Bob Burg on Closing More Deals with the Go-Giver Sales Strategy | Sales | YAPClassic

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What's up, Yap Fam? What if I told you everything you've been taught about sales is backwards? What if the key to closing more deals was to stop trying to close and start giving instead? In this Yap Classic episode, which first aired in 2022, I spoke with Bob Berg, host of the Go-Giver podcast about a radically different

approach to sales, one that's not about pressure or persuasion, but about value, service, and

authenticity. In our conversation, he breaks down the five laws of stratospheric success,

the most common mistakes salespeople make, and how to build real trust and connection with every

prospect that you meet. Are you a Go-Giver when it comes to persuading and influencing others? Stick around and find out.
Hey, Bob, welcome to Young and Profiting Podcast. So happy to have you here.
Hey, thank you, Holla. Great to be here.
Yeah, likewise. Before we get into all that good stuff and the meat and potatoes of the interview, I do want to talk to you about your career path.
Similar to me, you started in radio. So I started my career at Hot 97 and then kind of evolved from there.
So I'd love to hear about your broadcasting background and how you ended up, you know, becoming such a popular writer. Just began as a sportscaster for a local radio station where I grew up, Got into TV.
I was the late night news guy for a very small ABC affiliate in the Midwestern United States. I wasn't very good at it, though.
I could read the news. Anyone can do that.
But I certainly wasn't a journalist. And so it wasn't long before I graduated into sales.
And I stumbled and floundered for the first few months because I had no formal sales training. And the company I was with apparently didn't either.
So I was sort of left on my own. Fortunately, after a few months, I was in a bookstore and I saw there were a couple of books on sales, which doesn't seem like a big deal right now, but that was 40 years ago.
And sales books were just, they simply were not as prolific as they are now. So I didn't even know such a thing existed.
So when I saw them, I picked them up, bought them, brought them home. And every night I'd come home after work and I would study into the wee hours of the morning.
And within a few weeks of applying the information, my sales began to go through the roof. And it was really a great experience for me.
From there, I started to really get into the personal development aspect because I quickly learned that sales was really about building yourself on the inside, right? And that that success manifested outwardly, but it really was what you put into your mind and took into your heart. So I started getting all the, you know, the classics of personal development from Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People to Think and Grow Rich to the Magic of Thinking Big and Psycho-Cybernetics and As a Man Thinketh and Ogmandino's books and all the great books.
And I just, I became a, I guess, an internal library. And, you know, so I really enjoyed it and eventually worked my way up to sales manager of a company and people began to ask me to show their sales team what was working for me and eventually just morphed into a speaking business.
I love the fact that you brought up that you've read so many books. I interviewed Steven Kotler pretty recently, and he told me that books have the best ROI on your time.
And you can literally time arbitrage with books because these authors are spending years of their lives researching and pouring out their expertise that might have taken a decade to acquire. And then you get to read that book in just a few hours and absorb all that information.
Exactly. And, you know, I think when you, and there are different types of books.
There are the books that really you're just developing yourself personally and professionally. And then there are the how-to books and they can provide in such as the ones I purchased and they were by Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins, the two that I purchased when I first saw them.
They were roadmaps for me. They told me how to do what I needed to do.
It was really, it was a methodology. It was a system.
And to this day, I personally define a system as the process of predictably achieving a goal based on a logical and specific set of how-to principles, the key being predictability, right? If it's been documented that by doing A, you can get the desired results of B, then you know all you need to do is A and continue to do A and continue to do A, and eventually you'll get the desired results of B. So yeah, absolutely.
And you think about how many years Mr. Hopkins and Mr.
Ziegler spent learning their craft. And then as you said, they put it into book form and I got to read it within a few hours and you apply the information.
So yeah, I think you really hit it right on the head. So I know we don't have that much time together.
So I do want to get into the bulk of the interview and really understand what a go-giver is. So go-giver is a very popular book series that you wrote with your co-author.
And there's four books in that series. I think it's sales, leadership, influence, and then the original.
And let's just understand what a go-giver is. I guess it's the difference and the difference between a go-getter and a go-giver.
Well, kind of. Let's look at that.
So the basic premise of the go-giver is simply this, that shifting your focus. And this is really where it all begins, shifting your focus from getting to giving.
