The FIRST Sign of a Struggling Entrepreneur Is… Lack of Sales Skills (Expert Sales Coach Explains)

Introduction

Sales, sales, sales, sales, sales, sales. Sales, sales, sales, sales. And for like an entrepreneur, not a salesperson. How about just an entrepreneur who’s looking to start a business? Well, if you can’t sell, if you can’t influence, if you can’t persuade, good luck trying to get your business off the ground. I’m not talking about just your customers. I’m talking about the bankers, the people of venture capitalists, your vendors, your credit card processor, the people who work for you. How do you get people to work for you, excited? How do you get them excited? How do you get them to want to buy into your vision?

The Essence of Sales

At the highest level, what sales really is, it’s the transference of emotion. And the emotion you’re transferring is this emotion of certainty. That someone feels certain, yeah, it’s a good thing, it’s going to help me, it’s going to fill my need. When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re trying to start a business, and you’re recruiting people. Well, you’re selling people on your vision for the future, your vision for this company. If you can’t do that, good luck trying to get great people to work for you. It’s nearly impossible, which is why you always see, you know, the people they say, “Oh, he’s a visionary.” Well, that’s true, but typically not only are they visionaries, they also possess the ability to sell the vision to other people, to inspire them, to motivate them. So selling is not just like, you know, people think of selling, “Oh, well, I’m not a salesman, I don’t even…” Well, yes, you do. You need to learn how to influence.

The Importance of Communication

How about trying to get your kids to make their bed or do their homework or believe in the value of education? How about trying to get a landlord to give you a reduction on your rent or to extend the lease the way you want? How about trying to negotiate terms? You understand it cuts to everything – communication. You need to be able to sell, whether it’s Kickstarter, whether it’s The New York Times, whether it’s your local newspaper. You need to be able to communicate effectively and sell. Which is why when entrepreneurs ask me for books to read outside of business books, I say, “On Writing Well,” “Bird by Bird,” all books on writing, improving communication. David Ogilvy, Ogilvian advertising, study print ads where you have very little space. I think those are all very, very effective. The best entrepreneurs I’ve ever met are all good communicators. It’s one of the very few unifying factors. They’re exceptional communicators. Practice is the only way to get better at communicating, and practicing speaking does not provide you generally with something to review later, which is why the written word is so powerful.

The Power of Writing

Writing is thought crystallized on a piece of paper that can then be reviewed. It’s very difficult to do that with speech, which is why I recommend people focus on honing their skills in writing and take time to study good direct response ads. Take time to, for instance, maybe develop a swipe file. So one of the things that I did for years is anytime I bought something, I would identify…

Reverse Engineering and Building Relationships

The ad, the phone call, the print ad, the offer, whatever it was that made me decide to buy it, I would either cut it out or record it, put it into Evernote, whatever it might be, and save it so I had a record of everything that I bought and why I bought it. And then I could go back and review it, and I’d be like, “Oh, looks like I fell for this, this, and this.” Not a bad way. It looks like this tipped me from not interested to, “Yeah, I’ll spend $5, $50, $500, $5,000 on that.” Yeah, I save all that. Everything that works in sales has been done already. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. So just keep track of the crap that you buy or the awesome stuff that you buy and decide, you know, what was the trigger, what pushed me over the edge, and then just sell to people like you. That’s what I do. It’s really easy. People are like, “Who’s your market?” I’m like, “Well, you know, I’m a 30-something SF-based tech-savvy male, so why don’t I just sell to those people?” It makes it a lot easier than trying to guess.

Austin, I think you need to reverse engineer who you’re selling to. So if I were you, Austin, I would spend all of January taking people out to lunch and dinner or drinks or getting them on the phone. But literally spending the entire month of January not selling to people and just listening to the people that you sell to, to figure out what their pain points are. I would walk in and be like, “Hey, Drock, you know, I sell you computer stuff and things of that nature. What are your pain points? What’s your problem? What’s your struggles in your business? Like, let’s cut the crap. Yes, I want to sell to you, but let’s take a step back. I want to sell to you by providing you some sort of value. Maybe I have a friend, maybe I will recommend that you watch the AskGaryVee show to make your business better. Maybe I’ll do a lot of things. But what I’m doing is I’m providing you value, and our conversation and our relationship is not just predicated on me selling you.”

Building Meaningful Relationships

It’s kind of like I was talking to one of my friends. He’s like, “I want to have better relationships with girls.” I’m like, “Cool, why don’t you make it something about other than sex? Like, if your whole relationship is like, ‘I want to hang out with you every time to just hook up,’ there’s probably a good chance that person doesn’t think that you’re providing them much value outside of that execution, which is a fine execution, everybody needs it, I get it, blah, blah, blah.”

