Speaker 1 (00:00) If you can’t sell, your business is dead. If you can’t sell, your dream is dead. If you can’t sell, you can’t staff your team. If you can’t sell, you can’t create technology. If you can’t sell, you don’t have a business. So to me, I agree with you that sales as the heartbeat of the culture is first and foremost. If you as the owner or entrepreneur founder disappeared from your business for 30 days, would sales continue or would they stall? That’s what we’re talking about on today’s episode. How to scale your sales, how to grow your revenue, how to close deals without a founder dependent or CEO or leader dependent company. Welcome back to the Wealthy and Well-Known Podcast. This is where we teach you how to grow your influence, your income. so that you can make a bigger impact in the world. I joined by my business partner, my wife, my best friend and co-host, AJ Vaden. Speaker 2 (01:02) All right, what are we gonna talk about? Speaker 1 (01:04) Let’s do this. So we’re talking about scaling sales without it being dependent on you and you are the CEO of brand brand builders group. We have an eight figure business. How have we done that without having you involved in doing sales calls? So I guess I would open by just wanting to hear some of your philosophies about when do you think is the right time for the CEO founders to be doing sales calls? How do we pull you out and when did we pull you out and maybe just share some of that story. Speaker 2 (01:35) This is very short, answer. you’re here. ⁓ I don’t have to do all the sales calls you are, but that’s a unique benefit of being in a partnership. Now, what I would say is, ⁓ you know, that’s, that’s simply the conversation and the transition from startup to established, right? In the very beginning, you and I both were taking sales calls, but so is our whole team. I think one of the things that a lot of people miss when it comes to entrepreneurship or starting a new company is like sales is how you grow, right? It’s like you’re not gonna cut your way to success. You have to grow your way to success. And I think a lot of people think somehow they should outgrow sales and every company should have a sales minded culture. Sales is not a department. Sales is not a task. Like sales is a mindset. Sales is a culture that has to be grown and established within a company. And it starts with the founder, right? And it’s like, if the founder wants to get out selling or they think selling is beneath them. Well, as the leader goes, so does everyone else. And they think, sales, a sales position is a stepping stone. It’s like, no sales is the cornerstone of companies in order to grow and scale or just to survive. Right. We talked about this in a recent episode, how 90 % of all small businesses fail within the first 10 years. And most of them, it’s most of them, not all of them, most some of is they run out of money. Some of it is they get burnt out and they just don’t want to do it anymore. But for the most part, that’s not it. They run out of runway, i.e. revenue. And that’s because they didn’t have a sales-focused culture or a sales-minded group of people. So in my opinion, it’s like even though I have phased out of taking sales calls on a formal role, I take sales calls anytime that’s needed. Right? It’s like… I will make time in my calendar. mean, we’re fairly established. We’re seven years in a brain builders group, but at our former entity, I still had the predominant amount of time on my schedule. Even 13 years later was generating leads and making sales calls. It was a sales mindset. And even today it’s like, have leads in my calendar right now that I will make time for. Right. And so that is still a part of what my role is. It’s still what has attention and It’s just not my main attention and focus as we have built up a group of people now the unique part of our dynamic is that I have a partner right a you know a husband and a spouse who also carries the weight and some of those and I think that’s when if you don’t have that in a Partnership then at some point you’ve got to hire a sales minded leader to help build up that sales culture But I think this is just as an important question for you because you know we made the decision or on in our business, I was going to take on the operations, finance, administrative parts of the business and that you would take on more of the sales and marketing. And it hasn’t been until really the last year, two years, so five years into the business that we’ve really started stepping you out of that. Speaker 1 (04:52) Yeah, and it’s interesting because I think our roles almost flipped from our first company to our second company. In our first company, I was more behind the scenes creating the strategy operations, et cetera, and you were the top revenue producer in Brand Builders Group. Those roles have flipped. One thing I will say directly that I think is a lie and a mistake and crappy advice that people get is they say, hey, if you want to build a great business, all you have to do is build a great product. I don’t believe that. I can share with you countless examples of friends and stories that we’ve heard of people who have amazing products and the businesses crash because they never learn how to sell. If you can’t sell, your business is dead. If you can’t sell, your dream is dead. If you can’t sell, you can’t staff your team. If you can’t sell, you can’t create technology. If you can’t sell, you don’t have a business. So to me, I agree with you that sales as the heartbeat of