The Science Behind Closing More Deals | Lorenzo Bizzi - 1938
Episode
29 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Productivity, Relationships, Sales & Revenue
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Likability redefined: Buyers prefer organized salespeople over warm, gregarious ones. Conscientiousness—being mindful of time, reducing uncertainty, and providing clear information—builds trust more effectively than attempting to appear inspirational or overly friendly in B2B sales contexts.
- ✓Excitement timing matters: Display excitement while discussing product benefits and solving client problems, not as a general sales tactic. Anticipatory emotion shown during valuable insights builds trust, while stating you are excited without context signals inauthenticity that buyers detect immediately.
- ✓Problem discovery over benefits: Salespeople win deals during the discovery phase by helping buyers better understand their problems, not by explaining product benefits. Making buyers feel smarter about their challenges creates partnership dynamics that lead to stronger rapport and closed deals.
- ✓Customer orientation balance: Excessive customer focus correlates with lower sales performance because salespeople neglect prospecting when spending too much effort on individual clients. Moderate customer orientation performs best, as extreme focus on existing relationships reduces time spent on the difficult but essential prospecting activities.
What It Covers
Lorenzo Bizzi shares findings from four years of research comparing popular sales advice with scientific evidence, revealing that common recommendations about likability, excitement, and customer focus often contradict what data shows actually drives sales performance.
Key Questions Answered
- •Likability redefined: Buyers prefer organized salespeople over warm, gregarious ones. Conscientiousness—being mindful of time, reducing uncertainty, and providing clear information—builds trust more effectively than attempting to appear inspirational or overly friendly in B2B sales contexts.
- •Excitement timing matters: Display excitement while discussing product benefits and solving client problems, not as a general sales tactic. Anticipatory emotion shown during valuable insights builds trust, while stating you are excited without context signals inauthenticity that buyers detect immediately.
- •Problem discovery over benefits: Salespeople win deals during the discovery phase by helping buyers better understand their problems, not by explaining product benefits. Making buyers feel smarter about their challenges creates partnership dynamics that lead to stronger rapport and closed deals.
- •Customer orientation balance: Excessive customer focus correlates with lower sales performance because salespeople neglect prospecting when spending too much effort on individual clients. Moderate customer orientation performs best, as extreme focus on existing relationships reduces time spent on the difficult but essential prospecting activities.
Notable Moment
Research reveals that extroversion has zero impact on sales performance despite widespread belief that salespeople must be outgoing. The only personality trait consistently linked to sales success is conscientiousness, fundamentally challenging conventional wisdom about ideal sales personalities.
Episode Transcript
This episode is brought to you in part by the following TSC sponsors. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty much impossible. Right? But that is exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, HubSpot's AI tool, to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the result, they're pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped 25%. Qualified leads quadrupled. You heard me. Quadrupled. And people spend three times longer on their landing pages. Go to hubspot.com to see how Breeze can help your business grow. This episode is brought to you in part by Blue Mango Studios. Imagine using a podcast as a lead generation source, not only attracting your ideal customer, but entertaining them and getting qualified leads. To find out more, go to bluemangostudios.com. If you're struggling to close deals, you need to try LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Get a sixty day free trial all on the house. Go to linkedin.com/tse. Again, linkedin.com for a sixty day free trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator. What does the science tell us about selling? If you could have the science, the actual data help you to perform better selling, do you think that you could generate more business or is it just hogwash? Well, let's have a discussion about it. Check it out. Hey. Hey. Hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist podcast. I'm your host, Donald c Kelly, the sales evangelist, and I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. On this episode, I have the one and only Lorenzo Busy. Now Lorenzo did four years of research on the actual science of selling. What is the data telling us about sales performance? And there's a couple of things that I have done, not gonna lie, that he shares that you probably shouldn't focus on, and we make mistakes on this. We all do it, but this is why we look at the data so we can get better. Listen, if this is your first time listening to our podcast, know that the show is designed to help you to be able to, one, build a stronger pipeline and, two, teach you ways to accelerate deals to that pipeline faster. In this episode, we're gonna go full throttle on several ideas. Lorenzo did a research, and he has, like, 30 points that he put into a new book on the science of selling. But he actually gave us three or four of them because we just didn't have the time to go through it. I want you to check out the book. There's a link in the show notes. But the first one that he got into is likability. Sometimes we feel that we need to be outgoing and we need to be likable by our prospect. But the data is actually sharing something totally different. I didn't even think about this. And it's not not being like, it's something else. As we dive …
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