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