How to Sell Better than 99% Of People (4 HOUR ULTIMATE GUIDE)

This is all my best presentations and videos on sales. You could call it my Ultimate Guide. Enjoy selling with logic to make lots of money. And so this will either be the best presentation on sales you’ve ever heard, the worst presentation on sales you’ve ever heard, or somewhere in between. That is a promise, all right.

And so I thought it would make sense to start with this. We have a high—this is Charlie Munger, who’s probably like my number one hero in this season of My Life—um, we have a high moral responsibility to be rational. And I think that getting someone to rationally decide is important because emotional buyers often times get excited; they’ll buy, and then who’s had somebody who calls him two days later? It’s like, “I don’t know why I bought this.” Anybody raise your hand, just so you know you’re not alone. Okay.

And what happens is it’s just like dating. I think Lea talked about it yesterday: if you have a rational foundation for a relationship or a decision, when the emotions fade, the logic will continue. And so it’s good to—to answer both sides of the decision-making process. The short-term side is the emotion that gets you to decrease your astion threshold and take a step right, but the logic is what makes it stick and actually makes a great customer. All right.

And so for me, and I think that the further along you get in business and the higher up you get in business, the more you’ll see people who tend to make more logical decisions, more logic-first decisions, and fewer and fewer emotional decisions. All right. So what does being a rational—sorry, what does rational, logical have to do with selling? Well, you have logical buyers and you have emotional buyers, in general, right? Most people sit on this continuum one way or the other. And emotionally, people want to believe you; people want to buy. You must help their logical brains justify the decision that they already want to make. Think about it that way: they want to buy from you; you have to help them. All right.

So who here identifies—actually, I’ll skip through this. Emotional, logical—you’re probably in between. Anybody in between these two? Anyone? All right, then you’ll love this. So before we get started, I thought I would give you a few beliefs about selling that have served me very well throughout the years.

Number one: People want to believe you; they want to buy. You must help their logical Brains Brains justify the decision.

Two: Selling happens before you ask for the sale; closing happens after. So you’re selling for a lot longer period of time, but the moment you kind of like take your pants yourself and you’re like, “This is what it is,” that’s when you’re closing, right? You have now solicited; now you close.

Three: It’s easier to handle obstacles than objections. I’ll get to what the difference between those are in a second. That being said, expect and plan for no. It is not failure; it is expected. So stop being surprised. It’s one of the first things we talk new sales guys into: expect no. That’s not like—that’s a part of this. If they already were going to say yes, then you are not necessary. No is the job, right? If they could make the decision on their own, they would just send you the money, right? The reason they’re struggling is because they can’t, and they need your help, which is why sales is actually the first step in coaching. And I see sales as power. If you can have the ability to direct or influence others, that is power, and I feel like it should be made much cooler than I feel like it is.

Five: If you didn’t get a gasp from a price tag, you didn’t go high enough. This is another belief. So for those of you who are afraid to raise your price, if you’re not getting gasps, you’re not going high enough, straight up. And when you do it that way, you can always walk down and have a beautiful price anchor, right? When you say $100,000 first, a grand feels like a rounding error. It’s true. But when I say $10 first—like I’m saying right now, $10—and I say a thousand, sounds way [ __ ] bigger, doesn’t it? So you got to get the gasp, and you got to train your guys—if you have a team—they have to be comfortable with the no, and they have to be comfortable with the gasp. They got to go for the gasp. Be like, “Dude, you should have heard the gasp on this one!” Right there we go.

Seven: Selling properly is the first step in becoming a coach, right? Your first impressions, the expectations you set, dictate the relationship; how you sell, the fact that you use logic in the sale will set you up for success and your client for success in the long run.

Eight: Selling is helping prospects make decisions to help themselves. Like you are helping them help themselves. That’s where the power comes from. You are not helping them; you’re helping them help them. See the difference? It’s nuanced, but it’s real.

Nine: Keep the prospect, not the sale, as the priority. It’s not about us. The more you can vanish in the sale and—and magnify them, the better your selling conversations will go, because it’s not about us; they don’t care about you; they only care about them, and they will talk about themselves as long as they’ll let them. This is a really important one, especially when you start getting into closing.

Seek to understand, not to argue. And the way that I train our sales teams around this is childlike curiosity. So when someone says—when someone objects to something, it’s like, “Ha, that’s so weird; I wouldn’t have thought that. Tell me more about that,” right? And you get to be able to maintain that childlike curiosity. The same way they train fighters to not breathe too much during a fight, through exposure, the more—more times you get into these uncomfortable, high-stakes closing scenarios, the less weird and high-stakes they become because they become what you do every day. And the good thing is you get to have this conversation hundreds and thousands of times, and they only get to have it once, so you [ __ ] better be better at it than them.

Closing is a dance, not a fight; it’s seduction, not rape. I mean, I’m being super serious about this. The goal is not to beat them into submission; the goal is to sell from your back foot. It’s like, “I’m good; I want to help you—help you. And if that means not doing this, then I [ __ ] love it; I’m with you; I’m on your team.” And I’ll give you a bullet around that in a second.

Selling is a transference of belief over a bridge of trust; therefore, there are two things that are required: You Must Believe, so that you can transfer it, and you must have trust to make the transfer. Because if you truly believe—and a lot of times you—anyone been on a hot streak when they’re selling? Anyone? Anyone who just had their hand up? Ever been on a cold streak? Most times you go from hot to cold not because you forgot how to sell, because you stop believing in why you’re selling. You have the same skills as you did the day before, but sometimes you get a text, you get an email, get a pain-in-the-ass customer, you ask for a refund, whatever the hell it is, right? And then you question yourself. And so that bridge might have been created, but there was nothing to walk across it because your cup wasn’t full. And so that’s why—especially it’s you in the beginning, but your teams over time—the process of filling conviction is one of the easiest and best ways to increase someone’s closing percentage, better than any of the training in the world. If you get someone to believe, they will sell the right way because they’re doing it not to make the deal, because they want to help the other person.

16: You can only build trust if you genuinely want to help, and humans are exceptionally good at sniffing out intention. It’s a survival mechanism; you have to know if someone’s trying to double-cross you. We’re very good at smelling it out. And the reason a lot of you guys can’t close is because you only care about closing.

Belief and Trust are a continuum, not binaries. So it’s not you believe or don’t believe; it’s not they trust you or don’t trust you, but how much do they trust you? How much do you believe? How deeply do you believe? Because anyone ever been around somebody who just believes balls to the bones something that you think’s batshit crazy? Like, I mean, all the way—so much so that you start to question what you believe? That’s what real conviction does.

18: Closers ask hard questions, and it’s because you genuinely care; that’s why you do it. It’s why we’re here. Who here wants to impact thousands of lives and help people? Then you got to [ __ ] ask hard questions, because it’s the only thing that’s going to actually pierce someone’s hard and actually get the transformation to happen. If you can’t make—if you cannot have transformational conversations, you cannot coach, and this is the first step. The person who cares the most about the prospect wins the sale; that includes them. So if you care more about their well-being than they do, you will win. And if you are more convicted, they will question their own excuses because you are so certain.

Little TI—Little Nugget for you: record all your sales, by the way. Because when you do get on that hot streak, right? When you get on that hot streak and then you get cold again, watch your hot streak. See where you paused, what jokes you made, when you asked for the sale, when you didn’t, how you overcame it, and it’ll get you back in the flow much faster than trying to question yourself, “What do I do? What do I do?” Always record all your sales. It’s also the easiest way to train new people.

And then lastly, 21: Power is the ability to direct or influence people. If you want to be powerful, you must understand this skill, and that’s what we’re going to talk about. Cool. Awesome. When does selling happen? Does it happen when they’re a lead? Does it happen when we’re qualifying them? Does it happen when we solicit the sale? Does it happen when we close the sale? When does the selling happen? All the time. The entire time selling is happening. But what are we going to talk about today? Just this—just closing. Everything you have to do after asking someone to buy. Why are we doing that rather than the entire process? Beyond the fact that we’d be here all day, the other reason—and I love this—is that closing has one of the highest predictors of success in business. And here’s an analogy for it. Everyone familiar with the NFL? Yeah, great. So here’s an insane statistic: the top five Red Zone offenses in the league, now, last five years, made the playoffs 90% of the time. Here’s why this is interesting and crazy: there’s a million other stats; they could have horrible defenses; they could have terrible coaching; they could have a terrible whatever it is, right? They could have all these things that are wrong with their—they could have terrible Special Teams, whatever. But just this one set: if they’re in the Red Zone, they [ __ ] close. And I can tell you, if you have this ability, if you have this skill, it will make up for a tremendous amount of deficiencies in other areas of your life and business, and it will buy you time to learn those. But if you can’t close, it’s very difficult to grow in business, especially in the beginning, because it’s probably you. That’s why we’re talking about closing.

Why is this important from a money-getting perspective? Well, first off, if you have 100 people walking the door, 10% are never going to buy; just accept that, right? Problem is you don’t know which 10% it is, but 10% are ever going to buy; 10% are always going to buy; you just got to not [ __ ] it up. And most of you guys—these are the only sales you’re getting—they’re like, “Well, I already—I’m already here; my friend told me about you; I have my credit card out.” And some of you are like, “Well, you know, let’s make sure…” You’re like, “Just shut the [ __ ]; just take the card,” you know what I mean? Like, shut up, right? That’s like, “Hey, my friend’s so awesome; you got to meet him,” and she’s like, “Oh my God, he’s great!” And then the guy starts talking, and she’s like, “Oh, just kidding,” you know? Like, terrible, right? But this is what we fight for; this is what we train for. And if you want to make a big impact, that’s what we’re fighting for: it’s the middle 80.

Why this presentation will make you money: If after this presentation you just have one more bullet, one more play in your arsenal to close, where I get you one more deal a month, I’ll feel like my job was done, all right? And hopefully, if you just do that, it’ll pay for your entire weekend, all right? That’s my goal for the presentation: that everything that you guys have done for this whole weekend is paid for. Is that cool? Fair outcome? All right.

So this is one of my favorite sayings: “You’re only one decision away from changing your life forever.” And whenever I feel overwhelmed or I feel like I’m decreasing—like I feel powerless or I feel like I have less power than I want to have—I always say this to myself, because it’s like, I can take one decision and change [ __ ] everything, you know what I mean? Like I can—I can drink a bottle of Jack, get the car; I can change everything with one decision, right? I can make a step to—to invest in something; I can buy something; I can invest in myself; I can—I can have a terrible conversation with Laya, or I can have an amazing conversation with Lea, but just one decision. And that’s always given me power. But the thing is, is that instead of changing our lives, we blame—when I say blame, I want you to think, give power to sources outside of our control. And this is what you—and this is what your prospects and your customers are doing, and this is why so many people are weak and powerless. And so we’re going to do a fun activity today because I want you to be involved so you can learn it, and we’re going to do this so that one, you can help decisions to help yourself with whatever decisions you’re facing; two, you can use these frameworks to help prospects help themselves; and then three, become more powerful.

But rather than keep this hypothetical, I need you to visualize the decision that you need to make. All right, can you do that for me? Fantastic. And this is why I want you to actually think through a decision together, because this is a statement from Confucius: “I hear and I forget; I see and I remember; I do and I understand.” So my goal here isn’t for you to take screenshots of every picture of every slide; that’s not my point here. Because the thing is, is when you do that and you kind of—I mean, this is why I do it: I take pictures so that I don’t have to remember it, but I don’t want you to remember it; I want you to understand it. If you understand it, you won’t have to go back to your notes, because let’s be real, half the time you’re not even going to open these notes up again. You’re here now with me; try and understand. If you do that, it can change your life. Because what we’re going to do is not going to be some scripts that you have to understand, but the logic behind the arguments that people will give you as to why they are not choosing to become more powerful. And if you can unlock that, people will feel more powerful talking to you, and they will want to buy from you because of the feeling they have. Does that make sense? And so that’s when you’re using logic to create an emotion. So you—here’s an easy one for it. Anyone here presented with a decision last 24 hours? Yes? Great, fantastic. So who thinks the—a decision could change your life for the better? Great. For the worse? Knows. All right, let’s go.

So here’s my goal: I want to show you—as though you were a prospect—how to think through a decision and help others using these frameworks, right? What you want, what you don’t want; maximize the left, minimize the right. So here’s what this is translated to: if you decide to buy the offer, you feel more certain about your decision; if you decided not to buy the offer, you feel [ __ ] certain about the decision; and if you’re undecided, you make a [ __ ] decision, all right? And you feel good that it’s the one that has the highest likelihood of you getting—you close to where you want to go. And this is what we have to walk through with—with our prospects. When you’re looking at them, you have to be like, “I don’t want you to buy; I want you to decide for you, not for me. I’ll be the same either way,” right? You’re like, “I’m going to be ripped and in shape; it’s not going to change me,” right? Like that’s not going to change, but like it will change for you, right?

So quick note on sales ethics, and then we’ll dive in. Helping someone make a decision to help themselves does not mean buy from you. That’s a reiteration; you have to keep their goals at the center of the decision, and you should be happy—I mean this—because if you can shift this truly, if you can be happy when someone decides to own the power and not work with you, then the pressure around sales disappears; it evaporates. There’s no stake; the stake is, “Did I help them?” Does that make sense? And that means that you can win every sale because you change the metric you’re measuring yourself by. That’s the superpower, like—and that’s where you do make the most sales because you don’t care about the sale because you care about the person, and the people pay—the people who pay the most attention. So what I call it: paying attention; they pay for it; they pay for you to pay attention rather than talking about yourself, right? CU—they don’t care about you, cuz they’re thinking about 100 other things. And this is why—most importantly—make high-stakes decisions to help your prospects in order to best serve them.

Okay, so I told you earlier I was going to talk about the difference between obstacles and objections. A couple of you guys raised your hands about the differences. I’m not going to ask; I’ll tell you what it is. Obstacle is a thing that blocks one’s way or prevents or hinders progress. When you disagree with them, that is an obstacle. This happens before you solicit the sale. Someone says some [ __ ] before you even get to the sale; that’s an obstacle. A simple example I hear all the time: “Hey, why’d you hop on the call today? Hey, why’d you walk in the gym today?” Whatever it is, right? Them: “I just wanted to find out a little bit more about the program.” First 10 seconds: obstacle. You’re not here to find out more about the program; I’m here cuz you’re fat. But they got to say it. So you’re like, “Oh, so you finding out—like, do you do this all the time? Do you go to lots of different programs, it’s find out information, or is there a problem you’re trying to solve?” They’re like, “Oh, well, you know, I’m trying to lose weight.” Like, “Got it. So you’re not just hopping on 100 calls a day, cuz I was like, that would be a very weird existence, right? You just hop on for information all day.” Ha, great, fantastic. I’ve had this conversation before, right? So that’s an obstacle, right? And the thing is, it’s easy to confront and destroy obstacles before you ask for the sale. Once you’ve asked for the sale, you switch to objections. Objections is when they disagree with you. Do so—it’s much easier to be on the other side, disagreeing and helping them break their beliefs before the stake has been presented. After—after the—after you’re in the Red Zone, it’s all closing; it’s all objection overcomes, right? Example: that’s like, “I don’t want to buy right now,” and you’re like, “Totally understand. What are the main criteria you’re thinking through?” Which is always funny because people are like, “I need to think about…” I’ve never had someone like leave because they need to think about it. I’m like, “Cool, what are you thinking about?” And they’re like, “Oh, I’m still here,” right? Like, so learning how to talk through these high-stakes decisions with yourself or others is the purpose of this presentation, and as a result you’ll become more powerful.

Okay, so before I dive into these—each of these arguments, I have to make this one statement: is that the person must really want the goal and believe three things. One—which you’ll get to—there we go: the product will get them the goal, comma, the way they want to get there. And I learned that second half the hard way, because we found out in gym launch that people would say no sometimes to buying memberships, right? Or buying challenges or whatever, but when we offered them the ability to come back the next day, help them for free, we’d sell them $400 of supplements, and they just said no to a $100 down service thing. I’m like, “What the [ __ ]?” It’s because they want to lose weight, but they want to lose weight their way. And so that’s when I started learning, like, “Oh, not only do we have to make sure that they want the goal and they believe that the product’s going to get them there, it has to get them there the way they want to get there.” This gives you ammo for the questions that you’re going to ask. Does this make sense? Okay.

The second thing is that you and others will support them. Like, “Are you telling me the truth? Is this really what’s going to happen? Will other people around me support this decision?” And the third is that it will work for them and not just everyone else. “Sure, I’ve seen the people who step on the stage, but they’re different than me. I’m a snowflake. I have metabolic thyroid keto osis, right? Whatever. I have zero influence—oler—whatever, you know what I mean? Like, I have no following—itis, right? Whatever it is, right? Whatever [ __ ] you tell yourself.” And what you have to do in this situation, you have to pride-proof, so that it’d be more unreasonable not to believe than to believe. And this is a logical close; this is not a—this is not an emotional close. This is when you look at someone and say, “How many people would you need to see for it to be more unreasonable for you not to believe than to believe? At what point is it 10? Is it 50? Here’s a thousand. Tell me when to stop.” Okay, okay, okay, great. So that’s not the real reason, and then you can confront the real [ __ ]. All right. So otherwise, if they’re not sure of those things—if they don’t actually want to lose weight, if you don’t actually want to make money doing online fitness—then it doesn’t matter what Jason says. You don’t want to make money doing online fitness, then you’re not going to buy, right? If you do want to make money doing online fitness, then you go down—you go down the train—the train tracks. That make sense? Okay. Again, this is why you expect no at first, because if people could make the decision, they would have already made it. All right.

Out of the main course, Richard Feynman—besides Charlie, one of my favorite thinkers of all time; he was like the second guy on the—the atom bomb—sounds negative; brilliant teacher. He’s known for this: understand, don’t memorize; learn principles, not formulas. And that’s what the rest of this presentation is about: is the principles behind overcoming these distortions that people have. And so this is me asking you, for your own sake: don’t take pictures of the slides; it’s because all the stuff’s going to be in the recordings, but you are here now, so be here now so you can understand it. Okay. So there are three sources—this is a huge breakthrough for me, so I’m going to share it with you this first time—try to share to life. There are three sources that we cast our power to, okay? And it took me a very long time to get through this, because I looked at Grant, and he had his, you know, you got stall decision maker, money, then you talk to Barry who owns Sage, she’s like you got time, fit, uh, money, fear, shame, right? Those are hers. And then Jordan Belfort’s got his. And so everybody’s got like—these are the only overcomes, right? I was like, “There has to be an actual truth here; like, there has to be something…”

That's true. That's uned. And so trying to figure this out, I actually went back to Dr. Albert Ellis. Anybody who knows who he is? No one. Great. Um, who here knows what cognitive behavioral therapy is? CBT? He invented it. Smart dude. And so what he noticed is that he originally had 11 distortions of reality, then he dropped it to nine, then to seven, and then he came to three, and the three stuck. And the three are what I'm about to share with you.

And you're like, why is he talking about this about sales? Because the objections that people offer you, where they cast their power to, are distortions of reality. They are the things we use to upset ourselves. These are the three circumstances, and this is the irrational statement that people make:

1. I must get what I want when I want it. I must not get what I don't want. If I don't get what I want, I can't stand it. That's when people blame their emotional disturbances on circumstances.

2. Others—other people must treat me fairly and kindly. And if I, if they don't, they are no good and deserve to be condemned and punished. It's like your animal brain, right?

3. Self—I must do well or else I am no good.

These are the three core distortions that upset people. This is like mental illness, right? And so I'm not saying anyone has mental illness if they don't agree with you. It's more so that these are distortions that are not real. And if you can understand—not memorize—if you can understand this, then you can have these high-stakes conversations, understanding exactly which distortion they're suffering from. And I'll show you how to overcome them. Okay.

And so I like to consider like the onion of blame. People—this is like one of the bigger breakthroughs I had—they start with the outside; they blame circumstances, time, money, other [ __ ], and then the step next to that, they start to blame other people: my spouse, my kids, my employees. And then finally, they say like, "It's me. It's my fault." And so you might have to overcome multiple layers as you peel back. And based on the objection they give you, you can know where you're at. You can know how close you are. If someone just says, "I have to think about it," you're like, "Great. I'm talking to the person who's in power and the decision-maker, and I just need to get them to say yes." If they're like, "I don't have…" they're casting the power away. And some of you guys are probably casting your power away on decisions you need to make, which is why I'm making this presentation.

Even though that these are the things that distort people's realities. CU—you're like, "No one's ever said circumstances are getting in my way," right? Like, no one says that, right? They manifest in five ways that I want to equip you to deal with—all right, for yourself and others. So these are the five most common excuses, scapegoats that people use for circum…and if you find other ones, these are the biggest buckets because I didn't want to have a hundred things here, but the big three buckets are circumstances, others, and self, right? But they manifest with time in multiple ways, and I'll show you how value, price, money, etc., fit. I'm a special snowflake, others, which is, "I don't have the authority to make the decision," and then finally, self, which is, "What if I just don't make the decision? Let some…let life make it for me," right? Avoidance, stall. You go from surface level to core. And as a side note, you should never get stuck on the stuff near the top, and ideally, you really never get stuck anywhere on this equation if the person wants what you have and you truly believe in what you have to help them. And I mean that like, if you understand this thoroughly, you can walk someone towards helping themselves. Okay. Okay. This is what they look like, or this is what they sound like in reality:

"Not a good…not a good time right now. I'm really busy," right? That's time. "Can't afford it. Too expensive." Fit. "Not sure if it's for me. I hate broccoli. I can't do a plan with broccoli," right? "Can't do a plan where I have to DM people every day. It's against my brand. I'm poor, but it's against my brand," right? Authority. "Have to talk to my partner, spouse. I have to talk to somebody who has more power than me." It's funny because when you start thinking this way, it sounds silly. And then avoidance: "I need to think about it. Clearly, let's think about it now," all right?

And so I told you I want you to think about the principles behind these things, not memorize. You've got circumstances, you got other people, and you have yourself, and we drill down. So quick test: who here is physically in the room? Raise your wonderful arms. We're working. We're rocking. So here's my ask: raise your hand if you or your prospects present with this distortion. So who here is a Time person? "I'm busy. It's not a good time. Maybe in the future." Anyone deal with these sometimes? It's yourself totally.

So I'm also going to tell you a secret about this. I think the reason I got pretty decent at logical arguments is because I am inherently skeptical, and I will paralyze myself from not doing anything unless I have really sound reasons to do it. And I realized that I couldn't move forward to make any progress in my life until I had these frameworks to think through these hard decisions through, so I could start taking steps to where I…where I wanted to go. It took me years to get there. And so…so hopefully I can give you some keys that helped me unlock my own head to get out of my own [ __ ] way so that you can too and help your clients. All right.

So the way I think about time—and there's a lot of overcomes for all of these things—what I tried to do is bunch the three biggest ones that I like to use most frequently. And if I uh…veer from like the…the bullets on the screen, it's because I'm riffing with you, and I'd rather just kind of stay in the flow. Is that cool? Okay, fantastic. So when you're overcoming this one—each of these is kind of a specific angle that you're attacking it from—so macro is like, "I'm…this is a busy season for me. Got lots of stuff going on," right? Micro is like, "I don't have any time in my day." So you're one person is saying, "I've got lots of [ __ ] going on." One person's like, "I can't find the time." It's different. Sounds subtle, but it's both about time but in different ways. All right. And then the…the last one is, "Well, when…when I have time, I'll start," right? Everyone know this [ __ ] horseshit, but whatever. Okay.

