How to Handle Rejection and Build Trust in High-Emotion Sales with David Smith

David Smith [00:00:00] By getting someone to smoke, quit smoking by showing 'em what's on the cigarette pack. Logic and reason have no place, especially if you're correct, right? So what you need to do is find a way to reflect back to the person in such a way that they can pull their own motivation. You need to nurture their motivation and their confidence that if they were motivated to change, they could. That's in a nutshell what motivational interviewing is. I'm Miriam Hoffman, a full-time college student living in Carbondale, Illinois, and you're listening to the Vance Crow podcast.

Vance Crowe [00:00:38] Welcome back to the podcast. I'm glad you're here. Today I sit down with author David Smith. David wrote a sales book that you might not think would be important to you, but I read this book and it so profoundly changed the way I thought about sales that I wrote David, a huge, long email. It was actually kind of rambling and excited to tell him how much it changed the way I thought of myself. David's book is about how to help people make large transitions, like move from living in their homes to a retirement community and what needs to go on with somebody as they make those large psychological decisions. So I decided to have David to come in and talk about sales. And if you're thinking, Hey, I don't have anything to do with retirement communities or older people, why is this relevant to me? David is an expert salesman. Throughout his book, he cites different sales books that he's read, different ways of thinking, experiences that he had, and even failures that he faced. I think that anyone that has any aspect of their job to do with sales is gonna find this conversation quite interesting. We're gonna get to the interview in just a moment, but first I wanted to talk about an experience I had earlier this week. Often companies will buy a legacy interview and give it as a gift to some of their special clients. And this week, as I was calling one of those clients that had been given this gift and were talking, they interrupted me to say, Hey, I'll do this interview and I'm excited about it, but I wanna make sure that I'm gonna have a chance to do a shout out for the company that gave this to me.

Vance Crowe [00:02:12] It's really important to me that I share why they've been somebody that I've worked with for so many years. I told 'em of course, and when I called the company back to tell them that this was what was gonna happen, they were elated. If you are somebody that wants to deepen a relationship with your client and potentially have the footage of them saying why they work with you and why you've been such a great partner over these years, go to Legacy Interviews dot com to find out more. Alright, without further ado, let's head to the interview with David Smith.

David Smith [00:02:40] David Smith, welcome. Thank you. So nice to be here, Vance. It's great to have you. You know, you're one of the few people that I've gotten to read your book and then sit down and do an interview with you. And so, while I was reading the book, I had hundreds and hundreds of questions for you. The first one that comes to mind is why

Vance Crowe [00:02:59] Is it that people separate themselves from calling themselves a salesman?

David Smith [00:03:03] That's a great question. I think this simple answer for me is with, to start with the fact that in American culture today, we don't think very highly of pretty much anybody or anything. We don't take the notion of a professional, I'm a professional, I studied law, I apprenticed for 10 years and got my license. And we had a certain respect for ourselves and for others. That doesn't exist at this time in the world, whether it's lawyers or congressmen or news reporters, clergy, we don't have a lot of respect for any profession. So I think that's part of iter where American culture is. Then I think that's sort of an oxymoron, if you will, to say a good salesperson in terms of a professional, because who is the best salesperson? The one who is very knowledgeable, helpful, competent, intent on helping their customer? Or is it the person who has the most sales, regardless of whether they did or didn't look out for the best interest of their customer? I, I think a lot of people have the notion that those who are in sales put themselves and their company and their personal objectives ahead of anything else that's going on in the conversation or the transaction. And most of us don't want to feel like that's who we are. So I think that's why we shy away from the term sales.

Vance Crowe [00:04:37] Yeah, just yesterday people ask me all the time like, Hey, my daughter wants to get into communications in ag, how? How should she do that? And just yesterday I was like, if I were gonna do it all over again, I would start out being a district salesperson. You know, go learn how to sell. And you would've thought, I told that guy that his daughter should go be a stripper, right? It was like, why would I tell my daughter to do sales? But from my point of view, like there is nobody that understands how to communicate better than a person that at the end of the day, their communication led to somebody getting what they needed, even if they started out not knowing that's what they needed.

David Smith [00:05:14] Yeah. So for any professional, I practice law, I could probably tell you as many lawyer jokes as you could tell me, but in every profession there's the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the same is true in sales. And sales have gotten a bad rap over the years because there were so many hucksters. There were used car salesmen, there were people who would tell you anything regardless if you could afford it, if you needed it, if you wanted it. It was part of a, you know, of a con and a manipulation. And certainly that kinda sales is not what I'd want my daughter to be either. On the other hand, sales can be, in my view, a very noble profession. One where you help people get what they need and what they want and with the information they have to make a reasonable decision about quantity and timing and all kinds of stuff. So you can, in the best case, a salesperson can be a mentor, a guide, a counselor, depending on how complex the issues are that you're trying to buy and sell.

Vance Crowe [00:06:20] So the book that you wrote was called, it's About Time. Tell me about that title. Why, why is that the title and what is your book about?

David Smith [00:06:28] So my book is about a time of life, a time when people have find themselves challenged in terms of their identity and their day-to-day activity because of what's happening in their surroundings. And this is in their senior years. In our senior years, I'm crowding 73 now. So including myself in the lower end of the upper end of the age boomers and lower end of the silent generation in terms of my experience. And what happens is there are things that happen to us in our jobs, in our careers. We're no longer hold the same authoritative positions maybe that we did at one time. Perhaps we've passed some wealth onto our kids, or at least rearranged it. We use our time differently day to day. Our friends start dying in our eighties and our nineties. It's not uncommon that our world begin shrinking from all different dimensions. And it's something that's fascinated me. It's something that I've wanted to try to see myself as being in a position to help somebody figure out what are the best options. So it's possible that the home that you chose to live in with your spouse, if you still have a spouse and a family that your family grew up in, maybe you've been in for the typical person in their eighties today in America, has been in that home for a very long time.

David Smith [00:08:02] Probably only 10 to 15% of them will move between the age 70 and the end of life. So it's become familiar, it's become comfortable, it's become convenient, it's become, in the broadest sense, the fulfillment of the American dream. I have my, my home, my fee. Simple, absolute. And yet, if you looked at that person's aspirational self, what they hoped to be at the beginning of their career or even when they moved into the house, right, a lot of things have changed. And logically it's probably not the best situation, are certainly not the only situation that could be optimal for 'em in terms of where they live. There's just a lot of resistance and built in negativity towards the idea of age segregated, congregate, housing, retirement communities that keeps them from exploring it. So a salesperson, what I've made a career out of doing after I left the practice of law was helping people evaluate that decision. Should I move into one of those places? Beginning with my own place that I tried to fill up? But then I filled places up all over the us, Canada, and the uk and I noticed that people are a lot more alike than they are different in this particular situation. And finding ways to help those people make logical decisions, whether it's to stay or to move, and whether it's to the place I'm advocating or somebody else's place, right, to help them get from the emotionally laden resistance to even considering the idea, to making a decision to move, has been extremely rewarding for me.

David Smith [00:09:54] Almost every person that I've moved in and I've helped thousands move in within 30 to 60 days, will tell me I wish I would've moved sooner.

Vance Crowe [00:10:05] Do you think that everybody that moves into a retirement community thinks that?

David Smith [00:10:09] I think the law overwhelming majority do. There are some operators who aren't as good as others. So I would only advocate for a place that I myself would think about living in or I'd move my mother into. So you'd have to have a certain level of quality and people who move into a bad place probably don't feel that way. But for the most part, resident satisfaction in retirement communities is extremely high. Higher than multifamily, higher than cruise ships. Yeah. It's way up there. People rate their communities very high.

