Antonio is a charismatic and experienced trainer, speaker, consultant and author in the areas of sales, management and strategic planning.
Using the proven Sandler techniques and methodologies, Antonio is well known for his expertise in developing and training powerful sales strategies and tactics – his clients learn how to win more sales, in less time, while creating a common sales language and dynamic prospecting culture.
Antonio’s Sandler Specialism: Questioning Strategies. He is known for his book Asking Questions The Sandler Way.
Antonio’s Overriding Management Principle: “For prospects to see you as better than your competitors, first they have to see you as different from them. If they ‘zig’, you should ‘zag’.”
In 2020, his latest book, The 21st Century Ride-Along, was released. Focusing on sales management, he discusses how to avoid the most common mistakes and deliver the greatest possible value by sitting in on sales calls, with proven strategies to dramatically improve sales teams productivity.
Antonio has over 20 years of experience in executive sales, business development and management. Prior to co-founding Absolute Sales Development, Antonio held a number of senior executive and directorship positions for some of the world’s best respected and trusted brands.
Antonio is a fully qualified and certified Business Mentor with the IoEE – ‘Institute of Enterprise and Entrepreneurs’, and was awarded the highly-regarded Institute of Personnel Development award for ‘Change Management’
Contact Antonio:
[Podcast Transcript Using Artificial Intelligence]
Umar Hameed 0:01
Are you ready to become awesomer? Hello everyone! My name is Umar Hameed, I'm your host on the No Limits Selling Podcast where industry leaders share their tips, strategies and advice on how you can become better, stronger, faster. Just before we get started, I've got a question for you, do you have a negative voice inside your head? We all do, right? I'm gonna help you remove that voice and under 30 days guaranteed, not only remove it, but transform it. So instead of the voice that sabotages you, there's one that propels you to much higher levels of performance and success. There's a link in the show notes, click on it to find out more. All right! Let's get started.
Umar Hameed 0:41
Hello everyone. Today I have the privilege of having Antonio Garrido here with me today. He's a Sandler disciple. He's the author of many books in the way I really wanted to dig deeply into was asking questions that Sandler way, but beyond that the ability to ask questions is such a powerful tool that we have with the right question, you can change the mindset of the person you're talking to. And Antonio, welcome to the program.
Antonio Garrido 1:08
Hello Umar, thank you so much for the invitation. I'm excited to be here. I do appreciate it. Thank you.
Umar Hameed 1:14
So you must have seen a need that, you know, people really need to understand the power of asking questions in order for you to, especially your first book, because the first time I wrote a book, it is freaking awful, especially the first time you meet an editor, it's like, I've still been traumatized by that. So what did you see that made you write that book?
Antonio Garrido 1:33
Um, well, a few things, I guess, I maybe the thing that really prompted me to start to sit down and kind of plan the book or sheduled the book or, or actually write down the issues that I was hoping that the book would try to resolve, right? so I had a plan before I, before I dove in. And I guess the main one was I was I found myself wondering a few years ago, because prior to be becoming a Sandler trainer, I was always in sales marketing, and I came up to company leadership through the marketing route and through the sales route, right? and I found myself wondering,
Umar Hameed 2:23
Oh nice.
Antonio Garrido 2:23
one day, I was having a conversation with a prospect. And I thought to myself, I wonder what percentage of the time to our suspects and prospects and clients tell us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and I was kind of wondering about that question.
Umar Hameed 2:43
It never happens.
Antonio Garrido 2:44
Oh, okay. Interestingly enough, since I wrote the book, and I've been training now, for seven or eight years, I've asked that question of my client, countless times, you know, well, either on a one to one situation, or a group training session, or even if I'm on the stage, and they're, you know, hundreds and potentially thousands of people in the audience and no one has ever said, 100%, like, never, like never ever, right? And I've had a lot of very low numbers, right? but no one's ever said, "Oh, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, 100% for sure," you know, if I were generous of spirit, I would probably say 75%.
