How to Scale the Sales of a Startup Business – Ask Clay Anything

Audio Transcription

Do you have questions? America’s number one business coach has answers. It’s your brought up from Minnesota. Here’s another edition of ask clay. Anything on the thrive time business coach radio show?

Oh, Oh yes.

Here we are back with another exciting edition of the thrive time show on your radio and podcast downloads. And on today’s business coach show we are answering a question from a great thriver out there by the name of Mike and to protect his anonymity, we’re going to call him Magic Mike. So beginning with the word a wondering. Jason, can you read the question? Yes. Wondering if I can get your business coach advice on revenue generation. We have branded from blank to blank targeting Btb, summer camps, universities, pe teachers, parks and rec, youth ministries. So they’ve rebranded the company. It used to be called something and now they’re called. So they used, they used to be called and now they’re called.

Manufacturing is beginning on our run or end. Our runway is narrow. My outbound phone sales strategy isn’t working as expected as most summer camps by March to April and could use your advice to get through the next 90 days for a solid product launch. Okay. Well let me verify that we are doing the fundamentals of good cold calling. Before we say it doesn’t work. Let’s, let’s, let’s verify we’re doing the fundamentals. It’s Kinda Jason. You Cook Food? Yes. You will have a culinary background. I do. You went to school for this [inaudible]. What is your favorite meal? What are your favorite dishes? And one of them. One of the best things that you know how to make. Well, I did get really good at Sushi, but I guess like a more practical meal is. I love making fa now that’s a Vietnamese noodle dish. It’s like soup soup. Yeah, it’s spelled pho.

Watch your mouth. How do you spell that? P, h o o okay. Okay. It’s not as bad as I thought. Okay. So. Alright. So you, you’re, you’re good at making. Yeah. Talk to me about getting good at making Sushi, whatever that looks like a. do you want the American red or the Japanese or. I want to know. I want. I want you to educate me about what. How do you. You have the floor. Well, the first thing you have to get good at is the rice. You have to know exactly how to cook it. What temperature to cool it too. Don’t let it stay too hot. Don’t let it get too cold. You have to know the ratio of vinegar to put in the rice to make it sticky. Here we go. And then you have to know how to evenly spread it over your Nori or seaweed.

And then how to cut the fish properly. Get it all nice and uniform and cut the fish properly. Oh yeah, because you’re eating raw fish. True. And how do you. How Ra is. The fish will so mean. The fish is completely raw, but it’s frozen to the extent. It’s basically cooking it and reverse. You’re freezing out all the bacteria, so it’s stable to eat, but it’s still raw and uncooked. You’re cooking it in reverse? Yeah. Please explain. Well, so like anytime you have like a piece of like let’s say you’re grilling steak and the goal is to heat it to a point where you’re cooking out any of the or most of the rawness, God is going to kill the bacteria, change the entire makeup of the muscle tissue with Sushi, you freeze it to a certain degree. And so what it does is it basically does a, does it kills any bacteria so it makes it edible in its raw state.

I did not know that. Oh yeah. Wow. See, so what we’re saying is if I was making Sushi, let’s say that Mike came over to the Camp Clark and chicken palace at the Lampoon Lagoon and uh, he goes, you know, uh, this, this, I think I’m going to die. I feel really sick right now. And I would say, well, I, uh, I, I put, I took the fish it over the reese’s and I, I, uh, you know, just cut it and put it on the plate and there it is. I don’t understand. It’s raw. Right, right, right. I mean, I would probably kill a man because I don’t know, I didn’t know these moves and I’m just thinking raw, like they’re just getting fish and just cutting it up and there you go. A lot of people think that a lot and I thought that until now. This is what I’m talking about.

So what happens is we’re saying cold calls, cold calls aren’t working and maybe they are, they aren’t working. Let’s just cut it. Go through the checklist of the things you have to do to make a cold calling campaign work. Yup. So Jason, could you read, move a move, a must call ideal and likely buyers. You’ll only want to call your ideal and likely buyers. So let’s make sure that you have a list of the Sufism, physical education, teachers, parks, recreation centers, youth ministries, Btb, summer camps in universities. Let’s make sure that you have a big list. Now. I would recommend for anything, I want to put this on the show notes. A, you’re cold calling. I would recommend you at least have a thousand at bats if possible. At least a thousand at bats as possible. You really want to do that because rejection, man, you’re gonna get rejected.

