Resources in this Episode:

Christine Schlonski [0:02]
This is episode number 022.

Andrea Waltz [0:05]
Hi, this is Andrea Waltz and you’re listening to Heart Sells! with Christine Schlonski.

Christine Schlonski [0:11]
I am so super excited to have the wonderful Andrea Waltz back with her amazing body of work Go for NO! where we talk about rejection, where we talk about receiving a no like all the time and what we can learn from it, what you can make out of it. So I hope you enjoyed Episode 021 where she already shared amazing wisdom with us. Stories that I inspiring and I’m super excited to have her back today. Make sure you hop on over to christineschlonski.com where you find the podcast. Each and every single episode including the show notes, the transcript, all the resources and my invitation to the Success Library where you can hop on into that free membership and get like my free content and especially the sales journaling prompts that will help you to shift your mindset into a sales-success-mindset. So here again it’s a short recap of Andrea.

Christine Schlonski [1:18]
Andrea Waltz is the co-founder of Courage Crafters Inc. and co-author of the best-selling book, Go for No! Yes is the Destination, No is How You Get There. Go for No! is a short, powerful fable specifically for organizations and sales professionals of any kind who must overcome fears of failure and rejection to be successful. So on a side note, basically this is for everyone, especially for each and every entrepreneur. The book has sold over 400,000 times and it became a number one Amazon bestseller in 2010 and it is still in the top ranks of all the sales books on Amazon. Since launching the company with her husband and business partner Richard Fenton, Andrea has built a whole brand around ‘go for no.’, btw. you can find her goforno.com. Using the book as the launch off point, she produced a “documentary” style movie interviewing 58 top achievers on how they utilized failure and rejection to reach their goals and dreams. Most recently, she’s also teaching go for no through online coaching and online training. And she has spoken all over the US and the United Kingdom and is also a frequent keynote speaker at entrepreneurial and corporate sales meeting and conventions. When she not working, she writes fiction and guess who is the co-author on partner? Her husband, Richard Fenton. And when not doing anything, in particular, they enjoy watching something creepy on Netflix while drinking a glass of good red wine. I hope you enjoying the next episode and I’m really happy to welcome back Andrea Waltz.

Christine Schlonski [3:27]
Well, welcome back Andrea. I’m so super excited to dive deeper after the first interview with you. goforno.com is where people can find everything about you, your husband and your offers. And so you said you really had to understand that you needed to niche down to make it successful to make it really taking off and you got the feedback that go for know is what your customers love the most. So you decided to niche down and that really gave you the momentum and the success that you have today.

Christine Schlonski [4:07]
But on the other hand, it’s so counterintuitive, especially when we start that entrepreneurial journey, because most of us think we can help everybody. And you know, no matter what it is, we will figure out the solution. What advice would you give to an entrepreneur who feels a little bit stuck and who gets a lot of no and doesn’t really know where to look at.

Christine Schlonski [4:34]
Um, I would ask two questions. And that is, What is the main problem I’m trying to solve? And well, it’s actually three questions Who has that problem more than anyone else? And where do they hang out? So I’ll give you an example. And the way our business kind of went was, first, we started with an industry so you may be someone who starts with a particular group of people, then with Go for No!, we moved to a, from an industry of people to really a problem that you could make the case that everyone has, right, everyone has a fear of failure and rejection. So we could be working with entrepreneurs and artists and, and job seekers and actors who are trying to get auditions and insurance salespeople. And we could I could make a list of almost everyone on the planet, right? And then you have to say, wait a minute, what, what’s the problem that we’re solving? Who has the problem? And where do they hang out? So we said, well, let’s start with people who sell and let’s look at a certain type of salesperson. So for us, we decided that our target market was people in direct sales. And then we also decided that it was people who sold like insurance. And we said, so if we want to get in front of people in the insurance industry, we should be sending Go for No! and reaching out to Vice President of Sales at insurance companies and people who own their own insurance office and have a team of insurance salespeople. So really asking those questions, What problem Am I trying to solve?

Andrea Waltz [6:23]
And then saying, I’m just going to pick a couple types of people who have that problem. And again, it’s, it’s a niching down, niching down, because when you do finally make the communication, they need to feel it’s for them, they need to read it and say, oh, my goodness, this person, this is the sounds like me this, this feels like it’s for me, this person understands my challenge and the more, kind of general and generic where people can’t wrap their head around what you’re saying there, you’re unfortunately, you probably won’t even get to no you just get silence. And unfortunately about that is silence doesn’t tell you anything, at least no says okay, I’m getting some information here. Maybe I can get the opportunity to ask why? Which is really key if you can, if you can have those opportunities, which I have done when I’ve gotten some noes. And if it’s a sometimes you have to use your intuition about when that can work and feel the person out. And I say, Just out of curiosity, you know why? Why did you say no, today? And so I can learn? Oh, it was my offer. Or I’m just barking up the wrong tree. This person had no desire. I ‘m off base here. So it teaches you a lot.

