Three Outside Sales Skills That Outperform Any AI Tool | SOS Ep. 384

We cut through the AI noise and get back to what actually wins in outside sales: practiced skill. We break down the three abilities buyers test for and why tools can support your process but cannot replace your presence.
• AI as an accelerator rather than a replacement for outside sales
• Why skill development beats “education” and sales hacks
• Knowing what questions to ask to frame the deal
• Knowing what to listen for so you do not chase noise
• Responding with confidence as the real separator
• Using role play and repetition to sharpen performance
• Preparing for “no” so objections do not throw you
• How buyers judge tone, certainty, and business acumen
• Why scripts break when real calls go off path
• Rebuilding systems and the idea behind Sales Builder OS
• What modern cold outreach gets wrong and why it gets deleted
Send me a DM on LinkedIn and say, hey, I’d like to have a conversation.

Transcript

AI Hype And The Real Work

SPEAKER_01 0:00

The Surviving and Outside Sales podcast, hosted by Mike O'Kelly, presented by Sales Builder Academy. The goal is to survive and prominent all phases of outside sales, whether you're getting in, dominating, or getting out. Surviving Outside Sales. Now we're the show.

Three Skills AI Cannot Replace

Practice, Role Play, And Reps

Expect No And Build Credibility

Coaching Help And Free Consult

Rebuilding The Sales Builder OS

Cold Outreach Mistakes Buyers Hate

Final Takeaways And How To DM

SPEAKER_00 0:34

AI is everything right now, and I agree that people should be using AI. But I want to tell you this right now AI is not a shortcut for the one thing that you have to develop as a sales professional. And I still do not see this. When I chat with people weekly, sometimes daily, new people coming into my universe, new people wanting to be coached, new people asking about how to develop their skills. It is the skill development part that they are not taking into account. AI is amazing. And I am building a lot of tools right now with AI. AI is fantastic. You have to know how to use AI. It's just like anything else. Okay. When CRMs first came out, I remember hearing, oh, it's going to be so easy to sell now that there is technology and now you can track it, X, Y, Z. That wasn't the case. You still have to have skill. You still have to develop the ability to get people to say yes. You still have to take people that you may or may not have ever met before, take them through a client journey, and get them to say yes at the end. That's never going to change. And there are three main things in your skill set that you have to know how to do it. You cannot chat GPT. And on a side note, if you're still using Chat GPT, please, please elevate your game. Move over to Claude. Use manace. Use perplexity. ChatGPT is not going to get you where you want to go. All right. Stop. Stop using Chat GPT. Okay. Chat GPT is wrong a lot of the time. It is very, you know, it was first to market or was one of the first markets, first to market out there. It was great for a time. Other technologies have moved past it. What AI is going to do, it's just going to accelerate what you already do. It's not going to do it instead of for sales, for outside sales. Okay. There might be something in accounting, there might be something in finance, there might be something in marketing that it's going to completely replace people. It's not going to do it for outside sales. You're still going to need to know how to develop the skills for these three things. And AI can't fix that. AI is not going to take that place. People are still going to buy from people. Okay. Those three things are number one, you have to know what questions to ask. If you don't know what questions to ask, you're never going to get the information you need in order to frame the sales conversation in a way where the where the buyer is going to say yes. If you don't know what to ask, you're dead from the beginning. And that's one of the reasons why the P3 sales method works so well is because it it coaches you, it guides you on what to ask. And it's not something where it's static. You have to learn it. It has to be become become a part of your DNA. It has to become so intertwined with what you do that it comes out naturally. And what does that mean? You have to practice it. The practice is the skill development, not the coaching, not what you saw on YouTube. That is not skill development. That's education. The application of what you learned is your development. In order to earn a skill, you have to apply what you've learned. Not just learning a bunch of stuff and then shooting from the hip. That's not skill development. Okay. Skill development is you take a piece of information, you learn it, you practice it. Okay, that's number one. You have to know what to ask. Number two, you have to know what to listen for. Listening. One of my mentors said, you have two ears and one mouth for a reason. You should listen twice as much as you talk. I catch myself sometimes over talking. So I will purpose purposefully stop what I'm doing and ask a question to get the other person to talk. I want them to verbalize, I want them to talk. This is also about psychology. If you the more somebody talks, the more they like the other person. Why? Because the person talking is typically talking about themselves. You want to get the other person to start talking. You want to ask them questions. So the first is you have to know what to ask. The second is you need to know what to listen for. This is a skill. If you hang on the wrong word while the person is talking, you could go down a rabbit hole that leads to three months of frustration and no deal. Again, Chat GPT and AI is not going to teach you what to listen for. And again, you have to practice it. How do you do that? You have lots of conversations. You start thinking about what is my buyer going to say when I say this? What is