One of the great things about my quest to have lunch with 500 strangers in five years is that I regularly get exposed to brilliant people I wouldn’t otherwise meet.

Take Tom Hitchcock, my 158th lunch companion, who I met last month.

During our lunch, I discovered Tom has superb sales skills, which is a major reason for his entrepreneurial success.

Tom conducts sales training. I want to get better at sales. So when Tom asked if I wanted to sign up for one of his sessions on objection handling, I could hardly object, could I?

Now that I’ve done the training, I can say that Tom is not only fantastic at sales, he’s also fantastic at teaching sales. (That might sound obvious, but many people who are good at practising a particular skill are bad at teaching it.)

The main thing Tom taught me was how to make the client feel you’re on the same side and make them more receptive to whatever counter-argument you might offer.

Before Tom’s training, I feared objections. Now, I’m so keen to put my new skills into action that I can’t wait to receive my next objection.

Makes sense, yeah?