Umar Hameed 3:25
Just digging into that little deeply will go there. When I think about how many times do I tell myself the truth, when I first got married, you know, I am a really romantic guy. And I had mentioned this to my wife after we were married and I said, you know, I'm a really romantic guy, and she said, "Actually, you are not," And she gave me all these cases but the illusion I had was, I absolutely am but when she pointed out all the areas, it was like, "Huh!"
Antonio Garrido 3:55
Yeah.
Umar Hameed 3:56
I had no idea, I deluded myself to think I was better at this than I am and other people think they're worse than they are. So that's just the human condition.
Antonio Garrido 4:05
Well, that's truth.
Umar Hameed 4:05
So anyway, let's go back to what you were saying in terms of,
Antonio Garrido 4:08
Now I just have to respond to that just before I come back to the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. That's a route you know, in the book, one of the things that we do talk about, for obvious reasons, is, you know, self awareness, right? And, you know, that mindset of reflection and wisdom comes from evaluated experience and all of that kind of stuff. And it's a bit like, you know, when you say to a sales guy, how good are you asking really, really good questions. It's a bit like saying somebody how good a driver, I mean, everybody thinks they're a tremendous driver. You think you're a tremendously, right? It's like my wife, my wife, my wife tells me she must be a good driver because she's never ever been in a car crash, but she's seen about 50 in the rearview mirror, right? So um, so, so um, so what our prospects, some clients tell us this tell us a version of the truth, right? that they think it's in their best interest to have us believe. And if we are enormously gullible, we'll just take them at them at face value, and we just go, "Okay, well, that that must be the truth of it," and we, we, we tend not to dig below the surface and really try and understand. One of the things I did when I was writing the book, I spent some time talking to some FBI agent, they're not easy to get hold off, by the way, and, you know, the FBI for all that you might think about them, they are pretty good at getting to the truth, right? And so I was, in the book, we do talk about what do we, as individuals have to do if we want to get to the truth? And how do we prepare for that? So, so one of the issues but your original question, which is a great question was one of the motives for writing the book was, I was wondering about this instance of, well, this issue of truth, whole truth and nothing but the truth, and then trying to figure out how do we get closer to that. And then as I was, you know, kind of planning the book out, it occurred to me actually, that there are, there are other things that were also an issue for me in lots of my clients, which is, you know, if you talk to a buyer or a prospect, and you ask them, "Hey, if you had a magic wand, you know, how much time would you give to, you know, the salesperson that wants to try and come in and sell to you," and typically, the buyer wants less time than the seller wants. So that then obviously...
Umar Hameed 6:42
Yes.
Antonio Garrido 6:42
...gets into, "Okay, so we've now got limited real estate, because we don't have four hours to kind of interview this individual," so you know, if you can imagine, I don't know. Yeah, yeah. But imagine if you had 60 minutes, or let's just say, 60 minutes, just just to play that game, if you had 60 minutes to spend with, with, with an interested prospect, like, how many questions could you ask in that limited room,I mean, it's not 100, right? You can't ask 100 questions in 60 minutes. So, so if we have limited...
Umar Hameed 7:15
No, and nor should you?
Antonio Garrido 7:17
Right and exactly, nor should you, so, so in that case, then, then we should make each question really, really useful, right? or pursuit to an end, because we've only got limited real estate, we can't ask a million questions. And then something else fell into that, which was, you know, if a salesperson looks and smells and feels and tastes and behave like their competitors, well, how are they going to be treated, exactly like that? And then if that,
Umar Hameed 7:51
Same way for me.
Antonio Garrido 7:53
Exactly. So then how would the buyer differentiate you from another? Well, typically price, and so that's never good, right? So, so we have we have something to do with real estate, or the time that we have we got something to do with the truth, we've got something to do with their time. And we know that, you know, asking questions is the single best way for us to control the airtime. Now typically, the buyer wants the seller to do all the talking but typically, the seller wants the buyer to do the talking. Yep, go ahead.
Umar Hameed 8:26
So what I'm gonna just now make a funny joke here, because you asked the question, it's really, you made a comment, it's really hard to get ahold of the FBI, and there's a really easy way, all you have to do is go to any open phone line, say, "Bomb airport and Allahu Akbar," you'll get a call immediately, I bet.
