Transcription
Uh, few beliefs about selling that have served me well. One is that people want to believe you; they want to buy you; you just have to help their logical brains justify the decision. Like, most people are like, "Hey, I can make you a lot more money." They want to believe you; you just have to help them justify it. "Hey, I can help you get into your high school genes; I can make you look the way you did 20 years ago." You just got to help them. They just want—they want to believe you; you just have to help them.
Selling happens before you ask; closing happens after. All right, so everything that happens until you say, "Here's the money; here's the amount that I need for this thing," all of that is sales, for me. I define closing as the moment you present the offer; everything after that is closing. And to be clear, that is what I'm going to be talking about today: just the red zone. Three—it's easier to handle obstacles than objections. Obstacles are what you handle before; objections what you handle after. That being said, expect and plan for no. It's not failure; it's expected. So stop being surprised. It's one of the biggest things I see with new salespeople who are just getting into sales: they freak out when someone says, "No, thank you," "I need to think about it," "I'm not sure," "I got to talk to my spouse," "Not sure if it's a fit for me," "I don't make fast decisions," "I don't have the—I don't have the card I want to use on me" right? They say these things, and we're like, "What do I say?" It's like, this is what you train for. Because if they were just going to buy, then you wouldn't be needed. If they already knew that they needed this thing, then they wouldn't be struggling with it to begin with. Like, the sale is the first part of the coaching relationship, in my opinion.
And this one's also a really good one to train salespeople with: if you didn't get a gasp from the price tag, they didn't go high enough. And so I like this a lot because then it prepares us, and we shoot for what we used to be afraid of. Like, if you didn't get a gasp, they're like, "It's a lot," and you're like, "I know," you're like, "It's a lot. Um, hey, let's keep PG." Okay, so selling properly is the first step to becoming a coach. Your first impression, the expectations you set, dictate the relationship. All right, how you handle this first conversation. Like, every—how many of you have seen research on first impressions, right? It's a lot harder to change a first impression. Well, the first impression of your business is the sale, and so a lot of things happen here. Like, often times you can change LTVs, churn, simply by changing the expectations you set in the sale. One conversation dictates how months of service are taken in. Selling is helping prospects make decisions to help themselves. I said that earlier. Keep the prospect, not the sale, as the priority, because it's not about you. And I don't know if I have this on here, but the person who cares the most about the prospect ultimately wins. Think about that for a second. So if you care more about them than they care about them, you will win, because you'll have the leverage, because you really want to help them. And then you will be kind, not nice. You'll ask the hard questions.
If someone objects, seek to understand, not to argue or be right. This is something that took me more time to understand: is like, if someone objects to buying, if you keep a curious hat on, you can keep in that frame for as long as you want; you just keep staying curious. Like, "Huh, that's so weird; I wouldn't have thought that way. Why do you think that?" Right? As soon as you get into like your fists up of like, "Well, let me prove you wrong," it's kind of like Dale Carnegie's like, "No one wins an argument." Like, you don't win the sale by being right. Getting them to want to buy is the ultimate objective, right? Because if they feel like they made the decision, then you'll also get buying later. And so you can't be combative; it's much more of a dance, which I think is one of these other ones. So maintain childlike curiosity at all times. Closing is a dance, not a fight; it is seduction, not rape. All right, that's the one that wakes everyone up in the morning. All right, the idea is like, it's a dance; it's fluid. Fluid—you're moving, right? It's not coercion; it's not forced. And this is a big one; this is what I was hitting on earlier: is that selling is a transference of belief over a bridge of trust. All right, so you have to have belief in order to transfer it. Sometimes your new salespeople have belief; they gain trust, and they transfer it, and then they learn more about your company, and then they have less trust—even sorry, they have less belief—and even though they have trust with the prospect, because they have trust, they don't transfer the belief, 'cause they don't have it anymore. They used to; they thought you were all that, and now they don't. And so they can't transfer it because there's nothing there. And so, anyone ever met somebody who became like re—uh, like a born-again Christian? I don't want to put a term on it. Anyone changed religious beliefs that like, you know, anyone like in your life? Okay. So one of the really interesting things, at least that I've observed, is that like, if someone comes to me, and it doesn't even have to be a religious thing, it's just an easy one to—to—to—to observe, is that they're so convicted in their new belief that you start to question your—you're like, "Maybe they are right," right? And the thing is is that like, the best sales tool is belief, and I keep repeating this because if I'm going to—if I'm going to turn a whole sales team around, all the stuff I'm going to show you is—is the hand-to-hand stuff you got to memorize, the stuff you got to know, the stuff. But this is like the sets and reps, right, of sales. But if the team doesn't believe it, it just doesn't matter.