the culture is first and foremost. And we’re living through this right now. Last year was one of our toughest years, probably our single toughest year in sales that we’ve had, I would say in seven years. And so it is like an all recommitment back to sales. It’s like nothing else matters. Like if we can’t fix the front door of the company and create the conversions and the lead flow that we need, literally nothing else matters. ⁓ So sales gives life to everything and that’s a commitment and decision you gotta make. And I think most founders and CEOs are sort of reluctant. Like sales is like the necessary evil we have to do or that’s like the grunt work that like those people over there do or I’m above selling or like if our product’s so good, we shouldn’t have to sell it. Speaker 2 (06:40) I would just add one to that. think a lot of founders and CEOs, they think that sales is the first thing that they should get off their plate. And it’s not even that. I mean, I think some people do think sales is beneath them and now I’m the owner, I’m the founder, I’m an executive. it’s like, and your number one job is revenue. That’s what it means to be the owner. It’s like you create the revenue to actually provide for your company and your team that is your number one role. But what I see more often is people go, ⁓ this is the first thing to get off my plate to outsource, to delegate, to hire for. And our philosophy is and has always been sales is never the first thing. It’s the last thing. It’s the last thing that you let go of as a founder. It’s not the first thing, right? The first thing is all the very menial, mundane, repetitive, easy to train tasks. But sales is what you hold on to until the very, very end. So you know that there is a system. You know there’s a process. It’s documented. It’s trainable. You know that there is something that you can pass it off to someone. You’re tracking the stats and you have all of that in place. It’s the last thing, not the first thing. Speaker 1 (07:55) Now, I think if someone’s out there asking why is sales the last thing or one of the last things that should come off the founder’s plate, if you don’t know the answer to that question, then there’s an important lesson you need to learn about sales, which is that sales is a transference of emotion. Sales is a transference of conviction. At the end of the day, sales is an emotional part of the business and the human connection. And that emotion radiates most powerfully from the founder. So a founder should have higher conversion rates because it’s their life, it’s their mission, it’s inherently connected to who they are and why they exist in the world. And to some extent, you can transfer that to other people, but it typically never is quite as concentrated or as passionate from the founder. And so that is why I think we have to hang on to it. Speaker 2 (08:47) And just to add to that, think one of the other things is some of the hardest things for people to transfer our stories. And one of the reasons that I think it’s so important that it’s the last thing that a founder lets go of is no one has the story recall like the founder. Why we started all the testimonials, the client success stories, the trials, the successes, they are the repository for the entire company history. And a lot of people don’t take the time to sit, record, tell, and train. They just don’t. They expect somebody that they hire who has a lot of sales skills, and I’m using bunny ears with that, are gonna be able to come in and just do what they do. They don’t, they can’t because they don’t have the entire story recall that the founder does. They don’t have the recollection of, when this happened and when this happened and this story and this thing, ⁓ those things have to be documented. Speaker 1 (09:50) You said the backstory of why we started the company, how we started the company. There’s no way they have that unless you tell it and. Speaker 2 (09:58) Tell it and tell it again and again and again and it’s documented so that somebody else until they have their own stories can borrow your stories. And again, that is a training process but requires documentation and time and most people skip that. Speaker 1 (10:15) Let’s walk people through then to go, okay, don’t rush to outsource sales. I think that’s our first kind of point here, but to go, all right, then when, let’s talk through, when do you start outsourcing sales? How do you start outsourcing sales? Why does outsourcing sales fail? And what needs to happen, I think, to outsource sales to somebody else effectively. So. When do you think is the right time to have this conversation? If we’re saying it should be kind of like the last thing, how do you know when is the right time to start looking at training someone or someone’s outside of the founder to sell? Speaker 2 (10:56) In my opinion, this is basic laws of economics. It’s supply and demand. Like at some point when you have gotten off every single thing off of your plate that can be delegated, that can be trained to someone else that doesn’t have such a risk factor involved. And again, I just want to encourage everyone. One of the reasons we say it’s last is it has the most risk, right? If you outsource it and it doesn’t work, it fails and someone else doesn’t follow through or they bail. Speaker 1 (11:27) Company’s over. Speaker 2 (11:28) It’s catastrophic. And now you’re back in sales as the founder with everything else. Right? There are other things though that are easily or easier, but in my opinion, easily