Vance Crowe [00:10:46] The thing I loved about your book was, I was reading it, you and I had met you, you run like the premier retirement community here in St. Louis called the Gates Worth. And we walked around and you gave me a book. And I generally have a rule if you, if somebody gives you a book that they wrote, you better read it. Like there's, there's something to that. And I didn't really know it was a sales book. I was like, I don't view myself as a salesman, but I got just a little ways in there. And you said, I'd built this Gates worth, I'd sunk my like savings into it. I'd left my legal career and 15 months in, I am broke. And like I am, like the time is running out. And to me, that humanized you in a way. It was like you weren't the, oh, I'm good at sales. And I've always just been able to talk people into things. Because what that told me was there is something to be learned about how to connect with people to make a sale. Tell me about those, those 15 months when you didn't know how to sell.

David Smith [00:11:41] Yeah, so I, I grew up here in St. Louis, relatively poor. My dad worked for the Jewish Community Center and I watched him take care of a lot of people in terms of health and phys ed and make their lives better. Never made much money. But he got involved through the Jewish Community Center in building one of the first not-for-profit senior centers here in St. Louis called the Covenant House. And when I watched that and I began thinking about my own career change from practicing law, which I didn't, I found very lucrative, but not very satisfying. I said, I began to wonder, I wonder if you could do the same thing. I see all the tremendous benefits these people have, right? And this HUD subsidized retirement community where they've got socialization, they have convenient meals, they have transportation, they have activities, they have healthcare accessible when they need it, and so on. I said, I wonder if you could make a business out of it. I wonder if you could do this for people who've got means. And began exploring the idea of actually building something. I became fascinated with my own idea. I had no idea I couldn't do it. I thought once we built it, I got a partner to help finance and a partner to help build it. I thought I'd fill it up. It'd be like selling real estate, residential real estate, which I had done to get myself through college and law school. And I was pretty good at it.

David Smith [00:13:15] I thought, this will be much easier than that. This is so much more elaborate and beneficial for the individual who moves right than subdivision house, which I could sell all day long. But it turned out that the skillset, the approach, the sales scenario that I was trying to work with these people to have them see what was what, what the benefits were, just failed miserably. I mean, it just didn't work. Nobody was buying what we were selling. And it just amazed me. 'cause I was mesmerized by my own concept. Had I, any idea how hard it was gonna be to fill up, I probably never would've done it.

Vance Crowe [00:13:59] What did you think you were selling?

David Smith [00:14:02] I thought I was selling a parked cruise ship and a place that I, myself in my thirties at the time, right? And my two partners where we would wanna live, where we had access to food, entertainment, venues, a theater, a gym, locker rooms, private dining rooms, card rooms, a billiard room, you know, staff. So that as you're walking around, you feel a sense of community. You can have as much privacy as you want in these residences that are up to 2,500, 3000 square feet that you can customize. And I thought people that could afford 'em would easily choose that over staying in their own homes, many cases by themselves or in a situation where their health is deteriorating without much chance for socialization. And actually, I was right at the end of the day. It took 23 months to fill it up. I just almost went broke between five months, 15 and, and 23, because the methodology I was using wasn't working.

Vance Crowe [00:15:12] So let's talk about that.

David Smith [00:15:14] Yeah. What

Vance Crowe [00:15:15] Was the methodology you had been using for the first 15 months?

David Smith [00:15:18] It was very similar to how I would've leased up a new subdivision. So I did a lot of marketing, I generated leads. That's what I paid most of my attention to. I had several people who were selling, but my efforts and our resources were primarily just to drive leads. 'cause I thought once people see it, once we can explain it to 'em, they'll close themselves. It'd

Vance Crowe [00:15:43] Be just a numbers game. If you get enough people to see it, let's say 10% of the people that see it are gonna buy it. So you just gotta get, you know, 10 times the number of people that you

David Smith [00:15:52] Have rooms

Vance Crowe [00:15:52] For. Yeah.

David Smith [00:15:53] To come look. And actually it's called a transactional or a volume and velocity approach. It's still the most common approach used in senior housing sales today in our industry.

Vance Crowe [00:16:07] And so what changed then?

David Smith [00:16:09] It didn't work for me. I was going broke. I mean, I was, it was bad. I was,

Vance Crowe [00:16:15] Let's talk about that because I think a lot of people that are in

David Smith [00:16:17] Dale, it was humiliating.

Vance Crowe [00:16:18] Tell me, tell, what do you mean? So,

David Smith [00:16:21] So I started as the sweat equity guy. I was the partner that brought in the idea and was willing to work hard, but other people were bringing in the money, including my in-laws and a partner.

Vance Crowe [00:16:35] Oh man, you had in-law money in there.

David Smith [00:16:37] Oh yeah. That was where we put up my share of the equity with my in-laws. And I had my wife living off of our income. We had two small kids. I was 35 years old and I had never done a real estate project before. So it was, yeah, it was tough. Friends and family and all, all everything I had was tied up. That was the one guy, some of your audience may appreciate this, but since I was the sweat equity guy, I was the guy that could afford to go bankrupt. Everybody else had money. So I wound up taking on personally all the debt for the overruns, you know, from what we, we had no idea what the budget, nobody had ever done one before. And so when we ran outta money, I went out and personally borrowed and ran up a million and a half dollars of personal debt, which at 30 something years old, you know, back in 1985 was a lot of money.

Vance Crowe [00:17:33] And you're going to your wife and saying, don't worry, this is gonna work. Like

David Smith [00:17:37] I, I'm saying I'm gonna figure out how to make this work. And then I have credit, I was living off credit cards, you know, I'd get credit card solicitations in the mail and I'd take 50,000 from this one to pay off the one I had from last month. Ooh. Yeah. It was something. And I spent my, I was spending my time trying to generate leads. So I'd be working on the advertising and the marketing, right? And I suddenly, at some point the aha light went on. We had several consultants, one of which triggered something that the aha went on. I had like 3000 leads and 50 vacancies. Well break evens probably at about 10 or 15 on the first fill out of 220, right? So I'm still losing money every month on operations as well as on marketing. And I'm suddenly thinking to myself, how many leads do I have for every vacant unit? I'm spending all my time and all my money figuring out how to get more leads. I wonder what, what I got. And I looked, I had 3000 leads and 50 vacancies. And to this day, that's one of my go-to numbers. How many leads do I have per vacant unit? How many would I actually have to close? For whatever reason, no one in the industry had really thought about that. It was always more is better regardless. So I switched. And

Vance Crowe [00:19:05] When, when you were getting these leads were, how were you getting, you were paying somebody to produce them.

David Smith [00:19:09] How did that work? Oh, any way you could think of. At the time there was no internet at the time. So we were doing direct mail, we were doing cold calls, off mailing lists, we were holding events and sp you know, having people show up and trying to solicit their names and their interests while they were there. Ads, print ads, broadcast media.

Vance Crowe [00:19:31] And then you were bringing people in, you were showing it to 'em and then they'd say, I'll get back to you. Or how, how are they rejected?

David Smith [00:19:37] Yeah, yeah. Oh, this is really a great idea, but I'm not ready for anything like this yet. What a wonderful thought. You know, and we're talking about, it looks like everybody is so old. We're talking to people who are 90 years old, you know, who are telling us how old everyone looks and people who are just, just not open to the idea that you had moved to one of those places. 'cause let's face it, their generation, right, for the most part took people into your own family. And it was intergenerational. If you take the generation of people that are, are prospects today, and you think about what happened with their elders, most of them moved in with family. And that was the traditional and accepted way. It was, it was what was expected in, in many cases, the only time you would find somebody in one of those places, right? Which at the time were unlicensed board and care homes, group homes, old age homes, right. Usually run by the church or the state. Very institutional, very unpleasant. This is the current generation, the current customer's notion of what these places are like. 'cause that's what they experienced. And the only reason you would put somebody there and you literally would put them there 'cause no one would go on their own, is they were really sick. They were really poor, like badges of dishonor, you know, they were mentally ill.

David Smith [00:21:13] Which at the time, I don't know where we are with mental illness today, but to a generation ago, we weren't nearly as, you know, as tolerant and understanding as to where mental illness come from. So it was, you became an outcast and that's who went to these places. And that stigma, that generational stigma is very strong.

