Getting Rid Of Head Trash with Noah St. John and Trust-Based Selling with Ari Galper

I’m so glad you joined us because we have Noah St. John and Ari Galper here. Noah is the author of fourteen books including Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money. Ari is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling and the creator of Unlock The Game. This is going to be a fascinating show.

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Getting Rid Of Head Trash with Noah St. John

I am here with Noah St. John who is known as the Power Habits Mentor and is famous for helping entrepreneurs get rid of their head trash and make more money. He’s the only author in history to have his works published by Hay House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Mindvalley, Nightingale-Conant and the Chicken Soup For The Soul publisher. He has written fourteen books including The Book of Afformations and Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money. It’s exciting to have you here.

Thanks. Good to be here.

I’m interested in your work because you touch on a lot of things. I used to be in lending and real estate. I did a lot with money-related jobs. I have an appreciation for how confusing it is and how passionate it is for people when you’re dealing with their money. I am curious about your new book. First of all, what is head trash? I like the title.

I actually started my company which is called SuccessClinic.com in my college dorm room in 1997 with $800 and a book on how to do HTML. I’ve been doing this for more than twenty years and there are very few people who have been coaching and teaching people about money as long as I have. What’s amazing is it all started very much by accident because I grew up poor in a rich neighborhood and I hated that experience of being poor. Especially when right down the street I saw that there were people that were very wealthy. “The secret to success is hard work.” We hear that a million times. The problem is my parents worked hard and they were never successful. I was like, “That’s not the answer.” I went on a very long journey to try to find the answers. I finally figured it out in 1997 and I had these epiphanies that led to the creation of fourteen books that we’ve been able to help our clients add more than $2 billion in added revenues. Meaning that we help people that multiple six, seven and even eight figures to their business.

A big reason for that is this whole concept of head trash. What is head trash? Head trash is that moist in your head that says, “I can’t do it because,” then you just fill in the blank. “No, I can’t do it because I’m too old. I can’t do it because I don’t have the time. I can’t do it because I don’t have the money. I can’t do it because I don’t live in the right city, because I’m married, because I’m not married, because I’m a woman, because I have kids.” We can come up with any excuse, but the real problem with your head trash is that you always make yourself right. For example if you tell yourself, “Noah, I can’t do it because I don’t have the time,” you’re going to make yourself right. Meanwhile, I can show you that you’re wasting hours every single day doing things that aren’t moving you towards your goals. I’m not suggesting that we should be working 24/7 and never see our families. Who would want that? That’s not a lifestyle that I’m talking about at all.

In fact, what I teach is called the freedom lifestyle. We have live events called Freedom Lifestyle Experience because that’s the whole point. It’s not about working all the time and never having a life. It’s about having that work-life balance. One of my clients heard me speak at a conference, I speak at real estate conferences, network marketing conferences, entrepreneurial conferences around the country around the world. He said that before he took my coaching, he was wasting hours every single day. What used to take an hour it takes him fifteen minutes. What I often say to people is imagine getting all that time back in your day. What would you do with all that extra time? That’s one simple example of how head trash can affect you.

That is interesting because I always say people plan the plan and then they don’t do it. I’m curious what you think are some of the biggest time wasters that held people back?

We live in a world of infinite distractions. There’s an amazing statistic that says if you took all of the information that was uploaded onto the internet in one day and put it into CD-ROMs, that pile would reach from the Earth to Mars. It’s staggering. It literally is infinite. We live in a world of infinite distraction. To give you a quick example, I’ve written fourteen books. I have the interesting distinction of having written two books in 90 days because I happened to sign contracts with Hay House and Nightingale-Conant, two of my dream publishers, in the same 60-day period. I was so excited I forgot to read the fine print and they’re both books I’m doing in 90 days. I went, “What do I do?” I said to my wife, “I’m not going to see you for about a few weeks. I’ve got to write these two books because I signed two contracts.”

I’m not recommending this, so you know. It happened. I shut off all distractions. I’ve got to get these books done. I can’t call them and say, “I’m sorry I was on Facebook. I was checking Instagram, I couldn’t get my book done.” It’s the whole thing of getting the term paper done the night before, but that’s not quite it. The point is you’ve got to eliminate distractions. It seems like to me with the coaching clients that I get to work with and speaking at my events, the point is that being able to focus on something and finish is like a superpower in this world of infinite distractions.

I’m impressed that you had two completely different book ideas. 

It was a long time coming. It was a dream come true. This happened all at once.

