Better Presenters Earn More Money.

In this episode of How To Sell More, host Mark Drager sits down with Victor Antonio, a top sales expert, author, and business consultant with over 20 years of experience as a sales executive. Victor dives into how you can boost revenue, overcome customer indecision, and build strong client relationships by mastering authentic sales techniques. He highlights the importance of aligning your proposals with what executives care about, building trust, and communicating genuinely to close those high-stakes deals.

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"People want to buy from you, but they're afraid. Our job as salespeople is to find a way to reduce that anxiety." — Victor Antonio

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Listen to The Episode!

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Top 3 Reasons to Listen

Actionable Sales Strategies: Learn practical techniques to improve your sales approach immediately.

Building Authentic Relationships: Discover how sincerity and trust can set you apart in a crowded market.

Aligning with Executive Priorities: Understand how to tailor your proposals to meet the key concerns of decision-makers.

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Follow Victor Antonio on Social

Website: https://www.victorantonio.com/

X: https://twitter.com/VictorAntonio

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/salesinfluence

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorantonio/

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More About Today's Guest, Victor Antonio

Keynote Speaker and Author - "Sales Ex Machina”, Relationship Selling" & "Mastering the Upsell | Hall of Fame Sales Speaker

Victor Antonio is a seasoned sales expert and consultant with over 20 years of experience as a top sales executive. He’s held major leadership roles, including President of Global Sales and Marketing for a $420 million company and Vice President of International Sales at a Fortune 500 company, where he earned recognition for his sales and management excellence.

With a passion for helping sales professionals thrive, Victor has written 13 books on sales and motivation, including Sales Ex Machina: How Artificial Intelligence is Changing the World of Selling. He’s also known as the host of Spike TV's reality series Life or Debt, where he helped families tackle financial challenges by applying his business expertise.

Before launching his consulting career, Victor founded the Sales Mastery Academy, a learning platform with over 350 videos that have helped thousands of sales professionals sharpen their skills. Earlier in his career, he was selected from more than 500 sales managers to join the President’s Advisory Council at a Fortune 500 company.

Victor’s also shared the stage with renowned speakers like Zig Ziglar, Daymond John, and John Maxwell. Known for his engaging, practical sales training, his mission is to help business leaders and salespeople succeed by aligning proposals with executive priorities, building trust, and communicating with authenticity to close high-stakes deals.

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Key Topics Discussed

• The Importance of Authenticity in Sales: Victor explains how genuine interactions and sincerity can significantly impact your sales success.

• Building Trust with Clients: Introducing the "Trust Equation": understanding the client's point of view, being a domain expert, and keeping their best interests in mind.

• Aligning Proposals with Executive Priorities: How to tailor your sales approach to meet executives' key concerns: increasing revenue, reducing costs, and expanding market share.

• Overcoming Sales Challenges: Addressing common pitfalls salespeople face, including self-doubt and the fundamental attribution error.

• Leveraging Existing Clients: Strategies for upselling and increasing revenue by focusing on your current customer base.

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Key Takeaways

• Understand Executive Priorities - Focus on how your offerings can increase revenue, reduce costs, or expand market share for your clients.

• Build Trust Through Authenticity - Prioritize understanding your client's needs and keeping their best interests in mind to foster long-term relationships.

• Leverage Existing Relationships - Upselling to current clients can significantly increase revenue while reducing sales cycles and costs.

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A Transcription of The Talk

Mark Drager: Victor Antonio, you are a speaker, you are a consultant, you are an experienced executive in the sales area, and you're the author of a whole bunch of books. And so this might come off a little aggressive, my audience might get a little uncomfortable right now. But when I see someone in your position, I think two things: one, my goodness, they are very good at speaking, and at sharing and getting audiences to think about things in a brand new way, which is a whole skill set and a zone of genius. But two, I think, have they been speaking for so long that they're so out of touch with what's actually happening in the real world today? Because you're kind of used to things from five or 10 or 15 or 20 years ago? And so as a practitioner of sales, and as someone who educates and consults people, can you? Can we just kick off with you explaining to me what puts you in a position to talk about sales in 2024?

Victor Antonio: Yeah, by the way, I love that you totally insulted me in a good way. So let's begin with the speaking thing. Years ago, I joined Toastmasters because I wanted to get better at speaking. I remember I'd seen Zig Ziglar, the great Zig Ziglar speak and I said, one day, I want to be like that. So I started doing Toastmasters. For those who don't know, Toastmasters is a speaking organization that's in your area, they give you 10 speeches, and you work on 10 different speeches over a year and get better at it.

