Business Podcasts | Why Every Business Fails Without Sales + How to Build the Ultimate Turn-Key Scalable Sales Super System

Audio Transcription

I’m gonna beat all of their competitors prices for I’ll give you the matches for free. How’s that sound? Look good. Let’s sell some mattresses Sales for me, you know, it’s what makes the world go round And it’s my life, you know when I step out onto this showroom floor. It’s my time to shine. It’s my time to nominate This is my Coliseum and I’m the gladiator. So Look out. Hi. Oh, hi. Cameron Coates. Hi. Nice to meet you. You’ll be taking care of Jenny. Mary. Yes. What a great name. That’s beautiful. And you are such a vision. Oh, wow. OK. Oh, Mary. What do I got to do to get you to bed today? You know, really, I just want to serve the people. I want to use my knowledge to better mankind. This is 100% memory from mattress, OK, with a circle knit top. It comes from our King Arthur collection, and we call it Excalibur. Hop on up, Mary. Oh, no. That’s not necessary. A lot of these guys out there, they’re dishonest, you know? But I believe in truth in sales. This is a limited edition, which means it’s a collector’s item, which means that it will appreciate in value. So really think of this mattress as an investment into your financial future. I just love making people smile, you know? If at the end of the day, I’ve made at least one customer smile, then I’ve done my job. I’ve succeeded. I need them to buy something as well, of course, because they don’t pay me for smiles. But I would be rich if they did. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show. But this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you and they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show, starring The Thrivetime Show starring the former U.S. Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zilner. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multimillion dollar businesses. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom and we’ll show you how to get here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re here. We started from the bottom, now we’re on the top. Teaching you the systems to get what we got. Cullen Dixon’s on the hooks, I’ve written the books. He’s bringing some wisdom and the good looks. As the father of five, that’s what I’m about. So if you see my wiving kids, please tell them hi. Alright Thrive Nation, on today’s show we’re going to talk about a topic that I prefer to talk about pretty much exclusively. If I had my way, this is all I would talk about, this is all I would be doing all day, every day, and that is sales. I’m going to play a clip for you in just a minute here, folks, so you can see what it looks like to have a well-organized sales team working for you. And then on part two of today’s show, I’m going to share an interview I did with Jerry Vass, the best-selling author of a book called Soft Selling in a Hard World. And I love selling. Love selling and if you’re listening today, and you have a team of people on your in your company and their sales are less than great This is the show for you if you have a team of people and you say they just are not selling well the leads are Coming in, but they’re just not selling well I’m going to teach you how to build the ultimate sales machine I’m going to teach you ten super moves that you can use to immediately and and dramatically grow your company and increase their sales volume. And if you do this, if you implement these moves, if you implement these moves, you’re gonna have a lot of success. Okay? So move number one, Sean I’m gonna have you read off the move and I’m gonna explain what the move means. Move number one, write a proven call script. If you do not have a call script in place that has been proven to work, your team is not going to have any success. They’re going to say weird stuff. They’re going to say weird stuff. And you’ve worked with a lot of great clients, Sean, as a business consultant over the past five plus years. What percentage of business owners that you’ve worked with had a script in place before you worked with them? None of them had it written down, and I’ve actually never had one of them that had anything consistent being said either before we worked with them. Repeat that again. Well, never have there ever been a single client that I’ve worked with that has had what they’re supposed to say on the phone through their sales funnel actually written down. And so because of that, when we start listening to calls, I’ve never yet had a consistent… It’s an abomination. Yeah. It’s an abomination. So you’ve got to have a pre-written call script. Now move number two, Sean. You gotta have the call recording for quality control and provide a manager to provide real-time feedback on those calls. Every single day the calls are recorded. We use a service called ClarityVoice.com ClarityVoice.com but in our office, you know, the phones ring all the time. People are requesting tickets to come to a conference and so when they request a ticket to come to a business conference, I want to know what our people are actually saying to people on the phone. I want to know that. Oh yeah. I want to know. I want to know. I want to know what they’re being… That way I can give them feedback on what they can say, how they can improve their sales, give them positive reinforcement, tell them what they can do better. You got to have the call recording. If you don’t have the call recording in place, that would be like being an NFL football coach and not watching game film, or even watching the game. Maybe like being an NFL coach and you go, guys, here’s the playbook. I’m going to go over to Denny’s. They’ve got a special going on today. I’ll be there getting my grand slam. I’ll see you guys after the game. Then you come back the next week and go, you lost? Are you kidding me? I gave you the playbook. You also have to have real-time in-person coaching or training provided to your salespeople. So I, every single day, all day, every day, and I love doing it, I make sure that I’m giving my team feedback on what they could do better. And I have a manager who that’s their job, to give them feedback throughout the day, but I also do that. And if I did not do that, and if the calls were not recorded what would happen, Sean? Well, even if the script is written and you’re not recording the calls, you’re very quickly going to realize that nobody is actually going to stick to that script in any way, shape, or form. I love sales. Unless it’s A, written down, and B, there’s a manager making sure that that happens. Have I told you I love sales? Yes. I love sales. I love it. I love sales. I love it. A lot of people are scared of sales, but it’s really actually a pretty tried and true thing. There’s proven systems and steps to make sales not some ethereal, mystical thing that only certain people can do, but it can make it to where somebody who’s not all that intelligent and doesn’t know much about your service is able to actually help you sell it. My top sales guy back in the day with one of my companies called epicphotos.com, I no longer own that company, but he knew nothing about photography and he was the top photography sales guy because he just followed the script. It works! Okay, so now the next move number three is you gotta install a call quota. Oh yeah. You have to make sure that the people on your team are adhering to a set number of calls they have to make every day. Now yesterday I was asking James to keep track of his calls to totals. I do it every day, but I just asked him yesterday, how many calls did you make? He’s averaging 300 phone calls a day. Every single day. I love that. Oh yeah. Now why is it that somebody would go to thrivetimeshow.com and fill out the form. We have a guy named Chad right now. Chad, if you’re listening right now, this is, this goes out to Chad. There’s an actual guy named Chad right now who has filled out the form to attend the workshop and we’ve probably called this bro 50 times. And he emails in, hey I really want to attend the conference, how do I get a ticket? And we’re calling him, emailing him, I’m not kidding, it’s probably 50 contacts deep between call, text, and email. That’s impressive. Because he just won’t pick up the phone. But a lot of our long time great clients were people that they had to call them 10 times or more. Did you know that the average person that requests a haircut at Elephant in the Room, our haircut chain, has to be called an average of six times before they pick up the phone and schedule that haircut? I did know that. Yeah, because when I’m working with my clients, until I tell them that, that’s a very foreign thought. It’s almost like, Clay, they think that by calling somebody that many times, they’re somehow doing them a disservice, even though the person reached out for information. So I don’t really get it, but a lot of people are hesitant with that. And if you just tell your team, look, I’m grading you on how many times you’ve reached out to them, not on getting a hold of them. I need to get a hold of them, but I want you to reach out at least six times every day. That might wreck your head, but please just do it. They’ll get a hold of a whole lot more people, and your leads will close faster. Holy cow! Oh, incredible! I think it’s very important that we understand this idea that if you call your leads until they cry buy or die, that’s the attitude you have to have. Cry being, stop calling me, I’m getting like 50 times, my name’s Chad and you’ve called me 50 times and texted me 100 times, what’s the deal? Oh, hey Chad, how are you doing? I’m just tired of this. Why do you keep calling me? What’s crazy about this guy Chad right now is Chad claims that he listens to our show every day and he’s super excited to come to our conference. And we’ve called this guy so many times he won’t pick up the phone. This just in, Chad, reach out to us. I love sales so much that I tell people if you want to request a ticket, you can text me directly at 918-851-0102. That’s the move, Chad. If you’re listening right now, just do that. Make the connection! Just call us! Chad, all you have to do is just text me. 918-851-0102. Okay! Now you’ve got to track your numbers. The move number four, you’ve got to track your numbers. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You track your numbers. You have to track your numbers. I’m just being very clear with you. Being very clear with you. Yesterday, I was looking at the numbers, we got one person on the team who sold like 27 tickets in a workshop. And then somebody else sold four. And they’re in the exact same office, called the exact same quality of leads. But if you don’t track, you don’t know who needs to improve, you don’t know who’s doing well, you just… Holy cow! You’re screwed. Yeah. You gotta track. But what percentage of people, business owners that you know, track before they met you? They track, Clay, by opening up their bank account and going, do I have money? It’s ridiculous. That’s what they do. Total jackass, for the highest order. Okay, we continue now. Now, you’ve got to move number five, you have to create pre-written text messages. Move number six, you’ve got to create pre-written email messages. Move number seven, what? Move number five, you have to create pre-written text messages. Move number six, create pre-written email messages. You’ve got to pre-write, pre-script out, pre-write these email and text messages that your team are sending out because in today’s culture, people reach out to you on your website or via email or via text or whatever, and you have to call, text, and email these people, and you want to make sure that the text messages that your team are sending out are pre-written and the emails are pre-written, because if not, when you see what your team will send, prospects, oh no. It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue. It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking. It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit drinking. It’s like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines. Well, you see the kind of stuff that’s… I didn’t realize they were doing amphetamines back then, but that’s kind of like the 50s. Well, I mean… That’s the movie Airplane, by the way. Okay. But I’m just saying, it’s a thing. It’s a thing where people… People, if you don’t give them a pre-written script of what the text or email needs to say, they will send crazy stuff out to your ideal and likely buyers. Yeah, or they just won’t send anything at all and you’ll have a lower rate of people showing up for your appointments and whatnot. You’ve got to have a pre-written text or email. Okay. Now, again, on part two of today’s show, I’m going to share with you guys an interview I did with Jerry Vass. He’s phenomenal. Jerry Vass, he wrote the book called Soft Selling in a Hard World. I’m also going to share with you footage of the call center of a company I built back in the day called DJConnection.com running at full speed. The thing is, I love sales. Have I talked about how much I love sales? Have I mentioned that yet? Once or twice. I love sales. Seriously, on a good Saturday, if you said, hey, Saturday, weather’s great outside, you could be anywhere in the world. Where would you be? I’d say, well, we’re in a call center. I love sales. Oh, man. Sales is incredible. It’s so fun. You can make a lot of money when you just know the moves. I’ve done it in the dog training business. I’ve done it in the haircut business. I’ve done it in the carpet cleaning business. I’ve done it in the outdoor living business. I’ve done it in the indoor living business. I’ve done it in the home remodeling business, done it in the home flipping business, I’ve done it in the new home selling business, I’ve done it in every business. I’ve