Transcription
Now, when I watch you, bro, your stuff, it's so it makes so much sense and it's so digestible. You'll hear a lot of sales trainers and it all sounds the same. My first question is this. Where the did you study sales, bro? Like, who was it from? Where where did it start? Who did you was it Brian Tracy? Where did you learn from?
So, really interesting. Um, I actually only learned about the sales world after I'd already done 4,000 sales.
And so, I looked and gym launch. That was in my gyms. So, I started as a brick and mortar gym owner. And so I remember the first time I was like, it's actually funny because I graduated from college and one of my dad's friends was like, "Hey, you should work at my office." He was a a wealth manager. Yeah. And he was like, "You'd work in sales." And I was like, "I'm not a salesman. I'm an academic, you know, I'm a I'm a I'm a I'm a student." And he was like, "All right, man. Whatever." And so I I end up getting into fitness and then as soon as I opened my doors, I was like, "Shoot, how am I going to get money?" I was like, "I got to get these strangers to give me money." And then I guess that's when I started realizing I had to sell. And so, um, all of the sales that I learned was literally face-to-face in person. So, I was very fortunate that I, uh, learned how to run Facebook ads in 2013. So, really, really early to Facebook ads. And so, I was able to get leads really cheap. And so, for basically like four or five years, I took 20 inerson consults a day. Um, and so I got a lot of reps. And so, what ended up happening is I started developing my my team is that I had more and more locations. And I closed at such a high percentage also just because I got more reps than anybody else that they would just start stacking. They would stack like a week's worth of sales for me and I would go to like La Habra one day and do 25 sales and then I would go to my, you know, Lam Marada location, do 25 sales. Then I go to Huntington Beach and I do another 25 sales.
And you weren't training at this time. You were just doing them. Just learning.
Yeah. Just selling. Yeah. Just selling.
But you weren't you weren't like listening to sales training or anything like that.
I didn't even know that world existed. I didn't know the whole world existed at all. I only found out about it when I wanted to scale my sales team. So, I had six gyms. I sold those and then I started doing gym turnarounds. So, I started because I was really good at marketing and sales for the gyms. And so, I was like, man, I would fill my gyms up so fast that I was like, I honestly just need gyms to fill up so I can do more sales,
right?
And so, then it was like, well, I'll just find empty gyms and say, hey, let me sit at the front door. I'll fill it up. And that way, I had all this capacity I could sell into. And we would get 30 to1 on our ad spend. And so, I'd spend a grand or spend 10 grand and make a lot of money in 30 days. And so I would average about 100 grand in cash collected in 21 days of me just sitting at the front of a gym. And I did 33 turnarounds over two years just basically doing that model. And so it was just like Alex with a fold out table and pens and contracts and I would just hold court and I would set as many of point I'd set three appointments an hour um or every 30 minutes and you know two out of three would show and sometimes three out of three would show and sometimes one out of three would show and I would just do the same pitch over and over and over again and so um I'm sure that you like once you start you start breathing the script more than you start knowing it and I think you start realizing
how people work and my
what was interesting is that the sales training that I had when I started doing the turnarounds because then I was like, you know what, if I can do one of these, if I had 10 guys, then we could do 10 turnarounds a month. Like that'd be crazy. And so I scaled the sales team up to eight guys at the time and each of those guys was now taking 20 appointments a day at different gyms across the country.
Got it.
And the sales training that I had for those guys was like 60 minutes, the whole thing,
right?
And it was because it wasn't like I was trying to sell sales training. I just needed them to close. And so it was just like when the person walks in the door, this is what you say. You say, "Hey, you want to see the world's shortest tour?" And then you walk into the gym and you turn around because they don't care about the tour anyways. And they get a laugh. And then you're like, "Awesome. So what brought you in today? What's the thing you're struggling with?" And so what would happen is is like right off the bat if someone said something like, "H, you know, I just wanted to find out more information." I'm like, "Oh, you just opt into lots of different stuff, get information, or you're trying to find, you know, solve a problem." I was like, "I'm assuming you're just not trying to get information for lots of things." They're like, "Oh, well, you know, I'm trying." But the thing is, if you don't confront that, then later they're like, "Well, I just wanted to find out." But if you get them to admit the problem, then it's like we can move forward in the sale. And so, basically, at every one of the six or seven key questions that we had in the sale, it's like, "Here are the four or five offshoots that people are going to throw at you that we need to make sure that we handle, right?" And so,
and when you mean offshoots, you mean objections.
Yeah. Or Yeah. Exactly.
Got it.
And so, I just want to make sure that people were handling handling those things because it's like we have had this one conversation more times than anyone else has. There is no way they should be able to say anything that we have not heard before. So, you have no excuse to be unprepared for anything that Susie says when she comes in the door. She's going to say she has to think about it. She's not sure if these workouts are right for her. What if it doesn't work for her body type? She has low thyroid. She has to talk to her husband. She has to look at a couple other gyms. She wants to have time to make the decision. She doesn't have the card she wants to use. It's a little bit too much. Like, there's not that many things, right? There's not that many things that she's going to bring up. And so, we just need to know how we can thoughtfully walk through that without seeming like hardcore sales. And so like my whole objective was to teach people to close, not to sell sales training. And so all the stuff that I've had that I talk about now is just the stuff that I use to train my team.