Vance Crowe [00:21:35] Yeah. And to get people to even entertain the idea of like, oh, I'll go check this place out, is getting them to, to some place psychologically that they, that that would say, I've failed

David Smith [00:21:46] The anti chamber of death, someone called it.

Vance Crowe [00:21:51] And so the light flips on for you at

David Smith [00:21:53] Some, and these are vibrant places. I mean, at our place, everybody's got their own things, different things today. But at the time I was struggling to fill it. It wasn't because of the location, it wasn't because of the amenities, it wasn't because of the staff of the programs. We had three different themed restaurants, a hundred seat slope theater, live entertainment, any swimming pool, indoor swimming pool, a lot of amenities. So it wasn't because of what we were offering, the price was very reasonable. Although it was more than an apartment, it was less than most of the people we were talking to were spending on a monthly basis. You know, currently it was just all psychological. It was all emotional.

Vance Crowe [00:22:42] So tell me more about that. When, when somebody was going to make this decision, they, the, it doesn't, it's the anti chamber of death.

David Smith [00:22:50] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:22:50] So how did you make them change what they saw or what they thought?

David Smith [00:22:58] Well, I tried a bunch of stuff and a lot of it didn't work. First, tell me what I finally figure it out. Tell worked. I tried transactional selling speed, delete, vol, volume and philosophy. I tried showing, putting our best face forward in terms of marketing, soliciting inquiries, then encouraging people to come in and tour, telling our story to them. And then doing follow up with regards to trying to match value match benefits, features and benefits we had to things that they had expressed or desired as to why they would consider moving or problems that they had in their home. And I would try to value match and I would try that two or three times and have such low closing rates that it was just inconceivable to me that what was, what was ha something was happening and I knew it wasn't working.

Vance Crowe [00:23:54] So, you know, you have the product, you know, you have something that people would want if they understood what it was.

David Smith [00:24:00] I knew the people that had moved in were just fascinated. They were floored. They were ex ecstatic about the experience and how much different and better it was for them. It's not for everybody, but for the people who already were disposed and were willing to make the change, it was so much better than they expected.

Vance Crowe [00:24:22] And so then what was the problem?

David Smith [00:24:24] The problem was that people weren't ready to buy until they could let go of their notion of what the, what the past was till they could, till they could release, till they could move past some negative emotional preconceptions. What does took me a long time to figure that out.

Vance Crowe [00:24:47] And what does that mean?

David Smith [00:24:49] So it means different things for different people. Everybody's unique, but what it means is that in order for you to get to a point where you can think of yourself with a different identity or a new story, you have to at least be willing to acknowledge and be willing to accept that the story that you've been on, that those threads are coming to a conclusion of sorts or they're morphing, they're changing. So we look for you the commonality that goes through there, I call it like the aspirational self. What your legacy, your themes, your values are underneath that you take with you and help you be able to see that it's possible to recontextualize and actually wind up in a different and a better place with regards to your values and what, how you really see yourself, what you wanna be doing every day, how you wanna relate to your children and your grandchildren, and you know, your friends and the people in the community that, you know, they don't have to be the same way they've always been in the home where you're living now.

Vance Crowe [00:25:57] It sounds like a hell of a transformation that you have to help a person go through.

David Smith [00:26:03] I think it is, I think it can be, I think it can be extremely rewarding when you watch someone go through it and then you see 'em on the other end. So my, I'm 35 years in to this at the Gates Worth at that particular location, I've done hundreds of locations. But if I were to go back to any of them, my favorite time would be to walk and have a cup of coffee at breakfast and see the people who are sitting there engaged with each other in ways that they hoped, but never really expected. They would be, I, I must be the luckiest landlord on earth. People hug and kiss me when I walk through the dining room. They're my tenants, essentially. I don't really think of 'em that way, but,

Vance Crowe [00:26:49] So what did you change about the sales process to make that happen?

David Smith [00:26:54] A few things. One is that I slowed down. I spent a lot more time with a lot fewer people. I had each, each interaction that I was engaged in, I evaluated based upon what the outcome was for the prospect instead of what the, what I was able to get or convince or persuade. There was an outcome from the prospect. And I, I found eventually, I didn't do this at first, at first, I just started spending more time and I started directing that time towards active and empathic listening and evoking life stories. But I noticed that in the telling of the story, it was fascinating for me, right? It was like the prize in the cracker jack box.

Vance Crowe [00:27:54] I totally relate to that,

David Smith [00:27:55] Right? But it was really important for them. It, it turns out almost like a reverse dating app. We eventually put this into a CRM, but we did it without a CRM on note cards with Polaroid pictures for a long time. We would capture their story, we would help them capture their story and in the telling and in the paying attention and giving up the result, right? Of what was ever gonna happen sales wise. Just finding out for that individual, where are they in their life plan and how's it going for them? What are the difficulties they have trying to be the driver in the passenger seat that's watching them and sit, where are you going? How is it going? What are you noticing? What's it like that in that process of drawing out, it helped people see their own circumstances better for what they were in.

Vance Crowe [00:28:52] Yeah, it's amazing to me that most people go most of their lives never having anybody really listen to them. I mean, maybe about some minor task or whatever, but when they're thinking about their own life, and oftentimes I think that what that ultimately creates is a person that has all these thoughts about what they thought their life was going to be like, what they are proud of, what worked out, what they learned along the way. They, they actually have never really even thought about it themselves, right? They've never had it, they've never had the time and the space to have it come all the way up to the surface thought. So just even asking alone is putting people into a place where they can have a psychological process that, that if somebody doesn't ask, they may never go through.

David Smith [00:29:41] Yeah, it's a rough time. The transition time in one's life where you're no longer working actively or engaged. You may be, but you may just be going to the office because your kids are running the business and they left a space for you to come sit down kind of thing. But you're probably not, there are exceptions of course, but for the most part, the typical people that we deal with are no longer running major companies. You know, they're no longer practicing law or medicine. Their life has evolved into something different. And so that sense of authority is different for the male, for the female, it's, it's also different whether they've worked outside the house or not. The matriarchal role becomes more difficult. And you know, it's, it's important for them to remember aspirationally who they were too before they got this far down the road. Fascinating to listen to.

Vance Crowe [00:30:46] Yeah, I think one of the, I've been, I've been reading this book on childhood development, right? I have a 2-year-old and a seven month old. And yeah,

David Smith [00:30:53] We

Vance Crowe [00:30:53] Spend a lot of time humans thinking about the child development. What's the education process? What are the phases they go through? But we don't really talk about that for older adults. There's very little about that.

David Smith [00:31:06] There, there is some, there's a, a colleague named David Soley who's out in Calabasas and, and he talks about developmental stage. Ericsson had the idea of developmental stages starting with the 2-year-old and then the teenager solely adds on a developmental stage that happens at about 75 or 80 when similar to the other changes in our lives, our brain changes, the frontal part of the brains begin shrinking. And yet other parts of the brain that where you have experiences and where you actually can take, go across experiences, you can, you can sort out that we used to call that wisdom, that part of the brain actually expands. So as you're two and as you're a teenager, your brain changes. And that's where some of the weird behaviors come. And these cross purposes, the 2-year-old wants to be close and be nurtured and yet needs to go off and explore and bump into the chair or whatever. The teenager has more risky behaviors that are triggered new and different, but the brain changes. And it's like the 2-year-old on steroids. If you've ever raised a teenager, I've helped raise five. So I'm familiar with the process. It's a little weird, it's a little daunting. It's also pretty fricking amazing. So solely says this help, this happens to us.