my buyer going to say when I say this? In a nutshell, it's role playing. And I know everybody hates role playing, but you have to do it. You can either do self-role playing or you play both sides and you come up and you have fake conversations with yourself. I've mentioned this on many episodes before, but if you haven't listened to it, that's one of the things that I feel as if really helped my sales skills over the years. I stopped listening to music and I started either listening to audiobooks, podcasts, or self-role play in the car. That's all I do. If you're an outside sales, you're in the car for two to four hours per day. Use that time wisely. One of the ways that I did it, and one of the ways that I recommend role play. Just have conversations. Think of a topic and start verbalizing it out loud. Don't think of it, verbalize it. Practice going through it. You're going to get better through the repetitions, doing it over and over and over and over again. That's the only way you're going to get better. There is no sales hack. If anybody is telling you there's a sales hack, say this one thing, and this one thing is going to unlock all of these sales. No, it's bullshit. It's not going to happen. Your skills is an amalgamation. It is, it is throwing in all of these different skills and portions and frameworks into a big package that you've developed, and that is your ability. That's your skill. Everybody has a different ability. I've known sales professionals. Their number one skill was they're great listeners. I know other great salespeople, their great skill was they could connect dots. They could see a pattern forming. They knew exactly what to target, when to target, and how to and how to explain that to their buyer in a very clear, succinct way. So there's not a one step for everyone. That is the reason why, if anybody out there is telling you that all you have to do is learn this one script, all you have to do is say this one thing, they're full of it. It's not. You need frameworks, you need flexibility because not all buyers are going to say things. You know, these scripts that I see, I see a lot of these scripts out there. They're good to know. That's good education, that's good background. But these scripts are like, say this, they say that, they say this, they say that. That's great until you actually get in a sales call, and it never goes that way. It never goes the way you think it's gonna go in a sales call. That's why you have to practice even the most ridiculous situations and scenarios. You know, what are they gonna bring up? They're gonna bring up money, they're gonna bring up they don't have time, they don't have the education level. What kind of things would get my prospect to say no? I prepare for the no and I hope for the yes. I prepare for the no. I'm waiting for it. So it doesn't throw me off. Every sales call I've walked into, I'm expecting the no. I was talking to a I was talking to a sales professional last week just about this. Don't assume the yes. Assume it's gonna be a no. Prepare for it. If you prepare for the no, you're not gonna get thrown by it. They're gonna see you're not being thrown by it. And what does that mean? Oh, this is a pro. I'm not dealing with somebody who's a newbie because I'll tell you this right now. I'm not here to break in anybody to sales as a buyer. I'm a buyer, I buy a lot of things, lots of softwares, lots of products for my businesses. I'm a buyer. I'm not buying from somebody who's squeaky clean, brand new, and a product is brand new. I'm just not buying it. Simple as that. I need a track record, I need to understand how it's gonna work, I need to understand the process. I need to know I'm probably the worst person you probably want to buy from because I reverse engineer my sales methodology as a buyer. I want to know all these questions. And if you can't answer these questions, automatically, I'm going with somebody else. Some of my vendors know that I'm very hard on them because I expect answers. I'm paying you. I expect, I expect answers and expertise. And if you can't provide expertise, I'm going with somebody else. I believe that there are more buyers like me than there are that are not. Your buyers are looking for expertise. You're not going to get expertise from AI. You're not going to get expertise from, oh, before I go into this account, let me just chat GPT. Okay, what should I say to them? That might get you in the door, but what happens next is your skill development. It's that Rolodex of knowledge in your brain that, hey, I've seen this before, I know exactly what to say. That is the reason why people typically, the more they've been in the industry, the more sales calls they've had, typically are better. Doesn't mean that all salespeople in their 20s or early 30s are not as good as people in their 40s and 50s, but there are very few scenarios in the sales world that I have not been through. And some of my colleagues in the industry that are similar experience, similar age than me, have not gone through. Okay. It's just experience. It's just, you know, it's it's having that 10,000 at bats at the plate. I'm going to be better than a rookie, you know, in the in their first game. It's just how it is. All right. So the skills you have to develop. Number one, you need to know what to ask. Two, you need to know what to listen for specifically. And number three, and this is the most important, how to respond. Everything is in the response. A lot of people can get the opening questions, a lot of people can get the sit-downs, a lot of people can do the presentations, you can you can try to listen for the right things, but it's how you respond. At any point in the sales conversation, if you lose confidence, if your body language puts off negative vibes, and yes, that's a thing. If I'm sitting there and I have a sit-down meeting or I have a Zoom meeting with somebody, and I first thing I'm looking listening for is I'm listening for