Now, when we say giving in this context, we simply mean constantly and consistently providing immense value to others, understanding that doing so is not only a more fulfilling way of conducting business, it's the most financially profitable way as well. And not for any way out there, woo-woo type of magical, mystical reasons.
It makes very logical, very rational sense. When you're that person, Hala, who can take your focus off yourself and place it on serving others, on discovering what they need, what they want, what they desire, focusing on helping them solve their challenge and problems, taking your focus off of yourself and making it about helping to bring them closer to happiness.
People feel good about you. People want to get to know you.
They like you. They trust you.
They want to be part of your life, part of your business. They want to tell others about you.
Now, we would say in terms of go-giver and go-getter, it always depends upon how you define terms, okay? So what we like to say is we love go-getters because go-getters are people of action. You know, you're a go-getter as well as a go-giver.
You're a person of action, right? And you started in radio, you went into, you had your blog that you had, you led a whole group of teams. As that died down, now you went into something.
You're a go-get, but you're always providing value to others. You're a go giver.
And so we like people to be both go getters, people of action, and go givers, people who are absolutely focused on providing immense value to others. We would say the opposite of a go giver is a go taker.
And that's that person who feels almost entitled, if you will, to take, take, take without having added value to the person, to the process, to the situation. And they tend to be frustrated because they rarely have the kind of sustainable success that they believe they have.
I love that. Go takers.
I think that's really interesting. And I can't wait to get into manipulation later on.
And I think that really ties nicely with manipulation as well. But before we get into that, even though influence, persuasion, manipulation is literally my favorite topic to talk about.
Let's talk about your five laws for success that you talk about in Go Giver. What are those five laws at a high level? Okay, so they're the laws of value, compensation, influence, authenticity, and receptivity.
The law of value is all about making the experience so wonderful for the prospective customer and client and eventual customer and client that aside from just the intrinsic value of your product or service, it's the excellence, it's the consistency, it's the empathy, it's the attention, it's the gratitude, it's everything you put into the entire experience that makes it so worthwhile for them that they feel as though they're receiving much more in value than what they're paying. And they do, while you also make a very healthy profit.
In any free market-based exchange, there should always be two profits, the buyer profits and the seller profits, because each of them come away much better off afterwards than they were beforehand. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
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So basically what you're saying is we need to provide more value than just what we're getting paid for, if I understand correctly. So how do you, like, give us some examples, some concrete examples.
How can you have an engagement with someone? They're paying you. Give us examples of providing more than what they're paying you for and going and providing that extra value that they'll remember you for.
Okay. So let's say you hire an accountant to do your taxes and she charges you, we'll just name a round figure, a thousand dollars.
That's her fee or or her price, okay? $1,000. But what value does she give you in exchange that is so immense? First, through her experience, her knowledge, her wisdom, her desire to find out about you and what you're looking to accomplish.
She gets to know your business, okay? She's able to save you $5,000 in taxes. She also saves you countless hours of time.
She also provides you and your family with the security and the peace of mind of knowing it was done correctly. So she's just given you well over $5,000 in value in exchange for a $1,000 payment of price.
So you feel great about it, but she also made a very healthy profit because it's worth her time. It's worth her while, okay, to sell or lease her time, her energy, her expertise, her caring, her, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, totally.
And so both of you come away much better off afterwards. Awesome.
Okay, law of compensation. Okay, so this says that your income is determined by how many people you serve as well as how well you serve them.
So where law number one says give more in value than you take in payment, law number two tells us that the more people whose lives you touch with the exceptional value you provide, the more money with which you'll be rewarded. Nicole Martin, the CEO in that part of the story, told Joe, the protege, that law number one, the law of value represents your potential income.
But it's law number two, the number of lives you impact that represent your actual income. So we could say exceptional value plus significant reach equals very high compensation.
Got it. So my question for this law is really about referrals, because if we want to expand our sphere of people that we help, I think the best way to do it is through referrals.
And you are the guru when it comes to getting referrals.