David Smith [00:32:37] And, and again, it's the conflicting agendas for the teenager. It's pushing off into the world and individuating, right? Making my presence known, deciding who I am and who I'm not interacting with my peers, and yet I'm still running back home to mom and dad for the car keys and the credit card, right? And for my ultimate security, my feeling of wellbeing. So what happens is that older age says solely, and I think he's right, is that we, we also have conflicting agendas. On the one hand, we're trying desperately to hold onto control to anything that we've, that's been in our grasp because everything around us is loss and loss of control, right? Losing our friends, losing our consultative authority, losing our place in the family, losing our energy, losing our whatever. It's all about loss. So we're desperately trying to hold onto control and at the same time we have this other developmental driver sort of parallel to the 2-year-old and the teenager. We're trying to figure out what the hell did it all mean? This time we're looking back instead of looking forward and trying to recontextualize the meaning. And each of us as human beings go through that in some way. Most of us rely on others to construct that, you know, in our obituary on stories about us after we're gone. But you can proactively do it yourself or you can do it with the help of somebody who is redirecting you at this phase of life.

David Smith [00:34:15] Whether that's a geriatric case manager, a financial advisor, a trust officer, or a leasing counselor at a senior living community.

Vance Crowe [00:34:24] Ah, that's a fascinating thing to think about. The, that the, that the role of the leasing agent could be a very different one than just, I'm filling a spot. It's the, I'm, I'm here to have a conversation with you that helps you reimagine what your life was and no, maybe not re me reimagine, maybe recontextualizes, the word you used

David Smith [00:34:46] Solely uses that. I like the word because it's sort of like thinking about going through your files instead of time stamping 'em theme or value stamping 'em so that it cuts across times and places. That's what he means by recontextualize.

Vance Crowe [00:35:05] One of the things that here's

David Smith [00:35:07] A, here's a point where I was vulnerable and yet resilient in my life. It happened three times in these places. And these times in these situations, the commonality is resilience. The recontextualization is pulling from different timeframes in places

Vance Crowe [00:35:26] And being able to put those into words so that that way there's some kind of aha moment that you can have about them.

David Smith [00:35:33] Yeah, awareness.

Vance Crowe [00:35:34] Awareness. That's right. I see so many parallels between what you're talking about and what happens with the Legacy Interviews that I do in here. And one of the things that I'm struck by, as you were talking about how the brain, you know, changes people when they get older, they talk slower. And now having watched so many of these interviews and playing them back, sometimes I play 'em back on two x or two and a half x.

David Smith [00:36:01] And

Vance Crowe [00:36:02] What you notice immediately is people that are talking slowly are not dumb. They in fact sound just like a young person with a lot of connections between things, spotting patterns, making connections about things that you might not normally notice. But because they speak so slowly, it's hard to grab that on as, as intelligence. But I think that the speed with which people talk is like a loose indicator that people use for intelligence. That's actually all wrong.

David Smith [00:36:34] Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the research confirms exactly what you're saying, that of course there are things that happen to people that affect their cognition as they get older. But leaving that aside and taking the adult brain that's not diseased in some way, the part of the brain slows down, is the part that processes. So the process goes slower. I'm totally oversimplifying based on my own understanding, but the process, it, it slows down, but it's no less intelligent. The I IQs don't shrink ability to reason intuitive. None of that really changes unless there's intervention of a disease that causes it.

Vance Crowe [00:37:17] Yeah. I've become fascinated by this. And I remember finding research that said if you ask a 25-year-old, a 55-year-old and an 85-year-old, when has a minute elapsed or when has five minutes elapsed, the younger you are, the, the closer you can get to it being 60 seconds.

David Smith [00:37:39] And

Vance Crowe [00:37:39] Then the further you go up on that chain, you, you think much, much more time has passed than, than has actually elapsed. So like a minute goes by and like your ability to be able to say 60 seconds has just elapsed. Like, it, it, it becomes far less accurate.

David Smith [00:37:57] And you know what's interesting too is that if you think about it from a quantum perspective, who cares who's right? What is it, what is time Anyway, it's just a perceptual gauge that we use, right? So the gauge has changed.

Vance Crowe [00:38:15] Yeah. And there's a funny thing, I've talked about it in the last couple of podcasts is that time is linear in some way. The stories that you tell yourselves about what happened, but the actual reality of time is that we're just going around in circles inside of circles around the sun. You know, it seems like an infinite number of circles, but it really is just a circle.

David Smith [00:38:36] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [00:38:39] So as you think about,

David Smith [00:38:40] So it's about time. That's

Vance Crowe [00:38:42] Right.

David Smith [00:38:42] That's, so it's about time was meant in part to reflect a time in someone's life. It's about time was meant to reflect it's time for the industry that I specifically wrote the book for senior housing sales professionals. It's time to like wake up and figure out there's so much better way to do this pragmatically. And it's time also refers to the qualitative measurement that I drew in part from my practice of law and always keeping track of my time. When I got into sales and really made a career out of it, I began investigating, how can I tell how well we're doing or how can I predict what things that I can do to try to do better? And time became a qualitative measure of engagement effectiveness as opposed to efficiencies.

Vance Crowe [00:39:40] So say more about that. How did you even chart that?

David Smith [00:39:43] So I started by just making up what it was and I said, what are the things, it's almost, I made an analogy to Billy Bean in baseball when he said, what's a great hitter? It's the one who gets on base, not the one with the best batting average. So what are we really trying to count? He wanted to count men on base. I want to count actual conversions that take place and I wanna see what factors make those conversions higher. Same store analysis, which is impossible, but as best as you can account for variance, what actually moves the needle. And what I found was the running thought was that more inquiries. More tours, right? More face-to-face interactions and more phone calls is what drives the needle. In fact, it's not at all, it's more time, more time specifically in direct sales activities. So face-to-face, voice to voice. Now nowadays zoom or FaceTime or any way you're communicating, you know, together at the same time it's planning. We can talk about that separately if you want, but planning what's gonna happen and then following up from your interactions. Those times were what I deemed to be in the selling zone and began to record 'em manually on index cards and on graphs, that charts that we would put on the wall, we would just all keep track of how much time did we spend selling today we use our best estimates, now it's in A CRM and you can get, you know, very detailed information on how much time you invested in what you did it on.

David Smith [00:41:39] And you can get benchmarks to what the best performers do on key data points that indicate, you know, opportunities for improved conversion.

Vance Crowe [00:41:51] So when you say you're spending time with these people, you know, after the, hey, we have the the gates worth and hey, tell us about yourself, what are you doing to keep engaged with these people?

David Smith [00:42:03] Yeah. And that was one of the first challenges that I ran into when I, I left the gates worth with my million and a half dollars worth of debt. It was all full, it was doing great, but I had to go pay the debt off. So I found a group in, in first in Denver, then in

Vance Crowe [00:42:21] Chicago, Cincinnati,

David Smith [00:42:23] Dallas. I went around the country and I filled other people's places up for 'em, usually in three or four months. And I would do it all on incentive fees and I'd say, let me live in your place. If I fill you up in the next, you're not gonna fill for the next year or two, right? If I fill you up in the next three months, here's what I'd like. And I kept making that bigger and bigger. And then I had 30 or something places that I went and filled 'em up and I was able to figure out how to translate what I was doing myself into teams and then eventually into A CRM and then into a book. But it worked. And I knew it worked and I knew it worked in Omaha and I knew it worked in Minneapolis and Toronto. The process worked much better than a transactional one.

Vance Crowe [00:43:17] So let's talk about the process from the moment you meet a person till they, they sign the contract that they're moving in. How does all that work? How do you find these people? How do, how do you engage with them?

David Smith [00:43:31] So finding 'em is easy and lots of people have made careers out of trying to help find them and find them better. I call that like the top of the funnel

Vance Crowe [00:43:38] That's

David Smith [00:43:39] Leads coming

Vance Crowe [00:43:39] In.

David Smith [00:43:40] My focus has always been what do you do with the people you have?

Vance Crowe [00:43:44] Hmm.

David Smith [00:43:44] And my theory in my personal practice has been, I can always generate leads if I spend money.

Vance Crowe [00:43:51] Okay.

David Smith [00:43:52] Some people can do it with less money than me and a little faster. And, but at the end of the day, 90% of the prospects that we generate inquiries from aren't moving anywhere.

