April 9, 2025 • 33 mins
Get ready for a different episode as we feature Telarus Solution Engineer and prior Military Trevor Burnside. Today, we dive into the episode titled The Art of Discovery Calls, Stories from Military Negotiation. Listen as Trevor unpacks lesson after lesson from his military training on rapport building and human intelligence and shares how it all translates to what we do in our daily work. We talk about Inception, techniques like fear up, fear down, and more. I think you'll find you may already do some of these, but listen as Trevor shines a unique light on how important getting the process just right really is.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling
technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lopresto,
SVP of sales engineering at Telaris, and this is Next Level
Biztech. Hey everybody, welcome back.
We got a fun one for you today on with us.
Today we have got Mr. Burly Man,Trevor Burnside, solution
(00:24):
Engineer Telaris. Trevor, welcome on Buddy.
Hey, appreciate it. How's it going dude?
We I'm I'm excited for this guy's today's today's title
track here the art of discovery calls stories from military
intelligence negotiation. This is going to get juicy.
All right, Trevor. So, so everybody knows you,
(00:45):
loves you, long time Telaris, you're out there helping
partners in deals. And, and I think we know, we
know that piece of it, right? We, we, we talked about that.
But what I don't know that a lotof people know is your
background, right? And your military and your
service and all of that stuff. So maybe just set the stage for
us, because this is kind of a different call.
(01:05):
This is a little bit of a different episode.
So set the stage for us, your military deployments, how some
of that training, rapport, resistance, all these things,
maybe some of the deployments just set the stage.
Here Yeah, yeah, When I. So I did enlist and I did six
years in the military, specifically Army.
And when I actually started, I thought I was going to go into
(01:28):
communications or intelligence communications or something,
actually went to the recruiter and was going to sign up to do
that. And they actually didn't have
any jobs open for the languages I wanted because I wanted to do
some translation. And at the time they said oh,
you can only do you know, Korean.
And I was like, I'm not learningthat.
(01:49):
So anything else I'll do any other language and they're like,
well, you got you can wait six months.
And I was like, I'm not waiting six months.
I'm here, I'm signing today and chose human intelligence and
went without route. Now, personally, I'm, I'm fairly
introverted. So, you know, in the in
(02:09):
intelligence world, the human tears are kind of known as more
like the social butterflies liketo talk to people and, and, and
not that I don't like to talk topeople, but it's more it's not
necessarily my in my nature, right to just get out of my
shell and talk to people. And something I've came to learn
actually is some of the best people in human intelligence are
(02:29):
introverted because it's not something that they is, is part
of their nature, right? They actually have to focus on
it. So it becomes something that
they get really good at because they just adopt these principles
pretty well of of using conversation like a chess game
rather than just saying what comes to your mind kind of
thing. So started that, did that for a
(02:51):
couple years and coming back into the sales world, I actually
just saw that there were so manysimilarities to it.
And a lot of what I've learned kind of in the military and
talking to people has directly translated to to the sell side,
working with clients, working with people, cold calls, all
(03:12):
that kind of stuff. There's there's a ton of things
that crossover more than you might you might think, actually.
And from a deployment perspective, can can we share
anything deployment wise? Are we not allowed to say where
you were? Yeah.
No, I can I can talk about some of that.
So I was in Northwest Africa fora bit of time and we were going
(03:34):
after, you know, ISIS groups that were and other violent
extremist organizations that were operating up there kind of
oppressing the local population.So we are working with local
government forces to, you know, help them since we had just, you
know, kind of gotten out of 20 years of war, got really good at
that, you know, following and and tracking and all that kind
(03:56):
of stuff. So we were helping our partner
forces and those nations over there.
Well, First off, I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you for
your service. We appreciate you.
Thank you. As we think about key, let's
let's talk about like key lessons, maybe what are some of
the key lessons from the intelligence training side that
you can share that that are applied to?
(04:18):
We've got advisors listening that are out there trying to
build these strong relationshipsin business.
What's the tie there? I I think when it comes down to
at A at a basic level is when you're talking to somebody on a
sell side or intelligence, really the goal there is to
convince them of something to change with their normal altered
(04:39):
like course of life, right? And do something different than
they would have done had you notbeen there.
So you're convincing them you'reusing different techniques in
that case to align your goals ortheir goals to your goals and
have that be more something you work towards together, right.
And and to accomplish. So from a, you know, sales side,
(05:00):
when you're working with clients, you're trying to get
them to, you know, see something, adopt something in
the new technology, change old technology, all those kinds of
things. It's still the same when you're
working in an intelligence of trying to get someone to work
with you and provide informationto you where otherwise they may
not have. I like it.
(05:23):
Let's let's think about, let's build this a little bit.
So why, you know, we can't walk in sometimes we like to walk
into these deals and just go, OK, tell me everything that you
need right here and I'm your person.
And meanwhile, they just met us or they just met our the
advisor. They just so why, why, why
tailor report building based on the client?
What's the value there? So anytime you're working with
(05:44):
somebody, it's in intelligence and really on the sell side too.
I'd say report comes first because people on the sales
side, people do business with people that they like and
intelligence people work with people that they like.
They want to, you're going to, you know, as the old adage says,
right, you're going to attract more bees with honey than you
are, you know, vinegar. It's it's the same way, right?
(06:07):
So report comes first and building a relationship, whether
that's, you know, just finding common ground somewhere is going
to come before any questioning, before any anything like that.
And it's the same in sales. You know, you get on the phone,
talk about sports, you talk about something, find the common
ground and then go from there and build those.
So like the small talk stuff, itactually matters.
(06:28):
You know, there's a lot of jokeson that, like online about, you
know, the weather and all the small talks on on zoom calls.
But in the end it actually matters, and it builds
relationships and lines with people to see the humanity
before you actually go into the convincing side of of the
conversation. Is there a, you know, thinking
(06:49):
prefrontal cortex primordial is what's the psychological unlock
with rapport building that's custom?
Is it, is it disarmament? I mean, what, what?
What do you see in that? Yeah, it, it's disarmament.
I think, you know, in intelligence, we, you sometimes
you end up working with people that, you know, you really on,
(07:11):
on every other day you would just detest, right?
Or they're doing things that areabhorrent or you, you just can't
get behind. And in those cases, you still
have to find a way to find common ground with those people.
And, you know, common terms of like, you know, same, same of
like you like this, I like this,you like this, You know, we,
(07:31):
we'll find something that we both like and make it so that I
actually don't focus on the things that I detest about you
or the things that I don't agreewith.
We can focus on something that we do agree with and sell the
same thing that you're going to run into people that, you know,
in this heightened political climate, right, that you just
don't see eye to eye with. And you can focus on the things
that we do get along with. And, and building that trust is,
(07:54):
is where that starts of I like something, you like something,
I'm building that trust. And now I understand you and I,
I know you and you know me. That's where that kind of
starts, at least on the report side.
You know, I like just listening to a podcast to the, there's one
out there, ACQ 2. What these guys do, you know,
they have on founders, CEOs, things like that.
They had on this guy, long time CEO for ServiceNow, Bill
(08:17):
McDermott, right? And he's arguably one of the
best enterprise sellers of all time.