their tone. If I ask them a question and all of a sudden their tone, well, you know, Mike, if their tone gets high, they don't know the answer. Are they confident what they're saying? I just want to know, are they confident? Do they believe what they're saying, or are they just trying to make a sale? What you also have to realize is most buyers are older. So you're selling to business owners, you're selling to, I mean, I came from the medical sales world, so I'm going to draw on a lot of my experience. I'm selling to doctors, I'm selling to nurse practitioners, PAs, lots of people with lots of schooling, but they've also been around for 15, 20, 30 years. They have seen every type of sales professional come up to them, pitch them every, every which way. You're not going to really shock and surprise them with a lot. So what's going to happen is they're going to test you. And there were a lot of doctors that I called on, and I would ask the front desk, like, hey, what can you tell me about, you know, Dr. Smith? Or there was a surgeon in Charlotte I called on Dr. Graper, and people warned me that Dr. Graper was going to test you. It was like, stand your ground. No matter what he says, stand your ground. He will not respect you if you cave in. He, if you back down, he will not respect you. Sure enough, I walked in, he started challenging me. I didn't back down. Not now, I would not have backed down anyway, but I would have had a softer approach if I didn't know that information. And that softer approach, he could have viewed as a weakness and not gone with me. And the reason why he did that was he told me later that he just is really sick and tired of salespeople walking in, thinking that they know what's best for his business and having that type of attitude with no humility and no business acumen. And he wasn't going to do business with anybody who didn't have that business acumen, regardless of the product or service. And I respect that. I don't necessarily know I would go through that. Or, you know what, now that I think about it, maybe I am a little of the Dr. Dr. Graper out there. Maybe I am very hard on the people that come into the building. But I've I've got I've got example after example. I've been debating whether or not for the last three to four weeks, if I start to show some of the horrible reach outs, horrible cold outreaches that I've gotten, that absolutely zero reach research was done by the person. There was somebody who sent something out. They called me Matthew. My name is Mike. We're off to a banger start right here. Either you sent that template to somebody else or you didn't do your research. But we're not off to a hot start. You call me by the wrong name. We're not off to a good start. Probably not going to buy from you. But there's little things. And so, you know, you start building these three things together. This is the foundation, this is the building blocks for your skill development, knowing what to ask, number one. Number two, what to listen for. And then number three, how to respond. That's it. And I'm sure if you chat GPT'd or you went to Claude and you just said, hey, what are the three things that I need to do for skill development? Something like this, something similar might pop up here. But what the AI is not going to do, it's not going to help you develop those skills. If you need help developing those skills, that's the reason why there are sales coaches out there. There are people that have been there. They can accelerate your growth. If you're looking for that, that's what Sales Builder Academy was built for. Doesn't matter what phase of sales you are in. If you are looking for that, send me a DM on LinkedIn and say, hey, I'd like to have a conversation. I'm not where I want to be in the sales world. I've done all the AI. I've tried. It's not working. I had several conversations last week. And it's interesting, just a side note, back in the fall, I had a couple people that I did consults with, and they were discussing that they just use AI. And some of my clients, I was having a conversation with four of my two current clients and two former clients last week. And they said they all use AI. And I said, fantastic. Is your has your sales skyrocketed by using AI over anything else? And they're like, no, it just gives us kind of peace of mind that we're on the right path. And I said, okay. A couple of people that that were thinking about sales coaching said they wanted to give it another month or two using AI. I said, hey, everybody's got a journey, you know. I don't ever I don't ever hold a gun to anybody's head. So I'm not dragging people off the street. People are reaching out to me. And you can either keep doing what you're doing, expecting a different result. But if you want to get a different result, if you are sick and tired of being sick and tired of losing sales, I think we should have a conversation. It's a free consult. You can go to well, I'm just gonna put my link. I'll have my link in the show notes. Or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Search me on LinkedIn, connect with me on LinkedIn, and then shoot me a DM and let me know you'd like to have a sales conversation. I can click, I can send you over my calendar link. If you don't want to search for it in the call notes, I get it. You know, people want to do different things. I'm gonna give some flexibility. Or you can go to Surviving Outside Sales for more information on the various avenues that I have, but I'd rather have a sales conversation. I've been rebuilding everything. I've been rebuilding the coaching programs, I had to rebuild my platforms, I had to switch over. You know, I I went with a coach myself that kind of guided me in the wrong direction. So I quickly jettisoned that plan and I pivoted. And you have to do that sometimes in life. You know, no harm, no foul. I spent money to know what I didn't want to do, which is fine, totally fine. So right now I'm working on