Vance Crowe [00:44:08] Oh, that's interesting.

David Smith [00:44:10] Yeah. That's the total absorption rate that our industry, it's a little better on the west coast and a little less in different places around the country. But 10 percents, 10 to 15% pretty much characterizes across the country. So almost everyone is saying no. So I'll find people that we can help convert in the process once we engage. And so the engagement has to do with it's prospect centered, which means that the nature of the engagement, engagement is about the person who they are, where they came from, what, what's going on in their lives, much more than it is about the product especially, or solutions, especially in the beginning. And I got there in terms of theory and ability to explain that two, two ways. 'cause I really looked for a long time to figure out what that was all about. Neil Rackham came in the mid 1990s and revolutionized sales by figuring out what large, complex, multi call sales are. And he differentiated those from small sales where there was a low price, usually one interaction or contact. You're buying sneakers, you're, you know, figuring out which beer to buy.

David Smith [00:45:44] These are sales that are more complex, they're larger dollar. And in our case, they also have a huge emotional overlay. And so the traditional notion from decades ago that I think, I think his name was Douglas Edwards, the father of closing, you know, said that it takes five or more attempts to close. And most salespeople just don't have the grit or cur courage or creativity to be able to ask that many times. The more you ask and the better you ask, the more often you're going to actually close. Well rack and found that while that was true in simple sales, not very high dollar volume ones that you could close in a single face-to-face interaction and where there was lots of demand, it wasn't true in complex sales. And in fact, the opposite was true. The faster you tried to get to yes or no, the more often you were to get no. And these are sales, he wasn't talking about senior housing, but he could have been high dollar value. People are in independent living, for example, plan to live probably five to seven years on average times whatever the monthly rent is over that period of time as a significant amount of money. Usually there's more than one person involved. It could be multi-generational. So it's a complex sale. And what we found was really consistent with what Raku said, trying to get to yes or no very fast based on the solution and logical benefits takes you to know so pragmatically it just doesn't work.

David Smith [00:47:26] So slow down says Rackum, and then engage in discovery in a very different kind of a way. He had a sequence of questions and he coined the term spin, SPIN, for the types of questions that you would ask in sequence first about their situation and background, whether it was business or personal. Then you'd ask about problems or difficulties in the way they're dealing with the problem. Now, then you'd ask for the implications of those problems. If you're not, if your supply chains down and it's doing this in Omaha, what other problems does that cause? So he is building up the perceived size of the problem in the mind of the buyer. And then finally needs payoff only at the very end as he offers solutions or suggest solutions. Rackham was brilliant, but he was like a egghead, he was a scientist and he had all these crazy terms like express and implied needs and things that were hard for a person to just practically follow up in a conversation. You could understand it, you could believe in it. So we turned to the psychologists and looked at people who were studying psychology of change and how did they help people through drug and alcohol abuse, smoking cessation, weight loss, gambling disorders. How do you help somebody change a behavior that they probably on the front end don't even want to confront.

Vance Crowe [00:49:02] Yeah. Even the very thought of that change is enough to make people uncomfortable, let alone going through and purchasing something for that change.

David Smith [00:49:10] Yeah. So you have to have some kind of an intervention. Something has to happen for that to even get that person engaged. And then when they're engaged, there's a whole arm of psychology from the clinical psychologist that's evidence-based called motivational interviewing. And it's a style and methodology of asking questions that's relatively easy to learn, not to become an expert at, but to be able to, to learn much easier than rack M was. And solves the same problem of helping people let go. Helping them redirect and accept change. 'cause that's what it's really about.

Vance Crowe [00:49:47] What would be an example of motivational interviewing?

David Smith [00:49:51] So let me just back up one, one step and then I'll give you an example. So I lost my thread for one second.

Vance Crowe [00:50:05] Well, so you had just gotten in talking about spin and then about how he had

David Smith [00:50:09] Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. So Brian Tracy, psychology of sales is really foundational.

Vance Crowe [00:50:15] I read that book at your recommendation. It was an excellent book.

David Smith [00:50:18] He's great. You can still watch his podcast and some video that he does. He's amazing. He says, regardless of what you're selling, anything to who product or service, there are four antecedents. There's four things that have to happen before you can have a sale. Okay? A sale he says takes place when there's a transfer of enthusiasm with confident expectations. I think that's perfectly fine definition, but it won't happen unless four things are in place. One, somebody has to be able to benefit from the product or service. Okay? That's pretty obvious, right? In our case, virtually everybody who inquires about senior housing could benefit from all the different things that are provided. Second, they have to be able to afford it. Third is they have to be able to use it. So in our case, that means that the, that they don't have a level of health need that would prohibit them from living in that section of the building or in that, that particular license or of a community. And so those are relatively easy, right? To qualify for and find many, many thousands of people within a market who would qualify for those. Then the fourth one says, Brian Tracy is they have to want it. They have to have a desire and they have to have enough desire to have it now. And in senior housing in 35 years, I, I could count on two hands the number of times somebody actually came in who didn't have to have senior housing, didn't have to move out of their place because of a crisis who actually wanted to, in advance of being forced.

David Smith [00:52:04] Nobody wants it. So you're missing a fundamental prerequisite to what Brian Tracy says, you need to close. And I agree with him. And that's where I went to RAC and that's where I went to the psychologist to try to find how can we help someone build their own de desire? How can we generate motivation for change, right? That logically is gonna lead 'em here pragmatically, it will, if we only let go of the result and try to guide them in terms of how to think about change. And the oversimplify, it's just sort of re reverse psychology only. It's way more sophisticated. So it's open-ended questions and it's asked with an understanding that change like grief and some other emotional processes go through stages. And you can use those as a navigational map to see where you are and to help the prospect wherever they happen to be. It's not linear, they don't just go like this, but it's like the compass rows, you can just sort of see where you are and then nudge, you know, a very simple example would be when, if you've had teenagers and you've ever had one of them date somebody that you just think is the worst thing that could happen to that beautiful human being I raised, the worst thing you can do is tell 'em that, especially if you're right. Try getting someone to smoke, quit smoking by showing 'em what's on the cigarette pack.

David Smith [00:53:37] Logic and reason have no place, especially if you're correct. Right? So what you need to do is find a way to reflect back to the person in such a way that they can pull their own motivation. You need to nurture their motivation and their confidence that if they were motivated to change, they could.

Vance Crowe [00:53:58] That's

David Smith [00:53:59] In a nutshell what motivational interviewing is. I love that

Vance Crowe [00:54:02] It works. Let, let me, so you're saying you are helping a person come to the conclusion that they could do, they could make the change that they wanna make. And so therefore they're more willing to look at the thing that they, they

David Smith [00:54:16] Could make a

Vance Crowe [00:54:17] Change. They could make a change.

David Smith [00:54:18] That there is a need to make a change because their values and their, what they really believe to be important in life is not being served by the lifestyle they have. Now. If you're wrong and in the course of the conversation, you shake hands, you ha send 'em a bottle of wine or whatever and say Congratulations, it looks like you're doing exactly what you need to be doing and what you wanna be doing. But one outta 10 times among qualified 80 year olds is, is not the right number. In other words, there's just a lot more that you and I and your listeners, if we just all had to agree for any particular person of the people that we agreed would be better off in senior, some kind of a senior living situation, there would be many times more than people who would say yes.

Vance Crowe [00:55:11] So let's go to the analogy of the child dating somebody that they don't like.

David Smith [00:55:15] Yeah. What

Vance Crowe [00:55:16] Is the sort of motivational interviewing that gets them to have this aha moment,

David Smith [00:55:22] Help them become aware of and reflect what they value, what's important to them, whether it's in terms of their own career, having a family, what was most important to them in terms of their childhood? What did they resent? What explore the ground, right? Of what do you value, what is important? And in the context of that, try to draw out a reflection and awareness in the person as to why you think maybe the person they're involved with isn't necessarily the best representation of those values.