So tell us about some key strategies. And I know we've got to be a little bit quick,

but what are your best strategies for getting referrals?

Well, it's building the relationship. One of the things that I said, the premise of endless

referrals and something that was in The Go-Giver was that all things being equal,

people will do business with and refer business to those people they know, like, and trust. So this is really where law number three of The Go-Giver comes into play, right? The law of influence.
Your influence is determined by how abundantly you place other people's interests first, which isn't to say in any way that you should be anyone's doormat or a martyr or self-sacrificial. It's just that when you look at the all things being equal, the know, like, and trust, what do we see? That placing that other person's interest first, okay, that is the way to develop that know, like, and trust toward you in others.
And that's how referrals will happen because you're developing, you're creating these great relationships with people. The way you begin doing it is from that very first conversation to make it not about you, but about them.
It's asking them questions about themselves and their business, not in a prospect-y type of way, just in a way that creates a relationship. It's asking them how they got started in their business and what they enjoy most about it.
It's asking that person what I call the one key question that will distinguish you from the rest, which is, how can I know if someone I'm speaking with is a good customer for you? Which totally reframes everything from being the typical, I'm out there trying to give my elevator speech and sell you my product or service the first time I meet you, to I want to know how to help you. I want to know how to serve you.
I want to know how to bring value to you. And it's the same whether you're in person or online.
You know, you're really a LinkedIn expert. You're someone who's so lit.
You have such a huge audience on LinkedIn. And how many times do you see when someone sends you a connection request? What's the first thing they do after you connect? They send you a sales thing, right, to buy from them.
Well, are you going to create a relationship with that person? Probably not. But it's probably the person who's asking themselves the question, hmm, how do I add value to Hala's life, to her business? How can I comment on one of her posts or one of her interviews? You know, how can I share something that's going to bring her value? How can I get to know her in a way that she sees that my focus is on, right? And that's how we start the referral process.
Now, there's certain questions we can ask once the know, like, and trust is there to create the context where the person's probably going to give us great referrals. But it always begins with the relationship.
I'm going to have to have you back on to just talk about referrals at some point. We can do 30 minutes just on that.
I know, for real. Okay, so let's go on to, I think we got to law, we're at the law of influence.
We kind of did law of influence. We did that within that.
So we sort of snuck that in a little bit because it's, again, it's placing the other person's interest first, not in a self-sacrificial way, but in a way that benefits everyone concerned. So I do want to dive a little deeper on this influence topic because I heard you saying something on another interview and I loved it.
And that's the fact that when you're a true person of influence, you're not pushing, you're pulling. Talk to us about that because I think that's really powerful.
Sure. So if we ask what influence is, because remember, you know, the word influence has been thrown around so much now that people have lots of different definitions for it.
And so I think if we look at it first on a very basic level, influence can be defined simply as the ability to move a person or persons to a desired action, usually within the context of a specific goal. Okay, that's the definition, but it's not its essence.
Because the essence of influence, as you said, is pull as opposed to push, right? How far can you push a rope? Well, at least not very fast or very effectively, which is why great influencers don't push. They don't push their will on others.
They don't push their ideas on others. They're not pushy, right? You never hear someone say, wow, that David or that Mary, she is so influential.
She has a lot of push with people. No, Mary's influential.
She has a lot of pull with people. So how does that pull manifest itself? Well, again, this is that law of influence.
It goes back to placing the other person's interest first. The genuine influencer asks themselves questions to make sure they're facing the right way.
See, I believe that we need to be internally motivated, but outwardly focused. Because remember, people don't do things for our reasons.
They do it for their reasons. I often, when I speak at sales conferences, I'll often say, nobody's going to buy from you because you have a quota to meet.
They're not going to buy from you because you need the money, or even because you're a really nice person. They're going to buy from you because they believe they'll be better off by doing so than by not doing so, which is the only reason we could ever expect or should ever expect anyone to buy from us.
So the genuine influencer

