One of the key mindsets that you have to have to be great at sales is that sales is a performance.

Not just knowledge, not just action, not just service, not just relationships.

Most salespeople will do anything to try and avoid this reality.

Now, we can all talk, and this is what trips up a lot of people who have never been in sales.

People who have never been in sales think that anybody who has great conversational skills, interpersonal skills can be a salesperson.

And that might be a good start, but there's so much more to it than that.

It's how well they persuade somebody, how well they listen, how well they elicit what the other person is really trying to accomplish.

Now, if you don't pull this out of your skill set, of your focus and your consciousness, you're going to miss why you're not selling.

Because if you want to be more successful at sales, you've got to be better at sales.

And that may seem obvious, but what do people do? They read another book, Knowledge, not Performance.

Maybe they listen to a podcast, Knowledge, not Performance. Hey, I'm talking myself down here.

My point here is that without focusing on how well you're selling your performance, how are you going to be more effective at selling?

And the other thing I noticed the other day is, you know, those like five or six stages of grief, the first one is denial.

Now, I was like, well, isn't that what everybody does when they're pressed on something that's a latent pain? They deny it.

What's the first thing you do when you lose a deal?

Are you saying, what did I do wrong? Or are you saying, where could I have done better?

What did I miss? How did I get it so wrong?

Those are reasonably good questions to ask yourself.

If you say, oh, it's politics, oh, that's the economy, it's my territory, my product, that's denial.

And denial is the precursor to delusion, which is the most dangerous state, because delusion gives you the confidence that you think you're right, even though you're wrong.

That's pretty dangerous. That's the opposite of learning.

So in today's interview, I've got Dustin. You may remember him. He's been on the show before. He's been through both courses. He started his own business, applying the courses to sell.

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