So as always, we never disagree with prospects because you're not in a fight. Totally get it. Totally understand. "Do you think…do you want this to be something that lasts for the long term?" Right? It's a question. You're like, "Yeah." "Do you think that you're going to be busy again in the future?" "Well, yeah." "So you want this to last in the long run, and you do think you're going to be busy again in the future? Well, then don't you think it'd be best to start now when you are busy? Because if you learn how to do it when you're busy, you'll be able to do it forever. If you can only learn it during a perfect circumstance, then you're going to fall off when it gets busy again. And isn't that the time you'd want to have the most support?" Goes for you guys too. That's just number one. We got so many lore, right? And so when you knock that out, the goal is that the person says, "Well, [ __ ] that's not a good reason," and you take one step towards the truth. So when you're thinking about it, it's not like, "Oh, I've got to overcome this one thing, and then they'll buy." You got to keep peeling. And if you have this framework, you understand the direction you're going in, and you can start listening for the, "Oh, they're talking about themselves now. I've gotten two layers deeper," right? So that's seasonal, micro…you can't tell someone in a sale, "Hey, take out your phone, take out your hours by week, pull it up. Oh, look, 22 hours on social media this week. You've got time." So you say it differently. You say, "You know what? I had the same issue, and I used to complain all the time about like how I didn't have time to…to be successful and do things I needed to do. And my wife got so sick and tired of me saying this, she pulled my phone out, and she was like, 'Look, I guess I just found your time, didn't I?' I was like, 'Ah, [ __ ]'." And you can say it that way, and then a prospect feels better. Does anybody here feel like they don't have time, right? And the first thing that any program is going to do, if it's a good program, is going to cut out the 90% of the [ __ ] that you are doing, which is causing you to feel overwhelmed, which is probably the real reason you feel like you don't have time. Jeff Bezos got the same time you do, right? It's just what are the things that you're doing that he's not? It's not about adding [ __ ] to your plate; it's about removing the stuff that's not working because clearly everything you're doing that's filling your time is not making you more money, so you're doing the wrong [ __ ]. So there's going to be plenty of time because all the stuff you're doing now is not working, right? Not simple, but that's the reason, right? So we went macro, when…then, "Hey, in the future, when I've got time, I'll totally sign up for your program," right? Anyone heard this one? Anyone say this one, right? And again, you want to…you want to empathize. You don't say like, "Ah, that's [ __ ]." You say, "Totally understand. That's…I was stuck like this for years." If you can step in their shoes, you're not attacking them. You actually go from the inside out. You step into their self, and then you walk them through the epiphany that you experienced, and it doesn't feel judgmental; it feels helpful. That make sense? I used to feel the same way, right? And I found this out actually from Jason Flatley, and he was the one who told me this. It's a…it's a logical fallacy. It's called the when-then fallacy, which is why that's how I remember it. And the when-then fallacy simply states, "When I have X, then I will do Y," but it flips sequence. So it's like, "When I get better, I will go to the hospital." Sorry, there's just so many like hilarious ones about like money and stuff like, "I start saving money once I'm rich," like, all right. But the thing is is that we do this, right? We do this: "I'll pay for the program that'll make me more money when I have more money." That's the point of the program. "I'll pay for the program that'll help me get a six-pack once I have a six-pack." Once I have more time, which the program is going to help me have. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's just…it doesn't make…it's a fallacy. And so what that means is it's a distortion; it's not real. And so the goal of having these high-stakes conversations is simply showing people we're not attacking; we're just walking them through it and be like, "Do you realize that this is holding you back? And I know this better than anyone because I'm a skeptical [ __ ]." The reason I can do all these logical things is because I'm the first person I'd overcome, right? And you might be too. So once we attack time from these three angles, it depends which one they present with. If they present with one and then move to the next, you can knock all three out. You'll probably find some that…that make the most sense to you, but the thing here is it's not about memorization; you just got to get it. Macro—you're always going to be busy. Once you want the most help when you are busy so that it can stick forever. Yes, time. My wife showed me my phone. Turns out I got [ __ ] time, but the reality is it's not about what I am doing; it's about the stuff I got to stop doing, and that's what I'm going to help you with, right? This isn't scripting; this is just understanding it, right? And then when-then, it's a fallacy; it's a distortion; it's not real. And then just use two crazy examples like, "Once I have money, then…" or, "I'll save money when I'm rich," right? It's just like ridiculous. Okay. So what do we do? One reason down, and we're getting closer to the core, right? Right. So who here is somebody who's like, "I can't afford it. It's too expensive," or has heard this from a prospect? I like…I better see everybody's hand, especially if you're selling high-ticket, which hopefully you get a gasp. So these are the four frameworks that I think through. There's a million like money closes, but these are the ones that I like the most and that…that to me resonate the best, right? And so why a lot is good is kind of like my…my…my first one here. And so the reason that if someone gasps or thinks that this is a lot of money, you just ask them, "Is this a lot of money to you?" And they're going to say, "Yeah." If they say, "No," then you're like, "Awesome, buy it." And if they say, "Yes," right? And if they say, "Yes," then you're like, "That's the exact reason how you're going to be successful because there's other people who buy this thing, and you know what? They're not all in on it, but the question is, 'Do you want to draw the line in the sand and go all in? Do you want to step over the line and be the person you want to be?' Because I can tell you that this is not about whether this works or not; I've already proven that. The question is whether you work or not. And so if you put more on the line, then you have a higher likelihood of being successful, so you should be the last person to be worried about this. I'm more excited because the best stories are always coming from people like you in your exact situation, so don't let that be a reason not to do it; that should be the reason to do it." So the next one is like, "Why is this not a lot?" So first is the fact that it's a lot for you is good; it means you're going to try hard. The second one is like, "Well, it's a lot in terms of absolute amount, but relative amount, very little," right? Because if all this does is add $10,000 a month to your income, is it worth it? If all this does is get you into a bikini, is it worth it? Yeah. And so then what happens—and the reason that this is a stepping process, right?—is that we're…we're just taking these objections out of the way so we can get the person to confront reality, not a distortion they've created, because the reality is the thing they're afraid of. And so what happens is when they say, "Yeah, if it did that, it would be worth it," right? The problem is they don't believe you, right? And so it's like, "Great, then it's not about the price; it's about whether you believe me." So you can sidestep it. Does that make sense? We're taking a step closer. And then obviously you can use a comparison, you know, depending on what you're selling. If you can price anchor with like, "Well, here, they don't have a four-year degree for doing online fitness; that's why the alternative education industry exists, and it's because the formal education has failed most of us," right? Anybody graduate with here with a four-year degree? Anyone immediately be able to use that for degree to get leads, make sales? No? Me neither, right? And what's crazy is that some of these degrees are $50, $100, $200,000 and take four years when you've got something that can help you make…make that entire amount of money in half the time, right? For a tenth of the price. When you think about it like that, frame it, it's actually a great deal. Does that make sense? So you just frame it; you have to give context. All right. So number one is the fact that it's a lot for you is good; means you're actually going to try. Number two is if it does what we say it's…it's going to do, the value is there, so that's not actually what you're opposed to, which then we can take the next step. All right. Number three is, "What's money good for anyways?" This is actually one of my favorite lines of reasoning for a variety of reasons, and I'll get to it. When you're looking at a prospect or looking at yourself, you're going to spend this money either way over the next 12 months; you're going to spend it, right? And in fact, not only you're going to spend it, you're going to buy the program; the question is whether you're going to pay for it in money or pay for it in time. And so like, you can learn every single lesson that's in this program, whether it's losing weight, you know, uh, getting leads, selling online, whatever it is, right? You're going to learn these lessons, but do you want it to take 12 weeks or 12 years? And the question is, are you going to be able to live a thousand lifetimes because of the thousand people that we've helped just like you and gathered all those lessons and put them together so you don't have to do the trial and error for that entire period of time? So the question is not whether you're going to buy it or not; it's just how do you want to pay. And so for me—this is a personal note, and I…I'll probably say it at the end—but like the reason we haven't…don't move quickly through life is that I will buy other people's mistakes because it's just…it's the only way you can buy time in this life is to buy the knowledge to take less time from other people who have taken their time. And like, if you think about human civilization in general, Edison took however long to make a light bulb, and then we just bought the lesson from him, and now we have light bulbs, right? And the next guy figures out the next thing, and then we just buy the lesson from him, and that's how we have to move faster. So you're going to spend the money either way; question is, 12 months from now, is it going to be on [ __ ] that didn't get you anymore or stuff that is going to get you somewhere? And no matter what you're buying, you're buying the program; just going to pay time or you're going to pay with money. And if you're being real, you've probably been paying for time the last six years. How's that working for you? Do you want to do more of that? This is also…this is a…this is a classic one; it's a very easy one to remember, but like, who here knows the difference between a self-made billionaire when they had nothing and where you're at right now? If you have nothing, zero, they both…you're both broke. They were broke; you're broke; whatever it is, if that's where you're at right now, the only difference is that that proves that if they were successful, it wasn't about the resources they had; it's about how resourceful they were. So I'll tell you a quick story about this. So anyone here read uh…Shoe Dog, right? Story of Nike. So in the story, he talks about how he was about to lose everything multiple times; it's a crazy story. And this time it was like…it was…it was going to go down; like it wasn't going to happen. And he needed a tremendous amount of money, and he just didn't have it. He'd extended all his credit lines; the banks wouldn't do it. And the next lenders said they…they canceled on him, and the company was going to fold because it was growing too fast. At that point, he could have just given up and said, "There's nothing I can do. I maxed out all my cards. I maxed out all my banks. There's literally nothing I can do." And his people had already worked for free; they were like, "We can't do this anymore." He went to his vendors and said, "You need…need to pay my payroll for me." He went to his vendors. Anybody use like landing page software? Anyone? Or anyone use something from a vendor, right? It's like going to that guy…going to your videographer and be like, "Listen, you got to pay payroll for me this…this month because otherwise I'm not going to be able to keep doing business with you because I'll be out of business." Resourceful, not resources. And the reason this is so important is because when you have nothing, it's the easiest excuse to give yourself is you're like, "Well, I have nothing; that's why I can't…" It's like, of course, but every self-made millionaire and every self-made millionaire was self-made, and they started with nothing, which puts them in the exact same seat you are. So the question is, do you want to have power or do you want to not have power? You want to have power; you're resourceful, not resources, right? And so if we want to make these decisions that are going to help ourselves, we need to step into that. And so when you're talking to your prospects, it's the same thing, right? Does that make sense? Okay, rocking. I mean…and you can drill deeper into this as like, "Do you think there's anyone else who's been in your situation who's achieved this or maybe worse than your situation?" The answer is yes. And if they can, why can't you, right? So we're taking steps closer. Are you guys digging this? Okay, cool. Oh, thanks. Thanks. I wasn't sure if it was wra attention or sheer boredom. So we're not…you feel…you feel we're progressing? Are we making like…the person presents this: "Say I don't have time. Shit's busy," blah blah. And you're like, "Nope. Nope. We're going to take one step closer." They like, "You know what? But I…I don't have the money, or it's too expensive." You're like, "Well, if you don't have the money, you're going to be successful; it's worth it," right? "Yes, I understand why it's worth it." "Well, you don't need money to begin with, right? You got to be resourceful, and you can find the money." 'Cause I'll ask you this: this is a fun one for business owners. Who here has had an unexpected bill ever come up? Taxes, right? Yeah. And then all…okay. So everyone here is still alive who raised their hands. Who here was able to magically pull money out of their ass and figure out a way to do it? Raise your hand. Here's what's crazy: you have the ability to be resourceful when it's for someone else and not for you. It's because you choose to be powerful when someone else needs it but not for yourself. [ __ ] up, right? So stop doing that. If you function like…you have to make payroll tomorrow, and like…you…you're back on rent; you're going to get kicked out; you think differently. And if instead of paying your landlord, you're paying you because that's what you want to do, it shifts internally because everyone here just prov…the fact that you can be resourceful when you choose to be, so just choose to be. So number three is, "It's not…not sure it's a fit for me." So besides the obvious ones, which is like, "I don't want to work out. Broccoli sucks. I…I can't do a program where…where I…I can't do cardio," whatever the [ __ ] right…um, like I said, "I don't want to do DMs. I don't want to post on Instagram. I don't want to have a Facebook group," whatever, right? Whatever the [ __ ] is. All right. "I'm not sure if the vehicle is a fit for me." So usually you can overcome the easy ones, but if someone is just really sticking hard, these are the three that I use to…to shift perspective. Okay. So this one is new identity, new priorities. So it's good to have cues for these things, which is like, "We vote with our dollars about the things that we care about," and if you show me what someone is spending their money and their time on, I can tell you what their future is. And I'll tell you an interesting story. So…um, I had somebody who was just like you who was like, "You know what? I don't want to do this either," and I told her this story. Can I tell you it? Yes. And this is what you'd say to the prospect, right? So I was with Lea, and we went to Sephora, which…

Is it a makeup store, and and I show up like this? Um, I feel welcomed, and so we're we're standing there, she's doing something, and I usually stand in the corner like this, um, and I saw these two little girls. It might have been like, I don't know, girl age, so like 12 to 15, this like this this, and they were like giggly and so excited, and they had like the girl with the smok came over was like helping her out, helping them out, and she was like, okay, this is like eyeliner, and this is lipstick, and this is whatever blush. Um, I'm just like using words I've heard. Uh, this is how you paint your face, and the thing is the girls were like so excited, and then they were like, right before they left, she was like, "Girls," she's like, "You have to remember like now that you're getting older and you're becoming a woman, you need to start budgeting for this stuff, all right? So you're going to start buying this every month, all right? So like remember you got to save some money for this so you can have it." And the girls were so excited that they were like, "Yes, like we're becoming women now, and these are the things that women do."

It's because when you have a new identity, you have new priorities, and so you've had priorities that are aligned with your old identity. Right, there's the you that goes out, the you that drinks, the you that does the blah blah blah blah, spends money on [__], you shouldn't do, spends time on [__], you shouldn't be spending time on, and there's the you that you want to be. And so right now we can draw the line in the sand and be like, do you want to keep walking down the road that you have been walking? And if you don't, then you have to step into a new identity, and with that new identity comes new priorities, because people who want to be rich spend money on themselves; they spend money on education; they invest in their skill sets because I want to align my identity with the identity of those who came before me who've done the things I want to do, right? And just like those little girls stepping into that identity, we too must step into the identity we want to be. Does that make sense?

And so when you're talking to somebody who's trying to lose weight and they're like, "I can't afford a gym membership," and you're like, "Girl, you're spending 200 bucks on your nails, and you've got a $1,000 outfit on, do you think another $1,000 outfit would make you look better or your high school weight? Right? Do you think another $1,000 outfit would make you look better or being rich as [__]?" And I say that for those of you who are thinking about on the money side, right, like who waste—like some of you guys have bigger shoe collections than like—it's like fitness, like fitness people and shoes, it's like the weird like, and Lululemon and the, you know, spandex, it's like a hundreds piece of SP. Anyways, so it's like your whole wardrobe could be consolidated into a skill that could buy you as many wardrobes as you want if you chose to, right? Okay, rocket. I don't like this certain aspect. This is one of my favorite easiest ones to hit, which is like, you got to change the change, right? What you have been doing, it's been getting what you've been getting, and you got to change the change, cuz like I remember I would go through meal plans with people, and they'd be like, "Well, can we change this because this is what I eat for breakfast? Can we tell, can we make that the breakfast?" And I'm like, "That breakfast makes you look like you, that way you spend your first four hours of the day makes your bank account looks like what it does look like." Ooh, right, right, taking steps, right? We're getting closer to the truth.

And so the thing is is that it's going to hurt to change because change hurts, and you've heard this one probably from Tony Robinson. If you haven't, the question is whether the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change, and that's we just ask someone, and this is in the help part. If someone's like, "The pain of staying the same is not worse than this change," it's like, then girlfriend, like gain 50 more pounds and come back. You know what I mean? Like, get there, you—I mean, hit rock bottom. This isn't it for you. I'm being real. Some people's rock bottom is 12% body fat; some people it's 500 lb, but everyone's got one; you just got to know where yours is, and all you really got to do is just move what rock bottom is for you, which is kind of interesting because you start making a change here, which is kind of interest—like interesting as a thought, but are you in enough pain is the question you ask the person. So for those of you who are unwilling to make a change because it feels contrary to like, "I don't want to do, I don't want to seem salesy, I don't want to, I don't want to help people," like whatever, right? Like, is your current situation more painful than the change that you'll have to go through or experience to get to where you want to go?

And so the last one is hypothetical. I actually really love this; this is a great framework overall for overcoming lots of different obstacles um, or objections that present themselves, but the hypothetical, and there's lots of ways of phrasing this, which is like you've probably heard the unicorn clothes, you probably heard like, "If this were perfect, would you do it?" On a scale from 1 to 10, where would this program be if 10 was amazing, one was terrible? You know where is this? They say a number, and you say, "Cool, what would make it a 10? Why isn't it a one?" Like you guys heard this scripting before, so you guys are like, "No, please talk slower." Um, the reason I said we have to learn the principles behind it rather than memorizing the script is that it all is based on one thing, which is hypothetical, which is, "If this were perfect, would you do it?" Because you get a hypothetical agreement, and they say yes, if it were—the thing is that if you're like, "If this were perfect, would you do it?" If someone says no, then you're like, "Girl, okay, like let's take five steps back. Does my breath smell?" Because the thing is they've actually told you a lot there; it's like it has nothing to do with the stuff you're talking about; they don't trust you, and now we can talk about that, right? So it's a great question to frame like, where are we? And so it's like, "If this were perfect, would you do it?" Sometimes they'll laugh; if you ever poor, they'll laugh; they'll say yes, right? And so then you get to flip it and say, "Then what's the difference between perfection and what we've got?" And the thing is is that people are very hard; they don't actually know how to generate making a program cuz they're not going to like know all the things you can deliver on the spot, right? And and so they're like, most of the time they'll be like, "I don't know." You're like, "Right, well, because it sounds like it's nothing to do with the program; it's all about to do with you, so let's talk about that," right? And then all of a sudden, boom, one step closer to the truth. Does that make sense? Yeah, all right. And that's why we do hypotheticals. So if it were perfect, what's missing? And then if you can, if it's if they do give you an answer and they're like, "I just don't want to do broccoli," and you're like, "I do green beans, would you do it?" They're like, "Yeah." You're like, "Great, green beans it is, sign here," right? Like some you would be [__] amazed how many times [__] like that happens. It's like one crazy thing; it's like, "Well, if we didn't have that, would you do it?" Like, "Oh yeah, sure. Where were you 10 minutes ago?" Right? And that's how you do hypothetical. Okay, we're making we're making progress. You still with me? Still digging? Okay, cool.

Authority. All right, this is one of my favorite F, and so this one instead of having three, I really just have like one very good statement of reasoning that you should understand. Okay, this is real [__]. So this is more of a process than it is anything else, but the spouse or decision-maker is not there right now. Note for you guys, a lot of you guys have had the opportunity to go talk to a spouse, but a lot of you guys don't have that in your business, right? Like spouse ain't there, and they leave; they're not coming back, right? Or they are, but a very small percentage. Don't wait for it. Okay? So what we have to do is try and sidestep it by isolating the objection and casting aside the partner because the partner is not there. So how could they object? Anything, they don't even [__] know who you are, right? And so the idea is, and again this is assuming if you have a really long-term thing, then you want the partner to be there, right? Like ideally, that's what you have, but if you don't have the opportunity, then you got to go through the next step, all right? Which is, "What do you think they wouldn't like?" And then they will tell you, and then you just overcome the thing which has nothing to do with the spouse because spouse isn't there, right? Very easy sidestep. Does that make sense? This works really well. It's like, "Why wouldn't they?" It's like, "Because they don't want me to fail." "Oh, they don't want you to fail. Let's talk about you." And so this is the process that I walk through. "Do they approve of your current struggle? Are they happy that you're struggling?" No. Okay, then why would they not approve of something that's going to fix something they already don't approve of? Right? They're not happy with how you're currently doing; why would they be against something that's already making them unhappy? Right? Right. Well, let me ask you this, and they pause, like, "If the rules were reversed and your husband needed this to make what he wants his dreams happen or your wife needed this program to make her dreams happen, would you support her then? Why wouldn't you support you?" Right? Right. And I think the real problem that we're dealing with here, and this is the kicker, this for everybody, is that you're asking for permission instead of support because it is your life, not theirs. And what happens is if you give that power to them, and then two years from now you're still fat, you're still poor, whatever it is, who are you going to blame? Them. And so that's when you have a resentful marriage because you didn't own your [__]. And so I'm not saying you shouldn't like explain the decision to them, but the way you explain it to them is what I just said, which is, "If I don't do this for me, I'm going to end up resenting you, and I don't want that. And instead of me bitching to you every day about how we don't have money or about how I don't like my body, I'm now doing this, and I'm joining a group of support, of community of people just like me. And crazy enough, for some reason doctors go to college, right? Right. That makes sense. They go to medical school; lawyers go to law school, but where do entrepreneurs go? There's no entrepreneur school; no one teaches the stuff. But it turns out there are people who teach it just for this specific industry, and I can take failures of a thousand people and pack into a year, and it's 1/10 the price of a 4-year degree, right? And so instead of whining to you, what I commit to is I'm going to show up and be a better husband, a better wife, a better partner. I'm not going to [__] to you about this stuff because I'm going to take this seriously; I'm going to go all in, and I'm not asking your permission; I'm just asking for your support, all right?" That's how you can overcome it because I'm going to be real with you; it is about them, and you have to believe that, like you can't say this unless you believe it because like you will—you save marriages by showing people that they are the ones in control because if they keep saying, "My husband's not going to let me buy a weight loss program," what do you think she's secretly saying? "Can't believe you won't let me do it," right? If that's real, if she's using it as a foil, you sidestep; you get yourself right, but that might be the real thing, and if that is the thing, then you have to let them step into that, and that's where you know having—that's where like having a three-day no-sweat guarantee or something like that is also helpful. It's like, "Hey, sign up, and I use—I use a lot of aphorisms and humor in my selling, and so I'd be like, 'Hey, Cindy, if you sign up and you tell your husband and he's upset, you have—and when he sees you, he's like, 'Girl, I don't want you to get in shape; I want you to stay overweight; I want you to put those sweatpants on; I want you sit on that couch, reach your hand a bag of Cheetos, put the Cheetos fingers on there; I want you to create generational unhealth; I want you to live 10 years less long; I want you to see our grandkids.' I don't want that, right? I want to marry a younger, better you sooner because you're going to have a heart attack.'" If he says that to you, you have him call me, and then they're like cracking up, and you're like, "Okay, okay, listen, sign up, three-day no sweat, like if he if he does tell you that he just wants you to be out of shape and never leave him because uh, because he doesn't want you to get you hot cuz he's insecure, if he says that, um, yeah, just let me know," all right? So like the whole time you're just joking and stuff, but the three-day guarantee helps like nudge a lot of these people over. Is that cool? You guys get that one? Okay, sweet. And so that goes for you, right? Like it's it's about support, not permission; that's the bottom line, right? Support, not permission, because otherwise you're going to blame them for your lack of dreams being realized rather than blaming the person that should, which is you. All right. So this is avoidance. Now we're getting to the core. We've gotten rid of time; we know that you've got time, and the best time to do it is today because you're going to be busy forever, right? Value. We know that you can't afford it. If you can't afford it, you'll buy it. If you can't afford it, it's a great great reason to do it, and if the value is there, then there's no reason not to do it because it'll pay for itself, right? What's money good for anyways? You're going to pay for the program regardless; you want to pay him less time or more time? Value is not a problem. Fit. You got to step into a new identity, right? You've got to be willing to change, and the question is just whether the pain that you're experiencing is less than the pain of the change that it takes to experience the next thing, right? If they step into that, they're good because it's not about resources; it's about resourcefulness, so the fit's not an issue. Authority. They have to own it; it's about support, not permission. We all here, do you feel like we've peeled the layers back on your prospects, and they're just laid bare, naked, there—just you've solicited the sale; now you got to close, all right? Avoidance. So now they're like, "Wait, wait, I need to think about it." So now that we've exhausted—I'm putting this as emphasis—we've exhausted all outside reasons; now we are finally talking to someone in power, and that is what a good coach does; we don't make decisions for people; we help them make decisions. So here's—"I have to think about it; not sure; give me a hand." Who's dealt with somebody who says thinks that way? All right, at least one person here? No, I'm kidding; all you guys—that you guys are great. So this is how I divide this up: past, present, future. And so hopefully this should already—before I I dive into these—give you simple frameworks to work through. Time. You've got macro, micro, when, then, right? You've got—you got value. You're thinking about—it's not a lot of money; even if if it were a lot of money, it's not a lot of money; you're going to pay for it either way, like you have the simple frameworks that you can walk through; you might just hit them with one, and if they hit it with again, you hit them with the other angle because they're logical frameworks; they're not scripts; that's why I made them bubbles; you don't have to memorize it; just got to understand it. Past. So like, "I need to think about it," and so the thing is is, and this—the first bubble there is—if someone's like, "I feel like this is happening so fast," anyway, we get that one, like, "I just I just got on the phone with you; I don't really know who you are," and you're like, "Hey, this is not a fast decision, right? You've been making this decision for the last 6 years; you continually make the decision; we're doing to say is deciding you're actually going to do something about it, right? How long you wanted to lose weight? A long time. So this is not a fast decision at all, but the thing is is that, and this is where you go sunk cost. So if I were talking to you guys, I would say you you know you bought tickets cuz you saw some ad, you registered there, you got your flights, you got a hotel, you blocked the time, you flew here, you listen to this whole thing; you're 6 in from gold; this isn't a fast decision at all; you did all these to get here because it's important to you, so don't let that distortion stop you from getting what you want, right? It's fear, right? Let's face that. What are you afraid of having happen? Which, by the way, I took the slide out, but my two favorite questions to ask in a in a sale that I feel like are the fastest to cut through is, "What are you most afraid of having happen if you buy? What are you most afraid of? What's the worst thing that you envision in your mind?" And if they're not sure, I just fill in the blanks; I'm like, "I take your credit card; I swipe over as as much as I possibly can; I go to Vegas; I put it all on black, and then I go to Monaco where they can't extradite me." Fair enough. And they're like, "I was not thinking that," and you're like, "Right, so what's the worst, you know, like what's what's the real thing?" They're like, and then they're like, "You know, I just have bought so many programs before." You're like, "Right, let's talk about that," right? And so I'm going to skip one forward, and then I'm going to go back to it. This is one of my favorite obstacle or objection overcomes; it's I call it "Don't let it burn you twice," and this—you can see the date; it happened yesterday. This girl texted me—or me—April 6th; she said, "It's crazy to think that I had a sales call with you 6 years ago, and I'm kicking myself in the butt for not jumping on this." This is yesterday, right? Like I don't even own the company anymore, and I said, "You let a bad decision burn you twice: once when you made your poor investment, but a second time when you let that bad investment stop you from a good investment." It would be like—anybody ever have a boyfriend or girlfriend in middle school or high school that they're not currently married to? Anyone? Just like, just come on, help me out here. Okay? It would be like having a bad eighth-grade boyfriend or girlfriend and being like, "You know what? Men aren't for me." All coaches suck, right? There's good coaches, there's bad coaches, there's crazy ass [__], and there's crazy ass dudes. You know what I mean? Like, there's also good ones. And so the things is, if you stop—if you let the bad one prevent you from the good one, you get burned by being with the bad one and because you let the bad one control your next decision, right? And so when someone has had a bad experience with doing keto or whatever the [__], right? Or you had a bad experience with some program that you did or did not do, or they didn't fulfill whatever, either way, don't let that burn you twice because no matter what you're going to have to do—you're going to have to do these workouts whether you're part of the program or not; doesn't matter; you're going to have to do it; so you might as well do it, but somebody's going to get you there faster, right? Let me go back one real quick. So it's not a fast decision, and this is another one that I love, which is, "Do you think that you're maybe in this position because you have struggled to make a decision in the past? You have waffled when it came time to make to make the hard call? Have you been in this conversation and said no before?" Yeah. "Do you think that's why you're here?" Yeah. "Do you think that might be the reason you should change that?" Yeah. "Okay, let's change it. One decision can change your life." And the last one is like, "Are you tired of another year of almost? Tired of another year of almost hitting your goals, of almost getting to 10K a month, of of almost, you know, hiring the team that you wanted, of almost retiring your your wife or husband, or almost moving into the neighborhood that you wanted to move into, or almost being able to pay for your kids' recreational sports rather than not being able to because you can't afford it? You're tired of another year of almost. Well, if you're tired of another year of almost, then we can't do what we're doing to get here for another year because we're going to get another year of almost. And so the question isn't what it cost you, but how much has it cost you to not decide up to this point, right? The cost of inaction. And I think that when we think about our lives in reverse, we never never regret the things that we did; we regret the things we didn't do, the opportunities that we let pass by. And I think that if you can let that person step into that power, they will make the decision to help themselves, like this person did. Not all right. Present. So depends on who you're talking to; someone's talking about past stuff, then you do with the past stuff. The second frame for avoidance is present, which is they just don't know how to make a [__] decision, right? And so you have to help them make a decision. And so this one—the rocking chair is one that I just for some reason have used a tremendous amount of time, especially when I was selling weight loss—is to be like, "I just really really need to think about it." Like, "Totally understand. Well, let's walk through like what that looks like. You're not going to like go home, sit in the rocking chair, you know, smoke a cigarette because of course you're not healthy yet, right? You'll quit when you're healthy, right? You're smoking your cigarette, and you're like, 'Hmm, am I going to do this weight loss program?' Right? You're just sit there and stare into the clouds like, 'I wonder...' No, of course, now you're get in your car, and you're going to realize you got to pick up Timmy from soccer practice; you got to get groceries; you got to cook; you got to clean; you got to pick, you know, go do the laundry; got to do all these things, right? And then 3, 4, 5 days from now you're going to put on that pair of jeans, and it's not going to fit; you'll be like, [__], and just there you'll have made the decision; you'll keep living your life. And so let's just make it now because the reality is that it doesn't take information to make decisions; sorry, it doesn't take time to make decisions; it takes information, and I'm the only source of information you got, so let's talk; I'm here; I'm here for you; let's do it, right? Because that's the fallacy is that people think they need more time to make decisions because they assume they will get more information in that time, but if you are the source of"

The information, then time, does not help them. And so let's confront it now. And let me answer the questions you have to make the decision one way or another. Does that make sense?

