How do you honestly say you care about a customer when you are being paid to care? I put that question to a sales trainer, badly, and he took it apart.
Jorge Chavez is president and co-founder of Topaz Sales Consulting and has spent his career teaching business owners to sell, hire and lead. He did not dodge the tension. He answered it with a question of his own: do you care?
“You have to care. If you don’t care about people, sales, and relationships, you’re in the wrong business.”
— Jorge Chavez, Topaz Sales Consulting, on Unscripted Small Business
Authenticity is alignment, not performance
His model of why people can smell a pitch is not about technique:
“When your your words and your tonality and your body language align, you’re more authentic. But what’s more important than all those is your belief system. When your beliefs, your body language, your tonality, and your words are in alignment, they’re congruent, you’re being authentic.”
— Jorge Chavez
Which means you cannot train your way into it from the outside. If the belief is not there, the alignment fails somewhere and the person across the table registers it without being able to name what they registered.
The hardest instruction in the trade
“The goal can’t be to sell. It’s a byproduct of right thinking and and effectively executing your process. It can’t be the goal… What’s the greater goal? It’s to help people solve problems and make informed decisions. So let go of the goal of selling something and focus on aligning yourself with your client, walking in their shoes, and understanding their problem.”
— Jorge Chavez
He goes further than most consultants would dare in front of a paying audience: the aim is to see whether you can help them solve it even without you. That posture is what makes it possible to ask every question honestly, because you are no longer steering toward an answer. His summary of the standard: “you have to be not seeking yeses and not seeking no’s, but seeking the truth.”
Listening as the actual skill
Jorge distinguishes between active listening, which most sales training teaches, and something harder:
“there’s a higher form of listening, which is empathetic listening. And what that is, is when you walk in someone else’s shoes, you detach yourself from your own biases, your own training, your own experiences, all of that.”
— Jorge Chavez
His diagnosis of why so many people cannot generate a follow-up question on the fly is uncomfortably good: “most people after they become adults lose curiosity as a skill.” The definition he uses to fix it is one worth writing down — infinite curiosity is running out of time before you run out of questions.
The consultant who calls himself the barkeep
Paul Pape, who runs Gamify Business, arrived at the same place from an entirely different direction. He deliberately calls himself the barkeep rather than the coach or the strategist:
“the barkeep is a position of service… instead of a position of power leadership. So when you come to me and you’re, I’m the barkeep, I’m here to, you know, run your game, basically I’m just letting you know I’m here as service to you. I am not here to lead or to make you do what I say.”
— Paul Pape, Gamify Business, on Unscripted Small Business
He is also honest about the counterfeit versions he has personally paid for. Some consultants shoehorn every client into the package they already built, because that is what they are selling. Others take a darker route:
“Instead of going empathy, they go to manipulation, which is let tell me all of your fears, all of the things that make you upset. And then I’m going to utilize that to keep you on the hook, to keep you paying more. And I I’m not a fan of that either.”
— Paul Pape
Same information, two uses. You can learn what somebody fears in order to serve them or in order to hold them. The technique is identical. The intent is the whole thing.
What this looks like on a Tuesday
- Ask what happens if they do nothing. Jorge’s favourite question surfaces the real cost of standing still, which is the honest reason to act.
- Recommend the option that fits, including the cheaper one. Jorge trains toward one right solution found by asking, not by pitching up the ladder.
- Get out of email. He is blunt that text is a poor way to build a relationship. Email books the meeting and confirms what was agreed.
- Be willing to lose the sale. Paul turns away work that is not a fit, and says so.
- Walk your talk in writing. Topaz has a stated core value: “Every one hundred percent of advice we give, we follow. And if we don’t, we’re hypocrites.”
That last one is the test that costs something. Their sales consultants have to carry a bag themselves — go to conferences, introduce themselves cold, do the thing — because that same afternoon they will be teaching somebody else to do it. If you cannot do it, you have not earned the right to advise on it.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcripts, trimmed only for false starts and filler. More at Digital Christian Collaborative and Unscripted Small Business.