How To Think Like The Top 1% | Sales Masterclass

You're making mistakes in entrepreneurship because of patterns you have yet to recognize. And those happen because the solutions to your sticking point are counterintuitive. And don't confuse that with psychological versus logical solutions, which is like, for example, if I wanted to get um my neighbor to stop having their dog [ __ ] on my lawn, um you can't hurt the dog because then you'd get arrested. You can't steal the dog, you'd also get arrested. And you could ask the neighbor nicely, but they might not give a [ __ ] So, what do you do in that situation? It's actually really tough. You could try and go to court, but it still probably wouldn't stick because there's really no ramifications. And even then, it would just be a ticket that the other person would pay and the dog could still shoot on your lawn. So, it's like a real predicament. So, what would you do? Now, you could say, "Okay, I could try and build a fence." And that's a a potential solution. Um, but I'll tell you the cheapest one that you could do, which is uh just get a motion activated sprinkler installed on your property and then whenever anything comes onto the grass, it squirts them and then the dog would not do it anymore. And so that is an example of a psychological versus logical solution. The types of solutions I'm talking about are intuitive versus counterintuitive. And so an intuitive solution would be what you would naturally think would be the thing to do. And what I have noticed that is an entrepreneurship is that we get stuck at the counterintuitive solutions because we almost always start with the intuitive one, right? You you do the one that you think would make the most sense. But and to be very clear, the intuitive solution usually is the correct solution in the majority of situations because you have a problem, you have an intuitive solution, you do the intuitive solution, the problem goes away and you don't get stuck. You move on with life and you solve problems every day. But some larger problems in business have counterintuitive solutions. And I thought I would note down call the top 10 that I have seen get entrepreneurs stuck. And this is at every level. So this is at 1 million, 10 million, 30 million, 100 million. Um, and so let's start with number one, which is that counterintuitively, this is a little warm-up for you, you will save, I'll say it differently, if your labor cost you too much, it's probably because you're paying them too little. Counterintuitive. So what does that mean? If you pay above market rates, you will get above market talent. And the value of above market talent is in excess of above market rates. So Henry Ford figured this out years ago. He had uh he paid people above his competition and as a result he was able to suck up the best talent in the marketplace and then his people did two three times the output that call it B players would. And so an A player might be priced at 25 to 50% above what a B player might be, but one A player is worth three to five B players. And so it's counterintuitive to think, wait, in order for me to save on my labor costs, I should increase how much I'm paying. And to be clear, if you tomorrow just increase how much you're paying all your people, you're not going to all of a sudden get a talent. The point of increasing how much you pay is so that you can attract a talent because a certain level of compensation that they're going to expect in order for them to even consider your kind of job opportunity. And to be clear, this is horizontally as in, you know, plumbers versus plumbers or accountants versus accountants, not a seale versus a front a frontline employee, right? Competition is horizontal, not vertical. So that's number one. Here's the second kind of counterintuitive uh problem that people have. They think that in order to make more money, and this is super common for people who have an existing audience, but is that they need to sell more products to make more money. when the counterintuitive solution is that you need to sell fewer products to make more money. So, how does that even happen? Well, the reality is if you if you have fewer products to sell, then you will be able to make those products better. You'll able to be clear about the avatars that you're trying to serve. You'll be clear on the messaging that you can put out in your advertising. And so, you think that, oh, I'm going to sell more stuff so that I can sell more stuff. But you end up selling less stuff and having more things to maintain. And that applies to both services and products. Here's a third counterintuitive one. Um, in order for me to grow my business, I should, uh, be broader in terms of who I'm selling to, right? So, I'm going to instead of niching down, I'm going to go broader. So, uh, instead of selling just to gym owners, I'm going to sell to any fitness professional, right? Or even wider, any business owner. And so I can talk to this because I've gone through this experience which is that first off if you ever are going to go broader which I'll make my cautioner care ter why it's probably not a good idea is you need to earn the right to go broad right it's like first I started with weight loss and then I started with gym owners specifically and then and only then I talked to people who sold to niche lead genen which was in Allen which was that business uh the software company and then and only then after we had the exit could we then talk about business in general because at that point I'd already scaled an e-commerce business to $20 million plus I'd scaled brickandmortar to um you know six plus locations on my own they were privately held I had the uh the B2B consulting side and in gym launch that it's killed nationally and so it's like had these differentam examples and we had Allen which was an agency related business which was SAS and so I had these very desperate examples that allowed me to have credibility to then speak more broadly it is very difficult to just say oh I'll just talk broadly because what ends up happening is you talk to no one and I can say this firsthand it is much more difficult to be able to go deep on many different subjects which is something that um I'd they've been able to do relatively disproportionately well to the market which is why you know we have the you know audience we do I'm saying so I think that it is much easier to win in a narrow pond now there are significant benefits to this counterintuitive solution so in order to make more money you get narrower why would you get narrower because when you get narrower you can sell the same thing for more money out so um a classic example that I love