done it in the legal business, done it in the dentistry business. And I just love sales. It’s so good. And some people are so afraid of it. Yep, and that’s why move number seven is so important. Move number seven, you must conduct the group interview every week now. So it says what’s the group interview a long story? sure, we have entire shows about this, but every Wednesday at 530 I interview people that applied to work here and just so you see another numbers about 75 people a week say I am going to come to the interview Wednesday at 530 Of that 75 about 45 show up of that 45 that show up maybe 15 of them mentally show up, another 15 show up, they’re not mentally here, another 15 show up incredibly late. The interview is at 5.30, they might show up at 6.22 just to see what happens. I’m serious. Every week. Every week. So this week we have three great people that I think are going to be great members of the team. And we have other tasks we do. photographers, web developers, search engine optimizers, remodelers, people on payroll, haircut people, with the companies I’ve partnered with, we have dog trainers. I mean, there’s so many different jobs we have, but none of that matters if you can’t sell anything. True. Yeah. Why will everything fail? Why does everything fail without sales? Everything fails without sales. Why, Sean? Cash is the lifeblood of the business. You have to have money to run the company, and if you don’t, then you can’t pay for things. If you’re not selling, you won’t have any money, so you won’t be able to pay for things. That’s actually how most businesses fail, is they run out of money. sales like a burning, hot, crazy, maniacal focus and passion as a startup and then just never lose that. Hey, real quick, I’m not going to argue with you on this show, but I want to just call into question something you just said. Okay. It creates a little conflict and the listeners love it. They love the conflict. That’s why they watch The View. The conflict? No, they do. They want to see one guy who’s like, going to go on ESPN and argue the other side. Skip Bayless guy. It’s like, you know, I mean, it’s like one team is 13 and three going against the team that’s, you know, they ended the year seven and nine. Somehow they’re in the playoffs together and they want to, they want to find some talking head to come on and go. The seven and nine team is the underdogs. They’re going to win. You’re an idiot for thinking that. And then the guy who was the guy who’s advocating for the team that’s 13-3 to win, he’s like, I think you’re clearly wrong here. And the other guy’s like, no, you’re an idiot! And then they want him to fight, and then they go to commercial. That’s what they do. This just in. But I’m not doing that for them, I’m just telling you. I think your businesses fail, and it’s not because you run out of money, you run out of money because your business failed. That’s what it is. At the end of the day, what is a business? It’s a business is you sell something low, you buy something low, you sell it high. You buy something low, you sell it high. You’re solving a problem for people at a profit. And if you have a business that doesn’t have any money, you’re done. You’re not in business. It’s just like a weird-ass hobby or something that you’re doing that’s not profitable. It’s just like a weird passion project. It’s not a business. And so I’m not saying you’re incorrect. I just want to make sure we get this idea. I think it’s like if you see a dead person at the funeral and you’re like, the reason why he died is because he’s not living. Oh, okay, thank you. I’m just saying, without sales, your business will fail. That’s just the thing. Oh yeah. That’s just how it is. People, they just, why did his business fail? He didn’t sell anything! But they were selling a lot of things. Not at a profit! Oh, okay. So you’ve got to sell something at a profit. I agree with you. I just wanted to hammer home that idea. Now, move number seven. You’ve got to conduct that group interview. We talked about that. Every single week. Every week. Every week. Every week. I feel like you’re saying every week. There’s a lot of stress here. A lot of pressure here. Every week? That’s my birthday. Feel it. It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse. It goes up and down and around. Circular, circle with the music, the flow, all good things. You have to do the group interview every week. A lot of pressure. You’ve got to rise above it. You’ve got to harness in the good energy. Block out the bad. Harness, energy, block, bad. Feel the flow, happy. Feel it. It’s circular. It’s like a carousel. You pay the quarter, you get on the horse, it goes up and down, round and round. It’s circular. It keeps turning. Circle with the music, the flow, all good things. All good things. Summer. Summer. A lot of pressure. Fall. You’ve got to rise above it. Summer. Fall. Good energy. Spring. Block out the bad. Summer. Fall. Energy. Block bad. Feel the flow. Group interview. Every week. It’s circular. You get on the horse, it goes up and down and around in a circular circle with the music, the flow, all good things. It’s what we do. Every week! It’s why we don’t have a problem with people who don’t stick to the script. Ever! It’s why we don’t have a problem with people who don’t call the leads that much, because they should. You know what’s so crazy about this show? We’ll have millions of listeners that listen to this show, but almost no one who works here ever listens. Because they’re not interested in how to become successful. So I have people that work in my companies that have no interest at all. They are literally 10 to 15 feet away from a person that knows how to make millions of dollars and they never, ever, ever ask how to become successful, nor do they ever listen to the show. So I’m not going to tell people the date I recorded this show, but I’m just going to give you an example. I’m looking out my window in the studio here, and we’ve got a lady on our team who her job is to call our clients. She calls the former clients of my clients. So one of my clients is in the medical space, right? Her job is to call their former patients and to ask them for objective reviews. Her job is to call one of my clients in the fitness space. Her job is to call his active clients and get reviews. Another client of mine, home building space, she calls his clients to get reviews. And she is awful at the job. So she gets paid $12 an hour, which is probably too much, plus every time she gets a review she gets $5. I have a young guy by the name of Danimal, who just left to go to college, his name is Dan, I call him Danimal. Danimal would get 20 reviews in a day. He’s making $100 of commission plus he’s making $96. That dude, 18 years old, making $200 a day doing this job. This person doesn’t ever get a review. Ever. She’s just awful. And then she says, well, I just, I don’t like it. It doesn’t matter if you like it. You’re hired to do this job. job, and I can freely state this, and she will not ever come up to me and say, were you talking about me on the show? Because she doesn’t listen to the show, ever. I could name them by names on the show, and they would never know, because they don’t listen to the show, because they have no curiosity about how to have success. Now, why does that matter to our listeners? Because if you have a business, and you’re like, guys, the key to us improving sales is I want you guys to sit down and read The Ultimate Sales Machine and Soft Selling in a Hard World and How to Win Friends and Influence People, they’re not going to read it. If you give your whole staff a book to read, Sean, why are they not going to read it? That would require them to spend their own personal time, which they’re not being paid for. Which they’re not going to do. And they don’t care. Even if they were being paid, they would read the book and not know what it was about. Why? Well, basically, when I was in school, I was a terrible student, but I did the same thing with AR, accelerated reading. I wouldn’t read the book. I would go get the cliff notes, and then I would just take the test and forget everything in the book. Let’s just be real, folks. That’s what it is. Yeah. That’s what it is. I mean, let’s be real. Let’s be real. Women, Facebook, Instagram, women, women on Instagram, Facebook, they’re going to put a filter on that thing. Oh, every time. Every time. And you meet her in person and you’re like, Sharon? Because it doesn’t look like Sharon? And Sharon found the best photo of her from like her junior year of volleyball in high school, and she’s now 54, and that’s the head shot. Because people are going to fake that mess. People in your call center are going to fake those numbers. People are going to say, I did my best. I read the book. It’s awesome. No, I’m giving you the 10 moves you need to use to grow a super successful company. So now, move number eight, you’ve got to create a universal pricing list. Everybody on your team needs to know what you’re charging for the products and services you’re selling. You have to have a universal pricing list. Move number nine, you have to create a weekly training meeting. Every single week, we train our people at the same time every week. You know why? Because I don’t have to tell the team, hey guys, let’s try to get together this week. No, it’s every Tuesday at 7am, that’s when we’re doing sales training. Yes, and it’s important to mention that it’s every Tuesday. Every Tuesday? Because he did say weekly. A lot of pressure. You’ve got to rise above it. There’s a lot of circular things going on with this. Group interview, every week. Sales meeting, every week. Sales meeting is when, Sean? It’s every week. Group interview is when? Every week on Wednesday. Every week? Every week. Every week. Every single week. It seems like it’s the same thing over and over. It is the same thing over and over. People hate that. I don’t know why. I love it. It makes money. It does make money. It blows my mind. Okay. Move number nine, you’ve got to create that weekly training meeting. And then move number ten, final move, and then we’ll get into Jerry Bass, soft selling in a hard world. And by the way, I’m going to share with you guys footage in just a second of me running a call center at one of my companies called DJ Connection back in the day. And I love that business. And you know the average person was making 300 calls a day at that business? That doesn’t surprise me. I love 300 calls a day. I don’t understand what kind of person that doesn’t want to make calls all day. I don’t get it. It’s so fun. You make calls, you make more money. You make more money, you make more calls. Steve, hop on mic three. You like making calls. You’re a mortgage guy, Steve. You like making calls, right? Yeah, I mean you have to. SteveCurrington.com, that’s the website. You sell mortgages, by the way. You also have multiple Lamborghinis and you have a private plane. Rumor has it you had to exchange money in exchange for the goods and services you want, right? Yep. And so you have to sell mortgages, am I correct? Yeah, I have to. I have to pick up the phone and make a lot of calls all day long, every day, and I have since I was about 19. You like it though. Yeah. Bro, you like it. Yeah. I like it. I mean, you know what? It sucks if you don’t because then you don’t have any money. Put that on a shirt, folks. That’s stevecurrington.com. He just happened to be in the studio. I thought we should get here from him. Final move is you got to create a transparent commission structure for your team. So Steve, it’s stevecurrington.com. If anybody goes there, you provide mortgages in all 50 states. If anybody goes there right now to apply for a mortgage, this just in, you make a commission to do that. Yep. If you didn’t know what the commission was that you were going to make, and it was kind of a murky, weird, sort of nebulous number, how motivated would you be to sell mortgages? I wouldn’t be motivated. I would kill whoever that was that was murky, and I would take their job. Kill them in a metaphorical kind of way. Yeah, exactly. I would whack them, Clay. Whack them all! Whack them all. But seriously. Yeah, you’ve got to know what you’re going to make every time you sell something, which is what motivates you to pick up the phone to make the call to sell something, so that you get the payoff at the end. Otherwise, you know, you get to the end of Rainbow and there’s no gold there. It kind of stinks, right? Womp womp. You know, this is a quote. I know you said payoff. You didn’t say playoffs. Right. But it works here, okay? Listen to this. Listen to this audio. Playoffs? Don’t talk about it. Playoffs? You kidding me? Playoffs? I just hope we can win a game. This is a message to Coach Jim Mora back in the day. And reporters asking him about his team. The playoffs? They’re asking him, sir, what are your plans for the playoffs? How do you guys think you’ll do in the playoffs this year? And he’s like, playoffs? Playoffs? You’re talking about playoffs? I just hope we win a game. I’m just trying to win game one. I’m not worried about playoffs. So I just want to be clear though, is all the business owners are talking about payoffs. Payoffs? I’m just trying to get you to make a phone call. Payoffs? You’re talking about payoffs? I’m just being real. Yesterday, James and Devin and the team, they each made about 300 phone calls each. Guess what? They each sold about 30 tickets to a conference. These are inbound leads to sell 30 conference tickets? Well, you know, people sign up for things and then they wake up the next day and wonder why or 30 seconds later wonder why. Whose pants am I wearing? Yeah, sometimes. Sometimes, you know, we’ve gone through a time, I would say like the Trump era when things were good, right? Rates were