transferable that are just less, less risky. Right? So I think if you’re following the basic laws of economics, supply and demand, it’s when there is more demand on your calendar than you have supply. And that is after you have gotten off all of the administrative, all of the operations, all of the personal tasks that can be, you know, removed or, you know, replaced with technologies, automation, outsource contractors, agencies, fractional teams, whatever, full-time employees, it doesn’t matter. But once those are all done and then there’s just so many calls on your calendar that you can’t handle it, then you start, then you start adding people in. But again, you don’t take it all off your calendar. You don’t take it all off your plate, you gradually do that. And it’s like, okay, now I’m going to gradually start taking some of these sales calls off my calendar because that’s a part of training, right? It’s not like you hire someone, you go great. 100 % of what was on my plate is now on yours. Good luck, go team, go. That’s not how it works. And so I think it’s a gradual process. Once everything else has been outsourced, delegated, automated, eliminated, you know, referring to the focus funnel. Speaker 1 (12:54) Shout out to Procrastinating on Purpose, second book. It’s a good one. It does, it covers a lot of these emotions. Speaker 2 (13:00) But then and only then do you start the gradual process of backfilling for sales. Speaker 1 (13:08) And I would say like, we’re, I feel a little bit like we’re living this right now because we did have a tougher year in revenue last year. And it’s like, what is Rory doing in this year? I’m back in sales and it’s like, I’m waking up all day, every day. And I go at the end of the day, you know, people joke about, you’re the janitor. You take the trash out. And it’s like, that’s not the thing that saves the company. Sales is the thing that saves the company. And you go, if, if, if somebody doesn’t wake up and say, I’m going to go generate leads. then everybody’s job is in trouble. And so I view myself even today, you know, this is our second eight figure business. We’re now seven years into brand builders group as the rainmaker, right? So ultimately in the beginning, we’re doing sales calls like, and we’re actually like closing sales. Even now, I still close some sales, but in general, I’m like, my job is to bring in leads and to create lead flow and a cascade of warm leads. And to your point, supply and demand, where I go where I don’t have another minute on my calendar to take a call. Now I start passing them to the team. And now we have full time sales team that we’re trying to fill up. And then, and then, you know, I think the mature, you know, that phase one is you’re doing the lead generation and the selling yourself. Phase two is you get like one person who can just basically handle the overflow of your leads. And then the more advanced stages are, can I train other people to be the rainmakers and can we generate other lead sources outside of me? Because if I am the sole lead generator, then the company is also at a big risk and a big liability if something were to happen to me. Speaker 2 (14:57) But I think comes back to one of the first things we talked about, is sales as a cultural component, sales as a mindset, and it doesn’t live with a person. It doesn’t live within a department. You have to have a company. You have to have a culture where everyone has leads on their mind. Everyone has revenue on their mind. Doesn’t matter if it’s in customer service, operations, finance, marketing. It’s like everyone is looking at leads in two different ways. How do I bring them in and how do I keep the ones I have? It’s two very distinct things, but that means everyone is involved in revenue generation and revenue retention. Yes. And I was going to call it revenue protection. Protection because everyone plays a role. And if you think you don’t, well, you’re severely mistaken. And that is part of the founder’s job to communicate. No, every role is tied to revenue. Speaker 1 (15:42) that we’re having a new On this note of every role is tied to revenue. think particularly like if you’re in a small business and you just think like say you’re an operational person and you’re you think I want to raise and you go why because I’ve been here a long time because I’m good at what I do because I work hard. All good reasons you should get a raise. The most practical thing that’s going to drive whether or not you get a raise is if you contribute to revenue coming in the door, and if the revenue of the entire company is growing. If the revenue of the company is not growing, then no matter how valuable you are and how important you are, there’s not a magic pot of money that we just go, we like you, you’re so great, here’s some money, right? It’s like, we have to grow revenue. It’s different maybe when you’re in private, you have a company that’s owned by private equity and these giant corporations that just have like, you know, They’re willing to go massively into debt and they have all these different ways of banks and stuff to finance. It’s not most American businesses. And so most American businesses live and die by revenue, including your job, no matter what position you’re in. So to your point about everybody needs to care about this, that’s how you get a raise. It’s like you’re either bringing a customer in or you’re keeping a customer. Speaker 2 (16:54) That’s not most American. It’s rather you’re generating revenue or you’re protecting the