Ep. 188 Earn the Confidence of Others

Sales and Business growth is in direct proportion to whether or not clients have confidence in you. Joe Pici shows how to gain the confidence of others by building your own competence.

Transcript

Get ready for an unfair advantage over your competition. This is The Sales Edge podcast. Were globally recognized sales expert and trainer Joe Pici helps you sharpen your skills for booking more appointments and closing more deals. And now here’s your host Joe Pici.

Joe Pici (JP):

Hey team, this is Joe Pici of The Sales Edge. I am your host and I want to thank you for coming back. Want to thank you for your loyalty. I want to thank you for helping us grow this podcast throughout the world. And we want you to know that the sales as podcast is sponsored by Pici and Pici which is a speaking, coaching, training, consulting firm and sell more virtually.com. Which is a virtual speaking, coaching, training, consulting firm. The sales edge podcast will continue to bring on better and better content. And guests, want you to be a part of this. Feel free to call me at 407-947-2590 for a complimentary cup of joe. Maybe give us suggestions or disagreements. Also, you can send me an email at Joe@piciandpici.com. And so as we’re moving forward podcast 188, we’re going to be talking about how competence delivers clients.

Competence. Wow. I’m, you know, as I was thinking about this podcast and I was thinking about what does competence really mean. It it takes me back and you know, I’m not the kind of guy that starts with a story. But this what really happened as we move on you’ll see the reason the need and why competence becomes very important in our business development, career, development, whatever we’re growing. You know, I was considering that I might share in this podcast this quick story. It reminded me many years ago of something that happened Dawn and I were at a very critical point in our life. We were massively in medical debt. We were losing everything. I was working a hundred hours a week as a football coach and we decided to step into a part-time direct sales business. At the peak of our ignorance. You know, I did a sales meeting with a guy named Ed. I’ll never forget it’s that across from Ed and I didn’t really know what very well, you know, it was kind of a cold call. And we sat and I did my quote unquote core story or presentation, in those days. And at the end Ed said no. The business was not for him. So we both both moved on in life. Three years passed and one day out of the blue I get a call from Ed.

He said my brother and best friend had decided to get into that same business and wanted Ed to give him with them. I told him it was a great business. I wished him well. Surprisingly Ed wasn’t interested in getting in business with his brother or his best friend. He asked me if I could bring him into our business? I was kind of shocked and I asked why? He said he had watched us and watched me over the course of years, he saw my confidence in my ability growing and growing in the business. He said you’re competent.

After thinking about this, I realized you know, we can give a great sales presentation, check all the boxes and still fail to close the deal. If you’ve ever lost business or are concerned about losing business to a competitor this podcast is going to be for you. Because it’s more than about the presentation. So let’s move forward. Let’s talk about what is competence. You know, you hear that word thrown around. You know, competence is a set of demonstratable characteristics and skills that enable an improved performance. It’s the ability to do something successfully and efficiently. It’s having the ability, knowledge, judgment, and skill and strength to get the job done. Now Vice Versa when we look at, you know incompetent people, incompetent company, what is incompetence? Well, it’s lacking the ability and the skills to perform a desired result. It’s it’s unable to perform.

With the ability, and skill, and judgment, Strength to get the job done. Who do we trust? Do we trust incompetent people or competent people? If you’re going to hire somebody, if you’re going to work with someone, do you want them to be competent? Have you ever worked with an incompetent person? Have you ever hired a company and thought they’re incompetent? But here’s a more important question. Are we competent? Do we demonstrate competence? You know, the process of mastering the skill and becoming competent is tough. It’s not a sprint, It’s a marathon. It takes time. Tt, you know, it involves many hours, you know, it’s trial and error. It’s success and failure. I mean, I think about Joe and Dawn Pici that we you know, we’re not very special.

We’re about trial and error, success and failure. Over and over and over and over. In every new thing we do, we realize it takes time to get to competence. It takes time to get to mastery. You know Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book, you know, Tipping Point and it was about to 10,000 hour rule. And for many years people said if you do anything for 10,000 hours, you’ve gained mastery, you hit the tipping point. You are competent.

Now many people disagree with that. You know, quantity is not what makes it work. Yes, 10,000 hours is important. However on its own you won’t master skills. You know doing something wrong for a long time does not make us competent. And so sometimes people are no better off five years later than they were because they didn’t get better.

