"The perfect salesperson would take maximum calls, have maximum conversion rate, and have maximum consistency." In this episode, Alex (@AlexHormozi) breaks down the 9 things that top salespeople do differently. These are observations from building multiple 7 and 8 figure sales teams across his companies and the Acquisition.com portfolio.
Welcome to The Game w/Alex Hormozi, hosted by entrepreneur, founder, investor, author, public speaker, and content creator Alex Hormozi. On this podcast you’ll hear how to get more customers, make more profit per customer, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons Alex has learned on his path from $100M to $1B in net worth.
Timestamps:
(00:39) - Maximise Hours (#1)
(2:53) - Pull Up Calls (#2)
(5:47) - The 2 Sop’s (#3)
(6:40) - BAM FAM (#4)
(10:18) - Multiply Your Leads (#5)
(12:50) - Pre-Call Prep (#6)
(16:16) - Take Notes (#7)
(17:17) - Talk Less Sell More (#8)
(22:13) - Breathe The Script (#9)
(26:10) - Kill The Zombies (#10)
(34:03) - Ask Hard Questions (#11)
(36:55) - Ask Again (#12)
(41:17) - See Everything As A Skill (#13)
(42:07) - Kill For Sport (#14)
(44:47) - Track Data (#15)
(49:23) - Never Blame Circumstances (#16)
Follow Alex Hormozi’s Socials:
LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter | Acquisition
Mentioned in this episode:
Get access to the free $100M Scaling Roadmap at www.acquisition.com/roadmap
For my sales fiends in the audience, it's been a long time since I've made anything on sales. And so today I want to talk about nine things that brilliant salespeople do differently than everyone else. And they are things that you can immediately implement if you're a salesperson or into your sales team, if you're a business owner. And so if you boil it down, a salesperson has three jobs to do. They have to maximize the number of opportunities they have. They have to convert the highest percentage of those opportunities. And, and this is the important part, they have to do it consistently for a very long period of time. And so the nine things they do differently will fall elegantly into each of these three buckets. Let's start with the first one, which is maximizing leads or maximizing the number of opportunities that a salesman has. So right off the top, I've never seen a salesperson who does the most in a company have the lowest amount of hours worked. I've had to have it. You know what? Maybe there's a special snowflake out there, but every company that I've owned and every company that I've looked at, the guy who works the most hours is the one who sells the most deals. And so maximizing opportunities comes in a number of different forms. So number one is that they have the total most hours available per day because you should be available when the prospect is available. And that means sometimes working long hours, it's sometimes being working weekends. And yes, businesses also pay rent on Sundays and so you can make sales on Sundays. So my software company Allen scheduled 4,000 plus appointments per day across a number of different industries. And so we got to see all the way from click to close which companies were selling the most people. And we looked at all the different data. So times of day, number of days per week, you know, speed between text responses, number of characters in text response, all of these different variables because I had two data analysts that looked at this to figure out how could he maximize throughput for any business and obviously sales a big component of that. And the single greatest lever on throughput across all companies was the number of total available time slots, which means availability was the strongest predictor of total sales. And let me give you a tactical example of this. When Layla and I were traveling the other day, we went to a different city and she wanted to get her nails done or something. And so she just pulled up Yelp and looked at the one that had the top reviews, called them up and said, "Oh, I'm sorry, we don't do same-day appointments." And they're like, "We can book you in for two days from now." And she was like, "Yep, don't care. Called the next one. Same thing. Called the third one." And then they were like, "Yeah, we can take you right now." And boom, she went in. And the thing is that both of those other business owners, the first two business owners that said, "No, lost money." And the next time she comes to that place, she'll probably go back to the one that she went to as long as they did a good job. And so trying to be egotistical about it, rather than accommodate customers, it's like, "Well, we're so great. You just lose money." Now, if we maximize the total number of time that's available for the salesperson to sell, then the next part of maximizing the opportunities is getting as much of their days, seemingly possible, filled with the best opportunities. And so the second subunit of this is they will pull up calls. And so the first thing is, if you see a call that gets booked or you book a call that's on Thursday and today's Monday, if you have a time slot that's open, you grab your Thursday appointment, you drag it into today, because today appointments always have higher shop rates. And if you pull it up, then they're even more interested and you can close even higher. And you can have two or three calls by that same Thursday times to increase your sales velocity. Now, a core layer to that is if you look at your calendar and you've reached out to a prospect and that person has not responded back and now it's the same day and they're coming up in a few hours. Well, what do you do? Well, the best sales people pull that time slot and say, "Hey, sorry I didn't see that you confirmed. Why don't we do the same thing for tomorrow?" You can push it out one and then try and fill that time slot with somebody who is responsive even if they're later in the week. And that increases your total number of calls per day. And so fundamentally, the perfect day for a salesperson is that they have call back to back to back to back to back with the best possible leads that are the hottest that day. I learned that little tactic about pulling up because we had one of our companies was in solar sales and they had one rep that massively outperformed everyone else. And I was like, "What is this guy doing?" And so what he was doing was whenever a new appointment would book, he would immediately call the appointment to qualify the lead because that checks two boxes. One is he says, "Okay, is this person qualified to buy?" If the person was, he had two decision paths. If they had the time right then, he would just go straight into closing because he was in off the call SOP and then by getting in contact with the lead became on the call in terms of his SOP. And if they said they had time right now, he just went for the sale. That maximizes his time on call. If they said no, then the reason for his call was that he had an opening lead of that day that he was trying to fill up. And so he either takes the moment now that he's working the lead and turns it into a sales call or he fills another slot later in the day and turns that into a sales call. Both of those things maximize the number of sales that guy was having. And this guy was selling like four times more units than the second best guy on the team. And then they obviously saw this and then adopted it company wide. And then of course I saw it and adopted it across all my entire portfolio. And let me double down a why that's so powerful because not only does the salesman have two opportunities to sell now or later that day, he also opens up the slot later in the week for availability for another customer that can't make it today to book that time then. Because what I have found and we saw this with the software was if you have fewer time slots, people may still book with you, but they are not booking at the most convenient time for them. You'll see schedule rates, but then show rates will drop because