I got flown in to turn this sales team around years ago—years—years ago—um, and it was a mortgage sales company, and they were selling mortgage leads. And first the morning, I rewrote the script, repositioned it, blah blah blah. In the afternoon, they wanted me to train the guys, so I got on the sales floor; they, you know, gathered everybody around; they wanted me to do like a Glen Gary Glen Ross, if you've seen that scene, like, "Always be closing." And so they want me to like, R the troops up. And so I sat down, and I was like, "Who's the guy who's having issues?" You're like, "John." I was like, "John, how good are the leads?" That's what they were selling—like, "How good are the leads?" He's like, "Well, there—" and I was like, "I'm good, thanks, man." And uh, I was like, it was a simple question. I was like, "If you believed, you would have been like, 'Dude, these leads are so good right now. I'm studying for my real estate exam so I can start taking these leads. I got my aunt to quit her job so that she can start taking these leads. My uncle is a realtor, so I'm selling him leads right now. And honestly, I hope that in 12 weeks I'll be out of this role so I can start doing these too.'" I was like, "That's what it sounds like when you believe. You don't believe, so of course you don't sell." I was like, "It doesn't matter," and I ripped up the script, to be all dramatic. Um, I was like, "Doesn't matter what's the words on here. I was like, 'If you guys don't believe it, it's not like—none of this will matter.'" And then they went and closed a bunch, right? But it was like, it's about the belief more than anything. And so if you need to fix that, fix that first with you or your team. And if there are things that you know you should do to fix the product, to make a better onboarding experience, etc., do—do that. Because the thing is is that when you do that, you will approach the sale differently, because you'll be so confident what you're—what you're—what you're delivering. You can only build trust if you generally want to help. And humans are exceptionally good at sniffing out intention; like, we've got thousands of years of adaptation and evolution to help us see who is lying to us. And so it's like, commission breath. I like that term a lot. If you have commission breath, people can smell it. And so I think one of the big FR shifts that I like to do when I approach a sale is like, it's about them; I just want to help this person. And if like, I just have to reset myself every time I get into the room, right before I sit down with somebody, is keeping that intention at top of mind, which is human first. It's like, I'm going to prioritize this human, not the sale. But if you do that, they'll have a positive experience with you either way, and you'll also close more deals.
This is a big one. So I've talked about belief; to talk about bridge of trust. They are continuums, not binaries, so you have to treat them that way. It's—it's not, "Do you have belief in your product? Do you not have belief in your product? Do you have trust with the prospect, or do they trust you, or do they not trust you?" It's, "How much did they trust you? How deep is your belief?" Right? Because if they trust the out of you, and your belief is miles deep in terms of how much you believe, how hard do you think it will be to sell? Not right. And so a lot of us are like, "Did you build rapport?" It's not, "Did you build rapport?" It's, "How much rapport did you build?" Does that make sense? Okay. If you can start changing your language this way, then it also gives you an ability to continue to get better. It's not like, "Oh yeah, I built rapport; I have trust; they believe me," right? Like, it doesn't work that way; it's how much—it's to what extent. Oops, wrong way. There we go. Closers ask hard questions because they genuinely care. Right, these are the hard conversations. It's funny because a lot of you guys are really good at having hard conversations with prospects, but really bad at having hard conversations with your team. If you can have a hard conversation with your team, it'll be easy with prospects. The person who cares the most about the prospect wins the deal. This is just a side note: record all your sales. Always. One of my biggest regrets in life is that I have 4,000 undocumented sales. Like, boy, wouldn't that be nice today if I could use all those? So please, for the love of God, document all these things. Best champions watch game footage. The goal of closing is to get someone to decide, not to buy. And the thing is is that you actually have to believe this if you're training your sales team, and you're like, "This is what I want you to do; I want you to help these people decide; I don't want you to help get them to buy; I want you to help them to decide. And if their decision is to buy, that's awesome, but that means that you reward them when they get someone to decide either way." This is different than many of you