Same way I think about sales. If you’re just selling every single time, that is what your foundational relationship is based on, and you become spam in sales all the time. Why don’t you spend all of January not selling even once and opening your ears and listening and trying to help even outside of the context of you? Even outside the context of you, meaning how can you help them besides just their business? Maybe you’ll get to know Drock and find out that his aunt is a huge Dallas Cowboys fan, and you just get a Dallas Cowboys hat and say, “Hey, go to eBay and buy a Tony Dorsett opened starting lineup for 49 cents, three dollars shipping.” But you send it and say, “Hey, give this to your aunt. It’s not what you spent; it was the thought that counts.”

Lifelong Learning and Sales Wisdom

Matters top salespeople commit themselves to lifelong learning. This, by the way, changed my life so dramatically when I was 24, almost like I tripped over something and picked myself up, and it was a great treasure. And the treasure was that your mind is your most precious asset, and the quality of your thinking determines the quality of your sales career. If you commit yourself to lifelong learning, you must achieve such extraordinary success, and I cannot emphasize this too often. Read, listen to audio programs, attend seminars, and never forget that the most valuable asset you will ever have is your mind. As you continue to learn, you’ll eventually become one of the most valuable salespeople in your company. The more knowledge you acquire that can be applied to practical purposes, the greater will be your rewards, and the more you will be paid.

Let 100 Flowers Blossom

This is about rainmaking, about sales. These are the things I learned about sales. The first thing is, let 100 flowers blossom. This I stole from Chairman Mao, although it’s not clear to me he implemented letting 100 flowers blossom. 100 flowers blossoms mean that at the start of a company, you’ll often see people who are not your intended customers using your product or service, and they’re going to be using it in ways you didn’t anticipate. Many entrepreneurs go crazy, “My God, the wrong people are buying our products in large quantities. What are we doing wrong? Let’s get marketing and sales in here. We need to reposition the product because we know who should buy our product.” Well, it’s categorically stupid. Fundamentally, when you see this happening, first of all, take the money. Take the money.

There are two theories in engineering for revising a product. One is you go to the people who aren’t buying your product and you ask them, “Why aren’t you buying our Macintosh, Mr. Fortune 500 CIO?” And the CIO will say, “You don’t have a letter-quality printer driver. You don’t have Lotus 1-2-3.” You come back to the lab, you convince Lotus to do it. You get a letter-quality printer driver. You go back to the Fortune 500 CIO, you say, “Alright, we listened. Now there’s a printer driver. Now there’s 1-2-3.” They still won’t buy it. They still won’t buy it.

The other theory in engineering is you go to the people who are buying your product. Mr. Desktop Publishing or Miss Desktop Publishing, why are you buying our product? Because it’s WYSIWYG, because it’s high-resolution printing. So you come back to the labs and you say, “Wow, people are buying our product to use for desktop publishing, not spreadsheet, database, and word processing like we intended. And what do they need for desktop publishing? They need bigger monitors, they need higher-resolution printers, they need higher-resolution monitors. They need all these things to make desktop publishing better.” That’s my theory – fix for who’s buying. Ignore the people who are atheists; atheists are too hard to convert to your religion. Go for agnostics and go for believers. Forget the atheists.

Enable People to Test Drive

The second point is you need to enable people to test drive your product. That means you’re saying to them, “I think you’re smart, and because I think you’re smart, I’m not going to bludgeon you into becoming my customer. Take home my product, take home my service, try my software, try my website. Then you decide.”

Suck Down

The third point is to suck down. One of the fundamental shortcomings of sales training is that you think or many people think that selling a new product is about sucking up. You need to suck up to C-level people, suck up to a CIO, suck up to the CTO, suck up to a CEO, a CMO, sucking up to the CXO-level people. It has been my experience that, particularly from a tech startup, the people who truly make the decision to try a product or service are not the people with CXO-level titles.

Suck Down and Suck Across

Vice president or director-level title, they are the people who are administrative aides and database administrators and tech support people. They’re the interns, they’re the summer hires, they’re people without titles. They’re the people who really do the work. However, and so if you want to be successful in sales, you have to understand something that in most organizations, the higher you go, the thinner the oxygen, and therefore, the more difficult it is to find intelligent life, right?

So if you dedicate yourself in a sales effort to sucking up, you’ll be sucking up to the dumbest people in the organization. You need to learn to suck down, and you need to learn to suck across because that’s where the decisions are made. For a high-tech startup, suck down, suck across, don’t just suck up.

Learn Sales

This is the one where everyone goes, “Uh, I don’t want to be a salesperson,” right? One of the things that we do in our business is we take experts and we teach them how to package their information up into products like ebooks and other information products and sell them. Well, when I start talking to these experts, almost universally, they say things like, “I’ve got all the content. I just need to find someone who can market and sell it for me.” And when I say to them, “Well, you know what would probably be good for you is to actually learn some marketing and sales,” they go, “Oh, I don’t want to learn. I’m not a salesman.” They kind of look down at salespeople like it’s some lower form of human business scum or something like that.

