Sales Pipeline Radio, Episode 320: Q & A with Rhonda Petit

By Matt Heinz, President of Heinz Marketing

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This week’s show is entitled, “How and Why a Bulletproof Sales Mindset Requires Resilience“ and my guest is Rhonda Petit, Sales & Business Peak Performance Coach at 3×5 Coaching LLC and the author of “The Spirit of Selling“.

Tune in to learn:

• Is resilience something people are born with or can it be acquired?
• What can introverts offer to selling?
• How to hire for resilience
• How to maintain a successful, positive attitude

Listen in now for this and MORE, watch the video or read the transcript below:

Matt:  All right, welcome everyone to another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio. My name is Matt Heinz. It’s a pleasure to have you here today. A couple weeks hiatus as I took my family down to San Diego for our annual trip to basically do nothing. We go to North County, San Diego, to go to the beach, to eat way too many surf and turf burritos, to take some naps, and just get some quality time together. So turn everything off. The laptop was shut down three weeks ago today, and flipped it back up this past Tuesday. So excited to be back in the saddle, but really nice to get that time and highly encourage everyone to, whether you are employed somewhere or doing your own thing: everyone deserves their PTO. And when you take it, you take it. Very big on that, but excited to be back doing Sales Pipeline Radio with y’all.

If you are watching this live on LinkedIn, thanks so much for making us part of your workday and work week as we kick off calendar Q3 and a new month as well. If you’re watching or listening to this on demand, thank you very much for downloading and subscribing. Every episode of Sales Pipeline Radio past, present, and future available on SalesPipelineRadio.com. So every week, for those you’ve been around for a while, we feature some of the best and brightest minds in B2B sales and marketing. Today is absolutely no different, very excited to have with us the author of the book The Spirit of Selling, founder of 3×5 Coaching, Rhonda Petit. Rhonda, thanks so much for joining us today.

Rhonda:  Thanks. It’s great to be here with you, Matt.

Matt:  I’ll be honest, we get a lot of pitches from a lot of people for guests and topics on the show, and yours stood out for sure, just in terms of the topic and the depth of what we could cover in this. Because I think a lot of times, as you well know, when we think about sales support, sales enablement, it’s a lot about the structure or what I think you describe as the mechanics, right? Like the playbook. What are the systems we have? What are the tools I have? And in your book you talk about the mechanics as being 5%, and you talk about how important mindset is.

And so, our audience is B2B sales and marketing folks. And even for the marketers that are supporting sales people and want to create more effective sales enablement programs, let’s talk about that mindset. So first just introduction to you, who you are and where this book came from, and then we’ll get into it.

Rhonda:  Sure, sure. So my name’s Rhonda Petit, and I am in the Philadelphia area. And how this book came about is I started my coaching business in 2019. I ended up going to a matrix event with the late great Bob Proctor. And this was an event for startups and businesses to network, etc. And he started talking about all these laws, and I was just fascinated. I think a lot of the laws, we’ve all heard them, maybe if we went to science class and Newton’s law and things like that, but universal law in terms of selling, I started to really study it.

And I said, “Boy, if I would’ve had this information, when I was 21 years old and started in selling, oh my goodness, how powerful that could be.” And everyone really needs to understand this. And if they do and they can apply it to selling, they’ll be able to take the torch way further than I did in my first 37 years. So that kind of spurred on the book and then put it together. And now it’s out, and I’m just preaching the gospel of principles over mechanics because of it.

Matt:  Well, let’s dive into that and talk about some of those principles. The book covers some really important ground, so if you haven’t picked up a copy, this book, we’ll put it in the show notes. The book is The Spirit of Selling. The word that I hear you use the most is “resilience.” Can you, as it relates to selling, as it relates to sales professionals, can you define what resilience means to you and talk a little bit about why it bubbles up to almost the top of the list for you in terms of attributes and principles for the successful sellers?

Rhonda:  Well, I think when we’re in sales, we need to have a bulletproof sales mindset. And when I talk about bulletproof sales mindset, I think we have to realize that today, especially, the world is changing ever so fast. Just think of some of the major events that changed the sales landscape, whether it was 9/11, now we can’t go walking into buildings. We had to go through all kinds of security, then we had the pandemic, and we weren’t even allowed to go to the buildings. We had to do virtual selling and do all kinds of things.

But resilience is really important, and it comes down to a mindset, I think, of whether you get caught up in what my mentor calls “recency of events,” or do you stay in your intentionality of what you’re doing, where are you going, and why you’re doing it, and see opportunity when a lot of other people are caught up in the recency and the negativity of what’s going on the outside, and they get off their game and they get wrapped up in that energy that’s negative and can spiral out of control. And that’s why I think when you really understand your mindset and you can leverage it, you can be making a lot of hay and turning challenges into opportunities when other people are caught up in it.

Matt:  In the best of selling conditions, resilience is important. I think you get “no” a lot, you get a lot of prospects that either don’t answer their phone or don’t follow up with you in the timeline you want. And so resilience and the ability to continue is really important. As we record this, there’s maybe a little bit more economic headwinds, we’ve got a lot of companies just making sure like, “Hey, am I doing the right thing? Am I preserving cash? Am I thinking about runway?”

And so now in a more challenging selling condition, there’s still lots of companies buying, still lots of companies looking at this as an opportunity to accelerate, not to slow down. How do you think about resilience as a seller? And then what is the opportunity for sellers to embrace and evangelize resilience to their buyers in this market as well?