So much. So, uh, Jay’s, we’ve talked about this on other business coach shows and maybe I haven’t talked about when you’re here, but how many guests per week do I invite to be on this glorious sanctimonious and Super Humble? Thrive time show hundreds, 900, 900. Wow. Every week, Bro. One hundred and 900. Now think about this for a second. 900 people that you might say why? Well, let me tell you what we released nine shows a week, Jason. Yeah. And I am of the belief that I have a one percent success ratio. Now. We just interviewed the founder of a, a Ritz Carlton and the founder of Intuit, Horst Schulze. We just interviewed Guy Kawasaki who Guy Kawasaki is the guy who was known for helping market apple. He’s a successful silicone, a value investor. He’s a best selling author. He’s huge, right? We just got wolf gang, gang pack weight, just booked off gang.

We’ve got so many cool people book. But Jason, we have how many shows we do, do we do? We ere, Ooh, nine. Nine. Gotcha. How many guests a week do I invite? 900 because I’m planning on what percentage of success? One percent. Now, were you here when we interviewed Horst Schulze, the founder of of Ritz Carlton? I was not. I heard like a brief segment of it. I’m going to assume Mike hasn’t heard this one yet because it hasn’t been released yet, so this is what Horst Schulze would say to somebody out there. If they go one percent, that must feel terrible. This is what holds. This is what Horst Schulze says about how to process negative emotions and feelings and the feelings of rejection.

You’re waiting for feeling. Make a decision. What my feeling is a feeling. Make my decisions. You’ll make a decision. The decision you have to fight against the feelings that tried to interfere with your decision.

Oh Wow, that’s good. That’s real good. So you’ve got to decide what you’re going to do and then fight against that feeling. Now, we couldn’t have a steve jobs on today’s show because he is

surely. You can’t be serious. I am serious and don’t call me Shirley.

It’s it’s. It’s too soon to ever to joke about the late great steve jobs, but he couldn’t be here because he’s dead right, and we have the philosophy around here. We will call people until they cry, buy or die, and sometimes we have to call them until they cry, buy or die again. But Steven could not be here on today’s show, but this is what steve jobs had to say about pushing through rejection.

You have to have a lot of passion for what you’re doing and it’s totally true and the reason is is because it’s so hard that if you don’t, any rational person would give up. It’s really hard and you have to do it over a sustained period of time. So if you don’t love it, if you’re not having fun doing it, you don’t really love it. You’re going to give up. And that’s what happens when those people actually, if you really look at at at the ones that ended up being successful in the eyes of society and the ones that didn’t, oftentimes it. It’s the ones that are successful, loved what they did so they could persevere. When you know, when it got really tough,

now, Ryan tedder couldn’t be here on today’s show, but I went to college with Ryan and he is the front man for one Republican Grammy Award winning author. I’m Jason. Do you know Ryan got his first internship? Didn’t he just call his way through? You know what? Let’s let. Let’s let Ryan share with us how he did it himself. Okay. I’m going to cue it up. Here we go. This is what Ryan tedder says, but how he got his first internship

at the back of every cd or DVD, there’d be a number. If you have issues or whatever causes plants, I’d call it the complaint hotline. Somebody would pick up eventually after like a hundred calls, how can I help you? Oh, and I would say, I’d say, Oh, I’m sorry I was. I was on the phone with her resources and I think they, they misconnected crafty and I would literally then work my way up and they would keep. Oh, I’m sorry, because they always feel so bad and then they would connect me up to the. Eventually I’m talking with the head of hr of paramount pictures from a dorm room in Tulsa. I got a call from dreamworks one day. It was the Nashville office and they just opened a record