revenue, but every role is tied to revenue Speaker 1 (17:14) So let’s talk now about actually the function of outsourcing sales. So we go, okay, it’s time once there is enough demand generated, there’s an overflow of leads. So what’s the first thing we do ⁓ when we step into that? it could be six months in, it could be a year in, it could be five years in, but whenever… we go, there’s more leads than I can keep up with. What’s the first thing we go out and do? How do we start thinking about what are the mission critical essential things to scale revenue beyond the founder? Speaker 2 (17:52) Number one, you document the process of what do you do to convert a lead into a customer. that whole, again, I think this is a huge mistake that people make, not just in sales, but just in business, is they lack processes. They lack documentation and they think if I just hire someone else, they’ll know what to do. No. Speaker 1 (17:56) Heck yes. Speaker 2 (18:14) I don’t know where this mysterious belief came from, but it’s like, no, your company is unique. Your systems are unique. Your processes are unique. your products are different and the way you sell them is different. We’re all different. And so you have to go, this is how we sell here. So bring the skills that you’ve learned, bring the knowledge that you have, and then let’s adapt those into how we sell here, what story we tell here. And that is how you have done it, which means you have to sit down and go, okay, When I have customers, what do I say? What questions do I ask? One of the easiest ways to do that is just to record yourself. Speaker 1 (18:52) Yeah. So, so before you dive into like the recording and the train, the materials, I just really want to edify and underscore what you said there. We tend to think that a person will be our savior if there’s an issue or like a company and it’s like, we need help. And it’s like, no, it’s the process. You need the process because if you do get lucky and you find a unicorn who can just step in and take off and like run. Speaker 2 (19:07) I need help. hear about all of I just need help. Speaker 1 (19:20) Now you’re vulnerable to that person ⁓ leaving, which is what a founder is. The founder is like, it’s great for the founder to have passion, but if we don’t document the processes in the founder’s head, the whole company is vulnerable to something happened to that founder. So documenting the process that we take people through and what happens at each stage in each step is truly number one. And I think it is not something people think about. It’s the opposite of how people think in the world. Speaker 2 (19:51) Yeah, I think one of the things that we’ve learned, our prior company was a sales consulting and sales training company, so we have a lot to say about this. This is really all I did for companies for 13 years. This is it. All day, every day, I was thinking about what is your sales process? ⁓ How do you open? How do you close? What questions do you ask in between? Like this is all I did. And it is a severely missed thing, small business or corporate big business. ⁓ the board it’s amazing to me how many companies purely have no consistent process and it just totally depends on who you talk to with what’s going to be said today because there isn’t a consistent theme of what questions do we know are the most important to ask. What are the pieces of information we need to get from the prospective client to know if they’re the right fit for us? Because not everyone is. And it’s like those things are severely undervalued in the importance of having a process that gives a consistent experience prospect to prospect, which is a part of how you create consistent revenue flow is that. Everyone goes through the same process. Why? Because then you can figure out what works and what doesn’t. Who’s the ideal client? Who’s not? Because we’re all doing the same thing. But if no one’s doing the same thing, then some people get sold something very different than the next person, even though it’s the same product, same service, same company. Speaker 1 (21:19) I mean, what I just heard you say there is a consistent process precedes consistent revenue. Speaker 2 (21:27) 100%. Speaker 1 (21:29) Totally. And I think one of the mistakes you got to watch out for when you’re making that transition from the founder or whatever, the executive leader, CEO selling to somebody else is because of the passion and because of the backstory and because of the things that we said earlier about why you don’t push sales off until the last kind of possible moment, founders can typically talk more in a sales conversation. and sell more because they have so much passion. If your salespeople come on and all they do is talk, talk, talk, you’re gonna lose sales. So when you are saying you have to figure out questions, what are the right questions to ask? One of our big beliefs is that you are selling when they are talking in professional salesmanship, in true scalable revenue with true systems and true processes. And so I think under like figuring out what those questions are is a really important first step. Now you said record yourself. So go back, go back to that and pick up from there. Speaker 2 (22:37) Yeah. And I’ll, and I’ll just add this in, like one of the things that I have seen over my 20 years in sales has been you can take a top performing salesperson at another organization and bring them into yours and with no process, no system, no way of doing things. And they’ll be a C player and a heartbeat. They’ll go from