Antonio Garrido 8:43
Well, that yeah, that's plan B.
Umar Hameed 8:50
On a serious note.
Antonio Garrido 8:52
Yeah.
Umar Hameed 8:53
On a serious note, I think asking questions is, of course, really, really powerful and we're going to dig deeper into that. But if you don't have enough rapport with the person you're talking with, like you and I, right now could not have a conversation about your wife. But if we had enough rapport, I could go Antonio, you know, can you give me some advice around this area? How do you handle this with your spouse? You'd be more than happy to and I think a lot of times salespeople go through that opening stage of just, you know, like cliche comes to shove, "Oh, how are you?" "That's great." "Oh, that picture on the wall," and they, they do this kind of false rapport building. But if you can connect with that, as a human being, they'll tell you anything and everything. And yeah, so let's dig deeper into questions but building that trust first is critical.
Antonio Garrido 9:43
It's absolutely critical and it segues quite nicely into, you know, one of the, one of the one of the other questions I asked him for what I'm sort of training them talking about about doing a tour but I asked them what is the single most important question of all of the questions that a salesperson can ask, right? And then when you ask that question of of audiences, go ahead, you have it, go ahead.
Umar Hameed 10:12
I have the answer.
Antonio Garrido 10:14
Okay, good.
Umar Hameed 10:15
Do you validate parking? Nope, that's not it! What is the most important question?
Antonio Garrido 10:20
Well, I think we're not, I think I absolutely believe and know that the most important and it starts, it starts this rapport. And I shall explain why in a second and start, starts building this rapport and, and with the questions that we ask, you know, the intent is to move away from vendor towards trusted advisor, right? Vendor, just one of many trusted advisor, one a few and how do we move up that ladder from that very first, hello, and start building that bonding rapport and start building that principle of being a trusted advisor. Well, so to answer your question, because I'm sure that all of your listeners are on tenterhooks with their pattern, poised, the most important question of all questions is to get permission to ask questions, right? Because if we don't get permission to ask these questions, then it becomes a bit of an interrogation, it feels a bit more aggressive than it needs to be and then you're not going to build trust. And from from my way of thinking, the most important way of selling and I, and I mean this, not because, you know, I'm, as you say, a Sandler act like but it doesn't matter what sales process you follow, but the principle of trusted advisor is always important. The principle of permission based selling and permission based selling means you ask the right questions, and then, so let me give you an example, may I give you an example?
Umar Hameed 11:48
Of course.
Antonio Garrido 11:50
That was an example of a question type called the UNIVERSAL YES, where you ask the question, and the answer is always yes, so if you said somebody may give you an example, they say yes, and that is permission based selling, and there's lots of those. So if I said to you, Umar, "Hey Umar, just before we get started, I was thinking about this meeting this morning," before it started, can I share with you what I was thinking? That there's no way you're going to say NO to that question.
Umar Hameed 12:18
Of course.
Antonio Garrido 12:18
Right. Of course, if I said if I said to a prospect. "Hey, George, would it be okay, if we spent I don't know, maybe five minutes talking about the kind of investment it might take to get this fixed for you?" That's again, it's a, it's a permission based question where the answer is universal yes, and if I said that to George, my prospect, who is in control, if I said, "Hey, George, can I tell you my biggest fear?" the answer is always yes, or, "Hey, George, that's a great question." Another client of mine asked me that six weeks ago, can I tell you what I told him? the answer is always yes. So these questions, if and at the moment, we're just talking tactical questions, we'll come on to strategic questions later. But these tactical questions that align draw the conversation in such a way that if I said to a prospect, "Hey, would it be okay, if we spent five minutes talking about the kind of investment might take to get this fixed for you?" And they say, "Yes," who's in control, who's in control of the interaction if I asked that question of a prospect?
Umar Hameed 13:27
So by you asking because you know what their answer is going to be you're in control, but the other person has the illusion,
Antonio Garrido 13:33
Exactly!
Umar Hameed 13:33
that they're in control.