streamlining things for sales professionals, and I'm creating right now sales builder OS, which is the complete sales builder operation system. So it's everything. It's everything utilizing AI, utilizing tech in one platform. So you don't have to go other places. It's very simple, it's very easy. It is your resource as an outside sales professional. Whether you're 1099 or you're working for a company, but their CRM, what they're providing you, isn't working, isn't cutting it. Because I've said before, I'll say it again: your company is not going to personally invest in you. They're going to invest in the person that is working for them. You want to work on your skill development so that you can progress your career, not just make as much money or not just to sell products for your company right now, because the average professional now is going to work for eight different organizations in their career. So if you're on organization number two, you're going to work for six more organizations on average. The days of working for a company for 30 plus years, those are over. They're done. It doesn't happen. Companies get successful, they get bought out, they change sales teams, they bring somebody else in. You know, that's the way, that's the way the world works right now in sales. So you have to be very aggressive with yourself. You can't sit on the sidelines and just wait and hope it happens. That's not a strategy. You know, that's not a strategy. Hope is not a strategy. What you have to do is take action. And if you want to take action, some of the action you can take is simply have a have a call with me. Reach out to me, DM, LinkedIn. If not, you can just continue to listen to this. I drop free sales advice on surviving outside sales. And, you know, it's a lot slower than if you take action and have a more targeted conversation. Or you know what? You don't have to go with me, go with somebody. I really, at this point, I've said it before, just invest with someone. Just invest with somebody. Your company is not going to invest on your personal development. So take these three, take these three, know what to ask, know what to listen for, know how to respond, know what to listen for, know how to respond as your starting point. And then do what you have to do to elevate and accelerate your growth. Thank you so much, everybody's been listening. Had another great week, even though I have been very inconsistent with with with my podcasts. I have been building for the last two months, I have been building a lot of unbelievable. Well, I think they're unbelievable. I'm a little biased, but I've been building tools utilizing AI. I have been studying, staying up super late to look at AI, to learn everything that I can about AI and what to build for the tools that I wish I had when I was in the field, the things that would have made my life a lot easier, where I didn't have to have 800 spreadsheets, you know, 20 notebooks, I didn't have to have as much paper in the car, things that things that will help accelerate the speed at which you can have deals done, et cetera. Those are the things that I am building. Really cool tools. And there's gonna be some announcements coming up in the surviving outside sales world by by Memorial Day, but that's kind of what I've been up to. I know it's I have I have some people that have reached out to me and been like, hey man, you you know, you haven't done any episodes recently. Like, what's the deal? I retooling everything. And I what I practice, I'm practicing what I preach. I dumped out my bag about late January, early February, and I said, Am I am I supporting the outside sales world properly? Am I supporting my clients properly? Am I instructing them properly? Is what I'm working in 2026, or is what I'm doing in 2026, excuse me, still working like it did in 2022? And I ran some analytics, and the answer is no. What I was doing was not good enough. And I'm elevating. And so what I had to do is I had to go back to the lab and I had to redo everything. I had to redo my thought process, how I interact with clients, what I was going to do. And this is after hiring somebody to help me with a strategy in 2026 that was looking back in hindsight, was not a good decision. I just took some advice because I paid them, but it was not a good decision. And so I pivoted very quickly. After about six weeks, I pivoted. And this was after making a change back in November. So if you're listening to this right now and you're still listening to this episode, thank you. But if you're listening to this, still listening to this episode at this point, I want you to know it's okay to fail. It's okay to take swings and miss. I took a swing in November and I missed. I trusted the advice that I was given. And the advice that I was given was very generic advice, it wasn't targeted. So what did I do? I swung and I missed. And then what I did, I paid for somebody to give me more targeted advice. And that advice was wrong. That advice was not what I what that advice was not what was going to get me there. And that's okay because anytime you fail, anytime you try something that doesn't work, you know one more way not to do things. Thomas Edison said, I did not fail at building the incandescent light bulb more than a thousand times. I learned more than a thousand times not how to not make an incandescent light bulb. And that's the attitude, that's the mindset that the top sales professionals have. It doesn't matter how many times they swing and miss. They're going to keep going up to plate. Keep swinging. Keep swinging. Never stop swinging. And along the way, hire a swing coach, hire a batting instructor. Get coaching. Work on your craft. Work on your skill. Do what you have to do at night, in the mornings, on the weekends. Do whatever you have to do to consume more information and then apply that information. That's what you have to do. That's what I've been doing for the last two months. And it's been a lot