The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Welcome to The Third Growth Option, where we're not just talking about growth—we're making it our mission.
At TGO, we understand that success isn't a fixed destination; it's an ongoing journey with twists, turns, and unexpected detours that take us to new places. Those moments are our Third Growth Options, where we throw away binary choices to create our own path.
Hosted by Benno Duenkelsbuehler, O.G #GrowthNerd, we're on a mission to redefine success inside and outside of business, one episode at a time. From humble beginnings to Fortune 500 companies, our stories are not just about business—it's about the relentless pursuit of greatness in every aspect of life.
With each episode, we don’t just want to share insights—we want to empower business owners across all frontiers to carve their own path to success, their way.
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The Third Growth Option with Benno Duenkelsbuehler and Guests
Mastering the Art of Sales with Austin Bunch
Are you looking for a Third Growth Option ℠ ?
Ever wondered how to turn a cold call into a gold mine? This episode is brimming with tactics for rekindling old customer flames and sparking new ones, as Austin Bunch shares his war stories from the front lines of 'focus calling'. He dissects the art of knowing your customer's history and the finesse required to master a sales script. Austin digs into the practicality of his PPP methodology, a compass for navigating the waters of sales meetings and ensuring that every interaction is a step towards closing the deal.
Even in an age where clicks might seem to rule, he reaffirms the timeless power of human connection. So get ready to elevate your sales game and infuse your approach with gratitude and collaboration, don’t miss it!
Always growing.
Benno Duenkelsbuehler
CEO & Chief Sherpa of (re)ALIGN
Hey, welcome to the Third Growth Officer podcast, where we talk about all things growth, yes, even and especially those hard parts where you shed some skin and pick yourself up by the bootstraps. Hey, I'm Benno Dunkelspüler, growth sherpa and OG hashtag growth nerd. We're on a mission to redefine success inside and outside the business, one TGO episode at a time.
Speaker 2:Hello, I'm Austin Bunch. I'm a salesman, I'm a manager and a trainer and a consultant. I live here in Atlanta.
Speaker 1:You're also an author of the book the Bunch Book of Selling Austin. First of all, welcome to Third Growth Option Podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you, Ben.
Speaker 1:I am delighted to have you on this episode. You and I met many years ago 15, 16 years ago. 16 years ago I was running a wholesale distribution company that had definitely a problem in sales, distribution, sales channels, and you came in and helped develop and then train an inside sales force. We did not have an inside sales force and you took that from basically nothing to $3 or $4 million of revenues in less than a year. So I'm a big fan of yours, a big believer in you, and you just wrote this book, the Bunch Book of Selling If you want to sell a bunch, I think, is the tagline to it.
Speaker 2:You probably have it. Do you have it in front of you? My grandson actually named it. It said the Bunch Book of Selling how to Sell a Bunch Not a Little. And so I said, okay, I'll just go with it. And so we've had fun with the title and what have you and Ben, if I may, the preference in the book kind of sums up who and what I am. And, if I may, I'll read real quickly.
Speaker 2:It says the world. According to Austin Bunch, nothing in this book is untested or just conjecture. It is sharing of what I have learned through trial and error in front of my customers for many, many years. Many ideas will resonate. Others will be new to many. A few will bring back what you know that you had forgotten you had.
Speaker 2:Many ideas are innovations to growth, ideas that force you to dig deeper into yourself, to become open and discovering new strengths and opportunities. Become an outstanding sales specialist. Putting these ideas to the test in front of your customers will differentiate you from many common salespeople, and I think that just kind of sums up why I wrote the book. In fact, a lot of people ask me why did you write a book? I said I'm not an author, I'm a trainer, I'm a consultant, but I've had many, many people, including Randy Eller, who's one of the industry areas, said you ought to write a book and after a while I believed him and the book is a result of 18 years, randy has a way of doing that, yes, he does, he has a way of saying things where you're like yeah you know, maybe I should think about that.
Speaker 2:Two or three times a day. So it's after many years of doing that. I created a manual and that manual I kept updating according to experiences I was experiencing. And, of course, over the last 15 and 20 years, sales have changed, the economy has changed, conditions have changed, stores a lot of things have changed and if you're not aware of that and stay abreast of it, you get behind.