Now he's, he's ascended to ServiceNow CEO.
But his thing was, I just like to be out there.
I like to run loose. Let me out there, let me run,
let me do these things. And so he had a lot of a lot of
great techniques that encourage everybody to go check out that
episode. But one of the things that he
(08:39):
talked about was you have to it relates to this kind of building
rapport story. You can't walk into these
meetings cold. You have to know more about or
know something about that audience to have some sort of
custom. I mean, I have to imagine that
that that helps you fall back onwhat am I going to talk about,
right? I don't want to go right into
business. I've got to find some sort of
(09:00):
common ground to talk to them. About right.
Yeah, absolutely. And, and even an interrogation
or or otherwise, we always say the best manual is how to win
friends and influence people andstarting there, right, it's open
source. That's not secret, you know, on
how to build rapport or be likable with people.
That book and those concepts areapplicable on sales and and
(09:23):
really talking with any people really as a day-to-day job.
Yeah, love it. OK, so let's think about, I mean
those are some of the obvious reasons.
What's a what's a non obvious reason to kind of demonstrate
the value and incentivize these clients during the conversations
and why is that so key? Yeah, this is where it kind of
gets into the the chess aspect of things, right?
(09:43):
Where these are things that we do without even thinking every
day. When you're having conversations
with people, with your family, with your friends, we're all
using these techniques. Often, though, we're doing it
without knowing it. So the the difference about kind
of taking these techniques and understanding them and actually
harnessing them for your benefitis where it kind of the, the
(10:05):
secret power comes, right? The Jedi mind tricks, so to
speak, where you can, you can dothe cool kind of cool things on
the on the convincing side. Now with when you're convincing
someone, it always has to come with an incentive.
And we do this, like I said, automatically.
And the agent side, we tend to, we tend to almost wrap this with
(10:26):
my value. You know, I, I need to explain
my value as an agent or as a partner.
And they need to understand my value really that's I need to
give them the incentive I need. They need to see the incentive
of working with me or working with or doing business with my
suppliers or whatever that is. It's understanding that there's
an incentive to doing business with me and then throughout that
(10:47):
process reinforcing what that incentive is.
And sometimes that incentive canactually change per customer or
per client, right? Because not everyone necessarily
cares about the same thing. You know, from a, a partner
perspective, my value could be that I help procurement teams.
Well, if the client has 25 people on a procurement team,
(11:07):
maybe that value is lessened, right?
So that incentive is less. And so I need to provide a
different incentive and we can pivot and change and, and be
different and provide different things to different clients.
And I think those where we see, you know, agents that understand
that and do that, you know, sometimes second nature, you
know, just being able to pivot like that are the ones that are
really successful. So what are think about some of
(11:30):
those techniques, right. So, so the advisors out there,
they're trying to enforce this position during these
conversations, maybe give us just some of these narrative
building techniques that work. Yeah.
So in conversation, you know, there's different techniques as
far as how to talk to somebody and from the information
(11:50):
perspective of changing their will to my will, right.
And what I have to do is create a narrative around that to it so
that it makes it reality for them.
There's, there's several ways todo this.
And I'll, I'll kind of just talkabout it in a vague sense where
I can, I can pick certain things, what's going on and
(12:13):
focus on those. Fear is actually, you know, a
driving factor for a lot of people.
And so taking fear and I can either weaponize it and make
increase the fear or I can decrease the fear and use it to
my advantage based on how I'm looking at it at something,
right? So let's for an example, if I
(12:33):
have a client who has an old phone system, right, an old
phone system that's still working, they don't necessarily
see a reason why they should change that out.
If it's in my best interest thatthey change it out, and I can
see it's in their best interest for the business to change it
out to go to UCAS or go to a cloud system or something like
that. I might want to increase the
fear there. And I could say something like,
(12:56):
you know, that you're right about those old phone systems.
They're great until they're not,right?
And the bad news, right, is you don't get to choose the day that
they're not. They just break.
And then now you're, what are you going to do?
Right? So now I'm building a, a, you
know, the storytelling and I'm actually creating a narrative to
him and painting that picture that it's great right now, but
one day it won't be. And you don't get to choose when
(13:18):
that day is. So I'm increasing the fear and
giving him a reason that maybe this is something I should think
about. If maybe I brought in a carrier
and they're having some issues, I might want to downplay that
fear and say, you know what? I know that this carrier,
they've had these issues, but I've worked with this in the
past. We've overcome this in the past.
(13:39):
It's not going to be a problem. I, I know my relationships, I, I
rely on those relationships and there's going to carry through.
We do these things, like I said,second hand nature, right?
We're always doing these things.But if we can think about it and
to where we're using it, like chess pieces, we can control the
narrative and the conversation. So you you've talked about
(14:03):
something that I've never heard before.
It's this thing called fear down, Fear up.
So kind of going from the next step of what we talked about,
can you give us some examples ofwhat is fear down, fear up and
how does that, you know, how does that apply to sales combos?
Yeah. So fear down, fear up.
It's it's kind of like those concept of taking a look at the
(14:24):
the situation to deciding if I need to bump this up to the fear
level or do I need to take down the fear level.
Same from an ego perspective. If I'm working with someone that
has high ego, do I want to play to that ego or do I want to take
their ego down? Typically the negative aspects
of like a, a ego down or, or a fear up, or is that I'm
increasing negativity into this relationship?
(14:47):
You know, from a security perspective, there's things that
you could say that you may not be able to come back from, like
if you really want to crank the dial, right?
An example would be, you know, we need to implement
cybersecurity with a client and they're they just don't see the
value or they don't see the risk.
And if I really want to crank that fear up, there might be
ways I might not come back from it, right?
(15:08):
Where I could say things like, you know, if I were you, I just,
you know, the clients like I can't get the budget.
You know, I understand I've got risk.
I just can't get the budget. If I crank that all the way up,
I could say, well, if you can't get the budget, I would have
your CEO sign off that you're not responsible for this risk.
And if they won't sign that off,I'd find somewhere else to work,
(15:28):
right? You could, you can go all the
way up and really push your point, but you might not be able
to come back from that. So same thing with ego up and
ego down, right? You can play to someone's ego to
a point where you're no longer relevant, or you can downplay
someone's ego to the point that you're offending him.
So there there's different techniques along those lines of
(15:49):
understanding where your client is and what's going to resonate
with them and what won't. Yeah.
Is that a, is that a read the room upon impact?
Is that spend time on LinkedIn and other places understanding
where these people have been before and kind of what their
career paths have been or what'sthe, you know, we got so many
people that are just walking into meetings that have got
(16:10):
referred in and don't know a tonabout the client.
What? What's your?
Where do you start? Yeah, it's a good question.
And all of those kind of narrative approaches to, to the
OR these techniques require report, require relationship
credit to use. And one, you have to know your
person. So you have to have asked enough
questions and understand them enough to know just how far to
(16:34):
push to get your point across and, and to have them be
convinced of, of something that they should be doing.
So report again goes back to youhave to build the relationship
and nothing's going to replace that.
Fair. OK.
The movie Inception, while we'reon this track, so you got to
(16:54):
watch it first time. You think, oh, this is great.