That’s an amazing feat. You mentioned, “I can’t do it because,” and ties into what I found. For my book, I wrote about curiosity. I’ve found there are four things that hold people back from being curious: fear, assumptions, technology and environment. A lot of that is assumptions that, “I can’t do it because,” falls into. You think something’s boring, you make assumptions about things that hold you back. Don’t you think that’s a big problem with people? How do you recognize that?

That goes to my whole teaching or methodology of called afformations. I have written this book called The Book of Afformations. Everybody knows what an affirmation is. Affirmation is what they’ve been teaching us for decades in traditional success literature. It’s a statement of something you want to be true. When I get my live events or when I do keynote speeches, I like to have everybody stand up and I say, “We’re going to do that thing that they’ve been teaching us for decades. Everybody says, ‘I am rich.’” They go, “I am rich.” What happens next is everybody starts laughing. I go, “What are you laughing at?” They go, “I’m not rich.” I said, “You just said you were.” They go, “Yes, but I don’t believe it.” That’s the problem with this statement. It’s not that there is anything wrong with the statement, the problem is we don’t believe the statement.

What I invented in 1997 was this technology that I called afformation. An afformation is an empowering question that immediately changes your subconscious thought patterns. The classic example of an affirmation or statement is, “I am rich,” which your brain says, “Yeah, right.” In fact, I call it in my book the, “Yeah, right,” response because that’s what your brain says. What I invented is this process called afformations. Instead of saying a statement, you ask a question, “Why am I so rich? Why am I so happy? Why am I good enough? Why am I so confident? Why can I get everything done that I need to do?” When you ask the question, you form it in your brain and that’s why I call it afformations. The word affirmation comes from the Latin word affirmare, which means to make firm.

The word afformation, I invented and trademarked. It’s perfectly legitimate to invent a new word when you have a new way of looking at the universe or new technology. We often needed a world like Facebook, Google, YouTube, these are all new technologies because we use them every day, we need new words. The word afformation comes from the Latin word formare, which means to form or give shape to. What I often ask my audiences and my coaching students is, “What if you’re making something firm, but it’s in the wrong form? That means you form the life you didn’t want.” For example, most people are going around unconsciously asking very disempowering questions like, “Why am I so stupid? Why can’t I do anything right? How come I don’t have any time? How come I don’t have my business growing fast enough? Why is there more month left at the end of the money?” When you ask lousy questions, what do you get? Lousy answers. That creates a lousy life.

What I invented or created is what we now call The Power Habits of Unconsciously Successful People. What that means is that what I discovered after twenty-plus years of study and research, working with people around the world is that highly successful people, what I call the naturals of success, are actually doing things unconsciously. They’re doing things that they can’t teach you. All of us do things unconsciously like tie our shoes, drive a car, get dressed in the morning, unconsciously competent. The naturals of success are allowing themselves to succeed unconsciously. I was the first person to write about that in my first book which is called Permission to Succeed. That’s why that book was called that because what I realized twenty years ago is that most people don’t need more how-tos of success. What they actually need is to learn how to allow themselves to succeed. It’s what I call how to stop driving down the road of life with one foot on the brake. That’s one of the big reasons we’ve helped our clients make over $2 billion in sales. We literally showed people how they get the foot off the brake, how to stop stopping themselves from the level of success that they’re capable of.

You talk about three big mistakes. Why don’t you discuss those because they’re in your book, Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money: How to Avoid the 3 Massive Money Mistakes Even Smart People Make?

The book we’re talking about is my new book called Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money. We want to share how your listeners can get this book for free at our website. The first big mistake is simply that you’re not getting rid of your head trash about money. Money is a very emotional topic. It’s very emotional, but it’s also a taboo topic. You don’t give that to a person say, “Bob, how much money did you make last year?” You get a punch in the face. One of the last taboo subjects is to talk about money. The point is we keep it inside. There’s no one to talk about. One of the things that we like to do is to begin the conversation about money. Then you see people are dying to talk about it because it is a hugely important issue. You can start to write or think about or I suggest that you write down three to five negative beliefs you have about money. What is your head trash? What do you believe about money like?

One of my clients, when we’re doing this exercise and I said, “What are your negative beliefs about money?” She goes, “I’m a bad money manager.” I said, “How’s that show up in your life?” She says, “The money comes in, it goes right out.” I’m like, “You made yourself right.” Sometimes we don’t want to be right. This is one example. That’s the first big mistake is not getting out of your head trash about money. The second big mistake and I see so many smart people and hardworking entrepreneurs making this is not having a mentor, trying to do everything yourself. What we teach at SuccessClinic.com is that a mentor is three things. This is what you should look for when working with a mentor. Whether you hire me, whether you work with my company or somebody else, we recommend that you look for three things. Number one, a mentor should be someone who is where you want to be. For example, if you want to publish a book, you should work with someone who’s published books. If you want to have online courses, have someone who’s done online courses. I have online courses that I’ve created three, five, ten years ago and they’re still bringing in money every single day.