You imagine, “Okay, I have to put on a funky, like a weird suit and like a windbreaker like a car salesman in order to sell my product. I would never want to do that.” Well, when you really learn sales, as I know you know because you’re very fantastic salesperson, the best selling methods are consultative selling where you don’t sit down and try to talk someone into buying. You sit down and you say, “Let me ask you some questions. Let me learn about you and find out what all your problems are, and let me see if what I have is even a fit.” And then once you’ve found out where they’re at, what their problems are, what all the challenges they’re facing are, and what they’d like to accomplish, then you sell solutions. You sell them fixing their problems. You sell them getting what they want. Not your thing.

And the best of the best salespeople are the ones that walk in and sit down and ask a bunch of questions and then say, “My product can’t help you. Let me refer you to someone who can,” because those are the people that win the trust. And when they say, “This is the thing that will solve your problem,” the prospect says, “That’s the thing I need,” because they’re trustworthy. So learning consultative selling and really learning how to sell like a professional is very important.

Don’t Try to Sell

Do not try to sell something that you wouldn’t buy yourself. Okay, so if you don’t truly think it’s something that you would yourself be a customer of, don’t try to pitch it. Don’t be a used car salesman. So please make sure that whatever you’re trying to come up with is compelling enough that you would yourself be deeply interested in buying that product.

Own the Sector

I spent 17 years getting a formal education. Competition’s good, competition’s healthy. For who? Imagine if you were the only marketing company in the world. Is that better than having millions of marketing companies? Exactly. I want to own the sector. I want to own the sector. I want somebody, when somebody thinks about sales training, I want them to equate Grant Cardone. And whatever I have to spend to get there, I’ll spend to get there. I want to own the sector completely. I don’t want…

Competing and Overcoming Obscurity

To compete in it, one way you could own a sector is by tweeting, okay? If you’re not tweeting or Facebooking or YouTubing, okay, or using LinkedIn, if you aren’t using these free mediums to communicate to the world, you’re not in the game, man. You’re not in the game.

Now, this morning, if you look at my Twitter account today, because this is more than just about selling and closing a transaction. If I don’t have anybody to pay attention to me, I can’t sell or close, would you agree? Look, there’s nobody here, man. Hey, man, I’m a good salesman. I can shut you down right now. Who am I talking to? Myself? I need people. Obscurity, obscurity is the biggest problem your business has. There is no bigger problem than obscurity. It’s not money, it’s not financing, it’s not price, it’s not value, it’s not packaging, it is one thing—obscurity. All those media programs that you saw me on this morning, they all tell you that there’s not enough money, the banks aren’t loaning, consumers don’t have confidence, people aren’t healthy, the economy is in trouble. Dude, none of those are the problem. The problem is nobody knows you. I don’t know you, man. I don’t know you. Who are you? Right? Price doesn’t matter at this point, value doesn’t matter at this point, the package, the offer, the problems—I don’t know you. If you don’t know me, you can’t buy my books. Obscurity is a bigger problem than money. Okay, so I’ll go broke just trying to get out of obscurity, and I’m gonna use these free mediums to do so.

Harvard Study

They did a study at Harvard of the different levels of sales techniques that were the most in top sales guys in the world and women used versus those that were average. They went through several steps about getting rapport, about understanding the client’s needs, you know, about being able to demonstrate the features and benefits of the products, and going through overcoming objections and then closing the sale. And yeah, they looked at it, and what was surprising was that the people who were the absolute cream of the cream, the top 1% of the top 1% of salespeople on the planet, did exactly the same steps as those who were average.

The difference was that those that were exceptional focused on the first part, which is being able to build rapport, being able to understand the client’s needs. In other words, there was a sincere level of appreciation for what the client wanted. The intention that was set, the congruency that was set, was how can I serve you? How can I understand you, not how can I sell to you? In other words, how can I contribute rather than how can I take?

Now here’s what’s interesting. The people that focused more on that spent far less time on the closing and overcoming objections. It was almost a natural progression of the sale. Those that spent less time on building rapport and understanding the client’s needs and creating the relationship of trust based upon a level of sincerity, appreciation, and authenticity of who they were, those that spent less time on that and got through to the sale and/or got through to trying to close the sale had to spend more time on overcoming objections and closing techniques to make up for a lack of authentic connection and wanting to add value to the clients. Make sense?

You don’t have to learn better closing techniques unless you focus on being less than authentic about adding value to the client. Hello.