asks questions of themselves to make sure they're outwardly focused. For example,

how does what I'm asking this person to do, how does it align with their goals,

with their needs, with their wants, with their desires?

How does what I want this other person to do, how does it align with their values? What problems am I helping them to solve? How am I helping them to get to a direction or get to a place where they want to be? Now, when we ask ourselves these questions thoughtfully, intelligently, genuinely, authentically, not as a way to manipulate another human being into doing our will, but as a way of building everyone in the process, now we've come a lot closer to earning that person's commitment, right, as opposed to trying to depend on some type of compliance or push. The other thing I really want to cover for my listeners is the difference between influence, persuasion, and manipulation, because I think they're all slightly different, and I think it will help us understand, you know, where on the spectrum we want to be.
Sure. So, if influence is a matter of being able to move a person to a desired action, okay, there are two ways to influence.
You could do it through persuading another human being, or you could do it through manipulating another human being. One's positive, one's negative, right? Now, the interesting thing is both persuaders and manipulators understand human nature.
They understand what motivates people. They understand how to move people to action.
In a sense, you could say persuasion and manipulation are cousins. Now, one's the good cousin, persuasion, and one's the evil cousin, manipulation.
If we want to describe manipulation, I think the person who described it best was a guy by the name of Paul W. Sweats, who wrote a book published in 1987 called The Art of Talking So That People Will Listen, which was really more about listening than it was about talking, but that was the title.
It was a wonderful book. And in it, he said, manipulation aims at control, not cooperation.
It does not consider the good of the other party, and it results in a win-lose situation. Now, in direct contrast to the manipulator, the persuader always seeks to enhance the self-esteem, or I would say the position, of the other party.
People respond better because they're treated as responsible, response-able, self-directing individuals. So it begins really with intent, though that's not where it ends.
But here's the thing. See, a manipulator may not be trying to necessarily hurt the other person, but if that's what it takes to get their way, they'll do so because it's all about them and their needs.
With a persuader, that can never happen because for a persuader to be happy with the situation and with themselves, they have to know that not only has the other person benefited, but that the other person feels good about the situation. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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Find yourself a co-host at Airbnb.com slash. Okay, so my last question on influence is really about the fact that people love to be the ones making their own decisions and they want to make their own decisions.
So tell us about the law of the back door. I thought this was really interesting.
Well, thank you. Yes, autonomy is a key aspect of human nature.
People want to feel they're in control of their own lives, okay? An out or a backdoor is an emotional escape hatch you give someone so that they never feel as though they're back into a corner, okay? So, Berg's law of out or back door simply says the bigger the out or back door you give someone to take, the less they'll feel the need to take it. So you don't necessarily give them that out so that they'll take it, although if they think they should, they will, which that would make sense.
But no, you do it so that they feel comfortable enough with you and the situation that they don't feel pressured and they don't feel the need to take that out or back door. So even saying something, let's say you have a prospect, a sales prospect, and you're in front of that person and they kind of come to the table kind of defensive and it's, well, you know, don't think I'm going to buy anything necessarily from you.
I, you know, I'm not some easy sell. Why did they fit? But who knows what their experience has been.
We never know what someone's experience is. Maybe that somebody took advantage of them and, or maybe they really are someone who doesn't trust themselves to make the set.
I don't know. But what we can do is reframe this using the out or backdoor.
So it might be something like, you know, Susan, while we've been fortunate to be able to help a lot of people with this product, whether or not it's the right fit for you, we simply can't know without exploring deeper and both of us discovering that. So please know that this conversation is for both of us to determine whether this would be right for you.
And if it is, great. If not, that's okay too.
And I bet you, you could even do that in a simpler manner. Like if you just want to hop on a call with someone, you could be like, hey, you're probably slammed this Friday, but if you have time, would you be able to hop on a call? Like, does it work in, yeah, it even works in simple situations like that.
Very, very much. Okay.
So I know we have two more laws that we didn't cover, and so I just want to make sure my listeners understand them at least at a high level. So I believe it's the law of— Yep, go ahead.
Most valuable gift you have to offer is yourself. And in this law, Deborah, who was the mentor in this part of the story, explained that all the skills in the world, the sales skills, technical skills, people skills, as important as they are, and they are all very important, they're also all for naught if you don't come at it from your true authentic core.
But when you do, when you show up as yourself, day after day, week after week, month after month, people feel good about you. People feel comfortable with you.
They feel safe with you. And why not? They know who it is they're getting.
So authenticity is a very powerful part of building trust. Now, I think, you know, today, authenticity, just like influence, it's a word that gets bandied about so much.
I think people kind of confuse aspects of it. I think, you know,

