June the 5th, which is Friday. We're going to talk about how to build a conversion event. And a conversion event is very simply an event that you do online that converts suspects to prospects. Yep. A lot of times we don't have, you know, people don't do this. And so then we're always trying to make it make suspects into prospects. And I think a conversion event works a whole lot better for that. We'll tell it, teach you about it to join the insider, go to advanced selling podcast.com slash insider. I'm actually going to give you a script for this entire this entire conversion event, and you're going to put in your information and out we'll put out we'll spit the actual outline for this. So it's going to be uh be worth a lot of a lot to you if you uh deploy this. Uh tuition is 97 dollars for insider, 97 a month. Love to have you there. Go, please go. All right. That's it. Yep. That's it. Bye.