Yeah, all right. And so then they're like, well then [__], how do I make a decision? You're like, glad you asked. So there's three things that we got to understand. Do you believe that this product or service is going to help you achieve what you want? Yes or no. They're going to say yes, right? And if they don't, you can confront it. Note all of these are confronting decisions, so we've moved all the way down the onion, right? We're at truth now, and all like the theme of the of the last bullet is confrontation. We have to confront the decision. We got to peel it back and be like, are we going to do this or not, right? Because we already got out the time, we got out the fit, we got out the SP, we got everything out of the way. It's just, do you think that this is going to help you get closer to your goals? Yes or no.

Two: Do you trust me to fill to fulfill my word that I said I'm going to help you? I'm going to do these calls, I'm going to do these workouts, I'm going to do whatever, right? Three: This is the mo, probably the most important one: Do you think it'll work for you? And if they say no, you say why not? And then they have to defend why not, and then it's very easy at that point; it's a 6-inch putt, right? And once they say yes to all three, which is usually what'll happen, be like, cool, we'll make the decision together. Do you know how to make the decision? They'll say no. You go through the three, and the last question is, they said yes, yes, yes. It's just, do you have or have access to the amount of money to get started? Do you have the MX? Do you want me to help you enroll in an MX? Cuz I want to, I want to help you. I'm good either way, but if you believe that this is going to help you get closer, you believe that what I'm saying is true, and you believe that you can be successful, it's my moral obligation to get you going and do everything in my power to help you get the money or get access to it. Because the real R is, if I was giving you a Ferrari right now for $5,000, you'd find the money. If your landlord needed you to come up with $10,000 because you had background and payroll, you'd find the money. So find the money; let's do it, right?

Three: Who wants to make informed decisions? Yes. How can you make an informed decision if you haven't even tried it, huh? So this is when you have some element of trial in the program or some sort of guarantee, which is why I'm a big fan of guarantees. It's like, well, you can't make the decision to buy that's informed until you're on the inside. So I'm not even asking you to make a decision right now; I'm just asking you make an informed decision, which you can only do on the inside. And if after 30 days I'm not what I said, this product doesn't do what I told you, I didn't fulfill my promise, and you don't think it's going to work for you, you let me, I'll give you the money back. Low pressure. You get someone to decide by not deciding; even easier. Does that make sense?

Think that'll help you close? Yeah, all right. And then uh, this one is uh, it depends on who you're selling to, but sometimes if you a logical person, it's like, do you know what deciding even means? Like, where the etymology of the word comes from? It's *dcad*, which is Latin, which means to cut off, to kill off. And so the question is, which future are we killing off today? Are we killing off the future of the dreams that you want? Are we killing off the future—sorry—are we killing off the future of of not doing anything and the life that you've lived up to this point? Because indecision is a decision; inaction is an active decision, right? And so it's just, which one are we killing today? We killing your dreams, or we killing your past?

Second and last one: future. So we talked about past. So if they're thinking about the past, the things that hurt them, don't let it burn you twice, etc., right? They don't know how to make a decision. Rocking chair: This is how you make a decision. Three things: You have access to money? Great, let's get going. You want to kill your past? You want to kill your future? Right, awesome. We're talking about the future. This is actually magnifying pain, which is cool. You got here; it's been 5 years; you've been struggling. How's another five years sound? What if we just keep doing—let's go with indecision—let's look at it. What does five years of you doing what you've been doing look like? And is that a place you want to be? No. You got to change the change; let's do it, right? And then you go right into, let's consider the options, which is like, like this is logic, right? So let's consider the options: Option one: You do the thing, get the result, life is awesome. Option two: You don't do the thing, you don't get the result because you didn't do the thing. Option three: You do the thing, but then you don't get the result. All these are the options that can happen in front of you because we have a guarantee; they're all risk-free except for one of them. Only one of them has a true guarantee of not getting you where you want, which is walking out the door. So which risk-free option do you want? The one that's risk-free that guarantees that you're not going to get there, or the one that's risk-free and has the potential to get you where you want to go, right? That's not an emotional close; it's logic. And if you have an offer that's set up that way, you should be able to close most people, as long as they don't think you're an [__], right?

Okay, this is one that's more around urgency because again, this is avoidance. If someone says, I, I'm still not sure, I want to think about it more, whatever, you say, well, you're not going to struggle forever, right? Like, you don't want to struggle forever; you're going to do something about this, whether it's weight loss, business, whatever. They're going to say yes. You're like, well, if you're going to fix your business eventually, you might as well start fixing it now so you can start enjoying the fruits of that labor sooner. Would you prefer making more money faster or slower? What's your preference? Great. So if you're going to do it eventually, you might as well do it now. Does that make sense? It's a little nudge.

This is a final one that I just really like from a framing perspective, which is, instead of a like, this has to be my savior, this program has to get me to an IFBB Pro bikini body, and I'm 100 pounds overweight—probably not realistic, right?—reframe the question is, do you think that making the decision is going to be help you get closer or further from your goal? That's it. Because if we keep making decisions that keep getting us closer, we will get there eventually. But if we make decisions that get us further away, we will not get there. And so, do you think that this is going to get you closer to your goal than what you're currently doing? Yes. What are we waiting for? We don't need to be snipers; we need to be directionally right. We do that long enough, we'll get there. Does that make sense? That helps you too, because we have this fear of perfectionism. Is this going to be the one? Probably not, but it will get you [__] way closer, right? Because I can tell you there's no one program that changed my life, but the the decision to buy education changed my life forever. Does that make sense? Yeah, all right. Boom. And so let me, let me look at the top. We have no reasons left not to own the power that you have; it's just you, all right?

And here's bonus number six, and you can use this as one of like, there's some closes that you use all the time; you always go back to, right? The reason you are telling yourself not to do this is the reason you *to* do it. How long do you want—I can't afford this—to be on your list of problems in life? The fact that you don't have time is the very reason you need to do this. The fact that you're so dependent on your spouse is the reason you need to take this decision and own it, right? The fact that you're not sure about the person that you want to be is the very reason that we're going to help you get it in this program. So whatever the reason is, is usually the biggest chain that you're holding on to is the thing that you're enslaving yourself to is the thing that you're casting your power to. If you break that chain, power comes back to you. And so the very reason that you're holding yourself back is typically the very reason that you need to do it. So hopefully this helps you realize that you and your clients are always in complete power. Did I accomplish that? Awesome, thank you. And like I promised at the beginning, My Hope Is that you become more powerful by making decisions rather than letting life make them for you. All right, so here's a few final thoughts: Fortunes are created by taking a lot of risk with a little bit of money; fortunes are maintained by taking a little bit of risk with a lot of money. And every one of those people that was self-made takes a lot of risk with a little bit of money, and sometimes you need to take that step because it's the only way to build the fortune, all right?

And if everything that I've ever made in my life, all right, sorry, everything that I've made in my life is a result of investing in my own education. It has gotten me far higher returns than any stock, any real estate, any crypto, right, any whatever. Buy a mile, and people say like it's all about investing yourself, like I just, I think it sounds a morphus; it's like, Buy experience and skills because no government can take that from you, no divorce can take that from you, nothing can take that from you. And I come from a family where, so we're Persian, and so my my parents had to flee Iran during the Revolution, and so they had land and houses and other stuff, right? And my uncle was uh, the brother to a guy who started the lottery in Iran; he owned the lottery because you can do that there, right? Very rich, rich. And so my dad and him, he went to London, my dad went to the US; he had no skills, and he was able to just forge enough money to buy a print shop, and he lives above the print shop in London, and still to this day that's what he does. And went to visit him; it was incredibly sad seeing just like, well, once once incred, and his wife, my dad gave her a scarf, and it was like a nice scarf apparently, and she just baled; she's like, I used to have rooms of these, and now I have nothing, and blah blah blah blah, right? My dad came to the United States with $1,000, but because he had skills, he built it all from scratch. And so I mean, he was a doctor, as all Middle Eastern and Indians are, um, right, doctor, lawyer, accountant, engineer, anyways, um, the only four approved paths. But when we say invest in that, we come from a place where like it was literally all taken; the government was like, that's our house now, that's our land now, that bank account is our bank account now. And so that was why it was so, and like that might be a benefit for me; I had somebody who was always like, it's the only thing no one can take from you, and so why would you not invest in the one thing that can never be stolen, can never be taken, and compounds with time, and it increases your capacity to make money, increases your capacity to live. And so I like to think of the Investments that I've made in myself as bricks on a bridge. And so if I'm on the bottom left here, and where I want to be is the top right, is right looking like *The Nightmare Before Christmas* now, um, you're going like, there are many skills that it takes to cross the bridge, right? And just like you have an arithmetic teacher in high school, once you learn calculus, you're not like, that guy was a load of [__], calculus is what—no, you have to learn things in sequence, right? And so the thing is is that when we build this bridge, it's one brick at a time, and I always come back to the same question, which is, is this going to get me closer to where I want to go? I don't need it to get me there; I just need to get closer. And if I get better, I'll get there eventually, right? As long as I don't stop moving. And so that's why that's that what I've dedicated my life to—education. My mission is to document and share the best practice building world-class companies. Because when you realize that you are the source, you realize that Superman is not coming; it's just you. And every decision that you make is a vote towards or against the person that we want to be. And so the question for you is that are your decisions voting towards the person that you want to become or just more of what you already have? And so people ask me all the time, how do you move so quickly? And the answer is, I know how to buy time. And the follow question is, how do you buy time? You buy Time by buying the time it took other people to make mistakes that taught them the lessons; that's how you do it, right? That's that's the heck. And so, right now, the ignorance of not knowing how to create a million dollars a year is costing you a million dollars a year. The fact that you don't know how to make a million dollar a year is costing you a million dollars a year. Think about it, right? And so therefore, you should always be willing to invest money to increase the capacity for your income because once you have it, that capacity pays you forever; you're increasing your ability. Does that make sense? We're widening the pipe. And so when I thought about this, I just added zeros to it, and I was like, it's [__] costing me a billion dollars a year not knowing how to make a billion dollars, God, right? But it's true because the thing, the number one tax that no one appreciates or no one respects is not the tax of the government; it's not capital gains, not income tax; it's the time tax of ignorance. Someone asked Leila yesterday, what's the number one thing that people from 0 to 10K are messing up? You don't know what the [__] you're doing; that's what's messing you up; you're ignorant; you have no idea; you're eating an orange like an apple; no clue, right? And it's not because you don't have the processing power; it's not because you don't have the ability to reason; it's because you just don't know. And so the goal is to pay down the time tax of ignorance as fast as humanly possible, and the only way you do that is by educating and investing yourself, right? Specifically investing in experiences that build skills. So make the decisions that to help yourself Implement like crazy; take ownership because we just discover that all the other [__] is not real; is literally a distortion of reality that anything that you give your power to that's not you is fake; you're making it a false god in your life, and your prospects are too. And you now you know how to confront those when your mind tries to play tricks on you and realize that there are no silver bullets; no program is going to save your life, all right? But some things can move you close to your goals, and when those rare opportunities present themselves, take them, all right? Because either you win or you learn, and both of those get you closer to wherever you want to go, all right?

And so a wrap up with this: 10 years ago I had to—that was me, a swanky uh, you know, when I was a consultant looking cool—was actually after—I don't even have a good picture when I was a consultant, but there's me in a suit—and I, I knew I hated the job that I had. Um, I made okay money, but I just like, I just really wasn't happy. Um, and I emailed 40 gym owners, and I was like, hey, I think I want to get in Fitness; can somebody like help me out? One guy was like, sure, you can work for free. I was like, awesome. Uh, that guy was Sam Bakr, and anybody know who Sam Bakr is? Raise hand. Jeez. Okay. Well, seven-figure Sam is what he used to be known as; he actually died during Co, um, which is really sad for me because I really looked up to Sam. And the thing is is that when I got to his office, I literally drove across the country from Baltimore to LA or Chino Hills, which is where he was, and I showed up without notice, and he was like, you're a psychopath; I just met you from the internet. And I was like, I'm here; I'm ready to learn. He was like, I'm going to lunch. And um, but right after he came back from lunch, uh, he was like, all right, so you should join my my Mastermind. And I was like, I don't have a gym. He's like, that's okay; it was a gym Mastermind. Um, and I didn't, I mean, like I was 22; like I did not have a lot of money. Um, and he was like, well, it's 10 grand. And I was like, I, I don't know. And he's like, you need a [__] commit, man. He's like, you've been waffling back and forth; I had had multiple phone calls with him before, left. Um, he's like, I think you need to draw a line in the sand. And thank you, God, you know, thank God he did, cuz I did take a step over; I had no idea what the [__] I was doing, but I was trying to start paying down the time tax of ignorance, and I got around a whole bunch of other Fitness professionals, and I learned way more from all of them than I ever learned from Sam. But because of that, my belief started to change; the ways I saw the world changed; the traits I started to embody changed, and started taking steps. The Mastermind I got from Sam is not what made me $100 million, but it got me on the right path towards making it. Over the years of having hundreds of salespeople work for me, I've seen these nine things that the best salespeople do differently than everyone else. 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 lead needs or maximize 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 yet 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 sometimes means 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: times of day, number of days per week, you know, speed between text responses, number of characters in text response, all these different variables, cuz 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 Leila 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, she just pulled up Yelp and looked at the one that had the top reviews, called them up, and they said, oh, I'm sorry, we don't do same-day appointments, and they're like, we can book you in for 2 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 is that both 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 their opportunities is getting as much of their day as humanly 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 show-up 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 time, so you increase your sales velocity. Now, a correlator 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 salespeople 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 uh 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 he would whenever a new appointment would book, he would immediately call the appointment to qualify the lead, cuz 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-op. 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 later 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 into a sales call, or he fills another slot later in the day.

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 companywide. And then, of course, I saw it and adopted it across all my entire portfolio.

Let me double down to 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, 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 high. But if I say, you know what, Sunday afternoon I'm free, I'll have all the time in 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 brain 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 you have an off-the-call SOP, which is what to 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 salespeople 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, you start at the top, and you're like, I'm following with this person; I'm following with 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 friend Shiron Bamfam—which is "book a meeting from a meeting," 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 uh connect offline, we'll, you know, 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, like 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: Isn't this a problem for you? How much are you losing every day not implementing this solution in your business? How much like, how much of a problem is this in your life, and why isn't it 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 jolly, 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 a call, you know, say has something mean, they're not like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this. Or if someone no-shows, they're not like, well, I'm not going to work the rest of my leads; no one really cares about me; like, woe 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 them 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 everyday 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 their number of leads is that they create their own opportunities. 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, hey, 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 referral. So 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—this is where rapport is important—but you could say, say something like, why do you hate me so much? And they're like, what do you mean? It's like, well, I 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 in the spirit of Bamfam—book a meeting from a meeting—if you consider this to be a meeting, if you would like us to help you more with your sales process acquisition, just started a workshop division where my sales director, my team, will talk to you specifically about your sales, your process, your scripting, so we can implement some of the things that we know work in our portfolio into your business ASAP. We do other stuff at the workshop, but we also talk about sales. If that's at all interesting, you can book your next meeting by going to acis.com, clicking the scale button, and following the steps. And if you're qualified, my guys will reach out.

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—was about 50% higher than the number—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 is not very common because that means that they're doing a different process, right? And so he was following the script, and we listened to the calls—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—they were selling um some sort of uh 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 rate is like 80 or 90%. And so if you think, okay, I take, you know, four calls and I close one, and I ask for referrals in all—all four, and only one of them gives me a 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 a 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 refer someone, then you cut your cost to acquire a customer by a third. And this is the type of stuff—as 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; um, what size shirt do you want? I've set aside uh thing here—was 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 got one for Amazon, one for Starbucks, and one for whatever—which one would 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 of opportunities they're getting from those opportunities. And now we get to the call, so now we got to close them.

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—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, whoo, 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 first five 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 literally have to piece together like a profile of who this person was 'cause 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 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 um 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—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 with like, I see the problem; I also have the solution 'cause I thought about it before we got on the phone 'cause I don't want to waste your time trying to figure things out. Now I want to figure them out beforehand and come with you with solutions. And this is when I was starting 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 win 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 making sure; just reading over some of the past notes—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—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 salespeople 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 are like, you should get into sales 'cause you don't shut up—uh, no, that's not—not always the case. That's what bad salespeople look like, uh, and unfortunately the thing is is the best salespeople don't come off as salespeople; they just close. And so people don't feel sold; they feel like they bought. And so everybody buys 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, uh, I don't want to be sold. If they do it 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 sales 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—best salespeople listen twice as much as they talk. And so the little isms that I have for this is that the person who's 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—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 are you 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—I can do this all day, right? Like, I—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? For what did you like? What did you not like? Rather than picking apart the things they did. And then they—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 f*** 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, you should never ask 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—this is what the brilliant salespeople 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 feeling 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 of the 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, uh, I mean, it—it was good; I had a couple calls before this. And you're like, oh, that's fantastic; was that related to this thing? 'Cause I looked—looked you up online—totally different perspective on that salesperson 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; they 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 they 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 'cause 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 100% 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—

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. It 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 salesperson, you need to be able to do it again and again and again because the word concision matters a lot. You don't want to be one of these salespeople that takes a hundred words to say something you could say in five. It'll also make your sales way longer. So again, the best salesperson can take more calls because they shorten the call.

A mediocre salesperson will do the script in the beginning, and it'll close, and they will have coughed right before they asked 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 salespeople 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 salespeople 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 sales manager uses is that you rehearse the script every morning. They do role plays, meaning, let's pretend like I'm a prospect. Like you got to, 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 it every morning, you're going to be able to work through 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 by, 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 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 salesperson.

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, um, 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 the, the time is ticking on the bomb, like now you have a short period of time before it blows up on you, right, uh, or the zombie is 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, for the close.

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 some, 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're 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, and it's almost a, it's 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, 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, cuz it means 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. Great, 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, um, 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 $1,000, maybe $2,000, usually you have to do that right there. If you have like a B2B sale that's going to be a multi, you know, multi-call sale, then you might have to bring in stakeholders. And so this is one of the nuances that depends on the thing you're selling and 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 a decision-maker, you'd say, hey, so let me tell you about this girl Susan, she was just like you, and um, she actually had the same issue come up where she was like, I don't do anything without the consent of my husband, and you know what happened? She 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, um, that's got to be kind of rough, and she's 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 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 5 pounds a year, so you're 25 pounds heavier. So 5 years from now, if you're 25 pounds heavier than you are right now, they're like, oh my God, if I'm 25 pounds heavier than I am. But that's just the track you're on. And so let's play it out. It's like, what if they say no? And so sometimes they're like, well, then I would do it anyways, then you're like, awesome, let's sign you up now. One out of three times that's actually what happened, which is crazy; I still am 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, uh, 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, when you get busy? Well, shoot, I want it to last forever. It's like, okay, well, then you should probably start when you're busy, cuz 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 coasting, 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 because 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 money 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 how much time can you dedicate to this implementation, to this SEO agency, to this weight loss program, whatever it is, right? If you ask that up front, then if they say, oh, I don't have time with it, then you can 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? Um, and again, this is where tone matters a lot, cuz now you're in the red zone, right? Now it's like the bomb's way more sensitive cuz the, the, the time ticker is going, and so we want to be extra—this is where rapport is so important in the beginning—because I, I'll add this in, this is a bonus one, I call it the ghetto tone, okay? And I learned this from Sam Back, so he had a personal training business, and that's why I, I shadowed underneath when I got into fitness; he let me just work for him for minimum wage, uh, 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 them 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? 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 to my four hours? If I say that, no one's going to be upset with me; they'll be like, ah, well, I mean, I didn't know that it was going to be X, Y, and Z. And then I'll be like, fine, I know, like, and then, then, then tone switch, and you're like, what's really going on? And then you get the real stuff because guess what? Closers ask hard questions, right? And they're the questions, it's the place where you don't want to go versus 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. 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 going to 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 things; you don't want to—cuz like you're not—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 going to avoid it; I promise you, you think you're avoiding the landmine, but like, CU, 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 call, dude; it's going to blow up in the close. 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 follow Dave Ramsey, and I have envelopes of cash, and if I give you this envelope, that's my grocery money for the week, uh, 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. CU, she thought she was going to win the sale that day, but it was a trap, um, and I was like, but you're trying to lose weight. I was like, worst-case scenario, don't afford food, you lose some weight. I was like, win-win. 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, have 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 survived; you're not on the couch, right? I was like, we always make it work in the end, right? And you have to, you cut somewhere else. I was like, this is something that's going to last with you forever; like you have all these clothes. I was like, you want to make all of them look better in 6 weeks? I was like, just lose 20 lbs; 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, so 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, like I've probably closed more sales on best case worst case than any other close 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 the likelihood 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 look. 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, uh, 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, Lila will tell you that like if it was either a Sunday sale, cuz I usually had way less calls on Sundays, um, or it was the last appointment 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 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 [ __ ] let them leave. And I was like, it's cuz I think, I think that they need it; they came in cuz 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 un-p 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 then they get confronted with the decision, they get freaked out again because they reli- 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 going to have you eat some [ __ ] chicken and walk a little bit; it's going to 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 going to 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 cuz 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 going to play out cuz I've seen a hundred other people just like them walk out the door, and I see them, you know, a year later, and they're in the 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 they can 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 again, they go annoy. 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 salesperson who has maximum hours, maximum days; they have as many time slots per day filled up with the best prospect effect. CU, they work them well; they have a plan before and after to come prepared to the call and take notes and follow up with them; bam, famam, 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 memorized so they can help people overcome their issues; they stick to the script; they don't add to the script; they keep their word concision as tight as humanly 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 increasing the likelihood that the prospect buys; that's all 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 would get 100% 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 rep. 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 salespeople. The things that most salespeople struggle with are trait.

Issues meaning they are on and then they're off again. They're on and they're off; they get motivated, they get demotivated, motivated, demotivated. If you feel like this, then it's a skilled deficiency; you just don't know how to sustain performance for a long period of time. And I promise you, the difference between Champions and everyone else is 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 dude." Here's the cleared 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 the next week. Being able to sustain and maintain a high level of enthusiasm for with 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 salespeople kill for sport.

So let me tell you this, a little analogy, huh? Notice a little iies. So I heard this from uh, Mike Ary, and I just love this. He said there's three types of salespeople: 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 all this 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, he'll kill the bunny for sport." He's like, "You want tigers," and I love that little analogy because the best salespeople that I've ever met in my life, they love sales; they love the thrill of the close, of the hunt.

When I was selling weight loss, I would sometimes have homeless people and things like that that 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 sale so 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 as 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're just like, you know, treating 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, practicing your skill, sharpening the sword, which is what we call it in the sales world. You could be sharpening your sword, but you're actually making it duller, cuz you're practicing the wrong way; you're learning bad habits by not taking the sale seriously. So the best salespeople kill for sport.

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, "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, cuz he took more reps, and he took every one of these as a [__] 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.

Track data. 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, if they're like, "Ah, 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 are showing; I want to know of show rate, what percentage are you offering of offer; how many of you're closing; how many, how many; what's your average call to close? Are you doing one call, two call, 1.2? 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 salesperson. And yes, for everybody, like, shout this from the rooftops: if you can get their schedule rate up by 20%, it's just as good as getting their close rate up by 20%. And so there's so many other things in the funnel that the best salespeople 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 spoonfed to me, and if I don't get them fed there, and you don't pat me on the head, I'm going to starve to death and die," right? That's what the dogs do. And if you've got salespeople 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 say, "These people have the highest likelihood of closing when they have these three characteristics; they close at a way 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 sales rep for a timeshare business, and it's exactly what you think it was. So it's a billion-dollar-plus company; this guy was making 3 million a year in commission selling timeshares, and I had 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—it was 3,000 salespeople—it was 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 5x his income as the sales guy, and then they took it, and they rolled it out nationwide, and they 5x 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 that best guy used to make 200,000 a year as the top closer, but now 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 steel 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 and 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; "I'm a little liquid right now; I'm between things," you know, whatever, right? And they're closing those people for lunch money. Uh, 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 salesperson does, so that they can develop their skills, cuz just 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 salespeople, is they never blame circumstances. So whenever I have a salesperson is like, "The leads are bad," or, you know, "uh, these these people aren't a good fit," or just like whatever BS that they can come up with, or like, "I don't like the commission structure; we should change," 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 salespeople, you give it one-on-one with the manager; say, "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 going to 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 [__]; I'm I'm not taking these calls," right? That's just a prima donna, and I hate that. And so again, the worse the leads, the better you get; the flex your skill. And the best salespeople 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. We doubled one of our portfolio company sales by tweaking several tiny things in the sales process, and you can use all the same tactics in your business too.

Enjoy. Three young founders who are all sad because they were not making the amount of money that they wanted to make. So before I show you the data, let me explain what each of these terms actually mean. So show rate is the percentage of people who have an appointment who show up for their appointment. So in any business, if, if you deal with people, you will have sessions or appointments; you have a time slot that someone says they're going to show up, right? If it's a sales consult, then they are a prospect, and they're going to show up to get sold. So if I have 100 people have an appointment and 70 show up, that would be a 70% show rate. The second one here is offer rate, which we forgot to put in the rate, so let me just put that in for you. There you go. Offer rate, which is the percentage of people that we actually make an offer to. You might be like, "Well, why would I not offer everybody?" Well, not everyone's qualified. And so, for example, if I work with only gym owners and somebody comes on, it's like, "Oh, I'm a personal trainer," well, you shouldn't be here; we had all these other things that said, "Don't be here," but you still came; why are you here? That means that you don't offer them anything, and that's it. Now if 100% of people who showed up show right, you are able to offer to, then that means that your offer rate would be 100%, and that is an indicator of the quality of the lead flow that you have. The third is close rate; this depends on how you can track this, all right? So you can either do it based on percentage of people who show, or you can do it on percentage of people who are offered. What I normally do is I'll just track both. I'm going to guess that this one is off of offer rate because it's what we have here. It's good to have both stats here because let's say a salesman wants to artificially increase his close rate, well then he will just say, "Well, I'm not going to offer anyone unless I know they're going to say yes," and so then their close rate is high, and then they'll show that there's a really low quality score. But if that salesman—this is why having team stats is so important and individually is because if the team is all saying that they're offer rate 70 and one guy saying his offer rate's 30, but he has 100% close rate and they all have 30% close rates, we know where the data went. And this is why having high-quality data allows you to see what the problems are. If I didn't have this percentage, then I wouldn't know it's because we have low-quality leads or because my salesmen suck. This data allows me to identify the problem and then fix it. So the fourth set here is percentage of cash collected up front, meaning if we're selling $1,000 widgets and the average cash we collect today is $500 because people do payment plans, then we would know our cash collected percentage would be 50%. If I have a low close rate but high cash collected percentage, that would tell me a different story than a really high close rate and really low cash collected percentage. I'd be like, "Oh, so they're just getting anyone to say yes and taking $10 down if they can," versus somebody saying, "We have a hard line," and so it's really trying to find the magic between these two and saying, "How can I get as many people to say yes and get as much cash collected up front?" The final one here is just unit sold, and this is really just the output of these four. Well, if we multiply these things together, how many do we end up closing? And that's the result.