So going on sales training is usually a substitute and a poor substitute for coming to the table from a place where you say, “You know something, I am willing to let this sale go if I sincerely, and every core of my being, every cell in my body vibrates the fact that this really isn’t the best product or type of deal for the client.” If you can come to the table from that place rather than be hooked on the fact that your manager has given you a sales target and you need to make a close this Friday, then, by contrast, by paradox, your sales tend to go up. You spend less time prospecting because these people that you do connect with have such a level of trust and appreciation for what you’ve done and how you work with them. They’re far more likely to recommend you, so your referral bank starts building. Now, yeah, if you can come from a place of authenticity and sincerity, I guarantee you spend time there, not just your…

Everything is Selling

Clients, not just your prospects, not just your potential sales, will start to increase, but the richness of who you are comes out. And that’s in your relationship with your spouse, your relationship with your kids, your relationship with everybody. People want to do business with you rather than people are being convinced to do business with you. Make sense? Go out this week and try that. Go out this week and say, “You know something? Before I walk into that meeting, I’m gonna sit there for a minute or two and just connect and think, ‘Is my intention pure? Am I going to come from a place of adding value?’ And if I walk into that meeting understanding that, ‘Yeah, this has to match this,’ how am I going to show up differently?” And I think you might be surprised what happens.

Everything is Selling (continued)

Now, of course, ladies and gentlemen, everything is selling, and everybody is a salesperson. Whether you’re a dentist, a doctor, a preacher, a teacher, a coach, a child, music matters, doesn’t make any difference what it is that you do—everybody is a salesperson. Let me share a couple of examples with you of what I’m talking about.

When I was between the 11th and 12th grades during World War II, I went to junior college so I could pick up some extra classes so I could get in the Naval Air Corps. Alright, now, I had to pick up an extra course in history in order to graduate, and so I would be free then the following my senior year to take a lot of extra math and science. Well, I didn’t want to take American history. What possible good is it going to do me, you know, to learn something that happened 100 years ago or 200 years ago? But I had to learn it, so I was going to go in there, and I was at least going to pass. But don’t think I’m going to try to remember it. I’ll just transfer the knowledge from the teacher to my mind to the pad, and then I’ll get out of there, and they’ll end it.

But the teacher threw me a curve. He was Coach Joby Harris at Hinds Junior College in Jackson, Mississippi. And you’re talking about a salesman, folks. He was a salesman. He spent that entire first period selling me on why I had to learn my history. He really put the story on me. He also sold me that as an individual, if I had any ability that permitted me to do more than support my family, that I had a moral obligation to my fellow human being and my community to donate some of my services for the betterment of mankind. I walked out of that classroom that day a history major. The only subject I made consistent days in throughout the time I was in college.

What I do today in all of the activities outside of my actual business was directly, emphatically influenced by that salesman, a school teacher, Coach Joby Harris. Everything is selling.

I’ll never forget when our second daughter was born, our first child was three years old at the time. And I’d been out on the road, not long after our baby, Brooke, came home from the hospital. I’d been out on the road, and I got stuck. There was a snowstorm, and I spent the night in a Greyhound bus. Fortunately, on the side of the road. When I got in the next morning, I was exhausted. There was about 10 inches of snow on the ground, and I’d no sooner walked in and just had my topcoat and my gloves and my head off when the redhead said to me, “Well, honey, we gotta go to the store. We need some things.” So, I reluctantly put all the gear back on, and my three-year-old said, “Daddy, I want to go.” And I said, “Oh, Susie, I said the weather’s too bad. It’s too cold and wet, and I won’t be gone long.” But she said, “Daddy, I’ll be so lonely.” I said, “Oh, Susie, you won’t be lonely. I said your mother’s here, the maid’s here, your baby sister is here. I said you won’t be lonely.” She looked right at me and she said, “But Daddy, I’ll be lonely for you.” I don’t need to tell you she went to the store with me.

You see, the truth of the matter is, everything is selling. The third example: at our church, we recently got a new music minister. Now, please understand that I’ve got the kind of voice that prompted Mitch Miller to write me a personal letter asking me not even to bother to sing along with. And you know, I want you to understand it. My own children ask that I not sing in church. But last Sunday was our first Sunday, and this minister had the congregation so excited. He sold them so much on participating. Now, he knows his music too, but he had so gung-ho that for the first time in my life, I actually enthusiastically got involved in the singing process.

Everything, ladies and gentlemen, is selling. I mean, everything is selling. And that’s one of the reasons that I’m so excited about it. Thank you guys so much for watching. I’d love to know which of the videos resonated the most with you. Leave

it in the comments below. I’d also love to know either what your biggest sales challenge is right now or what your biggest sales advice would be or both. Leave it in the comments below. I’m gonna join in the discussion. Thank you so much for watching. Continue to believe, and I’ll see you soon.