being a top producing performer somewhere else, which is why you hired them and you expect them to come in and just figure it out. And they went from a top performing to an average or below average performing person. overnight and you think it’s them. It’s not them. Right? You can do the same thing. You can take someone who’s never been in sales, put them through a proper process with the right scripts, the right training, the right accountability and turn them into a top performing person because you’re like, I know this works here. How do I know? Cause I’ve been doing it for the last this many years and I have documented it. And I know if you ask this and you say this and it’s this type of person, this is what’s going to happen. There’s predictability in it. Now there’s a numbers part of that too, but that is the power of a process, specifically in sales, but not only in sales. So yeah, so how do you start building that process is you just start recording yourself. Speaker 1 (23:48) So on this note, so there’s a metaphor that we use, by the way, we, one of our courses is called scale your sales. It’s in our phase four curriculum. For those of you that are members, you have access to that. We walk you through the eight S’s of creating a predictable revenue inside any organization. But one of the metaphors that we use, which you’re touching on here is we talk about the seed and the soil, right? So the environment is the soil and you got to have great processes. You can take a healthy seed. That is a perfect seed, but if it’s placed in the wrong soil, it will not grow. Right. And likewise, if you have great soil, but you have the wrong seed, it won’t grow. so part of the trick with sales is going, I need to find the right seed, the right type of person for what we do. And then most importantly, I need to create the right environment for them to flourish. And when you do that, you get, that’s where the exponential growth happens. ⁓ so finding, finding those people is, a huge, huge part. Okay. So pick up, pick up. So you’re recording. This is step one of creating a sales process starts with you recording yourself. Speaker 2 (24:52) Now what I would say today is very different than what I would have said two years ago or even a year ago because of the emergence of AI right and this makes it inexcusable for you not to have a process today like what would have taken a company months and a lot of money to pay me to do right so I’m glad I’m not doing that anymore because I would have been like you don’t even need me like there’s a part of that where it’s like yeah pay for some strategy but literally what would have cost companies tens of thousands of dollars and months of their time, I could probably now whip out for someone in 48 hours because of AI. there is no excuse. It’s inexcusable. So what I would do is I would take 10 sales calls that I, the founder, have actually done myself. I would take at least five that have gone as ideal as possible. Speaker 1 (25:29) Because of AI. like normal. Speaker 2 (25:48) Normal, right? So not the weird outliers or this, this, that, but ideally those five would have also been yeses, right? Then I’m gonna take two that resulted in a outlier type of situation, but somehow came back into, okay, that was a little unique, but this is where we landed, right? So that gets you to seven. And then I would take three where they were clearly not a fit. Right? And how do you know they’re in a fit? They said no, they did not buy. That’s how you know they were in a fit. But I would take 10, right? And that’s how I would get to the 10. I would take each of those recordings. I would have them transcribed. And then I would upload those into your preferred AI model, chat, GBT, Claw, Gemini, whatever you use, doesn’t matter. And then you gotta have a really good healthy prompt. And the first thing you would do is you have to ask yourself, what are the parts of a sales script? Right? So you have to know that. Right? So this is where people would still actually pay for sales consulting today is, we don’t know that. Right? But what’s the strategy that I’m actually looking for? You can’t just say, hey, listen to these and create me a sales script. Right. That’s not how it works. That’s where AI doesn’t help you. You humans still have to have the strategy of what do I want you to do? Then AI is the expedition to Speaker 1 (27:01) which by the way, if you are a brand builders member, you have access to brand bot, which is everything we teach. One of our bots is called Sales Script Bot. It has already been trained on all the principles that we teach in our service centered methodology. And so it will take your entire brand memory of all the other things you’ve been uploading and it will automatically create you a custom script for your business. based on our expertise on top of it and it will give you that structure and that’s one of the reasons we created the tool is AI can’t just really whip that part out but either way it’d still be much better than nothing. You could still get much further than you could, know, decade ago. Speaker 2 (27:41) Sales script bot is unique for members for all non members. I think this is this is really important It’s like you have to have this strategy to know what to do and then you have to tell it and so let’s talk about what are the parts of a script right and some people don’t like the word script call it outline guidelines talk tracks, whatever Don’t get hung up on the words. I’m gonna use script because it’s the easiest thing