When I learned how to do speeches and presentations, I can just say there was a direct correlation, a proportional correlation between how good I was in presentations and my money. In other words, closing deals, right? I was an engineer, so I had to learn how to present. If you really want, Mark, if you really want to just laugh, haha, that type of thing, if you search Victor Antonio's first Toastmasters speech, you'll see it is pretty bad. I put it online just to give people inspiration. It's like I didn't come out of the womb going, "What's up?" It didn't happen like that. I even have hair if you really want to really have fun with that one.

And so it took me a while, like anything else, when you work on a craft, you just get better at it. I wasn't that good when I first started, I just got better over time. And I think speaking and communicating is a science and an art at the same time. Really dedicating yourself to that is important for anybody in business, whatever you do, it's just important.

So I started out as an engineer, and eventually got into sales. My motivation to get into sales was a total financial incentive. In other words, for the money. We were starting a young family, and engineers weren't making as much money. I was designing fiber optic network systems and wireless systems. They said, "Hey, would you like to be in sales? We have an opportunity." And they were looking for somebody who spoke Spanish. That's me.

That's how I got into sales and did very well in it. Fast forward to my career, I became president of Sales and Marketing for a $20 million company. One day, May 9, 2001, at 3:48 pm, I decided to quit. It was because I just wanted to do my own thing. I've been speaking since 2003. Right? Since 2003. And the question you bring up is very good. It's a very good question to ask people: what gives you the right, given the fact that everything is changing so quickly?

Let's put AI aside for all just in general, just the infrastructure, how we do business—transactional, complex, doesn't matter. Everything has changed so much. It's always in some amorphous state of flux. And so how do you stay current? I live by that—I forgot the guy's name, he was with Intel—he says, "Only the Paranoid Survive." Bill something, I forget his name. I've always liked that phrase because I think that's how you should be today.

As an older guy, I'm a baby boomer, right? And so are you always like, you do not like a baby boomer man. Dude, I'm a baby boomer man. I'm 61. And the thing is, I think I have a young mind, though. That's what keeps me, you know, just hustling going? And so I'm always paying attention to what the—I’ll just say—the younger generation is doing because I don't want to be that old guy. "No, that's not the way we used to show back in the day." You hear that? You're like, "Oh, God, nobody wants to hear that crap." You know, "When I was your age, this is how we did it." Nobody wants to hear that. Gen Z, nobody wants to hear that. Millennials don't want to hear that.

So I'm figuring out how they sell, which is why I've learned to like my YouTube channel. I built it myself, right? Got over 200,000 subs. When it comes to video editing, I can do my own video editing. In other words, I've learned the tools to do it instead of just talking about it or just trying to find somebody else to do it for me.

When it comes to sales processes, I really try to read everything that comes out. I'm subscribed to so many newsletters, it's pathetic, right? I'm always looking for the latest research on what works, and what doesn't work. And it's funny because, Mark, I have this perspective now because I've seen the pre-Internet, now post-Internet.

Believe it or not, there are a lot of common things in these changes. But at the end of the day, what you're going to find is that people want to change. People want to buy from you, but they're afraid. Our job as salespeople is to find a way to reduce that anxiety. They always say, "Reduce anxiety, increase certainty, and you'll close them." And so I'm very paranoid about how things are changing, especially now. So I'm constantly reading. That's my big advantage today.

Mark Drager: You've just made me feel so much better about my own paranoia. I mean, because, you know, I'm 41. I started my agency 17 years ago. So I've been in this industry for about 20 years now.

Victor Antonio: Congratulations, by the way, congratulations.

Mark Drager: Well, thank you.

Victor Antonio: But I say that genuinely because it's not easy. You asked a question and I'll throw this one out. I'll interview you on your podcast. I love it to keep your business running. He wants to go well, Victor, when did you when was the last time you officially had a sales role? Right? And I'm glad you mean when I worked for a company. Yeah, I'll say 20 years ago, and they go, Well, you haven't been in sales. I'm like, you idiot. Shut up. Do you realize that to start a business and keep it going for at least 20 years, you better be a hell of a salesperson? And so I throw it back to you have you had to learn how to show differently just to keep your agency growing? Or scaling?

Mark Drager: Oh, my goodness. When people go like what when they asked me about a given part of my business, my growth, the ups, the downs, surviving COVID, surviving the great recession, and they ask me anything I go, Well, I can give you answers in two or three years snapshots. Because every two or three years, we either adjust or are forced to adjust to Goodwill. And that's it. So do you want to know what things were like? Oh, 609? Do you want to know Oh, nine to 12? Do you want to know 12 to 15? Like, literally I can break down the chapters of growth, of operational challenges of differences in terms of our clients and what they're asking for the commoditization of our markets, the squeezing, that tends to happen where clients expect more and more and more for less than less in two or three-year snapshots.