Antonio Garrido 13:34
Exactly. So you retain control of the airtime and lots of other things, whilst ever the the prospect thinks that they're in control, which is great, because then you don't get any resistance and you start again, moving from this vendor to trusted adviser status. So the first of all, come back to your question about, you know, what's the mindset that we have to have, as an individual to start building this bonding and rapport with our new prospects, it's, we have to believe that we have equal business stature, if we don't believe we have an equal business stature, and we, if we think, right? wrongly, of course, that we are subservient to the buyer, and they're in charge there, and if we believe all of that stuff, then this, these techniques of asking really, really searching questions are very, very difficult. I can give you an example of a really dumb question, I asked you what's the most important question, I can give you an example of a really bad question and a really good question if you'd like.
Umar Hameed 14:37
So, before we go there, let me ask you a question, is it okay if I asked you a question?
Antonio Garrido 14:43
Of course!
Umar Hameed 14:44
So...
Antonio Garrido 14:44
Nice. Could universal yes.
Umar Hameed 14:48
Here's the question. So you can get somebody trained to like this is an equal relationship where both equals here and some sales people are truly deep, they gonna believe that and other sales, people will think you but not believe it, so and their actions will show it. So how do you coach people to really buy into that, because sometimes in their heart of hearts, they're like, "No, no, the client has all the money and I have to da da da da," so how do you get people to cross that chasm to truly believe what they need to which is, you know, "Hey, I'm here to help you, you need help, let's figure it out!
Antonio Garrido 15:24
Well, that's a great question. So that that issue is it's entirely conceptual, right? So it's entirely, you know, in the six inches between their ears, and it comes from, you know, scripting as a child, it comes from, you know, lots of learned behaviors and so on. And so, how do we address conceptual issues? Well, if you think about if anybody has any issue, but let's, let's let me backtrack just for a second to set the stage, if anybody's going to succeed at anything, at anything, whether that's riding a bike, driving a car, making a souffle, selling your products and services, right? whatever it is, while souffles are tricky, but the other things are pretty easy. So how do you, how do you have you succeeded those things? Well, it's the right application of the right behaviors, that's kind of doing things right? the right attitude, that's those conceptual issues in your head, and then skills and techniques. And if you use the right behaviors, the right attitudes and the right skills and techniques, in enough density, then you will succeed. Okay, so we were talking then about this belief about this equal business stature, well, where does that live? Does that live in behaviors? No, skill and technique? No, this entirely attitude? No. So how do we fix, how do we fix? attitude fixes a very provocative word, but how do we address attitude no value based belief systems. Well, for everybody's listening, and if they are a manager of somebody rights that they have, there may be a sales manager or a leader and they have some people reporting to them, we know that you can't manage somebody's attitude, you can't just say, "Cheer up," right? You know, I demand that all the beatings will continue until morale improves, right? That's not the way to fix those things. So we manage behaviors, we coach attitudes and we train technique, skills and techniques. So come back to your original question, good question, how do we deal with that delta between in terms of that equal business stature between what the salesperson thinks and what we want them to think such that they can run their own sales process as these really tricky questions and we haven't got onto those yet, then it's conceptual. So if you're a manager with people who don't feel, don't believe that they have this equal business stature, coaching is the only answer. It's, this, it's the only answer, that's the only tool that helps that attitude, now, but what if you are not a sales manager, what if you are, you know, an individual, what if you are a sales professional and or even a business owner, right? and so it's your company, and there's nobody that's going to coach you, and you're not going outside into the world and chatting to somebody like you or somebody like me to help coach them, then they have to, again, it comes back to the self-awareness that you were talking about earlier, when we, when we when we started our conversation, you, you better start trying to address that head trash, right? And so you better start to journal, you better start getting very good at being self aware, what that means is to you need to start evaluate. So every meeting, every interaction, every every kind of conversation and a professional business sense, you need to walk away from that, notwithstanding that you must have had, of course, a pre-call plan, but we won't get into that today. You should say to yourself, you know what, "I'll give myself a B minus for that." When you start to self-evaluate, and you say, "Okay, well, what how could that B minus have become a B or a B plus or an A minus or an A or an A plus? Once you start so what should I be doing more of what should I be doing less of what things need to be addressed? Start writing stuff down in your journal, and I know that people don't like to journal they think that it's, you know, when I first joined Sandler, and my CEO said to me, "Hey, Antonio, do you journal, right? And I said, "No, no Dave, I don't," and, and he asked me why, and I said, "Probably because I'm not a 16year-old Victorian school girl, right? He said, "Yeah, but okay, I hear that but think about and you'll find that most certainly," most Sandler trainers across the globe, and there are hundreds of others and certainly most successful, you know, nearly every single leader that I speak to, they do journal, right? And they do try and get their mindset right. And that it comes back to what I said earlier, Umar about that wisdom comes from evaluated experience, but not just experience evaluated experience. So go ahead.