a lot of people, I believe, think authenticity means you have no boundaries. Say whatever you want, do whatever you want, this is how I am, take it or leave it.
Which, by the way, good philosophy if you want no happy relationships and you don't feel like being successful in business. Then it's a good philosophy.
But otherwise, no, it's really not. Authenticity does not mean you have no boundaries.
Authenticity simply means you act congruently with your values, okay? It should never be used as an excuse for staying where you are. It's like the person who says, well, I have anger issues, and I yell at people a lot, and I yell at people a lot, and if I were to act any differently, that wouldn't be authentic of me.
That's baloney. That's hogwash.
It simply means that person has an authentic problem that that person needs to authentically work on in order to become a better, more effective, higher version of their authentic selves. Got it.
And so thank you so much for explaining that. And then your last law.
Yeah. The law of receptivity says the key to effective giving is to stay open to receiving.
This means nothing more than understanding that, yeah, you breathe out, you also have to breathe in. It's not one or the other.
It's both. Breathe out carbon dioxide, you breathe in in oxygen, you breathe out which is giving, you breathe in which is receiving.
Giving and receiving, despite the many anti-prosperity messages we receive from the world around us, which is really a shame, despite that, giving and receiving are not opposite concepts. They're simply two sides of the very same coin and they work in tandem.
The key is that you focus on the giving and you allow the receiving, which is why John David Mann and I say that money is simply an echo of value. So you focus on the giving and when you do this and you create such wonderful value for others, you've created that benevolent context for success.
And then you allow yourself to receive as a natural result of the value you've given. I think that's a really important point.
A lot of people kind of block themselves off from receiving all the good that they put out for themselves. So I totally agree there.
So the last question that I ask all my guests is what is your secret to profiting in life? I think it goes back to a definition as you can tell. So many things go back to definitions, right? And I think it's when we, you know, we talked about authenticity, acting congruently with your values.
I think happiness, which is really what it's all about when you think about at the end of our life, what is it? It's how happy we were, right?

I personally define happiness as an ongoing and genuine feeling of joy and peace of mind, the result of living congruently with one's values. So I think that with everything we do, if we're able to check on this, is what I'm about to do congruent with my values, congruent with the person who I believe I am and or want to become, then I think we create that context for happiness, which doesn't mean life is, you know, rainbows and unicorns either.
Life is life, okay? But it means that we have that ongoing sense of happiness.

Makes sense. Thank you so much, Bob.
This was such a wonderful conversation.

Where can our listeners go to learn everything about you and what you do?

Best place is Berg, B-U-R-G.com.

Awesome. Thank you so much.