So beforehand, damn, we had a 49% show rate. So let's say we have 100 appointments. Now we have 49 who actually show up for their appointment. And then of the 49, we're able to offer 83% of them beforehand, so 80% of that is 40; 40 people now are getting offered out of our original 100 appointments. Of the people who get offered, 27% of them, which is 10 people roughly, are actually buying; in that closing percentage. And then our cash collected from those 10 people is we're getting a little less than half of the cash that we closed down. Now I gave you 100 as a number, but the actual number of units sold for this business in the prior month was 56 units, all right? So this is current state. If you don't know these numbers in your business, you should, so that you can improve them. Let's say I invested in your business today; the first thing we want to do is get the data so that, so we can see what baseline is, so we can see where the discrepancies are and where we think the biggest opportunities for improvement are. And you're going to have to wait till the end of the video; I'm going to show you what happened after.

So let's start with problem number one, or opportunity for improvement number one: we had a low show rate. As in, based on our benchmarks of 70% for any kind of appointment-type business, we think that we should have at least 70 there. Allen, which was a company that I had, all we did was show rates; we were doing 4,000 appointments a day. We experimented; we had a machine learning team to think like, what was the number of communications that we had to have with a prospect? What was the delay between responses that got the most people? What were the total number of exchanges? How far apart were the exchanges? There is lots of data that we were able to collect. So their number was 49% of appointments were showing up; what we wanted them to be at was 70%. This is our benchmark where we'd say, "Okay, this isn't a problem anymore." Now do we want to improve things? Absolutely. But where are we going to allocate our effort? At the constraint; this was a constraint. Now to give context here, this delta is a 40% difference; 40% is a lot. Think about the S&P 500; they're like, "We're trying to grow 9% a year." It's like, "Boom, I unlock that; I get 40% growth; I don't have to do anything else for like 4 years in the S&P." Big wins; that's what we look for. Lots of things can affect show rate, by the way; the number one one that affects show rate is number of total time I'm available; take that to the bank. But one of the other ones is the targeting and the offer itself. So targeting is who's actually seeing this promotion. If I'm targeting teeny boppers, for example, I might get people to schedule, but then realize that they're not here for a laser hair removal appointment, so the targeting there would be off, and, and so that would affect our show rate, and that has nothing to do with our lead nurture sequence or our salesman or anything like that; it's just the wrong people were seeing it. So that was issue number one. For context for us, just imagine that's underneath it was 25-to-35-year-olds who were gainfully employed and love their job, and this, when we came in to look at it, was actually targeting 18-to-24-year-olds. The reason that this was far off for us is that the ad objective—now I'm going to get a little bit tactical with you—ad acis.com. At Hold Co, we have media buyers; we have pros who do this for a living. And so when they zoomed in on how their media buyer was optimizing the traffic, they were optimizing against what a lot of people would initially think they should do, which is optimizing for the lowest cost leads and the lowest cost appointments. What we had to do, we switch to optimize around cost per sale. If we can optimize around who we actually sell to, we will shift where the sales come from. And just to give you how big of a problem this was, they had to cancel 75% of their appointments before the 49% show rate; the sales guys are spending most of their time just looking at their appointment, looking up the person, canceling to get their 49% show rate, and that's about the closest thing to literally burning money.

Second big problem was multitasking, and this really goes for any role, but especially like sales-driven roles. They had a setting team and a closing team, and the setters were both trying to call leads to get appointments and then also nurturing and doing the follow-up to remind them of the appointment. And it's similar as that may sound in your mind; it's two completely different activities. You're banging phones, calling people up; you're in that flow, and then you're like, "Oh, wait, Sarah has an appointment today; let me go remind Sarah." Does Sarah going to interrupt it? And you're like, "Wait, I'm calling," and then you start like, and it's you go back and forth, right? So they had three big issues: number, number one is that they weren't double dialing, right, which is one of the most common things that you can do, by the way, if you're doing phone calls, because a lot of initial screens will stop the first call, but if you dial twice, you'll get through. Number two is that the time to contact was too slow; so lead would come in, and they would just like sit there for 30 minutes, 60 minutes, an hour, 2 hours, 3 hours, right? And they weren't getting contacted; it's like, "What did this person do?" They're like, "Oh, I'd like to find out more information," nothing. And the third thing is that they didn't have the right times to set appointments, and they weren't nurturing correctly. So we go same day, next day; I'm just giving you some secrets. And they didn't have morning-of nurture, meaning if you have an appointment today and you booked this appointment 3 days ago, if I don't remind you that day that you have an appointment, the likely that you show is lower. And so these are the problems that they have: no double dial, slow speed to contact, and they didn't have any morning-of nurture. But wait, there's more.

The second problem they had, or opportunity for improvement, was that they had a low close rate, and this is based on our benchmark. I would normally give you a KPI, but it has so many different variables in terms of what percentage close rate is, cuz if you're selling in person, for example, for a low-ticket thing, you might be able to sell 80% plus of people walking the door. On the flip side, if you're selling an investment opportunity over the phone on, you know, a first or second contact, you might sell 5%. But for this particular type of sale that they had, which was a two-call close for like, I would say a mid-priced consumer service, in my opinion, they should have been about 40%. So 40% is what I wanted them to be at, and then current was 27%. So this is where they were; this is where we wanted them to be. And again, for context here, this is about a 50% improvement. So problem number one is that they had service-level discovery. If you're not familiar with that terminology, in a sales script, there's different kind of phases that you go through in a conversation, and the opening part is often a little bit of rapport, and then right after that, you get into discovery. And discovery is where you're discovering what the problems that the person's going through; you're trying to understand why they are where they are, why they're on the phone with you, why they decided to take time out of their day, why this problem's important to them, what they've tried in the past, etc., etc., right? This is the discovery; this gives you all the ammunition that you're going to use at the end of the sale to close it. So the way that they were doing was simply saying, "How much money do you want to make?" Just asking the one question, which is the big obvious question; it's surface level. But the big thing that you always want to ask when you're selling is intention: why do they want this? Like, what changes as a result of this? How will your life look different? What can you not do now that you would be able to do as a result of this change? Who else in that, in your life would that affect? Why does that matter to you? Right? And so these are all why questions, and it's to, to dig up their intentions because if you can understand why someone's there.

It's much easier to get them to agree to getting them there right, but if you don't know that someone's trying to, let's say, replace their income versus quit their job versus just have side hustle money, those are very different intentions. If I want to talk to side hustle money, I'm probably not going to be like, "This is going to take a ton of time." On the flip side, if someone's like, "I hate my job; I just want to do something that's not this," then I might talk about what the day-to-day looks like in this scenario and ask them if that sounds better to them.

So if you think about sales process, what they were doing is they were asking questions that were here, surface level, but this is where all the meat is, and that's where all the money is: the questions that are below the surface. Is understanding why someone's even doing this to begin with. Look at that Iceberg, killer Iceberg.

And so the second issue is that they had a lot of objections coming up on the call. I'll say objections, but I also mean obstacles, for those of you who are sales sales senses. Objections happen after you talk about the number; obstacles happen before you talk about the number. If you come on the phone and I say, "Hey, why are you here?" and you're like, "I just want to find out more information," that's actually an obstacle. Like, you already have to confront that, because like, no, you're not hopping on phone calls all day trying to find information. What problem are you trying to solve? And then they're like, "Well," and then you get into it, right? But if you don't address that up front, it'll blow up on you in the close. So objections and obstacles is what they were encountering a lot of, and part of that is because their discovery was wrong; they were talking to service levels, so then lots of [__] was blowing up on them in the close.

Common objections that happen after you present price is, "Uh, this is too much," "I need to think about it," "I have to talk to my spouse," "I'm not sure if this is for me," "I'd like to get more data; can you send me a brochure?" Like, these are all just the make-believe things that people will say in order to not buy from you. Interestingly, a lot of times if you stay in the surface level, they'll even give you what we call smoke screens, but basically, like they'll just come up with a reason that they're not going to do it, and it's not even the reason; they just throw a smoke bomb up and they're like, "I don't like English," you know, walk away, right? Has nothing to do with it; they just want to get off the phone.

So those are the two issues that we had on the sales, and that was getting us to this 27% close rate, and what this looks like is lots of argumentation and like hard closing, and it's because the S isn't positioned properly, and they were basically talking at people and not listening. If the salesperson is talking more than the prospect in your sales, like these are likely issues that are coming up. I'm going to give you two examples real quick to show you how important delivery of a message is. So if I say, "I have to think about it," and I say, "Oh, like what are your main concerns, or what are the main like, what are the main variables that you're considering?" You're not thinking, "Wow, this guy's a douchebag." I sound like I just genuinely want to know. I call it childlike curiosity. I always cue it by tilting my head; I'm like, "Huh, what are the main things?" and I would increase my voice at the end there. An improperly trained salesperson might be like, "Well, what are the main concerns you have?" And all of a sudden that sounds like a very different thing. So they're saying the script, but they're not—but the prospect isn't hearing the same message, and these are little details that actually can make a huge difference in ultimately how you close.

There's a lot of things in tone, but I'll just say one is how you raise or lower your voice, and the second is where you choose to emphasize. If I say, "I didn't say he hit his wife," if I say like that, I have neutral tone. If I say, "I didn't say he hit his wife," then it's like I'm not saying that. "I didn't say he hit his wife" is now saying that, like those weren't my words. "I didn't say he hit his wife" means like he might have done something else, but he did something to his wife. "I didn't say he hit his wife" could have been somebody else's. "I didn't say he hit his wife"; it might have been his kid, right? And so it's the same sentence, but simply emphasizing different parts of it communicates different things. And so the tone and emphasis create an altogether package of how we communicate, and for them their tonality was way off as a team because they were missing the first five minutes of discovering and setting the frame properly. And so I'll give you the last set of problems, opportunities for improvement, and then we'll dive into what we did to solve them and what happened.

Sales problem three, opportunity for improvement: people in org structure issues. So issue number one is that the CEO was the sales manager, and that was because he was the best closer. He had a significantly higher close rate than the rest of the team, but he wasn't a very good sales manager, even though he was a good closer. By the way, that's one of the main issues that a lot of sales teams have: they promote their best closer as a sales manager, and often times those are two very different skills. And we could see this because the churn on their sales team was through the roof. Just to be clear, like they were a group of young Founders; it's not uncommon; it's actually probably very common because usually when you start a business, learning how to promote and sell the product is usually the job of the founders, like, "How do I get people to want to buy the thing?" And so they end up getting the most reps early on and also understanding the prospect better than just about anyone.

And so one of the big things you guys were in a little mini sales last I is that companies will over-educate on the product and under-educate on the prospect. The person that you should be educating your sales stuff on is who we're talking to more than what we're selling. Because for me, if I know someone deep in their core, what their intentions are, I can tell them anything. I know someone inside and out, and then someone says, "Sell this thing," and I know nothing about it, I could probably get them to buy. On the flip side, I know everything about this thing, and I don't know who I'm talking to—talking to a child, a man, a woman, old, young, different language. And so a lot of people talk like, "Hey, sell me this pen," when in reality what we want to do is like talk to John. The majority of good sales trainers who try to do that gimmick, what they want the person to do is ask them a question; it actually has nothing to do with the pen. And so if they say, "Sell me this pen," what you do is you take the pen and you put it in your pocket and you say, "How's it going? What brought you in today?" Right? Because I got to go from where they're at to wanting a pen. I'm not going to just be like, "Hey, buy this pen, give me money," like it doesn't work that way, but bad salesmen do.

The second issue was setting team expectations. One of the benefits of working with someone who has more experience is that we know what the benchmark should be, and so a lot of times we can reset someone's minimum standard. And they're like, "Well, they're setting two a day," and we're like, "They should all be minimum setting three." And that sounds tiny, but again, two to three is a 50% increase in sets, and that's across a whole team, so that means a lot of productivity. But if you set the bar low, people just naturally shrink down to that level. All right, so you understand the problems, and here is the data. This is before: they had a low show rate issue; they had low close rate and multiple issues around that; and they had people in organizational issues. I want you to pause real quick in the video, in the comments, to be like, "What would you do? How would you attack these issues if this was your business?" And then I'll tell you what we did. Now there's two elements of solutions: element one is what would you do to attempt to solve the problem, and the second is which one do we do in what order.

The third problem, that was actually the first thing we decided to fix, was so we hired a sales director. The reason for that was because the CEO was overly involved; he was micromanaging; he wasn't a good manager; and he also wasn't doing CEO stuff. And so we had to hire an experienced sales director who, in this instance, had been a sales trainer for a similar type of sale in a consumer good. This guy ended up being exceptional and being able to implement the rest of the changes that we outlined. So this was in terms of order of importance. I think if we hadn't done this and had tried to do the rest of them, it would have fallen flat. This is like one of the most common errors that business owners and Founders make is that they see the what and not the who, or they focus on the how and not the who. And if you have the same problem that has recurred multiple quarters in a row in the same department underneath of the same who, it might not be a what issue; it might be a who issue. One of the reasons having experience is helpful is because you know what it looks like when it's right. Some of the biggest costs in the business are hiring incorrectly: you waste the time trying to find them; you waste the time onboarding them and training them; and then you waste the time of all the time it takes you to figure out that they're not the right fit and all the loss growth that you would have had to then start that process over again. That's tough, but a lot of businesses have to deal with that, which is why picking personnel is so important. With this instance, we looked at culture fit, which is like, "Do we think that this guy will fit in?" which we usually—the Founders pick that part out, like, "Hey, does this guy fit in? Cool." And then we're going to hardcore drill on usually experience and tactical knowledge. And so we have subject matter experts at holdco: media buying, CRO experts, sales experts, finance expert, whatever, and we will then do tactical interviews. We talked about earlier: you can know that someone is good based on the quality and quantity of the data that they collect. I would ask somebody, "What data do you plan on collecting, and how would you plan on fixing those things?" Based on how vague they are and how high level they go in terms of their solutions, it'll tell you how nuanced they can be in their thinking and ultimately executing solutions. Sales directors specifically, in my experience, when I have guys who are like, "I just want to build up people; I want to give these guys skills," and they marry that with, "Like, and these are the metrics that I track to know X, Y, and Z," that's a good sales director.

The next thing we decided to solve, boom, was fixing the ad targeting. And the reason we did the sales director first was because we're like, "Well, how do we know if anything else is going to happen afterwards if we fix this?" So what we ended up doing here, it turns out, is that we also had another personnel issue: the media buyer was asleep at the wheel; they were optimizing around the wrong stuff; they were trying to split their attention and start their own side hustle. It was clear that they were negligent; they actually were doing the right thing, and then they stopped doing the right thing, and it was clear that that type of behavior the Founders felt was not going to correct itself, so they let go of that person, hired a new person, and boom, fixed the ad targeting problem. We were back to 25- to 35-year-old people who love their job. What did we fix next? Boom. We reduced the sales team, what, and we reset expectations for the setting team, what. We looked at sales team utilization. If we know that guys can take 10 sales a day and they're actually only taking four, then we have too many salespeople. In this instance, it gives you an opportunity to cut the fat, for lack of better term, and reward the people who are actually doing their jobs and closing well. If you cut the lowest percentage of the team and you have utilization, like you have space, you lose the lowest closing percentage people, and you gain more closes just by shifting the closing rate overall of the team. When you make those changes, in my experience, salespeople get into a rhythm. If you don't take enough sales calls, you're too desperate to close the deal, and then you start being too hard and not listening enough, because it's about you, not them. When salespeople have more and more consults, they sell from the back of their heel; they're open-minded; they're asking questions; they're feeling good; and they get in a rhythm. The setting team, we both downsized and increased expectations. How did all these sales increase by having fewer people? We had better people; that's how. And that also helps recreate the culture of the team so that we can have a new standard set of high performers, because there's nothing that demotivates a high performer like a low performer who's still on the team. And so we went from two to four in terms of our expectation per day for the team in terms of sets.

Sales fix numero quatro. I'm messing all my columns up now; just going to have to deal with it. We promoted one setter to lead nurture specialist. I was saying earlier that they were multitasking, right? So they're doing some setting and they're doing some lead nurture, and that gets really hard for a team of six guys to split those things. We took one of the setters who was really good and made that person the lead nurture specialist, who basically acted as the bridge for both the setting team and the closing team to basically coordinate and remind the people of their appointments. And we equipped that lead nurture specialist with one of our checklists for what that role needs to do to get the most people to show up. And I'm not going to give you all because of the long checklist; I'll give you two quick examples. One of them is doing a three-way intro once you have the set appointment between the setter and the closer, and doing it via iPhone if you can, because now you have a known person and an unknown person and a person that bridges the two. They might know show on Johnny over here but not on the guy that they just spoke with. And so the idea is, how can I bridge that gap and kind of make the association for them, add some trust? The other thing is that the closers, beginning of, would remind them with either a voice memo or a video text personalized to them, being like, "Hey, John, really excited for our appointment today. I saw your profile, XYZ," personalized to you, "Really pumped for you; I think we might help you out." So that's just a couple of the things that we have on that list that we had them implement and all do consistently.

Sales team fix number five, boom, is we optimize the sales scripts. I said earlier that the discovery was too surface level, so we rescripted the discovery, made sure we were asking deeper, more meaningful questions, and a part of that is also bringing some of the objections to the front. It's much easier, and this is the—this is the terminology that our team uses, which is killing zombies, right? It's a lot easier to kill zombies when it's far away than when it's on top of you. If somebody's trying to bring up a zombie in the close, another way of saying it is like you want to diffuse the bomb before it goes off in the close in your face. So we solve the problem before we bring it up. Now this is actually something that we added to this part of the script, which is prior to the appointment, we say, "Hey, is there anyone else who'd be required to make a decision about this thing?" If they say yes, then you say, "Cool, well let's push back the appointment and let's get that person on." That way you have all the decision-makers present. So these are just little things, but like little 1% improvements over and over and over again is what yield these 50% boosts.

The third main change we did was that we drilled the team on looping, and looping is just a sales terminology for basically when you encounter an objection, handling the objection and then asking again, handle the objection, ask again, right? Because a lot of salespeople are afraid to ask if someone says no, and they don't want to ask again, right? And I can tell you this is that the number of sales you make is directly proportional to how many times you ask. There's ways to do it wrong, and there's ways to do it right. The idea is that you should be able to resolve the concern, right? So if someone says, "I need to think about it," and you say, "Well, what are your main concerns?" and they say, "Well, it seems really complicated," you say, "Oh, what part specifically feels more complicated?" They're like, "It's the whole tech thing," and we're like, "Oh, we also have a vendor that can actually fill that in. I think it's a couple bucks extra, but like we can just handle that for you. Does that solve the problem?" And they're like, "Oh, okay, so you guys—you guys will just handle that one part of it?" Like, "Yeah, we'll handle that part of it for you." Cool. Now this is where the salesman says, "Great, you want to move forward?" You have your idea on you; hey, what's your—you can just make the ask right after that. And so then at that point you might say, "Ready to move forward then?" And they might say, "This feels like a fast decision." It's like, "Oh, well what makes it fast? How long you been thinking about this?" They're like, "Well, I mean, I just met you," and you say, "Well, how long have you wanted to solve this problem?" And then they would say, "Well, I mean, a long time." It's like, "Well, that doesn't sound like a fast decision at all; it sounds like you've already made the decision a long time ago that you wanted to change; now we're just acting on it. So now do you want to move forward?" Right? Keep looping and continuing to resolve the concern, ask again, resolve the concern, ask again.

Drum roll please, what happened in the real world? So let's go to the data. All right, so in our first column, we had 49% show rates. After we implemented sales fix two, fixing the ad targeting, sales fix four, promoted one lead setter to lead nurture specialist, and sales fix three, reduced the team size and reset expectations, survey says we had a 70% boost, which is almost exactly the KPI, and that's because when you do things that work, they work. So that was a 40% improvement in sales, and to be clear, this was just over two months. All right, so some of these changes are going to happen real quick if you know what you're doing. The second change we have is our offer rate, and so here's what happened. So survey says 80%. We actually offered just about the same amount of people realistically. What they were doing is offering people who weren't qualified, because the sales team wanted to eat. I get that; like, there's a human component here. They were offering people who weren't qualified for the deal because they needed commissions, right? Which is what we were trying to fix with the targeting. Close rates, we went from 27%, and 60 days later we were at 41%, so 1% above our benchmark. All right, this is a 50% improvement in sales, so 40 and 50, Kazam. Next up, we have percentage of cash collected, a really good metric for knowing how strong the sales team is, and this is especially important for that early discovery portion and how good they are at looping and closing, because the deeper you get the discovery, the more convicted the buyer will be about the solution, and the more likely they are to pay up front as a measure of their conviction in the solution. The survey says we went from 47 to 82%, so we almost doubled the amount of cash that we were collecting up front per sale. In 60 days, we had a 40% improvement, and we had a 50% improv, and we had an almost doubling of cash collected. So if we almost doubled the amount of sales that happened and we almost doubled the cash upfront collected, what did we do to the cash flow of the business? Forex, ah, much more enticing. After we added all these four changes together and we waited 60 days, what happened? Survey says we went from 56 to 93 sales a month, and that was just from a few of these fixes on one particular part of the organization. I taught 116 sales professionals my closing framework, and after implementing it, they increased how much they closed. Enjoy.

Um, Alex Becker, who's the—who's the founder of that—clued me in recently to something. He's like, "Dude, your—your—your ROAS is insane," because he can see everyone's revenue and their ad spend. And I was like, "What do you mean?" He's like, "You have the highest return on ad spend of everyone in the entire platform by like a mile." And I didn't really ever think about it, but our lifetime return on advertising is 36 to 1. So to do over, you know, 100—now you know five or 10 million, whatever we're at now, um, we've spent just under $3 million in advertising. And so there's a lot of other pieces to, you know, making more, but just for everyone on this call, we're talking specifically about sales, correct? Yeah. So, so Alex, yeah, yeah. 99% of these guys are—are closers, and they're getting closing positions. A couple of people are sorting like a closer agency where they partner up with a guy like you and they're like, "Hey, let's do like a little JV deal." I slam your deals. Okay, sweet. Well, then why don't I—so what I'm going to do is because I do have a presentation, um, which is just how I think about sales, um, and I have the third part of the presentation about scaling sales teams. Does anyone here have multiple closers who work for them, or is—is most people just closing on your own right now? You guys got to talk with Alex; he don't bite. I also can't see—I can't see the chat; I can't see the chat. We're working towards that, Alex. Okay, so how about this? I'll give you the things that—so, um, Russell, when I first met him was like, "Dude, how did you learn how to sell so well?" And it was because I looked at my CRM, and I'd done 4,000 sales one-on-one, uh, in fitness. And so that's a lot of reps, you know. I was taking 20 consults a day for like four years. And so that's in-person, face-to-face. My team would double or triple book me every 30 minutes, and I just sold the same thing over and over again. And because I was really good at sales, I ended up not hiring a ton of salespeople, and I would actually have my manager set appointments for me all at one location, so I had six gyms, and so I would go there, they'd stack up an entire day, I'd mow down a whole day, go to a different gym, and they'd been stacking all the appointments, and I'd mow down. And so usually I do 20 to 25 consults a day, and you just get—you—you know, you just get these reps in of reading people, gauging tonality, and seeing where you need to lean in and where you need to lean back. And so, um, you know, over time I've then started training salespeople and sales managers. I had a remote sales team; we'd—we'd fly out and do turnarounds, um, like in person. So I had eight guys; we'd fly out to eight facilities every month, and we turn these facilities around. Because I know, Mike, you were in the fitness world before this. Um, that's right. And then…

I brought that sales team in-house, and they started doing phone sales for high ticket. So I've had, um, I've had in-person, phone, high ticket, low ticket; we've kind of done a lot of those things. I trained mortgage leads teams, um, so kind of the whole Gambit. And there's definitely some things that I've seen. You know, I've bought every sales product on the market. I bought Grant's stuff, bought Bord's stuff, um, and I think there's a lot of merit, and there's a lot of good stuff out there. But in my experience, uh, simplicity is what scales. And so I'll give you—if you're okay with it—I'll give you the few things that I have implemented consistently within my companies that have generated outsize returns. Is that cool? All right, awesome. What I'm gonna roll, let's get all right, full jam.

So, as I said, simplicity, right? I'm a—the world's best graphic designer—uh, as you can see here. So I'm trying to uh, show the the real Keys of the Kingdom. So everybody here, everybody here selling expensive stuff, is that most people on this call? Yes. Everything's high, Alex. Fantastic. All right, everyone still see me and the screen? Yep. All right, rock and roll.

All right, so I'm guessing this guy's isn't your first rodeo, um, not your first presentation with the sexy headliner, big promise. And so if you have failed—for you guys to uh, grow your thing in the past—I promise you it's not your fault. Lots of information, very confusing, um, and you can sometimes be inundated with lots of different sales people's information. You've got Mike here who's a who's a gem and knows his [ __ ] and you guys are lucky to have him, um, but in hopefully in this presentation I will put some of those fears to rest, of like, what if I'm never what if I never make it? What if I never turn this corner um, and become the salesperson I want? What if I never hit the 100, 100 grand a year? What if I never hit the 100 grand a month, or whatever, don't hit the million a month goal that I have? And then what does that what does that mean about me, right?