Vance Crowe [00:55:56] So these are things like, as as you get older, you imagine yourself being, you know, well

David Smith [00:56:04] Ma let's make it really simple. Sure. Okay. You're living by yourself. You've got some arthritic situation or something going on with pain medicine and it's hard for you to get up and down the steps. Your laundry room is in the basement. You're eating TV dinners because you can't always get to the store. You shouldn't be. You are driving, you shouldn't be driving. And your, your son who lives locally and your daughter who lives across the state desperately are begging you to get out of there. You're calling on them, you feel really bad when you have to call on them for support. I'm, I'm making it pretty graphic. This

Vance Crowe [00:56:41] Is great.

David Smith [00:56:42] Keep going. And yet you're not ready to move.

Vance Crowe [00:56:47] It's not time yet.

David Smith [00:56:48] It's not. Well, yeah, I can see that maybe someday. And if I did move, it would only be to your place. But you know, I'm not ready yet. When when will you know that you're ready? Oh, I'll know I'm ready when I, and usually they can't answer that question, but it's when I can't drive anymore or when I can't, there's something I can't do when I have no choice. Do you think it'd be better to move at that time? Oh, you know, they can't really answer that question either. Do you have a plan as to how you're gonna move or who's gonna help you? So the awareness of what their plan is and the realities of how that's gonna work, you know, and make it real. So who, who will, who will be notified if you did fall? You told me that you had fall last spring. What happened? Help me understand that. Are you sure you can stay? Have you thought about A, B and C? Have you thought about chairlift down to the basement? Have you thought about maybe having some,

Vance Crowe [00:57:51] So you're giving them other options that they could consider to be able to make that thing? I want

David Smith [00:57:55] Them become aware and explore the situation they're in and come to their own conclusion so that there, if so, I can try to generate a motivation to change. If I see it now, if I'm wrong again, they'll convince me otherwise, but I'm just gonna jump in. I do what we call go with the skid. I follow the resistance like you would if your car was skidding out to the right. Your every impulse is to tell your daughter, don't date. The guy is to turn the car the other way. Just go right into the skid instead the resistance. Because usually it's a house of cards built on fear.

Vance Crowe [00:58:37] Say more about that.

David Smith [00:58:38] Well, there's usually no there, there. I mean, most of the people that we talk to actually don't have a plan for what happens. They haven't really thought of it. If you ask if they actually told you what their plan was, it's to wait till something terrible happens and my daughter or somebody, whoever it is that's anointed, is gonna have the problem. I won't. And yet if you said, is that really what you wanna do? Is that how you want your last chapter to be? Is to dump all this on your daughter? They would, they wouldn't agree. So the idea is to help build awareness. Again, if there's a solid plan and it makes sense, great, but it's to try to draw out the story of who they are, who they've been at their best, what moments in their life have they been resilient, when have they been vulnerable? What was that like? How do they want to be remembered? And the best place to do that, by the way, is in the home, in their home. So that's another thing that I did is I gave up tours as a way of explaining and doing a show and tell of what I have until I first know who they are. So I go to the island of isolation and loneliness where their life is being lived and go explore.

Vance Crowe [00:59:59] Yeah, you probably make a lot more observations about what this person is really going through when you see them where they are, as opposed to them getting dressed up in their best and being around their children who brought them there or what, whatever that is. It's probably a really profound difference.

David Smith [01:00:14] Yeah. It's being a mirror. It's being a true mirror.

Vance Crowe [01:00:19] And how do you think, if somebody is not doing this with retirement communities, this motivational

David Smith [01:00:26] Interviewing.

Vance Crowe [01:00:27] Interviewing,

David Smith [01:00:28] Yeah.

Vance Crowe [01:00:29] How does this, it works the same way only on other problems.

David Smith [01:00:33] Oh, it works on all kinds of problems and challenges. I have the good fortune of actually meeting William Miller, one of the guys with Steven Rolnick wrote the book on motivational interviewing. Fascinating guy. I read his book probably four or five times and broke it down and began teaching it and you know, was able to come back to him, the guy that actually wrote the book on motivational interviewing. God bless you and learn some things. But it's been adapted for a variety of different things. It's just, it's that pragmatic, you know, in terms of a process. So it starts with a notion of empathy and connection and trust. It has to be authentic for it to work and for it to be powerful.

Vance Crowe [01:01:25] Yeah. My my wife talks about when they were first getting their physical therapy clinic up and running and they wanted to hire some consultants to help them figure out, like, how should we do our pricing? How should we explain this? She said she'd get on these calls and every single consultant did the same kind of motivational interviewing. So to her, as soon as she thought that she was getting that she would be repelled by it. But it, I think that's because these people were just using a script and they weren't actually like,

David Smith [01:01:53] Really

Vance Crowe [01:01:53] Listening.

David Smith [01:01:54] Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there are no scripts. That's what's so cool about it. Everyone is, goes along a similar path that you can abstract from, right? And you can write down some stuff about so that you can see the landmarks, but every, every journey is completely different. And so the idea is to actually be there, to be present, to have a childlike curiosity and wonderment to have just a real interest in the other person and what they're trying to achieve and see how they're trying to go about it.

Vance Crowe [01:02:28] Yeah. I think you and I have spoken a little bit about the tiniest choices game. I, I talk about this when I'm interviewing people. They, they interview somebody's telling you something. They include details in that story that they didn't have to, they could have told the story without that detail, but there was some reason they put it in there. Like, we were at the University of Delaware and we were doing this thing and this crazy thing happened. They didn't need to tell you that they were at the University of Delaware, but that detail was the important thing to them. That's what places them there. And so you can ask about the big thing that happened, or you can say, why were you at the University of Delaware? And then that pulls it apart because that tiny detail is what makes everything else make sense. But to them, it's such an integral part of their story that they don't even know they've added it in. It's just a, a part that's there. But that only happens if you're actually listening to what people are saying.

David Smith [01:03:20] Yeah, my brother happens to be a clinical psychologist. He teaches memory and learning and creative thinking at Texas a and m University. He would tell you that in terms of how memories are embedded, that's part of the anchor. That detail and time and place is an anchor. And that's tied to the emotional content of what it is that you're remembering. It doesn't just like going to a file in the computer. It's somewhere stored in the body in connection with that anchor. So what you're doing is you're triggering the anchor and you're releasing the emotion that's directly associated with it, which is ultimately what a memory is. It's a, it's a emotion with factual details and a story surrounding it.

Vance Crowe [01:04:08] Oh, I love that. I love that. You're right. It is a, a memory is an emotion. It, one of the reasons I love your book is because you are going through and working out many of the same things that I am experiencing. And I've never had anybody else at that level talking about it in such great detail in a way that feels authentic, right? Because when you're talking about people like, well, you know that you're talking about people's life stories. You, there is there, there's no roadmap. There's a, this is what I do to get us on the path, but that path is going to go in all kinds of crazy directions. And if I ignore the fact that they've just taken a a, a left hand turn, then we get really far apart. And you're the first sales book that I had ever read where I was like, this guy really understands the, the dance that goes on between you and another person when you're connecting them with something that you have and they would want if they knew it.

David Smith [01:05:09] So let's give you a simple example. So I'm talking to a prospect. I'm in the home, or we're doing a tour, or we're on the telephone and the prospect makes a statement in the context of what caused you to call us, call us today, or tell me a little bit about what you're looking for. Something like that. They'll say, well, I'm not driving as much as I used to. Okay. So a transactional seller immediately thinks we have a van, we have transportation. I can solve your problem. The the reality is, however, is that that has nothing to do with what the person is talking to you about. And if they were to be honest with you, they might say something like they would, you would trigger objections because your solution is only a partial solution. Right? RACA makes a big deal outta this, but it's okay. But right now I'm driving a 10-year-old Buick with leather seats and it's got 3000 miles and I listen to country radio. Am I gonna be able to do that in your van? Right. It triggers a variety. Well, I have to sit next to the old lady who sneezes. You know, can I go on Thursday afternoon at two o'clock where I always like to go? You just raise all kinds of detail, right? 'cause you miss the whole point. You it. Somebody who's trying to do more of a motivational interviewing style or a more deep dive into discovery might say, oh, how do you get around? Well, my daughter drives me wherever I need to go.