probably do this, and this took me time, so I'm just—I'm giving you the stuff that I've learned, all right? Because if you do that, then you reward the activities rather than the outcome, because they can only control—like, the sales team, yourself included, can only control what you do; you can't control what they do. But what you can do is actually try and get them to confront the decision that they've been putting off for a long time. And finally, power is the ability to direct or influence people. If you want to be powerful, you must learn the skill, because fundamentally, if you can move mountains, you can move rooms; you can get people to do stuff; you have power; you have the ability to direct or influence other people. And so sales is power, and if that makes you feel queasy, then I think you should check yourself and think like, "Why do I not want to be powerful?" Right? Can build hospitals; can build bombs, right? Power. And so I think for me, I've, you know, sales has been always near and dear to my heart, because it's the thing—if like, you want to make an impact, it's like, "Well, what is an impact?" It means like, influencing lots of people. How do you influence lots of people? You have to persuade them, so that's what we're doing. Cool. It's 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're 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? L—label them with a problem. We can't cure cancer unless they admit that they have it, right? Has anyone had that situation? Like, "I just want to find out more information." Had that, right? 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. O—after that, 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, because obviously, same 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 framework 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 chargebacks, which your sales guys and you will be happy about.
I want to tell you about the most powerful sales tactic that I have learned. I never learned it from a book; I actually learned it by accident. And it will be included in the $100 million sales book when it comes out. And so you heard it here first, but it's a concept that you can do as a salesperson to gain trust, and I stumbled into this. I ended up selling 100% of people after I made this one switch in how I sold, and I was able to teach it to people who had never sold before, and they were able to close 80-90% of people who were coming in the door. Mind you, this is a retail environment, selling physical products. So rewind the clock: I was selling supplements at my gym, and the way that we would sell supplements is that we'd sell some sort of service package, and then we'd do a nutrition orientation. When they came for the nutrition orientation, we'd actually, you know, set them up with their meal plans, and then we'd make recommendations for products. Now normally I would sell pretty well, but still I always wanted to sell more and get better. We killed this launch for like a new challenge or something, and we had 100 new customers supposed to come in, and I ran out of one of the key uh products. I had ladies come in the first half of the day and able to get—get the products, and then some of their friends who signed up with them came in the second half of the day and were like, "Hey, my friend Sandy told me that I need X, X, Y, and Z." And I was like, "Oh, we don't have Z anymore," and it was like really awkward. And I was like—a lady came in. And so rather than me try and skirt around this clear item that was on the list that I didn't have, I said, "Hey, by the way, you can get this one for cheaper down the street at Costco, so like you don't need to get this one from me; like, this one's a little better, but I think it'll get the job done. You can get this one after you're done on the program." And they were like, "Oh, thanks; like that was cool." After I made that one cross out, I was like, "But you do want this and this from us," and they're like, "Okay, cool." As soon as I made that switch from saying, "Hey, you don't need to buy this one; you can get that from over there," everyone bought what I recommended afterwards, and I was like, "Whoa." And so then I leaned into that and was like, "I wonder if I could do more of that, so I could sell even more on the backside." So then I had two products that I was like, "Hey, you can get this and this over here; get this brand; it should be at this price; you can go get it; it'll save you 10 or 20 bucks." And they were like, "Wow, even better." And then I remember I looked at my list, and there was, you know, a lady there, and it was like a mass gainer, and she obviously wasn't trying to gain mass. And so I was like, "You're not trying to gain mass already," and she's like, "No." I was like, "You can just cross that out; go ahead; you don't need to worry about that." And so I gave her a recommendation of two things that you could get for cheaper, and then I said, "You don't need to worry