Christine Schlonski [7:41]
Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s really brilliant advice. Because when we have an issue with rejection, when we fear the No, then when we get it, you know, it feels more like, okay, now I’m going to turn around and I’m going to walk off. Instead of embracing the situation, being grateful for the opportunity to ask for feedback. And that teaches you a lot

Andrea Waltz [8:07]
It does. That is it is so important. And it’s just part of the process. It’s part of that growth process.

Christine Schlonski [8:14]
Yeah, yeah. Wonderful. So when you really niche down and created that Go for No!, I guess it was at the same time creating the book Go for No!, and then the documentary followed. How could somebody goes through their own process? Like, where could they start? We know it doesn’t feel good rejection. But where could they start to get over that those hurdles? Like what would you advise?

Andrea Waltz [8:47]
Well, one of the things is, in terms of implementation goes back to something that you had said in the previous interview, which is being aware of your numbers. And I encourage people to create a no awareness, how many noes are you really getting? Are you talking to enough people? Are you are you hearing no at all? And start to analyze your numbers. And one of the fun things that we encourage people to do is go for it was kind of a two-part strategy, if you will, one part is just mindset. And the mindset part is Hey if you have the opportunity to ask somebody, anything, if they will buy? If they will meet with you? all, all of those questions that you have in your business. Take that opportunity, make that ask that’s kind of that just that mindset.

Andrea Waltz [9:36]
The strategy part is, well, how do I implement this in my business? Like, truly implement this and one of the best ways and it’s fun and easy. It’s something that we call no goals. And it’s to set a number a set a goal of the number of noes that you’re going to hear. Now, typically, people who start their own business are very good goal setters and visionaries and have ideas of where they want to go. But we typically are good at setting Yes, goals. So I want to have 10 clients this year, or I want to make six figures this year. And those are the yes goals. But it really always comes down to well, how are you going to get there? What are you going to do? How many emails are you going to send out? Are you going to send out physical packages? How many meetings are you going to have? and drilling down. The no-goal has to do with how many noes are you going to hear in a given day, week or month? So when we started our business, and we launched our company, we did okay initially. It took a while to get going Go for No!, took even longer because we didn’t, we weren’t going after particular industry. And it took us longer to figure out who we wanted to target and how we were going to niche that down. And so that transition took a long time. But once we did that, we said, All right, let’s set a goal for the number of companies and we were selling companies that we’re going to approach every month. And we said we’re going to try to get 100 noes. Now we had a yes goal of getting four yeses a month. But we said let’s try to get 100 companies to say no to us every month. And when we did that, we had more business and we knew what to do with it was very difficult to actually and it’s probably even more difficult to get 100 these days.

Andrea Waltz [11:23]
Because just reaching out to people and getting them to engage with you is challenging when we got those hundred noes we had more yeses and more business that we knew what to do with. And so in terms of, well, what’s a good no goal, it completely depends upon you and how many people you’re talking to. And how many opportunities are created, right not a number that we set for people I have, I have sometimes people write me and they say I’m inspired to go for No, I’m going to get 10 noes a day, I’m going to get 20 noes a day. Our co-author who wrote Go for No! for network marketing with us got 20 noes every day. And he did a very fast he just talked to people all the time and asked Hey, would you be interested in looking at my product? Would you be interested in and checking out this business opportunity? And if the person said no, he go great. And he did that 20 times a day. And he became the number one income earner in this company. Because he just talked to people all the time. He asked all the time. And so setting a no goal for your day or week is very powerful.

Christine Schlonski [12:34]
Yeah, but you don’t really want to start with just with your offer, right? You want to have a conversation around it.

Andrea Waltz [12:41]
You know what? And that’s a great, great point. And it depends, it depends. So so for example, you could start with just an opening question that if the person said no to, they immediately disqualify themselves. And then you wouldn’t necessarily want to build that rapport and continue that conversation. So for example, when you said you are doing now sometimes it’s completely different. Sometimes you do start with rapport and you don’t ask a question about business until way down the line. So you have to do what works for you. You have to take what works for you and leave the rest. In your example in our previous interview about high ticket sales, if you called somebody and you opened up with a question of, hey, do you ever, you know, send your people out to events? And if the person said, No, I don’t have a team and actually, I’m closing down my office. If you in that moment, you said, well, hang on, hang on, let’s sit down and talk about this. I want to get to know you. But maybe there’s a way we can actually make this work. Now, you’d be wasting your time, right? So that kind of disqualification of I want to just see if this person is open is kind of what I’m talking about. The 20 knows a day. So depends on your business.