low, people had money, people were buying things, everything was great. And now, they’re not so great. And you know what it means? It means that you actually have to sell. And that’s the thing. You got to work that thing. You actually have to sell. You can’t just go lay down. Everybody was a lay down from 2016 to 2020, basically, right? And now, all of these salespeople that were just getting these lay down sells, they’re now having to work and they’re actually having to sell and they can’t because they suck and it sucks to suck. Now, this is one thing and I’ll leave you with this little idea. This is an example of how you can really sell right now with high interest rates. You ready for this, Sean? Oh, yeah. I’m going to pretend that I’m a mortgage guy. Sean, good news, interest rates are at an all-time high. More people are interested than ever. I don’t know if that’s what that means. More people are interested than ever. The interest rates are at an all-time high. That’s the good news. Also, think about it. You’re going to love that house because you’re going to be paying a lot for it. Think about it. Right. You treasure what you measure and you’re going to be paying a lot. Does that work, Steve? It does work in some situations like when people are getting divorced. The rate is double, but you’re getting rid of her. There you go. Sign right here. Thank you. Have a good day. I mean, you’ve got to… I mean it, though. You have to learn sales. Yeah, you do. You have to learn sales. Again, Soft Selling in a Hard World by Jerry Vass is an incredible book that everyone should read. I don’t know if you will read it, but you should read it. We went over the 10 moves you need to use to build the ultimate sales machine. In part two of today’s show, we’re going to introduce or play an audio with the late, great Jerry Vass, where I interviewed him about his best-selling book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. And if you’re out there today and you want to attend one of our in-person Thrive Time Show workshops, just go to thrivetimeshow.com. You’ll see thousands of testimonials and you can request tickets there to attend the in-person Thrive Time Show workshops. If you’re looking for a mortgage in all 50 states, go to stevecurrington.com. Boom. And if you’re somebody out there that’s, you know, concerned the interest rates went up, that’s right. The interest rates have gone up. People are more interested than ever right now, Steve. People are more interested. Yes. The interest rates have gone up. Think about this, Clay. Because rates are so high, you have the opportunity to refinance later. Oh! You know what I mean? Oh! So that means you can talk to me now, and you can talk to me in like two years. And it’s more memorable, too. And it’s more memorable, too, right? Yeah, and we’re doing Lamborghini rides only for customers. So think about how much money you’re going to save if you would have had to buy a Lamborghini just for your kid to get a ride, versus do a mortgage, maybe double your interest rate, but you get to spread that out over time and you get to refinance. Steve, there are people, as we wrap up, there are people that do vacations that are terrible. And they’ll go, yeah, we made memories. Pretty much everyone I know who’s been to Disney World is like, it was the surface of the sun and we sweat the whole time. We made memories. Well, one way to make memories is to spend a lot of money on that mortgage. There you go. I mean, that’s a memorable thing. You won’t forget it. You won’t forget it. Right? That’s right. Isn’t that amazing? Yep. Okay, well that’s it. By the way, if you’re thinking about proposing to her, do it on the day the mortgage is due. There you go. So you’ll never forget that. Yay! That’s awesome. Okay, over at SteveCarrington.com. That’s Shawn Loman. He’s a beautiful man. And again, folks, get those tickets at Thrivetimeshow.com. I would definitely recommend that second or that third package. Those packages are regularly $800 and $900. However, with the price threshold this week, the price of actually $600 or $700, I think that’s a good deal. Nice little buzz in the room. Nice little buzz in the room. It’s getting pretty crazy now. I black out from like 3 to 9, and then at 9 o’clock I wake up and I’m like, I’m gonna put a bunch of money on my desk and I’m gonna remind myself that we’re working. It’s a lot of fun. It’s hard to sort. Do you just use the money to heat your home? You don’t know what to do with all the extra money? That’s one way to do it, but a lot of times, you know, we just want to make sure that it gets to the right person. Makes sense. Two men. 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Eight kids. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. Thrive Nation, there are very few legal ways to get rich quick. Your chance of finding one of those opportunities is very, very slim, or about twice the odds of getting hurt in a commercial plane crash, twice. Now, the bright side is that getting rich slowly is actually fun and will yield you thousands of adventures in the process. And on today’s show, we are interviewing a guy by the name of Jerry Vass, who wrote a book called Soft Selling in a Hard World, where he explains in great detail that there are only three ways to really make exceptional money as an entrepreneur. One, you got to work in a place where no one else wants to be. I had a buddy of mine years ago that was an Alaskan fisherman, fishing in Alaska. Sounds like a lot of fun. No it’s not. I had one of our employees years ago that worked on an oil rig out there in the Gulf of Mexico. Rumor has it we have a couple podcast subscribers located in the Gulf of Mexico who listen to each and every show. And I know you guys probably don’t enjoy the time away from your family and living on a on a floating city that smells like oil, but you get paid well, right? The second way to get rich is you can perform work that no one else wants to do Sales no one seems to want to do sales. I like doing sales, but a lot of people fear sales. They’re scared of sales They just don’t know how to sell and when you can’t sell your business will just go to hell and the third the third way To get rich is to do work that no one else can do well Steph Curry can do that and he’s pretty great at it. I mean Oprah, I don’t know how many people could do what Oprah does. Serena Williams, Venus Williams, I mean there’s a lot of people out there that are LeBron James that can do things that I frankly can’t do and that’s why I like to pay people with that kind of skill. I like to watch them. I like to vote with my dollars and say, yeah, Brad Pitt, you’re a better actor than me, Mr. Tom Hanks. You’re better than me. I like to pay to watch your movies.” So, again, the three ways to get rich are you can work in a place where no one else wants to be, you could do work that no one else wants to do, or you could perform work nobody else can do. And it’s really the last two conditions for making extraordinary money that we’re going to explore on today’s show. You see, learning to sell softly isn’t only about money, it’s about enjoying the process of sales. This little manual called Soft Selling in a Hard World is all about reality. It’s about a survival guide for the strange mastering of persuasion. It’s kind of a strange road to learning how to master persuasion. It shows you the mechanics. Soft selling in a hard world teaches you the mechanics needed to sell well. That’s what the book is about. The book is designed to teach you the specific tactics, not the strategy, to walk you through the step-by-step process that you need to take. And the whole system, what’s great about it, is you can learn the whole system and implement the system and write all the scripts and utilize the system in a way where other people can do what you can do. You can make yourself repeatable and duplicatable. So you can create not just a job, but you can create a thriving business that can create both time freedom and financial freedom for you. My friend, selling is the highest paid profession in the world. I mean, our leaders in politics, business, and research, and the arts, they’re all great salespeople. It’s just a lot of times you don’t realize that they’re selling. I mean you see presidential candidates, heads of companies, I mean Steve Jobs was legendary for his annual presentations. Warren Buffett, you don’t think of Joel Osteen as selling but he’s trying to convince you to become a Christian. He’s trying to share with you the love of Christ. You might not think of Oprah as a salesperson but she’s trying to convince you to tune in and watch the show again. You might not think about President Obama as a salesperson, but he’s trying to get you to vote for him. He’s trying to get you to vote for his ideology. So if you’ve ever struggled to sell well, this show is for you. Or if you’re very good at sales, but you’ve ever struggled to teach a team of people with no experience to sell. That’s where the magic is. Can you teach an army of people to sell well? If you’ve ever struggled with learning how to personally sell or how to teach an army of people to sell, you are gonna absolutely love today’s show as I interview a great man, a wonderful friend of the show, Jerry Vass. Jerry Vass at the age of 83 is now retired, enjoying the high life there, living in Florida, enjoying his home in Jacksonville and the fruits of his efforts. But he decided to come on to the show, my friend Jerry Bass decided to come on to the show and to share with us the answers to so many questions that I had as a result of reading his book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. If you don’t have the book, get it today. Get out a pen and pad. You’ve got to get a piece of paper. This is a show where you’ve got to take a lot of notes. And I would encourage you to get soft selling in a hard world today. With any further ado, my exclusive interview with Jerry Vass. Also, just a quick disclaimer. I apologize for the audio quality of this audio only interview, but his phone was kinda cutting out a little bit. We tried to edit it the best that we could. And so with any further ado, here’s Jerry Vass. All right, Thrive Nation, welcome back to another great conversation. On the Thrive Time show today, Chuck, I could not be more excited to have the man that I would consider the godfather of systemic sales. You see, back in the day, Eric, I started working in the world of commercial real estate. One of my clients wanted to go into commercial real estate, and before we exited Fears and Clark, we actually had the commercial real estate listings for one-third of downtown Tulsa. That’s roughly 33%. And do you know, do you know what sales book we used to build our scripts, our systems, our process, the entire system that we used at Fears and Clark when representing Canbar Properties and roughly one-third of downtown Tulsa. Do you know what system, what book we read, Chuck? What book was it, Clay? Soft Selling in a Hard World by you, Mr. Vass. How are you, sir? I’m perfect, thank you very much. And I want to tell you I’m flattered by all of this. I’m not used to doing this anymore because I’ve been out of the training business for 10 years because I had old and my mind went, took a vacation. So, that was the best kick. Well, I appreciate you, and you are much sharper than I am. I aspire to be half as sharp as you think you once were. Your book is amazing, the book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. In that book, Jerry, you wrote, if you aren’t selling up to your potential, you probably don’t understand that selling is a game. Most people don’t. Those who do make 85% of the money become executives or run their own successful businesses. This book is about fulfilling your potential without resorting to motivational and inspirational beliefs. As in sports, you find that certain mechanical moves need to be mastered before your inspiration or genius can shine. Like a dog, a dog can be inspired to chase a car But doesn’t know what to do with the car once it’s caught it This knowledge is about what what you do when you catch the car that thin Slice of face-to-face time when the buyer We with the buyer when persuasion really occurs Jerry I’d love for you to expound on this and I just that’s such a beautiful excerpt from your book I’d love to get your thoughts on it. Surely. Well, I use the word game in the sense of a professional sport. And just as any professional sport, one has to understand the game, develop and polish the skills needed, and have a plan for the big contest. In selling, that translates to getting your story together, getting your tools ready, and practicing your delivery. Then putting it all together under pressure and from a perspective of a client. You may hear someone say, you know, if my job doesn’t work out, I can always sell. You never hear them say, if my job doesn’t work out, I can always be an NFL quarterback. Right. Right. Right, right. And I think the preparation that you teach in your book is what allowed me to be successful. Because, Jerry, when I was sitting down meeting with somebody about listing their commercial real estate, they would ask me directly, how many other listings do you have? And I would tell them, we have this many listings. And they would say, what makes you different than the competition? And I had it all on a one sheet. I had all my sales presentations. I had all my testimonials, all my statistics. I had a system for it. I had incorporated all seven of your selling moves, and it helped me be proactive so that I could lead the conversation, build rapport with the buyer, find their needs, deliver benefits supported by facts, and close deals. Jerry, in your book, Soft Selling in a Hard World, you wrote that sales is a profession identified