Speaker 2:And so, as a sales trainer, I would go to market with my customers, actually interact with the retailers and always ask them a lot of questions. And one of the things I think that if I had to put a bad mark on a lot of salespeople is they don't do a lot of discovery, they don't ask in-depth questions and when they do, they ask multiple choice and then they give the answer rather than asking open-ended questions and letting the customer engage so that you can learn from it. So these are things I've observed that I've done wrong over the years that I corrected, that I watched other salespeople, I trained them and tell them what to do, and eventually they would kind of merge right back to where they were, and if they didn't have a good manager on site, they would kind of stay there, because when you ask someone to change, it takes a lot for them to stay changed, even though successful. So that's kind of why I wrote the book.
Speaker 1:May I ask a question Now I am being silly a little bit because this is one of the Austin Bunchisms. You have thought quite carefully and intentionally about certain things that a good salesperson be that a professional sales rep or any of us who are not maybe in sales, but any of us in life you know, life is about persuading people and interacting with people Talk a little bit about this one. I'll call it a bunch-ism, may I?
Speaker 2:All right. Well, if I may, I'm going to back up and give a little basis to that. You know I do a lot of reading. I'm a voracious reader myself of all types of things, not just sales and marketing, but all kinds of different books. And a lot of sales books refer to a PPP, and everybody has a different thing of what PPP means.
Speaker 2:My PPP came from Wilson Learning International, which is one of the largest training companies in the world, and in their point it means what's the purpose of your call, what's the process that you're going to use in your call and what's the desired payoff. And actually that works, whether you're making a phone call, whether you're having a business meeting or anything you do. If you use that format, then you stay organized. And if I may, I'll share with how one of the companies I first worked with. I said you know, I've been here several months and I noticed we never have any meetings. Nobody knows what's going on.
Speaker 2:And when I proposed the idea, they said, oh, you don't want to have a meeting, they're horrible, they're long, they're disorganized and they're just terrible. And I said, okay, we're going to have a meeting and it's going to be 20 minutes. And I still had a hard time getting to come and I sent everybody an agenda and I told them. I said the purpose of this meeting is to set the parameters for meetings in general. The process will be questions and answers and the payoff is we'll all be on the same page and understand how to conduct a meeting. Going forward, and it actually went 20 meetings Well they were just 20 minutes.
Speaker 2:It just blew them out of their minds. So we began having monthly meetings and so the company. So, in that area, whenever you say purpose, process and payoff, so how do you start a phone call? And one of the things I came up with years ago there's two things that we sometimes murder. One is a suicide.
Speaker 1:We assume a lot of things. There's another bunch. Yeah, I'll be honest with you, it's a suicide I had forgotten that one.
Speaker 2:It's a suicide. That came from Glenna Ballard, which was a top trainer in the world and she was a friend of my wife's, who happened to be in the training business also. And Glenna and I worked together a couple of times and I borrowed some things from her One of them was the Summa side and we assumed a lot of things. If you've been working with a customer for many years, you assume she knows everything about you, you assume she knows everything that you need to know and you assume that you know everything about her. There's no changes. Nothing's happened since the last time you saw her. And, of course, in our industry you know, in the home, accessory and gift and dealing with small stores there's constant change, there's constant redirections and all. And if you don't ask your customer like a sales call may go like this using the PPP Hello, this is Austin, married with ABC Company. The purpose of my call today is twofold Number one, I'm always interested in how your weekend goes and your sales are tracking up at this point. And number two, I'd like to share some things that I've learned from my other customers that are working well and to introduce a couple of new ideas and products that you might want to consider now or going forward. So, mary, how was your weekend selling? Now, you may notice in that I did not do something that everybody does. I did not say hello, mary, how are you? Because when I do that, that's the first question. And when you ask your customer a question, guess what? You're giving your phone call to them. And now they have the ability to say thanks, austin, I'm busy, can you call me later? Goodbye. And they haven't learned who's calling, why you're calling me and what value is it to stop what I'm doing and listen to you or interact with you? And that's where you're walking into the store, whether you're at a market or what have. You make the assumption that the customer wants to talk to us and that she's not doing anything. And, pardon me, I don't know any retailer or buyer that's sitting in her office with her feet on her desk reading a comic book. I mean, in my 60 years of selling I've never run across that, so I don't make those assumptions. And so everything you do in a sales call is planned.