If you've ever thought those things, um, like I can tell you I did, two, um, right after the instance that I had uh, Mike with that individual, um, and that individual drained my entire bank account and then sent it to their girlfriend in Sweden and then filed bankruptcy. After that happened, I had $1,200 because I had sold all my gyms and put my money into that account. So I started at zero, which I'm very grateful for because it gave me the experience that I have now. And so what I'm going to show you is that you can have a simple sales process that can yield outsize returns. A lot of people like to make this fancy because it makes it easier to sell stuff to people about selling, but these are the things that I have seen that have unlocked the growth for us because I don't think I'm the best marketer out there. I think we've simply attached a phone to a funnel, um, and we've been very efficient at it. And so as a result of that, I've always been able to make more per customer than anyone else because of how efficient we are at the conversion process. All right. And so that's what we're here for. So I want to show you exactly, step by step, our process for selling. All right. And so there should be two types of people here: some of you guys who are under $100,000 a month, and I'll show you how to never compete on price again. All right. And if you guys are over $100,000 a month, I'll show you exactly what we did to scale a team to get to a million a month and beyond. Is that cool? Yes. Because if you're under 100, it's just you, right? If you're over 100, you need people. All right, so it's gonna kind of be like the actual selling itself and then the scaling of the sales. All right, so that's kind of the goal for the 60 minutes. I'll probably be able to get it done in 40-ish. I'll talk fast so we can have some time. All right, everyone can just listen fast, is that all right? All right, I'm it.

So I've been really fortunate, um, yeah, now we're at 105 or 110 or whatever it is, um, in in selling stuff, which has been cool. What's been cooler is we've been able to donate to causes. You guys don't know my story, but um, I had a I had a gym teacher after school who stayed with me; he didn't have to; he didn't know me from anybody, and he worked out with me for an entire year and taught me how to work out because I was like a really insecure kid. And as a result of that, I got into fitness. And so I feel like it's all of our opportunity because you guys are on here; like we're already in the top 1% in the world. You know what I mean? Like we're bitching about not making a 100 grand a month, like [ __ ] you, you know what I mean? Like, really. And so, um, it's been a great privilege to be able to give back. You, we've donated 1.4 million just in the last three years—actually 1.7 now, I have to update that—um, but anyways, just the causes that we that we care about. And so for us, it's it's kids being able to have the opportunity that we had. All right. And uh, if you guys are in the fitness industry, Arnold was my hero; is the reason I quit my job, um, and I've been able to, you know, grow a friendship with him, which is been awesome, um, and we've had, you know, over a thousand clients hit $100,000 a year using the sales framework I'm going to show you. All right. So like you can imagine that these people are not maybe as good as you are. You can imagine that somebody in that thousand is probably not as naturally talented, right? So the process works. Okay. And we've got a lot of people over seven figures now, um, but it wasn't that way, right?

So this is me when I started my first gym. I slept on the floor. I had $5,000 total; my rent was $5,000, um, and so I had one month that I had to learn how to make money. And uh, I built a funnel because I learned this from the internet, and I was actually I sent this picture to my dad because I was so excited; I was so proud of this picture because I sold that many people in the first in the first two weeks uh, for free, um, and things started to grow, right? I, my that was my one of my gyms. I had nine employees; I felt like a badass, you know, my dad finally told me he thought I, you know, wasn't a schmuck for, you know, being an idiot and getting into fitness. So I thought I felt like I was figuring things out, and then all of a sudden, Facebook slap happened. This is years ago, and there's been many slaps; Facebook just kind of kind of has its its [ __ ] hand proverbially swinging back and forth, but um, you know, we got slapped, and overnight my my lead cost went up 5x, right? And so my my money my moneymaking rain turned into a desert. And the thing was my marketing was losing money every day, and all I could think about was letting my dad down and more realistically having my dad be right. I'm gonna I'm gonna all right, cool.

Um, and so the question that I asked myself was like, how can I afford to get more leads, right? And so I called on my friends up, and he had a he was a brick and mortar gym owner, and he told me that things were going great for him, and I was like, what the hell, dude? What are you what are you doing? He was like, dude, we just we just attached the phone to the funnel. And I was like, no [ __ ] He's like, we're selling expensive stuff on the front end now instead of selling trials. I was like, well, that's cool, I'll do that. And so we went from losing two and a half to one to making 10 to one return on the front end, right? And what that meant for my business is I went from being able to break even at $10 a lead to being able to spend up to $100 a lead and still make money, which is crazy, right? And so then things started to grow again for me, and then we, you know, open location after location, and things grow, and I met this guy, and uh, I was I was I met I joined his Mastermind. I was trying to I told him I wanted to create a nationwide gym gym chain, and he said uh, you should teach other people how you do what you do and not grow that chain. And I was like, well, you make more money than me, so okay, I'll listen. And so then I started making uh, our doing our Marketing System. Mike, this is by the way at that guy's gym, um, did 191 signups in 19 days, and that was the stack of contracts, um, some of you guys may have seen this; it was like the most run ad for like a year and a half, um, but we did I know $100,000 in in 19 days in sales, like in the ghetto. All right.

So these are the three Frameworks. Sorry, I sped through that because we already covered a little bit of my story early, so I wanted to get through it, um, and these are the free Frameworks that I kind of discovered, um, to scale high ticket. All right. And it'll take if you if you're if you're partnering some with someone then it'll help take their losing funnels and turn them into into cash machines, and I mean that genuinely. All right. So the free three Frameworks that I do is one is the closure framework. All right. These are the questions that get prospects to say yes. All right. And so adding this to any kind of any funnel process is going to instantly make it more profitable. All right. And I'm going to walk through the questions that we ask and specifically what only three things that you can say on a sales call, period. It's the number one mistake that all the sales guys that even my guys make, and I have to remind them of. All right. The second thing is the conviction framework. So anyone who believes can outperform a seasoned sales rep by simply learning control their tone. All right. So some of you guys right now, can I get a hand, um, I'm gonna unshare my screen real quick. Can I get hands on the screen of who here is newer to this, newer to high ticket sales? Okay, great, great, perfect. Then this is for you. I'm going to show you how you can beat the best sales reps. All right. And this is how I never ever hire seasoned closers, just FYI. No, no, Mike, we're good. No trading sales. I don't, um, but I'm gonna show you how you can beat seasoned prep, seasoned pros. All right. Which if I can find my presentation, there we go, um, by learning control your tone. And the last one is scaling. So for all you guys who are over $100,000 a month and need to scale a team, I'm going to show you how to duplicate the skill in other people. All right. Because it's one level of the skill is learning to sell; another level of the skill is teaching to sell, and it's a more valuable skill. So if you can duplicate your skill in someone else, that is how you can make 10 times, 100 times more money because it's no longer you're no longer constrained by your time. All right. So let's rock and roll.

Closure framework. So after pouring over like hundreds of scripts, like I mean it, hundreds of scripts, um, I realized that there was always like these minor in wording, but if I hit these kind of main milestones along the way, I ended up closing the sale, right? And the nice thing is that this process works for B2C and B2B, so I don't know what stuff you're selling, but it works for both, and it worked for $500 tickets as much as $100,000 tickets; the process is the same, right? And the way I teach my sales teams and now thousands of clients is this acronym, right? And like even when I'm thinking through sales calls, we use we like closer, C, right? L. So the C is clarify why the person is on the phone with you, right? That's the the objective. Why are you here? Why'd you take the time to take the call? What's the problem, right? What are we trying to solve here? After that, then we're like, got it. So what I'm hearing is you're struggling with this; does that sound about right? I'm going to label you with a problem. After that, we overview their past pain. It's like, okay, so you have this problem; I can't be the first person you've talked to about this. Tell me a little bit about what you've done so far to try to try and get past this, right? Tell me more about that; how'd that work out for you? Okay, understood. After that, it's like, okay, so hearing all these things, this is why you're here; this is what you're trying to get; this is what you've tried and hasn't worked. Okay, well, can I tell you about how I think we might be able to solve your problem? This is where we sell the vacation, right? And then finally, or step before finally, we explain away their concerns. So this is where we tell them about the program, and then we're like, do you want to do it? They say yes or no. If they say no, then we explain away their concerns so they say yes. And then once they say yes, we reinforce the decision. And this last R here is a point that I added years later because we realize that the sale the sale just continues throughout the entire customer relationship, right? And so for you guys, if you're dealing with clients uh, who you're selling for, you have to also sell them on continuously selling, right? You might have closed the card or closed the first payment, but they're onboarding experience; they got to close them again. And then after that, when they have their first week check-in call, they got to get closed again because we have to consistently sell them on why they should do anything. Why should they not just watch Netflix? Why should they why should they take action? Why should they have the discomfort of getting, you know, smacked on the phone by a stranger, right? Why should they why should they feel the the sting of failure? We have to sell them consistently to help them overcome their pains, right? And so I'll show you each some of these more closely.

Clarifying why they're there, right? It's like, what made you come in today? What made you reach out? What's your goal right now? Why is that important to you, right? Okay, helping me understand what what you what are we doing here, right? This is one where someone in the beginning, like you have to hit this because if someone says like you, I just wanted to find out more information, you're like, cool, but why? Like, what did you want the information to solve? What was the like, I'm sure you don't just go around collecting information all day, right? Like there's something you're trying to get out of this; what's the problem? And then and then you get what you need; you're like, got it. Okay, so just so I'm hearing you right, it sounds like this is your goal, correct? Then they acknowledge they have a problem. This is important because they have to say it; they have to own it. I can't cure cancer until you admit that you have it, right? We got to give it to you before we can cure it. After that, we overview the past, right? So it's like, what have you tried so far to accomplish this? How long did you do it for? How long ago? How did that work for you? What else have you tried? We call this the pain cycle, right? We consistently do this over and over again until we've exhausted all options, right? At that point, we have tons of ammo that we can use later in the clo, which I'm sure you're aware of, right? And the big piece here is we explain how it's not their fault because if they had this missing piece or two of the equation, they were halfway there; they were three-quarters the way there; they were just missing this one piece, which we're going to provide for them, right? And the nice thing is is for most of you, hopefully you're selling a a holistic solution, right? So, for example, I'm gonna use a fitness example because Mike's from from that background too. If someone came in and said they tried workouts in the past, I'm be like, I'm not telling you don't that you don't need to workout; it's great, but you also need the nutrition and the accountability, right? You need nutrition to make sure they stop eating [ __ ] because if you just start working out eating donuts, it's not going to work, right? Of course, now if I make you the best plan in the world, but you don't follow, it's not going to work either; that's why you need the accountability, and that's what I'm here for. And so from that point, that's kind of how you can naturally transition. So it's like, I'm hearing these things; this is what you're missing. Well, do you want to hear how the program works because I think we might be able to solve that for you? They'll say yes.

All right, so what we've seen is that there's three things that make clients successful, right? And at this point, this is my belief is that three things has been, you know, unequivocal and most pitches is that I think it's human brain is that you can't take more than three, but typically it's like three pillars to the to the stool, or three, you know, finish and accountability. If I was selling leads, I'd want them to be, you know, timely, uh, you know, qualified, and, you know, uh, exclusive, right? There'll be three elements to make what makes a good lead, right? There's there's always three that you can usually find when you're selling a solution. And most times—not most times, every time—if you're on the phone with the prospect, you always have the upper hand because they have admitted at the beginning of this phone call that they have a problem; they have not solved it, and so inherently they're going to be missing one of the keys; they cannot have them all, or they would not be on the phone. So you have a you you you are in in an unlosable situation unless you choose to lose it, right? Unless you choose to lose the frame. And so in this instance, it has been my experience that we use stories, short short anecdotal stories to to to break the belief of the prospect around a topic. What's important here is that we don't get into uh, jargon, right? We don't get into technobabble and talking about the program and the modules and the the things they're going to do because all of that sounds like work, and that's not what they're there for; they're there for a result, right? And so instead, I would say something like with the Fitness Nutrition accountability, like I said earlier. So if I was trying to explain accountability, be like, listen, you don't have accountability when you were a kid. You ever like have your parents tell you to brush your teeth? They were like, yeah, like, you know how you're like, I don't want to; I don't want to, and they would tell you, oh, no, you got to go brush your teeth, and and you go and you brush your teeth and you sulk back to bed, and next night you do the same thing; they tell you brush your teeth, you go brush your teeth, go back to bed, but you're an adult now, right? You brush your teeth; they're like, yeah. And that's because you had external accountability that turned into an internal habit, right? And that's what we're going to do for you here, right? So I didn't tell them about [ __ ] the coaching call that they're going to have and the post that they're going to have and the blah blah blah. We told them as the result of that; we gave them an anecdotal story that made sense to them. For that's probably a really key point I just want to drive home here: out when you have your pitch part, it shouldn't be longer than three minutes, like tops, because no one really gives a [ __ ], and at the end of the day, the reason they're going to buy is going to be because of how understood they feel. So how much when you went through that overview of the pain you were able to restate back to them accurately exactly how they felt, felt, and the struggles they are experiencing, which is why you need to shut the [ __ ] up when they're talking, right?

And so there's only three things that are ever said on a sales call; do you guys know what they are? There's only three things that ever come out of your mouth: questions, restatements, and anecdotal stories, which is the story that I just referenced, the three stories that you will use to break a belief; that's it. So this so that's how you sell them the vacation; you have these little sound bites, right? I'll give you another example. So if I was doing um, if I was doing food, right? I'm like, listen, uh, three parts of the program: Fitness, accountability, so nutrition-wise, you've got to eat stuff that's going to make you lose weight; can we agree on that? Yes. Okay, cool. But the problem is you don't want to do that, right? That's where we're here, right? Right. Okay, so let me ask you a question: when uh, do you feel like what's your favorite TV show? They're going to be like, uh, whatever, Game of Thrones. You're like, okay, Game of Thrones. Do you feel like you need to get like motivated to watch Game of Thrones? Like, man, I was trying to watch it tonight, but I just couldn't, you know, I just I just I got really busy, and I just couldn't sit down on the couch and turn the TV on; I couldn't do it, right? Of course not, because you look forward to it because you wanted to do it. And the key that we're going to do here is we're going to get you to look forward to the foods that you're eating because if you look forward to it, you don't need to be motivated because you do it on your own because you like it; does that make sense, right? So what I didn't talk about the macros and the carb cycling and the intermittent fasting and the calorie counting and the blah blah blah blah blah because the end of the day that does not matter; what they want is for them to solve the problem and have it be painless, right? And that's what we're explaining to them. So that's selling the vacation, right? And this is a saying that I've used for a long time, which is sell the vacation, not the plane fright, right? And so this is what everyone else talks about; they're like, sir, for us to get you these results, you're going to have to take your pants off; you're going to have to jump through this loop; you're gonna have to go through the TSA, the airport lines, pack your suitcases, take your shoes off, do the layovers, connect your flights, uh, have a person farting next to you; don't worry, they don't have COVID; you'll have turbulence probably on the plane. Then as soon as you're out, you think you're done; you still have to wait for baggage claim; they probably lost your bag, right? And in our world, it's your modules, your MPL, your Macros, your workouts, your support team, your URLs, your domains, your funnels, your targeting, your ads, and the other [ __ ] that doesn't matter, right? But instead, what they want is you sell Maui, final destination, and you always sell the same thing because the difference is only the level of service and how they want to get there, right? If you have multiple levels of service, so do they want to swim to Maui to where they're trying to go? There's sharks, and you could drown or get robbed, right? This chick's crazy. Uh, do they want to take a boat to Maui? It'll take a little longer, but there's no shark attacks, but there's still no Wi-Fi, and you're kind of, you know, in the sun. Uh, do you want to take a normal flight to Maui? Get there a little faster; still smells bad, has security, bad food, but you're going to get there? Or do you want to take a private jet to Maui, right? Direct, non-stop, champagne on the plane, suitcase is packed when you arrive, right? And so that's the selling piece. E is explaining away.

They concerns, and so these are the questions that sound like, um, so there's—I'm sure Mike has already taught you a lot of the uh, the obstacle overcome Concepts, right? So fundamentally, there's there's three big ones, right? Price, and rather than teach you like the uh, the the the drilling of the obstacles, I told you there's two things you need to memorize: one of them are the stories; the second are the obstacle overcomes. All right, because those are the things that you're in the Red Zone, like that's not where you start thinking about what you're going to say. All right, so the two things that you need to memorize as a salesperson are the stories about what you sell and the obstacles that you're going to encounter when you're in the red zone. The questions on the front end, you need to know the Milestones you need to hit in order to move forward, and this is one of the big mistakes I'm sure Mike talks about a lot, which is you need to sit in the pain. If someone does not clarify why they need a solution, you do not ask for the sale. If they're if we just say, hey, you know what, what brought you to here today? I just want to find out more information. Okay, cool, so you know, let me tell you about the program, like that's not—we didn't get the [ __ ] like we don't know why they're there; we don't know what their goals are. Like one of the things drives me nuts about my team sometimes is I'm like, dude, we're eight minutes in the conversation, I was like, I don't know how many clients they have; I don't know what their revenue is; I don't know what their profit is; I don't know what their biggest pain and struggle was right now. I'm like, what are you doing? I'm like, you just told them they're like, oh, Jim is a $100 million dollar company. I'm like, they don't give a [ __ ], but they do my sales guys because they get their OS puffed up, right? But it has nothing to do with the prospect; they do not care, right? They only care about them. So, right, that's right. Yeah, that's the issue, right? Everyone talks way too much about the product. And so when you're training sales people, you don't train them on the product; you train them on the prospect. The product doesn't matter. I mean, it matters obviously from like how you're going to make money because you have to do a good job because I'm going to get that in the second point, but in terms of when you are selling and training someone, if you guys know someone or know a specific Niche really well, then you will know their pains. And if you have a new salesperson, you hear them say [ __ ], and you're like, that's not what he thinks; what is he doing? He might know the product perfectly, but he just said that the guy's problem was not the problem. And so then it doesn't matter what the product is because he doesn't feel like it's for him, even though it's totally for him, but you just misarticulated the problem; that's where the clarity has to happen. If you nail that, the rest of the pitch is easy. All right. And so the key here is relying on past agreements that have already been made. So this person with their partner, with their spouse, with their B, you know, whatever, has—that person knows that there's a problem, and they also don't approve of that problem. And so why would they be in any way against remedying a problem that they already don't approve of, right? And then finally, we always tack on—sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission, right? Ha, depends on the ticket sale, right? But you can get those in, right? And then obviously last, last case here is you just do a delayed close and say, let's get your car down; we can put it down payment; we can pay the rest on Friday. And if between now and then, you know, your partner comes back and says, no, man, I want to be poor; I want to keep struggling, and like, I want to never make money and like continue to do this for the rest of our lives, then I'll absolutely tear up the contract; don't worry about it.

Right, finally you've got stalls, right? I need to think about it. So these are because people don't—people are afraid of making mistakes, right? People are afraid of making mistakes, and because of that they don't like making decisions because it's easier to let life make the decision for you. And so they like doing it that way because then they feel like it's not their fault, right? And so I mean a great obstacle over for this is, what's your main concern? Which is usually my number one thing I go to when someone's like, I need to think about it. It's like, totally, what's your main concern, right? Let's think about it together, right? And so fundamentally these are the things that they need to know: Do you feel like what we're doing can meet your needs and solve the problem? Yes or no. Yes. Do you want to work with us as a company? Do you like our values? Do you like what we stand for? Do you believe what we believe about the world? Yes. Do you have access to funds or know someone who does? Yes. Well then let's rock and roll, because those are the only things we know to me, the B decision, right? Do you like the product? Do you like us? And do you have the money to do it? That's it, simple as that, right? And so when we walk through those, if you encounter these situations, obviously there's, you know, if you're going to do it now, sooner or later you might as well—like there's plenty of things to say, but I think it's more important to understand the theory behind why someone has this objection, right? They have an objection around price because they don't see the value because you didn't articulate it; they have an objection around decision maker usually because you [ __ ] something up earlier in the sale, but at this point you're in the red zone, so you got to deal with it. So you rely on pasted agreements; if they come with a stall, then you help them confront a decision and make a logical choice and teach them how to make a decision. That in that moment you say, what are you most afraid of happening? I'm afraid of you just—you're afraid of me taking the money, right? Just taking your money and you getting nothing, right? Again, well let me tell you how that's not going to happen, right? You can bring their concerns, all right? And then finally they say yes, and you're like, awesome. And this is where, if you're selling for someone else, get them to send a personalized video, like, hey Johnny, saw you just signed up with us today; super pumped to have you; uh, you're going to be meeting with Heather tomorrow; she's going to get you kicked off; um, you should in the mail get a special gift, so keep lookout for that. And then uh, you know, send a handwritten card. If someone just bought a really expensive thing, people are making their decision about whether they believe in you as a company within the first 48 hours after the sale; they make a decision of whether or not they're going to be with you in the long term and how they are treated in the first 48 hours after they give you money, so it's critical, and it's usually in that point that people [ __ ] up and just ignore them. Framework two, and you know, Mike, I can stop; I'll just do framework two and then we can do the Q&A because if I don't have time to scale the sales teams, I can hit on the points later. Um, so this is a big one for everyone who is who's newer to sales, all right? If you believe you can outperform to season sales rep by learning control your tone, all right? And so I reworked all of our scripts into the closer framework, and the thing is is immediately some people were crushing it, right? While others were still not selling [ __ ], and I was like, what the [ __ ], right? And so I talked to my friends, and they were like, dude, you should read this book by Jordan Buffer, and the big biggest thing that I got from the book was just he was very specific about tonality, and that was a big shift for me in just learning to teach how to ask the question, not just asking the question, right? And so in the book he talks about having the same issue that I had with scaling sales; it's like I give the script to two guys; some guy crushes; some guy doesn't; I'm like, what the [ __ ], right? And the thing is, there's a hidden dialogue that the sales team does not know that they are talking in, right? And so the words are not going to be enough, all right? They're just literally 10%, so the words that you have—it might be the most tested script in the world; it's still only 10%; 90% is how you say the words, right? Because how you say what you say is tonality, like right now I could give everyone here, you know, Jerry Seinfeld standup script; you could read it; it wouldn't be funny, right? Because it's not just that you had the script; it's how you deliver it, right? And that takes time to develop, right? And that's kind of unconscious Mastery. And so there's two ways to do this, all right, that I have found: You can either trick yourself into it, or you can train yourself to do it, all right? And since we don't have enough time to uh, to train on the influence of tonalities, here's the trick that I teach, all right? Conviction will correct your tone; conviction made real. So um, let me tell you this story. So I was I was brought in to do a day of Consulting for this mortgage leads company to train their sales team, and the first half of the day I reworked the whole script; I put the closure framework; made it a question-based um, sale, and then I came in, and they were expecting me to like rain, you know, fire and brimstone on these guys. And so I sat down; I was like, who's the guy having the most trouble? It was this guy John. So I was like, John, and they were still on the leads; I was like, John, how good are the leads? He was like, well, you know, and I was like, we're good, thanks. And I was like, let me show you how you would answer it if you actually believed that the leads were good. I was like, you say like, dude, these leads are [ __ ] unbelievable, right? Now I'm studying for my real estate exam so I can get in on these leads; my aunt is real, her and she has more business she can handle, and I'm sending her traffic; I'm trying to get my my my brother to do it with me; I'm not sure how long I'm a worker because these leads are killing it for us, right? If you believe in the product, you don't need to have all the sales skills; you'll do it the right way because you'll actually want to help the person. So that's why the most important part of the sale is the product. Because unless you're a malicious person—like most people here—was everyone here have some level of ethics on some level? Like no near just wants to like take someone's last dollar, right? So then the only way to sell hard—because if you're going to close, you got to sell hard—the only way to sell hard is to believe through and through, balls to bones, when you look at yourself in the mirror at night. This is what I talked about when Mike said at the very beginning, like, what happens when people start hating on you? The only way that I've been able to stay where we're at in the gym industry—Mike knows the amount of hate that I get, right?—the only way we've been able to do that is that I read the testimonials, the thousand of them that I have of Jim who have gone to six figures, of the hundred gyms we've taken to seven figures, right? Like I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that our product works; I also know that if you sign up for a gym, not everyone loses weight, and I'm willing to deal with that; I I'm willing to give everyone the opportunity to change their life. So here's the tactics around this: Reread testimonials out loud daily in front of your sales team, all right? And if the business that you're working for doesn't have testimonials, find another business, all right? I'm serious; you're not going to be able to close unless you're like literally—unless you're unethical—you're not going to be able to close. So go find something that is a good product because there's plenty of them out there, all right? Find a good product that you believe in; you just see tons of testimonials, and then read those every day in front of the team, all right? Second—well, this is for the business owners—but fix everything you possibly can about the product, all right? And never blame a customer for lack of success. So as much as there are people who have not been successful who've used gym launch, I still take the fact that they were not successful, and I think, what could I have done that would have made the next person like them successful? And you plug the hole, right? If you do that over and over and over and over again, you know, truly at the end of the day, when you look at yourself in the mirror when no one else is watching, whether or not you truly put the effort forth that merits the price that you are charging, right? And only you can know that. And the thing is is like the reason sales get beat up is because they don't put the work in, and then it grates on their soul, and then eventually they burn out; they burn out not because they can't handle no, but because they can't handle how they feel about themselves, right? And so you have to put the work in to have the conviction because that's what's going to get you through it. If you've ever met someone who's a born-again Christian, all right, they are convicted; they do not care how many people tell them to shove it because they are trying to save people's Souls; it's real. Like if you let that hit you, it's real; you know what I mean? And if you can be a disciple of whatever the product you have—an evangelist in the truest terms—then all the scripting stuff, it won't matter. Why are some of the best sales people clients who had success because they believe in it? That's it. And the most convicted person will always win the fight, right? They'll always lead the dance because they have conviction in their skepticism; you have conviction in your product, and one of you is going to win out, right? And it's the question is whose belief is stronger? Because belief isn't binary; it's not do I believe or do I not believe; it's how much do I believe? To what extent do I believe? Would I bet $1,000 on this product? Would I bet $10,000 on this product? Would I sell my mother this product? Think about it. If you would sell your mother this product, how convicted are you? Probably very, and you will have no problem closing deals. And notice that I have a lower tone right now so that you listen to the words that I'm saying so you think that they're important. In terms of uh, the training schedule: 60 minutes a day, 5 days a week; my guys do world-class sales training; they text me in the morning before they wake up; they text me once they're done; uh, they do the first 25 minutes; they read the script out loud; five minutes they drill obstacles—I need to think about it; I need to talk to my partner; um, this is expensive—and then they talk; they they drill the second half, right? As a closer, you got to talk; you got to listen; you got to train both skills, right? The talking is the tone and saying the words the right way in the right sequence without having to think about it; the listening is going over recording and figure out what went right, what went wrong, and what we're going to do next time, and saying it, drilling it as a team, marking it, and moving to the next one. That's the short answer. We 10x the recurring Revenue in one of my portfolio companies by using what we call the diagnostic sale. There are seven steps that you can use to follow the script and apply it to your business. Enjoy. I crossed $100 million in net worth by age 32; I sold my first big company for 46.2 million, and the reason we're able to do that is because we know how to grow companies. And so now I buy companies at a lower price; I grow them, and then we sell them. And so I want to talk to you about one of the companies we just bought; uh, we bought them a year and a half ago I think or a year ago; uh, they had 14 locations, so it was a chain of brick and mortar, and since then we've gone from 14 to 32 locations, and the reason we're able to do that is because we focused on the sales process, and through a process that I want to walk you through—something that I call the diagnostic sale—we're able to 10x the recurring revenue of the business across all the locations. So before we get into the nitty-gritty of the story, let me just walk you through the steps in the diagnostic process: First is we like to have some sort of pre-sale questionnaire, which the purpose of that is to get get more information that arms the salesperson so they know who they're talking to, what their pains are, but from the sales perspective for them, they also increase their awareness of the problem. Second is we get their information and their credit card, which is key, and I'll explain why it later. Uh, third is we want to understand what their current situation is—where are you at today?—then we have your desired state—so where would you like to be at?—and then what's the obstacle—why aren't you there?—and then finally, once we have these big three, we present the desired State and our vehicle to overcome the obstacle, and we tie our price to the way we're going to get them there, and then finally we give them an incentive to prepay. So here's the five steps that we follow to actually get this done. So number one is that we secret shopped the business, so we actually looked into it; we went there. By the way, you should secret shop your own business; highly recommend doing it; you'll be horrified by what you hear your sales guys say; you're like, I thought we had a script; what are you even doing? Number two is from there—this is basically information gathering—we figure out what the constraint is; okay, where do we think there's big opportunities in the business? Now you should think about yourself as your own business consultant; if you could buy your business today and look at your business, what would be the no-duh thing that you would do? Now for this particular business, we thought that they had an offer constraint, which really came down to packaging; we had offer/packaging because fundamentally we're not going to change the core of the business; we're not going to all of a sudden start selling soap when you sell HVAC; like that's not going to happen, right? So the core of the business can remain unchanged; it's how we're going to package the services we deliver or that the services we sell to a customer; how are we going to get them to perceive what we're selling? We gathered the data; we figured out the constraint was that they should get way more re-bookings, which I thought was an offer and packaging issue, which is we need to sell the solutions; sell the goal. And so number four is, okay, if we assume that we're going to make this new transition to this new new offer, new packaging, we have to anticipate—so you—we call it killing zombies—uh, which is one way of putting it; you anticipate the obstacles or objections that people are going to throw at you ahead of time; write this in neon marker above your sales team, which is—it's way harder to get someone to buy buy after you presented the price because now they're like, he's trying to sell me; so we have to counter that before we become salespeople in their mind; we are a trusted expert; ideally if we're positioned well, and you should be that way if you know what you're talking about, and I like to use the frame of childlike curiosity; I always tilt my head; I probably even did it subconsciously just now; you tilt your head when you ask the question because it's non-threatening; you're like, huh, that's weird; what changed between then and now, just so I understand? Then they can tell you rather than be like, you said that your husband said supports you; you can't say that now; you have to buy; doesn't work that way. If you win the argument in a sale, you lose the sale; the only way that you win the sale is being willing to lose being right. And so the fifth step, and this is the ongoing step, is that you implement the diagnostic sales process; so it's implementation. So now that I just outlined the five steps, let me deep dive into the implementation into the actual business and how it did this with this particular business. When we bought them, I spent 4 hours with our director of sales, and we outlined the new sales process we wanted to implement, and as soon as we implemented that sales process, we 4X LTV progression, meaning how much people paid us; it went from 200 to 800, so really big jump, and we—the crazy thing about this is that we didn't change what we delivered; we only changed how we presented it. And so this is the key of how we create value, how we scale companies, how we grow companies, and many companies keep these things as Secrets, uh, as their special sauce, and I just fundamentally believe that that the more we put out, the more we get back, and so that's why I operate this way, all right? So I will hold nothing back, and this is something I call the diagnostic sales process. Now to be very clear, the diagnostic sales process is one of two different sales—or maybe three different sales processes—big picture that you can have in a business: One is a transactional sale all the way on this extreme, so on one side you've got transactional sales, and on this side you've got Enterprise sales, which is like uh, relational sales; like if you think about like you're selling some big Fortune 500 company, you have to get stakeholders involved; get budget approval; there's all that stuff. And on transactional side you've got like High Velocity sales; we're talking 20, 30-minute sales; a guy who stands in of the car wash sells Car Wash; somebody sells gym memberships—transactional. And then you've kind of got like this Middle where you might sell something that's a little bit higher ticket, but it's a little bit more custom, all right? Now what we did was I took their sale from here—a purely transactional sale—and moved it towards custom, all right? Now in a transactional sale, you typically fit the customer to the product, and so let's say that I sell pens, all right? So I sell pens; if somebody comes in, I'm going to basically spend all my effort listening to what they say they want and then telling them how this pen fits their needs, or I have to basically say your needs are wrong; let me educate you more, and this actually solves all your problems, right? And so those are pretty much the only two approaches you can take in a transactional sale. Now the advantages of having this type of sale is that it's really fast; uh, they tend to be lower ticket in general; uh, and from an operational perspective in the business, you don't need to personalize anything, and so you get the sales team and the sales process to basically Orient everyone like a funnel down to one solution, and then you just make a ton of these Solutions, and you get lots of efficiencies because you only have to produce one thing. This—the custom sale—is a harder sale—sry—easier sale to do, but harder on the operational side. And so the magic happens when you can actually Bridge the product component of transactional, which you say, okay, we only sell these types of widgets; this is the only thing we deliver, but I can do it in a way that feels custom, feels personalized, all right? So I'm going to give you two examples, and I'll explain this one in a second; this chart that I have here, which