The only problem is that’s the easy part because you can’t turn on Facebook anymore without seeing some dude saying, “Look at all my cool stuff. Look at all this money I made.” Yes, dude, you’re awesome. The point is we’ve got to go to the second element which is have you helped anybody else? The point is have you helped anyone else other than yourself? If you look at most of these so-called mentors out there are gurus, they talk about how much money they make. I wrote an article in The Huffington Post years ago, Do You Care About My Money Or Yours? I got so fed up with all of these fake gurus out there saying, “Look at all this money I made.” Have you helped anyone else? That’s why we have a website called WorkingWithNoah.com, which we call our Wall of Fame. The Wall of Fame has over 100 stories of my clients. I’d rather brag about my students, my clients rather than myself. I’m weird that way. My point is to look for someone who’s helped other people because otherwise you got a personality-driven success rather than system-driven success. If it’s system-driven, then anybody can do it. If it’s personality, then if you don’t have that personality, you’re probably out of luck.

Then the third element you need to look for in a mentor, what we suggest is someone is actually going to help you. I’ve been doing this for over twenty years. What we say at Success Clinic is we are a customer service company that does business and personal growth. We’re not a business and personal growth company that has customer service. When we make that switch, everybody in our organization buys into that because we are here because of the success of our clients. That’s why we say you should look for stories of people who succeeded. That’s why I’d rather brag about my students than myself. Those are the things that we suggest looking for in a mentor. That’s the second big mistake is not having the right mentor.

Then the third big mistake that we see, and this is so common, is overwhelming yourself with information without giving yourself permission to succeed. It’s literally what I call you’re drowning in shelf-help. A lot of people have a lot of shelf-help. We had one student, her name is Susan. She had spent $60,000 on all these different gurus. She was about to declare bankruptcy. She is about to lose her home and her marriage. Her husband said, “I can’t take it anymore. You’re buying all this stuff to make us get better and we’re getting worse. We’re going in the wrong direction.” She was literally at the end of her rope. She decided to come to one of my Freedom Lifestyle Event Experience. She hired me as a coach. Within less than six months, she went from $60,000 in debt to a six-figure income. She literally landed what she calls her dream job following my system. In fact, she also wrote a book, she published her book and asked me to write the foreword for her because of how she says I changed her life.

The point is she did the work, I didn’t do the work. It was the methodologies, going back to a system-driven success versus personality. I always say, “I’m boring. I’m the guy who likes to read books. I’m the nerdiest nerd in this industry because I like to see how things work, break them down, then make them into a system.” We’ve had teenagers come to my events and then go home and start their own businesses. That’s the point, you want to look for systems rather than following these big personalities. At least that’s what we believe.

Is it all about developing habits to get into these systems? How important are habits with all this?

They are enormously important. That’s one of the things we talked about. We call it the hidden connection between your habits and your money. What we teach at Success Clinic is what we call the inner game and outer game. Inner game is everything that happens between your ears that you can’t see directly, but you see the effects of it everywhere. When I’m doing my keynote speeches, when I’m speaking at my events I often say to my audiences, “I want you to tell me where in your life your beliefs don’t affect you.” Then they go, “Nowhere.” Exactly. They affect your relationships, your health, your weight, your social life, your family life, your marriage, your money and your business. There literally isn’t anywhere. That’s why when you look at the multiple six and seven and eight figures that we’ve helped our clients add over the last few years, 80% to 85% of that is inner game. It’s not about doing all these marketing strategies, not that that’s not important. That’s outer game. The outer game is everything you can see directly. That’s the habits, the lifestyle, the system strategies, the blocking and tackling that we as business people entrepreneurs have to do every single day. Your sales funnels, your web pages, your customer service. The only problem is so many people spend so much time focusing on the outer game and they completely ignore their inner game.

A quick example of that, I was speaking at a conference for about a thousand business owners and a guy comes up to me. I was walking off the stage and he says, “Noah, I want you to be my coach. You’re the coach I’ve been looking for. I’m totally stuck. I’m only making $4 million a year.” I go, “That’s funny, a lot of people like to be ‘stuck’ at $4 million a year.” He goes, “No, you don’t understand. I own a software company and we get $4 million in revenues fast then we’ve been plateaued at $4 million for the last four years. I hired everybody. I spent all this money. I hired all the gurus, but we’re still stuck. As soon as I heard you speak about inner game and outer game and afformations, flipping the break and head trash, everything you said, I knew you’re the coach that I’ve been looking for.” Long story short, I did end up coaching him for about a year and that year, his company went from being stuck at $4 million to the previous four years to over $16 million in sales in one year. You might say that’s amazing and it is amazing. The point is though what’s even more amazing is that we didn’t even talk about outer games. We didn’t talk much about marketing and sales, customer service but it was 90% inner game. It was getting rid of his head trash, following the system to help him get his foot off the brake. That’s another example of how inner game can affect you.

