How the Quiet and Shy Can Outsell Anyone
Matthew Pollard is the author of The Introvert’s Edge: How the Quiet and Shy Can Outsell Anyone. He’s an incredible sales professional and a fellow introvert. His client list includes multiple Fortune 500 companies. He’s one of the top 30 global sales leaders in the world.
Today, he talks about how introverts can actually excel in sales by following a process and tapping into the power of telling stories.
What We Discuss with Matthew Pollard:
- Looking up to mentors who attained success against the rules
- Doing door-to-door sales and getting into the top 20% of his study
- A journey to find himself and working at a real estate agency
- Bringing process into sales
- How an introvert can out-beat an extrovert using process over personality
- Asking structured questions and planning your stories
- The power of telling stories
- What introverts can do to excel in sales
- How to successfully market a book
- Leveraging LinkedIn to promote your book and ultimately getting on TV
- Matthew’s book writing process and the ghostwriting experience
[01:05] Lessons Learned from Mentors
Instead of saying you can’t, change that into a mindset of how you can achieve it.
Matthew had a hard time growing up as a 16-year-old kid. The “rule book” didn’t work for him so he had to force himself to think outside the box.
Matthew still did what he could to excel in his studies.
[04:33] Getting Into the Sales Role and Being #1
Matthew took a job doing data entry for a real estate firm until he found a sales job doing door-to-door.
He had to make a decision that sales had to be a system!
He began looking for options, trying to discover the system behind the sale. As he applied this, he eventually became the #1 sales performer at their company within a period of 6 weeks.
[10:15] How an Introvert Can Outbeat an Extrovert in Sales
Introverts suck at selling if they had to rely on their natural ability. But with a system in place, they can practice it and get better at it.
Over the long term, the introverts can actually outsell the extroverts. Introverts learn the process of selling and take the time to understand the system.
Extroverts think that the ability to sell is connected to the mood. But if that’s the case, your sales can crash if you went through a bad situation.
Introverts hold on to the system and because of that, they’d get better and better. While they may still struggle at the start, they will improve quickly and deliver similar results over and over again everyday.
Just run the process and it gets the awkwardness out of the sale.
[15:25] How Introverts Can Make the Sale
Use the power of stories. Stories get rid of the awkwardness among introverts.
Ask the right, structured questions to help you understand the customer more effectively. Plan great questions beforehand. Plan your stories.
People remember 22x more information when embedded in a story.
Stories short-circuit the logical brain, which is the part of the brain that is hard to sell to. The emotional part of the brain loves stories and can’t interpret the logical brain. Then they just listen.
Prepare three stories and pick one story as necessary. Leverage one of these prepared stories to take the fear out and just deliver.
Be present in the moment and have that dialogue with the customer.
[22:44] Mastering the Marketing Part of Your Book
People go down the hole to create the book and they want to publish on Amazon. But it just sits there and no one reads it because no one even knew it was there.
The book doesn’t have to be good as long as the marketing plan is good as well as the strategy. However, if both the book and marketing are good, you get a bestseller.
Make sure the book is incredible but also focus your attention on working on the marketing plan. There are so many amazing books nobody has ever read because people assume their bad since there are no reviews and haven’t sold a lot.
Make sure you structure a book in a way that drives people to you. No one gets super rich off a book unless you’re driving it into other things.
Learn the amazing things Matthew did to drive his book towards success!
Leverage your stories online to get in front of so many people that it creates a catalyst effect where people see you everywhere.
[32:33] The National Introverts Week
Did you know you could actually purchase your own “national week”?
There’s a company that looks for days, weeks, and months that have the heart of society in mind. They publish them on the national calendar and publish it on social media.
Everything you do should be based on passion.
Matthew bought the National Introverts Week that falls on the third week of March every year. The goal is to help introverts realize that they are amazing people! (Did you know Zig Zigler is an introvert?)
Introverts are programmed to project extroversion on anyone that’s successful. So the week is about celebrating the introverts that are successful. They seek to help people realize that you shouldn’t be ashamed of that.
As soon as you know the strategy, you will outperform everybody else – including the extroverts.
[41:00] The Book Writing Process: The Ghostwriting Experience
Matthew was only writing blogs when he was angry. He put off writing a book because of this.
He and his co-writer, Derek, did some interviews. Derek would send him 3,000 words for each chapter and Matthew would write 3,000 comments on each chapter. He would also get it from text to voice so he can just listen to it.
A book proposal is a book in itself. Remember, an okay book with a good marketing plan will outsell a great book with no marketing plan.
[47:40] Everyone Loves Options
When you give the brain multiple options, it doesn’t think about whether or not the answer is yes or no. But it thinks which of the two choices makes sense for them.
People want to buy something but they hate to be sold. By presenting it this way, it allows them to consider the options as opposed to yes or no.
Episode Resources:
Visit Matthew’s website The Introvert’s Edge to know more about building a sales process.
Listen to Matthew’s podcast The Introvert’s Edge
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