And so right now a lot of our sales trainings are actually very very short. And the most of the effort like if we buy a company, so we just we just um bought a company and we we added a 40 person sales team to went from zero to 40 people in 90 days um taking basically ascension calls. So that that company had an automated sales process on the front end selling um like kind of e-commerce thing and I was like man if we just called all those people and just sold them something else it' probably make us more money and it did and so the idea was like okay well how do we look at the script and then how do we just compress it and compress it and compress it and just make it as short as possible. Um and so we try to delete more than anything else that we possibly can because at least in my belief there's this tiny clip from Y Combinator where the founder of Base Camp talks about when he sold shoes. Mind if I tell the story? I think it's really cool.
Yeah.
So he says, "Hey, when I sold shoes, you know, the the shoe reps from Wilson, it was a tennis store, Wilson and and Nike or whatever would come and they'd say, "Hey, you know, these are the new graphite bottom, rubber, extra light aerosol, and they tell them all the specs about the shoe." He's like, "But you know, people how people actually buy shoes." He said, "They come in, they'd put the shoe on, they'd walk back and forth for a little bit, and then do this little bouncy thing, and then they'd kind of like look at their shoe in the mirror, and then they'd come to me and they'd ask me how much it was." And he's like, "So all they really want to know is it comfortable? Does it look good? And can I afford it?"
Right?
And that was it. And I found that for the most part in sales, like there's not a ton of things that actually drive the purchase. And most of the time sales people talk themselves out of sales rather than just closing. And we study this because we we do a lot of analytics on the sales teams that we have across all the portfolio is you I have this belief that every time you make a statement, you give something you give the other person something to disagree with. And so you're like smoke if you just simply ask questions. Even when somebody has an objection, right? And they say, "Hey, you know, like I'll give you a gym example." It's like, "Well, um, are your trainer certified?" I'd be like, "What what certification you looking for?"
And then they'd be like,
uh, because they don't know, right? They just think they have to ask that question to see to seem like an informed consumer.
Correct.
And so or like, well, what would you what would what would the certification accomplish for you? And so just literally asking questions about their objection usually would just sidestep the objection more times than not, right? And so that's what I try and train the guys is like if you say nothing, there's nothing anyone can disagree with you on. And we just because they will only agree with themselves. We can't sell them. They have to agree. Like they have to they have to say, you know what, this makes sense.
And so we get them to say that by asking them the question
and that's that's pretty much the methodology that we've worked with. And you know, I I taught something that I called the closer framework for a very long time because it's just simple and because people can learn it. And so like we have a big chain of of teeth whitening studios. I have to teach someone who makes $10 an hour to sell a thousand dollar thing and sell like many of them every day. So, how do I do that? Like that's the challenge that I like to take on is like, how can I make this process so easy? Because in my opinion, the higher ticket sales most of the time sales training is very vague because the people who do the training and I know we're going to talk about this don't know what they're doing at all. But I believe that if you can really systematize the process, anyone can sell and they just follow kind of color by numbers. And so the closer framework is simply clarify why someone's there. Label them with a problem that you can solve. Overview their past experiences, sell the vacation, which I usually have is three main points. Almost every pitch I it's like, okay, you want this, this, and this. You want fitness, nutrition, accountability, you want the leads to be timely, exclusive, and whatever.
So when you mean the vacation, it's like their dream. Yes. What they want.
Exactly. It's and the the AC that that little story comes from uh a lot of times people sell the plane flight, not the vacation. They're like you got to go through TSA, you got to bring your bags and this is what we're going to do on the flight and here's the check. That's like no no no, no one cares. They won't talk about Maui. We'll talk about the vacation. Like let's talk about that vacation.
And then E is explaining away their concerns and R is reinforce the decision.
So that's the closer framework. That way you know someone's like, "Okay, I'll do it." And then it's like now this was a great decision. Here are the next steps and let's walk you through what it's going to be like to accomplish this and let me tell you exactly what happens next. because that's where people get cold feet, they back out. You get chargebacks, you get refunds, things like that. It's like we need to have a clear handshake between the sale and whatever the next step they have to do and it's just smooth process, right?
And so we link those.
You're cuz I I think the same way where you don't need the most craziest closing line to close somebody because it I think it starts in the beginning to me. I think you could [ __ ] everything up within the first 5 seconds of beginning. And when people have these I was we were just on a show like 10 minutes ago. He's like, "Man, you know what's the secret closing line?" And I never even thought of sales like that because I said at the end of I've never used some wicked closing line where I turn back to my guys in the office. I'm like, "Did you [ __ ] hear that line?" And I'm like the, you know, I'm like the in-your-face sales guy, you know, very very outgoing. But I never had one line that closed somebody. And it's always been so easy towards the end because it's everything leading up to the sale where you shouldn't even try to attempt for the close unless you intimately know that you have the clothes.
Dude, I say that all the time. It's like lawyers don't ask questions they don't already know the answer to.
Correct.
like I don't ask for the unless I know they're going to say yes. And so like the more I think that's where that's where I do think some pattern recognition with sales like you're like I don't think they're there yet. You know what I mean? Like what's what else are you concerned about? Like what are you really worried about right now? And I think that's where like the the asking genuine questions. And I think one of the things that I got from Ila is keeping the human first. I know that sounds kind of soft, but like actually having that as the frame because I genuinely believe the person who cares more about the prospect wins.
M
and so like if they care basically in that moment if you care more about them than they do over the long term you will be able to convince them because you actually are putting their needs first and that also means that sometimes and I tell my guys this if you get to the end of the conversation you really don't think it's the best thing for them to do
push away.
Yeah. And that's a successful sale to me.
Yeah.
Because my point the end point of a sale for me is a decision not a sale.
That's how I see it. And that way my guys can win on every single conversation. I just want to get to aision a decision one way or another. Real quick, if you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it into these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free, you can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out on the thank you page. You can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.