Speaker 2:And then we talked about discovery a while ago. How do you ask discovery questions? Now, a couple of things I want to know about a customer, if they're new to me, is. I want to know, especially small stores. I want to know about what their sales volume is. I'd like to know who some of the competition I'm dealing with and I'd like to know how long they've been in business.
Speaker 2:Well, if you just turn around and say Mary, what's your sales last year, she's not going to answer you. That's impertinent to her. But if you say the same question, mary, may I ask have you blown past a half a million dollars yet? Oh, yeah, austin, we passed that a long time ago. Oh, fantastic, have you passed a million? Yes, now I've got an idea of who I'm talking to, because in the home accessory industry there's a lot of $250,000 stores, a lot of 800, a lot of very few to a 3 million, and so when a store tells me, oh, we're plus $3 million resets what I'm going to talk with the store.
Speaker 2:Then, if I, the next thing I might want to know is Mary, may I ask who are some of your must-go-to vendors, rather than saying who are your best vendors? And they're not used to that. Now, I used the word earlier differentiation differentiate from other people. Language is the differentiator and you learn to use languages that are non-invasive A good. Another example is, rather say Mary, may I suggest you would say Mary, may I make a recommendation? Suggest is directive, recommend is you can do what you want to you see.
Speaker 2:So again, in training we learn to use words that are less common, so that the customer is always listening to what you're going to say next, because you're not saying the same thing that Bob the last salesman, the last salesman, the last salesman said. So that's where assume aside, don't assume anything. Set. So that's where assume aside, don't assume anything. And then may I is how to ask questions, and the may I, you know, get you out of. You call a customer. That's a non-responsive customer. Mary, how did your week go last week? Okay, so then you might say well, mary, may I ask if you'd elaborate a little bit more? Did you do this, did you do that? And that may I is just powerful of how they will do that. So another way that may I is so much fun is working showrooms. Now, every showroom that a customer walks into, she usually gets this Hi, mary, let me show you my best sellers, rather than hello, mary, welcome to our showroom.
Speaker 1:May.
Speaker 2:I ask is this your first visit with us? Are you a current customer? No, this is my first visit. Well, welcome and thank you for coming. Mary, may I share my two minute commercial with you about our company, if I only take 30 seconds. And every time I've said it. I've been using that for 50 years and it still works. And you know, it's the hardest thing I can get to train people to say that. And so then the counselor says well, yes, a lot of them are looking to watch, and so I've got my speech down to 29 seconds. We're this, we're this, we die, we ship from so-and-so. We have a certain so-and-so special. Then I turn around to Mary and I said to Mary, may I ask you to share a little about your story, and you may take as long as you like. So again, discovery. I want to know who she is, why she's there, what have you. And she doesn't tell me. I ask. So now we start off with a little knowledge of what to talk to her about and don't make a suicide.
Speaker 1:I have to ask you now. You have said that you've done one thing 50 years. You've said another thing you've done 60 years. I happen to know that you're not referring to having worked since you were two years old. When did you start working?
Speaker 2:Well, actually I started my second year of college. I'm one of eight children and my dad did not have the funds to send eight children to college, so I worked in high school from the time I was 14, every afternoon and weekends, every weekend, including 4th of July, and saved my first year of college. Second year of college, I had a brother that had gone through college selling pots and pans, and so he introduced me to selling pots and pans door to door to single working girls. Sounds like a wonderful thing and it was. But I was taught and that was 60 years ago, to be honest with you. I was taught transactional selling skills and I'm going to explain that. We had to think about it. We had to knock on a girl's door that I did not know.
Speaker 1:And she did not know. We called them women, I think.
Speaker 2:Well, at that time they were girls, they were 18 years old, so let's stay in the time frame. Fair enough. Young women, okay. And in one hour I had to take her from something she was absolutely had no interest in to a sale. In one hour and I got very good at it because I followed the script that they had taught me. I could bore you with it today almost verbatim, but I learned to do it so well that they made me a manager and I began making good money and I quite honestly lost interest in college and I'd gotten married. So I quit college at 20 and ran a sales organization that I actually did across North Carolina and hired people from University of North Carolina, duke University, all the schools and help these young men and how to follow a script and how well it worked for me and had answers for everything that person was going to say to me and even what her mother said I had been trained of how to respond and how to listen and not respond too quickly, sometimes repeat. So that was my basic of selling skills and as long as I followed it.