Christine Schlonski [14:01]
Yeah, so set a goal and just go for the no, let’s have a list know your numbers. And also what I found really interesting. So when I started out, I made, I don’t know, maybe hundreds, thousands of calls. And so I could really then see how many qualified decisions that I send out, like, where person was really interested, where they wanted the offer, where I sent an email where I set a date to have the next conversation. And I could really see the number became, you know, smaller and smaller, which was great because I needed less calls to get to the same results or to get to better results. So would you encourage an entrepreneur to have kind of this internal game those offers as well? Like, go

Andrea Waltz [14:57]
Absolutely.

Christine Schlonski [14:58]
track and see how you get better? And, you know, by asking the questions, what made you say, no, maybe you can find a way to change the conversation slightly?

Andrea Waltz [15:09]
Absolutely. Because, again, it’s it is getting that data and saying, am I trying to convince people who are not in the market for what I have to take me up on my offer? It’s like, would you ever sell cleaning pool cleaning services to anyone who doesn’t own a swimming pool? And the answer is no, of course not that would be silly. But sometimes if we’re not focused, that’s in an analogy, right? not exactly. But that’s what we try to do. And so it’s asking those questions helps us keep that type of thing from happening to where we are talking to people that really do have a need for what we have. And interestingly, as you just indicated, the more conversations we have, the more confident that we get, the better we get.

Andrea Waltz [16:05]
One of the things I’ve seen with Go for No! in the end, I don’t do personal coaching. But we have a group page where I kind of do a little bit of, I guess, you call group coaching on our Facebook page in our course. And people have a tremendous amount of anxiety around picking up the phone oftentimes, and this for all different reasons. But I think a lot of it has to do with the pressure that we put on ourselves to be perfect and to make the sale and in simultaneous to that pressure, a lack of confidence because we just haven’t done it and done it enough. So I would also encourage people listening to this to say, don’t try to be perfect, this is not about Hey, get on the phone. And I need to, you know, get a yes. The first thing, the first thing that you do, I think that’s what entrepreneurs do to themselves. It’s kind of like, I’m going to go out, I’m going to tell my story, I’m going to get all these yeses, it’s going to be amazing. And then they get a couple noes or things don’t go right. And now they’re all of a sudden questioning themselves. And and I say just you don’t have to be perfect. Just keep doing it. Keep doing it. And you will get better. And you’ll will figure out better phraseology, you know, things to say things that work. And one of the things I’ve learned even I do a lot of marketing on LinkedIn. And I try tons of different ways of phrasing things. So that the person I’m talking to, if I know they’re qualified, even introductory lines to the sentence, so whether you’re on the phone, or you’re sending an email, you just, you test and you test and you say, Wow, this particular line seemed to help people understand what I’m saying that seems to get a better response. Let me try this more. And you just keep testing. But that beer and that anxiety in that person pressure sometimes, I think causes people not to do that.

Christine Schlonski [18:04]
Yeah. Well, you know, being rejection, one of the biggest fears or pain points we have as humans, and you seem to master that so well, is there anything you are afraid of?

Andrea Waltz [18:21]
Oh, gosh, well, that’s a really good question. I probably am most afraid of letting people down. And so and someone in our group said this not too long ago. And I thought it was an interesting comment, and I can relate to this, which is, ultimately there’s fear of failure. We all know that. And then there’s simultaneously there’s a fear of success. But I think we all kind of battle and I sometimes wonder, do I have a fear of success? Do I have a fear you’re just getting too big? And, and not really, what it comes down to is, it’s like, Why? What will I do, I, I won’t be able to handle it, right? And the more successful you get more successful, you get you, you find ways that you actually can handle it. And yet at the same time, there’s always this nagging feeling of, I don’t want to, I don’t want to disappoint anyone. And really, what that comes down to is fear of success, that I will be so successful, and then because I can’t handle it, and I don’t want to let people down, I will somehow screwed up and then I will fail. So it all comes back down to fear failure. So in the end, I think, I think fear of failure for me and letting people down. But I will say this, Christine, I struggled for years not liking and hating the word no. And fearing the word No, because and I joke about it. But I’m a member of the pathological people pleasers club. I want people to like me, and I see hearing if somebody tells me no, somebody rejected me, way back before I and I’ll give you a book suggestion that really, really helped change my mindset with this as well.

