Ask a business owner to name their biggest competitor and you will get a company name. Jorge Chavez thinks nine out of ten of them are wrong.
Jorge is president and co-founder of Topaz Sales Consulting, and he has spent his career teaching business owners and sales teams to sell, hire and lead. He put the question to me on the show and then answered it himself:
“the real answer is no change. They could be using a competitor, a real competitor, but it’s not the competitor who’s your competition. It’s that they continue using them. No change. They do it internal in house.”
— Jorge Chavez, Unscripted Small Business
The question that surfaces it
If the status quo is what you are actually fighting, then the diagnostic changes. Jorge’s favourite question is one most people never ask a prospect:
“in sales, the question always has to be assessing their readiness to buy. What’s their timeline to make a decision? And here’s our favorite question: what happens if you do nothing? What if you don’t change, which is the biggest competitor for everyone, the status quo? We learn that and done properly, buyers ask to buy.”
— Jorge Chavez
Notice what that does to the close. He is not saying to stop asking for the order. He is saying that if you have done the diagnosis properly you do not have to, because you have surfaced the cost of standing still and the buyer has done the arithmetic themselves.
Asking for the order is an assumption
He walked me into this one on the recording, which was mildly humiliating and entirely fair. He asked whether a competent salesperson has to ask for the order. I said yes. He asked whether that might be an assumption. It is — the assumption that they are ready to buy. Most people are not, and the pitch that arrives before the readiness is the reason nobody likes being sold to.
His diagnosis of the whole failure mode is worth reading twice:
“The goal can’t be to sell. It’s a byproduct of right thinking and and effectively executing your process. It can’t be the goal… What’s the greater goal? It’s to help people solve problems and make informed decisions.”
— Jorge Chavez
And the standard he holds his own consultants to: “you have to be not seeking yeses and not seeking no’s, but seeking the truth.”
You cannot fake the part that matters
I pushed him on the obvious objection. How do you claim to care when you are being paid to care? His answer was to reframe authenticity as an alignment problem rather than a performance problem:
“When your your words and your tonality and your body language align, you’re more authentic. But what’s more important than all those is your belief system.”
— Jorge Chavez
Which lands on a sentence that should probably be on a wall somewhere: “You have to care. If you don’t care about people, sales, and relationships, you’re in the wrong business.”
If you cannot answer this, neither can your customer
Matthew Slaymaker runs a digital advertising agency handling brands spending anywhere from a hundred dollars a day to more than thirty thousand. He has a related complaint that shows up at the top of the funnel rather than the bottom:
“You’d be surprised how many people I ask like brands that I ask, like, Hey, what’s your unique selling posi proposition? Like what what makes you guys different? And they’re like, I don’t know… If you can’t answer that question, then how are how are customers gonna be able to tell the difference?”
— Matthew Slaymaker, Unscripted SEO
Same problem, earlier in the chain. If nothing distinguishes you, nothing forces a decision, and no change wins by default.
What to actually do about it this month
- Add one question to every quote or estimate. “What happens if you do nothing?” Write the answer down. It is the real objection.
- Stop treating email as a qualifying tool. Jorge is blunt: “email in in text is a horrible way to qualify a prospect or develop a relationship.” He uses it to book the conversation and to confirm what was agreed. Nothing else.
- Write down your USP in one sentence and read it to someone who does not work for you. If they shrug, your ads will not fix it.
- Role-play before you hire. Jorge’s biggest frustration is that almost nobody makes a sales candidate actually sell during the interview. “their best sale is at the interview, and then they can’t sell.”
You are not losing to the other guy nearly as often as you think. You are losing to Tuesday.
Quotes are verbatim from the raw Riverside transcripts, trimmed for false starts and filler only. More at Unscripted Small Business and Unscripted SEO.