it's not the time that works for them ideally. And so you want to make it the most accommodating. So it's not just art is it convenient or inconvenient, it's how convenient is it? If I have a tight deadline and a hard stop and I've got something that I'm stressed about afterwards, I might be able to schedule a call then, but I might not be in the mood to buy. But if I say, you know what Sunday afternoon, I'm free, I'll have all the time my world, I'm going to have zero urgency to get off the call. I'll listen to you and I'll be in a completely different zone. And that might be when I'm in receiving hands in terms of prospect rain mode for buying. And so one of the things that the best salespeople have, and this is something that companies should provide, but often don't, is that you have two SOPs, meaning standard operating procedures. You have an on-the-call SOP, which is what you say when you're talking to prospects, and they have an off-the-call SOP, which is what you do in between. The vast majority of companies don't have an off-the-call SOP, and they're losing tons and tons of money because they just say, yeah, just work the leads in the meantime. When the total amount of output that a salesman has is so correlated with the amount of opportunities they have, and they get those opportunities by the time they have when they're not on the call. And so they should have two separate checklists if they don't have them in front of them, and this is what the best sales people do, is this is what I'm doing when I'm on, and this is what I'm doing when I'm off. And you can just switch hats as soon as you're off, and you start at the top, and you're like, I'm falling over this person, I'm falling over this person, I'm dragging this person forward, I'm canceling this appointment, and they have high activity. One of the things that we do across all our companies, and I learned this acronym from my French Iran, BAMFAM, which is book a meeting from a meeting, which is that the best salespeople never finish a call with a prospect, not knowing when the next time they're going to talk to the prospect. So that prospect should never fall into no-man's land, they should never fall between the cracks where they're like, I don't know. And so if you get to the end of the call and they're like, yeah, let's connect offline, and we'll circle back up and we'll find another time. No, you have to address it at that time, because if, for whatever reason, a time obstacle is still an obstacle, and you can resolve it right then, you both have your calendars up, you can both make the decision. If someone's like, well, I'm not sure, then you actually address the concern, like, isn't this a problem for you? How much are you losing every day not implementing the solution in your business? How much, like, how much of a problem is this in your life, and why isn't it this something that we'd be doing sooner, right? And so you want to address those things, because that is, these are obstacles, and so if you just get off the call jollily, then you actually lose more sales. So you always book a meeting from the meeting. Here's three more things that the best salespeople will do. Number one is that they don't take rejection personally, because they're going to reach out in more volume than the mediocre salespeople. And so you can see on a CRM how many outreach attempts and how many follow-up attempts that a salesperson is having between calls, and it correlates with the number of calls that they take. And so they work their leads harder, and that's because if someone, before they've scheduled the call, you know, says something mean, they're not like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this, or if someone knows shows, they're not like, well, I'm not going to work the rest of my leads, no one really cares about me. Like, whoa is me? It's no, they know it's a numbers game, and they just keep plowing. Something that I've noticed the best salespeople do is they have something called a kill list. And so those are those prospects that you're like, this is a whale, or this is a really good prospect. And they, they sure they have in the CRM, sure they have them in the place that they're supposed to have them. But they also have it somewhere else that's visible so they can always think about it. And like, that's like an every day list. It's like, I got to get back to these two guys. I got to make sure that these ones I'm going to put extra attention to, because they're high value deals. Now, the last element of what the best salespeople do for increasing the number of leads is that they create their own opportunity. So sure, they're going to get the inbound leads from marketing. They're going to get the people, you know, the leads that are handed to them. But the best salespeople know the value of referrals. And so the way they do that is at the end of the call, or at the time that it makes sense, they say, do you know anybody else? Or my favorite way of asking is who do you know? Because it forces the prospect to answer the question with a not yes, no, but with a name. You say, who do you know who is as awesome as you? Now it's a compliment, who would also benefit from this? So now I'm giving them a compliment by, by, by asking them for the referrals. I kind of like have a, like a nice guy sandwich there. So like, you're amazing. Who else do you know who's like you, who would love to do this with you or with us, who could benefit from XYZ, right? Now, sometimes if they say no one, then sometimes like, this is where we're poor is important, but you could say something like, why do you hate me so much? And they're like, what do you mean? It's like, why is only can assume that you hate us because you don't want anybody else to know about this amazing thing? And you probably hate your friends because you want them to suffer as well, right? And if it's because you don't believe me, then let's talk about that. But otherwise, like, why are we not getting your friends in here? Because I can promise you, you'll be far more successful if you have more people you know who are in it. So as any good salesperson would do, ask for referrals. So you're amazing. And if you have other amazing friends who you don't hate, because if you hated them, you shouldn't send this to them. But if you love your friends or you love your coworkers and you want them to make more money, my ask is that you please send this via text to anybody who's in your organization who sells or who manages salespeople or other business owners who have sales teams if you found this valuable and you don't hate them. When I had a team in a different portfolio company, we had one guy who was outperforming everyone else by a huge margin. This one wasn't as big as the pull up thing. That was massive. This was about 50% higher than the number two guy. And we were like, what is this guy doing? He was brand new. And that was what was interesting is like brand new going to the top leaderboard. It's not very common because that means that they're doing a different process. And so he was following the script and we listened to the calls and we're like, this is the same call. And so when we called him up, we said, what are you doing differently? And the thing is, he was multiplying his leads. And so what he did was at the end of the calls, he was just asking who they knew, who would also benefit from this thing. And I think they were selling some sort of tickets of some sort. And so he was saying, who else wants to come with you? Who else would you like to bring? And it's just a simple little thing that he was doing. But by doing that, he was increasing his sales by 50%. Because the referrals, even though only one out of three or one out of four people would refer, the referral close rates, like 80 or 90%. And so if you think, okay, I take four calls and I close one and I ask for referrals in all four and only one of them gives me referral, but then that referral