Speaker 2:At that time Direct salespeople were in great demand by insurance companies and other companies because we had been trained in prospecting, cold calling, transactional selling, selling in a short period of time and moving on. And most people at that time had not been trained in their skills. So when I went to work for a large hosiery mill, I was very successful because I went into my customers and I would show them something. They say to me well Goss, great, next time through we'll buy something. And I look at my say what do you mean next time through? I spent an hour here and you spent an hour right to damn order. And they did.
Speaker 2:And so I became a kind of an oddity that worked and always about. I didn't take them to dinner. I wasn't a I was not a relationship salesperson. I built a reputation of transactional. So my customer knew that I was always going to have the right product at the right price at the right time for them and all the fluff was taken out of it. Now, two reasons for that. I traveled coast to coast Southeast United States by air and didn't have a lot of time to lily lolly around. So I had to take that discipline and use it so I could come home on Thursday night rather than Friday night and leave Sunday morning.
Speaker 1:So that's for you. Steve, in order to be a successful sort of transactional closing the sale salesperson and showing up with the right product at the right time, you have to spend more. Somebody, either you yourself or somebody supporting you has to spend more time preparing for that sales presentation, to do the research of what is the right product to put in front of that buyer versus another buyer.
Speaker 2:Is that a fair comment? That's a good point. That's why we talked earlier before the thing about technology. I've always been a person that has tried to get companies to run me a report that gives me a five-year history of everything a customer has bought from you for five years. And then before I call that customer, in fact I'll jump ahead and training telesales with customers and with people. I train them that we work, focus calling, and that means we do three hours of calling and not necessarily three exact hours, and then four hours of preparation. A lot of people will make a phone call, hang it up and then do work on the next call and it'll be 15 or 20 minutes.
Speaker 2:I said no the day before your four hours spend time with 70 people. You're going to call and walk about short notes so you can quickly reference it when you get them on the phone because you already know what that is. So when you get them, it's a review and a big pushback. I always have with people 70 calls. Yes, I said dial 70 calls, I did not say complete 70 calls. It's impossible. But if you do that you'll find yourself being disciplined, staying focused and then, by making 70 calls. All of a sudden you get better at it and you for some reason, magically, you talk to more people, because you're always the discipline of making those 70 calls. So that's one of the disciplines I teach is focus calling.
Speaker 1:So it is almost 50-50. I mean three, four hours.
Speaker 2:Yeah, three hours.
Speaker 1:Preparation and actually in front of the customer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you know a funny thing, benno, about a lot of my clients, especially in the home accessory industry they have a habit of if a customer hadn't bought in two years, they don't research them. They kind of take them off the books and park them. And so when I come in and I look at it, I asked one company one time. I said how many customers do you have? And he said about 3,000. And I said okay, I looked at his report and I said why do you say that? I said when I look at your report, you actually have 2,000 that are consistently buying from you and another 1,200, 1,500 that are not. And then when I drill down into your system, I see that you have another 4,000 that have bought from you in the last three or four years that you no longer call on.
Speaker 2:And so when we put inside sales in, the first thing we do is we practice calling inactive customers, and I learned everything about trying to trial and error and reverse engineering. So for one week I take three young ladies right out of college, train them, and we get on the phone and we call 600, 900 dial calls in a week and we talk to about 100 people. And our call went something like this Hi, this is Austin, so and so purpose of my call is to learn why you're no longer purchasing from us, and blah, blah, blah. And when I asked them that, they told me a thousand reasons why not? So the end of the week we said, hey, that's not the answer we want. Let's change the question. So we changed it this way Hi, this is Austin, with ABC Company.