of sleepless nights. Well, not I'm not gonna say sleepless nights. Like there's a lot of times that I stayed up till two, three o'clock in the morning. Kids are asleep, wife was asleep. And what I kind of learned was that I actually work really well at night. I'm a night owl by trade. I've always been up really late. I think that goes back to my sports days where I played a lot of games. You know, games were at night. I'd get home, I'd be all wired from the game. I was a bartender when I first moved to Charlotte and I was the off seasons of playing uh baseball. I was a bartender, so I'm used to staying up till 4 a.m. And then through my 20s and, you know, maybe one or two years of my 30s, just going out on the weekends, you know, staying up till 2:30, 3 o'clock in the morning. I've always worked really well at night. What I do love about working at night is once my once my wife and my kids go down to bed, is there's no and there's no distractions. There's no notifications on my phone, nobody's calling me, there's no sounds in the house, there's no sounds on the street, there's no lawnmowers going, there's no truck drivers, you know, drive dropping, there's no delivery drivers, there's no knocks on my door, the dogs aren't barking because they're asleep. There's no distractions. It's just me, my laptop, my computer screens, my thoughts. And that's where I get a chance to design, that's where I get a chance to build. And for about six to eight weeks, it has been rough. It's been rough. I've been getting, you know, some nights I get three to four hours of sleep because you can't sidestep being a dad and getting my kids off to school and preparing for the day. But it's it's short-term pain, long-term gain. And what I believe that has been created, the sales builder OS, what's going to be unveiled in May is I'm going to be very, I'm very proud of. And I think it's really going to help the outside sales world. Because that's why I'm doing it. Because I'm not in the outside sales world anymore. I'm here to coach the next generation and allow people to live the great life that I have lived through sales. But the only way to do that is to build your sales territory like a business and to treat it like a business. It's a small business. And I thought that things weren't going to change. I thought I could just, you know, create a course and all the information was going to be in there and then do one-on-one calls. And what I'm realizing now is that it just wasn't good enough. It wasn't good enough. It wasn't exactly what people needed in that moment. And I basically said, I basically, you know, for me, something similar you should do in your business is if something feels off, you have to take a step back, dump out your bag, and say, okay, is what I'm doing working? If the answer is no, I'm not going to 10x something that's not working. It doesn't matter if you 10x, 100x something that fails, it's not going to work. You know, you're not going to throw more money at it. You're not going to throw more effort at it. So sometimes you have to back up and say, okay, the market has shifted beneath my feet. I need to shift as well. Cold outreach, sending a text message to somebody and being like, hey, can I just grab 15 minutes of your time while you provide zero value? That's over. That's gone. No, you're not even getting a second glance. And in fact, so that person's probably deleting your text message. You're never gonna get that response. That might have worked five, six years ago, sending a text message to a prospect, but now everybody's doing it. I mean, each week I probably get 150 to 200 cold tick text messages. I don't know where my phone number keeps popping up, but I keep getting them. And I just look at it and I'm like, delete, report a spam, delete. I had a I had a laser rep reach out to me, and it was the worst cold open I've ever seen, or worst, worst cold approach I've ever seen before. It was very condescending. It was very like, hey, you know, you probably you probably aren't familiar with this industry. So I just wanted to educate you a little bit, and I wanted to do so in a 15-minute call. Yeah, you don't if you don't know your audience and you don't know who you're talking to, the best thing to do to piss them off is to assume that they don't know anything. So all right, here's your takeaway. You're still listening to this, fantastic. I love it. Thank you. If you're still listening to this, there's a lot of cool things that are coming down the pipe. If you want to reach out, great. If not, keep listening. These updates are gonna be coming in the next three or four weeks, and I'm really excited to share them. And if you're interested, you can you can DM me sales builderOS on LinkedIn, and I can kind of walk you through and do a free consult call and I can tell you what's coming down the pipe because I think you're gonna I think people are gonna really flip out over this. Because I'll tell you this, I'll tell you this right now. In the tech world, you have very few sales professionals working. So the tech world is a bunch of tech people thinking they know exactly what is gonna be awesome for outside salespeople, and hence you have Salesforce. Salesforce is really built for inside sales, but you know, they claim that they're for every single sales operations, but it's not. And they try to add things on, but it's very clunky because it's not the stuff that they need. It's it's not how do I execute faster, how do I organize faster, how do I plan faster, how do I develop my skills faster, how do I accelerate everything without getting lost in the details? That's what sales builder OS is going to solve. Thank you so much. Really do appreciate it. Again, you can reach out. I'm at any phase of your outside sales career if you want to have a conversation. Just DM me on LinkedIn and you know, DM sales builder os and I'll I'll have something for you. Until next time, this is Surviving Outside Sales. Cheers.