You know, we all need deliberate action. We need feedback. We need coaching in the right techniques and strategies. We need very highly focused efforts on improving our skills. Our strategy, our mindset, our communications. You know, we have to see gains along the way. Very rarely will you find somebody that’ll put 10,000 hours in not gaining results because they’re doing the wrong thing. So we have to see gains. We have to see Improvement. Hours and deliberate focus plus feedback and coaching.

To continued execution will lead the competence. Let me say that again as I thought this through it’s going to take hours and deliberate focus. It’s going to take feedback and coaching. It’s going to take continued execution and that, is going to lead to competence. you know, many years ago, many many many years ago. I looked up the word competence and I found and many of you will relate to this and many of you have probably read about this. And if you’ve been to our coaching, I mean I can think just the day before yesterday, I was training a group. A training a group of people on communications, conflict resolution, and better connectivity. And I actually use this model as I use this model and all of my training and all of my coaching. So we’ve all heard of the five stages of learning. Yknow, and again I tend to use these in our training. So let’s talk about stage one.

This is called unconscious incompetence. Unconscious incompetence is the stage of learning where the learner knows nothing about the topic, nothing about the skills, nothing about the strategies. They’re both incompetent and do not know they’re incompetent on on the topic. In other words. They don’t know what they don’t know. When we first stepped into business, you know, we had no clue about what it was going to take. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. I see this one business, businesses get opened by people who have a tremendous passion for what they do. And they might have a great skill at the execution of something. However, they don’t know what they don’t know about running a business. I always say this this is the peak of your ignorance. When we first stepped into business, this was the peak of my in my ignorance. In other words, there were things I didn’t know but there were things I didn’t know that, I needed to know. So therefore, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. That’s why there’s so many businesses that fail early because people step into a business not knowing what they need to know. Not being aware of it, so they crash and burn. You know, I’ve always said if you’re deciding to go into a certain business, pay somebody who’s in that business. Sit down with them and just say, you don’t have to teach me this but what do I need to know? What are the traps? What are the pitfalls? You know, and so whether it’s opening up a business, starting a new career, there are strategies. There are skills, there are practices, okay, that we all need to know. And so when we’re looking at this if you’re entering into and this I see in sales you I see people that are great in interviewing and I see people that they decide they look at a distance and they look at a lifestyle of somebody in sales. They look out a lifestyle of somebody in business and they go wow.

I want to live like that. Wow. I like the flexibility. It appears that salesperson has and so they step into that arena. And they don’t know. So the first stage of learning is unconscious incompetence.

Now the second stage of learning. And this is where it all hits the fan. Okay. This is where it’s called conscious incompetence. At conscious incompetence. You know, we begin we become aware of our inabilities. We find out the things we don’t know. Okay, this can be motivating. This can be scary. This is where you say, Okay now I know the things I need to learn to have compentence, have mastery to be successful. However, the learner may go through some frustration at this stage. This is hard. This is the hard stage. Because they’re trying to achieve a skill, level of knowledge that they don’t have. You know, sometimes we are unaware of our inadequacies. So this is where I called, I called this the river of pain and truth. Because at this point we have to make a conscious decision. Am I going to take on this challenge? Am I going to invest time? Am I getting invest money? Am I going to make sacrifices? Because this is where the sacrifice comes, because this is where I’m going to have to sit at the feet of the giants who know what I need to know. This is where I’m going to have to write a check to somebody who’s going, I mean we’ve really worked on taxes this weekend and I’m looking at all the money we’ve invested in learning these new skills to launch sell more virtually.com. And it wasn’t easy. It was intense. It was an investment. Tt took time and took money. Remember in the book Think and Grow Rich in the second chapter. It starts out with how much money do I want to make and what do I have to give up?

And the Is where we are at this point. That’s why at this point there’s so many people that will pivot and go back to what they were doing. They’ll pivot and decide maybe I can do it without the knowledge. But this is where they decide, this is where we decide am I going to take this on? Am I going to do what it takes now?

Let’s go to stage 3. Now for the people who cross the river of pain and truth, for the people who decided to embrace what they didn’t know. Now they know what they don’t know. Now they investing in training and coaching on whatever. They give up time. They give up some sleep, you know, they do what it takes. They get and if they persist, they get to conscious competence. And wow. What a great feeling that is. That’s when this person, this student, achieves conscious competence. They’re able to do the task nn their own without coaching. Now they still have a Lifeline to a coach. They still go back for that feedback. We always need feedback.