Victor Antonio: I love that, by the way, just wondering, because I love that because it's I've never layered that timeframe. Like I heard the name Jason somebody I forgot who he is sorry about that. Jason talks about millennials from all these different generations, I forget his last name. And he said There's a new generation every 22 years, it was something like that there's a new generation every 22 years, right? So in other words, you have to kind of keep up the windows shift after 23 years. Nobody knows who you are. So you have to reintroduce yourself to a new generation. But I think what you said was very insightful, I never thought about that, that we should look at change layered on top of that every two or three years. That's a good perspective. I don't mean to interrupt you. Thank you.

Mark Drager: Oh, no, no, no, no. And I mean, what we're actually circling around on is what I was hoping we would speak about because I've gone through, I've looked at your books, and I've gone through your podcast, and your YouTube channel. And I can take any one of the snapshots of any one of the topics that you speak on. And it's clear to me that you thought that you were really well-researched, well-experienced, and thoughtful, and you explained in such an amazing way. So I hope I don't ever diminish the role that a coach or a consultant or speaker plays in getting audiences to think and to take action in new ways. That's not where I wanted to start. But I but before we hit record, you did say like, Hey, let's have a tough conversation here. And in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking, are these authors? Are these professional influencers, professional authors, professional speakers, are they kind of just full of shit because they know where the joke lands, they know where the punch line happens. And if that's your job, that's awesome. But what I want to talk about is how my listeners can increase lead gen. How can they increase revenue? How can they increase sales? How can they remove indecision from the sales process? That's what I wanted?

Victor Antonio: You know, it's funny because let's talk a little bit. The first one is about speakers. The eye, I'm chuckling because man, there are so many speakers who are just full of it. If you just scrape you know, scratch the surface, there's not a lot there that, in other words, is a very shallow pool of information. And so I'm always looking at people's backgrounds. What do you do with this? And so I came from the corporate side, and I started in engineering and moved up through management, VP, then executive right. So I suffered the slings and arrows of it all. And so nobody could tell me anything. That was just Why think I could walk into a room with a lot of confidence what do you want to talk about? I said, there you can't surprise me, you can probably tell me about some new technology I bought, pretty much I've heard of it. And it's really interesting. In the world of speaking a lot of it is a performance. And I don't think people don't see anybody wants to admit this. Everybody thinks this is like the World Wrestling Federation. To some extent it is because I think the best of the best know how to blend content, entertainment, and then insight and I used to always say insight is information beyond the obvious like I didn't know that but there's nothing wrong with making it a performance entertaining people taking on a ride, right having a journey. I think at the end I don't care how you deliver your content presentation. What do you got those moments you make them cry? I mean, I've seen people play the music in the background that wispy music, and Ninja their voice drops. And everybody gets and then horrible stories show most Yeah, that to me is I always do that as manipulation you know what I mean? I am very left-brain in terms of giving me content, give me something I can use when I walk out of your please give me something I can use. So I love speakers who can give me content. But if you're an aspiring speaker realize delivering content facts is one thing but you have to wrap it up in some type of performance buy that makes it entertaining, make it engaging, that they'll go, you know what not only did I enjoy that and win quickly, but I learned so much. So that's why I would package that up. Now the big question. Alright, so I like to, I have–

Mark Drager: Hold on, hold on, I just, we're gonna get to the big question in a second. But listeners, if you're like, "What the hell's this guy talking about? I don't want to be a professional speaker," I'm going to circle around on why what we're talking about will help you with joint ventures, with pitching new opportunities, with your sales process, with training your staff, with better presentations, with just better engagement at networking events and what have you. Because what we're talking about—the ability to communicate, to wrap things in a story, the dog and pony show, the experience you give people—this matters so much and is so often overlooked when we're trying to build a value proposition, a business case, a rationale. And so I want to circle around on this but go ahead with the next.

Victor Antonio: Oh, that was beautiful wrapping on that gift, you know what I mean? It's beautiful wrapping with a bow on top of it because everything is you just look at presenting or pitching or getting somebody to buy into a concept or an idea. This is what I'm talking about. So it's not just about public speaking, but about public presenting in any venue.