David Smith [01:06:42] Okay. Oh, that's interesting. What do you do in the days when your daughter's not there? Tell me about what it feels like to you to stop driving. By the way, what was your first car? I don't know anybody that doesn't remember their first car.

Vance Crowe [01:06:58] Oh no. Yeah.

David Smith [01:06:59] First time they made out in the backseat. The first time they ran outta gas. You know, people remember their car. Their car has a representation to 'em. So when someone is saying, I'm not driving as much as I used to, that's akin to the detail that you look for in terms of the time and place. I'm trying to anchor that into an emotion that helps the person become aware of what they really feel like that their independence and everything they thought about with that first car is now being taken away.

Vance Crowe [01:07:30] Now, when you mentioned motivational interviewing, you talked about it's not that hard to learn, but you have to be both listening and prepared with a question. How does one get better at this?

David Smith [01:07:43] Yeah. Really give up the preparing the question. Just really listen, listen. Like a curious child with a naive mind and just actually just wanting to know how does that work?

Vance Crowe [01:07:59] I was talking with a young person today that said, or not today, a couple of weeks ago that was talking with me about how he finds himself being really distracted in conversations. And he's like, 'cause I'm just sitting there like thinking about what I'm gonna say. And it really is like, he's like trying to be like, I want to be cool or I want to be, you know, seen as intelligent. And the best advice I could give him was, if you're really listening to somebody, it's about trust in yourself.

David Smith [01:08:25] Yes. And

Vance Crowe [01:08:26] You have to just believe that when you get to them being done talking them, saying everything that they need, that there will be a question that will come up in you and, and it, once you trust yourself, it, it just happens. But it's very difficult. And in fact, most people stumble and talk over themselves many, many times over because they don't trust themselves enough. So,

David Smith [01:08:48] So yes, you have to trust yourself. It starts there and you have to trust the person you're talking to.

Vance Crowe [01:08:56] Say more about that.

David Smith [01:08:57] Well, you have to trust that they have autonomy. That there's actually something going on in there.

Vance Crowe [01:09:03] That's true.

David Smith [01:09:04] Because that's what you're trying to find out, right? You're trying to, it's like you're trying to provoke or evoke a response in the other person. That's what you're trying to do. So you have to have confidence that if you're, if you're determined to do that and you stay present, you will be able to help them. They'll be able to get there.

Vance Crowe [01:09:27] That is an added that that that's correct. You work with a lot of people teaching them how to do these things. Can anyone be a salesperson?

David Smith [01:09:41] I'd say probably not anyone. I'd say there's probably some people who are just not very well suited. I command it a slightly different direction and talk about what I find the most interesting and the, and the most probable characteristics for success starts with curiosity. Nothing beats curiosity, just genuine curiosity, empathic concern. So emotional empathy is, I can feel what you're feeling, right? Cognitive empathy is I can, I can feel what you're feeling somewhat or not, but I can think about, I see, I can think through what's happening to you emotionally. I get what you're reacting to. I see what the emotion is you're expressing. That's cognitive emotion. Emotional concern is yeah, but do I give a damn? Am I willing to do anything about it? Am I willing to put myself out there and face rejection failure? Right. By actually trusting that empathy, do I actually care about trying to help you versus trying to make the sale. And so I look for co for cognitive empathy and emotional concern, determination. You gotta be determined because you have to face up to rejection over and over and over again. And you have to be able to just like that kind of wash off and believe enough in the process and what you're doing to go back and be resilient and take at it again.

David Smith [01:11:20] And then creativity. So those would be the traits I would look for.

Vance Crowe [01:11:26] Let's talk about this rejection. 'cause I think that in sales, that is the, the thing that, that drowns people before they even get wet. Right? They don't, yeah. We don't want to be told no

David Smith [01:11:38] Before they get wet. That's right.

Vance Crowe [01:11:40] And I like, I think that there's an experience that people have where they want so badly not to be told no that even asking they, they cut themselves off. How do you help a salesperson get over that, that fear of being told no

David Smith [01:12:06] Tolerance to see if they have tolerance to it. Help them get into a situation where they just wind up being told no to over and over again. And see if it changes how they, if they can become aware of how they're reacting, what story they're reacting to, and if they can redirect themselves. None of us, I don't think put our purposely put ourselves in front of someone who we know is gonna tell us no.

Vance Crowe [01:12:33] Yeah, that's right.

David Smith [01:12:34] It's not an ordinary thing that your kids would tell you that. What'd you do at school today? I found three people who are gonna tell me no, it's not ordinary. And some people just are better at it than others. You know what's interesting is that another challenge and other fear of salespeople is being told Yes. And what I mean by that is, as you begin working, especially with older people who have needs and they become more and more reliant upon you, there's a sense of there's an intimacy that generates this nu gnawing sense of concern and responsibility and accountability that people shy away from sometimes as much as rejection

Vance Crowe [01:13:21] Anymore.

David Smith [01:13:23] They don't wanna get that close to somebody. They want this to be a cl more of a cleansing, sort of a transactional, factual thing. They don't want to get vulnerable themselves.

Vance Crowe [01:13:35] Ah. And even to be listening to somebody go through this,

David Smith [01:13:38] If you really care about it and you're listening to it and you're trying to help you become, you can become, have this feeling of responsibility after all the people who are calling us all have needs or they wouldn't call us.

Vance Crowe [01:13:57] So how does one overcome that? Or maybe they can't.

David Smith [01:14:00] Well, a lot of people overcome it by just remaining factual. They don't ever want to explore the emotional part. 'cause once you get into people's stories, it's like when I studied torts in law school, everybody is injured. In every case you read, it's car accidents, medical malpractice there, there's always a victim in senior housing when someone is calling is inquiring. At this stage of where we are in America, most every time there's something that's not working is triggered a call. People just don't, out of the blue say, Hmm, I wonder if I call a brain surgeon today, just find out what would happen if I had brain surgery or a divorce lawyer or a retirement community. It just is, it may, it may turn out that way and you know, in the baby boomer generation, but it's not that way today. People only call when something's already broke.

Vance Crowe [01:14:58] What about in those situations where people have what I call soft rejection? So in person, the person's like, yes, I, this is a great idea, I love it. This is I Yes, let's do it. Email me the details and then you go to do an email and then the person says, all right, thanks for the information. I'll get back to you when we're ready to do this. Yeah. How does a salesman handle that?

David Smith [01:15:21] Yeah. Well that's no fun. But you know, I always noticed when my kids were teenagers and I locked the doors, they came in and out through the windows. That's what I noticed. And once I told my teenagers no, and they just kept doing something anyway, just assumed that it was no to something else.

Vance Crowe [01:15:49] Interesting. Because

David Smith [01:15:50] In the scenario you gave me, I have no idea what it was no to. Was it No, I don't have a problem. No, you haven't properly assessed the problem. No. You don't have a solution that would help solve my problem. No, I don't trust you. No, I'm really busy today because my father-in-law died. I don't really know what happened. So I can assume somebody said no to me and I'm a, you know, something's wrong with me, or I'm a loser. Or I could think, wow, maybe just had a hard day. Let's figure out what no is saying to

Vance Crowe [01:16:25] Interesting. So, so approaching it in the sense of,

David Smith [01:16:29] I thought you said, you told me that you needed so much seed by some by this point in time did. And I happen to have the seed down the road and we've got trucks going your way. I'm just curious, did I misunderstand something?

Vance Crowe [01:16:42] Oh, that's good.

David Smith [01:16:44] But I mean, that would be honest, right?