then closes, then I take my one sale out of four and turn it to two out of five. If you're a business owner, thinking about how valuable just implementing that is consistently, is that your cost to acquire customer, you just, you cut in half by taking one customer and getting a referral from that customer. And if one out of three customers refers someone, then you cut your cost to acquire customer by a third. And this is the type of stuff that's advertising becomes more expensive because it always will become more expensive, that the businesses that do this, the salesmen that do this, will be the ones that win in the future. So now we have a salesman who has the maximum number of hours, the maximum number of days, they're pulling up appointments so that their time on call, closing with the best people is maximized. They're following up before, they're following up after, they're doing personalized reach outs and saying like, hey, voice memo, hey, video, hey, I've got this thing for you that I've got set up for the call. What size shirt do you want? I've set aside thing here. There's one of the things we did at the gym. Hey, what color shirt do you want? Hey, what boxing gloves? Hey, what, you do a tiny little thing. Hey, I've got three gift cards here. I go one for Amazon, one for Starbucks and one for whatever. Which ones do you prefer? Right? You ask a preference question prior to the call and more people show because the thing is, is you're like, well, shoot, this guy's doing this thing. The least I can do is show up. And so they're maximizing the number of scheduled appointments. They're maximizing the number of shows. They're maximizing the number opportunities. They're getting from those opportunities. And now we get to the call. So now we got to close understand the value of preparation. You would be amazed at how much of a genius you sound like if you just do five minutes of research before a call. And so my rule of thumb for research is that if it's something that you do all the time, it's about 10% of the time that you're going to be on a call or meeting that you can do in prep. So if you have a two hour call, then you've got 12 minutes of prep. If you've got a 60 minute call, then you do six minutes of prep. Now, this is something that if you do it all the time, if this is like, I'm doing a quarterly meeting, then it reverses. It's like six hours of prep for one hour of presentation, if it's something that you don't do often. And so salespeople do the same call over and over again. But the thing that's different, the tiny bit of difference is the prospect they're speaking with. And so like this applies to everything. Like if you're picking a girl up at her house, if you do five seconds of research in the car before you go in and you look at what her dad does and look at the company of the father and say, hey, so Mr. So and so really nice to meet you. So I see you work at, you know, whatever engineering, like, do you like that stuff? I see that they just had a press release coming out. Do you have any involvement in that? This guy would immediately see you no matter how you're dressed, what you look like as it's a, it's a check. They're like, whoa, like, I will respect this person because he did me the honor of actually taking some time to look me up and figure out more about my business. He didn't show up like everybody else does, not knowing which way is Sunday, trying to figure things out as they go. I'm telling you the best salespeople take those five minutes. They do that tiny bit of research and the amount of rapport that you build in that first one minute from having those secrets. The person is then like, oh, wow, they know about me. Think about what it takes to close someone, no like and trust. Well, all of a sudden, you feel known because they did it. You like people who know more about you and what else do you do? You trust people who know more about you because you approximate friendship, you approximate a relationship and you do and you get to do a ton of that at the first second of the call rather than taking the five first minutes of the call to show that you don't know what you're doing. Right as I started selling gym owners rather than weight loss when I was selling my turnaround business, I started getting leads but I didn't have any like methodology. So like I had a webinar, it didn't work and so I just started finding people on Google using their emails. And so I'd find their social profiles and I'd let it have to piece together like a profile of who this person was because the only thing I was collecting was an email for this webinar. And so I'd find like three or four social profiles and then I would connect with them and I would do some research so that I could make my reach out and not look sketchy as hell. And so when I would do my reach out that I would have all this data that I put as almost like a little profile together about them. And so when I hopped on the phone they were like whoa like you know a lot about my gym. And I was like well yeah and I saw that because I look at the images and be like so I saw your square footage layout. I think if you move this here this might actually be able to allow you to double the amount of usable square footage that you have for the sessions and that would help me sell more people into your gym. So I don't know if you're open to something like that. But now I'm coming in with like I see the problem, I also have the solution because I thought about it before we got on the phone because I don't want to waste your time trying to figure things out. Now I want to figure them out beforehand come with you with solutions. And this is when I started out so I didn't have a reputation yet. So I had to build the reputation by showing up and providing more value than other people were ahead of time. And this is where like if you're new and you're coming into a space you win through prep. Like the big guys have the reputation, the small guys went through preparation. The best salespeople take notes. This is one of those things that is just like prep but it preps you for the next call. And so you do your public preparation with what you can find and observe. You do your second call preparation with what you find out on the phone. And I'm telling you if you hop on the phone and say oh yeah so you've got your daughter Sarah and Jessica and they're at you know Colorado and they're finishing up and you've got X, Y, and Z happening in the business. Is that correct? Okay cool just make a trick just to read over some of the past notes I forgot got on the call. They're like oh wow I don't have to re-say my whole life story again. This guy now when this guy makes recommendations I assume he does it within the context of my business. Because one of the big things when you are selling something is that people want to make sure that it not only that it works but it's going to work for them. And so you can address that concern before it ever comes up by proving that your recommendations are contextual. This is also what switches you from being a salesman to a consultant. This is what switches you from somebody who's just trying to close to somebody who's trying to help. The most brilliant sales people listen more than they talk and this is one that people get wrong all the time is that they see super talkative people I mean moms in high school like you should get into sales because you don't shut up. No that's not it's not always the case that's what bad sales people look like. And unfortunately the thing is is the best sales people don't come off as sales people they just close. And so people don't feel sold they feel like they bought. And so everybody buy stuff every day all the time and they're buying from companies that have salespeople and they don't know it. So when you go to a restaurant and they ask you if you want dessert that's a sale they get commissions on those things. And if they do it in a weird way