Victor Antonio: When we look at business, I have, Mark, I have like ADHD bad, like bad. Alright. And so I like to, I've learned that my brain works this way. I like models. I wrote a book called 50 Sales Models or something like that. And it's because I collect models. And so I want to share with your audience a couple of models that I use that might help them. And here are my statements. And so when I'm talking to an executive for your pitching, right, if you're pitching somebody, executives only care about three things. Investors only care about three things. One, and by the way, investors, I could add a fourth one, but typically, here's what they care about: How can this increase revenue, reduce costs, or expand market share? That's it. Talk to any B2B executive. And if you're going in to pitch a product or service, they want to know, how is this going to help me increase my revenue, or reduce my costs, or expand my market share, right? One of the three, if not all three. I call that the value Trinity. So every presentation has to be geared that way. And by the way, when we're talking to investors, we have to add the time component: how fast, how soon, how much, that whole thing, and how often. We have to add those, I guess, variables in there.

Victor Antonio: The other thing is that there are only four ways to grow your business. That's it. There are four ways. Everybody wants to complicate this, but there are only four ways. Number one, you basically gain new clients. Number two, you retain existing ones. Number three, you reengage people who stopped buying from you to even get them to buy again. And number four, I wrote a book around it, which is called Grow Your Existing Business, which is upselling. Now think about this, there are only four ways to grow it: get new customers, hold on to the existing ones. One study showed that if I can hold on, and increase retention by 5%, it could impact my margins, anywhere profit margins by 30 to 85%. Reengaging is actually just going out and trying to bring them back in, or a known entity. So short sale, a shorter sales cycle. I like today, in today's market, I like growing my existing business, which is why I wrote Mastering the Upsell. By focusing on just selling to existing customers, you can increase your revenue by up to 30%. Not only that, you increase your profit margin because they already know you're a known entity, which means your sales cycle is definitely gonna be shorter, and access to the customer is gonna be easier, which means in general, your cost of sales go through the floor, which means you're more profitable. And it's amazing to me how many people don't even think about upselling as a strategy. Everybody's prospecting, I get that we got to go hunt for new business. But why aren't we selling more to our existing customer base? If you have one?

Mark Drager: I couldn't agree more with you. If that's the right term, I can never tell. Is it I couldn't agree more? Anyway...

Victor Antonio: Just say I agree with you.

Mark Drager: I agree with you 100%. This actually plays a little bit into the whole idea of the experience, the story, the presentation, and the dog and pony show. Because let's say that you're working with a client over time. In my experience, what happens is there are diminishing returns on the experience side of things, right? You come in with a brand new client, you are, let's say, much better than the competition, you work harder, you care more, you deliver faster, whatever your value prop is, your unique differentiators you deliver. And you win over that client, and they love it. And then months go by, or cycles go by, quarters go by. And suddenly they get very comfortable. I mean, the first time they work with us, it blows people's minds. Literally, it's absolutely amazing the results we're able to drive when someone is starting with very little and getting a lot better. But as we start to move into optimization, as we start to move into small tweaks over time, the experience and the expectations are like a good job, Mark and team. You guys delivered exactly what I expected. You delivered exactly the way you did the last 12 or 15 times. And we don't get any credit for continuing to deliver on those things. And so I really always turn to my team and say, Guys, what is the story? What are we? What were the wins? What were the losses? What did we learn? What are we going to do next? What are we going to tweak? What are we going to change? What was the return on value? But more than that, what is the story of this month? What is the story of this quarter? What is the story of this year? How are we responding to competition to market changes? What's happening? Because if we come back with you've paid for X, and we've driven Y results, and they're pretty consistent over time, there is no story, there is no magic, you're not sharing your thinking, you're not sharing what you foresee happening in the future, you're removing all of that. And so it's very hard to retain those clients, it's very easy for others to come in and steal them from you with a fresh story or introducing fear or what have you. But I'm sharing all this because, to me, it all comes back to some of the lessons that you learned moving from an engineer to a salesperson to a presenter, and the experience, we're talking about this story, the experience that we take our clients through. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that.

Victor Antonio: There's a lot of great content in what you said. You know, you're astute to say it is like the law of diminishing returns, right? It's like if I take you from zero to I'll just say a million, you're like, oh my God, I love you, Mark, right? And then I now because we're at a million now I just take you to 1.2 million, you're like, okay, that was great. It was because of the first one because their level of expectation went up. It's almost like expectation creep, right? Excitement or motivation is always a function of expectation. If I expect this to be a higher number, you come in below that, I'm not excited. But if I was at zero, you took me to 1 million right away. I didn't expect that. That's the energy. And it's interesting because it's how you keep bringing that energy when you're not hitting those big numbers anymore. Now it's incremental.