label and a publishing company and they’re like, we want you to work for the publishing company of dreamworks through complaint hotline. I ended up in Nashville. That’s unbelievable. That’s how it works though. Every time it works that way. This is how it works. Did you hear him? He said he made how many calls? Hundreds. Right? So I just want to make sure that magic mike is making hundreds of calls per day. I and I, I’m not saying you’re not, I’m just saying this is the checklist of things we need to go through right now. Point B, move B, move b. What do you got to do next? Jason must have a call script and must record your calls or you’re going to have a zero percent success rate because when you finally get somebody on the phone, you gotta have a plan, right? Jason? If I go buy all were, where do I do if I want to start making Sushi tonight, where do I need to buy my meat?

I would say bodeans. They have some of the best Sushi grade fish you can find in the Tulsa area. So I go to Bodeans. I go there, I buy the Sushi grade fish. Yep. And then what’s my first step to get it ready to make the Sushi with the meat. So you want to. It’s going to come frozen solid as a rock and you went to thought out until it is nice and squishy. How do you thought you could just set it out in a cold? Not too warm environments or you can leave it in an ice bath. So just ice and water. You leave it in an ice bath and it melts in an ice bath. Yeah. See that’s where I would have got it wrong. Whether you just set it out on the counter. Well, I mean you can thought that way. It’s just going to be.

You want to make sure you have like towels or put it on a plate or something. That’s not going to get messy, but there’s so many ways I could screw it up though. Yeah, so I’m just sitting here making cold calls and you don’t have a script that’s like buying meat and tried to make Sushi on the fly. Right now. There’s so many things you could screw up. What have you. Don’t have seaweed on hand will you can do Sashimi which is just thinly slice pieces of the fish served by themselves. These are all things I’m not familiar with. Where can I work? Can I buy seaweed? Seaweed? You can buy at any grocery store in the international foods aisle or you can go to specific Asian food source. Is it likely to through entropy and just. Jack asked me that. I could figure out how to make Sushi today without a recipe or without any kind of training.

Is it likely? Oh, I think so. Really? Yeah. He didn’t just randomly stumble upon big Sushi today. I mean, I guess if you didn’t look at like a recipe, you can make very interesting Sushi. I think I would kill a man. All I’m saying is it through entropy? It is very hard to have success. You’ve got to have a strategy. You gotTa have a list of at least a thousand people to call and you’ve got to make sure you’re following the script. Now move number three, move number three. You gotta embrace the, the, the mindset that you’re only going to get a two to three percent success rate. Yup. We invite 900 guests a week. Now, right now we’re getting about 15 to 20 people a week reaching out to us to be on the podcast, but previously nobody was reaching out and you know why nobody was reaching out because it was just like my mom listening to my show and I love my mom.

It’s great, but it was just like my mom. It was like the. It was almost like just sitting down and talking to my mom because no one was listening to the show, but now we have people reaching out to us and that is how things change. Now I want you to read the notable quotable here, Jason, from Chet Holmes here, and I’m going to queue up some kind of a monkish musics that way. We can kind of just marinate on what you’re saying here. Okay, so kind of read it, but read it like in a, in a way with really going to provide some profound impact and slow enough for us to really grasp what’s being said. So here we go. About half of the salespeople, okay.

Worked with over the years, gave up after a single rejection they could call a client.

Client would say no, and the salesperson would never call that person back.

Few, perhaps only four percent to five percent. Keep trying after four rejectionist yes. As you learned in the previous chapter, I found it takes eight point four rejections to get a meeting and what makes the difference between people who will face

la about you said it takes how many rejections?

Eight point four rejections to get to meet. And what makes the difference between people who will face that rejection one time and quit or 40 times and never quit is determined purely by the strength of their ego.