you're like I don't want to be sold if they do in a great way you're like oh I'm so glad that person made that recommendation. And so you never felt like you got sold you felt like you bought. And so the problem is that the reputation of salespeople is terrible because you only remember the bad ones. We actually did this big study because we have a huge amount of sales calls that we can look at across the whole portfolio and we use software that analyzes the calls with AI and all that stuff we can see what's talk time versus listen time. And the best salespeople listen twice as much as they talk. And so the little isms that I have for this is that the person is answering the questions is the one getting interrogated. You don't want to be the one getting interrogated. And whenever you answer questions you give the other person something to attack. And so you want them to be answering so that you have things that you can pick apart and move around. If you're the one answering questions then you're the one who's getting picked apart and has things that they can disagree with. I want to be like smoke right. They can't catch anything that I say. And so if someone says you know hey well tell me tell me what makes you better than your competition. I'd be like well what things you're looking for. Right back to them right. It's like it's like hot potato it's like right back to you. Well I would want this this and this and this. I'm like why are those things important to you? Right back to you. Right like I can do this all day right. Like I cannot answer because the thing is is that they believe nothing that you say. They believe everything that they say. And so I need them to say that it's a good idea not me. When I started selling weight loss I realized really quickly that I had an agenda of what I wanted to tell people they needed to do. And I realized that I didn't have time in 15 minutes to re-educate someone their last 10 years of life of all the experiences good and bad that they had prior to me. What I needed to do in that moment was get them to buy and then I could spend the rest of my time trying to do the real education stuff. And so I wanted to simply align with where they were coming from to get them to make the sale. And so that was why I started asking what have you done before. What did you like. What did you not like rather than picking apart the things they did and then then be like I actually really like that about that other thing. Lost the sale. Only takes a few times of doing that to be like I'm going to shut the fuck up and just let them tell me what they liked. And then I'll say we're like that and not like that. And so the whole concept here is you want to educate the prospect so that they can come to their own conclusion. And so the only gaps that you're filling is is hard information. And I only give that information after I already know it's the right answer. And so just like lawyers don't ask questions when they're on the stand that they don't already know the answers to. She never asked for the sale unless you already know they're going to buy. And so there are times and this is where pattern recognition is helpful for sales people. This is what the brilliant sales people do is that if they're like I don't think he's ready there. I don't think he's ready yet. And it's like you don't you don't go for the kill you just ask more questions. Like I feel some hesitation. Like what are your main concerns right now. Like I'm filling some hesitation around price. Talk to me about that. There's two ways by the way if you're weirded out about asking questions is that you can both give commands or ask questions. And so you can change the cadence up in the script by saying so instead of saying for example hey how's it going it's an easy first thing a lot of people say on the first thing to call. But if I say tell me about your day it's a very different thing because it it people have automatic responses to questions they hear all the time. And so if you want to break a pattern with somebody and then get them more present you say tell me about your day. And then like oh I mean it was good I had a couple of calls before this and you're like oh that's fantastic is that related to this thing because I looked up look chip online totally different perspective on that salesperson in the first 30 seconds right. So they listen more than they talk they are like smoke. You only answer questions with questions unless you already know that the statement that you're going to say is in alignment with what you know the person wants. And so if they're like tell me why you're different then I'd be like well what have you done in the past. Because then it'll give me more context so I can help explain it. Now they're going to say all these things I'd be like what did you like about that. What did you not like about that. And so when I get to the point where I actually have to say what what are things about I'm going to highlight all the things they liked about the other stuff and I'm going to not highlight the things they didn't like about the other stuff. And all of a sudden I'd be like this is perfect. I'd be like what do you know I just asked you the question of the things you wanted and as long as they are the things that we can actually provide I highlighted those features about our thing because I already knew which piano keys to play because you told me. They breathe the script. And so the reason I use that is because that is the best description I can give is that they can they can say it without thinking just like you breathe without thinking they can say the script without thinking. Because you can't listen to a prospect if you're waiting to talk because you're trying to remember what you're going to say next. You need to know all of the script like the Bible or like something that you've memorized in the past so that you can be a hundred percent present with the prospect and listening. And so my favorite ism around this is again. And the first time I learned this was I saw an exceptional sales trainer training a rep and he was just drilling them on the opening 30 seconds of the script. And so they did the script and I heard and I was watching him listen to them while giving them visual cues. And so this is this was a huge advancement in terms of my understanding of selling happened because before this I knew how to sell but I couldn't transfer the skill. But this guy was sitting there and he was like yep yep yep pause harder on this word. Do it again. Nice. Do it again. Nice. One more time. Nice. Keep going. And so he would get them to drill it three times in a row the right way after making the correction and then he would keep going in the script. And so the point was is that if you're a sales person you need to be able to do it again and again and again because the word "consision" matters a lot. You don't want to be one of these sales people that takes 100 words to say something you could say in five. It'll also make your sales way longer. So again the best sales person can take more calls because they shorten the call required. A mediocre sales person will do the script in the beginning and it'll close. And they will have coughed right before they ask for the close. And then the person closes and so they get reinforcement for coughing. And so the next sales call they take they add a cough in and whether that person closes or not they're like well it worked on that other one. And so all of a sudden they add coughing in right before they close. Now the next time on the time that they close let's say on their fourth call after this they also added a second question in before the close. So they add the second question in and then you see where this happens is that they cough and add a second question to every single call that they do. And by doing this over time the length of the script and the length of the things that sales people do continues to expand because they get