And you watch it a second time and you pick up more third time.
It's one of those those movies, right.
So in the movie Inception, there's this side this, this
idea planting concept. Can you kind of lay the
groundwork for what that is? And then how does that relate
and how is that influential here?
Yeah. You know, the whole premise of
(17:16):
Inception, right, is you go deeper into like these dream
zones until you get to like where it's like their inner
thoughts, right? And then you plant an idea and
then you shut it and then walk away and back it up and then
just let it explode right into and snowball into their own
thought. The same can be from like a, an
analogy can be similar in the cell side, or at least on like
(17:40):
when you're trying to convince somebody of something that maybe
they're not as safe as they think they are, right?
These little simple ideas on thesecurity side, you know, you're,
you don't know your risk, you'renot as safe as you think you
are. You know, an attack is imminent,
right? These things that we can plant
in that that are inherently trueto some degree, They may not be
(18:03):
thinking about this all the time, especially if you're not a
cybersecurity person or, you know, if you're a phone person,
your phone system's going to break or you're, you know, just
from a business perspective, like when you're talking to ACEO
or you know, decision makers along those lines of your, your
competition is adapting to technology faster than you are,
(18:24):
you know, little, little ideas, right, that you can plant and
then build a narrative around that because these things can be
true and we can reinforce that. So it's a little bit of that
convincing side, but it's implementing an idea that
becomes theirs and then they start to adapt and they start to
adopt it and now you're just facilitating it and being a a
(18:44):
partner to help them get to those goals.
So I guess you know, the old school way we were talking about
this on a previous podcast was learn this from a partner.
I said you're really successful in in closing some of these UCAS
deals. Where are you getting, how are
you getting all of these leads? Like, what are you doing?
(19:05):
And he would walk around, walk into offices, he would look at
the equipment that they had right over the over the desk and
just see it was antiquated and he knew there was limitations on
it. And he would immediately start
understanding that and knowing that I, I feel like with what
you're saying now, it's almost like if a partner is trying to
crack into an account, go do some Recon on the competitors
(19:27):
and see how the competitors business and, and kind of what
that customer experience or product experience or whatever
it might be, just what that engagement is like.
And maybe you leverage that to your, your prospect to say, hey,
do you want, are you aware of kind of what the competitive
landscape is on this 'cause I did a little Recon.
Is that helpful for you? Is that AI mean that's an angle
(19:48):
here? Yeah, 100%.
I think people are have caught on to like, hey, if I'm going to
talk to a client, I better go totheir website and see if they've
got a chat bot, maybe call theirsupport line and see what that
experience is like, right? Because then I can relay that.
But to your point, maybe I call my their competitors, oh, their
competitor has a chat bot, theircompetitors using AII could we
could their competitor has a great website, right?
(20:11):
That that is, you know, potentially stuff that you can
use in that conversation to, to build that narrative the way you
want it to go. All right, you got another.
You got another concept I've heard you talk about.
It's called battle drills. So explain for the audience what
is a battle drill 'cause I love this theory.
And then how do we incorporate that into our line of
(20:32):
questioning, 'cause we we tend to just get a lot of information
and we just miss stuff. Yeah, well, battle drills
generally speaking in the military are are, you know, pre,
pre planned ways of how we're going to respond to something,
right. SO PS or standard operating
procedure, TT, PS, the mix of SOP and TTP kinds of ends up
(20:56):
being those battle drills, right?
When we get, you know, attacked from the right, we're going to
do this. When we get attacked from the
left, we're going to do this, you know, in this kind of
ambush, this is the way we're going to escape that ambush.
Those are all battle drills. In the intelligence side, we
have battle drills as well. And specifically in, you know,
when you're doing negotiation ordebriefings or things like that.
(21:19):
The battle drills that we have are when I hear certain things.
I'm going to do something every single time when I get when this
happens, this is my battle drillin a very simplified way.
When if I'm talking or doing a discovery call or doing an
interrogation or otherwise, whenI hear nouns, I'm going to
(21:39):
notate them and then battle drill them.
Meaning I've got a pre set up list of questions or, or things
I need to know about this noun. So you know, person, place,
thing, all those things, right? From an IT perspective,
firewalls, servers, you know, workstations, even people,
right? I want to know everything about
(22:00):
them. The reason we do a battle drill
so we can fully exploit those things, those nouns and exploit
sounds sinister, right? But when you, you think about
it, what it means is I, it's really just discovered.
I need to fully discover whatever these things are.
So from a server perspective or,or firewall, the make model, Oh,
(22:22):
you know, the, the firmware that's running on it, right?
The how old is it? Do they like it?
Is it functioning? Who's looking at the logs?
All those things right that we want to do from the battle drill
perspective. If someone gives me a line that
says we have two firewalls and three servers and 10 people on
(22:44):
staff, right, That those are, I have three things I need to
battle drill right there. So what I would do is I'd stop
the conversation, battle drill the firewall, get everything I
need from that battle drill the servers and then ask about the
people. So I've gone through those three
things, exploited them to the full list, and now I can move on
to the next sentence. If I assume I know some of these
(23:06):
things and I don't ask questions, that's where we run
into issues afterwards when we, we did the debrief with a
partner, with a supplier and they're like, they're doing
backup, backing up to where? What's the backup target?
They're like, oh, well, I guess I didn't ask that.
They just said they're already doing it.
So I didn't, I didn't find out right.
A lot of those or we, we talked to partners and, and some of
(23:26):
these like success stories. It's like we asked this one
question and it opened up the opportunity, right, to to be
bigger than it ever was. And that's on our team, right on
the engineering team. That's where we we specialize.
I don't necessarily think we know this, but it's because
we're exploiting and we're fullybattle drilling these things to
get, you know, how old is your hardware?
(23:47):
Oh, it's up for refresh. Boom, new opportunity.
Now we have a hardware refresh. Oh, you're backing up to an on
Prem Nas, What about cloud? Oh, you're not doing any cloud.
Boom, another opportunity, right?
It's these exploitations that wedo internally with our on the
discovery calls that really makethese opportunities much, much
bigger and where we have successand the battle drills, doing
(24:11):
them over and over again and getting good at them is what
makes that success repeatable. We can do it every time.
You know, I love the I love thisand I think you're right.
I think there's a theme in the beginning you talked about if
there's some of these things that we're going to talk about
that we just inherently do and we don't.
We don't know that it's, you know, so important to do them.
Maybe sometimes we do them, sometimes we don't.
(24:32):
But I love thinking about discovery calls in the frame of
a battle drill, right? Because it's repeatable, it's
scalable, nothing gets missed. And to your point, I think that
the value that we've seen the partners, the feedback, right,
from having folks like yourself on the discovery call is, my
gosh, we thought we were going to come in for a VDI
opportunity. And we walked out with a VDI
(24:52):
opportunity, a security opportunity, a backup
opportunity. And now the customers are
sitting here going, yeah. I mean, I didn't know that you
could help me with all of this stuff, right?
And I love, I love that process of just a layer deeper.
And they're not, you know, it's not this crazy.