Vance Crowe [01:16:46] That is honest. It's, and it's, I,

David Smith [01:16:48] Here's what I heard. Here's what I'm thinking. I'm just wondering if I'm off,

Vance Crowe [01:16:56] I mean, I experienced this with Legacy Interviews for the vast majority of my interviews, they come from farmers that listen to the podcast people are getting, but when I go in person, people love it. Right? They really wanna do it. And somebody that you think, oh, this person definitely wants to do this. Then they give you the, oh, thank you so much for all this information. We'll let you know when we have an occasion for this. And to me that soft no Yeah.

David Smith [01:17:24] Is

Vance Crowe [01:17:24] The hardest one to deal with because I don't wanna bother them.

David Smith [01:17:27] So, so validate, reflect. Yes. I hear that. You're telling me no, I I am not quite sure. Clarify. So it's acknowledge, clarify. Let me see if I understand what it is you're saying no to. Are you saying no to exploring your legacy? Is this, would you rather have Thursday than Tuesday? Or do we just have a, a bad day? Do you not like the process? Did you find another process or a different and better way to capture your legacy? Just like to have a few minutes to try to explore and figure out what happened, what you're saying. No, to clarify then test. Now that I've listened to what you have to say, it sounds like the issue is you're feeling really intimidated by sitting down for the interview. Is that what I'm hearing you say? Is that what really is at the bottom of it? Then try to find a solution. So acknowledge, clarify, test. Do I have this right? When you have something specific and then don't offer the solution till you do. If you don't have it right in the test, go back and start over. Oh, now I hear what you're saying. Your niece thinks it's a terrible idea. Or your niece has an next door neighbor who does this for free.

Vance Crowe [01:18:52] And and the weird world of of doing things in person and then having the exchange happen over email. How do you tell your salespeople to overcome email rejections? Do you try and get the person back on the phone? Do you do the conversation via email?

David Smith [01:19:06] That's really harder, isn't it? It's so much easier to be face-to-face or even voice to voice because the emotions all get lost in emails and even worse in text messages. Yeah. I don't necessarily have a good solution for that. And I personally get very annoyed when people chase me with repeated emails without any context. So I, there probably are people who have thought about that. I have not figured out how to do it. You can do it in the subject matter. You can do it through just disarming in the content. It just doesn't play as well. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:19:41] That's right.

David Smith [01:19:42] Electronically. 'cause it's not real time.

Vance Crowe [01:19:48] Yeah, that's right.

David Smith [01:19:50] Not happening at the same time. So,

Vance Crowe [01:19:52] And because a person can get the email, feel an emotion about that and then be like, oh, I'll get back to it and let me, let me deal with this later. Maybe feeling

David Smith [01:20:00] An emotion about 10 other things, completely unrelated. Yeah,

Vance Crowe [01:20:03] That's right. Yeah. The business of sales becomes infinitely more complicated when you have all these different mediums that you can interact with somebody.

David Smith [01:20:12] And again, it depends on what you're selling. Is it a simple sale where what you're selling is more like salt or lager beer? It's much more the same than it is different. And it's a pretty much undifferentiated product that you have a lot of demand for. Or is it something that is much more unique and personal, more expensive, has an emotional overlay. I'm sure email and the LinkedIn blasts and so forth were just fine for small ticket items.

Vance Crowe [01:20:46] One of the things that your book does a profound job of is talking about creative follow-ups. This seems to be something that you really enjoy. I mean that, that part of the book is just filled with joy. Talk a little bit about creative follow-ups. What are they for and how do you think of them?

David Smith [01:21:02] Yeah, so I got introduced to the idea from Jay Conrad Levinson Gorilla Marketing all the way back when I was first starting. And he talked about showing up for the prospect in a very personal way, showing immediacy and using your feedback to say, I see you. That's really the main purpose. And you can do it before someone comes in to tour or after you can do it during a tour. You can do it to people who surrounded prospect themselves. You know, the main key is it says, I heard you. I love you. I I take you seriously. I respect you. And it can be any myriad of different kinds of sales initiatives. You can send things. I've had conversations with older adults where there was not a whole lot of information, but one lady I found love crossword puzzles, I found about 10 pieces of information about her, including her phone number and where she lived and something about her profession. I went to the, she loved the mountains. It was two things that I was able to gather from a short conversation that she had. So I went to the internet and constructed a, a crossword puzzle using the 10 pieces of information that I had and put it on a ski background and sent it to her.

Vance Crowe [01:22:39] And did she call you then?

David Smith [01:22:41] Oh yeah. She called me right away. It's something that's different and outrageous prepared meals for people in their homes, fixed a maintenance problem. One guy was a brain guy, a neurologist, and gave him a chart of the brain and mapped out different areas as to what he might be thinking about relative to his staying at home or moving. Wrote a petition for an attor retired attorney, prescription for a doctor. Do tough love letters where like we were clarifying on a simple objection. Maybe you've had a longer term relationship with somebody who just drops off. You write a long letter and say, this is what I saw, this is what I heard. This is what your daughter said, this is what you're doing. And I'm just really, help me. It can be, it's only limited by your imagination. I once had a fighter pilot and I made like a top gun tape for 'em

Vance Crowe [01:23:45] With a top gun tape.

David Smith [01:23:47] Oh. I had top gun music going in the background. I acknowledged his service. I just, you know, dictated into a, this type. This was one where there were audio tapes. Yeah, you are, you were the man in Tulsa, Georgia in 1968. I can see the picture of you with the graduating class and

Vance Crowe [01:24:08] I mean, these creative follow ups that are in your book are fantastic. And I can say that they work on me, right. I had a, I had a, a guy that was just launching a financial services company. He sent me a package as a part of his announcement. He was like, Hey, I just wanted you to know, and it made me feel so good. I probably told 15 people about him and what he's doing. And you'd think like, well, you know that this is a part of a marketing thing, but the fact that he thought of me made me

David Smith [01:24:36] Feel so good. Well, and the more personal you can do, you can do it the better to reflect. So it's not how expensive it is. It's, wow. You ever see the movie Big Fish?

Vance Crowe [01:24:48] Oh yeah.

David Smith [01:24:48] You know the daffodil scene?

Vance Crowe [01:24:50] I don't recall it. Tell me

David Smith [01:24:52] Where he's courting this woman on the edge of this mysterious town and the high school football player is also corner and he fills her front yard with daffodils. That's the idea. Send the daffodils, send the daffodils, stand out from the crowd. Do it something that, that was her flower. I mean, it wasn't just random.

Vance Crowe [01:25:15] This has been an excellent conversation about sales. I I am certain that we could talk a a lot more about it, but as people, if they found what you said to be interesting, even if they're not trying to fill a retirement community, tell, tell me about where they can find your book.

David Smith [01:25:32] Yeah, sure. It's on Amazon, it's also on Audible. There's a, a voice version and it's called, it's about time.

Vance Crowe [01:25:42] So you, did you

David Smith [01:25:43] Do the voice version of it? I did.

Vance Crowe [01:25:45] Oh, excellent. I would've listened to that for sure. I didn't realize that I So you maybe noticed a spike in your sales after I started writing you emails because I loved your book and I started sending it out, out as actually a creative thought starter because I was sending it to people, people that I knew were in sales and said, I know you're not in this domain, but the way you think about sales is, is really excellent. And it connected with me on a human level. And I think I wrote you to tell you this, that before reading your book, I definitely distanced myself from saying that I was in sales. And after reading your book, I was like, no, I, I am definitely a, a salesman. I, I, I deeply feel that what you're doing is connecting people with things that they need. I thought that that was the mark of an excellent book.

David Smith [01:26:34] Thank you so much for that. That's so refreshing. That's what every author would love to be able to hear, is that actually I created something that was useful or beneficial to someone else that's really at the heart of what I think of as selling.

Vance Crowe [01:26:48] Well, I think if you ever wanted to abstract that out into selling in general, you, you have probably many, many more, more books inside of you. So

David Smith [01:26:57] Thank you so much. Thanks.