However, they at this point they need to focus on that very hard task and they will have minimum mistakes. They won’t have the mistakes they were having because they’re better at it. They’re getting competent. Their abilities are not yet habitual, but they’re built into a memory. In other words. They know how to do it. It’s not automatic pilot, you know.

They refresh. We have people that from time to time will refresh. We have people that do ongoing coaching with me. They have mastered their skills. They have got to the point where they can execute, but they do have that connection so they can correct quickly. You know, when you’re practicing like this and you have the abilities and skills, now the 10,000 hours of practice kick in. Now Malcolm Gladwell is right. Now when you’re doing it, right and you do it for 10,000 times, you’re getting ready to step into state four.

And stage four is the unconscious competence. By the time someone reaches unconscious competence, they’re able to carry out their tasks without much mental effort. They have enough experience with it that it’s second nature. We you know, we at This point we say they have reached Mastery.

Now listen. This is the point we say they are Masters. You know, when people are unconsciously competent, we often refer them. They’re entering into a flow stage. You know, this is where there’s continuous, or there was a book written many years ago The Zone. This is when they’re in the zone when you’re in the zone you have tremendous you can do things seamlessly. You don’t have to think about it, but you can do it. You know, here is where I coached these people not to fall into a trap. At this point we do not want to assume, we want to rely on what we’ve learned. Nope, but don’t utilize Intuition or preconceived notion. You’ve learned certain skills, continue to execute them.

Now, there is a fifth stage. Some people talk about this, some don’t. I like to. At this stage, you know, you’ve gotten so good at this, you have mastered it. People view you as competent and now you can dissect it and train and teach others. This is where you are looked at as the master trainer. You know, this stage requires returning to consciousness. You want to go back to consciousness to make sure over and over again, those skills stay fresh. You you, never want to teach what you did five years ago without refreshing. You want to be in the now. You know that the biggest thing about this is believe great trainers, speakers, coaches, consultants are at this stage. I think if you start teaching at the Consciously incompetent stage before you have mastery, I think you’re doing your clients an injustice. I think when you become consciously competent, you have the ability to sow into people, however, you may not have have the abilities yet to dissect it into learnable skills. So when you look at where you are on this, you know when if you’re taking on something new.

You know don’t be afraid to go through these these four five stages. You may never want to do never number five. You know, that’s why when Joe and Dawn opened up Pici and Pici, what we said was, we will never speak or coach or train on anything we don’t do and have mastery over. Hear what I just said, We’re not going to teach, coach, train, unless we’re competent that we can execute. So hopefully this is giving you kind of a road map. So now going back to Ed,,I once asked too many years later. Hey Ed, why did you kind of go with us and not your brother and your friend? He said you were compentent, you had mastery over the things I knew we needed to do to grow this business.

When your clients are getting ready to hire you, do they view you as competent? But here’s something else. When you’re ready to hire someone else, are you evaluating their competence? Do they have Mastery? So here’s a couple things I want you to do. First of all, we’d like you to visit our new website not, we didn’t get rid of Pici and Pici, is alive and well and cranking. But we opened up this is virtual portal called, SellMoreVirtually.com, visit that. There is so much content. We just posted two e-courses. One on LinkedIn, It’s like 12 module training. Another one on how to conduct successful virtual meetings. That’s about 10 or 11 modules. 15-minute modules. These are e-course, but there’s tremendous information.

Also, You can get to our free walk podcast go in there, or you can also take out your phone type in sales edged and text it to 55678. It’ll take you to a link to get to a splash page. There’s five free videos. There’s tremendous downloads. There’s so much information and also links to the podcast. If the sales edged podcast continues to be an asset to you and your growth, can you like it? Can you share? Can you write a positive comment on it? This has been Joe Pici of The Sales Edge and let’s gain mastery and be confident.

Voice over:

Thanks for listening. New episodes will air each Tuesday and Thursday. The Sales Edge is sponsored by Pici and Pici Incorporated. A firm which provides, training, consulting, and keynote presentations. Empowering corporations and individuals to attract and retain quality clients for higher revenues and growth. Make more money in sales. Speak with Joe in person at 407-9472590. Or visit www.piciandpici.com