positive reinforcement but the reality is that that person might have just been willing to buy no matter what. And so the script gets longer and longer even though it might not have nothing to do with what was required to close. And so you want to be as concise as humanly possible and this is what the best sales people do in order to close the most sales per day per unit of time because the less time you're on the phone after you make the sale the more time you have to fill your calendar back up and close more deals. And so the three tactics this is the sales managers is that you rehearse the script every morning they do role plays meaning let's pretend like a prospect like you got up you got to get over whatever your weirdness is with role playing. Like I don't know what it is but so many managers like don't want to role play like get over yourself you have to role play in order for them to get good. And when you do the role playing you work on one specific part of the script because if you're doing every morning you're gonna be able to work things pretty quickly. But you're like today we're just going to focus on the intro. Today we're just going to focus on the close. Today I just want you to focus on how we're overcoming spouse overcomes. I want you to overcome I have to think about it issues I want you to give me two or three bangs in a row to overcome that obstacle because you seem to be struggling with it right. And so and you just keep hitting it again and again and again so that when it comes up they just breathe it out rather than thinking about it. Also because no one can improve multiple things at the same time. So when you say hey there's nine things you did wrong one it's incredibly discouraging. Second they can't improve any of them. And so if you look at any good skills coach whether it's a basketball coach or it's a painting coach or a sales coach they work they might see that you have a hundred things wrong with your game they're just going to focus on one at a time until they clean them all up and then all of a sudden you become an exceptional sales person. So I said I had nine but I have way more than nine so enjoy. So here's number 10. They kill zombies up front. Now that's the term that we use internally. You can say diffuse the bomb which is one that I did earlier in my career is what I used to say but I'm Middle Eastern so you know we had to change that. The formal definition that I use is you've got obstacles and you've got objections. An obstacle occurs before you've mentioned the price. And so if someone says for example you know I have a special snowflake thyroid issue right and you're trying to say like you need to do this thing to lose weight. You know that that's going to blow up on you in the sale. See we're doing bomb references. So you have to address it up front and it's much easier to address things before you ask for money than after. If you do it after it's called an objection. All right so I say obstacles are up front you want to avoid them you want to move around them right. I mean you have to crush through them realistically but you get through those and then objections you have to handle but now that the time is ticking on the bomb like now you have a short period of time before it blows up on you right or the zombies about to bite you whatever analogy you want. Spouse for example or decision maker or I'm not going to have time to do this thing or there's elements of this you know program or implementation that aren't a fit for me. You want to address all that stuff up front so that you've handled everything before the stakes get lifted when you mention price and then you go for the close. And the obstacles and objections that you handle are always the same. And so they're going to bubble up to three main things one is going to be circumstances. So circumstances is going to be time it's going to be money it's going to be things about this specific program or implementation those are all circumstances those are outside. The next is going to be other people it's going to be my wife my employees my kid my sump my business partner somebody else has decision making authority and the third is going to be myself somebody who themselves doubts that they can do it or that they will be successful or that it's the way they want it to be done. The good news is that most of the time when you are diffusing these bombs they start with the outside because time money fit is what I like to call it are things that are really easy to cast blame to. And it's it's almost a it's a response right it's like they don't have to think about like I don't have time I don't have the money I don't have the card I want like I don't have the you know whatever if they talk about an authority figure then it means that like I would do it but this person's in the way. And so now you're one step closer to the decision maker once you handle that if you have somebody who says I need to think about it that's actually great because I mean you're already two layers of the onion deeper to just like you're talking to somebody who's in power who can make the decision right now you just have to help help them make the decision and so you should know all of the key fundamentals of how to overcome these now you can memorize each of them which I highly recommend but I think it's also good to understand the fundamentals and so this is what the best salespeople do is that they have key stories or metaphors to break the belief that the person has around that obstacle so for example if someone says hey I can't decide today because you know my husband and I make all of our decisions together right now this depends on the nature of your sale if you're in a transactional sale and I would say like a consumer based sale that's under a thousand bucks maybe two thousand bucks usually you have to do that right there if you have like a B2B sale that's going to be a multi you know a multi-call sale then you might have to bring in stakeholders and so this is one of the nuances it depends on the thing you're selling in the price point but the way that the best salespeople do this is that you play out something in the past and you play it out in the future okay so with the decision maker you'd say hey so let me tell you about this girl Susan she was just like you and she actually had the same issue come up which she was like I don't do anything without the consent of my husband and you know what happened if you walked out her husband said I don't want you to spend the money I actually saw her a few years later and when I talked to her I said hey so how's how's things going with the you know the fitness stuff she was like oh they're they're not and I was like oh why she was like well my husband never lets me do anything and I was like oh geez that's got to be kind of rough and she was like yeah it sucks and so the thing is is that if you play it out into the future like you're going to end up resenting that person because they're not letting you do what you want and so I think what you're asking for is permission when you really need support that's how you how you like you go from past to future right and so you then you can play it out with this person so so let's play it out five years so over the last five years you've gained five pounds a year so you're 25 pounds heavier so five years from now if you're 25 pounds everything you are right now they're like oh my god if I'm 25 pounds every then I'm like but that's just the track you're on and so let's play it out it like what if they say no and so sometimes they're like well then I would do it anyways and you're like awesome let's sign out now one out of three times that's actually what happened which is crazy I still been blown away by that but then the two out of three times then I go you want permission not support now if you're looking at time or money for example then you say hey we need we need resourcefulness not resources so it's like