Umar Hameed 20:27
One of the other benefits of journaling is this is that right now, most people are juggling a bunch of thoughts inside their head,
Antonio Garrido 20:35
Sure.
Umar Hameed 20:36
just so they don't forget them.
Antonio Garrido 20:37
Yeah.
Umar Hameed 20:38
And when you journal that it gives your mind the ability to let go that thoughts you can think new thoughts and solve problems in a more elegant way. So number one, you get that introspection and you get insights. And number two, you clear the clutter in your brain, so you can think better thoughts and tackle bigger problems.
Antonio Garrido 20:55
A 100%, a 100%, but I don't want people to think that, "Oh, so a journal is a to-do list," it's like, you know, like the Checklist Manifesto, right? anybody's read that book, no. You know, there is a place for to-do list and start checking things off a box, for sure. But journaling goes beyond that, and, and, and it can include things like what behaviors do I need today to succeed? What are my goals today? What did I learn yesterday? What am I grateful for? Because you can't have a positive life, and if you fill it with negativity. And the reality is about sales, right? Umar is that, yeah, and I know that you're super interested in mindset that we have to expect that most of the time we get no's, right? we for, for, for some of us, it might be we get 20 no's for every 1 yes, and so we have to build up our own resilience to that. And if we, if we start taking those rejections that we ought to expect personally, then that starts to degradate this principle that you're talking about of equal business stature, right? If we take, if we take those hits, our you know, our personally, and we say, "I'm just not very good at this," and then what happens is, we mean a live prospect that can fog a mirror, we get so attached to the outcome, and our need for approval goes so high that we just throw away all of our rules, we throw away our process, we don't ask good questions, and we actually think I need to ingratiate myself with this prospect so that he will like and love me. And unfortunately, when you have a high need for approval, your ability to ask good questions, crushes, your margins crashed, your prices crashed your sales cycle extends you get too attached to the outcome, you do too much unpaid consultancy, and, and a whole plethora of dreadful things happen. So this, this principle of equal business stature lies at the heart of being able to ask these questions and I guess the short answer to it is get help, I should have just said that. Get a coach get a...
Umar Hameed 21:48
Yes.
Antonio Garrido 22:43
...a mentor.
Umar Hameed 22:53
So...
Antonio Garrido 23:10
Yeah.
Umar Hameed 23:12
...a really good question to ask is one that gives your prospect an insight.
Antonio Garrido 23:18
Yes.
Umar Hameed 23:18
A lot of times we assume that the prospect knows everything ,they need to know and the reality is a lot of times, they've got preconceptions, or they just don't frickin' know.
Antonio Garrido 23:27
Yes.
Umar Hameed 23:27
And by you asking, excellent question, sometimes they go, "Huh...
Antonio Garrido 23:32
Yeah.
Umar Hameed 23:32
...I never thought of it that way," and that's how you differentiate yourself from the competition, because everyone is just placating and going through the motions. If you give insights, people want that.