That right there is a knowledge bomb from general bestselling author, the ultimate sales machine. You got eight point, how many times? Eight point four, eight point four, eight point four. That is crazy getting told no, but at the same person eight point four times. It’s pretty nuts. That’s what I do though. Yeah. That’s where I live. That’s where they operate. So I just want to make sure that we’re on the same page that we’ve had. We absolutely have to make enough calls now. So again, let’s review. You have to have at least a thousand people to call. Yep. Got To have a call script. And you’ve got to keep calling the same people until they cry. Buy or what? Jason Die. Yeah. Eight point five. Eight point. How many times? Eight point quatro. You got to do it every single time. You have to just keep calling. Eight point five times. Now I wanted to queue up some examples that people don’t know that I think would be healthy for the listeners to know. So I’ve got this little, uh, a text here, this little excerpt from an article written about Taylor swift from entertainment weekend. Jason, could you read this little story about Ms Dot Taylor Swift? Taylor says, when I was 10 years

or younger than that, even I would watch these biographies on Faith Hill or the dixie chicks or Shania Twain or Leann rimes, and the thing I kept hearing was that they had to go to Nashville.

So remembers. She talked. She talked her parents into letting her fly out to visit. I took my demo cds of Karaoke songs where I sound like a chipmunk. It’s pretty awesome and my mom waited in the car with my little brother while I knocked on doors up and down music row.

How old was she? 10. And she would. Her mom would drop her off. She walk up and down music row and just handouts out cds. Okay, continue please. I would say, hi, I’m Taylor. I’m 11. I want to record. Do call me. They didn’t. Oh wait, wait, wait. She said what? Hi, I’m Taylor. I’m 11. I want a record deal. Call me. Oh, continue, please. But you have to wonder how many of the folks who entered those doors suddenly flashed back to that moment when they saw a grownup swift screaming over her best album. Artists nod at the grammy nominations press conference rather than discouraging her. That rejection was like rocket fuel, your sweat, you, you see this. This is probably one the most profound articles that very few people have read ever said rather than what. Rather than discouraging her, it was rocket fuel.

Yeah.

She actually became more inspired as a result of the rejection and for her it was viewed as positive. I would say. If you’re getting rejected today,

unreasonable

unreasonable.

He just said it’s so unreasonable, unreasonable to not feel like. And he’s like, it doesn’t matter how you feel. Right? So I’m not saying Mike, you’re not getting rejected enough, but I would say that the average person doesn’t because you have to call somebody how many times it’s a person to have to tell you know, again, according to Chet Holmes, eight point four times, right? And Ryan tedder made how many calls? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and Taylor swift. Ten years old, 11 years old, knocking on doors. Hi, I’m Taylor Swift. Sign me and they said no. Oh my. This, this right here. Now, coincidentally, at the age of how old was she when she got her first record deal? She was 14 and she was at that point when she got that deal, she was the youngest person ever signed to the major songwriting company in Nashville, which is why I like Taylor swift because she pushed through the pain.

How many year if she got signed at age 14. I’m not a math guy, but if he got signed at age 14. Now if you carry the to move over the why. What, how old was she when she was going door to door? Do you remember that? She was 10. Ten, so she’s 10 and then she got a deal. She’s knocking on the door. She’s 10 and she got to deal when she was. How old? 14. How many years? Give me the to get out my protrack graphic calculator. We can take the 14. You minus out the 10 you do a new math or is this for years? For years. Took her four years.

Four years. It’s a lot. That’s a lot of no’s. Jason. We were just talking about this morning in our business coach meeting. It’s uh, we’re, we’re at 5:57 in the morning recording a podcast I just told you we’ve been doing search engine optimization for six years to get to the top for the phrase business conferences and business coach. That’s a crazy thing. How well do you remember how long it took Amazon to make a profit? And this isn’t a pop quiz, this is just more of like a, just trying to get, I want to get your tech, your take on it. As you know, the average man who doesn’t spend your day memorizing random facts that don’t matter. How long do you think it took Amazon to make a profit? Something like nine years. Oh, you when you, when you get omega point. Yes. Okay. So after three years of being in business, how much money had facebook last after three years? That I don’t know, three point six. $3,000,000. Wow.

Fedex, how long did it take Fedex to make a profit? They ship stuff there. Uh, you know, you can set your watch by on the really good guys. They do a great job. I’m gonna say something in the neighborhood of six years, if I’m guessing over 10 years. Good Lord. Could you imagine what it would be like now? How many times did Walt Disney lose it all? Do you think? Three a year. A negative guy who was a twice. Twice. How many times? How many times did, uh, how many times did Henry Ford with cars? I would say a lot. How many times do you think to your a delusional optimist? He lost it five times.