Rhonda:  Well, I think everything’s about perception, right? And point of view, how you look at it. And you can’t give what you don’t got, right? So if you are resilient, you’re going to be able to pass that resiliency attitude to another. And I think from selling or just anything, attitude really is everything, that energy field that you set. So I always like to look at, if you are going into a sales call, you’ve got to make three composites, right? So what I mean by composites, selling is taking an idea and helping bring it into life, right? You have an idea or somebody has a problem that they want to fix, something they want to accomplish, fix, or avoid. They want order where disorder’s happening, and with everything that’s changing there’s always disorder, so we’ve got lots to sell, right? To fix disorder.

But when you’re going into that sales process, I think you have to be totally focused on the client and what is it that they want and what is it that’s in the way that’s stopping them from getting what they want. And if you look at it from making three composites, the first composite you make with that client when you enter is your attitude, right? So the question I always ask is, “Can you hold the 10 out of 10, no matter how bad the other person’s attitude is?” Right? So you create this vector because if you hold the higher energy, you’re going to bring somebody up, right? But if you match it or mirror it, you’re going to pull yourself down. And that would be not having that resilience in the beginning.

So it’s real important, in that most sales are lost in the beginning of a conversation because people’s attitude might be pulled by somebody else or what’s going on in the room, or they’re not fully focused on the client. The second thing is you’ve got to really get that picture in your mind of what do they want? So you want to ask a lot of questions about the visual, because we think in pictures. Like if I was talking to you, Matt, and you described it to me, and I described it back to you to a T, what happens when that happens? You and I get on this emotional composite with each other, right? Because you get that I get you, and you’re being understood. And that helps as far as the selling process goes.

And then the next thing that you’re going to have to deal with is getting the customer to believe in themselves that they can walk across that bridge to where they want to go, and make the decision, which all sales require a decision. So when we’re selling and being resilient, we have to really think about, from a principal standpoint, what’s going to get that person to act? What’s their motive? Why do they need it? And in that questioning process, when you really seek to understand, and you can make that composite, and then you hold that belief and that attitude for them, and you look at them and you say, “You are a superstar, you can do this.” And they feel that belief, they’re going to walk across the bridge and decide to go for it.

And so in an economy, if you’re walking in there and you’re seeing opportunity, and you’re helping them see the opportunity and something that they can leverage that nobody else is going to do, and you get them excited about it, they’re going to act and decide and go, right?

Matt:  Is resilience something people are born with or can it be acquired? Can it be trained? And if it can be acquired or trained, what are some of the best practices to help people build a better practice and muscle around resilience?

Rhonda:  Resilience is a form of confidence and belief, and the best way to do that is either work with a mentor or do a lot of space repetition, you know, positive attitude is key for sure. But the biggest thing that builds belief is that repetition and working with someone that believes in you. So if you’re the sales pro in front of the client, you’ve got to have belief in them just as much as you have belief in yourself.

And one of the things that I found that’s good to do is just catch yourself. How often do you judge the client? Do you judge the company? Do you judge the experience before you even get in there? And if you judge it, that’s weakness. A better way to do it is trade judgment for observation and say, “I’m going to be curious and start thinking, just observing what’s going on.” And that puts you in a place of power.

Matt:  I love that. With the few minutes we’ve got left here, a couple more questions for you. I think one is how do you hire for resilience? What do you look for in someone’s experience? What questions can you ask up front that help you understand whether someone is bringing a skill set around resilience with them into a new job?

Rhonda:  I would ask them about their past successes and what they thought made them successful. What kind of goals that they have to move forward, you know, how effective they are at making decisions. Most indecision is a result of a lack of confidence. And so if someone has a lack of confidence and they don’t make decisions quickly, they probably need to build up that self-image and their confidence set, where a resilient person, to me it’s the big desire. Desire is the key. If somebody’s got red-hot desire and a goal to go after something, they’re going to be resilient. If they want it, that desire brings about creation, right? All desires come to form.

Matt:  Love it. Last thing I want to ask before I have to let you go, in the book you talk a lot about some common sales misconceptions, and one of them that I wanted to highlight is this idea that introverts can’t be successful sellers, that you need to be an extrovert to be successful at selling. You don’t agree with that. So I’d love to have you unpack that to help people understand what introverts can bring to the table and why they too can be successful at selling.

Rhonda:  Well, introverts are great observers, right? They’re very good observers. They listen more than they talk. My very first mentor, when I was 21, told me, “Rhonda, you have two ears for a reason, one mouth.” So zip the lips and listen more than you speak. And so I think the introverts, it’s all misconception. We may favor right brain or left brain, but we all have the same potential. We’re all built with the same divinity within. But I think introverts, because they’re really, really good listeners and observers, turn out to be really fantastic professionals because of that. And I think we can learn from them.

Matt:  I completely agree, as long as we can shut up and listen. Listen and observe, and sort of watch what they’re doing to create magic, and use resilience and desire just as much desire as anyone who’s a who’s extrovert. Well, this has been great. I really appreciate you, I know you’re super-busy. Thanks for taking some time today, Rhonda, to join us today.

If you want to learn more about Rhonda, you can go to 3x5Coaching.com. She’s got a lot of great resources on the website, you can buy the book directly there, you can find it on Amazon. The book is The Spirit of Selling. If you’ve enjoyed this conversation today and want to learn more, definitely pick up a copy of that at Amazon and other places. Rhonda, thanks so much for joining us today.

Rhonda:  Thank you, Matt, for having me. I really appreciate it.

Matt:  And thank you to everyone who was listening, watching. We will be back next week and every week throughout the rest of this summer with more great topics. My name is Matt Heinz. Thanks again for watching us on another episode of Sales Pipeline Radio.

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