you have your little isms that you can remember if it's time then it's well is it a seasonal thing because if it's a seasonal thing means you're busy right now and you might be you know less busy later that assumes that you'll never be busy again and so do you want this thing to be long-lasting this implementation or do you want it to be just like only for the time that you're not busy and then you'll fall off again when you when you get busy well sure I want it to last forever it's like okay well then you should probably start when you're busy because that's what I'm going to be giving you the most support is now so that when you get to the the free time it'll be easy posting and when you get busy again you know how to stick with it because you had the support right and so again it's like you have to be able to dismantle these things as you understand all of these there's a fundamental underlying fallacy of giving away power to something else because people don't want to make mistakes they don't want to fail and so they come up with all of these excuses they come up with time they say like that's the seasonal thing you can have time in terms of the micro which is I don't have time in my day I'm like well you're here so when were you imagining this is why you do this up front when were you imagining it how much time can you dedicate to this implementation to this SEO agency to this weight loss firm whatever it is right if you ask that up front then if they say oh I don't have time with it and you say well what changed between then and now just so I have understanding did I ask the question in a weird way that made you like not understand it and again this is where tone matters a lot because now you're in the red zone right now it's like the bomb's way more sensitive because the the the time ticker's going and so we want to be extra this is where rapport is so important in the beginning because I'll add this in this is a bonus one I call it the ghetto tone okay and I learned this from Sam back to art so he had a personal training business and that's why I shadowed underneath when I got into fitness he let me just work for him for minimum wage and so I learned how the gym business worked but anyways I saw him have this you know rich white lady doesn't put her weights back right and he was still training at the time like he was training sessions a little bit um and so he was like girl he's like I know you ain't about to leave my gym without putting your weights back and he's a Persian dude right but he would get into this kind of like ghetto like whatever you want to call it way of talking and she'd be like fine I'll go put him back and I thought about that and I was like man if I had just been like hey Susan can you put your weights back oh like she's like I pay for personal training you can put my weights back like that could get really bad really fast but when you say it like that all of a sudden it's like I'm communicating the same thing and I get the desired result and they think it's fun and light hearted and so in the same sense when you're in the close I use a ton of humor and that tonality to diffuse hard conversations so I say like girl I was like five minutes ago I was like you had four hours a week I was like what happened about four hours if I say that no one's gonna be upset with me they'd be like well I mean I didn't know that it was gonna be xy and then I'd be like fine I know I'm like so and then then tone switch and you're like what's really going on and then you get the real stuff because guess what? Closures ask hard questions right and they're the questions it's the place where you don't want to go which is where you need to go which is you want them to diffuse the bomb in front of you not when they get home right and so you don't want them to sit with the decision you want them to confront it's like you might be wondering this is a lot of money let's talk about it right you might be wondering if your husband's gonna be against it well let's talk about some reasons that he might not be against it let's talk about uh what your business partner will say if you buy this without their permission let's talk about that right and so you want to confront those ugly thing you don't want to because like you're not like if I if you take anything from this the best salespeople want to confront it because they're better at selling them than they are at selling themselves so you want them to confront the obstacle in front of you so that you can help them through it so don't wait for like you're not gonna avoid it I promise you you think you're avoiding the landmine by like because sometimes you hear that thing in the beginning of the call and you're like that's a bit I don't know if I want to blow the car dude it's gonna blow up in the clothes if you can't even can't even confront it before you've mentioned price it's definitely coming up after you mention price so like confront it now so one of my favorite ways to get to the hard question is asking what are you afraid of happening and then I follow that with let's just play it out a lot of times it's like people don't even want to look at what's going to happen it's like no let's play it out right like I remember I had this this sale that happened where I had a lady who was like I followed Dave Ramsey and I have envelopes of cash and if I give you this envelope that's my grocery money for the week if I do this program and I was like okay well what are you afraid of and she like paused and I was like is it that you won't be able to afford food I was like would you be afraid of that and she was like well yeah because she thought she was going to win the sale that it was a trap um and I was like but you're trying to lose weight I was like worst case scenario you don't afford food you lose some weight I was like when when now I did that with a good tone so she got a laugh out of it right and I was like but let's be real I was like if you ever bought anything in the past that you weren't sure you could afford I was like and where are you now you still survive you're not on the couch right I was like we always make it work in the end right and you have to cut somewhere else I was like this is something that's going to last week forever like you have all these clothes I was like you want to make all of them look better in six weeks I was like just lose 20 minutes what are you afraid of let's play it out best case worst case when you do that you can basically take away the emotion from the decision and say okay worst case scenario you're on your friend's couch and you know what you were poor before this and you were happy then too so worst case scenario is you're in the same position you've been in before and it was fine best case scenario you change your life forever does that feel like a bet you're willing to take right and so if you if you just you want to confront it and then walk into what they're afraid of and just say let's play it out so this happens here this happens here best case worst case and I can tell you that I probably closed more sales on best case worst case than any other clothes I have ask for the sale again and so this is a big one if you do not ask for the sale you will not get it that is a promise once you ask if you ask again you'll increase likely that they buy now there's a right way to do this and a wrong way to do this if you just ask again when someone says no bad luck if someone says no and you ask why and then you resolve the why then you ask again and that makes sense says hey I can't make Tuesdays and you say no worries if we're able to do it on Thursday would that work for you and they say yes they say awesome so you want to move forward you ask again right so all you're doing is resolving the concern there's terms in the industry called looping or you know obstacle overcomes whatever whatever wording you want to use is that you resolve the concern and you ask again and you can do this