Antonio Garrido 23:43
100%. I actually write in every pre-call plan I do. That one of my goals, and I'll typically have three or four goals, but one of my goals is to actually get the prospect to say great question I don't know, or what a great question I'm not sure, what a great question, let me think about that, right? I want them to mentally sweat because I don't want to look and sound and feel and taste and behave like my competitors. And so, so if I can get them, because this sort of a rule that I've developed a four, four piece rule that we talked about in the book, and it kind of sounds like this. And so there's four elements to this, this is sort of the golden rule of selling, right? If you want to know what this is, listeners write this down. Number one is they never believe what you tell them. Number two is they rarely believe what you show them. Number three is they'll often believe what somebody else tells them but number four is they always believe what they tell themselves. So it's our job then to have them say to themselves, "Man, these are the guys that I should be working with," Well, how do we do that? Do we do that by asking really dumb, trite questions? No, just as you said, Umar, what we want them to do is we want to ask them a question and we want them to say to themselves, "Man, that's a good question." Whenever they say to themselves, "Man, that's a good question," do we go up in their estimation towards trusted advisor or do we go down towards the plan that we go up, of course, right? So can I demo, can I demo a good one and a bad one? A terrible, I'll give you a bunch of dreadful questions that keep you down in that vendor world and then I'll demo a couple of questions that actually move you towards more, towards that trusted advisor status so that your listeners get the difference between a good question and a dreadful question. And it comes back to that everybody thinks they're a good driver, they're good at asking questions. So, so if I, let's pretend for a second that that you're a prospect of mine, let's just imagine that you're the CEO of an organization and you're considering getting some sales training or coaching for you or for some of your gang. If I, and remember, we've got this limited real estate so I can't ask you a million questions, I can only ask you a certain number of questions. If I said to you Umar any kind of question that sounded like, "So Umar, tell me a little bit about, you know, the markets that you operate in, or how long have you been the CEO around here, or how many people work here? this is really trite, boring, I mean, any question where you can get the answer on LinkedIn, Google Search and literature, website, right? They are, they are universal, universally dreadful questions. Because if I ask you any of those questions, what do you learn about me other than I am just like my competitors, right? I'm working on this principle that better, different is better than better, right? So one of the things I do I want to do is be different from my competitors. So instead of saying, "How long have you been the CEO around here Umar?" right? it's a dreadful question, limited real estate. I've only got 15 questions to ask and I've blown one on a completely dumb and pointless one, right? But if I said to you instead, Umar, "Hey Umar, why don't you spend a couple of minutes and describe what you're seeing in the marketplace right now that, that's maybe worrying you that will perhaps have the most detrimental impact on your competitiveness over the next two or three years?" Isn't that a better question than how many people work here?
Umar Hameed 27:36
Absolutely. In two things, number one, the person is going to have to actually may not have thought about it,
Antonio Garrido 27:41
Exactly.
Umar Hameed 27:42
and it will also let you know how they think what their thought process is.
Antonio Garrido 27:48
Right. Right.
Umar Hameed 27:49
Which is really, really useful.
Antonio Garrido 27:51
Right.
Umar Hameed 27:51
Because just getting the answer is like, you know, who cares. As they think about it and they articulate you get insights into how they think,
Antonio Garrido 27:59
Of course.
Umar Hameed 27:59
and that's going to be invaluable information as you move along the process.
Antonio Garrido 28:03
Right. What it also does is it tells the prospect, something about the kind of engagement that he can expect from me going forward and whether or not I am thoughtful, and I don't mean, I'm doing speech marks in the area, you probably can't say, I don't mean thoughtful like, I'm nice to my mother and pets and you know, buy her flowers, I mean, considered, considered right? So one of the reasons that most prospects have worried about talking to a new supplier is they think they don't really understand my world, and they can, then that's a concern of that. And so I might say to a prospect, "Hey, Mr. Prospect, in order for me to see the world through your eyes, such that I can give you, you know, my best possible advice, would it be okay, if I asked you a bunch of questions, some of them might be easy, some of them might be difficult, some other you might not even know the answer to but we'll figure that out as we go along, would that'd be okay? and that's that permission based question. But I hang it on in order for me to be able to see the world through your eyes, and when we do that, again, we move slightly away from that vendor status, right? more towards that consultative status. And I know there may be some people listening that go there, but you know, I'm in commodity sales, I'm not selling oil rigs for a second