with the worst of its practitioners. On behalf of that group, I apologize for anybody who I did a Presentation on years ago not the best it happens because they sell so well The public doesn’t identify those that are at the top of the cultural heap the politicians the movie stars the talk show hosts the televangelists and the business leaders the world doesn’t view these people as salespeople as Outstanding salespeople. They’re rarely caught practicing the selling trade. The best of them are so good that people simply like their quote-unquote personalities because people easily confuse skill with personality. When you study the best you find that they make many mechanical selling moves right. Is this due to practice or coincidence? Natural talent or learned response? Only they know for sure how much is talent and how much is learned. The results are the same. They convince, move ideas, create change, and solve problems. We love them for it, and we reward them with the best our culture offers, fame, fortune, cool clothes, and a big house. Jerry, share with us about what great selling is and what bad selling looks like. Well, great selling is problem solving, pure and simple. You find the buyer’s real problem and working with the buyer to solve it. You work together. To do that, you have to ask intelligent questions and listen intently. Bad selling is explaining well what you do from the client’s point of view. As in any activity, when someone is really good at what they do, it looks easy, even effortless. It’s transparent. Whether it’s running a podcast, playing tennis, skiing We all think we can do that. I can do that. Until we try and learn how difficult it is. The one thing, Eric, that happened to us years ago is we were approached, Jerry, by the Scripps Radio Network. They produce HGTV, the travel channel, and they said, Clay, we’d like to have you produce a show that we’re going to air in various markets throughout the United States. Now I had heard a lot of Rush Limbaugh in my life, a lot of Glenn Beck, a lot of Tim Ferris, a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk, a lot of the big names, and I have been a production person. I ran an entertainment company, so I’ve done a lot of audio production. And I realized going into it how hard it was going to be because I’ve been up close to it. But I can’t tell you how many people have listened to our podcast and have told me that they tried to produce a daily podcast for about four days in a row. Maybe. And they ran out of things to think about or talk about because they weren’t aware of the level of preparation needed. So I think it’s really hard when you don’t know. And that’s what I love about your book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. Everybody needs to own a copy of it because you break down the science of how to sit down with the prospect and build rapport and it’s very specific about what questions to ask You break down how to listen intently Then you explain how to find their problems how to find their needs Then you you teach how to solve the problems how to support it by facts The book is so linear and it breaks it down where I think the world looks at people who are great at sales and says That’s probably natural natural talent, but it’s not natural, it’s a system. And Jerry, we work with hundreds of business owners all over this great country, and we often find that many of them seem scared of making sales calls. What would you say to somebody out there listening right now, who is an entrepreneur or who wants to be, who’s afraid of picking up the phone and making sales calls? Well, I have told them often when I sit down with management, I say, look, you have a right to be scared because poor selling skills down the line are a message to your market. It’s your message to the market. It is a waste of your money and you trash the market as you go. No business and no person likes rejection. The real problem is that all salespeople, and I stress all, I include owners and managers here can see the upside of every possible transaction. Quote, this could mean $10,000 to my company. And they also sense the downside, no sale, wasted time, expense, and they don’t have the skills they need to control the downside and weight the transaction in their favor. Most of the time, they don’t even know such skills exist. And they often confuse personal magnetism with selling skills and a signed contract with being liked. Neither of those is true. What is true is that buyers would buy from a donkey if he could solve their problem. Chuck, that’s why I’ve done so well. People are buying from the donkey. Yeah, we’ll use that word. That’s a good word to use. Not the other one. Chuck, come on. Seriously. Only I can self-deprecate myself. That’s you deprecating on me. That’s just mean, isn’t it? In your mind, Jerry, why does it seem like so many business owners are scared of rejection when it comes to sales? That fear, the fear of the word no so much. Why? Because the real process is unknown to them. They’re walking into a situation thinking, I have a good product, but they don’t know one thing about the client personally and very little about the client’s business. So what would you say to a business owner, I see this all the time, they want to delegate their sales to an employee without actually using the script themselves first. Like they want to delegate the sales process to an employee when they personally have not used the system and or created a system. The owner wants to delegate their sales to an employee without them actually first creating and using the proven systems. What would you say? Well, not to be cute, but you know I’ve run up against this quite often. I just say, �Look, you�re an idiot.� Because if you owned a major sports team, you wouldn�t put a player on the field just because you liked him or her. You�d insist on training and practice and lots of it. Managing salespeople is one of the most difficult aspects of running a business. I mean, I�ve been in business since I was 17 years old. I�m now 83, so you can count it up. Partly because salespeople take their cue from management and many managers are not themselves trained. We’ve often trained salespeople where the managers would not come into the room with them and so the salespeople ended up knowing more about sales than the managers did, which caused conflicts in sales because the people are going, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. And the manager is going, no, this is what we’re going to do. The more years involved they are with their product and service, the shallower the presentation becomes. The senior sales person is often the worst person to teach others down the line. They’re often product-oriented, make a few new calls, and sell through their old connections. So they don’t like being told they don’t know what they’re doing. Business has changed now and businesses that keep on selling the same way will eventually fall behind. You know Jerry in Soft Selling in a Hard World you wrote a statement that blew my mind the first time I read it and I just kept reading it again and again. It says, there are only three ways to make exceptional money. To work in a place nobody wants to be, that’s one. To work in a place where nobody wants to be, that’s one. If you’re writing this down, Thrive Nation. To work in a place where nobody wants to be. Two, to perform work nobody else wants to do. Or three, to do work that nobody else can do. So as we’re kind of thinking about that, uh, I DJ’d hell gigs at the Holiday Inn Select, Jerry. I was a disc jockey. Seven days a week at the Holiday Inn Select for impersonators. So one, I was doing work in a place no one wanted to do it. Two, I was doing work that nobody else wanted to do because no one else wanted to be a DJ seven nights a week for impersonators who pretended to be Neil Diamond and Michael Jackson. And then three, I did work that nobody else could do because who knows how to host four shows in a row that are exactly the same, saying exactly the same jokes and pretending like you care while bringing the heat. Every single time, Jerry, people would pour in, I’d say, folks, welcome to the Incredible Holiday and Select, you guys are in for a treat. We’ve got Neil Diamond in the flesh! And everyone’s going, woo! And I had to tee it up every time, I was like his Ed McMahon. I mean, so, it’s so true, that is such a true statement. So I ask you Thrive Nation, how are you going to get rich? Now you have to perform work that no one else wants to do, to perform work no one else can do, or to work at a place nobody else wants to be. Jerry, talk to us about the importance of facing the reality that these are the only three ways to get rich, unless you’re a unicorn example. Yes, or a drug dealer. Yeah. Or a liquor distributor or something. These are financial conditions we all cope with daily. This book is about dealing with the second and third ways of doing what no one else wants to do and what no one else can do. As you have said, people are scared of selling, and many don’t have the skills to close deals. Learning to sell well allows you to bravely meet both of those conditions where you both want to and can do. Jerry, I love when you write in your book, you say, this book is about mechanics. I’ll preach it. It is designed from the street up tactics, not strategy. You won’t find any magic here, there is none. There’s no underlying motivation or belief. Here’s my favorite part. It says, it isn’t about something larger than yourself. You don’t have to believe in it to make it pay. You don’t even have to believe in yourself. You just have to use mechanics. Jerry, I want to pile on there, Chuck, because when I was selling commercial real estate, I didn’t care about commercial real estate. I would say the vast majority of the business ventures that I’m involved in right now are in industries and things that I am 100% dispassionate about. But my friend, why is great selling really just about mastering the mechanics of sales? Well, done well. Selling is a profession, and learning a profession isn’t something that happens naturally or in a vacuum. It takes an awareness of errors and learning from those errors and correcting the errors and in doing so, you eventually learn the profession. Persuasion as a profession is no different. It requires attention, troubleshooting, and practice. Jerry, I think that it seems so simple. You’re almost like, is that it? Is that it? No, but listen, it’s not Thrive Nation, it’s not a one-time event, it’s a process. And so, Chuck, we have our sales meetings every single week at Thrive, every Tuesday, Jerry. Because of you and your book, Jerry, you’ve caused this problem. We train our team every single week, and in that meeting, we record the calls, and we play back the calls of actual sales presentations. We watch actual videos. Yeah, and while reading the script at the same time. And while the actual salespeople, Jerry, are in the room. So the sales people actually get to watch themselves physically presenting on video and on audio every single week. And we do it every week. Jerry, for somebody out there that wants to do sales training like one time, why does it require ongoing training? Could you share that? Why does sales require ongoing practice? For the same reason that football players have to practice every Saturday and several times during the week in order to stay sharp, there are only so many responses that are available to the buyer, both in role plays and in reality. And when you hear them enough times, you go, I know what to do with this. So it takes a surprise out of the transaction for the seller. And you just get better and better. And I have to say, having your sales meeting once a week and doing role plays, I did that with, I owned a brokerage in Telluride, Colorado for 30 years. And I role played my people every Monday morning at 7.30, much to everybody’s pain. And we control 30% of the total market, two of us. And so it’s one of those things where you go, when this comes to this, this is what you do, this is what you do. You run down, you go for the long pass, or you go for the short out, or whatever. So practice and all of that is a very serious and rewarding activity for the business owner. So Jerry, can you explain to the listeners why you believe that sales is, that soft sales is a learned skill? Why do you believe that? Well because it doesn’t come naturally to us. For 30 years we taught a course in unnatural acts and for because the stuff is just not a natural response, it is a learned response. So for the soft sell, one has to put away the ego and let the buyer do the work. Believe it or not, it is very difficult for people to allow the buyer to do the work. We live in a culture that tells us we sellers are the center of the universe and to sell well, one has to allow and encourage the buyer to be the center of his or her own universe. Salespeople should talk more than 40% of the time. The buyer should talk 60% of the time. Great salespeople are all above average listeners. We taught people to do short list presentations in front of committees and buying groups and so on. We taught them how to give a mission statement, open with a probe and then sit back and watch the action rather than talk and talk and talk and do slide after slide and get into slide depth. So we teach this. slide depth. So, this is, we teach this, basically we did a course in civilized conversation, which is allow those people to do the work. I love it. I love it. I totally believe in the rule of conversational generosity. Let the prospect, let the buyer talk the majority of the time. Now, Jerry, there’s another knowledge bomb from your book that I highlighted and underlined multiple times and it read if you have a world-class idea and you want to give it