to do And the first thing is you have to have an opening Right. It’s like what and it asked it to evaluate of these ten sales calls. Find me. What are the costs? common themes in my opening, right? So how do you actually start the conversation? That could be a sentence, a paragraph, it could be one minute, it could be five minutes, but what are the components of how I open in my sales calls? Part two is what are the most common and the most impactful questions that I ask that elicit responses that lead to a sale? Right? And again, this is, this is a part of your expedition process. This doesn’t mean this is going to be what it is. It’s like what you’re looking for here. What are the common themes? What are the common practices? What are the commonalities amongst all the people that I talked to that happen on a recurring basis? Now, if you find there are none, well then you’re, then you’ve got to use this own process of going, well maybe that’s why I have really inconsistent sales. I don’t do anything the same. Huh. Speaker 1 (28:54) You’re trouble. Speaker 2 (29:05) And I would say also if you’re a salesperson who’s listening to this, I would also say this practice isn’t just for founders. This is for salespeople too. Anyone who is generating revenue has to be in the art of listening to what you do. This is your craft. This is your skill set. Speaker 1 (29:21) or sales managers building a sales team. I it’s 100%. Speaker 2 (29:25) What you have to Imagine a professional sports team going out on the field and they’ve never watched game footage. Or had a play. Imagine. Can you imagine? Speaker 1 (29:32) or how to playbook. Salespeople do that every day. Speaker 2 (29:37) In business, it happens all day long, every single day, and that’s why so many people run out of runway. That’s why 90 % of small businesses don’t make it past 10 years. There’s a reason why. They’re not committed to the documentation, to the process. They’re not committed to the playbook. They’re not committed to the practice and the discipline of rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat, make it better, do it again, do it again, do it again. And I think that’s the power of sports. That’s the power of being on a team is it teaches you like, there’s systems and rhythms. and there’s practice required. Y’all, same for business. Same for business. Speaker 1 (30:15) I think a lot of people don’t realize how much of a science sales is. A lot of people think sales is just like this magic. It’s like you’re a funny person and you’re just like born with this talent to go out and sell. They have no idea how predictive it can be, how tactical, how structured, how it’s something that you can create a process, which is one of the reasons like for us, we’ve been blessed to like I’m never concerned about sales. I mean, I focus on it, but I’m not worried about it because if our sales aren’t there, I know, oh, all we have to do is recommit to executing this set of fundamentals. And it will work. It’s not the theory of averages. It’s the law of averages. questions. Okay, so let’s talk about questions for a second. So high level, okay. Again, it’s a science for us. We’ve spent a lot of time studying this. And with the people we work with, we go deep, deep, deep. If you’re just starting out, Speaker 2 (30:59) to his questions. Speaker 1 (31:13) Don’t be too intimidated because at the end of the day, here’s what a sales is. You ask questions about what somebody wants their life to look like, and you ask questions about how does their life look currently now, and what’s the difference between the two. That’s what we call the gap, right? So if you ask them, what do they want their life to look like or their business to look like or whatever you’re selling, right? Their marriage to look like, their health to look like. You ask them questions that cause them to articulate consciously what they want in their life and then you ask them questions about what their life looks like now. That delta creates the buying zone. That creates the gap. If it’s very clear they want something, they don’t have it and you’re positioned to go, we’re the bridge between those, That is all of that is all of sales. Yeah. Speaker 2 (32:10) So part two is the questions, right? It’s like, what are the questions that you have to ask for you to determine if they’re a great fit for what you offer, right? And I think that’s an important distinction. These aren’t questions you Let’s talk about this. These aren’t questions you ask to sell them on what you offer. Speaker 1 (32:25) So this is a very radical philosophy that you have, we have, that is different. We don’t actually try to sell to every person we talk to. We don’t actually believe that every person should buy from us. Tell them what we actually do believe and what we try to instill in this. Speaker 2 (32:44) sales team. Well, I can tell you what I believe. I’m like sure it’s in alignment with what you believe. But I believe it’s like, listen, not everyone is a fit for me and I’m not a fit for everyone. I’m trying to work with an ideal client who I know, who I know because of the way they’ve answered these questions, are well positioned to get results that I know will happen if they do it. But here’s what’s important to me and here’s something that we’re trying to position our sales team. If you sell to everyone and we’re not completely sure that they’re aligned, when they don’t succeed because they weren’t a fit, because they weren’t going to do the process, it makes us look bad. Right. It’s