It doesn't have to be this crazy, overly technical
conversation. To your point, I think we just
(25:13):
know where some of these things breakdown and and we might hear
this oh, I have this database orI have this server, I have this
whatever. And maybe before you'd hear oh,
and it's maintained by X and that might be a you know, from
an objection handling perspective, that might be the
place that we stop. We're like, oh, it's handled by
(25:34):
X. We don't want to step on XS
toes, but I like your line of, of stealing your battle drill
line here of yeah, but how's it going?
How how is that? How's that experience being like
that's managed over there? And some of the wildest
opportunities have came when there wasn't anything seemingly
in an hour of discovery call. And then we asked, oh, by the
(25:55):
way, how's it going? Oh, actually, you know, it's
going OK. But it turns out that giant
piece of equipment in our infrastructure is being
decommissioned from the MSP that's managing it.
That's not anything you can helpus with, is it?
Absolutely right. So I think you've seen story on
story. And maybe at the end of this,
it's just, hey, we help you witha lot of things.
We uncovered six or seven things.
What's the most important? Like how do you how do you go
(26:18):
from discovering so much to thenfocusing in on what we handle
first? What's your process there?
I mean that that comes back to working out with the rapport
side and figuring out what theirpriorities are.
And then also kind of what your priorities are.
What do you want to focus on 1stright from what's going to get
you, you know, in the account fastest and what's going to keep
(26:41):
you in there longest? You know what's going to be
sticky, right? And sometimes it's balancing
those of like, hey, licensing can be fast.
We can get in the in the door with licensing, then we can work
on some of these bigger stuff. That could be a tactic you want
to go down or it could be, hey, their priority is this and this,
they're not going to do anythingelse till they would, till we
solve that. Then I'm going all in on that.
(27:02):
So the really the success comes down to do I have the rapport?
Do I have a relationship and I'masking the right questions.
And if you do the follow techniques correctly, you're
going to make the both of those line up and you're going to
you're going to be successful and you're not going to miss
information and you're not goingto miss opportunities when
they're presented with the battle drill.
(27:23):
Specifically what I, I would recommend, what I did, you know,
in interrogations or debriefing is, you know, person, place,
thing, whatever those, you know,whatever my, my nouns are that I
need to focus on, write down what those questions are, or at
least one word, right, age, OS type model, you know, those
things. Because even if you've been
(27:44):
doing it for a long, long time, which a lot of people on the, on
this call have been, our brains aren't great at remembering
things, especially when we're inthe heat of a conversation.
We've got other things going on,right?
So memory is something that, youknow, if we're doing a zoom
call, we can all have our notes up and just have things to
remind us and, and have those ready.
(28:05):
So we're not missing stuff. If we're, if we're not missing
it, we're going to ask the questions, we're going to have
the opportunities. 11 thought before we go to wrap this up, I
want to talk book recommendations for a second
'cause you drum me up thoughts for a couple.
So we we threw out Dale CarnegieHow to win friends and influence
people. That clearly still applies.
(28:27):
No reason. It's a no surprise.
It's a number one bestseller. You and I and a few others on
this team We've shared Chris Voss.
All right, Chris Voss is this excounterterrorism hostage
negotiator turned business consultant.
You know, I think he's got some great books out there.
What is it? How to how to how to depend, how
(28:49):
to negotiate like your life depends on it or something.
I I forget the title. Yeah.
He's got some good master classes out there.
Any other? Never split the difference.
Sorry, that's the one I was thinking of.
Yeah, yeah. Any any other books?
Any other resources? Any places to steer people like
this? Is that is that enough to get
people started? No, I think, you know, for the
(29:09):
other fellow introverts out there, right, that are in sales
or or otherwise, there's a book called The Charisma Myth by
Olivia Cobain, which talks abouthow charisma, while some people
just naturally have it, it's also can be learned, right?
It's there's a science to it. It can be learned and you can be
(29:29):
likable. And that's where it already
starts, right? You can from a discovery call,
you can do multiple discovery calls and miss stuff and come
back to things. But to be likable and have
someone want to do business withyou is really where it all
starts, right? So yeah, charisma myth, really,
really good. Even if you are a social
butterfly, I think it's good to like, you know, there's a lot of
(29:50):
practice things in that book that you can do to just get
better. Of it just the right mix or they
define it, just the right mix ofwarmth and the right mix of
power. OK, the people know you have
some stories, Trevor. I know a lot of them you
probably can't share, but take us out here.
(30:11):
Let's go. Let's go.
Funniest story that you can share in your military past that
is not classified? Yeah, yeah, there.
There's one actually I was thinking about the other day.
I brought it to a friend that that was pretty funny.
So I was on actually deployment and then and then, you know, I
was working with the French military a lot.
We were doing intelligence sync,so I was doing translation and
(30:33):
all this kind of stuff. So one day we had this meeting
because we're doing an operation, a joint operation.
And I go into to meet them and me and my boss and then a bunch
of the, the French military people.
And we're talking. And then in during this meeting,
a woman walks in, a French womanwalks in and everyone stands up.
And so we obviously stood up andshe starts going around and, and
(30:55):
kissing people on the cheek, right.
In France, when they meet someone that they know, they,
they kiss him on the cheek and then, you know, that's their
greeting, right? So she's, you know, they're
going through the room like fouror five people deep.
And then I'm in line and I, I see this coming and I'm
thinking, well, I guess this is what I've been trained for,
right? Like this is I'm just going to
(31:16):
take one for the team and we're going to move on and I'm going
to like, I can do this, it's no big deal.
I don't care. So she comes up to me and puts
her hand out and I go for her cheek and I kiss her on the
cheek and the like, she has thisbewildered look on her face.
So then my, my boss told me later, I had this panic look on
my face. And in France, they're all like
(31:38):
in French, they're talking like,do you, do you know him?
Like, do you know, how do you know this guy?
Like, what's going on? I didn't know at the time that
like you do this for people you've like, you're actually
close with. And they're like she's like, no,
I've never met this person in mylife.
So she was nice about it and kind of played it off.
My boss is like dying laughing. He didn't do it because, you
know, he's smarter than I am. Played off the meeting.
(32:01):
I didn't couldn't read the ranks, but ends up she's like
outranked everyone in the room. Was this general?
So lesson was, I guess, you know, don't kiss French generals
on the cheek when you're an American nobody.
But yeah, kind of a funny story.More embarrassing than anything.
(32:22):
But yeah, one of those, one of those times, I guess.
Just just when you think you've read the room, like, yeah,
there's always surprises. When you exactly when you think
you're the the master of human connection and yeah.
In walks the French general Awesome.
All right, good stuff, man. That that wraps us up.
(32:43):
I love this. I think this has been there's a
lot of good things in here that we've we can tend to use on a
daily basis. I think our advisors get a lot
of value out of this. I really appreciate everything
you do, appreciate you coming onand awesome knowledge drop man.
Yeah. Appreciate it.
Thanks for your time. All right, everybody, that wraps
us up for today. As always, don't forget whether
you're coming to us on Spotify on Apple Music, go follow, go
(33:06):
subscribe so you can get these as soon as they drop every
Wednesday morning and you won't miss out on cool stuff like
this. Trevor Burnside, solution
engineer, Telaris. This has been the art of
discovery calls, stories from military intelligence,
negotiation. Till next time, next level.