If you could take your recurring revenue from that to that just by changing how you sell, if you'd want to do that, hang tight. We're going to break that process.

So if I had—cuz I did this in the gym, in the gym world too, which is part of why our gyms make more money—so a traditional sale looks something like this: someone comes in. So this is traditional, and you say, "We have a membership that's, you know, whatever $99 per month. All right, that's your membership," and you say, "Our membership has this, this, this, and this, and you want that, right? Because it's going to help you accomplish all your dreams." Okay, sometimes you get people, sometimes you don't.

What I do—we do something called a diagnostic. And so the first thing is that when the person walks in the door, we get them to fill out a pre-sale questionnaire. And so that's like an application in a digital process, but an in-person process. It follows the same logic, which, by the way, internet businesses follow. Local businesses—local businesses can also model internet businesses. When you find out something works in one place—which I think has been one of the big advantages I've had in business—is I try and put it in a completely different place, and it often works too, if you understand the concept.

And so we fill out a pre-sale questionnaire. Now, the pre-sale questionnaire simply walks them through all the reasons they walked in today, and it asks them the same question in multiple different ways. So it's like, "Hey, like, what brought you in today? What's the current problem you're dealing with? How long have you been dealing with it? If you had to quantify how much this has cost you financially, what would it be? Uh, if it continued for 5 years, how much worse would the situation be?" And so the whole point is we're trying to agitate the pain; we're trying to bring attention to this problem and elevate its importance. So that's what the pre-sale questionnaire does.

Now, the second thing is we get info, and this is very key. So when someone comes in after that, we say, "Hey, I want to—I want to set up your account profile." And so when you do that, you collect their information, and this is the key part: you get their credit card. Now you're like, "Wait a second, I'm getting a credit card, but I haven't sold anything." Exactly, and you do that so that when you do sell something later, you don't have to ask for it. Now you get the pre-sale; they're like, "Wow, I really do need this thing." You say, "Hey, let me complete your customer profile. Just standard procedure, no big deal." All right, then you get their info. Now if they're like, "Well, I don't want to give you my credit card," you're just like, "It's just how the system works; it's how we complete profiles," and then they'll give it to you. All right.

So from there, this is the—this is where the special—the special magic that's unique to each individual business happens. So in the weight loss business, I want to understand where their goal is at. So we say, "What's current and then—what's desired? Where are you now? Where would you like to be?" And then this one, you ask them, say, "What's the obstacle? What's in between these two things? Is the obstacle right? Current—I've got an obstacle getting in the way of my desired." That's all we're asking in the process.

Now, in weight loss and in most businesses, the thing the person thinks is in the way is often not the real thing in the way, and that's because they've never had this conversation before. They clearly haven't solved the solution, and that's why they're coming to you. And so you want to just get their words—more so—so that you can explain it back to them using the language they gave you. All right. And so in the weight loss world, for example, instead of selling a membership, I would say, "Okay, well, it sounds like you need these three things: fitness, nutrition, accountability. Fitness-wise, you need to work out X days a week. Nutrition-wise, you need to eat this food at this time, and we can help you meal prep the stuff so you got—when you go to restaurants, you can still stick on it. And you need accountability because if you don't—if you do—if—if I give you the best fitness plan and the best nutrition plan, but you don't show up, doesn't matter, right? Account is what makes the whole thing work." Great. "Finished, nutrition, accountability. Easy three-step framework. Fantastic."

Now, this is where it becomes diagnostic. Now, most customers—and this is why—this is where the magic happens—is that even if you still deliver the same thing—so fundamentally, when I switch the sales process, the gyms remain the same; they still have workouts, they still have nutrition help, they still have accountability—nothing changed but how we presented it changes. And so rather than saying, "Hey, I'm going to sell a four-week thing or a six-week thing," I say, "Hey, you're currently 200 lb. Okay, now what's your high school weight?" She says, "I want to—I want to get to 140." You say, "Okay, cool. You want to get to 140. This is your desired. Okay, so you have a 60-pound difference. Now what we found is that we don't want people to lose more than a pound and a half to two pounds a week. All right, so let's just be conservative and call it one and a half. So then I take out my calculator and I say, 'What's one and a half times 60,' which would be—other way around—it'd be 60 divided by 1 and a half, which is 45. Okay, so 45 weeks is how long it's going to take us to take you from 200 to 140. So you lose a pound and a half a week; it's going to take 45 weeks."

And so six—present price in relation to goal. So you say, "Awesome. So we currently charge 99 bucks a week. We can get you there in 45 weeks, which means it's $4,500." And that means—and for us, I added a—a guarantee on the back end which—which said, "Hey, if you show up to the workouts for the next 45 weeks and you log your food and you don't lose the weight, I'll keep working with you for free until you do." So that means—this is the translation; this is the key part in the script—so that means when you pay this $4,500, it means that you can count that weight loss for good; you can put it out of your mind. You pay me this money; we're going to get there one way or another. As long as you follow the steps—you're going to follow the steps, right? Great. And so here you're trying to sell 99 bucks a month or—or whatever—this would be 99 bucks a week if—if I was doing equivalent pricing. All right, so this would be like a semi-private program, but by positioning it this way, I'm not selling a membership anymore; I'm selling exactly what they want and putting a price tag on it and saying, "You want to get to 140; it's going to take this long, and I'll guarantee that you—that you'll get there provided you follow these steps." And then they say, "Wow, that's awesome." You say, "Well, if you want, I can—can save you a little bit of money. You want to save a little bit of money?" And they're like, "Yeah, I want to save a little bit of money." "Well, if you prepay, you can save 10% a day. So I can save you 450 bucks. You want to do that?" That's what most people do. Great. "You want to—you want to use the card you have on file?" Done. So that's—that's the process.

Now I took this process and applied it to a completely different service business that we own, that's a chain—that this is a little bit more medical, but the concept still applied, which is—and this is the key part—is you have to figure out, for whatever it is that you sell, what the current is versus what the desired is. So if I were—a painter, all right, and I was painting houses—sounds crazy, right?—say, "Hey, so you currently have this thing. You want a completely painted house." And so the—like—now for them, this is like more—us do it for you rather than—self-service—like, "I'm going to have to—like"—they—you're not painting your house and them helping you; so they're actually going to paint the house. So then we just try and think, "How can we—how can we—how can we sell to goal and break it into a price that we tie to that?" And so it'd be like, "Okay, so we're going to need four coats of paint and—it's going to take this period of time, and then at that point, your—your whole house is going to be weatherproofed. And so that means that when you pay this price, that's what you're going to get by this date. And if we don't get it done by that date, I'm going to give you this." And that way we can relieve their risk that it's not going to happen—happen, and we tie the purchase to the outcome.

So this particular business, when I bought it or bought into it, um, it was a business that they had really good lead generation, and they have a good product, but they didn't have good packaging, and I saw the opportunity because I knew that if I installed my sales process into their business, I could make it make a lot more money. And so if you have the opportunity to—like—4X a business without opening new locations, you do that. And so that's more or less what we did. So I actually wrote down the new sales process—took me four hours—so I wrote down the new sales process, and then I presented it to the management team, and they were like, "Wow, this is the most valuable thing we've ever had happen to our business." And I said, "Great, so let me know when you do it across all the locations, and let's keep buying and opening new ones." And so 18 months later, we have 32 locations, and the recurring revenue in that time period has gone up, and the average revenue per customer went from $200 to $800 from this one process. And that was because before this, they were selling one-off transactions; they were saying, "Hey, we'll do this service for you." So think of it like Botox, or "We're going to do filler, or we're going to do something this one time." And so rather than just say, "Sure, give us a call when you want it again," which is pretty much what the process was before this, I say, "Hey, you want to look a certain way. You're not here because you want filler; you're here because you want to look a certain way." So if I show this chart to you of faces and filler densities, where—where do you see yourself on here currently? Now you let them self-identify. You can't be like, "Look, Vix, you're ugly." Can't say that. So you got to say, "Where are you on this chart?" And then they say this.

Now, in the weight loss sale, I got them to step on the scale. The scale called you fat, not me, all right? So maybe just point to the third party, not me. So—so—so you get them to pick how ugly they are, all right? And then you say, "How pretty do you want to be?" Now everyone's going to say, "I want to be super pretty," but here's the beautiful thing: when they pick how pretty they want to be, they're the one who set the goal, and that means the price came from them. And you know where I picked this up was yogurt stores. So one of the things I thought was genius about like Yogurt Land and things like that was if—if you go to a store and then they fill up your stuff behind the counter and then they say, "Hey, it's eight bucks," you're like, "Man, what the hell? This place is so expensive." But if they give you the cup and you fill it up and you put it on the scale, you're like, "Man, I'm a fat ass." Same pricing, but because I had control over what I picked, I'm the one who's responsible for the decision. And so by saying, "Where are you on this chart?" And again, this is where the magic happens. I say, "Current, desired." That's where the thinking behind how I'm going to structure a sale is—where—like—that's where the—that's where the experience—that's where the expertise—that's where it comes in. This is the process, and hopefully you guys can take this for your business and think like, "Okay, what's current? What do they really want? They're not buying lip filler; they're not buying a painted house; they're buying an image in their mind of what they want that house to signify or what it means to them." And this lady is not buying filler; she's trying to buy a certain look. She wants people to think about her a certain way—that she wants—when people walk—when she walks in the room, she wants guys to turn their heads, though—cuz she's probably getting a little older; they're not turning their heads as much, and she still misses that, and she'll pay anything to get that. So say, "You're ugly now. How pretty do you want to be?" We say, "Cool. So for us to get you from here to here, it's going to take us 45 weeks; it's going to take us Botox, filler, and you know, plastic surgery—whatever—we're going to have to hit you with a pretty shovel and bring you back to life. All right, we're going to have to do this, and it's going to take this many weeks for us to reverse this level of aging or at least take these cow feed out or whatever it is." And so we tie where you're at to where you want to go, and then our solution is only the vehicle that delivers this outcome. And so that is the moment that you present the price because they picked where they were, where they want to go, and then you, as the expert, explain the path to getting there. So they pick the before and after, and you just use your expertise of—this is what we found best to get people to here who start where you're at.

And so we found out that this opportunity existed within this particular business because I had my sales director secret shop them. So mind you, this is a brick-and-mortar chain; we have a lot of locations, so we could sneak our way in. It's harder if you have like a, you know, four sales guys who do all the sales; they'll just tell the owner, right? So we wanted to secret shop before we actually completed the investment. And so—uh—when he went in, he was—I asked him—so I went through this checklist. I was like, "Okay, so did they give you some sort of pre-sale question?" He was like, "No." I was like, "Okay, great. I like—did you—did they ask you for your credit card or did they ask you for your information or anything before you got the service?" And he was like, "No." And I was like, "Fantastic. What else—what else else did they do?" It's like, "Did they have you set—you know—pick—uh—where you're at and where—what your goal is?" He said, "Yeah, they did have me—uh—pick where I was at, but not where I wanted to go." So they just had him pick, "Okay, how ugly are you?" And he's like, "Okay." Now again, not completely flawed—I want to be really clear here—like this is a—at 14 locations—they're not—they're not idiots; they had the pain. We agitated the pain; they said, "Listen, this is how ugly you are on this scale that we invented, and you're here; you're a seven—ugly." Great. So he checked this, but he didn't get to say where he wanted to be. So then from there, he just went right into the service, and then when he came out, he just gave them the card to pay for the service, and that was it, and he just walked out the door. And I was like, "Wait, so they didn't—they didn't actually like ask you to buy a package or get into some membership or anything?" And he's like, "Well, they tried to upsell me this one product at one point, but this was the price point," and the price point was like 20 bucks or something. And I knew what the average customer's worth was, which was like 200 at the time. I was like, "That's—like—by the way, if you're going to do upselling, you want the price point to usually be—usually be five times more than the current price because if you get 20% of people—" So customers are fractal. So we're going to go into a little side quest here, but it'll be worth it for you since we're talking about sales. So you've heard of 80/20, right? So you've got 100 people, right? The top 20%—you've got the 80 underneath, right? These are the people—80/20—have five times the spending power of these people. And so because of that, if you get 20% of people to buy something that's five times as expensive—so let's say my current thing is $1,000—if I'm going to have an upsell, I want my upsell to be $5,000 because if 20% take it, then it's 20% times $5,000, which means I add $1,000 to my average ticket. So I go from $1,000 per customer to $2,000 per customer. And so when I heard that their upsell was 10%, it'd be like having a—be like my upsell is 100 bucks. Okay, fine. Maybe 20% take that, so I—I go from $1,000 to $1,020. Who cares? Like, what's—like—why bother, right? And fundamentally, again, smart business owners—and they were upselling product, which means there's no real delivery in a brick-and-mortar service business, so they could just hand the product, make the money, and I think they were using it more for commissions for their staff to increase the average pay, which is a different objective entirely and totally fine, but I was only looking at this from—how do I take customers who are worth $200 and make them—my goal is to get them worth $1,000. Currently it's $800; I'm going to keep getting there until we get to $1,000, but I think that we can get it to $1,000.

And so we secret shop them, number one—which, by the way, if you have a team of people who are currently selling your stuff, secret shop them—and then be horrified by what you listen to on the phone or what you see in person because you have this beautiful idea of what you think your sales process is, and it's a nightmare; it's an absolute nightmare. If they remember half of it, you'll be stoked. And so if you run in an environment—especially in a—in a lower-wage environment—so if you're brick and mortar, you have a chain of—of locations, and you have to take low-skill labor and teach them a sales process, you've—like—the expertise in sales comes down to how easy and simple you can make the process. And so that comes down to—like—"Can I automate parts of the—uh—the point of sale so that they can't move forward without doing this checkbox, right?" And by doing this checkbox, they have to ask the question, so it forces script adherence. Now, training sales—not into this video—but you want to basically repeat the process over and over and over until they're sick of it—until they say like, "Yes, Mom, would you like to have—do you have your credit—you want to use the credit card on—on file"—like—until they're saying it like they could—they can breathe it; they can think—they can say without thinking about it. That's when you've maybe just started to have a—a team that's—that's well-trained.

Now that we finished these seven—uh—pieces of the diagnostic, I want to add one more bonus because you're like, "Wait a second, so where's the—where's the recurring revenue?" Great observation, Andrew. Okay, so—so number eight is transition to recurring. All right, I remember this—I'll give you two separate stories that'll drive this home. So a friend of mine has a recurring membership that he sells, and he sells it at—I think he was selling it at 300 bucks a month, and he couldn't get people to stick past three months. And so he tried all these different gimmicks and things, and he just couldn't crack three months of LTV. Now that could have been a pricing issue, whatever. So this is what he did: he stops selling it at $300 a month—month to month—and started selling it as a $10,000 program with 36 months of interest refinancing. And so when people bought, they were buying a $10,000 price point, but they got an amazing payment plan. And so he didn't change anything about what he sold, but that took his average customer from three months to eight months. So we're talking about a $900—so three times 300 to eight times 300—$2,400—that kind of change in a business—life-changing in terms of how much money you can make. The second one was I had a different friend who had a continuity program—uh—he was an—uh—agency, and what he did was he realized he had churn in his business, and so he said, "You know, people are way less likely to churn out of a payment plan—same as the other one—than they are out of a monthly recurring revenue stream." And so what you call it to the customer can affect the likelihood that they pay, but as far as the business is concerned, you just want payments that are regular, and all you do to take a program and take it from—from a payment plan to—to recurring in terms of what—how it actually looks and feels—is you just put an automatic recurring at the end of the program. And so when someone buys this big thing and you make a payment plan and then it recurs into the exact same price as the payment plan, you just move the pieces around, but the likelihood they stick is way higher. And so that's exactly what we did as the last step in the diagnostic sales process. And I wanted to highlight this point for you because I've done it in every business. And so we give someone the option to prepay. You can give—if you want a little bit more aggressive—you get 20% off if they prepaid today. If you want to have one step down below that, which is what I like to do, you give them 10% off if they do half down and then make the rest as payments. And if they still can't do that, then I take the whole thing and I spread it over—let's say—our 45 weeks. And so I'd say, "Okay, it's 99 bucks a week—99 a week," and there you go. Now they go from 99 a week to 80 bucks a week if they prepay the whole thing, and they go from 99 bucks a week to 90 a week if they prepay half. And here's the key part is that when we present the price, you present it at the highest rate. So you present it at the payment plan. Let me walk—I'll walk you through this—CU—I think it's important—well, I'm going to put it here, and so I don't have to flip screens for you all right. So you have your full boat—I'll say full interest price—so for us in our example is $4,500. All right, 45 weeks times 99—roughly—all right, so this is our full boat price. We have our prepayment discount in full, which is—%. All right, so for us, it's going to be minus—what is that?—900. Yeah, 900. From there, so that's $3,600. Sorry, other way—uh—$3,600. If they do half down, you say, "I'll let you save—uh—450 bucks—so 10%—so 4,050." All right, so this is 10%—minus 10%—that's—20%. Now the reason this is so important is think about the alternative—think about—and this is what most people do—so listen to me, Andrew—most people do this: they present the price as $3,600, and then they say, "Oh, well, we have payment plans that we have interest on, and so we do—we do have 10% interest if you can put half down, and we have 20% interest if you put—nothing down, and you just go onto a straight payment plan." Well, which one would you rather buy? If on one hand you have a $4,500 price tag which anchors you high and you say—or you can get a benefit for prepaying today, rather than—you think about $3,600, you're considering it, and then they say, "Oh, it's even more"—even though you're just considering this peg—guess what—you have to pay way more now because you can't afford it—you have to pay more. Banks do it all the time, and guess what? Everyone hates banks. So if banks want—

To fix their process, Mr. Bank, maybe this will work. Who knows? Anyway, the point is that this is how you present the price because you get the benefit of a price anchor, and you get to be the good guy for getting them to pay upfront rather than the bad guy for them not being able to. So we're going to, we're going to go through step eight in the, uh, in the more transition process for the sale. And so I want to just walk you through step downs. And so this is super important to understand from a sales perspective. So we'll call this sales step downs, and, uh, this is, by the way, a preview for my next book coming out, $100 million. Yeah, anyways.

So, so sales step downs is one of the things that we have. So obviously, the first thing we're going to present is a prepayment, all right, which is painful today. Prepay yay. By the way, you've probably noticed from any of my content, I don't say paid in full, and that's because that's a, that's a salesman term, not a customer benefit. If you prepaid, you get a benefit, whereas paid in full is like, I got all the cash to front, good for me. And so I have trained myself, because I used to say paid in full, PIPs, P, you know, whatever, PIFs, like all of that stuff I used to do as a sales team, sales leader. And then I also heard my team saying that to customers like, hey, if you want to pay in full today, like it's just like kind of gross. And so I prefer to say like, hey, we have a prepayment discount. And so, training that, just little pro tip for you.

So number one is prepay. Number two is we do discount with partial. So this is the half down, oops, half down here. You can also do in-house. Well, this is whatever, sorry, this is credit card or third party. So if you have like most, most businesses that sell legitimate services have third-party financing solutions that already exist. And so I promise you there is a banker somewhere who started a business to service this emerging market of whatever it is that you do who says, I'll bet you I can help finance transactions. Now, the prices they charge for that financing will differ based on how risky your business is. And so like, there's financing for casinos. Like if you want to get, if you want to get a loan to go gamble more, like there's financing for that, but they will charge you a lot of money, right? And so like that being the extreme, on the other hand, if you want to finance a house, there's obviously a huge mortgage industry. And so from every step in between, there are partners who will step in as third party and take on that risk for you for a price. And so I prefer, can I get the prepayment because it's easiest and fastest? If not, I usually have a third party that I set up so that my customers can get financing. If we don't move past either of these two things, then I try to go with a partial with some level of discount, not as much as here, but a little bit. And if they still say no, then I go for continuity, which is, why don't we just make a payment plan on the thing? And in this particular business, because what they were doing before was simply rebooking people for another session of service, we just had this be the automatic, like everyone gets rebooked. And that would became, that became an internal saying, like I like having mantras within sales teams, which is like, everyone buys something, like everyone buys something. There's no reason someone should not buy something. And so, sure, we'll get them a prepay, maybe a partial, okay, fine, we'll do a payment plan. That's whatever, call it, you know, 250 times four, great. That's our $1000, that's our $1000 plan that we're getting people to buy, and you pay 250 today and then three more times, and you can do it every other month if it's a more intermittent service, whatever, just match the payments to when they get delivery. And then finally, if they're like, well, I can't do any of those things, and like, cool, let's just, let's just book the next time you want to come in. That's it. And so this is the final of the process in terms of, in terms of the step downs that we might offer someone. We just walk through this whole process, and you're like, wow, maybe that's a lot of work, I have to use my brain power, but welcome to business. But let me tell you why it's worth it.