Going back and forth. You’re a polarizing person. Guesses are going from two to five. What are you, what are you doing now? Google. Okay. Google, they started this company called back rub, which is now called Google. I’ll do it. Don’t even know that. Nineteen 96. They started back, rub it years. Nineteen 99 now. So from 1996 times 99, how much profit do you think they had made? Maybe a million dollars just so grounded in delusional optimism. It hadn’t made any money yet. Wow. It all after three years. So the question that, that, that, uh, Mike and a lot of listeners have is how do I, how do I ramp up my sales? And I’m going to give you a quote from Thomas Watson, the former CEO of IBM and Jason, you can look this up and put on the show notes. This is Thomas Watson, the former CEO of IBM. He says, if you want to double your rate of success, you have to double your rate of failure.

If you want to double your rate of success, you have to double your rate of failure. Did you find the quote, because I’m kind of paraphrasing, did you find the actual quote there? It says, if you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. Oh, see, I got it wrong. So let’s say that one more time there. If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. Now again, we don’t have, um, we couldn’t get Chris Farley out on today’s show because he is also a no longer with us. But I had a quote from Chris Farley, I’d like to play the legendary comedian about what will happen if you don’t want to double your rate of failure, because again, he Thomas Watson said, what again, if you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate. Okay, this is what Chris Farley’s says, all the entrepreneurs out there who don’t want to double their failure rate

cancer, probably saying to yourselves, Hey, I’m going to go out and I’m going to get the world by the tail and wrap it around and pull it down and put it in my pocket. Well, I’m here to tell you that you’re probably gonna. Find out as you go out there that you’re not going to amount to Jack Squat.

That’s pretty harsh, but I mean horse would like to pile on. He says,

what? This is so unreasonable to even allow that to happen. You’re waiting for feeling. I haven’t. I rather make a decision what my feeling is.

It’s so easy to say, but hard to do. So you’ve got to push through the rejection. Now another example, are you familiar with this guy named Justin Bieber? They’re adjacent teeth move. Justin bieber loosely at the age of 12. Justin Bieber was, you know, at the age of 12 he was becoming a success, right? Yeah. But people don’t realize that the age of like seven, eight, nine, 10, a young age. This kid would perform on the, on the streets, not like in the ghetto streets. He’s up in Canada. What he would do is he would get on the these, these streets and he would perform his songs in Stratford, Canada. So I’m going to queue up the audio clip of this is Justin Bieber playing on the steps of the Avon Theater in Stratford, Canada. And this is what he did and I’m going to pull it up here and here we go. Let me go. But he’s playing constantly on the streets. Is what Justin Bieber’s doing now. If you. Have you seen these old videos of Justin Bieber? Yeah, I actually saw his biography, so I’ve seen quite a few of them. Oh, well you’re taking the joy right out of this. I’ll say this is, this is, let’s say young Justin beaver here. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll pull it up for the listeners. They can hear this. This is Justin Bieber at the age of nine playing the drums on youtube.

Yeah. Is that right there? I mean that kid is good, excellent at the drums at that age, but he can play many instruments that well and it’s because he just focused on focuses on. If you’re gonna learn a new instrument, would you have to do is you focus on it, you play it and you’re not good at first and you just practice day after day after day and you get better. You get better and you get better and that is how you do it, but in order for you to become super successful with this business that you’re building, I believe you’re going to do it. You got to start off with the cold calls. Now, after you make a little bit of money from the cold calls, Jason, then you can build a snowball. You know the snowball is rolling down the hill. It’s picking up momentum. Then you can take some of that cash.