Biztech has been a production ofTelaris Studio 19.
Please visit telaris.com For more information.
Welcome to the podcast designed to fuel your success in selling
technology solutions. I'm your host, Josh Lopresto,
SVP of sales engineering at Telaris, and this is Next Level
Biztech. Hey everybody, welcome back.
We got a fun one for you today on with us.
Today we have got Mr. Burly Man,Trevor Burnside, solution
(00:24):
Engineer Telaris. Trevor, welcome on Buddy.
Hey, appreciate it. How's it going dude?
We I'm I'm excited for this guy's today's today's title
track here the art of discovery calls stories from military
intelligence negotiation. This is going to get juicy.
All right, Trevor. So, so everybody knows you,
(00:45):
loves you, long time Telaris, you're out there helping
partners in deals. And, and I think we know, we
know that piece of it, right? We, we, we talked about that.
But what I don't know that a lotof people know is your
background, right? And your military and your
service and all of that stuff. So maybe just set the stage for
us, because this is kind of a different call.
(01:05):
This is a little bit of a different episode.
So set the stage for us, your military deployments, how some
of that training, rapport, resistance, all these things,
maybe some of the deployments just set the stage.
Here Yeah, yeah, When I. So I did enlist and I did six
years in the military, specifically Army.
And when I actually started, I thought I was going to go into
(01:28):
communications or intelligence communications or something,
actually went to the recruiter and was going to sign up to do
that. And they actually didn't have
any jobs open for the languages I wanted because I wanted to do
some translation. And at the time they said oh,
you can only do you know, Korean.
And I was like, I'm not learningthat.
(01:49):
So anything else I'll do any other language and they're like,
well, you got you can wait six months.
And I was like, I'm not waiting six months.
I'm here, I'm signing today and chose human intelligence and
went without route. Now, personally, I'm, I'm fairly
introverted. So, you know, in the in
(02:09):
intelligence world, the human tears are kind of known as more
like the social butterflies liketo talk to people and, and, and
not that I don't like to talk topeople, but it's more it's not
necessarily my in my nature, right to just get out of my
shell and talk to people. And something I've came to learn
actually is some of the best people in human intelligence are
(02:29):
introverted because it's not something that they is, is part
of their nature, right? They actually have to focus on
it. So it becomes something that
they get really good at because they just adopt these principles
pretty well of of using conversation like a chess game
rather than just saying what comes to your mind kind of
thing. So started that, did that for a
(02:51):
couple years and coming back into the sales world, I actually
just saw that there were so manysimilarities to it.
And a lot of what I've learned kind of in the military and
talking to people has directly translated to to the sell side,
working with clients, working with people, cold calls, all
(03:12):
that kind of stuff. There's there's a ton of things
that crossover more than you might you might think, actually.
And from a deployment perspective, can can we share
anything deployment wise? Are we not allowed to say where
you were? Yeah.
No, I can I can talk about some of that.
So I was in Northwest Africa fora bit of time and we were going
(03:34):
after, you know, ISIS groups that were and other violent
extremist organizations that were operating up there kind of
oppressing the local population.So we are working with local
government forces to, you know, help them since we had just, you
know, kind of gotten out of 20 years of war, got really good at
that, you know, following and and tracking and all that kind
(03:56):
of stuff. So we were helping our partner
forces and those nations over there.
Well, First off, I'd be remiss if I didn't say thank you for
your service. We appreciate you.
Thank you. As we think about key, let's
let's talk about like key lessons, maybe what are some of
the key lessons from the intelligence training side that
you can share that that are applied to?
(04:18):
We've got advisors listening that are out there trying to
build these strong relationshipsin business.
What's the tie there? I I think when it comes down to
at A at a basic level is when you're talking to somebody on a
sell side or intelligence, really the goal there is to
convince them of something to change with their normal altered
(04:39):
like course of life, right? And do something different than
they would have done had you notbeen there.
So you're convincing them you'reusing different techniques in
that case to align your goals ortheir goals to your goals and
have that be more something you work towards together, right.
And and to accomplish. So from a, you know, sales side,
(05:00):
when you're working with clients, you're trying to get
them to, you know, see something, adopt something in
the new technology, change old technology, all those kinds of
things. It's still the same when you're
working in an intelligence of trying to get someone to work
with you and provide informationto you where otherwise they may
not have. I like it.
(05:23):
Let's let's think about, let's build this a little bit.
So why, you know, we can't walk in sometimes we like to walk
into these deals and just go, OK, tell me everything that you
need right here and I'm your person.
And meanwhile, they just met us or they just met our the
advisor. They just so why, why, why
tailor report building based on the client?
What's the value there? So anytime you're working with
(05:44):
somebody, it's in intelligence and really on the sell side too.
I'd say report comes first because people on the sales
side, people do business with people that they like and
intelligence people work with people that they like.
They want to, you're going to, you know, as the old adage says,
right, you're going to attract more bees with honey than you
are, you know, vinegar. It's it's the same way, right?
(06:07):
So report comes first and building a relationship, whether
that's, you know, just finding common ground somewhere is going
to come before any questioning, before any anything like that.
And it's the same in sales. You know, you get on the phone,
talk about sports, you talk about something, find the common
ground and then go from there and build those.
So like the small talk stuff, itactually matters.
(06:28):
You know, there's a lot of jokeson that, like online about, you
know, the weather and all the small talks on on zoom calls.
But in the end it actually matters, and it builds
relationships and lines with people to see the humanity
before you actually go into the convincing side of of the
conversation. Is there a, you know, thinking
(06:49):
prefrontal cortex primordial is what's the psychological unlock
with rapport building that's custom?
Is it, is it disarmament? I mean, what, what?
What do you see in that? Yeah, it, it's disarmament.
I think, you know, in intelligence, we, you sometimes
you end up working with people that, you know, you really on,
(07:11):
on every other day you would just detest, right?
Or they're doing things that areabhorrent or you, you just can't
get behind. And in those cases, you still
have to find a way to find common ground with those people.
And, you know, common terms of like, you know, same, same of
like you like this, I like this,you like this, You know, we,
(07:31):
we'll find something that we both like and make it so that I
actually don't focus on the things that I detest about you
or the things that I don't agreewith.
We can focus on something that we do agree with and sell the
same thing that you're going to run into people that, you know,
in this heightened political climate, right, that you just
don't see eye to eye with. And you can focus on the things
that we do get along with. And, and building that trust is,
(07:54):
is where that starts of I like something, you like something,
I'm building that trust. And now I understand you and I,
I know you and you know me. That's where that kind of
starts, at least on the report side.
You know, I like just listening to a podcast to the, there's one
out there, ACQ 2. What these guys do, you know,
they have on founders, CEOs, things like that.
They had on this guy, long time CEO for ServiceNow, Bill
(08:17):
McDermott, right? And he's arguably one of the
best enterprise sellers of all time.
Now he's, he's ascended to ServiceNow CEO.
But his thing was, I just like to be out there.