What kind of head trash in that situation did he have?

A lot of people have a belief, for example going back to that head trash that I was talking about earlier, that you can’t be a good person and rich at the same time. You can’t be spiritual and wealthy. Where’s that belief come from? It comes from everywhere. We’re taught, “It’s easier for a camel to get through the eye of the needle than a rich man to enter heaven.” There are lots of quotes like that out there. There are a lot of spiritual good people out there that believe that and have been taught that, that you can’t be spiritual and wealthy at the same time. Money starts to come in and they go, “I don’t want to be a bad person. Let’s make sure that money goes away.” No one is doing this consciously. No one wakes up in the morning and says, “This looks like a beautiful day. I’ll sabotage my success today.” That would be crazy.

Mackey’s Conscious Capitalism did open up a lot of dialogue for that. It’s something so important to a lot of people to discuss that because they don’t know where to draw the line anymore. When you talk about this head trash, I have so many people come on the show and we talk about the importance of communication. There’s that self-awareness and self-communication. I wrote my dissertation on emotional intelligence and self-awareness is all part of that. Do you do emotional intelligence training with them? Is that part of it or you don’t call it that?

I don’t personally call it that because I haven’t had training in that per se. For example with Adam, that CEO went from $4 million to $16 million in a year. A big part of it was getting in touch with his head trash. That belief that says, “I can’t be spiritual and rich at the same time,” whatever it might be that might be causing the listener to be driving down the road of life with one foot on the brake. Another big one is, “I can’t be more successful than my parents.” Particularly my father, that happens for us men a lot. The men say, “I have to hold myself back because my father wasn’t that successful. I don’t want to overshadow my father.” This goes back to Oedipus. This has been written about for centuries. Honestly, this is why we’ve seen grown men in tears in my events because this is emotional stuff that frankly they have never heard about. They haven’t had the language to talk about it. That’s a very powerful thing to see people finally getting that language and then being able to get their foot off the brake and have amazing results.

What size of events do you hold? Are these intimate little things or are they bigger events?

They’re anywhere between 100 to 300 people, so they are not huge, huge events. We keep it more like a workshop because we don’t want people to leave confused. We want to un-confuse people that’s why we call it the Freedom Lifestyle Experience. That’s the name of the three-day transformational event. Day one is Inner Game Mastery. I teach you how to get rid of your head trash about money. Day two is Outer Game Mastery so I teach you how to have that 24/7 automated sales machine. Day three is Freedom Lifestyle Mastery. You put it all together and have that freedom lifestyle. Being such a nerd, I created the event that I wish someone would have created for me that I never got. I ended up spending $542,000 on great self-promoters that couldn’t teach the way out of a paper bag. That was very aggravating. In all my coaching, all my teaching, the live events, I do that. I do it because I wish that someone had done it for me and then because I love to see our success stories for our clients.

There are a lot of masterminds being held. It’s interesting the popularity hasn’t always been like this or even it might be missing. It seems like there’s extra amount these days. How do you stand out from the crowd? You’re saying you’re different, but how do we know when we’re looking for something?

That’s a logical question. First of all, if you go to our website for the event, which is FreedomLifeX.com, you’ll see literally over a dozen videos of my clients saying directly to you the viewer, “This is why Noah is different. This is why this event is different.” This is one of my favorite stories. His name was Bill. He came to my event and he said this in front of 100 people, “I came to this event, Noah, to expose you as another charlatan, another fraud.” He said that in front of everybody. He said, “I have to eat the crow because I spent three days with you and I have been studying personal growth for the last 40 years. I have a PhD in Psychology. You’ve taught me more in the last three days than I learned in the previous 40 years. I have done a million-dollar deal at this event. I closed a million-dollar deal.” As soon as he left the event, he’s doing multi-billion-dollar deals. It’s absolutely incredible. You can’t get any more skeptical than, “I came here to expose you as a charlatan.” He’s one of my biggest fans. I look for stories. I want people to realize whatever you’re going to do, whoever you’re going to go learn from, just make sure it’s not about their personality. Make sure there’s some system there because the system means that it can be replicated. It’s not personality-driven, it’s system-driven. That’s what we want to emphasize for folks.