You’ve made and you can get into trade shows and trade shows. There are trade shows out there that are attended by, like every church camp in America all goes to the. I’m making up the trade show, but there might be like the dead church camp trade show. Yeah, and you do. Then you would buy a booth at that show, usually get like a 10 by 10 booth. You properly train your representatives and now you’re getting in front of all of these church camps at one time, but you got to start off with cold calling. Why do you have to start off with cold calling sometimes as a startup there, Jason? Well, I mean one, you have to find out who your ideal and likely buyers are true. You also need to get comfortable with that rejection and what better way than to do cold calling and it’s less expensive and get rejected.

Cold calling. True. Whereas it trade shows going to set you back 10 or 20 grand to everything Jason said was valid and you’re building up the cash reserves to be able to afford the trade show. The snowball starts very small at the top of the mountain and it picks up momentum as it goes down. Now the picture of the ball, it’s bigger. The ball is now bigger. The snowball is bigger. It’s going down the mountain. That’s a trade show right there. Here we go. There’s a lot of ideal and likely buyers in one place. Now you can get like 100 rejections in a day and like 10 yeses in a day. That’s awesome. Then once you get a little more momentum, now you move on. Now you got the snowball going. You did the cold calls. You have to trade shows you. By the way, you never want to stop the cold calls.

Keep the cold calls going, keep the trade shows going. Now you’re going to get these mass mailers going. Now the mass mailers, Jason Wire, mass mailers, so awesome. How much rejection do you feel when 10,000 people throw away your mailer? Zero, right? It’s awesome. Mass mailers, so you’re not. You’re doing the mass mailer, so let’s repeat. Get the snowball at the top. This is you cold calling. Little snowball, little, little cute. Snowball, acute, snowball rolling down the hill and all of a sudden it’s picking up momentum, picked up momentum over it, over. This is a sound of a snowball. Them a minimum and then and then he didn’t have the trade shows and then I got it. Trade shows going and now you start to do the math faster. People going, oh my gosh, ever match or have a barge and you’re sitting here today because you like an avalanche. You want an avalanche? You’re saying to yourself,

people

around you and say, oh my gosh, where did you come from? You’re on fire. You are feeling, and how in the world did you build this business? You are awesome and you say from a dorm room in Tulsa, Oklahoma. I call it the back of cds. You say, I went door to door to Nashville when I was 10. You see, I was on youtube at the age of nine playing the freaking drums. I was on these steps of the Avon Theater play in my freaking guitar when people thought it was bizarre, but I did not stop. I built that little snowball started getting that momentum. I was cold calling, then I got the trade shows go, and then you have the mailers. Then I took my money and I started doing targeted online ads. Have you ever seen an ad for Harry’s razors, Jason? Yes. Oh Gosh.

And do you see them everywhere now, don’t you? Oh, like everywhere. You’re going to target before? Yeah. That’s actually where I bought my first Harry’s razor. You see seem in target. Do you see them in Walmart? Yep. You see them online? Yeah. They kind of follow me on my. Where did they start? Oh, I don’t know that nobody ever knows. The guys who started Harry’s razors, the cofounder of Harry’s razors. Harry’s razors is also the co founder of Warby Parker. Oh, in these homes. Started with the same system I’m teaching today. That’s how it works. We’re going to actually interview the founder of Warby Parker here. Students going to be exciting, so I’m just. I’m telling you, if you’re out there today and you feel like you’ve got no momentum and you’re sitting there saying, I don’t got any momentum, I need momentum. I’d need momentum.

Unreasonable.

Nobody cares. I care. But nobody else cares, so you can’t you gotta, you gotta find a way to get up that strength to get up that motivation to start that little tiny snowball, to start with the cold calls, then reinvest into the trade shows, then reinvest into the mass mailers and then into those targeting online ads on youtube and facebook, and then all of a sudden the big retailers are wanting to do business with you and you win the game of life. And that is how you scale up sales. And any further ado, three, two, one. Boom. If you learned something today and today’s show is impacted you in a positive way, I would ask you to share today’s podcast with a friend on instagram, twitter, facebook, spotify, itunes, maybe via a homing pigeon, maybe via a smoke signal, maybe via a mass mailer, maybe via an email. Whatever you can do to share today’s show, it would mean the world to me and the entire thrive time show.