Speaker 2:Mary, the purpose of my call is to apologize for losing contact with you and to bring your attention back to ABC, who you did a pretty good job with for years. Do you recall ABC? And here's what she said oh, yes, I used to love your company. I haven't seen a salesman in years and I missed you at market, and blah, blah, blah. So we've learned that if you reverse, engineer a lot of things, what's the answer you want? Then? What is the questions you ask that you want to? There's a great book called Question Behind the Question that simply says if you ask the right questions, the answer is within the question, and I believe that.
Speaker 1:I love that. Tell me a little bit about how being in front of the customer has changed with the onset of online marketing, digital marketing. Just sort of compare. Early 1990s, there was no internet and anytime you called a customer you were probably the first line of defense as a person. Now, if the sales process let's say if it were a 10-step process, I believe the first three or four or five steps are the buyer checking out the company on their iPhone, on the website, on social media to see what kind of a company it is. So as a salesperson, you come in later. You come into the process later. Today, compared to 30 years ago, how has that changed?
Speaker 2:the face-to-face let's see if I can put that in perspective. In this particular industry we're in, as I said I work a lot of inactive customers and I find that's one of the easiest sales is to go back and reactivate that customer. The company I spoke to earlier about, earlier that had 3,000 customers, fast forward four years, they have 10,000 active customers that buy something with every 18 months, and the purpose of inside selling is to be able to constantly stay in touch with the customer and keep her abreast. Now, years ago, when I started this, we had a computer but no Internet, no visuals, no website, so we worked from catalogs. And so customers would have a catalog and you'd call and say, mary, do you have your catalog at hand? And they'd say yes or no. And on that site Devi a little bit, I learned that everybody would say no, they don't have your catalog at hand. And they'd say yes or no. And on that site, deviate a little bit, I learned that everybody would say no, they don't have my catalog. So I took the company at the time I said I want you to take the catalog and on the spine I want you to print a bunch of bold red and black diamonds. So I've been in enough stores to know that to stack those catalogs up in the corner and they couldn't find it. So I would say to Mary yes, you do have it. If you look in that stack in your corner, it's the one with the red and black diamonds. Oh, here it is. So I got it in her hand. So you always fix what you can't get.
Speaker 2:So for years we called and went through the catalog with them, which was time consuming and a lot of deals, and so as time evolved and the web came out in, I think, 2000, the website at that time still wasn't very clear. So if you had pictures on the website and it was slow. But today you have a fast website and a lot of companies say well, you know they got the website. Why do you need a salesperson? They've got all these items to buy from. Our companies. Buy from, yes. So how do you differentiate yourself? In our industry there's 18,000 competitors who are competing for your money, not necessarily your product, but for your money.
Speaker 2:So now when we call a customer, it goes like this Mary, this is Austin with ABC. The purpose of my call today is to review some great items we have, that you've sold some and some you don't have. I have sent you a link and if you'll click on that link, you and I will meet on our website and I have taken your open cart and put some items in there, plus the items you purchased from us, so we can do a quick review and do a quick add-on. May we do that now, yes or no? I'm real busy right now.
Speaker 2:Mary, what about later this afternoon? When do you take your break? Oh, she or no. I'm real busy right now, mary. What about later this afternoon? When do you take your break? Oh, she, how do I never take a break? Well, let's force one. Let's go in the room, shut the door, take your shoes off because I'm not going to be there, and let's go. Give me 15 minutes to show you how we're going to work together and we'll make this a marketing call. And if you how we take the things and all of a sudden they see that we're non-invasive. But if you're not actually reaching out to your customers and you're depending on cell phones and web pages and advertising, you're behind the times. Use the tools you have, but don't assume, because they're there, that they are using them for your company. Does that answer your question?
Speaker 1:It absolutely answers the question. And so I'm going to think about the things that you taught me 15, 16 years ago. 16 years ago. They are these bunchisms of sumicide. May I and the three Ps I cannot tell you how many times I sit during the day with my legal path, preparing for something and I think about you know.
Speaker 1:I just jot down, okay, what is the purpose of this, what is the process? How am I going to take, you know, the person or the group or the client through the process and what is the payoff? You know what's the golden pot at the end of the rainbow, which sometimes is money and sometimes is you know, some other goal that the person or the company has. I would like to close this episode by recommending to all people who are listening and watching this to pick up the book. Listening and watching this, to pick up the book. I have watched you, you know, both close and from afar, for a long time. You are the real deal of a salesperson in a world where people try to come up with all kinds of names other than sales. You know, sales rep oh, I don't want to be a salesman. I don't want to be a salesman and you're like I'm a salesman. That's what I am.