If people want to go to any of your events you mentioned a couple of sites, anything you want to share in terms of other links?

The new book is called Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money. For the audience, you can go to SendMeABookNoah.com and I will send you a book. We cover the cost of the book for the first thousand people. Then we just ask you to cover the shipping. If you’d like to book me to speak for your audience, go to BookNoah.com. You can book me to speak at your event. Our main website is simply my name, NoahStJohn.com.

This has been so interesting. Thank you so much for being on the show. You’re so much fun.

Trust-Based Selling with Ari Galper

I am here with Ari Galper who is the world’s number one authority on trust-based selling and the creator of Unlock the Game, a new sales mindset and results-oriented approach that has revolutionized the world of selling. This has been 45,000 subscribers. I’m sure it’s growing quite a bit because it was growing at over a thousand a month at that time with 38 different countries, including business owners, entrepreneurs and sales professionals getting involved in this. This is going to be interesting. Welcome, Ari.

Thank you. I appreciate you having me here.

Perry Marshall was on my show and he suggested you for a guest. He said what you’re doing is fascinating. I love this stuff because I’ve been in sales for many decades. I came from the generation where they threw the phonebook at you and told you to dial for dollars. You’re a busy man. You shared the stage with Joan Rivers, Mark Victor Hansen and the list goes on and on. For people who don’t know what Unlock the Game is, can you give us a little background of how you got to this level and what that means to unlock the game?

It might help to start with a story behind the concept of trust-based selling and the whole Unlock the Game mindset approach. About fifteen years ago, I was a sales manager for a software company and I managed about eighteen people. We launched the first online website tracking tools to track website behavior. It was all about moving the data. You probably heard that before. It was a fast-growing business, we charge a lot of money back then. I was the target of the big accounts the big lead came to the lead funnel. This one account kept calling us for a demo. I got to lead myself. They were interested in our product and they finally agreed to a conference call.

This company is such a large opportunity that if I close one sale, it will double sales revenue in one year. That’s how big the opportunity was. The team was excited. I was excited and my contact agreed to a conference call and webinars or for us do a demo. The day finally came. It was 4:00 in the afternoon on a Friday. I go to my conference room with my CEO, a closed door behind us and there’s a long conference table in front of us there. In the middle of the table is the speakerphone. I hit the dial tone, power on and dial tone. I dial the number of my contact. He says, “Hello,” and then he says to me, “Ari, let us tell you who’s in line with me here.” The next thing I hear is, “My name is John I’m CEO.” “I’m Julia. I’m Head of Marketing.” “My name is Mike, I’m Head of IT.” Everybody on this call was basically a decision-maker. This is a call we all dream of getting, to get them in one room at one time. It’s the ultimate sales opportunity. I was pretty excited. I then described who I was and introduced our product. I began to give a live demo over the web showing them what it’s like to see their website behavior in real time, all the stats. I’m showing this to them answering questions.

I started to hear this noise in the phone call like, “This is great. This is fantastic.” I could hear the positive feedback. They asked me all the questions like, “How does it work? How do we install it? How do we get started?” I was competent. I was doing the sales for answering the questions and build rapport with them. There was so much chemistry on this phone call. It was like a love fest on the phone. It was the ultimate sales call. I was like, “This is so good. There’s no resistance.” I got the high-five from my boss on my back from behind me. He’s in the corner of the room on his cell phone ordering his new car for the year from the bonus of making this deal. That’s how good it was. He’s pretty excited. An hour goes by, I’m answering the questions professionally. The call comes to a close. My guys told me, “Ari, this is great. This is fantastic, just what we need. Give us a couple of weeks. Follow up with us to move this thing forward.” What a perfect next step for the process.

I was so excited. I said, “Thank you so much. I appreciate your time.” I said my goodbyes. I took my arm and I reached for the phone in the middle of the conference table to hit the off button. By reaching the off button, by complete accident, by divine intervention I say, my thumb hit the mute button instead of the off button. They were right next to each other. I hit the mute button and a small click happened and they thought I hung up the phone. In that split second, a voice inside of me said, “Ari, go to the dark side. Be a fly on the wall. Listen in. You’ve got nothing to lose.” For whatever reason, I put my thumb back for a couple of seconds and they started talking amongst themselves thinking I had left the phone call. This is what they said verbatim, “We’re not going to go with him. Keep using him for more information and make sure we stop someplace else cheaper.”

That’s got to kill you at that time. I’m cynical from being in sales for so long that I knew you were going to say something horrific. Sales to me is like a slot machine. You pull the lever and you see those first to come up, and that third bar you think it’s going to almost hit. Something like this happens and it kills you. How did you handle that?