I like to run loose. Let me out there, let me run,
let me do these things. And so he had a lot of a lot of
great techniques that encourage everybody to go check out that
episode. But one of the things that he
(08:39):
talked about was you have to it relates to this kind of building
rapport story. You can't walk into these
meetings cold. You have to know more about or
know something about that audience to have some sort of
custom. I mean, I have to imagine that
that that helps you fall back onwhat am I going to talk about,
right? I don't want to go right into
business. I've got to find some sort of
(09:00):
common ground to talk to them. About right.
Yeah, absolutely. And, and even an interrogation
or or otherwise, we always say the best manual is how to win
friends and influence people andstarting there, right, it's open
source. That's not secret, you know, on
how to build rapport or be likable with people.
That book and those concepts areapplicable on sales and and
(09:23):
really talking with any people really as a day-to-day job.
Yeah, love it. OK, so let's think about, I mean
those are some of the obvious reasons.
What's a what's a non obvious reason to kind of demonstrate
the value and incentivize these clients during the conversations
and why is that so key? Yeah, this is where it kind of
gets into the the chess aspect of things, right?
(09:43):
Where these are things that we do without even thinking every
day. When you're having conversations
with people, with your family, with your friends, we're all
using these techniques. Often, though, we're doing it
without knowing it. So the the difference about kind
of taking these techniques and understanding them and actually
harnessing them for your benefitis where it kind of the, the
(10:05):
secret power comes, right? The Jedi mind tricks, so to
speak, where you can, you can dothe cool kind of cool things on
the on the convincing side. Now with when you're convincing
someone, it always has to come with an incentive.
And we do this, like I said, automatically.
And the agent side, we tend to, we tend to almost wrap this with
(10:26):
my value. You know, I, I need to explain
my value as an agent or as a partner.
And they need to understand my value really that's I need to
give them the incentive I need. They need to see the incentive
of working with me or working with or doing business with my
suppliers or whatever that is. It's understanding that there's
an incentive to doing business with me and then throughout that
(10:47):
process reinforcing what that incentive is.
And sometimes that incentive canactually change per customer or
per client, right? Because not everyone necessarily
cares about the same thing. You know, from a, a partner
perspective, my value could be that I help procurement teams.
Well, if the client has 25 people on a procurement team,
(11:07):
maybe that value is lessened, right?
So that incentive is less. And so I need to provide a
different incentive and we can pivot and change and, and be
different and provide different things to different clients.
And I think those where we see, you know, agents that understand
that and do that, you know, sometimes second nature, you
know, just being able to pivot like that are the ones that are
really successful. So what are think about some of
(11:30):
those techniques, right. So, so the advisors out there,
they're trying to enforce this position during these
conversations, maybe give us just some of these narrative
building techniques that work. Yeah.
So in conversation, you know, there's different techniques as
far as how to talk to somebody and from the information
(11:50):
perspective of changing their will to my will, right.
And what I have to do is create a narrative around that to it so
that it makes it reality for them.
There's, there's several ways todo this.
And I'll, I'll kind of just talkabout it in a vague sense where
I can, I can pick certain things, what's going on and
(12:13):
focus on those. Fear is actually, you know, a
driving factor for a lot of people.
And so taking fear and I can either weaponize it and make
increase the fear or I can decrease the fear and use it to
my advantage based on how I'm looking at it at something,
right? So let's for an example, if I
(12:33):
have a client who has an old phone system, right, an old
phone system that's still working, they don't necessarily
see a reason why they should change that out.
If it's in my best interest thatthey change it out, and I can
see it's in their best interest for the business to change it
out to go to UCAS or go to a cloud system or something like
that. I might want to increase the
fear there. And I could say something like,
(12:56):
you know, that you're right about those old phone systems.
They're great until they're not,right?
And the bad news, right, is you don't get to choose the day that
they're not. They just break.
And then now you're, what are you going to do?
Right? So now I'm building a, a, you
know, the storytelling and I'm actually creating a narrative to
him and painting that picture that it's great right now, but
one day it won't be. And you don't get to choose when
(13:18):
that day is. So I'm increasing the fear and
giving him a reason that maybe this is something I should think
about. If maybe I brought in a carrier
and they're having some issues, I might want to downplay that
fear and say, you know what? I know that this carrier,
they've had these issues, but I've worked with this in the
past. We've overcome this in the past.
(13:39):
It's not going to be a problem. I, I know my relationships, I, I
rely on those relationships and there's going to carry through.
We do these things, like I said,second hand nature, right?
We're always doing these things.But if we can think about it and
to where we're using it, like chess pieces, we can control the
narrative and the conversation. So you you've talked about
(14:03):
something that I've never heard before.
It's this thing called fear down, Fear up.
So kind of going from the next step of what we talked about,
can you give us some examples ofwhat is fear down, fear up and
how does that, you know, how does that apply to sales combos?
Yeah. So fear down, fear up.
It's it's kind of like those concept of taking a look at the
(14:24):
the situation to deciding if I need to bump this up to the fear
level or do I need to take down the fear level.
Same from an ego perspective. If I'm working with someone that
has high ego, do I want to play to that ego or do I want to take
their ego down? Typically the negative aspects
of like a, a ego down or, or a fear up, or is that I'm
increasing negativity into this relationship?
(14:47):
You know, from a security perspective, there's things that
you could say that you may not be able to come back from, like
if you really want to crank the dial, right?
An example would be, you know, we need to implement
cybersecurity with a client and they're they just don't see the
value or they don't see the risk.
And if I really want to crank that fear up, there might be
ways I might not come back from it, right?
(15:08):
Where I could say things like, you know, if I were you, I just,
you know, the clients like I can't get the budget.
You know, I understand I've got risk.
I just can't get the budget. If I crank that all the way up,
I could say, well, if you can't get the budget, I would have
your CEO sign off that you're not responsible for this risk.
And if they won't sign that off,I'd find somewhere else to work,
(15:28):
right? You could, you can go all the
way up and really push your point, but you might not be able
to come back from that. So same thing with ego up and
ego down, right? You can play to someone's ego to
a point where you're no longer relevant, or you can downplay
someone's ego to the point that you're offending him.
So there there's different techniques along those lines of
(15:49):
understanding where your client is and what's going to resonate
with them and what won't. Yeah.
Is that a, is that a read the room upon impact?
Is that spend time on LinkedIn and other places understanding
where these people have been before and kind of what their
career paths have been or what'sthe, you know, we got so many
people that are just walking into meetings that have got
(16:10):
referred in and don't know a tonabout the client.
What? What's your?
Where do you start? Yeah, it's a good question.
And all of those kind of narrative approaches to, to the
OR these techniques require report, require relationship
credit to use. And one, you have to know your
person. So you have to have asked enough
questions and understand them enough to know just how far to
(16:34):
push to get your point across and, and to have them be
convinced of, of something that they should be doing.
So report again goes back to youhave to build the relationship
and nothing's going to replace that.
Fair. OK.
The movie Inception, while we'reon this track, so you got to
(16:54):
watch it first time. You think, oh, this is great.
And you watch it a second time and you pick up more third time.
It's one of those those movies, right.
So in the movie Inception, there's this side this, this
idea planting concept. Can you kind of lay the
groundwork for what that is? And then how does that relate
and how is that influential here?