about this," and then when I said, "Hey, like I need you to take two of these in the morning next to this; take three of these; take them next to this; put this in your car so you always have it with you," I closed everyone. What that gave birth to was something that I used to call sacrificial lambs, but now call ghost products, 'cause it sounds better. But ended up over time not even carrying the products that I had on there that I was recommending out, because they were so powerful as a sales tool for me to gain trust from the other person. This is an incredibly—incredibly powerful tactic. And like all persuasion, the difference between manipulation and help is intention. And so if you want to help someone, you are manipulating them, but you're just doing it in a positive intent. Now, and if you change someone's behavior and you have negative intent, you are manipulating them. If you believe in the stuff that you sell, you can create an environment where someone will trust you faster by giving them a reason to trust you. And so that means that you acted in their self-interest rather than your own, so that they can feel like you're not trying to—like, listen, you know, I sometimes I have a temper; um, I can be—I can be short at times; uh, I don't have a ton of time to get dedicated to a relationship right now because my business is taking up the majority of my time, but I'm absolutely fantastic in bed. Right? If I said something like that, the thing is is the more negatives I can say in the beginning, the more believable the thing that I say right afterwards is. Right? And so if I own all of my negatives, which is why I love this, because be truthful in the things that you're saying that are negative, and the more true they are and the more damaging they are, the more believable the thing that comes after the sentence. All right. And so the way to use "but," because everything that happens here after the word "but" is amplified, all right, and everything that is before the word "but" is diminished. So you have—so the good thing is you can actually control where your prospect's attention is going. So this is where we're—where we're directing them is after the word "but." And so I do this sometimes, um, you know, the word "because" is actually really similar too—to—to this in a different way. I'll use it in another video, but uh, if—if I say something really horrible—um, I'm trying to think of something else—uh, let's see here—I'm—I'm—I'm really hard to live with; um, I—I absolutely do no house chores whatsoever, but—whatever I say right now is something that you're going to believe. Finally, I was sitting down, and this nice lady walked in; she had like a nice ring and a nice purse, and I was like, "Okay, if I don't sell this woman, I'm going to kill myself." And so—and she was like super upbeat and…
Anybody who's ever done sales, like you know, when you see that person, you're like, "I'm definitely closing this one," like, "I, I have to close this one," like, "this is how I pay my bills." And so she sits down, and I remember getting to the end of the presentation, and I just said, instead of my normal pitch around like hypertrophy and maintaining lean body mass and just a whole bunch of jargon that she would never even understand, I said, "Hey, uh, so with the program, I was like, 'Do you want to do, uh, you want chocolate or vanilla for your protein?'" And she was like, "Which one do you like?" I was like, "Chocolate." She was like, "All right, I'll take one of those." And I was like, "I didn't want to scare her away," so I was like, "Uh, I've got, uh, for the, the Pre-Workout, do you want to do kiwi or strawberry?" I, I like the kiwi. She was like, "Okay, I'll do that one." And I didn't want to sell any more because I was afraid that she would somehow back out, and so, and I didn't want her to like make any other purchasing decision. So I said, "Do you want to just use the card you have on file?" And she was like, "Yeah, that's fine." And then I took these off the shelf, and I, and I slid them over to her, and she grabbed them, and she smiled, and she walked out of the facility. And I made my first supplement sale, and I was like, "Holy, I didn't even talk at all about what these even did or how to take them or what the benefits were. I just simply asked her which one she wanted." And the key was I didn't ask her whether she wanted them; I asked her which one she wanted. And as soon as I realized that, that is when I was introduced to the assumed close. All right, it is one of the strongest upsells in all of business. All right, like I can't tell you whenever, whenever I hear someone, if there's every sales process that generates tons and tons of traffic and they're closing anywhere in the 80% plus range, I usually know that it's an upsell. All right. And the beauty of an assumed close is that the prospect is choosing between two options that both are buying from you, rather than whether or not they're going to.