So these are the actual stats, and I put the numbers without the names to keep it nice, open loop for you. So number one is that they had 9% of revenue that was recurring within this product line, all right? So they, 9% that was recurring. After we implemented this process, 60%, they took this 9% to 60% of this product line within the company. So awesome. Number two, they had basically no membership at all because they just weren't, it wasn't even an option, not really. And we were to push that to 30, that's a 30, 30% into memberships. This included payment plans, this is just memberships. And then we went from getting one additional extra visit on average per person, meaning two, to getting four to six visits per customer by introducing this sales process. From a money perspective, we went from $20,000 when we bought the business, so mind you, this business made a lot more money than this single product line or this service line, but this is where I wanted to invest my time because I thought there was a huge opportunity here because I saw from the secret shopper, from the constraints, I thought this was a big area of attack. And so they only do $20,000 a month, which business de-sizes, not a lot. And then however many have been dots this later over $250,000 per month in and added, and it continues to grow, and this compounds. And that's the, that's the beauty of this type of sales process and repackaging of what someone already sells. And so we went from 9 to 60, 0 to 30% on memberships, from one visit to four to six visits, and from 20 to 250,000. So we more than 10x the recurring revenue of this business by following a diagnostic process rather than just selling some traditional one-off thing. The first thing you have to learn how to do is how to sell. The second thing you have to learn how to do is get someone else to sell for you.

And so in this video, I break down how he scaled a new sales department from 0 to 40 sales reps doing 5 million plus per month in sales within 90 days. But before I explain the $21.6 million increase, let me kind of give you some context on this business and where it was in the life cycle. We brought in mercenaries. So when I say mercenaries, I mean an outsourced sales team. The founder of the business had never been in sales at all. He'd never got on the phone, he'd never done door-to-door, he never done anything related to getting a stranger to give him money one-on-one. I thought it was too risky to try and have somebody's completely new to it try and start from scratch. And so I called somebody in my network and I said, hey, do you want to make a bunch of money? And he said, yes. Can you round up some of your guys and start taking calls for this company that I have? And so they started taking sales, and we started making more money. We have a W, money up, W, fantastic. And in a second, I'll walk you through all the statistics of what the mercenaries and the outsourced team did, which then led us to a fully in-house team. Now, as you can imagine, imagine going from zero sales guys to 40 sales guys in a fresh company is hard. But let me explain some of the problems with the mercenaries, and then I'll walk you through the actual stats.

So there were three main problems with the mercenaries, all right? Problem number one is that we were giving them 20% of the revenue, all right? Now, this is something that I was vehemently against, to be very honest with you. In this particular company, I was in a minority position. I said, it's ultimately your call. I was like, but I would not do it at this percentage. They decided to move forward with it anyways, and hey, we made money, there was a W there, but it was a problem. 20% of revenue coming in is a big [ __ ] check. The sales team, company was arguing, we can't get the top guys to sell unless we give them a really big rip, that's sales slang, big commission. So we had to give them 20% of the revenue that they collected as commission to the mercenaries team, the outsourced sales team. The second problem that came up is related to performance. They were getting less than 30% of people to ascend, meaning people who buy the first thing to buy the next thing, and we wanted it to be higher than that, or I believe that it should be higher than that. We're paying a lot, and we're not getting as much out as we want. The third problem with the outsourced sales team, and this is one that I think more long-term about because I'm an investor in the business, is the sellability and enterprise value of the business, meaning in the future we'd like to sell the company at some point, probably. And even if you don't want to sell a business, creating a sellable business still makes the business more valuable. And so if you can make a business more val, valuable to a stranger, it also becomes more valuable to you. If you have an outsourced sales team, something that exists outside of the business that's responsible for 20, 30, 40% of the revenue in the business, then that could be a material issue. That's why we decided to look at these three things and say, all right, let's see if we can move this in-house. I'm going to walk you through first the funnel, kind of before and after, and then I'll walk you through the process that we did to fix it or swap it over that resulted in the $21.6 million increase in profit, not revenue, profit.

The way that this process was structured is we had a two-call setup. We've got a percentage of people who schedule a call, a percentage of people who show to the call and then schedule the next thing, then they have to show to the next thing, and they go to the next call, and then do they buy? So let me walk you through the stats here because everyone who bought the product had a first call that they wanted to attend. 100% of people were scheduled to show up for this call with the outsourced sales team. We had 74% of people actually showing for the call. Once they got on the call, we're able to get 53% to schedule the follow-up call. And so some people call this a qualification call, which is, if you're going to sell something else, you want to make sure the person actually fits for the thing you sell, makes sense, right? You want to make sure they have the problem to solve and the money to spend. With the 53%, the outsourced team wanted to only give their closers, because he's trying to optimize for his dollars per hour for his team, only the easiest closes. So they weren't willing to take calls they weren't already sure were going to close, all right? So because of that, they're only passing 53% or almost half to the next call. Now again, this is just scheduling. Now from here, we had 63% showing up to call two. So this is call one, this is call two. Now this is the close call, this is the set call, this is the close. So I'll just put set, this is close. So the last box we got to fill in here is how many people were they actually selling, all right? And they were getting 80% of people who show up to the second call, the closed call, to buy, all right? And so that is where money came out the other side, hooray.

So let's walk through the math as if 100 people bought the product. So if 100 people bought the product, then it means that we'd have 74, 74% of 100, 74 people who would show up to this first call. Now of the 74 people, 53%, so about 37 of them would then schedule for the second call. Of the 37 people who scheduled for the second call, we're going to have 22, so 63%, 22 of them are actually going to show up to this close call. Now 80% of these 22 are going to close, which means we'd have about 20 sales or 20% of that front end that ascends. Now remember I said at the very beginning, one of the problems is that we wanted it to be closer to 30. This is the issue. And so I want to be very clear, a big part of this was, was the price point we were selling at and the fact that we were selling people who are already customers. We're not selling cold traffic here; we're selling people who already bought this, already demonstrated an interest, and we're saying, do you want more help with that thing? So we thought it should be much higher.

So there's five steps that we broke down that we had to do to go from out of, outsourced team, mercenaries to in-house sales team. And the first one started with hiring a director. Now, right off the bat, let me explain our thinking process before I explain who we were looking for and how we found them, cuz listen, you don't want to hire 40 people, people, right? You were thinking, okay, I want to hire one person who can then hire 40 people, times a lot more circles, right? It's even long to write it out, all right? It's an old investor saying, which is, hire one to hire 10. We're going to hire the one person, not the 40. That's the main decision. After that, what we're looking for is, who, who are we looking for? What do they look like? And then how are we going to find them? Okay. Now, from a who perspective, we wanted someone who had been there, done that, which means specifically somebody who sold this type of product in this type of industry and ideally scaled a big team and knows how to coach up new salespeople. So that's what been there means for us for this particular role. The next thing is, you want the person to be metric-driven. So one of the easiest ways that you can measure someone's proficiency in any skill, this little pro tip, the quality and quantity of metrics that someone explains about how they do their job is directly correlated with how good they are at the job. And so if someone's like, hey, I'm an amazing HR person, and I say, cool, what metrics do you track? And they're like, well, the happiness of the team, and I'd be like, what else do you track? How many complaints I get on payroll? I'd be like, okay, what else do you track? The order that they tell me the metrics they're looking at and what they track is going to tell me what they care about, what they pay attention to, and their level of expertise. Now, on the flip side, if someone says, hey, I like to take companies from, on average, a 45-day time to fill to 20-day time to fill, because we know that every day that company doesn't have something they need, they're losing money, there's opportunity cost of revenue they should be making by not having them. This is really interesting because they're connecting their metrics to the company's revenue. And so how people talk about the metrics and which metrics they track and how they connect those with how it makes the company more money will show you how good they are at what they do. The third one is just kind of the, I would say, demeanor. Now I've hired a lot of salespeople and sales directors in my life, and the personality of a sales leader is usually not the same as the personality of a sales killer. Now there are some superstars who can do both, but it's rarer. Often times, the demeanor of sales directors is a little bit more even-keeled, usually more humble, very servant-oriented. They have to be people people. They have to be the type of person who wants to pour into the team and loves watching someone improve their skill set and can repeat the same directions over and over and over again without losing enthusiasm. That's who you want. You want somebody who's like an Energizer Bunny of positive vibes, because for the most part, sales director is just performance management. They manage the culture of the team. Like the output of the entire team is the direct function of the sales director. And so if you think about this like on a, on a football team or something, you can switch the coaches, and all of a sudden the whole team does way better. It's because the coach drives the culture in the team that drives the performance and the output. And so that is what they are responsible for. And so if they don't have values, everything else that comes from the team is going to be a diluted version of them.

Now we go to the how. You're like, okay, well, that sounds like an amazing unicorn, Alex, how do you find that person who's going to replace this? Well, I personally have a relatively large network of salespeople. And so one of the big things here is that you can either, this is the core four, by the way, you can do outreach, which means you reach out to strangers who you think might fit the role. You can run ads, so you run ads to go get more people. Content. You can also do recruiter. I've used all of these, all right? So there, there's pros and cons to each of them, but what I will do is I'm going to cross out two of these early for most of you. Most people think that you can run ads for these types of roles. The reality is usually no. The higher the role is, the better the person is, the less likely they're going to respond to an ad, cuz think about it, an amazing sales director is always going to have a job and always going to be making good money. Now they might not like their job as much as they, they, they could, but they're going to keep making money. And sales directors tend to be money-oriented in general. And so they're going to keep making money. So ads is probably not the way to get them. Content, unless you have a salesperson audience, probably not going to be the way. You can always try it, it's free, give it a shot, but I wouldn't say I'm going to bet the farm on this. So it's probably not going to be content. And so usually you're going to do one of these two, which is you're going to get a recruiter to do it, or you do it yourself. But guess what? A recruiter does, they do outreach too. I know this is going to sound crazy. You message them, and you say, hey, I've got this role, and it looks like you're perfect for it. Could I tell you about it? Or if you want to be a little less direct, you can say, you're an amazing person who'd be a fit for this role. Do you, do you know anybody else like you? They're going to be like, screw everybody else, talk to me, Alex. How many people do I reach out to? Five? Five, no one's even going to read it if you message five people. 10? No one's going to read it if you message 10 people. Reach out to 100 to 1000 people. And if you get to that 1% on the 100, and you haven't found it, then you might have to go 1% on 1000, and that's okay, cuz remember, would you rather have a top 1% sales director? I sure the [ __ ] would. So it's okay to turn down the first you talk to just cuz he has a pulse and has one of these things. It's like, okay, this guy talked about metrics, but he was a dick, and he actually doesn't have the experience that I'm looking for. Well, then don't hire him. The thing is, is it's tough to do that when you're an entrepreneur because you're like, I'm bleeding every day, the house is on fire, I need this role. But I promise you it's way more painful to hire the person, onboard them, spend two months, run getting them up, then they start hiring [ __ ] because they're a [ __ ], and then all of a sudden you're like, oh my, my God, I hate this whole team. And so even if you do get rid of the top, you then have all the stuff they brought in underneath, and so you have to clean house, and it's really, really painful. And so as much as you hire one to hire 10, if you fire one, sometimes you have to fire 10, and that sucks. And so getting this higher right is super important, but it's also why we spend more time on it.

So now that we hired our in-house sales director, we want to rebuild the compensation structure, right? Because remember, the 20% wasn't going to fly because if we just flipped it to 20, we might as well just save the effort, right? So we had to rebuild the incentive structure. The problem that we had right now, if you remember, was that we had the pro, I think it was problem one or problem two, whatever, problem one, problem two, whatever it was, 20% of revenue was going to the outsourced sales team. So we wanted to make sure we were less than that. Our target was sub 10%, and that's usually around what I like to be in. Now I want to be very clear here, there are things that this depends on. So if you're in a business where the salesman does self-gen, meaning they generate their own lead, so if you're, if you're going out and you're cold calling or you're door knocking, then these percentages will be shifted because you technically are a cost of acquisition. You're both marketing and sales; you're getting the leads and closing the leads. If you're handing sales leads, if you're running ads, you have a media team that then generates leads or prospects for a sales team, then you basically have to split that cost between the marketing team and the sales guys. And so given that, let me explain how I actually think about this. What skills do I need? How rare are those skills? So if I'm feeding softballs to somebody, then I don't need Ken Griffey to hit it out of the park, all right? For Jiny, uh, Mookie Betts, all right? I don't need Mookie Betts to knock it out of the park, uh, because I'm soft-tossing, right? Anybody can probably rock it out of the park. That's double A, R up because at that level, because it's so much easier. If you have crazy expectations, it's rarer, and they have more skills, so you got to pay more. If it's something that's not a lot of skills and more common, you can pay less. And so I just think, how much would I need to pay to attract the level of salesperson I need? Our goal is to take from 20% to around 10% or less and rebuild the comp. You can think about compensation in two columns, all right? You've got money and not money, all right? This very complicated system, I don't want to get into the specific, a lot of physics behind this, all right? So you've got the money you give them for closing deals, and then you've got other [ __ ]. And so that's recognition, praise, attention, approval, perks, status. If you publicly recognize them, if you have a leaderboard, if you give them more attention, you get, you actually train them more, you give them more skills. You say, hey, good job, awesome job, great day today. You say, hey, the guy who closes the most gets to park in the nice parking lot. And then status, like maybe when they close 100 sales, they get a hat with a stripe on it. When they close 1000 sales, they get two stripes, and so forth. So when you guys come on the team, they're like, [ __ ], I want one of those hats, right? Sales team six, let's go. There's all these things that you can do to increase the value of, of the job outside of money. And as much as people, sales guys included, will be like, that doesn't motivate me, sure as [ __ ] does, all right? It totally does, cuz it makes your life better. On the money side, there's a couple ways to do this, all right? And so I'm going to explain how we did it. I, we've, we've made a lot of different compensation structures. A lot of it depends on, again, the business that's involved. Now one of the big decisions we made up front was that we were going to comp setters and closers. Now, why is

That's so important. The funnel is through. If I can increase my show-up rate by 20%, it's just as good as increasing my closure by 20%. It makes no difference. The business—they were just as equally weighted in terms of their value. But again, how rare are the skills, and what skills are required? It's easier to set than it is to close—just as important, but easier.

Setters and closers are equally important, but it's rarer to find a skill from closers, so they got paid a little bit more. But setters still got commissions as well, to incentivize the fact that they would get people to show up. So the way that I prefer to set up compensation structures—the idea that I like to have—is that I like winners win, all right? Which also means losers lose. That's fine; there are fewer winners than there are losers. What that means is you can have ratchets for compensation. Meaning, if you close 50% of the people—I'm just using an arbitrary number—you get to keep your job. If you close 60%, you get a dab of boys. If you close 70%, your commission goes from 10% to 15%—a 50% increase—not bad. If you close above 80%, you get 25%—whoa, right? And so it ramps, and so it allows the people who are absolute killers to crush. And then the people who are not—guess what happens down here? Turnover. But this is structural turnover; this is expected turnover; this is part of the game with this type of role. Like, if you require work ethic, you require practice, require people to show up early, work late, work weekends, take calls—it requires a certain type of person, and a lot of people aren't cut out for it, which is also why most people don't make multiple six figures a year selling.

We fixed the compensation structure; we comped setters and closers; we ramped it so that the best guys would get more than 10%. But we knew that as a team, we averaged around—if you want to know the actual number—was we got the overall, everything all-in, fully baked in, including the sales director, for 9%. We are feeding them qualified prospects; they're not even prospects, they're customers. We already have their [ __ ] credit card. Like, we just had to say, "Want more of the thing you just bought? Want more help with that thing so you can get the outcome you just said you wanted?" Like, these are not hard sales. And by doing this, we got to move on to step three. Now that we rebuilt the incentive and comp to get the types of sales guys that we want on the team, then we had to rebuild the process. So I'm going to walk through what we do to improve each of these numbers one by one, because as you're thinking about your business, there is no silver bullet. There's no one thing you're going to do that changes this entire process. It's 100 golden bbs, and this is how we approach everything in business. Business is a pipeline like this, and so I'm going to show you what we did. And we did improve every one of these numbers except for one, but it was okay, and I'll show you why. But remember, 100% of people are automatically booked for this next appointment, all right? And so we wanted to improve this show-up rate, and so we improved it to 91%—woo-ooh! 74, 99, 91—more money, good. That's a 211% increase. Meaning, if we did nothing else—we did nothing else in this entire process, everything else stayed the same—we would have a 20% increase in sales, and most of that would disproportionately drop to the bottom line, cuz we already acquired the customer. So all this additional sales money goes to profit—big deal.

So we did three things. The first is that the mercenary team is way too aggressive in their copy—false urgency, false scarcity; people kind of see through it. Um, so that was number one that they did that we fixed. Number two is they were giving people way too much time—time to book out. I'd say, "Hey, when do you want to show up for your next call?" People would be like, "Oh, how's two weeks from now?" And they were like, "Sure." Our big rule of thumb, despite the fact that they're trying to push out five-plus days for appointments, is we try to go for same-day, next-day. And that's because in our history, more people show up for same-day to next-day appointments than five days plus from now. And so, by just simply making the messaging less aggressive, shortening the time when they can book their next call, and number three, setting reminders that were actually personalized. So rather than just robo-texts—they're the green ones that everyone [ __ ] hates, right?—we'd have the sales guy do a three-way connection with the setter and say, "Hey, my name's John. It's nice to meet you, Sarah. Looks like you've got X, Y, and Z that I can reach from your account. Really excited to talk to you tomorrow. I think I can help you with X, Y, and Z." Very simple, but it's a video or a voice memo, and they see it from a real person, all right? And they can take a picture, whatever. And those three things together—91%, which is a 21% improvement.

So now that we got people to show up for that first call, how many of them did we get to schedule the next call, which is basically the close of the set call? You're going to see some magic happen right here. We had a major improvement. I'm not going to tell you what; I'll tell you how much we improved this one in a second. But we did two things to improve the percentage of people who showed up to set calls who decided to schedule close calls, all right? So the number one mistake that they were making in this particular business is that—again, this was an outsourced closing team—and so they were trying to minimize how much unqualified work their closers would get because they so carefully wanted to make sure their closers were happy because they were all mercenaries; they all had to pay them a ton just to show up to work every day. Point being: one, the incentives were misaligned. And so setters—remember, we added our setters had a compensation to get people to set; they didn't have that; we did add that—and so what do you know? Our setters got more people to schedule—wild, I know. The second thing was that they were de-qing people on the set call, uh, in my opinion, too early. And so they wouldn't really go through a sale; they would just say, "Hey, here's the price. Are you down to pay that? If yes, I'll book you a call with John." But by doing that, they were basically not selling; they were just taking orders. Which, if I just tell you the price and you buy, I don't need you; you're not selling at all; you're just a checkout page—that's inefficient. That takes 20%. We corrected number one; we aligned the incentives of the setters with the overall business, not the closer. We aligned the setting incentive with the business throughput, which got rid of the DQs that were overly de-qing people, and we made sure that when they were talking about the product, we were just more trying to qualify the prospect to make sure they had the problem to solve and the money to spend—not telling them the price of what they would ultimately buy, cuz we haven't sold them yet. We just want to make sure that this is a big enough problem for them and that they seem reasonably able to pay if we present it to them. Our schedule percentage went from—survey says—53% to 94%—for those keeping track at home, that's a 77% increase. So forgetting this one, if we kept everything else the same and we only did this, we would have increased sales by 77%, assuming everything else stayed the same. But everything else didn't stay the same, so let me show you the next thing we did, which is: we had people show up for the first call; we got 94% to schedule the next call; and now we have what perc of these 94 actually showing? Cuz hey, maybe you just get everyone to say yes so they get off the phone, but are they actually showing? Believe it or not, this is going to sound crazy: the show rate that we had here was actually the same process that we had here, because believe it or not, if people have good experiences and it's personalized to them, they're more likely to show. And so, rather than explain—literally repeat myself—I'm going to say how we actually got the team to do it. So we did four things. Number one is we started implementing daily training, which means that every day the team would get together and they would role-play the scripting to make sure their tone was right, that they were coming off the right way, that they're hitting the main points, make sure that they were framing things properly, adding curiosity, hitting the main pain points that the prospect was going to have, so they could set up the next call. Number two is that we do game tape reviews, which is uh, very simple, but you just watch game tape with the team and you have the person who is in the call critique themselves. So rather than have everybody jump on them—cuz no one likes that; it's horrible—you just have them say, "What are all the things you could have done differently?" And then the team says all the things they did well, cuz remember, there's always something someone did well. You play the tape; they say all the things they would have done differently, and most people do know when they watch it, which is one of the best ways to learn. And then everyone else says, "Hey, I think you did a great job here. I think you did a great job here. Bravo." Next one up. The third thing is—this is why the sales director was so key and why they were the first hire—is doing one-on-ones and 101s. You role-play like I—you role-play till you're sick in the face. You have to learn how to train people how to speak; like that's what the job of the sales manager is—besides managing the culture of the team—is if John's rapport building sucks, guess what the sales manager does every time they have a one-on-one with John? They practice rapport building, all right? Which means you follow the script, no, say it again, Y, say it again, try like this, huh, like there you go, change your tongue, there it is. Like, we're talking 10, 20, 30 reps on one or two phrases in the script so they get it down. If your salesman is not talking back to you in the script on your one-on-ones, you were literally wasting time. The fourth thing was just end-of-day reports, which is: you just want to make sure that they know you're tracking what matters. And if there's no tracking throughout the week, no one feels held accountable; it also doesn't give you the opportunity to praise and give out of boys, all right? And so every day the stats are—get tracked in real time—daily leaders, daily winners, all right? So those are the four things we did from here to drive our show rate to—woo—87%, that's a 40% increase. So if we did nothing else but we just had this one improvement in this process and everything else stayed the same, we would have increased sales by 40%—not too shabby.

If you're following at home, which you should be, we should at this point have a ton more volume that is coming to these closers—massive improvements, cuz remember, these are customers; this is why we felt like we could do a lot better. Now hitting the close call. So in order to improve this number to the best degree possible—because we never—we're going to have more disqualified people here; remember, we told the setters, "Send anybody you can," because we wanted to get more at-bats. Okay, so one, we also added in a VSL—so video sales letter—between call one and call two, so people got to have some social proof, they got to see some results, they got to have a better understanding. Because in my personal opinion, I don't like salespeople repeating a pitch; I'd rather have someone understand the benefits and then have salesmen resolve concerns and personalize solutions to customers rather than have them say the same 15-minute pitch, because it then—it sounds robotic, and they zone out, and so does the prospect. So I like to say, "Here's all the info; watch that, and then we'll talk about it," okay? So number one is we added that piece in. Number two, we role-played a lot on the common objections, and we like to do that before the call. The video sales letter covered some of these common concerns in the video, so that the sales guys had a little bit more of an advantage going into the call. And then also in the scripting, we front-loaded the obstacles before you mention the price; you overcome obstacles after it's objections, all right? If I say, "Hey, do you think your husband supports you in doing this new thing," before I say the price, then I've overcome an obstacle. If I say the price and I didn't overcome it, it becomes an objection, which is way harder to close. We call it killing zombies, right? You want to kill the zombies; you want to defuse the bombs before you talk about money. And so we front-loaded the script to accommodate those issues that people were losing in the sales, and we focused the script far more on what they were going to experience afterwards rather than the features within the service, because at the end of the day, they don't care about the features of service; they care about where they're going to go, what life's going to be like afterwards. So sell the vacation, not the plane flight. So we made those changes, and we got the close rate—if you're like, "Wait, 42 is lower than 80"—sure as hell is. Great math. If we're doing the percentages here and we have a 21% increase here and a 77% increase here and we have a 40% increase here, so that's 1.2 + 1.77 + 1.4—we have far more than a double in terms of how much volume was going there. In fact, we had three and a half times more volume, but we cut the close rate in half, but 3 1/2 * .5 is more than 1, meaning we increased the total throughput of this system. And so the end result of this entire process is we went from closing 20% of that 100 people that buy the product to 32, for a net savings of going from 20% of revenue to 9%. So we paid less than half to get 60% more sales. And as you recall, all additional sales dropped to the bottom line because we'd already acquired the customers.

So now that we had an in-house director, we rebuilt the incentive and comp plan, we rebuilt the sales process, we scaled the sales team, and we stabilized it so that we were consistently beating the other team and doing it for less, then we're able to move on to step five, which is get rid of the outsourced team. With the outsourced team, we did $7 million in cash collected in Q1. The commission on that was $1.4 million—remember, 20%—so the company got to profit—loosely—$5.6 million. The company got to keep after paying the outsourced sales team. This 7% with the in-house sales team became $12 million the next quarter. The commission—because instead of 20%, we went to 9%—so the commission went from $1.4 million on 7 to $1.08 million for 12. Net change here was $12 minus $1.08—$10.92 million. Which created the difference between these two was $5.4 million, and that was just in that quarter. Times four for the year, and you get $21.6 million.

This is one of my favorite sales presentations I've ever given, and it covers three things: one, how to ask the right questions; two, how to ask them the right way; and three, how to duplicate those words in that tone across a team of people. If you're building your first sales script, if you're scaling a sales team, and you want to make sure that you can onboard new people and get them selling at the same percentage or better than you are right now—which for many people is the biggest bottleneck, especially when you're coming up for your first million or first $3 million per year—scaling the sales team is one of the most difficult tasks. And so I've broken this down into three frameworks that I've used very successfully to scale lots of different sales teams. I say that the company I'm referencing in this video has 14—that one company already now has almost 30 sales guys—so this process continued to work past when I made this presentation. So if you're trying to scale sales, you want to close a higher percentage, you want to get more guys closing at that same percentage or better than yours. And if you don't know who I am, my name is Alosi, acquisition.com—with a portfolio at this moment of six companies to do $85 million a year. Keep being awesome, love you, and enjoy the video.

What I'm going to be breaking down today is the scripting process that we've applied for calls, right? And so, as the world's worst marketer, I set my first email this year; I was very excited about it; we've been in business for 10 years—pretty big stuff—and it was because I couldn't get webinars, I couldn't get VSLs, I couldn't get all the fancy stuff that you guys get to work with. Um, and so I went back in time and just was like, "If I can just get them to give me their phone number, I'll be able to get them to—like—buy [ __ ] from me." And so I went and called back all these webinar leads that never showed up or never bought or whatever, and then doing like $100,000 in sales in a day, and I was like, "Wow, this is so much easier." And so, over time, I've consulted with sales teams; I've uh, trained and owned four high-ticket uh, performance teams—uh, I think we have 12 or 14 sales guys now; it kind of rotates—and so what I want to do is kind of show you what we've done to consistently replicate the skill of sales another human being would. Would that be cool? All right. So if I can add like 10% to your conversion rate in terms of how you attract better closers, how you script the process out, and how you should close more deals and scale them to incentivize them, would that be valuable for you guys? All right, sweet. So these are the three frameworks that transform losing funnels into cash machines. That was my real life; that was a picture of my actual first funnel, and that's what it became. And so these are the three—fail—the frameworks. Number one: closure framework—how to ask questions that prospects say yes to. Adding this to a funnel instantly can make it profitable; this is my personal experience. Number two is conviction framework, all right? How anyone who believes can outperform a seasoned sales rep by simply learning control—control their tone—really important. This is one of the biggest things that most salespeople miss. Number three: the scaling framework—how to easily duplicate this process across salespeople in any niche in seven days or less. So seven days from now we can do this; would that be cool? All right, let's rock. So number one, the closure framework. After going through hundreds of scripts—I've bought Grant's stuff, I bought the Wolf of Wall Street stuff, I bought all that stuff—and going through my own sales processes, I learned that the scripting process even was simpler.