There's a wonderful book by—ah, it's such a great book—Tim Riesterer of Corporate Visions, wrote a book, and man, he made me just look at things differently. He says, and this goes to what you're saying about holding on to people, or they want to switch. His whole thing is, and it's conversations that something I'll have to send you that you can put in the link. I'm telling you, this book is gold, one of those silent sleepers that nobody reads—

Mark Drager: The three value conversations?

Victor Antonio: I think that's it, I think that's the three value conversations. And one is, let's say that you're talking to a client, you're gonna give them the six-month report on what we've been doing, right? And so to get them not to switch, you have to remind them how much work has been done up to that point. And his whole thing is you really have to work that messaging in, here's how much work has been done. And you wouldn't want to start this all over again, with another agency. This is why you want to continue going forward. And it's his format, his structure of how to deliver that message in a conversation is powerful if you want to hold on to existing customers because what he's done is embedded in their brain, like, if I do switch, I have to restart this from the beginning. And to them, it's not top of mind. They're thinking, well, maybe we should go with somebody else who will help us make more money, give us a bigger boost. But they forgot because that's how humans are. We forget all the work that got us there in the first place. So I just thought I'd share that with you.

Mark Drager: Because it's the reason why. It's the reason why people leave their spouses, right? It's like, Oh, my goodness, this shiny thing over here is so much more attractive. And then you start living with that new person. First of all, you've lost all the amazing stuff that you had with your previous person. And you've kind of overlooked just the baggage that a new person might bring along with them.

Victor Antonio: Yeah, by the way, you're right. Because it is the grass-is-greener effect, right? And then we forget, it's almost like we get used to things. And I know there's a psychological phrase for it, you get used to things, and you don't value it as much anymore. And it's how do you keep reminding customers that here's the value we brought so far. And it's figuring out how to tell that story. Like, here's what we've done so far. And then reminding them when we started two years ago, here's where the revenues are at, compared to other companies where you know, on track or whatever, it's all a story. But I think we have to remind, I don't think we have to remind customers, what we've done for them. And in a subtle way, say if you decide to change, here are the things you're gonna have to restart from the beginning because you're not going to have them. How do you say that politely though, right in a conversation? Well, look, you bastards. If you don't go with me, if you decide to go somewhere else, you're screwed because you're not gonna be able to. I can't say it like that. You have to find a nice way of saying it.

Mark Drager: One thing that I've always worked very hard for. So there's a book about Apple working with Steve Jobs. Gosh, I don't, I think it's just an old simplicity. Maybe. They talked about the fact that Apple was very good at making the invisible visible. The whole reason why when the iPod was released, the earbuds and the headphones were white, was simply so if someone was sitting on a subway, most of the industry standard at the time was black. They went white. So the invisible device in one's pocket, they have no way of showing what that is. But those white earbuds suddenly thought of as a great point. That's a great point. The reason why the Apple on your laptop when you flip it up, is there, they were one of the first people to put the logos on that part of the laptop to make the invisible visible. And so often what I'm doing with my team, and when we're working through things is I want to, I mean, listen, we're a consultancy, we work on strategy. We work on branding, we work on sales tools for people. But they don't know whether we spent half an hour considering something. Or if 20 30, or 40 hours of work has gone into the research, the consideration and what have you. I have always found that my clients are really interested, not in the steps of the process, but in the thinking, the exploring on their behalf, the discoveries that were found, the rabbit holes we went down, the reasons why we chose not to do things or to do things on their behalf. And so I have always worked to try and make that invisible, visible for the people that we're working with. I always encourage our clients to do the same thing. And maybe even in your business in terms of, I know that you've written many, many books, I honestly don't know what goes into being good at what you do from a speaking point of view, an author point of view, or consulting point of view, or what have you. And so I just encourage everyone listening to look for ways to make those things that you take for granted, that you assume everyone understands—which they don't, you assume everyone values—which they don't, and just work to tell some stories the way that you're suggesting to make the invisible more visible.

Victor Antonio: Yeah, that's a great point. People ask me about books and why I write books. And this is gonna be so egocentric right now, if not narcissistic.

Mark Drager: Credibility. I mean, there's that.