like all of a sudden their inability to follow through, their inability to commit because we didn’t ask the right questions and we didn’t present it the right way makes us look like we don’t know what we’re doing because they didn’t succeed. I want to work with people who I know will actually get results from our program because when they do get results, guess what happens? Speaker 1 (33:41) They were for everybody. Speaker 2 (33:42) They refer everyone and they say, my gosh, this is the best program. It has changed my life. And we say all the time that the best form of marketing on the planet is a changed life. So work with people who you can change their life and they will send people to you, right? Because when you change someone’s life, they can’t help but tell people if you did a pretty good job, if you just like skidded through, no, I ain’t nobody talking about that. But if you go, oh my gosh. This is amazing. I could not have done this without X, Y, and Z. And it doesn’t matter what it is. Like we’re moving into a new house right now and ⁓ we just got window coverings, right? And I sat through and did the wholesale presentation with the company that did all of our window coverings. And you might think that’s not necessarily a life-changing experience, right? So why would anyone recommend someone who sells window coverings? Like my walking around going, these window coverings have changed my life. No, but every single time someone comes into my house and I’m going like, Look at how awesome these are. Like, look at this. It’s like, look at this. It’s like, they’re like, who did those? I’m like, and I’m happy to refer them. So am I screaming from the rooftops, window coverings changed my life? No. And at the same token, it’s going like, it was such a simple, easy process. They did what they said they were gonna do. They showed up. They had a simple install. When they found the errors, I didn’t even have to find them. They’re like, hey, just wanna let you know we saw this, we’re on it. We’ve already reordered the pieces. I’m like, my gosh. That’s, that is customer service. I didn’t even have to go around and do it. They did it for me. So you have to think about it. This isn’t about the mountaintop life changing moments. It’s like, I didn’t even have to do a walkthrough. They found the errors and then they notified me and they’ve already ordered replacements and I didn’t even have to ask for it. That’s amazing. Speaker 1 (35:32) And I think if you, if you do sales, right. Sales should not be about pressure and persuasion. Sales should simply be a conversation about collaboration. And that’s something that’s very different. And if you do it that way, takes the pressure off your prospect and it takes the pressure off of you as a salesperson to go, I’m not trying to tuck you into something. I’m trying to discover if we have a match, right? And if we have a match and I know, like if we don’t have a match, I will tell you and say, Speaker 2 (35:55) . Speaker 1 (36:02) you know what, we’re not the right fit to work together and that’s okay. But if we do have a match, I’m gonna tell you, look, if you’re a mission driven messenger and you want to build your personal brand, we can change your freaking life. That’s what we do here, right? There’s a certain type of person. Speaker 2 (36:17) That conviction comes from asking the right questions and when they say the right answers, you’re like ding, ding, ding, ding. That’s right. That’s your choice. that’s part two is questions. Then part three ⁓ is what people would say the presentation, right? But what we would say is the conversation, right? I think a lot of people think sales is a presentation and that’s where they make the mistake. It’s a dialogue, not a monologue. But once you have the questions, now you move into, well, let me tell you what we do, how we do it, and why I think it’s a fit for you based on what you just told me. me, right? So it’s the opening, right? Your introduction, it’s the questions, then it’s the presentation, right? And inevitably then it’s the questions. In sales, well, right? But I think in a lot of things, the questions can come in two different ways. They ask questions, which a lot of people perceive as objections. And we ask questions, which a lot of people perceive as closing. They’re just questions. Sales is just a series of questions from beginning to end from Speaker 1 (36:57) The closing questions. Speaker 2 (37:16) How are you today to do you want to give me your credit card? It’s just a series of questions ⁓ that go in a specific order and a flow. So you go from the opening, you go to the questioning, you go to the presenting, and then you go to the questioning, which is just part two of the beginning of the questioning. And it’s rather going to happen in two different flows, whether you’re going to have questions for them, such as, hey, does this seem like it’s a fit for you? Right? Does this fit in your budget? Or they’re gonna have questions for you like, well, how much is this? How long is it gonna take? What are the payment terms? What are the agreement terms? But questions are gonna happen either way. Ideally, the presentation leads into you asking them a question, which is, based on what you heard today, does this feel like it’s a fit? Right? And then, it’s typically, people are gonna go, well, depends. How much is it? What are the timelines? And again, Don’t get caught up in the idea of now it’s time to close or now I have to be prepared for objections. It’s just a conversation