Andrea Waltz [20:08]
I saw that rejection is not being liked. And so that, to me, is like the worst thing and if you’re an as a sick quote on quote, salesperson, the last thing you want to be looked at as the salesy salesperson, know, you want to be the person who builds rapport and is into serving others. And so that rejection is very much tied into that people pleasing. Richard and I say, all the time, we could have never written Go for No!, and I could never help people through these issues, if I didn’t have all of them myself, right. I mean, all of them deeply, deeply myself, because I understand them. If I was just like, hey, projections in your head, get over it. Stop being a baby, you’re fine. I don’t think that would inspire a lot of people. That would be kind of me, Oh, I get it, I get it, that this is where we all come from. And quite frankly, we’re biologically wired to, to not to be rejected, you not be thrown out of the tribe and fend for ourselves. No one wants to have that happen. So we’re dealing with an reptilian brain in the 21st century and the two don’t go together very well. So it’s it is it is a constant battle. The book that I want to mention, if I can, is called The Four Agreements. And one of the Four Agreements is not to take things personally. And it was the way I gave you the examples in the previous interview, it was the way that I was able to really love and appreciate other people’s opinions and not take them personally.

Christine Schlonski [21:38]
Yeah, I love it. And I know that I just today I just wrote a blog post about how I choked when I made my offers. Because that’s what I help people with, you know, to overcome that fear making offers with ease, great confidence. But um, yeah, obviously, everybody who’s teaching something was their themselves, otherwise, they wouldn’t have the material to teach it, to understand where the other person is. And I think it’s, it’s so beautiful. So you have taken us to so many points that we could just put into action to make our businesses more successful. Are you using for yourself a mantra? Or do you have a quote that you tell yourself when things maybe a little bit difficult?

Andrea Waltz [22:37]
Um, so many, there’s so many great mantras I think, and, and I hate to sound egotistical to quote myself, but I do try to remind myself that one of the things that Richard and I say is, there’s virtually nothing you can’t achieve, if you’re willing to hear no, often enough. And I would add to that long enough. And one of the things I’ve experienced over 20 years, with all of the books we’ve written, and projects we’ve done, and speaking engagements that we’ve had is everything takes longer than you think it will, and that it should and things that you say, Well, yeah, this will be done in three months, or six months, it’s usually double that. And so that persistence and stick to a toughness and resilience sounds cliche, but it’s so important because you will absolutely encounter obstacles and challenges that keep you and take, make things take longer than you thought. And so you have to have that willingness to push through those times, where you just say, gosh, this is just taking so long it will pay off.

Christine Schlonski [23:49]
So what was the biggest reward that you have gotten for your persistence?

Andrea Waltz [23:57]
Biggest reward?

Christine Schlonski [23:58]
Like reward like this thing you really wanted, and you kept going and going and going, and then it did work out?

Andrea Waltz [24:06]
Yeah, I’m probably the book Go for No!, we wrote that book, actually, in 2000, the year 2000 and in it hit number one on Amazon sales and selling list. It took us 10 years. In that in that 10 years, we were turned down by a huge publishing company. So we lost that deal. In that 10 years. We sold a fair amount of books, it did pretty well. But we have lots of ups and downs. And we had to redesign to the cover because somebody told us that it was a great book, but it was had the worst cover in the history and publishing which was great advice. Thank God. Somebody had the courage to tell us how about the book cover was because I think that changed a lot. We believed in that book. But we definitely had our moments of just forget it. And which is funny that Go for No! people get giving up, up and up being persistent, but we struggled and it was a long 10 years, but hitting the number one in the sales category on Amazon was probably the highlight.

Christine Schlonski [25:09]
Yeah, awesome. Awesome. Thank you so, so much for sharing all your wisdom with us. That was so much fun. And I hope for the people listening that is a such a great inspiration to not take it personally to just go for it to have fun with it. Because the best things will come out of it, right?

Andrea Waltz [25:32]
Absolutely. Yes, absolutely. So fun talking to you.

Christine Schlonski [25:36]
I am still so inspired by the interview with Andrea Waltz. Isn’t that just a really, really great concept go for No, I hope it makes your life so much easier. So if you want to connect this her go to: goforno.com or hop on over to christineschlonski.com and you all find it in the show notes including a transcript and all the amazing resources we mentioned, as well as my free gift for you the sales journaling prompts that help you to shift your mindset from a simple sales-mindset to a sale-success-mindset. They will serve you in a wonderful way like they served me to empower my sales game and to actually double and triple my revenue. Wouldn’t you like that? So hop on over tochristineschlonski.com. and make sure you subscribe for the podcast. So you do not miss out on any of these episodes. Thank you so much for listening. I so appreciate you being here. And I would love to hear from you. What are your thoughts? How do you put the things you’re learning on the podcast into action? What are the results and you can send me a or connect with me on my homepage, christineschlonski.com, or simply write me an email to info@christineschlonski.com. Thank you so much for being here. and tune in for the next episode. Have a wonderful day wherever you are in the world. Bye for now.