First of all, I was at the state of shock. I was just, “What? After all that?” I look at the wall and I said to myself, “What did I do wrong?” I did everything I was supposed to do in selling. The first big epiphany hit me and that was as you can tell me if you got this or not. What I realized is somewhere along the way it has become socially acceptable not to tell the truth to people who sell. It’s okay to say things like, “Sounds good. Send me information. I’m definitely interested,” without having any intention of buying.

They don’t look at you as a regular person. They completely distanced themselves and they feel like they can say whatever it takes to get rid of you or whatever it takes.

I was in a state of shock. Then I asked myself why they were afraid to tell me the truth? I realized that moment that what’s happening is there’s pressure underneath every sales conversation you ever had and you can feel it and they can feel it. I realize that can remove the pressure from the sales process, but I’ll be the first one ever to have enough trust being built in that process to allow the customer or prospect to feel comfortable telling me the truth. That became our entire new mindset framework called the Unlock the Game Mindset. We unlock the crazy game of chasing people and we actually get to the truth. That became our mindset. Our whole philosophy is based upon the notion that your idea is not at first to focus on the end-goal the sale, your goal is to remove the pressure to get to the truth of where you stand so you stop chasing what I call ghosts. People who say, “Yes, sounds good.” You’re playing the chasing game your entire life and you get stuck in that terrible cycle. That’s what finally cracked open our entire project, which is called Unlock the Game which is we’re about fifteen years in changing people’s lives, because it changes the whole energy and framework of the sales process to get to the truth. That’s the whole story behind on that concept.

It’s fascinating to me because sales has changed a lot since I’ve been in it. You’re always in sales and this is sales, what I do currently in some respects but when you’re actually a “salesperson.” They have teams. They have multi-generations, they have so many different ways of selling. Is it embraced equally by all the different generations? Is it good for teams? I’d like to know a little bit more about what it is that you’re helping them do?

Let’s go through some of the typical sales myths that most people think about. Let me clean the hard drive out for people’s minds and let’s start fresh here. Let me address some of the typical myths that most people view and think about sales. The first one is a classic one, which is sales is a numbers game. You probably heard that before. That came probably almost all of the managers that said to you, “Get out there because the more contacts you make, the more chances you’ll make more sales at the end of that game.” We realize in this economy, the selling is no longer a numbers game anymore. It’s about how deep you go on each conversation. It’s not how many contacts you make, it’s about how good you are at trust building, not how good you are building contacts. That is so contrarian to the old mindset of the numbers game. That’s number one myth.

Number two myth is the notion of the sale is lost at the end of the process. You probably had in your past situations where you work hard for an opportunity, great chemistry. In the end, it falls through. When that happens you say to yourself, “What did I do wrong? I did everything right. I have a good product.” We realized this economy, the sales is not lost any more at the end of the process, it’s lost at the beginning of the process. I’ll prove it to you in a funny way. If someone calls your office tomorrow morning and the phone rings, you pick it up and you hear, “Hi, my name is. I am a, we are a, we do.” What goes through your mind about three seconds?

Can I hang up on this person? It’s a salesperson.

It’s over at hello. I’ll make the case, the most business owners and people in selling and sales are losing their opportunities, not at the end of the process. They are losing it at the beginning of the process. I’m not suggesting cold-calling. I’m suggesting the entire engagement process. Presale is where it was lost from the beginning because the trust was never built. The other one is a big one. It’s the idea around rejection, that rejection is part of the sales game. That whole notion that it came from the same guy who invented the idea of selling is a numbers game. The manager said to you, “You can’t get out there take a no. If you’re not tough enough for rejection, you’re not made for success.”

In our research, we discovered that rejection is triggered by certain things you say and do that because the other person put their guard up and played a game. We invented our own what we call trust-based language. That essentially removes the triggers. You never, ever again have to worry about being rejected ever again. Once you master this, it’s so cathartic because you have no fear ever again of approaching people because you know how to defuse the pressure. That’s why I want us to set the tone here to deal with this because once you can clear out these old ways of thinking, I can introduce some new principles and some new ideas.

If they can’t call and say hello, how do you start? 

We have our own language that we developed our own proprietary what we call trust-based language that you use to replace the traditional, “Hi, my name is. I’m with.” The number one principle, our core principle is the idea of always defusing pressure. Always defusing pressure in the conversation to get to the truth. Let me give you an example. Let’s say you’re having your first call with someone on the phone, they contact you or you call them and you can have the good opportunity. Could be a good faith you preach about it and the call comes to an end. Usually at the end of the initial call like that, it’s positive. What do we normally say at the end call like that? What’s a typical thing we say towards the end of a call, its momentum and we feel good about it what we normally say usually in sales?

