#73 - Stop This... Nobody Cares

Okay, Bob, guess what? 

It's been a while, but I thought we ought to chat again. 

Okay. 

This time I think we should do another episode of Let's Chat Sales 

Let's Chat Sales! 

Excellent. 

So this one is, as the title says, Nobody Cares.

Right. 

And this is just a pet peeve. 

And this is prompted by, some work I'm doing with someone where I'm coaching them and they've got this predisposition for tell them about themselves. 

And, I'm not gonna explain who it is, but, 

One of the things I think is nobody cares when I say nobody cares.

I mean, nobody really cares about who you are and your bio. 

And they probably don't even care about your compensation or they really care about themselves. 

Right. 

And how you can help them. 

Yeah, exactly. 

And so when you go off and talk about your bio 

for four or five minutes about where you went to school and what you did and your masters in this

and blah, blah, blah.

You know what?

I don't think people care.

I don't. I mean, I don't care. 

Do you know where I have a degree from, Brendan? 

I wanna say it's like it's Phoenix. 

Is it Phoenix University? 

No, it's not. 

It's not.

And I don't know where you have a degree from, I've never asked. 

I've never really cared.

I know. 

See, and what good does it do?

And it's

And we've done business together for years. 

Yeah. Right?

And you learn these things.

And the truth of the matter is, if it's really important, 

you learn about it in the course of the content, 

in the course of the conversation.

And I guess that's my real tip here is, if you get on these conference calls 

or you get on these customer calls with people and they want to go around the room, 

you wanna make your bio, really short two sentences. 

Hey, you know, I'm based in Baltimore, 

I work with early stage startups and do coaching, 

and I've got an accelerator and you know, Bob, what do you do?

And then, you know, same. 

No one cares. 

No one cares. 

No one cares when you wanna went to school. 

Certainly nobody's gonna care about my GPA 

Right. Right. 

So Dean's list seven outta eight semesters. 

That's right. 

I never got expelled from college. 

That's what I would say. 

Right. 

And, 

but that would actually be interesting.

Yeah. 

No, well see. 

And if, I guess even that opens a discovery. 

Yes, exactly. 

I took every computer science course available 

Yeah. 

At this university. 

Yes. 

Which is kinda a closed. 

Yeah, I failed. 

I passed more classes than I failed. 

Right. 

That sort of thing.

I mean, if you're gonna do something, you bio, absolutely.

Make it sort of self-deprecating or lighthearted 

and by all means brief because again, as the title points out, nobody cares. 

Right. 

But if you are gonna mention something about it yourself,

you do it in conjunction with a comment that someone made. 

If you're gonna share something about your bio,  make it pertinent to the conversation that's already happened.

So if someone says, oh yeah, we're working with, oh, I don't know, blah, blah, blah in this face

You know Harvard, then that's your opportunity to mention, oh yeah, I happen to go to Harvard. 

By the way, for the record for people here, I didn't go to Harvard. 

Yeah, and it's probably, I'm probably fooling a lot of you people thinking that I did, 

but I did not go to Harvard.

So anyway, but the point is right. 

Nobody cares. 

And here's the reason, here's the thing.

So if you're gonna weave something like this about your bio into the conversation,

when you've been invited in some way as part of the conversation, something comes up.

Where it makes sense for you to mention that you went to Harvard 

or you played football or that you graduated Magna Cumlaude.

I can't imagine a situation where you wanna do that, if someone says, you know, my son's applying

to Harvard, 

then you could say, oh, oh, I went to Harvard.

Maybe I might be, if I can help in any way answer questions, then that's sort of useful.

Now you're being useful. 

Or sometimes someone will mention the city. 

Yeah, right. 

You can say, oh, I went to school there. 

Yeah. 

Oh, which school did you go to? 

Oh, I went to Wisconsin.

Oh, okay, great. 

That's a great school. 

And then you move on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

If it's not Harvard, 

you go to the pizza shop right down the street and all that. 

Because you're really taking time away from what you're trying to do, 

which is prove to them that you can solve their problems. 

Right, right. 