Speaker 2:Well, ben may I take three minutes and review the book, kind of how I did it, Perfect. Okay, Because I realize a lot of people I talk to don't read. I've trained hundreds and hundreds of people who do not read outside books or do not read things. In fact, even reading the manual with me. It's a hard pressed thing for them. So I thought about it and I said, OK, I need to write a book that a salesman would read, that it's concise, it's only one hundred and fifty six pages, but when you break it down there's only one hundred thirty pages of writing. It's only 156 pages, but when you break it down there's only 130 pages of writing. And those are frames and written on a white piece of paper bow black because it's easier to read. Plus, it's 27 chapters broken into seven parts, and all the chapters are short.
Speaker 2:I like to be able to read a book and stop, and I don't want to read 15 to 25 pages before I have a place to stop. So I decided to write the book and make it easy. It's really my manual, converted into a book, of how to literally do it. You can take this book and yourself be a sales manager. Literally do it. You can take this book and yourself be a sales manager. Every sales manager should have it, because most sales managers and I'm not being critical have themselves not been trained to sell. I wasn't trained to sell. I was early, was, and then 25, 40 years later I went to work for a training company and realized if I hadn't, I've never had the skills and techniques of how to transfer what I know and sell it. So that's what I did with the book. I put color in it. I had a lot of people say, oh, you don't know that, it costs too much. I said, yes, I like books that have color, I like books that have simple graphs, not completed graphs, so you can follow it. And if you actually follow it, it's everything I've taught for 20 years put into a book form that you can read in a day, skim it, then you can go back and study it, and there's parts that you will find, like Benno mentioned suicide.
Speaker 2:There's social styles in the book. A lot of people don't even know what that is, but we all have a social style. That's our dominant personality or how we act. So does our customer, and when you have a customer, that's a complete dichotomy from you. If you're outgoing and gracious, when you have a customer, that's a complete dichotomy from you. If you're outgoing and gracious and you have a customer that's analytical, methodical, you must learn how to slow down, talk in their language, because you've got to communicate on their wavelength, not yours, and if you learn that, it just increases it. So the book is about all how to to be a good salesman today.
Speaker 2:And a salesman, I say it's like a doctor or a lawyer. It's a practice and you're constantly practicing and staying up with what's going on with your customer, with your company. And if you're doing that, then you always get good at this. And last thing I'll say in training, for years I have a lot of companies that bring me back because a lot of people get good at things and they get so good at it they quit doing the little things that made them that way and keep shortening and all of a sudden they're back to zero and so I come back in and bring them back up. And the last thing I'll say on training I train this with everybody.
Speaker 2:Before you make a phone call, you ask yourself a question why am I calling that customer and what do I want to do? You make the call and the last thing you ask yourself is did I come to my purpose? And that's a yes or no. And the third thing is if I had that call to go over again, what, if anything, would I do or say differently? Because, ladies and gentlemen, you will have that call again with a different customer. Fix it now not later.
Speaker 2:Amen Amen brother.
Speaker 1:Amen, amen. Brother Austin, thank you so much for taking the time to jump on the Third Growth Option podcast with me and just share your deep knowledge that has been honed in through thousands of interactions over decades. You're not just. You know, you're not I think in your book you say you know. Maybe it was one of the people recommending the book that said you know those who teach and those who oh yes, I think my editor said there's those who can teach and those who can do.
Speaker 2:Austin can do both.
Speaker 1:There you go. I think that's what he said. You can do both. Thank you so much, Austin. Thank you for the opportunity.
Speaker 2:Not only for me, but for other people you extended to. Thank you so much. You're doing a great job too. Thank you for the opportunity, not only for me but for other people you extended to.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, you're doing a great job too. Thank you, austin. Thank you for listening to this episode of TGO Podcast. You can find all episodes on our podcast page at wwwrealign4resultscom. You can find me, benno, host of TGO podcast, there as well. Just email Benno B-E-N-N-O at realign4resultscom. Let's keep growing. Thank you.