What’s the next step?

We immediately try and move things forward. You move them forward. What do you lose in them at that moment if you try to do that?

You lose their trust if you try to move them forward.

You break trust. Let’s do the same scenario with our philosophy, our approach and our language. Same scenario call is going, good chemistry, great opportunity. Rather than saying, “Let’s go forward. Let’s have a cup of coffee. Let’s move this thing forward.” What we say instead is, “Where do you think we should go from here?” What do you suppose is changing in the conversation with transforming by me saying to them, “Where you think we should go from here?”

You left it open-ended and you put it in their court. You’re making them tell you what they want to do.

How are they perceiving you by asking, “Where do you think we should go from here?”

You’re not pressuring them.

You’re seen as somebody who’s opening and hearing the truth, what they want to say. What’s fascinating about this is they’re usually in a state of shock. They can’t believe somebody has asked them where do they want to go, not take them down a path. What I’m saying is it puts the whole moment into a trust space moment because when you say, “Where do you think we should go from here?” What happens is they start telling you the truth. They started saying things like, “I’ve got one more question.” They start telling you what you want, the truth of where you stand. That changes everything. Then what happens is they’re the ones who say to you, “How about we move things forward?” You have to take the first step to do it. That’s about being in the moment with people at a human level, not trying to pull them down a path to make your sale.

You’ve got to do different things because a lot of this stuff isn’t working that we thought used to work. People have figured out the old tricks and you can’t do tricks anymore. 

It is about being in the present moment of truth. Not a game, not a technique. You’re open to hearing the truth. The thing about this trust-based language and with the words that we created are magical because they inspired the other person. They feel comfortable opening up to you. One of the triggers of rejection is language. The words that we use. The other one is the delivery. What did you notice when I said, “Where do you think we should go from here?”

You’re very calm and you’re not making me feel pressured. Your delivery is not the typical, “Do you have a pen? Let’s sign you up right now.”

There is no momentum. I’m centered. I’m calm. I’m being able to connect with them. The whole idea here is to be centered, slows things down and pause. The moment you create momentum is the moment the wall goes up and then the pressure begins. I’m not suggesting that you change your personality. All I’m suggesting is be aware of being in the moment and not create momentum too early on

You say you’ve got to get to the truth and not the sale to remove rejection.

It’s to remove the pressure on the process. The next principle is the idea of getting to the truth. It sounds a bit abstract. Here’s an example. A guy called me, my gatekeepers got to me, “Mr. Galper, my name is Mike Johnson. I’m with XYZ company,” they’re a big corporation, “and we’re looking to bring in a sales leader, to change our whole philosophy and our whole team’s approach to the market. We’re looking at you and two other people. We’re on phase one collecting information. We’d like to know first of all why we should go with you? Why you’re the best? Give me your best sales pitch.” He is putting pressure on me. He’s playing the game. We don’t operate with that level. We don’t play that game. I took a deep breath. I stayed calm and centered. I lowered my voice and I said to him, “That’s interesting because over here our company, we have a very similar process to you. We ask some questions, gather information to see if we’re a good fit.” We have it to go from there. I said to him, “Would you be open to that?”

Did you talk very slowly like that when you actually said it?

I slow down the momentum, slow down the pressure. Then the next thing I know there is dead silence on the phone. He said nothing to me. Then he takes a deep breath and he breathes out on the phone. I could hear breathing out. He lowered his voice and he said to me, “What questions do you have for me?” The next thing we have a nice conversation in that dialogue I discovered one, he has no budget. Two, he’s not the decision-maker and three, he hears what I do. I set him off to a website for some video and hung up the phone. What did that process do that saved me months of?

Stress, rejection and thinking you made the sale that you haven’t and wasting your time.

It’s playing the chasing game. In fact, there’s this drug in our bodies and the drug is called hopeum. It’s when you hope you got a deal and it’s never there. Most of the business owners, most salespeople live in hopeum. They keep hoping the sale will close and it turns out it was lost at hello.

I love that you asked the questions because I’m a curiosity expert. To me, all of that ties into my research. You have to ask questions because half the time you’re wasting your time. You might not even be talking to the right guy.

Also, to build that trust for them to tell the answers you want to hear because the questions alone won’t do it. They have to feel that you’re okay with the truth. Let me give you a quick tip for your audience, which you’ll find helpful. I’m going to ask your audience to take an oath, a verbal oath to never again after this call post-Ari, ever to use this phrase. It’s two words. I’m going to ask you all to never ever again use the phrase follow up, ever again.

Why?