And then finally on this topic, 

and this is another, gonna be another quick one, but this nobody cares thing is 

actually a good thing to just keep in your head whenever you're talking about anything regard to

sales.

And that is, does this really matter to them? 

Do they really care?

Do they really care about a given feature? 

And you might even ask 'em, Hey, we do these things, blah, blah, blah, ABC did, did any of these

matter to you? 

And if they say, oh, A does and C does, then then don't talk about B. 

Or you might ask them a question, oh, B'S kinda interesting and 

here's why does that matter?

And then you can, you might be able to test a little bit to see if, 

you know capability B is of interest, but basically, 

Use this as a general rule, and that is when you're talking to customers, 

when you're talking to anybody, really, does it matter? 

Do they care about this topic?

Can you make it interesting enough that they do care? 

Right. 

Here's why 

you might wanna care feedback. 

Right, right. 

You do see it in their faces. 

You do see it when they start looking down from the screen on Zoom. 

Right? 

Right. 

Exactly. 

And most of the time, what I'm surprised by is how many times people don't realize those cues.

Right. 

Right. 

And yeah. 

So you 

or the person starts going like this, 

Yeah, this is a little bit being self-aware, but

it's a very specific form of self-awareness, 

and that is you're constantly asking yourself, is this important? 

Is what I'm talking about important to them? 

And will they care if I share it?

If you can look at yourself and examine that topic in the situation, 

really with a cold eye. 

It's gonna serve you really well, because at some point

you're gonna be able to figure out, 

oh, I'm talking about stuff that doesn't matter to them.

And then you know what you do, you stop doing that.

Right. 

Right. 

Because it's not advancing the conversation.

It's not developing trust, it's probably developing some level of distrust. 

Hey, these guys are talking about things more 

Distraction. 

Distraction. 

Exactly. 

You're losing their engagement because now you're talking about something.

And by the way, this specifically talks about talking about a lot of sports analogies 

or sports examples for people that are not out into sports, do they care about sports? 

Probably not. 

And if they don't, then why are you bringing up this that you played football or that. 

Or the analogy about, you know, golf or something like that.

Because if they don't play golf, it either doesn't make any sense or they don't care. 

It's certainly not gonna engage them. 

Right, right. 

So, Brendan, before we go, I think we've beaten that one up pretty well. 

You got a movie recommendation for us?,

oh, 

what are we like? 

All right. 

So, the Middle East is always still a big thing.

It's still, and this is a little bit old, but it's thousand years, so, you know, hope you get this in soon because it might end. 

Yes. Well, 

I've been, yeah, we'll see. 

Maybe we'll tackle that. 

See, we can fix that one upcoming episode. 

Well specifically about Saudi Arabia and our relationship 

with Saudi Arabia, and it's called Syriana

and it's with George Clooney and Matt Damon and some other people. 

Who's the woman?

Who is the woman? I wanna see.

It's who's Ben Affleck's ex-wife.

Oh, you got, 

anyway, you spell 

S y r i a n a. 

S y r i a n a and so, anyway, s y r i a n a. 

And it's probably 10 or 15 years old. 

But here's the thing, it is an excellent explanation of there are relationship 

with Saudi Arabia and oil and how complicated it is.

And, it actually does a really good job of 

explaining why 911 happened without coming out and explaining 911. 

But it's a really good story. 

And it makes you smarter about the history and the geopolitical dynamic of the Middle East. 

So that's my recommendation. 

And of course, 

Amanda Peet, 

Amanda Peet's in it.

That's it. 

Yes. 

That's, that's not. 

Christopher Plummer always when Chris 

William Hurt in it? 

William Hurt in it? 

Oh, yep. Matt Damon, 

Jeffrey Wright, Mr. Wright to the women.

They're all looking for him.

Chris Cooper, Tim, Blake, Nelson. 

I can't believe you just laughed.

Oh, that's a good one.

That's a good one. Mr. Wright

Right. 

So this is it. 

How's that? 

That's a good one. 

All right. 

That's a good one. 

Right? 

We should do this again, Bob.

I would love to. 

All right. 

I'll talk to you soon. 

See you, man. 

That was another episode of Let's Chat Sales a quick one, of course. 

And I hope it was helpful. 

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