Victor Antonio: Yeah, I mean, but I write them for myself. Like, the perfect example is the AI book Sales Ex Machina. So I wrote that with my friend, Dr. James Anderson in 2017. And we published it in 2018. And going through writing that book on AI, this was 2018. Nobody was talking about AI. I think we sold a whopping 50 copies of that book. Because everyone, what do you mean AI is transforming the world of selling? Because I'm always like, I'm like Paul Revere, you know, the town crier going AI is coming, AI is coming. And they were like, we don't know what you're talking about. But that wasn't the point. You want to sell more books. I can't even tell you that any business from that book directly led to business came from that book, I can't tie the two together, I really can't. But what was for me, what was gratifying along with James was that we had to explore every orifice of AI at the time. And you just get this understanding, you thought you knew something. But when you start writing a book, you realize there are a lot of holes in your thinking. And writing allows you to plug in those holes. Same thing with mastering the upsell. When I was looking for content on mastering the upsell, I found a book that was like, I don't know, 30 years old. And I said, why don't we talk about upselling? And so I just went down the rabbit hole. And I thought I knew something about upselling. Nope. When I was going through the book, I was like, Oh, I didn't know that. What about this? What about this? And it's those moments that make it very gratifying to write a book. And so what happens is you build this knowledge base over time, that allows you to speak with a certain level of confidence, and maybe answer difficult questions that clients can't answer. So I start from that point of view, I write a book because I want to write it. And I want to see if I understand the subject matter. And if I do, then by writing it, you to some extent, become an expert, a domain expert on that topic.

Mark Drager: And so if you were to give two or three tips, many of our listeners and many of our clients are in manufacturing or in industrial solutions or in engineering. These guys typically don't come from a speaking background. What advice would you have, the two or three things that we could do to be better at selling, presenting, and connecting with people from your speaking background?

Victor Antonio: One of my biggest, I'll say, client bases are residential homes, residential services, pools, and plumbers. Ah, back roofers. Yeah, great. And so, you know, obviously, I came from the B2B side. So I talked to manufacturers, I was talking to manufacturers, they built out a security booth. That was an interesting sales training process. But let's get back to the average person. And I'll say the average person who, let's say, you know, didn't come through sales. The reality is, that some of the best salespeople I've met are not fast talkers. I would argue they're not great presenters, either. The thing is, they have such sincerity when they speak.

But let me go deeper on this because every time I hear somebody say, "Let's create a value proposition. You got to build that trust." It doesn't mean shit to me if I can be so blunt. So I've learned from an engineering perspective, what does that mean? So I've defined trust like a good engineer, I came up with an equation, right? Let's see if you agree with my equation of trust. The trust equation has three components. You hit all three components, I don't care how you present, you hit the three components you're gonna sell.

The first one is you have to take the client's point of view, understand what they're going through, like, you know, just ask a lot of questions. Why ask me? Why did you call me? Why do you need this? Why are you trying to do this? What's holding you back? What are your biggest concerns, just puke with them, as I always say, really get in there with them and understand where they're coming from. So the first part is their point of view.

Plus, you have to be a subject matter expert, like a domain expert. You got to know, and I just posted something on your subject. And you're a domain expert when you're not in the conversation, you're in the conversation. Let me explain. And I stole this from Michael Gerber, who wrote a book called The E-Myth. And he said, "Never work in your business, work on your business." When you work in your business, you have to be there every day, when you work on your business, you have processes and people in place that you don't have to be there. I took that.

So here's a parallel. When you're an expert in your domain, you don't have to be in the conversation, you're in the conversation. When you're in the conversation, I have to think about what I want to say, I have to think about how I have to respond. You know, I'm just like, I have to think about these things. When I'm in the conversation, well, guess what? I know my content, I know every objection you could possibly come up with, and I know what response I have to give. So now because I'm in the conversation, almost like a third eye looking down, if I say something, and you just shift your body language the wrong way, or give me a micro expression, or maybe a facial expression that I go, he doesn't get it, I can catch that. And at that moment, I can stop the conversation. Mark, I just said this, and it doesn't seem like you really believe that is true, or that is something you want. Can I ask why? That's what the best of the best do because  they're domain experts.

And the last part, part three, so point of view, I understand you, two, I know my content, I know how I can help you. And then you, by the way, you're sharing content with the client. Again, I go back to the word insight, information beyond the obvious. When you can get your customer to say, your potential customer to say, "Oh, I didn't know that. I never thought about that. Really, you did that? You can do that? I didn't know that." That's insight. So again, and then the third piece is, I call it the BIM. I had to come up with an acronym: B-I-M-M. And that is you keep their best interest in mind. In other words, I look out for you, I'm telling you, I'm not trying to screw you here. I'm not trying to sell you something you don't need. Here's a minimum. And if you care about your clients, you say, here's what you need, at a minimum what you need to do, and you recommend something, but you do it with the best interest in mind, not just trying to maximize wallet share. So again, point of view, subject matter expert, never be in the conversation, be on the conversation. And then always keep the customer's best interest in mind, and they can feel that trust in three parts.

