🎙️ Unscripted Small Business Podcast
The Status Quo Is Your Biggest Competitor, with Jorge Chavez
The president of Topaz Sales Consulting on why buyers ask to buy when you stop selling, empathetic listening, authenticity as alignment, and closing the gap between sales and marketing.
🎧 Listen to the full episode on Castos →
This week on the Unscripted Small Business Podcast, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Jorge Chavez, president and co-founder of Topaz Sales Consulting. Topaz helps business owners and their teams sell more, hire better, and responsibly lead high-performing sales teams — and Jorge brings a refreshingly counterintuitive philosophy: stop trying to close.
AI Can Prep You — But It Can’t Have the Conversation
Jorge uses AI to research prospects and prepare questions, but he’s clear about its limit: someone still has to execute. AI can’t read tone, listen in real time, or build the next question on the fly when a prospect goes long-winded or dodges. That live, human read is still where trust is won.
“You have to be present, you have to listen, and you have to develop questions on the fly. That’s the human interaction that’s not available through machines today.” — Jorge Chavez
You Don’t Have to Ask for the Order
Most sales training says a competent salesperson has to ask for the order. Jorge flips it: asking assumes they’re ready to buy. Instead, assess readiness, understand the timeline, and ask his favorite question — what happens if you do nothing? Because the real competitor isn’t a rival vendor; it’s no change.
From the Episode
Jorge Chavez: The biggest competitor for everyone is the status quo. Done properly, buyers ask to buy — so you don’t have to ask for the order.
Empathetic Listening and Why You Have to Care
Above active listening, Jorge puts empathetic listening: suspending your own biases, training, and experiences to see the situation from the buyer’s perspective. Pair it with genuine care and “infinite curiosity” — running out of time before you run out of questions.
“If you don’t care about people, sales, and relationships, you’re in the wrong business.” — Jorge Chavez
Detach From the Outcome
The reason people distrust salespeople, Jorge says, is the show-up-and-throw-up, pressure-to-get-a-yes approach. His fix is to let go of the goal of selling and become a trusted advisor who helps people make informed decisions — even if the answer is that they solve it without you.
“The goal can’t be to sell. It’s a byproduct of right thinking and effectively executing your process.” — Jorge Chavez
Closing the Gap Between Sales and Marketing
Having trained over a hundred CMOs, Jorge frames marketing and sales as 180 degrees apart — marketing makes assumptions to pique curiosity; sales makes none and asks questions. The bridge modern marketers found: ask pain-tied questions (“do you feel your website is reaching the right market?”) to move from macro brand to personal engagement. And a hard truth for marketers: more leads isn’t more sales — feed real sales-call pain points back into your content.
“Business is an activity created by humans for humans. It’s always about feeling right while using the right tools or doing the right thing.” — Julika Novkova, whose ‘empathy is a business superpower’ line Jorge builds on.
— Julika Novkova | Listen: The Human Side of Small Business →
Connect with Jorge Chavez
Jorge Chavez is president and co-founder of Topaz Sales Consulting, which helps business owners build revenue-generating machines. Connect with him on LinkedIn or X, and find a plethora of tools and resources on the Topaz website.
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Real strategies from founders and operators — including how sales and marketing actually come together, like Jorge’s work at Topaz.
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