that continues with questions to drive people to a yes or a no. And I think that’s our big goal when it comes to sales, whether it’s the founder or it’s a brand new person who’s just entering into sales. The entire point of this entire conversation is to bring people to a point of decision. That is it. And I think it’s a successful sale. If you get a yes, in my opinion, it’s a successful sale. If you get a no, the only unsuccessful sales conversations to me are water left open ended, which is that maybe follow up with me in three months. That is unsuccessful. A yes is good. A no is good. A maybe no good. Speaker 1 (39:02) Yeah, so if you are listening to this going, need help creating a sales process, either for myself, for my team to scale or just to find one person to take extra leads off your plate. If you get a free brand call.com forward slash podcast, that’s free brand call.com forward slash podcast. We’ll do our first call with you for free. Again, we just wanna do, we’re gonna have a conversation with you and try to understand where you’re at and see if we can help you. And that’s what we’re here for, is to help you grow your impact and your income. That’s why we have the podcast. Before we land the plane, we’ve got our community question segment that we need to answer. This is a chance where our members, our active members in our program get to ask a question to submit to me and AJ to answer here on the podcast. Speaker 2 (39:56) All right, y’all. So here’s the question. I’ve scaled to seven figures, but I still feel like I’m the only one who can actually close sales. I’ve got a small sales team, but unless I’m on the call, things stall. How do I get my sales team to sell without me micromanaging every move? What a pertinent question. And I have to be honest, we did not know this was the question before we started, or at least I didn’t. But here’s my answer to that. The very first thing that I would do to whoever asked this question would be ask yourself an honest question. Do you have a documented sales process? Speaker 1 (40:34) starts with having the documented process, and then you got to coach to it, you got to train to it, you got to hold accountable to it. So one of the things that we’ve done internally and ⁓ also have made available to our members is we created SalesGraderBot, where we upload the manuscript of what the sales talk. is or the the the talk track of what it’s supposed to be and then you can upload the transcript of a recording of what a sales call actually was and then it will compare the two and it will grade each of the segments of the call that we talked about in this interview and it will give recommendations. So whether you have a tool to do that like we use and built or you’re doing it manually the point is you have to have a process and then you have to train and manage and hold accountable to that process. Speaker 2 (41:21) So I would say… Once you ask yourself the first question is, do you have a documented sales process? If in your heart of hearts, you can go, I do, I really do. Then the question is, are you actually managing your sales team? Which means, are you actually listening to their calls? Are you auditing recordings? Are you sitting down with them going, you see this process and you see what you’re doing? They don’t line up. Because if you had a true process that you use and you go, well, I know it works. Like, I know it does. So then the question is, are they using it? And if you’re not auditing calls and you’re not sitting down and listening to recordings and then coaching them, that would be the second question. It’s like, if you really have a sales process and you’re like, I did that, but it’s not working unless you’re on the call, then they’re likely not using it. Not because they’re defiant or they don’t want to. It’s like, people get off track. It’s like squirrel, rabbit, I forgot. yeah, I need to come back to that. So it’s, do you have one? And then are they using it? Those would be the two things I would go back and reflect on as the founder or the sales manager. And in order to know that you have to have recordings, you have to audit them, and then you have to sit down and listen to them with your sales team. Pull up your sales process, pull up your scripts, listen, and go minute by minute. Yes, that feels like micromanaging. That’s not a bad thing. That’s also called training and coaching. Pull it up minute by minute and go make sure what they’re doing and what you have on paper actually match. Speaker 1 (42:49) To use the analogy that you used earlier, every professional athlete watches film and the coach pauses it and says, right here, do you see where you went this way? You should have gone that way. That is not what amateurs do. That’s what professionals do. Professionals get into the minute details of accountability. They have professional coaching. They get into the nitty gritty of not this, this. and they do it again and again and again and again. So if you wanna be paid like a professional, you need to act like a professional. Professionals have coaches. If you need a coach, that’s part of what we do. You want your people to perform like professionals, they need a coach. That’s a part of what you have got to do. And that’s a reason to keep coming back and listen to this show every single week and share this episode with your team or anyone who you think should hear it. Thanks for being a part of the wealthy and well-known podcast and a part of the brand builders group community. We’ll see you next time.