I think than it's portrayed, and it's not that it's something to be sold against, but um, every sales script that has been absolute Gang Busters has been a question-based framework that is based on this process. All right, and this works for B Toc sales; it works for B Tob uh B2B sales; it works for $500 tickets; it works for $100,000 tickets. The process is the same, and so this is the acronym closure framework, as I said, world's dumbest marketer, so I made it nice and easy to remember. All right.

So C: clarify why they are there. When I look at creating a script, the first thing we ask is like, why the hell are you here? What made you reach out to us today? What was the thing? What is the goal you're trying to accomplish? Right? Two: label them with a problem. We can't cure cancer unless they admit that they have it. Right? Has anyone had a situation where like, I just want to find out more information? You ever had that? Right? Well, it's like, well, I'm assuming you're not hopping on sales calls all day just trying to find information. Is there a problem you're trying to solve? Oh, you're fat. Got it. All right, boom. So that's a problem we can solve. It. After that, I'm I'm assuming I'm not the first guy you've ever dated, right? So is there anything else that you've had happen in the past that got you here that didn't work? I'd love to know more about it.

S: once we've gone through the pain, we sell on the vacation. Right? There's a process that I'll walk through. E: we explain away their concerns, cuz obviously, samean people don't make decisions on the first call unless you're a closer, in which case they do, which I'll talk about. And then finally, and this is something that we actually added in my original flamework for my first couple years, was close, and then we added the R uh because when you do this, it actually transitions into the onboarding process that will get higher LTV per customer, lower churn, lower refunds, lower charge backs, which sales guys and you will be happy about. Cool. All right, let's rock. So we'll examine each one more closely.

Clarify why they're there. These are the questions that sounds like: What made you come in today? What made you reach out? What's your goal right now? Why is that important to you? Why that number specifically? What does it what does it resonate for you? Right? Why why is that real? The questions that we're looking is like, okay, so what I'm hearing is XYZ is your goal. Does that sound about right? Right? Really simple, but very important. It's a milestone that has to be hit in the process. All right. Then we overview. All right, this is where we're Gathering all the intel. And for some of you guys, my goal is that you can take this to your sales team, your sales director, and run your script through this framework and then see where you can plug in. You probably have some of it, but if you're missing one or two of these questions and Milestones, you're losing conversions on the call. Like you're closing people who already had those obstacles covered, but everyone who didn't have two of these questions covered, you lose them, and you don't know why. You watch the sales call; you're like, what the hell happened here? Right? So what have you tried so far to accomplish that? How this is what we call the pain cycle; it's a four-step process. What have you tried so far to accomplish this? How long did you do that for? How long ago? How did that work for you? What else have you tried? Right? So we just do that cycle until they're like, well, yeah, that's it. Now that you think about it, I've tried everything under the sun. Like I can't imagine what that's felt like. Wow. Right? It's not your fault; you're so close; you're 6 inches away. Right? And I think you you said this one thing, which I'm about to show you in a second, we could be able to help you. Want to hear about the program? Fantastic. That's when we transition to the sale. Right. Right.

So sell them a vacation. The number one thing that people mess up our sales pitch on the call is under 3 minutes; 3 minutes, 180 seconds. When we talk about um I think someone was asking about what are the bullets on the page, we don't say anything about that because what we're trying to do is get them to understand what they're going to experience, not how they're going to experience it. Right? And so when we have a sales pitch, just about every time we sell three things, right? And it doesn't matter what industry you're in. I was training mortgage leads team, and they were selling leads, right? And it was like uh the leads are exclusive; they're timely, and they're qualified. Right? And so we talked about, hey, you've had leads in the past. Ah, well, the Zillow leads, my real estate people, right? The Zillow leads are not they are timely, but they're definitely not exclusive, and these are people just window shopping. Right? Our leads are different. Three things you can always find them: your s fitness, your own Fitness Nutrition accountability. Right? And so what we do is when we say the three bullets, get them to understand. Yes, that takes 5 seconds. Cool. Fitness-wise, we get the commitment. This is what I need you to do. Fair enough. Be like, I need you to work out three days a week. Can you do that? Awesome. If we see any hesitation, you have a 30-second story that's memorized. Most of this script, and this is what makes it scalable, is a question-based framework, which means if you get lost, you can find your way back again. If anybody here have scripts that are like paragraphs and stuff? Anyone? Okay, like no, no one has a script that's paragraphs and Pages. Please. We all know um but if you have those things, it'll totally mess it up because then the the sales guy gets lost, and then he's just freeballing, and he has no idea where he is, hot dogging a hallway, no idea what's going on. Right? And so the point is here, little visual anyways, is that when we're telling the story like with the fitness example, I would say, hey, when you failed in the past, like right now, do you have a do you have a favorite TV show? Game of Thrones. That's awesome. Do you feel like like you got to get motivated to watch Game of Thrones? You're like, oh man, I've been wanting to watch it, but I just can't get up the motivation to watch TV. They're like, well, no, I don't have that. It's like, right? And so that's exactly how we're going to make your fitness program. So if you look forward to you don't need the motivation, The Willpower, because that's why you fail in the past. They're like, oh, I didn't talk about the workouts, the heart rate, and the calories they're going to burn, and they're going to sweat cuz all that [ __ ] sounds like work. Right? But what they do get is exactly what they want, which is, wait, so you're telling me that if I actually like something, I'm not going to even have to try, and it's going to feel like watching TV cuz I look forward to it? It's exactly what I'm saying. And if you can deliver, you make tons of money, and that's the point. So each of those points, your sales guy should know what that anecdotal story is. Right? If I was selling accountability, anyone have kids? Anyone here tell their kids to brush their teeth, and we have their kids to brush their teeth say they don't want to brush their teeth? Anyone tell their kids even though they want to brush their teeth to brush their teeth anyways? And now you're an adult, did your parents did that to you? Do you brush your teeth? That's an example of external accountability turning into an internal habit. It's exactly what the accountability we're going to do in this program indust. Does that make sense? Great. Done. Next bullet. That's how you transition in the pitch. Right? So if you think about this process, why are you here? I have cancer. I think we might be able to help you out, but I don't want to get into that because I don't know about you like I don't know what your situation is. Tell me what you've done. Ah, that sounds that sounds great; that makes sense. Okay, I think we might be able to help. See a little bit about that. All I did is I tell three stories that make complete sense to everything you just told me, and then we transition. And so um I pretty much just covered this um but we we call it sell on the vacation, not the plane flight. Right? And so we're not selling TSA; we're not selling your modules, your me plant, your macr workout, your sport team, your URLs, your whatever. Right? We're selling Maui; we're selling the Final Destination. And it doesn't matter what level of service you are selling; you're always selling the same thing. It's always Maui; it's just how do you want to get there? You want to swim to Maui? Right? Do you want to take a boat to Maui? Do you want to take a normal flight, or do you want to take a private jet to Maui? Right? It's your call; you're getting to Maui either way because we're a man of our word, and I'm not going to sell you something that's not going to deliver. Right? But it's going to be a little different; it's a little bit rock here, but we're going to get you there. All right. So everyone gets the Maui; the variables are the the speed and the quality of the journey. All right. The likelihood of arrival is assumed. So since it's always the same thing, you probably have multiple levels of business um but it's always the same process. Right? And so once we have that, they're like, got it, then we just make the ask. All right. From this point going forward, it's explaining away their concerns like any human being would normally do. I could drill price overcomes with you, but I think it's more valuable to explain the thought process behind price stall and decision-maker um objections. All right. So the first and obvious one is I can't afford it. Anyone to get this one? Right? Couple people, two people of God in the you guys have the best leads; give me your leads. Um and so the easy question that I use to explain to our sales team because it's really about breaking their Le beliefs is if we were giving away Ferraris right now for five grand, do you think they'd find a way to get the money? Yes. So that simply they do not understand the value we're trying to provide, and if you can get your team to believe that, then they understand that it is always their fault if someone cannot afford the program. Does that make sense? Fantastic. Second decision-maker closes; one of the hardest things to overcome. Right? I got to have my business partner; I got to have my husband, my spouse, my whatever. Right? So we have a specific process that we go about this, and so what we do is in the very beginning, we just say we circumvent, then we go over past agreements, and then we ask for forgiveness. All right, this is the best way that I've seen to overcome this. So the first thing we say is, well, what if they say no? One out of three times they'll be like, I'd probably do it anyways, and we're like, let's get started. Boom, it's done. You'd be amazed how many times that actually works. It's hilarious. If they say, well, then I wouldn't do it, then we divert. We say, well, what do you think their biggest objection would be about it? Because now they're just using a foil, even the person's not there and has no idea what the program is cuz they're not involved with call. Right? They're like, well, I think this, and at this point we can attack the actual obstacle even though the decision maker isn't there. Now, if they still if we still can't overcome it, then we go to P agreements. We say, well, does your business partner know you guys are struggling on sales? Well, yeah. Does he approve of that? Well, no. Then why would he be against something that he already doesn't approve of? That doesn't make any sense. Why would he be against a business partner solving a problem? Is know what you do? Well, that's great; you're being a great partner; let's go. Right? And so we try and rely on past agreements that are obvious and use those to Pro into the present. Right? And then finally, you know, sometimes it's better ask for uh forgiveness and permission. Right? And so we'll tack that on to the end; you can put that at the end of any of the closes. And so when we're dealing with this with price, it's value; with decision maker, we go on past agreements; and with stalls, we just teach people to make decisions. People are just so afraid of making the wrong decision; they're petrified. And so what we do is we literally teach them on the call. Here's how we make a decision; these are the the variables you should be considering: X, Y, and Z. Right? Can the product meet your needs? Do you think that if you work with us, you have a greater or lower likelihood of losing weight? Greater. Fantastic. I think we're halfway there. Do you want to work with us? Do you think it'd be fun to hang out and see me every day? Because believe me, this stash I had to I had to work 12 months to get my wife to say yes to that, so I understand if you're hesitant. Does that make sense? Would you be willing to do that? All right, let's rock. Right? And then do you have access to funds or know someone who does? Right? Because it's not just about you because if it's something that's amazing, we can find other ways to finance this. So do you have access or know someone who does? Yes. Well, then great, let's get started. And if for some reason we haven't closed them at this point, we say, how about this? Let's take a card down; we'll delay the payment to Friday. You go to your husband; you go to your business partner. Right? You go to your I love this one; you go to your husband. Right? And he says, baby, I want you to live a shorter life; I want you to I want you to be a terrible example to our kids; I want you to not have generational Health in our family to be down; I want you to sit in that corner; I want you to pull those sweatpants up; take up a bag of Cheetos; rub your fingers on there. Right? And just get comfortable with the fact that you're never going to look better than you are right now. I like if your husband says that to you, you call me back, and I will tear this contract up. Fair enough. Right? You close them. All right. So we explain where their concerns, and then finally, we get the yes. We reinforce the decision. This is stuff that we started doing, and it helped a lot. So personalized video from the CEO: Hey, welcome aboard; so happy to have you; thank you for trusting us with your business. Hey, we're so happy to have you; you thank you for trusting me with your your weight loss Journey. Know personalized; this is we want to do everything in our power to absolutely Amaze you. Right? Little things like that because the customer is usually deciding whether or not they like your business in the first 48 hours after the sale. I learned this later. So how you hand off from sale to customer experience and activation is where this all happens. Does that make sense? Is that cool? Was that nice? Love framework to work through. Okay, so that's the disclosure framework; that is the first thing; that's what you can run your script through. All right? How to ask the questions to get the prospects to say yes. Check one down, two to go. You with me? You still good? All right, let's rock.

So conviction framework number two: how anyone who believes can outperform a season sales rep by simply learning to control their tone. All right. So um after I reworked all of our scripts using the closure framework um some of my guys were really successful, but other ones still blew, and I was like, well, this sucks. Right? I was really excited; I had a little acronym and everything. I was like, that took me a long time to come with the acronym. Right? And I was like, what gives? And so I talked to some my friends um and they recommended this book, which was awesome, and the biggest takeaway from this book is the is the concept of tone, and this was something that really helped take us and give an extra Edge for our sales training ourselves process and the coaching that we give people. Right? And so in the book he talked about the hidden dialogue um which I just love and I just I just never want to take credit for an idea because I got it from him um but there's two dialogues that are happening. Right? Um because the words or the logic right what you're actually saying is talking to The Logical brain; how you say it is talking to the emotional brain. Right? That's the one's making decision; that's the one running the shop. All right. And so how you say what you say is what you say. So here's an example: that's my wife; she's going to be here with me soon, but if she were here, if she said Alex, right? Or Alex, right? Or Alex. Very different meanings, very different afternoon for me in each of these scenarios. Right? Based on how she said it because there's so much communicated, and that's just one word. Imagine a 30-minute dialogue where each word can be chosen to have packed with the meaning that you need them to feel. Does that make sense? Okay. So we need the words for The Logical influence; we need the tone for the emotional influence; we need both. Okay. And so once you become a more seasoned like sales crap, you can learn to control your tone on purpose. Right? You can raise your voice at the end of the statement to make it into a question. Right? It's a question. This is John. Right? I didn't need to ask him; I'm saying you know to answer that as a question; I didn't ask you that, but you know that based on the tone. Right? Or I could lower my voice right now. You know that what I'm saying is extremely important. Right? Tone matters. And so it takes time to develop this level of unconscious Mastery. So there's two ways to develop this, and I believe that you can either trick yourself into it or you can train yourself into it, and since I don't have enough time in 30 minutes to train on the influence of tonalities, here's the trick is that all right, I'll just give you the hack. Conviction will correct your tone. If you believe in what you sell, you will say it the right way, and that's why some of you guys have a sales rep; it comes on, crushes it, and then tanks because they did believe, and then they saw your reviews or they got customer support feedback; someone called them up after buying it was like [ __ ] you; I can't believe you did that, and they're done, and then all their tones off because they feel like out of Ethics. Right? And so I'm lowering my tone right now so you know that this is really important. Right? And so I'll go upbeat, kiss the boooo, bring us back up. All right. And so real estate sales team Consulting; this is a great story. So I was flown out, paid way more money than I should have been paid um to fly out and consult with the sales team. All right, they were selling mortgage leads; example I was giving earlier, and they were really excited, and they wanted me to give this ABC always be closing chat like this huge PumpUp chat. And so I spent the first half of the day on the script, and the second half of the day we're supposed to be drilling the sales team. Right? So I get on the sales team; they got I think had a nine-person sales floor, and uh they're like, we're having some problems with this guy John. I was like, all cool. So I was like, John, how good are the leads? He was like, well, you know, there's kind of, and I was like, I'm good, thank you. And I was like, because if you [ __ ] thought the leads were were good, you would say, dude, they're unreal; I can't believe it. Right now I'm getting my mom to pass her real estate certification so I can start sending her leads; I'm studying for mine; I'm a couple months behind, but I'm telling you, as soon as I [ __ ] get this thing pass, I'm out of here; I'm G to start buying these leads myself because I make more than I make right now as a sales guy. That's what you'd say if you believed. Right? The way you say and what you'd say would be entirely different. And so one of the hacks on this, by the way, has anyone ever gotten hot or has a sales guy who got hot starts just closing closing closing closing? Anyone that becomes a sales training for that person because the way they asked the question at what point how they closed that's how it's perfect. And so they should study the best game footage when they're on a streak, and that's when you can replicate it much more easily because it's like in the wild you'll witness it, and that's when they're Masters. Right? In those moments. All right. And so these are the actions that we do. So I'm transitioning into tactic for you guys who have teams. All right. Reread the testimonials out loud daily in front of your sales team. If you got fresh ones, which you should, read them; makes their day; makes them feel like they're making an impact. Right? They're getting the [ __ ] kicked out of them every single day; getting hung up on; getting cussed at; getting told a [ __ ] off every day. Right? And like the best thing you can do is give them a cup of coffee and says, hey, man, you're [ __ ] doing good in the world. Right? That's what they need, so do it every day. Number two: fix everything you can about the product. This is obvious, but I want to say it directly: like don't blame the customer for a lack of success because it doesn't help anyone. Right? Doesn't help them; doesn't help us. If we can take ownership, then we can fix the product. Right? Three: never stop improving it, so you always know it's up to date. And this is a good one for the sales team. If you're sales dip, take your head of customer support; bring them to the sales meeting and say, Erica, tell these guys what you do for our customers. They're like, oh, well, the first day what we do is we send them this text, and we send them this letter, and then we give them swag, and then we follow up with them, and then we like write them a handwritten card, and we give them a back massage and a foot massage, and then we find a wife for them. It's unbelievable. You know what I mean? And then the sales guys are like, God, this is [ __ ] awesome. I'm like, I know; let's go sell it. Right? And so these are the actions that you can do on a daily basis to get your team to be excellent. All right. And so that's how you can hack conviction and get your team's tone unconsciously correct by just truly believing in the product. Is that cool? You think you'd sell more if you did that? Hell yeah. Sweet. Thank you. All right. Conviction framework number two, check. All right. Number three: scaling framework; how to easily duplicate this process across sales people in any niche in seven days or less. All right. So we've talked about closure framework; we talked about conviction framework, and this is the oops; I think I'm going to skip one. Oh, no, where you are. Back, great. So when I showed my sales team this stuff, they didn't do it every time. All right? Because you're probably going to come back from here all gung-ho; you might show them this video, and they're like, yeah, and they go raw ra for two to three days, and then it's like back to normal. Right? No one wants that. So piece by piece, we implemented processes to get the same outcome over and over and over again because of the $10 million we've sold, which is crazy; it's been 100% over the phone; no one over the age of 20; no, we got one guy who's 40, but Bey besides him, everyone's younger than $27, $27, 27 years old. All right, like these aren't like crazy, you know what I mean? Like crazy veterans. Right? They just do this process over again; you get the right thing. As a total aside, find people.

And educate them about your prospect, not your product. That's a big [__] up because, like, they shouldn't even be talking that much about the product; they should be knowing everything about the prospect. And so right now, if your sales training is focused on your product, you're doing it wrong. These are the six C's that I use to scale teams from little guy to lots of guys. All right, so this still, you know, we used this to build a 3,000-person affiliate base in our physical products company. It added 35 million in sales, which is cool, which is awesome. And so I will show you how this works. All right. And so, um, we've used these sales teams, and this is how we've kind of—these were all multi-figure teams—and I'll show you what we did. All right.

So, closure sequence is the first C, which we went over earlier. The second C is consistent daily training and conviction, and I'll show you how to do each of these: call recordings, communication cycles, cuts, and competition. Those are the six C's. All right. So, number one: make sure you have a question-based framework that follows those steps in the script. It should just be questions. It's so much easier to just follow questions because if someone's out, and you know, out in left field, you know, wandering on, like, onto the highway, you're like, whoa, hey, come back over here; this is the next question in this process. So, thank you so much for sharing that; that must have been so hard for you. So what do you think that brought? Right, you go right into the next question, the sale. All right.

Number two: uh, consistent daily training. This is the number one thing. If you take one thing away from this besides conviction—because that'll do more for yourselves than anything—this is the second biggest thing. All right, is that daily training. Our team trains 60 minutes a day, five days a week. We actually do twice-a-day stuff, but that's okay, anyways, for right now. If you just do this, you'll already be way better than everyone else in your in your market. All right. So we do talking and listening because a salesperson needs to know how to speak the right tone, you know, how to listen right. And so we drill both scales. We're talking; we have them read the script out loud and the questions with the correct tonality for 25 minutes, and if they [__] up, they start again. Simple. Five minutes we drill obstacle overcomes: I need to think about it, I'm not sure, I don't have the money, can't afford that right now, I got to talk to my partner, right, I know what's going to work in my market, or whatever your specific obstacles are, because those, when they're in the red zone, they shouldn't have to think about those. So the only two things that someone will ever truly memorize will be those 30-second anecdotal stories I mentioned earlier and your obstacle overcomes. It makes it much easier to get new people on the team listening. So every day we listen to a 30-minute recording, and we'll go with what went right in this call, what went wrong, what are you going to do next time? Very simple, right? You play the call; everyone watches it. It's game tape review. We're like, man, you got kicked in the balls on this one, right, but you had great report in the first five minutes, right? Um, you're like, what went wrong, and that was about it, um, and what you going to do next time? I'm going to transition from the report to the question asking without sounding like a douchebag. Fantastic. All right, next day, and you continue to improve. I know this sounds crazy simple, but it's so simple, no one will do it.

So number three C's is call recordings. If you don't call—like, record your calls—one, you're not compliant, but two, like, how are you going to study game film? You know what I mean? Everybody's got all their data, and you've got your mouse tracking on all the pages. I'm like, how, where's the mouse tracking on the calls? Right? That's where—that's where you're going to train your team. This is like every NBA team; they play game, and they watch the game footage. Right? Why are we not doing that with the sales team? And so you have to record it. If you use Zoom, Gong is absolutely the best; highly recommend it; it's been awesome. We use this for two years. They'll tell you exactly how many minutes people are talking versus someone else; they'll tell you who's talking the most, where, how many questions were asked. If the AI they have there is unbelievable. Um, it's expensive, but it's worth it.

Four: communication cycles and feedback. Um, I don't know if you guys have heard the story, but if I were trying to uh fix your golf swing, right, and I said, okay, so I take a swing looking like I do, like an idiot, right? He's like, all right, man, well, first off, lose 40 lbs so you can rotate. All right, after you do that, uh, change your wrist by two degrees, turn your other hand over, put your thumb underneath. I need you to take your first foot, put it forward, and then point it the other way, and then put this foot back and try again. I'm [__]—no chance of swinging right. But if he just said, hey, take another 20 swings and just put one thumb under the other one, I'd have one thing to work on; I could probably get better. And so when you're training—and this is for the sales directors—if you're helping them out with that call, what went right, what went wrong, the what am I going to do about it is the one thing. Does that make sense? And so in terms of communication cycles, we do weekly with the team. We've got daily training; we've got daily wrap-up at the end, which is really just to pump up and kiss them on the forehead, good night, to make sure they feel okay, right, because they do get punched in the face all day. So it's—it's worth being like, hey, you see Derrick's overcome this morning? It's [__] awesome; he killed it. Let's watch that as like highlight footage; like watch him say he's going to have to talk to wife—Bo overcome—right? And then—and then they're like, dude, you killed it, and then it just makes them feel like they're part of the team, right? And so that's where we do the feedback and the communication cycles, and then we do once a—once a week. If they're new, we'll do one-on-ones; if they're a little bit older, we'll do once every other week. Does that make sense? Can you use this right now what I'm giving you for your sales teams? Okay, sweet.

Number five: cut the fat, cut it fast. Um, Randy probably knows this better than anyone. When you hire salespeople, at least in my experience, like, it's sink or swim. Like, if a guy's—if guys can't close in the first week to two weeks, unless it's some sort of crazy complex thing, they ain't closing, right? And then I've got somebody who now came in neutral; now they feel like they suck, right? They're actually worse than someone who's new because now I got to overcome all your beliefs and then bring you back up. And so in my experience, it's been much easier to take a six and get him to a nine than try and take—than try and take a two and get him to a five. It's more work, and it's not good for me or him, right? Does that make sense? So in most cases, does anyone have a salesperson that you've been waiting for them to turn the corner for the last like six months? They're not going to turn the corner unless they have like a come-to-Jesus moment, which does happen, but it doesn't need to happen on my team. You can do that and come back, right.

All right, number six: competition and career path. All right, a big one. So salespeople are competitive, right, as they should be, right? They are hunters, and they should go hunt. And so having competition on a regular basis—what we have found is that six-week cycles tends to work best; it is long enough that they believe they can accomplish something, but short enough they believe it's going to happen soon. And so we run our competitions on six-week cycles. Um, for us, I think what you said—uh, whatever Ryan said about the percentages, 10 to 15% actually works pretty well as like a group goal. Um, when we have those as like top salesperson, we like—we did like weekend to Vegas. So we'll split all the guys up—we like four teams of four, you know what I mean?—and they're all comp, so it's like you get the—the competitiveness, but you still get the camaraderie. CU, if it's just one, you know, one versus everyone, sometimes they can get um a little bit too, you know, teethy. Uh, so having like little mini teams helps too because then you can—you can kind of like make it an adjusted draft; you can put the best guy with the worst guy, and then he helps him out, and he speeds him up. Does that make sense? And then career path—this is one that I probably learned later, but it's really good—is that you can have minor—minor road uh milestones: 50 deals closed, 100 deals closed, 150 deals closed, right? And they just get a little—just a little, you know, they go from 500 a deal to 525 a deal, right? They go from 525 a deal to 550 a deal. Just the fact—fact that there's this—this road map of where they're going and there's actual progress because sales is one of the most repetitive positions in the world—just the fact that they're doing this and they something is changing on the outside, I think just helps relieve anxiety and help the guys focus. So that is one of the things that I would recommend doing um with the career path. And then obviously, if you have roles like—depending how big your team is—manager, etc., and you can move up. Um, something that I don't have on here that I will add is that um this seems to be common practice, but remember dumbest marketer on Earth—outbound and inbound—uh, keep them separated. We also have setters and closers for both of those teams. So outbound setters are different than inbound setters, which go to different closers on either side, right? Because the prospects are a little bit different, right? And so if you—if you have lots of different types of leads going to the same person, you're probably losing a lot of efficiency, and if you don't have that much lead flow, that's another issue, but it's—it's as soon as you can separating them out will get you a lot—a lot higher conversion rates. All right. So I'll recap this: this six C's for scale: in your closure sequence, make sure it's in a question-based framework; daily trainings and conviction, so you're reading the testimonies every day; you're training them every morning on talking, listening—the most valuable skills that a salesman can have; call recordings to make sure that they're actually doing—you have game tape footage to actually look at; communication cycles to actually improve on their skills based on the game footage that we just had; you cut the bottom people who are just dragging the team down that probably just don't have the makeup for this; and then you keep it competitive and you give them a career path so they have something to look forward to in the future. All right. And so uh now you can understand how anyone can sell expensive FX paper Pro, even if you don't think you're any good, which is completely normal. Yeah, that's sales.