What’s the only industry in the world that use the word follow up? Salespeople. The last thing you want to do is be associated with these negative salesperson stereotype. I’m sure the last few weeks some on this call probably called and said, “Hi, I’m giving a call, a follow-up.” That means to chase the sale or write in the email say, “Hi. I’d like to follow up on a proposal.” That’s all chasing.

Instead of pitching somebody, what do we do?

Instead of the word follow up, you use instead, “I’m giving you a call to see if you have any feedback on our previous conversation, on this proposal, on our previous meeting.” You go backwards and not forwards. When you say to someone, “Do you have any feedback on our last conversation?” What happens is they start telling you the truth because you’re not pursuing them for the end-goal anymore. It’s game-changing when you get the language right, the behavior of the customer changes altogether immediately in real-time. It’s awesome. You’re not creating forward momentum. The whole sales conditioning is all about chasing towards the end goal of the sale. That’s the problem. The mindset is the issue. What people have to do is be present at the moment and connect at a deep level and remove the momentum.

What do we do with that instead of the traditional pitch? You say we need to focus on them. What does it look like to be a problem solver or a trusted adviser?

That’s the final principle here. That’s the whole idea of how to shift away from pitching to be seen as a problem solver. Most people are conditioned. When you’re asked to explain what you do, your identity is attached to your solution. You’re going to say, “I’m going as an insurance agent. I provide consulting services.” It’s going right to your solution. We figured out that you have to first go to the problems you help people solve. We have a unique way of converting your pitch into what we call a problem statement. You initiate a dialogue with someone. They say, “What do you do?” What you say is not, “We offer software to help businesses grow.” That’s the solution. What you say is, “We help business owners to solve problems, their inability to get new traffic to their websites. I’m able to convert that traffic to customers. We solve those three problems.” There’s no discussion of your solution at all.

You’re still talking about benefits, but you’re doing it differently.

There are no benefits, no features, no pitching, no nothing. It’s only focusing in on the core problems that you help them solve. It’s shifting away from the comfort level of talking about you and your offering and stepping to their world and describing issues so deeply that they feel they resonate with you because you get them better than they get themselves.

I’m sure a lot of my audience are wanting to know how they can do this with Unlock the Game mindset to affect the way they sell their products and their whole process. If they want to do this and find out about what you do, how would they do that?

Just go to www.UnlockTheGame.com. There are a few things there. There’s a free test drive where they can drop their email in there and get some audios from me to listen to more of this concept. Also, there’s a book called Unlock the Sales Game. They can pick up there as well. If they want to get action quick, get some language and some traction, there’s also what we call Fast Start Pack. They’ll get some action going quickly with the language and some scenarios all at different speeds depending on the level of what you want to learn. UnlockTheGame.com contains what they need to get forward, but this requires very much a letting go of what you believe is right, all your years of selling to stop chasing people and shift to the connection. That is not easy for people who are so ingrained in the old way.

The old way hasn’t worked for a lot of people and a lot of people will be very much interested in what you do. I could see why you’ve been featured on so many the top shows, CNN Money, Sky News and everything else. Thank you, you did a nice job of explaining it. I hope everybody checks out your site. Thank you for being on the show. I’d like to thank Noah and Ari for being my guest. 

Important Links:

• Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money
• Chicken Soup For The Soul
• The Book of Afformations
• SuccessClinic.com
• Freedom Lifestyle Experience
• Hay House
• Nightingale-Conant
• The Power Habits of Unconsciously Successful People
• Permission to Succeed
• Do You Care About My Money Or Yours
• WorkingWithNoah.com
• Conscious Capitalism
• FreedomLifeX.com
• SendMeABookNoah.com
• BookNoah.com
• NoahStJohn.com
• Unlock The Game
• Perry Marshall – previous episode
• www.UnlockTheGame.com
• Unlock the Sales Game
• Fast Start Pack

About Noah St. John

Noah St. John is the author of 14 books including The Book of AFFORMATIONS® and Get Rid of Your Head Trash About Money. He is known as “The Power Habits Mentor” and is famous for helping entrepreneurs get rid of their head trash and make more money. Noah is the ONLY author in history to have works published by Hay House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Mindvalley, Nightingale-Conant, and the Chicken Soup for the Soul publisher.

About Ari Galper

Ari Galper is the World’s #1 Authority on Trust-Based Selling and creator of Unlock The Game®, a new sales mindset and results-oriented approach that has revolutionized the world of selling. With a Master’s degree in Instructional Design, which strongly analyzes the way people learn, and supplying nearly two decades of experience in direct selling in a variety of industries, Ari has pioneered a breakthrough sales system – Unlock The Game – through his experience working with iconic companies such as UPS and QUALCOMM over the past twenty years.

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