and for the moment, and I recognize that there are kind of four main sort of sales arenas, there are those, and it's all to do with kind of length of sales cycle and whether or not it's demand generation or demand fulfillment. But the main four are commodity sales, right? then you have unique value sales, you have account sales and consultative sales. And it's true that if you're in consultative sales, you might have to ask a different first set of questions, then if you are in unique value sales or account sales or commodity sales. And so when we, when we go through the book, we recognize that there are the right kinds of questions to ask of the right kind of customer. So if you're talking to an enterprise prospect, you may be, may be three or four or five or more individuals that you have to get your arms around. They're entirely different questions than if you're selling paperclips for a living. So the point about the question that I asked you earlier, some people might be thinking, but that's not appropriate in my world. And, my the point that I'm just trying to make is, that question might not be appropriate in the world, but it's entirely appropriate in my world and it's much better than how long have you been a CEO around here. And so what I would ask everybody to do this listening, and this is another trick from the FBI is, you know, a couple of things happen, most sales professionals, they get the same 20 or 30 questions day in day out weekend, weekly, they receive the same kinds of questions, right? Just in a slightly different pair of pants sometimes. And so if you start writing down the questions you receive, and then start constructing, when I hear that question, here would be my absolute best answer, right? So start doing that, and by the same token, start writing down. If a client looks like this, here are my questions, and I have something called a sales crib sheet, I have all of my questions like the FBI, pre-planned in advance. So I don't go into a meeting without having my questions organized, so that if we go down one way, because a lot of people, you know, they listen to respond instead of listen to understand. And so, and if they're thinking about their next question, they can't possibly be paying attention to the person that they are speaking to. And last point, just I know, I've been rambling for a second, last point that your value as a sales professional, is, is is measured more by the information you gather than the information you give. So your values as professionals measured more by the information you gather the information you give, and how do you manage that by asking questions. Sorry, I've been rambling on for a little while.
Umar Hameed 32:23
No. It's been totally fascinating, and I think a few things come out of this interview. Number one, you can take sales like, "Oh, well, so let me commission, there you go." When you're a professional, all the things that you spoken about is preparation for the call, questions that you want to answer, what are the different areas of customers? What are the questions I asked? So A, if you're in this profession, take it seriously, it is a profession, two, asking questions is a skill that needs to be improved as you go along continually. I bet you're still when you hear a good question, you kind of go, "Huh, I like that. I'm gonna jot that down," so the book is asking questions the Sandler way every day. And Antonio, thank you so much for being on the program, we're going to do another interview, and go deeper into some other topics, because I learned a lot. And thank you so much any parting words that you want to share with people, including, what's one simple mind hack that you use that makes you more productive?
Antonio Garrido 33:27
One simple mind hack that makes me more productive is whilst I said I journal, I also, you can't, from people who can't see, I organize Post-it notes. Everything just like you said, I don't try and clutter my brain. So I organize Post-it notes and move them around, that's the beauty of Post-it notes. We all know a Post-it notes a great one, how great they are when we're doing brainstorming sessions and so on but Post-it notes are a great way to organize your life. What was the other question? I'm sorry, I can't remember.
Umar Hameed 34:04
So any last thoughts to share with our listeners?
Antonio Garrido 34:07
Yeah, I just, you know, I would go there is, at the end of the book, the end of the book, there is a tool that you can download, which is 125 of the most useful questions to ask, right? in any sales situation. If anybody wants to send me an email, I will gladly forward that to them, you don't have to read the book to get the question. Should I give my email address or do you want to do that separately?
Umar Hameed 34:36
We're going to put it in the show notes so it will be hyperlinked on the show notes. And we're going to put the link to the book and your other books as well. So a dear listener, click on the link and go get it because and buy the book!
Antonio Garrido 34:50
Buy the book.
Umar Hameed 34:52
Antonio, thank you so much for being our program.
Antonio Garrido 34:54
Thanks ever so much Umar. It's been a blast. I've enjoyed it enormously. Thank you. I love your podcast. Thank you sir.
Umar Hameed 35:05
If you enjoyed this episode, please go to iTunes and leave a five-star rating. And if you're looking for more tools, go to my website at nolimitsselling.com. I've got a free mind training course there, that's going to teach you some insights from the world of neuro-linguistic programming and that is the fastest way to get better results.