Yeah. You know, the whole premise of
(17:16):
Inception, right, is you go deeper into like these dream
zones until you get to like where it's like their inner
thoughts, right? And then you plant an idea and
then you shut it and then walk away and back it up and then
just let it explode right into and snowball into their own
thought. The same can be from like a, an
analogy can be similar in the cell side, or at least on like
(17:40):
when you're trying to convince somebody of something that maybe
they're not as safe as they think they are, right?
These little simple ideas on thesecurity side, you know, you're,
you don't know your risk, you'renot as safe as you think you
are. You know, an attack is imminent,
right? These things that we can plant
in that that are inherently trueto some degree, They may not be
(18:03):
thinking about this all the time, especially if you're not a
cybersecurity person or, you know, if you're a phone person,
your phone system's going to break or you're, you know, just
from a business perspective, like when you're talking to ACEO
or you know, decision makers along those lines of your, your
competition is adapting to technology faster than you are,
(18:24):
you know, little, little ideas, right, that you can plant and
then build a narrative around that because these things can be
true and we can reinforce that. So it's a little bit of that
convincing side, but it's implementing an idea that
becomes theirs and then they start to adapt and they start to
adopt it and now you're just facilitating it and being a a
(18:44):
partner to help them get to those goals.
So I guess you know, the old school way we were talking about
this on a previous podcast was learn this from a partner.
I said you're really successful in in closing some of these UCAS
deals. Where are you getting, how are
you getting all of these leads? Like, what are you doing?
(19:05):
And he would walk around, walk into offices, he would look at
the equipment that they had right over the over the desk and
just see it was antiquated and he knew there was limitations on
it. And he would immediately start
understanding that and knowing that I, I feel like with what
you're saying now, it's almost like if a partner is trying to
crack into an account, go do some Recon on the competitors
(19:27):
and see how the competitors business and, and kind of what
that customer experience or product experience or whatever
it might be, just what that engagement is like.
And maybe you leverage that to your, your prospect to say, hey,
do you want, are you aware of kind of what the competitive
landscape is on this 'cause I did a little Recon.
Is that helpful for you? Is that AI mean that's an angle
(19:48):
here? Yeah, 100%.
I think people are have caught on to like, hey, if I'm going to
talk to a client, I better go totheir website and see if they've
got a chat bot, maybe call theirsupport line and see what that
experience is like, right? Because then I can relay that.
But to your point, maybe I call my their competitors, oh, their
competitor has a chat bot, theircompetitors using AII could we
could their competitor has a great website, right?
(20:11):
That that is, you know, potentially stuff that you can
use in that conversation to, to build that narrative the way you
want it to go. All right, you got another.
You got another concept I've heard you talk about.
It's called battle drills. So explain for the audience what
is a battle drill 'cause I love this theory.
And then how do we incorporate that into our line of
(20:32):
questioning, 'cause we we tend to just get a lot of information
and we just miss stuff. Yeah, well, battle drills
generally speaking in the military are are, you know, pre,
pre planned ways of how we're going to respond to something,
right. SO PS or standard operating
procedure, TT, PS, the mix of SOP and TTP kinds of ends up
(20:56):
being those battle drills, right?
When we get, you know, attacked from the right, we're going to
do this. When we get attacked from the
left, we're going to do this, you know, in this kind of
ambush, this is the way we're going to escape that ambush.
Those are all battle drills. In the intelligence side, we
have battle drills as well. And specifically in, you know,
when you're doing negotiation ordebriefings or things like that.
(21:19):
The battle drills that we have are when I hear certain things.
I'm going to do something every single time when I get when this
happens, this is my battle drillin a very simplified way.
When if I'm talking or doing a discovery call or doing an
interrogation or otherwise, whenI hear nouns, I'm going to
(21:39):
notate them and then battle drill them.
Meaning I've got a pre set up list of questions or, or things
I need to know about this noun. So you know, person, place,
thing, all those things, right? From an IT perspective,
firewalls, servers, you know, workstations, even people,
right? I want to know everything about
(22:00):
them. The reason we do a battle drill
so we can fully exploit those things, those nouns and exploit
sounds sinister, right? But when you, you think about
it, what it means is I, it's really just discovered.
I need to fully discover whatever these things are.
So from a server perspective or,or firewall, the make model, Oh,
(22:22):
you know, the, the firmware that's running on it, right?
The how old is it? Do they like it?
Is it functioning? Who's looking at the logs?
All those things right that we want to do from the battle drill
perspective. If someone gives me a line that
says we have two firewalls and three servers and 10 people on
(22:44):
staff, right, That those are, I have three things I need to
battle drill right there. So what I would do is I'd stop
the conversation, battle drill the firewall, get everything I
need from that battle drill the servers and then ask about the
people. So I've gone through those three
things, exploited them to the full list, and now I can move on
to the next sentence. If I assume I know some of these
(23:06):
things and I don't ask questions, that's where we run
into issues afterwards when we, we did the debrief with a
partner, with a supplier and they're like, they're doing
backup, backing up to where? What's the backup target?
They're like, oh, well, I guess I didn't ask that.
They just said they're already doing it.
So I didn't, I didn't find out right.
A lot of those or we, we talked to partners and, and some of
(23:26):
these like success stories. It's like we asked this one
question and it opened up the opportunity, right, to to be
bigger than it ever was. And that's on our team, right on
the engineering team. That's where we we specialize.
I don't necessarily think we know this, but it's because
we're exploiting and we're fullybattle drilling these things to
get, you know, how old is your hardware?
(23:47):
Oh, it's up for refresh. Boom, new opportunity.
Now we have a hardware refresh. Oh, you're backing up to an on
Prem Nas, What about cloud? Oh, you're not doing any cloud.
Boom, another opportunity, right?
It's these exploitations that wedo internally with our on the
discovery calls that really makethese opportunities much, much
bigger and where we have successand the battle drills, doing
(24:11):
them over and over again and getting good at them is what
makes that success repeatable. We can do it every time.
You know, I love the I love thisand I think you're right.
I think there's a theme in the beginning you talked about if
there's some of these things that we're going to talk about
that we just inherently do and we don't.
We don't know that it's, you know, so important to do them.
Maybe sometimes we do them, sometimes we don't.
(24:32):
But I love thinking about discovery calls in the frame of
a battle drill, right? Because it's repeatable, it's
scalable, nothing gets missed. And to your point, I think that
the value that we've seen the partners, the feedback, right,
from having folks like yourself on the discovery call is, my
gosh, we thought we were going to come in for a VDI
opportunity. And we walked out with a VDI
(24:52):
opportunity, a security opportunity, a backup
opportunity. And now the customers are
sitting here going, yeah. I mean, I didn't know that you
could help me with all of this stuff, right?
And I love, I love that process of just a layer deeper.
And they're not, you know, it's not this crazy.
It doesn't have to be this crazy, overly technical
conversation. To your point, I think we just
(25:13):
know where some of these things breakdown and and we might hear
this oh, I have this database orI have this server, I have this
whatever. And maybe before you'd hear oh,
and it's maintained by X and that might be a you know, from
an objection handling perspective, that might be the
place that we stop. We're like, oh, it's handled by
(25:34):
X. We don't want to step on XS
toes, but I like your line of, of stealing your battle drill
line here of yeah, but how's it going?