I do think that the number one predictor of good sales is conviction. Fundamentally, you have one person, person who should believe in something, another person who does not believe it yet, and trust is the thing that transfers that conviction. So if fundamentally there's the two things you need, you need trust and you need conviction. Most times salespeople don't have 100% trust, sorry, 100% conviction. And so the also the idea of conviction as a binary is false. So it's not like I believe it or I don't believe it; it's to what extent do I believe. Right? And so that's why like in terms of if I want to improve a sales team, I can do the drills, which we do, and that's like blocking and tackling, but the thing that really juices a sales team is hearing the testimonials of the people that they sold last week and what they're doing today and how their lives have changed. And so I noticed this because on my sales teams, when we were in person, whenever I did weigh-out day, which is when everyone finished their challenges and everybody was crying and so excited, I tried to stack as many sales appointments as I could while people were weighing out, and during those days we closed like 100%, cuz people were like, "Dude, how can you not think this works? It's right there." And so the thing is is like you can either trick yourself into having the right tone or you can train yourself, and I think that it's much easier to trick yourself into it by just simply believing, because if you talk, if, if you truly believe in the product, you will talk about it differently. And so in terms of an understanding of selling, if you need to have conviction, you need to have trust. Trust is going to come from expertise and some level of rapport. Right? I think that overarchingly to help someone sell, we just have to ask the right questions to get someone to come to the conclusion on their own. And so most sales conversations follow more or less the same framework if you know what you're doing; otherwise, people are just chasing their tail and trying to chase a prospect to an outcome that the prospect doesn't know how to. Like we've had this conversation 100 times; they have only had it once. We should be the one knowing how this conversation is supposed to go. Right? We should also come in with a massive advantage to how to have this conversation go the way we wanted to, cuz we do it all day. Right? And so big front-end pieces is like, why are they there? What's the problem? What have they done so far? Understanding where they failed, seeing why our product is different from the things that they failed, asking for permission to explain about the product, explaining the product not in any way based on features, but only based on the experiences that they will have as a result of it, and using analogies to explain, explain those experiences, and then having a close at the end, which the, the TikTok I think that you, you referenced is like a no-based close, and I think a lot of natural salespeople do this anyways. Like if I want something, I'm be like, "Hey, can you do this for me?" I'm like, "Hey, would you mind?" And they say no, they don't, I don't mind. Right? Like this natural communication dynamics that most people who naturally know how to persuade people or at least influence do that on their own. This is just retroactively looking at it and saying, "What did I do different? Like why is this different?" In terms of like overcoming, cuz people are afraid of confrontation, right? That's what they're afraid of. And so I believe that you can sell without ever having confrontation, and you can do that with what I like to call childlike curiosity. And so if someone says, "Well, my husband's not going to approve that," I'm like, "Why wouldn't he? What? He like, huh, that's so interesting, tell me more about that," rather than like, "All right, let's like your husband's an," like that's not going to work, because in arguments no one wins. Right? And so be like, "Why, why would he think that? Cuz, cuz I would think that he wants what's best for you. Right? Yeah, he wants what's best. Does he know you're struggling with this right now?" Well, I mean, yeah, he knows I'm struggling with it. Okay, so he wants, ESP, he knows you're struggling with it, so why do you think he would be opposed to solving something that, that you're currently struggling with, just so I understand? Would he be happier if you continue to struggle?" Well, no, it's like, "Well, great, then would you be opposed to moving forward today?" And that way, and hey, if you go home to your husband and you make a joke and the lights a scenario and then you close it. Right? And so it's, I think childlike curiosity is the immediate that you have to train because people get defensive. So that is one thing that like fighters talk about when they're in the ring, like in the beginning you breathe in too much. Right? I don't know if like if you've been like sparring and stuff like you breathe in, you breathe too much, you hyperventilate. And so the guys who've done it enough, they slow down their breathing, because when they get things get intense, they can slow it down. And so I think sales is a lot the same way, where you're like your adrenaline kicks in, start breathing faster as fight or flight, so you got to be able to slow it down and be like, "Huh, that's crazy. I wouldn't have thought that. Okay, tell me more about that," and like now you're interested, and then they don't feel like you're combating them; they feel like you genuinely are interested and want to help them, which is what you should be doing, because you should be selling them.