literally unlimited times as long as you resolve the concern and then you ask again I mean Layla will tell you that like if it was either a Sunday sale because I usually had way less calls on Sundays or it was the last deployment of the day for me she just knew that I would always close that sale because I would just have unlimited time because I was like I will just keep going and so I will ask again and again and again and I had um I had a partner back in the day I don't know if I like the visual but he's like he's like you're like a pit bull on someone's ankle he's like you just will not fucking let them leave and I was like it's because I think I think that they need it they came in because they're trying to lose weight we sell weight loss what's the problem like we just have to figure it out and usually it's just like it's mounds of stuff you have to unpile of all these excuses of all the times that they've been unsuccessful in their lives it's like they came in because they want to solve the problem and when they can confront it with the decision they get freaked out again because they really have this past traumas of the things they've tried and then feeling like a failure and then they associate that failure with you in the moment you're like hey Susan calm down we're just gonna have you eat some fucking chicken and walk a little bit it's gonna be okay and so the best closers come from the frame of helping the prospect and so I will tell you this right now the best salespeople care more about the prospect than they do so whoever cares the most about the prospect wins the sale and so if they care more about themselves then they will win now you're like well of course they're gonna look care more about themselves ah if you have more context than they do which you should because you know more about the product than they do you should be able to have the best perspective to say no I'm not going to let this guy's limiting beliefs get in the way because I really want to help him or really want to help her and I can see that today it feels safe to retreat back to not taking action on this huge pain that they have but I can see how this is gonna play out because I've seen a hundred other people just like them walk out the door and I see him you know a year later in their exact same position or worse and I don't want that for them and so if you keep the human at the forefront of your mind when you're making the sale you'll never come across pushy because you they could hear the intention they can hear the tonality in your voice about you actually just trying to help them so when you ask for the sale again having key stories and metaphors that you can use to break beliefs is what allows you to then ask again and you can do that literally unlimited times as long as they have time and you have time and you address the problem now if you don't address the problem and ask in the good annoyed so you just want to make sure that you have an answer and you should have an answer because you've had this conversation before there's nothing they should be able to tell you that should surprise you if we zoom out we have a sales person who has maximum hours maximum days they have as many timeslots per day filled up with the best prospects because they work them well they have a plan before and after come prepared with call and take notes and follow up with them bam fam the whole thing and when they're on the call they're completely present they breathe the script they know how to handle obstacles they have they have analogies and stories and metaphors memorize so they can help people overcome their issues they stick to the script they don't add to the script they keep their word decision as tight as seemingly possible so they can maximize the number of sales they have per day and maximize the conversion rate of those sales fundamentally sales by the way i should have defined this earlier is increasingly likely that the prospect buys so it is so everything that has to do with sales like if you had the perfect sales process it means you would account for every single variable that could ever happen to any human and you'd get a hundred percent of people who go through this process to buy that's what a perfect sales process would be and so it's a percentage conversion that's all it is and so with that we have maximum opportunities maximum percentage conversion we have an amazing sales era but what if they can only do it for a day that gets into the third bucket which is what i would consider meta skills which is traits of the best sales people the things that most sales people struggle with are trait issues meaning they are on and then they're off again they're on and they're off again they get motivated they get demotivated motivated if you feel like this then it's a skilled efficiency you just don't know how to sustain performance for a long period of time and i promise you the difference in champions that everyone else that they can sustain performance it's not like i don't know if sales is for me um i don't know if i'm growing enough in my room dude here's the clear deficiencies you can't stay consistent there's some growth that you can tackle right now being consistent another kind of meta skill around this is enthusiasm like they're enthusiastic one week they're not enthusiastic next week being able to sustain and maintain a high level of enthusiasm for the role and when you're on the call is a skill it's a skill you whistle while you work you got to learn how to do it you got to learn to like the stuff you don't love so you can do the thing you really love which is sales the best sales people kill for sport let me tell you this little analogy yeah notice a little analogies so i heard this from uh mike rsc and i just love this he said there's three types of sales people there's dogs horses and tigers he's like dogs you got to feed them and if you don't feed them they starve to death and you got to you got to give them off the attention you got to rub their belly every day and the moment you stop they die horses they will gallop as long as you keep whipping them but the moment you stop galloping they just go down to a trot he's like but tigers he said a tiger can eat a full meal but then if a bunny walks across his line of vision we'll kill the bunny for sport he's like you want tigers and i love that little analogy because the best sales people that ever met my life they love sales they love the thrill of the clothes of the hunt when i was selling weight loss i would sometimes have homeless people and things like that they would come in who would respond to my ads it would happen right i had two ways to take it i could try and not take it seriously try and just like basically just get through the sales i could move on with my life or i could see it as free practice and what's crazy is the amount of times where i judge someone is poor and turned out that they just dress different i don't know anything about that was more times than i can count and a lot of them were like hey i appreciate you just like you know treated me well i was like of course i was like this is a business your money spends the same and so you either practice the skill or you close either way you win it's a lot like lifting weights where if you have your warm-up reps and they look different than your heavy reps you're actually not practicing at all so you're wasting all these opportunities that you could be practicing your skill sharpening the sword which we call it in the sales world you could be sharpening you're sure but you're actually making it duller because you're practicing the wrong way you're learning bad habits by not taking the sale seriously so the best salespeople kill for sport and so i had uh i'll tell you a Jacob story which is my my young my young you know started with me at like 15 and now he's been with me however many years seven he started as a low man on the totem pole and so when we would