How how is that? How's that experience being like
that's managed over there? And some of the wildest
opportunities have came when there wasn't anything seemingly
in an hour of discovery call. And then we asked, oh, by the
(25:55):
way, how's it going? Oh, actually, you know, it's
going OK. But it turns out that giant
piece of equipment in our infrastructure is being
decommissioned from the MSP that's managing it.
That's not anything you can helpus with, is it?
Absolutely right. So I think you've seen story on
story. And maybe at the end of this,
it's just, hey, we help you witha lot of things.
We uncovered six or seven things.
What's the most important? Like how do you how do you go
(26:18):
from discovering so much to thenfocusing in on what we handle
first? What's your process there?
I mean that that comes back to working out with the rapport
side and figuring out what theirpriorities are.
And then also kind of what your priorities are.
What do you want to focus on 1stright from what's going to get
you, you know, in the account fastest and what's going to keep
(26:41):
you in there longest? You know what's going to be
sticky, right? And sometimes it's balancing
those of like, hey, licensing can be fast.
We can get in the in the door with licensing, then we can work
on some of these bigger stuff. That could be a tactic you want
to go down or it could be, hey, their priority is this and this,
they're not going to do anythingelse till they would, till we
solve that. Then I'm going all in on that.
(27:02):
So the really the success comes down to do I have the rapport?
Do I have a relationship and I'masking the right questions.
And if you do the follow techniques correctly, you're
going to make the both of those line up and you're going to
you're going to be successful and you're not going to miss
information and you're not goingto miss opportunities when
they're presented with the battle drill.
(27:23):
Specifically what I, I would recommend, what I did, you know,
in interrogations or debriefing is, you know, person, place,
thing, whatever those, you know,whatever my, my nouns are that I
need to focus on, write down what those questions are, or at
least one word, right, age, OS type model, you know, those
things. Because even if you've been
(27:44):
doing it for a long, long time, which a lot of people on the, on
this call have been, our brains aren't great at remembering
things, especially when we're inthe heat of a conversation.
We've got other things going on,right?
So memory is something that, youknow, if we're doing a zoom
call, we can all have our notes up and just have things to
remind us and, and have those ready.
(28:05):
So we're not missing stuff. If we're, if we're not missing
it, we're going to ask the questions, we're going to have
the opportunities. 11 thought before we go to wrap this up, I
want to talk book recommendations for a second
'cause you drum me up thoughts for a couple.
So we we threw out Dale CarnegieHow to win friends and influence
people. That clearly still applies.
(28:27):
No reason. It's a no surprise.
It's a number one bestseller. You and I and a few others on
this team We've shared Chris Voss.
All right, Chris Voss is this excounterterrorism hostage
negotiator turned business consultant.
You know, I think he's got some great books out there.
What is it? How to how to how to depend, how
(28:49):
to negotiate like your life depends on it or something.
I I forget the title. Yeah.
He's got some good master classes out there.
Any other? Never split the difference.
Sorry, that's the one I was thinking of.
Yeah, yeah. Any any other books?
Any other resources? Any places to steer people like
this? Is that is that enough to get
people started? No, I think, you know, for the
(29:09):
other fellow introverts out there, right, that are in sales
or or otherwise, there's a book called The Charisma Myth by
Olivia Cobain, which talks abouthow charisma, while some people
just naturally have it, it's also can be learned, right?
It's there's a science to it. It can be learned and you can be
(29:29):
likable. And that's where it already
starts, right? You can from a discovery call,
you can do multiple discovery calls and miss stuff and come
back to things. But to be likable and have
someone want to do business withyou is really where it all
starts, right? So yeah, charisma myth, really,
really good. Even if you are a social
butterfly, I think it's good to like, you know, there's a lot of
(29:50):
practice things in that book that you can do to just get
better. Of it just the right mix or they
define it, just the right mix ofwarmth and the right mix of
power. OK, the people know you have
some stories, Trevor. I know a lot of them you
probably can't share, but take us out here.
(30:11):
Let's go. Let's go.
Funniest story that you can share in your military past that
is not classified? Yeah, yeah, there.
There's one actually I was thinking about the other day.
I brought it to a friend that that was pretty funny.
So I was on actually deployment and then and then, you know, I
was working with the French military a lot.
We were doing intelligence sync,so I was doing translation and
(30:33):
all this kind of stuff. So one day we had this meeting
because we're doing an operation, a joint operation.
And I go into to meet them and me and my boss and then a bunch
of the, the French military people.
And we're talking. And then in during this meeting,
a woman walks in, a French womanwalks in and everyone stands up.
And so we obviously stood up andshe starts going around and, and
(30:55):
kissing people on the cheek, right.
In France, when they meet someone that they know, they,
they kiss him on the cheek and then, you know, that's their
greeting, right? So she's, you know, they're
going through the room like fouror five people deep.
And then I'm in line and I, I see this coming and I'm
thinking, well, I guess this is what I've been trained for,
right? Like this is I'm just going to
(31:16):
take one for the team and we're going to move on and I'm going
to like, I can do this, it's no big deal.
I don't care. So she comes up to me and puts
her hand out and I go for her cheek and I kiss her on the
cheek and the like, she has thisbewildered look on her face.
So then my, my boss told me later, I had this panic look on
my face. And in France, they're all like
(31:38):
in French, they're talking like,do you, do you know him?
Like, do you know, how do you know this guy?
Like, what's going on? I didn't know at the time that
like you do this for people you've like, you're actually
close with. And they're like she's like, no,
I've never met this person in mylife.
So she was nice about it and kind of played it off.
My boss is like dying laughing. He didn't do it because, you
know, he's smarter than I am. Played off the meeting.
(32:01):
I didn't couldn't read the ranks, but ends up she's like
outranked everyone in the room. Was this general?
So lesson was, I guess, you know, don't kiss French generals
on the cheek when you're an American nobody.
But yeah, kind of a funny story.More embarrassing than anything.
(32:22):
But yeah, one of those, one of those times, I guess.
Just just when you think you've read the room, like, yeah,
there's always surprises. When you exactly when you think
you're the the master of human connection and yeah.
In walks the French general Awesome.
All right, good stuff, man. That that wraps us up.
(32:43):
I love this. I think this has been there's a
lot of good things in here that we've we can tend to use on a
daily basis. I think our advisors get a lot
of value out of this. I really appreciate everything
you do, appreciate you coming onand awesome knowledge drop man.
Yeah. Appreciate it.
Thanks for your time. All right, everybody, that wraps
us up for today. As always, don't forget whether
you're coming to us on Spotify on Apple Music, go follow, go
(33:06):
subscribe so you can get these as soon as they drop every
Wednesday morning and you won't miss out on cool stuff like
this. Trevor Burnside, solution
engineer, Telaris. This has been the art of
discovery calls, stories from military intelligence,
negotiation. Till next time, next level.
Biztech has been a production ofTelaris Studio 19.
Please visit telaris.com For more information.
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