Mark Drager: Let's just drop the mic there. That, Victor, is... I have nothing. I mean, I can add to it, but you've said it all. And if you're listening, and you're thinking, "Well, I do that naturally," then I think you've been in business for a very long time. And the next trick is how can you get others within your organization to do it more consistently. How can you train them? How can you equip them? How can you give them the tools that they require? Because I've spoken to many people on this podcast who talk about, you know, people fearing objections. If you are operating where you want to put yourself in the shoes of your prospect, if you want to truly get to a place where you can make really great recommendations... and I love that what I say to my team is, are we going to do right by them? Like, I want to work with good people. And I need to know that we are doing right by them. They like that too if they've trusted us. And maybe it's this old-school type of mentality, but...

Victor Antonio: It's a human thing. And this is why too many people focus on style. How do I speak? Structure of a speech? I get all that. That makes you more effective in your presentation. But I'll give you a story. We had a leak. We didn't know where the leak was coming from, but the quarter that was leaking, right? A guy comes. I mean, we call somebody, he comes over, ding dong rings the bell, I open the door and he just says, "Hi. You call for repair leak?" Like that. And I'm like, "Yeah." He says, "Can you show me where it's at?" I'm like, "Okay." So I walk, and we point. He says, "Alright." He walks out the door. My wife was like, "Who was that?" I said, "Well, the guy you called." He just came in and asked what it was. She says, "I don't know. He came in, you know, he just said point to it." I pointed to it, and he's, I think he's outside. Like 30 minutes later, the guy comes back and he goes, "Alright, here's the problem." And he describes the problem. Now, here's what's cool. He had a clipboard with him, right? And he had mapped out like a top view of our house, like the actual design, like the roof, like the top view. And he says, "You see right here, that you also got a problem. Here's why. I can fix the leak. That'll be about 250 bucks. And I can see where the flashing's off. On top of that, I should tell you that your gutter system, you got the wrong size, and that's why it causes water to back up." He says, "Tell me what you'd like me to do. I can fix the leak. I can take care of it all. What would you like me to do?" And then we asked him a bunch of questions. He was like, bang, bang, bang, bang, just shooting them down. Like he knew what he was talking about. We're like, "Alright, give me the contract." We didn't call anybody else. He had the personality of a rock. But the thing is, you could tell he was so good at what he did that you just knew you could ask him. I mean, we asked him tough questions. "What about this? What about this?" He goes, "No, here's why." And he would explain things in such a way you go, "Damn it." And there was no flinching. There was no, there was just no show. It was just data. And we're like, "Alright." And guess what? He did well. He fixed our stuff. We've never had a leak since.

Mark Drager: I bet you if that guy sprinkled a little bit of personality and follow-up, and story and a few others, it would take off. But I love the core foundation of it.

Victor Antonio: The thing is, I think we need to start with the core. And I think that's a great way of putting it, Mark because I could argue that if he had more style and flair, I guess he could sell more. But I got a feeling this guy had enough business because I referred him to my neighbors. And then I can only imagine this guy lives off referrals. I've met so many people like this, who are just... I'm just gonna say blue-collar, man, or just blue-collar. There's no flair to them, man. They just do it. And people, they are good people. Yes. And we're, by the way, I think we're starving, like mentally starving for people who will just say it, man, just say it. Just, if you're really good at what if you understand my business, you understand what you offer, and you know how you can solve my problem, make the recommendation. If I know I can help you. I'm in sales training. Tell me what your problem is. And pretty much, I already know what their problem is. It's even in the four quadrants, right? And now ask questions. I said, "Okay, what are the priorities?" Alright. And then I positioned myself as a subject matter expert by asking great questions and asking them what are they doing. Trying to, you know, what are you looking at? He goes, "Did you ever try this? Did you look at this?" And he goes, "No, I didn't do that, Victor." I said, "Well, here's what I can do." Then I offer the best interests in mind. I don't think you should bring me out to talk to your people. It's too expensive. I can do that if you want. I think we can do a couple of virtuals and handle this problem after the first one. And we can measure it. If you don't want to do a contract, that's fine with me. But after the first one, you can determine if you want to do a contract for a year. And I go, "Okay." I have an incredibly high close rate, like 85% easy.