have lesser qualified leads they handed all of them to Jacob he's like i'll be the garbage man he's like i'll take anybody's leads he's like i just want to get good i just want to practice and so he's trying to take as many reps as he possibly could and guess what happened he started taking more reps than everyone else did and guess what happened after that he got better than other people did because he took more reps and he took every one of these as a fucking gift which is what it is is that someone's going to give you the time to learn the skill of sales the business paid for that lead maybe it's less qualified they paid for it just the same and you have the benefit of learning the amount of people who want to learn how to sell better and are unwilling to take quote unqualified leads is ridiculous to me it's free practice with stakes and you still have the possibility of winning and closing a deal the best salespeople track data and so they're meticulous about the data they track and so let me explain this so you can judge and i've just seen this across my portfolio the skill of any person in any endeavor that they practice by the quantity and quality of the metrics they track and so if someone says oh i'm good at sales i'd be like cool tell me about the metrics you track now if they're like oh just you know close rate it's like well there's so many other metrics that you could track to understand how good you are at sales because the close rate is really just an outcome it gives you no leading indicators it tells you nothing else right i want to know what percentage of leads you're booking i want to know what percentage of scheduled things you're are showing i want to know of show rate what percentage you're offering of offer how many of your closing how many how many what's your average call to close are you doing one call two call one point two like what's your what's your average number what's your average number of cash collected like there's so many other metrics that you can track to know how well you're doing as a sales person and yes for everybody like shot this from the rooftops if you can get their schedule rate up by 20 percent it's just as good as getting their close rate up for i 20 percent and so there's so many other things in the funnel that the best sales people know about closing about how to increase the total number of sales they get by controlling all of the other variables that are under their control now the bad guys the dogs are like i only want these times and i want them to be spoon fed to me and if i don't get them fed there and you don't pat me on the head i'm gonna starve to death and die right that's what the dogs do and if you've got sales people like that they're dogs i don't care how many how much experience they have they're dogs right tigers are like i want to be available to kill whenever because i just love the hunt i would do this for free i'm just happy i get paid to do it pro tip if you are somebody who's running a sales team if you want to increase the close rates across the entire team even more give the best closers the best leads and the way you do that is that you have to start by scoring your leads first which means you actually have to track data so you can see these people have the highest likelihood of closing when they have these three characteristics they close it away higher percentage and then you give those leads to the best guys so fundamentally you'd want the worst leads to go to the worst guy the best leads to go to the best guy and everyone in between and so by doing that you actually match the org and so i actually had a salesman that i knew who was the top salesman for a timeshare business and it's exactly what you think it is so it's a billion-dollar plus company this guy's making three million a year in commission selling timeshares and i had dinner with him and i was like what do you do you know differently and he said well i won the sales competition and so i got one hour with the ceo and on that one hour with the ceo which is the prize for winning the sales competition is 3000 salespeople is number one he said i just said if you give me the best leads instead of wasting them on these guys who are new he's like i will make you so much money and so the guy experimented with his little division and he fivexed his income as the sales guy and then they took it and they rolled it out nationwide and they fivexed the business and so there's a huge opportunity in every business to give the best closers the best leads because you make more money and what happens is is that the best guys will actually make more and more and more money which then creates a survivorship bias for new guys coming in and so if you know the best guy used to make 200,000 a year as the top closer but now it can make 800,000 a year the amount of salespeople that you will attract your opportunity will 10x now even though the entry level guys now make less than they did before the opportunity just like the lottery the same reason people buy tickets is they assume that they're going to get there and so by having it this way you'll have people come in willing to make less because they know that if they if they perform well they'll go to the big leagues now the other benefit of this is that you train your new guys on the worst leads so you lose the least money as a business but they also develop their skills because they've got to learn how to big borrow it steal and squeeze blood from the stones from the least qualified customers and so when they get to somebody who's got a 700 credit score it actually has intent to buy they're like oh my god this is amazing because they practiced on somebody who's like missing an arm and missing seven credit cards and they are in bankruptcy and they're actually in the middle of a divorce and the real name isn't Al it's actually Larry and you know it's complicated a little liquid right now I'm between thing you know whatever right and they're closing those people for lunch money and so when you learn how to do that when you get to like qualified prospects you're like oh my god this is amazing but at that point the business doesn't bear the cost the sales person does so that they can develop their skills because this being real you're still paying them to learn and I'd rather pay as little as I can so I can allocate the resources the best way possible in the business my biggest pet peeve and the reverse of that is my favorite thing about the best sales people is that they never blame circumstances so whenever I have a sales person who's like the leads are bad or you know these these people aren't a good fit or but just like whatever BS that they can come up with or like I don't like the commission structure we should change that like just focus on the things you can control right and the guys that I love the most never complain they pick up the extra shifts they call the leads the most they work them the most they're like these leads are amazing I'm so grateful to have these and be able to practice and get paid to do it and there's a time and a place for giving feedback on stuff group calls not one of them if you are one of these sales people you give it one-on-one with the managers and hey by the way I've noticed like some people get on the phone just objectively like their credit scores are just consistently lower than they were a couple months ago I don't know if we've changed anything on the marketing side I'm gonna approach the leads the same I love the practice just thought might be you know useful data for marketing right that's very different than like dude these leads are shit I'm not taking these calls right that's just a pre Madonna and I hate that and so again the worst the leads the better you get to flex your skill and the best sales people take 100% of the control and the best marketers take 100% of the control too and so if everybody is taking absolute blame for every outcome guess what you win