away for the good of humanity you will have to sell the concept and if you can’t sell it you’ll be stuck with your idea poorer for your brilliant brilliance and generosity it seems unfair but even freebies must be delivered with a certain salesmanship or the receiver does not perceive the true value of the gift. Jerry, why do so many people push back on the idea of learning how to sell effectively and resort to saying dumb things like this product is so good it will sell itself? Because they love this illusion, it is a cultural thing in my estimation. It is maybe two percent of the time it’s true that something will sell itself, but if your stuff sells itself, and that’s not really selling, it is order taking. We all love the idea of the financial miracle, winning the lottery or unexpected inheritance from a rich aunt, and we’re all looking for the magic bullet, whether it’s weight loss or closing deals. Those are myths too, and they’re fun, but selling is a skill. There are no shortcuts to getting good at it, and no quick fixes. It may not be the fun you’re looking for, but the profession is very lucrative. The highest paid people in our culture are salespeople. I agree with that. I think that there are many, many people out there that want to go into the marketplace and they want to just state, my product is the best, therefore it’s going to sell itself. And Jerry, in your book, you write puffery is hot air. Webster’s definition, Webster’s dictionary defines it as flattery, publicity, exaggerated commendation, especially for promotional purposes. In selling, it is claims that are unproven as stated. Typically puffery words and phrases are, we’re number one, we’re the best in our business, save big money, a lot, high profits, and the fastest, etc. Can you explain for our listeners the profound difference between attempting to sell using puffery all the time, but I happen to be in the executive sales training business, and so we were teaching people to sell at the very highest levels, which of course also works at the lower levels. The less sophisticated the buyer, the more likely they are to buy puffery. But buyers view puffery as lies. They may not be intentional, but the buyers don’t believe them. First, they make all the salespeople sound the same, so everybody in your business then sounds the same. And when you get killed on a price negotiation, you have no defense. And second, they set up conflicts with your buyer. I want to ask you this, Jerry. This is not about the sales process, but it’s about you, the sales wizard. How long did it take you to write that book, Self-Selling in a Hard World, which is the Bible of sales? That thing is amazing. How long did it take you to read that or to write that thing? That thing is awesome. Well, probably around six months. It’s a funny story. We don’t have time to do it here. Some day when we’re sitting over drinks, I’ll tell you the funny story about my book. I’ll come to you tomorrow. But it was one of those things. I wrote it as part of a software program I was developing at the time because I had my own bit rich scheme about how to build a playbook on a computer. And so we were developing that in the very early, early days and that book was just part of a package of teaching people how to sell using computers. So it was really an ancillary project to this larger idea, which the larger idea failed, but the book was residual out of that, and it’s now sold about 80,000 or so. It’s been on the market for 32 years or something. It’s been on the market, so it’s been backlist for a long time. It’s kind of one of those books there that I run into a lot of high-level salespeople that have read the book. Oh, yeah. But it’s not a book that everybody… If you’re listening to this podcast, you should own the book. But if you’re working for a company and you’re selling burritos and you have no curiosity about how sales works, you should read the book, but you probably won’t because it would require a lot of work and thinking. But that book is awesome, Soft Selling in a Hard World. Jerry, I want to go back now to asking you some of these questions about specifically the closing move. Can you share with us what the closing move looks like to you? Sure. Actually, the closing move is the last move of the seven selling moves that is explored in depth in the book. In fact, most of the course that we teach or used to teach had to do with covering the seven selling moves. It took three days. It just encompasses this entire idea of how to do persuasion from the buyer’s point of view. In selling, this move is called the close. This is the move that scares everybody to death and it’s not just you, it is where people go, my God, what do I do now? In selling lore, this is the scariest move. However, this seventh move is the simplest move at all, but only if you have set up your whole meeting from your first words to solve the buyer’s problem. The actual words to close can be as simple as, well, how do you see us working together to solve this problem? Or where do you think we should go from here? Or something along those lines, and let the buyer do the work. Now we often get a comment when we teach this, well, they never said yes. Well, they were never required to say yes. It was all assumed that they would say yes, and if they answered this question, where would you like to go from here, you don’t need yes, no. It just doesn’t come to that. You know, with our wedding photography company and then with real estate, people ask me, they would look up Fears and Clark online. And by the way, if you’re out there at Thrive Nation, take the challenge, type in Fears, F-E-A-R-S, Clark, and then Kanbar. Maurice Kanbar there, Jerry, is the guy who invented Sky Vodka. And after selling Sky Vodka for $600 million, he purchased one third of downtown Tulsa. And he asked me to list and market his properties for him. And people would ask me all the time, Clay, when you’re signing all those leases, what did you say to close the deal? How’d you do it? I said, well, I won. I’m using my Jerry Vass moves here. So I’m never going to say, well, do you want to go ahead and lease the space? I’d say, well, how much space do you need after you’ve looked at it? You want 12,000 square feet or 10? There you go. I’m sorry I stepped on your line, but that’s what I was looking for. I would say that. And then I would say now, OK, 12 or 10. OK, 12. OK. And then when would you like to move in ideally? The 1st or the 15th? OK, great. And we need a security deposit here. Do you want to do debit card or credit card? Okay. You want to sign right here? And then I would walk in to the office every time. And Braxton was there, and Buena was there, and Tonya was there, and our team was there. And every time they’d go, did you get the deal? And I’d say, guys, this deal was kind of tough. And so they could only pay with a credit card! And I would just get a deal every time. I would close every deal. I’m not kidding. I went Jerry in 2007 when I ran my company DJ connection as a result of your book soft selling in a hard world I went the entire year We booked 4,000 weddings and of all the appointments we set I only had one person say no the entire year whoa one Shannon and Clark you still remember him. Oh, yeah He shut me down Jerry. He said everyone in town’s using you so I decided to use somebody else. Well, go ahead. That move works. Now, Jerry, you write in your book that trickery in clothing is like trickery anywhere else. It’s short-lived. What do you mean by this? I mean, people teach, and I won’t drop names, but you know who they are, who say, well, there’s the puppy dog clothes and there’s this kind of clothes and there’s this reverse clothes and there’s, and I’m going, no, that’s bullish. I’m sorry. That is not right because it takes away from the buyer’s attention. The buyer hates that kind of stuff because they know all of these tricks. And so because they know the tricks, the tricks fall flat and it just turns the seller into this shuck and jive guy. Instead of being somebody that you would want to do business with, you go, well if you’ll shuck and jive me here in this transaction, what’s he hold for me down line when we’re in a serious business? That’s why trickery doesn’t work very well. If you are in low street sales, pots and pans and that sort of thing, perhaps you can get away with it. But if you’re going to be a legitimate, professional salesperson, don’t use trickery. I love the phrase, shuck and jive. Chuck, I’m going to begin using shuck and jive and shenanigans as words on the show more often. I agree. Hold me accountable. Why have I not said shuck and jive for a long time? You’re practicing shenanigans and you need to cut it out. Jerry has a better master of the English language than I have. That’s the whole issue I have here. Now, Jerry, I want to brag on Paul Hood, who’s on the show today. Paul and his company, hoodcpas.com, if you’re checking it out. By the way, we’re number three right now on the iTunes charts. No puffery there, Jerry. In the business section of the iTunes charts. We’re number three out of 530,000 podcasts according to the Wall Street Journal in all categories. I’m talking comedy, sports, I’m talking about comedy, sports, business. We are number 26 as of the time of the recording of today’s podcast. So Paul’s been a sponsor the entire time and Paul, over there at Hood CPAs, if somebody comes in and they meet with you and they do a consultation, you have multiple packages that the customer can choose from. Can you kind of explain, not necessarily all the specifics, but about the idea of having multiple packages and just letting the customer choose the options when you go for the close? You bet. One of the reasons we did that, it kind of ties in with Jerry’s book, is Law of Clarity, where he says if you can’t explain your product to a 10-year-old, then you don’t know your product very well. You’re not a very good salesman. And so what we have is we basically try to break it down into three decisions. And also so that they, it’s not a decision between yes and no. It’s a decision between which of the three do they want. And they go from a very basic, comprehensive, where we’re just doing some consulting-type work and meeting with them once a month, to the next, maybe if it’s a business we’re doing accounting plus all the consulting, the third one would be if we’re doing payroll and accounting and consulting. But it breaks it down to where, all right, Mr. Potential Client, which of these three do you want? Which best fits your needs? We’re doing textbook, the soft selling close. That’s right. Now, Chup, I want to teach Jerry a word here on this next question. Jerry, you’ve brought us back to Shuckin’ Jive and shenanigans, so I’m going to give you a word. I’m a huge New England Patriots fan, and the word I would like to teach you today is wicked awesome. Wicked. Wicked awesome. And that’s one word, and if anything is great in Boston, it’s wicked awesome. It’s not hyphenated. It’s just wicked awesome. So, Jerry, I would like for you to break down your wicked awesome bonus move on page 119 of Soft Selling in a Hard World. You write about this wicked awesome move called cross-selling. What is cross-selling all about, and why is it so wicked awesome important? Well, it’s wicked awesome important because many, if not most, salespeople have several things to sell. And after the buyer’s first agreement, because you’re going to be closing incrementally. And after the first agreement, the salesperson now has a proven performer in the buyer and must move on to the second and third sale and so on. Some businesses can’t even survive without cross-sells and successful cross-selling cuts across the cost of sales and increases profits. And you run into it very often when you buy something you say you want an extended warranty with that or you fries with that burger you need to add on accessories for the car well that’s where the real profit comes and so add-on sales really is the profit center for many of these businesses and a way to survival for them. You know, Best Buy… The cross-sell always starts with a probe, too, by the way. Always starts with a question. And so, you can just continue on. I remember I was trained early on and I was selling mutual funds in one of my many careers, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know a damn thing about mutual funds. I didn’t know anything about that business, but I was taught how to sell it and I went out and I just kept selling until I ran out of things to sell. I finally had to shrug my shoulders and say well that’s it for me I’m done I don’t have anything else left. So cross-selling is and can be pretty high adventure particularly on high end on high-end stuff like high-end real estate I’m talking business buildings, and that sort of thing, because I taught that for 30 years. And where these people are making a million and a half, two million, three million dollars per sale, they practiced all the time, all the time. And when they practiced, it was serious, man, because there was serious money involved and these were serious, bright, educated people and they were wonderful to teach. Now this is something I want to hammer home on here because, Chup, this great selling doesn’t, as Jerry has mentioned in his book and then on today’s podcast, great salespeople don’t even look like they’re selling, Paul. It’s happening. And I’ll never forget this, Jerry. I called the book a cruise with Karen Wheelock and if you’re out there, you know Karen Wheelock Say that Clay Clark is bragging on her because she was good And if you are Karen Wheelock Clay Clark is bragging. Oh, you’re the best Karen Wheelock So I went to book a cruise, you know, and Karen says well great. Yeah, I said how much are the cruises and Karen said to me this is the first cruise I went on I insisted on being the cheapest price possible and I had a Small boat got motion sickness the entire time. So the second time I call and I said, Karen, how much do you charge? How much would it be? And she says, Clay, do you, let me ask you, what are you looking to do here? What’s the big occasion? And I tell her and she’s, oh, oh, so you’re gonna surprise her? Oh, really? Well, so let me ask you this. What are some of her favorite activities? Next thing you know, she’s got the probing questions going on. Next thing you know, Jerry, she booked an appointment. She got me to commit, not to buying something, but commit to the appointment within 72 hours, kind of within that window of time when I’m still interested. I met with her and she just continued asking me, well, if you’re gonna be here, don’t you want to at least have like a balcony or don’t you want to get this room service or what about tickets to that? Have you thought about a catamaran tour? And Jerry, somehow that $1,000 cruise, I feel like that $1,000 per person cruise turned out to be about $5,000 per person, but it was wicked awesome. It was really good. So the cross sell, I mean, that is, whoo. And one thing, Jerry, that you’ve talked about is during your years working with thousands of salespeople, you’ve noticed that salespeople will instantly freeze up and seem to almost have kind of like a panic attack. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. It’s a salesperson has almost like an anxiety, immediate panic attack. It’s like their brain shuts off as soon as a buyer inserts any objections whatsoever. Why is it that most salespeople need to learn to overcome objections? Well, quite frankly, if you can figure out what the problem is in the objection, you’re about halfway to an answer just on that part without doing anything. So when you hear an objection, the first thing you have to do is figure out what the real objection is. English is a very complex language, and what you think you heard and what the buyer really is saying can be quite different. So the first move is to ask a question. Something simple as, why is that? Or help me understand why you say that, or what is going on here, et cetera. We’re now assuming salespeople have playbooks, so they will have practice the answer to this objection. But it takes practice, and you’re on the money having people practice, particularly in front of recording devices, cameras and so on, because people cannot simply believe how bad they are until they see themselves on camera. It’s just humiliating. I mean, I watch myself on camera and I just hang my head and cry. Now, Jerry, you’ve written much about how salespeople can truly make a fortune if they understand that the prophets are in solving the problems. I repeat, Chuck, the prophets are in solving the problems. Chuck, I’m not sure if I’m communicating. Maybe my mic is cutting out. You say the problems are in solving problems. Chuck, do you get what I’m saying? The prophets? Let me try it in Spanish. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. El Profito. There are really seven business problems that seem to be universal, as we discovered in learning from our students. They’re outlined in detail in my other book, Self-Selling to Executives, and they pop up over and over again. They are to acquire and manage capital, acquire and manage people, find and fill markets, meet and exceed the competition, improve quality and lower costs of production, maintain sufficient and predictable CAG flow, maintain control and predictable overhead. When you’re selling into this stuff at the business level, life goes pretty well. People are not going to argue with you. They’ll say, ìLook, we’re here to help you pick one, cut your overhead, or meet or exceed the competition, or find and fill a new market, or acquire and manage your people or your finances.î So when you hit the business level for upscale clients, that’s where the money is. And really selling becomes consulting at that point, where you really are genuinely bringing value, true value to your client. I want to make sure that the listeners get a specific example of this, okay? So Jerry, if somebody out there listens to our podcast and they reach out to us for business coaching, here are just some of the problems that we can solve, and I’ll just kind of list them out. And Paul, you can chime in if there’s something I’m missing out on. Hey, I’ve got a quote here. It’s a business guru. If you’ve got a problem, you all solve it at Checkout2Move. Well, my DJ revolves it. Thank you for quoting Vanilla Ice, the early 90s rapper. Business guru. Jerry, are you a big fan of Vanilla Ice? Were you a big fan of the early 90s rapper Vanilla Ice? Yes, I am. Okay. Nice. So this is the thing, though. People say, what do you guys do? Well, we do all the search engine. So what’s the problem we’re solving? How do you get to the top of Google? So we’re getting you to the top of Google. We help you make a workflow. What problem does that solve? It helps you create time freedom. Paul, sales scripting. What problem does it help for you when our organization helps you with sales scripting? How does that help you, Paul? Well, it helps by creating a duplicatable system that can be scaled so that it’s not all dependent upon the top salesperson, me. Videography. What problem does that solve, Eric, for our listeners out there? Yeah, we’re oftentimes educating the customer on who we are, what we sell, and we’re showing them happy previous clients and testimonial videos as well. A lot of our clients can’t afford a videographer. Right. They can’t do it. So we do the videography, the photography, the web development, the sales scripting, but we have to think about it in terms of the buyer. What are the problems we’re solving for you? And the problem for you, the average buyer, is you have a small business and you don’t have the ability to, you don’t have the money to hire a full-time videographer and a full-time photographer and a full-time web developer and a consultant to make it all happen. And so for $1,700 a month, month to month, for less money than it costs to hire a $10 per hour employee, you get all that stuff. And so that’s the, but I think, Jerry, a lot of us, we can become so experts of what we’re, we can become such an expert and a guru of our industry that we can’t explain it to anybody. And that’s why I love the chapter of your book where you talk about the importance of positive self-talk and really sharing with yourself on an ongoing basis, this positive, intentional self-talk and coaching yourself up, so when you head into the presentation you’re saying, I can do this, I’ve got it, I’ve prepared, I know what I’m doing. Jerry, can you talk to us about the importance of being intentional about what you say to yourself as a salesperson? Yes, yes. Because all of us, I mean I have never met anybody who sold who didn’t have fear at some level. And I mean, I’ve walked in many, many boardrooms to sell our services, and I knew exactly what I was going to do and how to control it because I had studied it and written a couple of books about it and all of that. But even then, I mean, it’s pretty easy to get tense in those things when it goes out of control. When suddenly the answer to a question ends up over in left field someplace and you’re looking at it and going, what the hell do I do now? So it’s easy for us to talk ourselves out of selling when all we can see is the stress of it. Preparation, knowing exactly where you’re going and where you’re taking the buyer can change that. There are many more problems than problem solvers. So it’s kind of incumbent on the salesperson to keep their eye on the problem. What is the problem? You continue to go, what is the problem? And if you know what the problems are when you walk in, I mean I would open with those. I would go into the boardrooms of big firms and my opening shot I just take a look around the room and say, �Hey there, my name is Jerry Fess and when your people walk in to sell your services, they don�t know what they�re doing.� And so they have one rec right after another, often three recs before they get to the end of the first sentence. And they go, whoa! Because you can prove it. There it is. And they know it. Somewhere in their heart, they know that I am telling them the truth. Let’s take the accounting business. 90% of new businesses fail within three years. That would be my opening shot. 90% of businesses fail within three years. So right away, it gets the attention of everybody in the room, and you can prove it. And it’s provable, and it’s researchable, and it’s all there, and it scales up, depending on your perspective. It scales up to that 10% is remaining, but it’s like half fail within the first year, and there’s some long-term ratio that goes like that. So, and more fail within the second year, but by the third year, there’s only 10% left. And it’s pretty easy, once you’re aware of it, it’s pretty easy to watch it happen in real time, and somewhere in your heart of hearts, you know it’s true. Okay? So, when you have a reputation as a problem solver, the opportunities just naturally flow your way. It isn’t effortless, but it’s certainly at a greatly reduced effort. Salespeople and managers worry a lot about losing clients. I’ll tell you, when you solve a client’s problem, you can’t get rid of them. I mean, they stick to you like glue. This is so true. If you’re out there, there’s one gentleman that I met here about two months ago, Paul, at a conference. And he said to me, he said, I am a, this guy was in Florida, okay, in Florida. I won’t give any more details. I’ll just say he’s in Florida. And he said, what I do is I’m a social media marketer, Paul. And I said, that’s cool. So what kind of problems do you solve for your ideal and likely buyers? What kind of problems do you solve? And he says, well, what I do is I generate leads. And then I said, do you? That was my question. Do you? Is it provable? And he said, well, yeah. So it’s like, how does that work? He said, well, you pay up front for the first three months. You’ve got to pay for the first three months. And it was a huge fee, Jerry. It was like $6,000 or something. And I said, okay, and then what happens? He goes, well, then if you want to cancel, you can after like the third month, because it’s only like a thousand a month after the first three months, the big upfront fee. And the guy, I said, well, could you show me an example of maybe a client you’ve ever worked with where they get leads, maybe just one? And he’s like, well, Paul, there’s kind of too many to name. You know, I mean, it’s got a lot of them, really. He’s fishing around and I wasn’t trying to, I was trying to help the guy. And then he pulls me aside at our workshop and he goes, I got to be honest with you, I’ve never actually done this for people before. And I said, well, dude, that, that move doesn’t work. What you should say is, Hey, I’m a social media marketer. I believe in my product and you’d be my first client. And so I’m going to do your first month for free. And then if you’re happy, then I’ll charge you this much per month. But you have to be direct and honest. You’ve got to use facts. But you also have to get in front of the decision maker or you’re not going to have a conversation anyway. So the decision maker, Paul, if someone’s trying to go to Hood CPAs, they go to HoodCPAs.com, they listen to our podcast, and they show up at your office, the chances of getting to you, unless they have an appointment, are pretty slim, probably none. Yeah, virtually none. Because you are a decision-maker, therefore you’ve set up systems in your life and processes to make yourself unreachable. So Jerry wrote in his book here, he said, Jerry, you write, in your book, the decision-maker is often as elusive as true love. Can you explain this, Jerry, why the decision-makers like Paul are always so elusive. Because they hate sales people. Because sales people waste their time. And our view is that you should be able to go in, make a complicated presentation, close the deal, and be gone at the executive level in 15 minutes. So that means that everything is quantified, it is provable, there it is, you have a lead, you got a story. The problem here is that salespeople spend a lot of time talking into a receptive ear, which often has no decision-making responsibility. It’s because salespeople often prefer to meet someone at a lower level who’s more interested in the features of what you sell, and salespeople are often intimidated by executives who are interested only in benefits. What is in this for me, for my business? That’s all they’re interested in. And so that would then dictate that you would walk in and say, my business is to increase your bottom line, your net profits by 2% annually. That’s what we do. Well we can discuss that, you know, and because we’re talking the executive language. So people don’t understand that executives are not interested particularly in features. That’s for the people down the line, the kind of computer or the app that they’re using or some relationship that they have with them. That’s not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about the wrong stuff. Once you know what your product or service does for buyers and how you impact their company, you are way less likely to be intimidated or willing to waste time with someone who can’t say yes. It is a question. How are decisions like this when you’re talking to anybody in the firm, I mean you’re just, I mean you are talking to the receptionist, or you’re talking to the janitor, you’re asking questions. How are decisions like this made inside this firm? I had a really good person today that asked me that, Jerry, a very skilled person, and for our Christmas party, it’s going to be $55 a head, you know, this year for the party every year Jerry it always is going up inflation you know it’s always going up there this year it’s fifty five dollars ahead we have a staff all in between Z and I they’ll probably be 400 getting closer to 500 people there this year there’s a lot of people and if you take four or five hundred times fifty five that’s a large number and so a person asked me today they said how are decisions made for you guys your holiday party within Thrive. How do you do that? I said, well, my wife decides the budget for the party. That’s what my wife does. She decides that and so you got to talk to her. And I think it’s so important because if you would have been pitching to me, I don’t care how good the pitch is, even if I would have loved it, Jerry, I don’t have the budget authority within our organization. We decided that 18 years ago that my wife would make all final decisions on that holiday party because I always want to swag it out and you know spend money on things we shouldn’t be buying and Vanessa is very good with the budget and so it’s such a wise question. Ask people who is the decision maker? How are decisions often made? Jerry, that is so important. Well, if you ask them who the decision maker is, they’re going to say that’s me. That’s me. And so you have to come in a side door on that, how are decisions made. My view is, in asking questions in probes, you start every one of them with how. Everyone. And once you’ve mastered how, you can move on to some other things like maybe what and who. How is so good! It’s so good! Okay? So anytime you ask somebody, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to correct you, but this is what I do. When you have decisions made inside the company, you’re going to get a different answer from who is the decision maker. Well, I’ll say this. I’m not going to argue with the sales wizard. I want to make sure we get this. The reason why we’re doing this podcast and this next question I have for you, Jerry, ties into this is once you’ve read your book, right, three times, okay? Once I’ve read the book three times, once you’ve read your own book, Jerry, 400 times. You have to make a playbook then, and you have to write down the specific questions, because you just pointed out you would prefer to ask how, which is a great question. And the thing is, off the cuff is a bad way to go. The pros prepare. They gotta have a playbook. So you and I are having a conversation here, but you’re gonna, after you’ve read that book and you’ve outlined and you’ve taken notes, you have to make an actual playbook because you and I both know the devil’s in the details. Can you explain what it means for salespeople to truly make a sales playbook? Right. Well, it’s on a basic simple theory that if you can’t write it, you can’t do it. Self-selling is an action plan, and writing comes first, then practice on the street. The playbook is a working document. It changes over time as your business, your products, your services, your competition all change right in front of your eyes. So after each call, make notes of what didn’t work and what you would change and schedule regular reviews of your playbook for review and upgrading because life is a continuous upgrade path here. It becomes an archive of the best of what you do. It’s not priceless, but it is very pricey in the sense that it keeps you from making as many bad moves in a live presentation. It’s so good when you take the time to do this. It’s so good. Thrive Nation, take the time to make a sales book. Now, Jerry, why do you think that most people never do take the time to make their sales playbook. None of our listeners, but other people on other planets, other parallel universes, other countries, not our country, other planetary systems, they will listen to a podcast like this and then they won’t actually make the sales playbook. What’s going on, Jerry? Why won’t people ever take the time out to make the playbooks? Well, they don’t understand, this is my assessment, they don’t understand the importance of the act of the creation and design stage. Actually what happens is people learn a great deal about their own business in the act of putting down the words and what they think they say. So what you think you say, when you write it down, it changes in front of your eyes. It’s like studying for a play where you read the words and you say the words and do the words over and over and over on the script and then one day, they change right in front of your eyes because you go, �Oh, I got it.� So that’s what a playbook does. It allows you to get it. When building it, you’re going to eliminate puffery and develop proof statements and quantify your benefits and find the unique benefits that you sell and design a mission statement for both your firm and the upcoming call. You’re going to develop each of the seven selling moves, which we’ve only touched on briefly here, as explained in the book. That is the seven selling moves. It’s really the central theme of our three-day hard selling course because we end up developing a selling book, if we ever did, in class and then sent him home to do homework. homework, and there was two or three hours of homework every night in order to work on the playbook. So it’s kind of a pain to do, it is time-consuming, and it will tax your brain because you have to shift your thinking over to how does the buyer think about this? We know what we think about it, how do they think about it? And you will eventually develop a return on investment for the buyer of your services or your products delivered. The ROI at the higher end of selling, when you’re selling larger ticket stuff, the return on investment becomes a very critical thing. We can say, look, you’re going to give me a dollar, and I’m going to give you $10 back within 90 days. Well, I mean, that takes away, that takes care of a whole lot of selling problems right there, and you can prove, if you can prove that, which we could in our case, you say, you know, it becomes. I want to, this, this, these final two questions, I’m very, very, very passionate, Chep, about this next question because I falsely believed, Jerry, for a decade previous to knowing you, from age 18 to about age 20, I guess it was age 17 to age 27, age 26, somewhere in that time frame, I believed that sales was about motivation. So I would send my team to sales conferences all the time. And I would go to these motivational conferences. Now let me tell you the kinds of things they would teach. And when I took notes, Jerry, I’m a note taker, these are the kinds of things they would write down. They would say, everyone stand up right now and say right now, if I can conceive it, I can achieve it. And they’d bounce the beach ball. The music’s playing. And they’re saying, everybody now! And everyone’s yelling. They’ll have you stand up on a chair and say, I can’t sell! And they would talk to you about feeling it, and they would talk about aligning your vision, Chup, with your goals. And they would talk about the power of discovering the infinite knowledge that you could find by tapping into the universal knowledge. They would never call it God, but it became almost like a religion, Jerry. There’s all this motivation. Sure. And I went to one conference, and I met these people, and I thought, why are all of the jackasses here? And then I thought to myself, why am I here? And then I realized I also was a jackass, and I was going to the Jackass Festival, and I kind of liked it for the first four or five times, because it was a jackass festival. But over time I realized all of those people were always looking for the new get rich quick move, their companies weren’t working, and things were going to hell because none of them could sell well. So if I’m out there saying, okay, I’ve been to all those conferences, I’ve been to all those woo woo things, I’ve walked on hot calls, I’ve watched all the motivational, Jerry, you’ve seen it, all the videos, I’ve done trust falls with my team, I’ve gone to ropes courses. I’d like to get your thoughts on how sales people can overcome their fears and the best way to train your team. Well, it sounds to me like you have much of this ball of wax well under control, but it But it reminds me of the thing, the question about the violin player. Violin player asked, how do I get to Carnegie Hall? And the answer is practice, practice, practice. And the sales is the same way. And it is not a glorious, is not a glorious motivational driven craft anymore. You can be a motivated football player and it doesn’t keep you from getting your head knocked off out there. So I feel the same way. If you know how to defend yourself with knowledge, then you can defend yourself in every circumstance that you run into, except earthquake and bombing, but you’re never afraid. I was terrified for years and I’ve been selling for 150 years. Fear doesn’t exist well in the face of extensive preparation. It just doesn’t. And the way you work your people, and I think it’s the way you’re working them, which is you find a buddy and you role-play every presentation. You don’t wait for a perfect presentation. You just start using the skills and perfect them as you go along because it is a lifetime skill. It isn’t something you’re going to do for a year and then leave because if you go for a year and leave and you know your business, you’re going to make yourself $100,000 or $150,000 and nothing makes you feel quite as good as having a nice fat bank account and there’s no time like the present to begin to do that so do it now and I absolutely agree with the motivational ideas because I think people do need motivation and particularly people who work alone they get bummed, they get disappointed and they get disappointed greatly in sales because they don’t have a skill to close deals that are walking in their door every single day. Those people turn around and walk out. I owned a real estate brokerage in the mountains, and I trained my people. People would come in and say, ìWell, we want to see what’s for sale.î I had to train my people to say, ìWell, come back to my office and sit down here and talk to me about that.” And the first question from our side was, what would you like the real estate to do for you? And that then began to greatly narrow the inventory about what you were going to talk about. And you just went along that whole line and you qualified, qualified, qualified, until finally it narrowed it down to where you had, I got two or three properties that we could look at that will do the way you want. You didn’t guess. You asked those questions. It’s so powerful. Yeah. Well, this is out of my experience of that I had in some trades and some of them worked and some of them didn’t. Actually, I’m a man known for his failures more than his successes. Well I think your biggest failure is agreeing to be on our podcast. That just shows a lack of judgment there, but thank you so much for making one more poor decision. I agree. I agree. All right now. This has been miserable. Okay, well Jerry, I have a final question here for you. You’ve literally worked with thousands of sales people all over the world. Why do you believe that most people just try to make things up on the fly as opposed to implementing a proven path? I think a good part of it is laziness. I mean, there’s two things. These are harsh words, but it has to do with laziness because it’s work and with a big It’s time consuming and people often do not even know that there is a proven path other than whatever the senior sales people told them who gave the new boy everything that he knew, which really wasn’t very much on how to make the sale happen. The guy’s been doing it for 30 years and so he is wired, he’s the number one guy in the company, and he is wired to accounts that he has been courting for 20 years. And so he confuses people when they say, let’s watch him work. And he goes out and he says, hey, Bob, I’m here to pick up our order for this month or for this year, or here to move you over to that other place. And so when do you want to get started? Because the trust is already built, it looks really easy. It’s very deceptive. Many people do not understand there’s an underlying structure to successful human communication and persuasion. Working without a structure or a plan is a design for failure. And in this profession, there’s no magic bullet in this profession, or any other one that you can think of or will run into in your lifetime. I think what you just said is so powerful. There’s no magic bullet. There’s a proven system. It works. It’s called soft selling in a hard world. Paul, I wanted to see, and Jerry, if you, if Paul no longer asks political gotcha questions. He no longer asks religious questions. He no longer paints our guests into a corner as one of our proud show sponsors, but he is a real entrepreneur with thousands of real customers. He has real employees. Paul, do you have a final question for the Wizard of Sales, Mr. Jerry Vance? Well, yeah. I apologize if this is a selfish question, but I would just like from the sales guru out there, Jerry, to do you have any advice for me? Because like I say, I’m in the wisdom business. And I read a long time ago, I can’t remember, look, I read it out, that if you sell somebody, you break rapport. But if you educate them, you build rapport. But then I’ve got to balance that side of things, the hard sell versus being not creating too much of a wisdom based or you know like you said vomiting my product or my wisdom or my knowledge all over them. What kind of advice could you give to me for that middle ground that I’ve you know I’ve got to educate them somewhat in that 40% that I speak but I don’t want to vomit all over them like you’re doing it right. There’s always a balance that has to be achieved, and there’s a balance