Mark Drager: Here's what I'm really excited about, though. You wrote a book, you know, four or five, six years ago on AI. Everybody's talking about AI today. What I'm most excited about over the next few years is authenticity will win. Because we are already, but just wait everyone, we are about to be bombarded with fake bullshit. Yep. And everyone will be pitching this scam and that scam and this tactic and that tactic and what have you and what like all of this stuff. And I'm already part of mastermind groups where people are talking about how you scrape this off this site. And you do this off this site just to use AI to send fake videos to people with fake emails to get them to believe that you're somehow real. And I'm like, "This stuff is..." But for those of us who have a real business with real people, and it's going to feel, like there's going to be a period of a year or two or more may be where it feels like we're losing out against all the people who are cheating. But their businesses will disappear very quickly. We will build sustainable businesses off of real relationships, off of keeping your best interest in mind, and off of trying to figure out what the true recommendations are because we have industry knowledge. We are not going anywhere. We have investments in real people, in real technology, in real processes, and in real fleets and all of that stuff. And so as everyone sees this rise and fall, and as it's super tempting to try and jump into all the fake bullshit, truthfully, if we just stick true to what has worked, you know, over the last 10, 20, 30, 100 years, we will come out on the other side, I believe, much stronger for it.

Victor Antonio: And I think you said it earlier when you said when you were talking about the plumber, the welder, the roofer. My case is that the core values have to be there. In other words, you have to be good at what you do, you have to understand them. And you have to keep, again, best interests in mind. You can't get away from this like a universal law. And so the technology that we're seeing today, these are just machinations. That's all they are. Kevin Kelley, who was the founder of Wired Magazine, put it in perspective, and he doesn't get enough credit. And he said this about seven, at least 10 years ago. He said, that to think of AI, and this was again almost 10 years ago, to think of AI, you have to think of AI as a utility. AI is a utility. I go, "What do you mean by utility?" Right? He goes, "It's like electricity." He said, "Like electricity is in your lights, your cameras, your TVs, you don't see it. It's in there. AI will be a utility." So for people who say, "You know what, I want to specialize in AI." Okay, that's like saying, "I want to specialize in electricity." It doesn't make sense. What we're going to have are just more tools, as you pointed out. Some will be used for good and some for nefarious reasons. But at the end of the day, you still have to deliver the goods, you know, which is, here's what I can do to help you increase revenue, reduce costs, or expand your market share. And the authenticity piece is dead on. Because with so much, I guess, artificial stuff going out, right? It's got all these fake videos, all these fake avatars, all these things that are making us efficient. The downside of that efficiency is that we lose connections to human connections where people make the buying decisions.

Mark Drager: I've been speaking with Victor Antonio. And if you'd like to know more about him, we'll have all of his details at the end. But I will just say that he recently released a book, "Relationship Selling: Managing Human Connections as Sales Assets." And it's available on Amazon and everywhere you might want to find books. And he gets into a lot of this type of stuff in the book. Now, Victor, I do have one question for you I'd like to end every interview with. If you gave us one tip or strategy to help us sell more, what would that be?

Victor Antonio: Ah, I'm gonna go with your operating system, which is your brain. And that is there's something known as the fundamental attribution error. The fundamental attribution error is when you attribute something to something you think might happen. And too often, as salespeople, we don't make the call, well, they're just not going to buy, they're just not going to answer, they're just not interested. When in reality, maybe they're just busy and you haven't grabbed their attention. So manage your operating system, which is your brain. I think that is the biggest skill set that we all have to learn. It's what we say to ourselves that determines whether you'll be successful in sales or not. That's really it. I hate to say that it's 80% mental. It's really, I want to be specific, it's what you say to yourself. I mean, sometimes salespeople don't listen to what they say to themselves. And the fundamental attribution error where we discount something because we think they're not going to buy, they're not interested, the market's going bad—all these external things we can control. Between your ears is wetware. And again, you just have to figure it out. There's always a way to make money whether the economy is up or down. I always say there's always a way to make money and make sales. You just have to make sure that what you say to yourself is positive and not just feed into what everybody else is talking about, which is the negative.

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Resources & Go Deeper

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"14 Must-Know Presentation Tips for a Killer Presentation [2023]" – Animaker

This article provides essential tips for creating engaging presentations, such as using humor, visual elements, and keeping the audience engaged through interaction and call-to-action buttons. It emphasizes that great presenters connect with their audience by keeping content concise and relevant, ultimately helping entrepreneurs stand out and earn more.

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"How to Improve Presentation Skills: 5 Key Presentation Skills" – MasterClass

This article offers actionable advice on improving key presentation skills like body language, eye contact, and time management. It focuses on building confidence, a crucial factor in ensuring that presenters can convey their message effectively and ultimately increase their earning potential.

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"Powerful and Effective Presentation Skills" – Harvard Business

This article explains how mastering advanced presentation skills can improve your ability to engage an audience and convey your message with clarity. It highlights techniques like rhetorical questions and storytelling to enhance the impact of presentations, helping professionals earn more by being more effective communicators.