between advice and persuasion and knowledge and experience and wisdom. There’s some kind of a balance, and I don’t know what that balance is, but I do know that that it is there because I mean in what we just did here in this podcast is that I have worked hard to balance advice and wisdom and knowledge that I have gained doing this for most of my adult life because it takes all of it. It’s kind of the whole mcgilla, the whole package. So frankly, I wouldn’t worry about it. I would do what I’m doing. If you’re successful doing it, I do not believe that you can afford to give away a new car with every sale and you want to do that, for God’s sake, do it. But if you can’t afford that, you’re going to have to figure out something else. So it’s one of those things where you go, I don’t like to try to change people from what they’re doing now if they’re successful now. I work with people who are less than successful than they should be. Given their talent, their education, their preparation, their time and rank, their education in the market, when they’re still losing, then they can use this information to start cleaning up their act and getting successful again. Most people have been successful at least once, but they wander off, they forgot where the center of the universe was. The center of the universe is communication with buyers and potential buyers. They forgot that and they started doing other things. I mean, I’ve done it. I mean, I had nine man years in a software program because I lost contact with reality, actually. I lost contact with reality. I was going on this $10 million deal that I knew that it was gonna be superb and I was gonna be rich for life and be able to buy myself a good used car. So it was, but I was wrong. I was wrong. And because I wandered off from the basics. So I don’t think I’m the right guy to ask about what you should do differently. If you’re successful doing what you’re doing, for God’s sake, don’t change it. All right, thank you. Yeah, Jerry, I appreciate you so much for taking the time to be on today’s show. Where are you physically located? What state are you in? I am on the beach in North Florida. In North Florida? On, yeah, northeast Florida, 40 miles south of Jacksonville. I’m looking at the beach and the ocean as the, and it is part of my success package, shall we say. That and my partner, years, Iris Heron, who actually is a co-author of the second book I wrote, which is Soft Selling for Executives. And so anyway, it’s a very happy circumstance. Is Soft Selling in a Hard World an in-print for the people that want to get a copy? I’ve been buying them off of Amazon. Is there a certain place you’d recommend all of our listeners to go to to get a copy of that book? No. Amazon is the place that the stuff is bought. And so that works. Well, Jerry, thank you so much for being on today’s podcast. If you see a pale male, the big white moose walking up and down the beach in Jacksonville, that’s me, because we’ve been to Jacksonville a few times. And I am the most pale man in the history of our planet. So just look away. I don’t want you to burn your corneas or anything. And when you see the… I like reflect light, don’t I, Chop? I mean it’s truly Casper. Handsome. What is the scream? Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it! That was Jerry Bass right here on the Thrive Time show on your podcast download. And now with any further ado… 3… 2… 1… Boom! 3, 2, 1, boom! Hey, this is Dustin Huff. I’m with Keystone Harbor Marina. We joined Thrive back in January and have been working with these guys for about seven months. During that time period, we have moved up our Google rank through reviews and SEO processes that we’ve compiled through these guys. Our leads have gone from about four weeks to now a hundred and sixty-five a week. So the process works. I will tell you from experience, once you begin you have to stay with it. As long as you continually do this week in and week out, month in and month out, you’ll continually grow your reviews and you’ll also continually grow your revenues. So it’s important to stay with it. Google reviews are paramount and content is king. So as long as you stick with it, your revenue will grow and your business will grow. Thanks. The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. And we have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah, so what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now. I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminix, they’re both $1.3 billion companies. They both have 2,000 to 3,000 pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually non-existent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has, by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, asking our customers for reviews, and now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed pest and lawn company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay, so 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now, our closing rate is about 85%, and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process, and that has obviously… The 411% shows that that system works. Yeah, so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals and more new customers last year than we did the first five months, or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. It’s incredible, but the reason why we have that success by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews, that way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists. Everything gets done and it gets done right. It creates accountability. We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly both out in the field and also in our office. And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned that has really really contributed to our success. But that, like I said, the diligence and consistency in doing those and that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives. And also, you know, it’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut, and we didn’t know… Sorry, the last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. They implemented those systems, they taught us those systems, they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely it’s been a grind this last year, but we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we’re in a rut. Thrive helped us get out of that rut. And if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action, and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline, but that’s what it’s going to take in order to really succeed. So we just want to give a big shout-out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatric dentist. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42% increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proof-and-turn-key marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985 Hello, my name is Charles Kola with Kola Fitness today I want to tell you a little bit about clay Clark and how I know clay Clark clay Clark has been my business coach Since 2017 he’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise and clay’s done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. He’s this kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with like Lee Crockerill, head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with like Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours on the day-to-day. He does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers, and they run 160 companies every single week. So think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. So in the weekly he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks he’s doing reawaken America tours. Every six to eight weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13-step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. So I’ve seen guys from startups go from startup to being multi-millionaires. Teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So, amazing guy, Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. That’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. I was really most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal, and they were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run and the guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy his highest desire was to do what’s right and anyways just an amazing man. He’s impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or navigating competition and an economy that’s like I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey guys, I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys, we appreciate you, and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us So this is my old van and our old school marketing and this is our old team and by team I mean it’s been another guy. This is our new house with our new neighborhood. This is our new van with our new marketing. And this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen, and I took this vehicle, though, though. We worked with several different business coaches in the past, and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts, and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. The Thrive Time Show, two day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13 point business systems that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. When we get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two-day, 15-hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can skate and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re going to leave energized, motivated, but you’re also going to leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop, we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get-rich-quick, walk-on-hot-coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying, and I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert Zellner and Associates, look them up, and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses, or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s going to be the best business workshop ever, and we’re going to give you your money back if you don’t love it. We’ve built this facility for you, and we’re excited to see it. ♪♪ Hey, I’m Ryan Wimpey with Tiptop K9, and I’m the founder. I’m Rachel Wimpey, and I am a co-founder. So we’ve been running Tiptop for about the last 14 years, franchising for the last 3-4 years. So someone that would be a good fit for Tip Top loves dogs, they’re high energy, they want to be able to own their own job, but they don’t want to worry about that high failure rate. They want to do that like bowling with bumper lanes. So you give us a call, reach out to us, we’ll call you, and then we’ll send you an FDD, look over that, read it, fall asleep to it, it’s very boring, and then we’ll book a discovery day and you come and you can spend a day or two with us, make sure that you actually like it, make sure that you’re training dogs with something that you wanna do. So an FDD is a franchise disclosure document. It’s a federally regulated document that goes into all the nitty gritty details of what the franchise agreement entails. So who would be a good fit to buy a Tip Top K9 would be somebody who loves dogs, who wants to work with dogs all day as their profession. You’ll make a lot of money, you’ll have a lot of fun, it’s very rewarding. And who would not be a good fit is a cat person. So the upfront cost for Tip Top is $43,000. And a lot of people say they’re generating doctor money, but on our disclosure, the numbers are anywhere from over a million dollars a year in dog training, what our Oklahoma City location did last year, to run your own Tip Top K9, you would be with us for six weeks here in Tulsa, Oklahoma. So we’ve been married for seven years. Eight years. Eight years. So if you’re watching this video, you’re like, hey, maybe I want to be a dog trainer, hey, that one sounds super amazing, go to our website, tiptopk9.com, click on the yellow franchising tab, fill out the form, and Rachel and I will give you a call. Our Oklahoma City location last year, they did over a million dollars. He’s been running that shop for three years before he was a youth pastor with zero sales experience, zero dog training experience before he ever met with us. So just call us, come spend a day with us, spend a couple days with us, make sure you like training dogs and own your own business. Well, the biggest reason to buy a Tip Top K9 is so you own your own job and you own your own future and you don’t hate your life. You get an enjoyable job that brings a lot of income but it’s really rewarding. My name is Seth Flint and I had originally heard about Tip Top K9 through my old pastors who I worked for. They trained their great Pyrenees with Ryan and Tip Top K9. They did a phenomenal job and became really good friends with Ryan and Rachel. I was working at a local church and it was a great experience. I ended up leaving there and working with Ryan and Tip Top K9. The biggest thing that I really really enjoy about being self-employed is that I can create own schedule. I have the ability to spend more time with my family, my wife and my daughter. So my very favorite thing about training dogs with Tip Top K9 is that I get to work with the people. Obviously I love working with dogs but it’s just so rewarding to be able to train a dog that had serious issues, whether it’s behavioral or whatever, and seeing a transformation, taking that dog home, and mom and dad are literally in tears because of how happy they are with the training. If somebody is interested, I’d say don’t hesitate. Make sure you like dogs. Make sure that you enjoy working with people because we’re not just dog trainers, we are customer service people that help dogs. And so definitely, definitely don’t hesitate, just come in and ask questions, ask all the questions you have.