that I I took from Dan Kennedy from years ago is if you had a t time management course right you could sell time management that's selling it to everybody. That's maybe a $19 or, you know, the $100 thing at most. If I sold time management to sales reps, maybe it's a few hundred thing, right? If I sell time management to outbound sales reps, now it's maybe a thousand or several thousand dollar thing. If I sell time management to outbound sales reps who sell power tools and garden uh materials, then I could probably charge $10,000 for that, right? And the idea is that as you go narrower, the relevance to the prospect goes up. And so the perceived value also goes up too. And so we think about the value equation of we've got dream outcome, we've got perceived likelihood of achievement. When you niche down, you jack up the value and perceived likelihood of achievement. The likelihood that they believe that your thing is going to help them goes through the roof when you're only talking about their specific problems and their specific benefits. All right, that's the jam. So, um, you want to sell fewer products. you want to uh rather than more to make more money. You want to sell, you want to niche down rather than broadening uh in order to make more money. Now, here's one that obviously uh I I will speak from the soul on this. Um which is that you will in order to make more money and specifically more profit, you need to hear no more than you need to hear yes. And so many times people think, okay, uh you know, I'm closing at 50%, in order for me to make more money, if I can close at 80%, I should do that. If you're closing at 80%, you should raise your prices. And so, counterintuitively, if you're at that percentage, you should actually raise your prices to hear no more to make more money. I know, counterintuitive. And so, if you're listening to this, you're like, "Wow, these are all probably not the decision I would make." And to be clear, these are all mistakes that I made at each of these situations and done it multiple times and only through saying, "Listen, I tried every intuitive solution up to this point and none of them have made me more money. Why don't I just try something entirely different?" then and only then I would have this breakthrough and then all of a sudden we're making more money. And so we we have to be willing and again a lot of these things because they're counterintuitive is because they're anti some sort of human emotion. We don't want to hear no and so we don't want to raise price. But when you do the math, if you can double the prices and your and your close rate cuts by 25%, you make more money for two reasons. One, every customer is paying you more money. But number two, your cost basis should go down by at least 25% because you have 25% fewer customers to service. Right? So margins expand double because of that. All right? And so um this is why pricing is by far the strongest lever. But it is a counterintuitive thing. That's why most business owners don't do it. They haven't revisited their pricing in a long time. By the way, there's a direct correlation to how often you test price in a business and the overall profitability of the business. Kind of interesting. So there's a great chart that profit well produced where basically people who never look at price least profitable. the people who test price annually more profitable the pe the people who test price quarterly and then the people who test price in real time and have pricing committees that full-time are dedicated to figure out what they should charge right I mean it's literally the amount of money that you get for the thing and and it's for some reason the thing that people think about least often all right another counterintuitive one um in order for me to grow I should do something different than I am right now I should do something new now to be Earlier I talked about products in terms of I should sell more products. This also applies from an advertising and acquisition perspective. So it's saying uh you know I'm I'm uh I'm doing outbound and to get customers and so I should start making content. Now to be clear I think the more people find about your stuff in general the better. But in terms of a focus of the limited resources you have as a business owner, it is more uncomfortable to ask the question, what do I need to do to make this go up? What do I need to do to do more of the thing that is already working? Because more is the highest riskadjusted return move that you can make in a business. Why? Because there's so many things that you can do in a business that do not make you more money. And the thing that you are doing is actually working. And so it makes more sense to find ways like to do more rather than try to do different or new. And this concept is again counterintuitive. We think okay well I'm doing this current level of thing and it I would encourage you to think with zeros when you think about more. So when I say more a lot of people think in terms of doubles and it's normal to think in terms of doubles because it's very human. You're like okay well if I work twice as hard I work twice the amount of hours you can get there right? And so you actually don't need any creativity. But when you add a zero, you think an order of magnitude increase in terms of how much volume you need to do. You have to solve the problem differently. Now, maybe it means that you need to get hired 10 times the guys. And that's fine, but you also need to solve the problem differently. It's like, I wonder if I could cut a I could remove a step from this process. I wonder if I could, you know, this is where um like maybe there's a there's a hook or a messaging change that needs to happen. Maybe there's a a step in the funnel or step in the sales process that I can remove or maybe I can um I'm about to give the next counterintuitive one away. But each of those I would encourage you before you do something new from an acquisition perspective. And mind you, this is somebody who comes from like I [ __ ] love selling [ __ ] right? I love building out sales motions. I love building out acquisition channels. I name the company acquisition.com. I like it. Um, but I've had to learn this the hard way, which is that whenever I want to do something new, I think to myself, is there a way that I could do this and not do something new? And have I truly exhausted more? And almost never in my life have I truly exhausted more to the scale that exists. So I'll give you one little image for this to give you an idea. A lot of people think that they have saturated their existing channel of getting customers. All right? So, they're like, "Well, I'm uh I'm running ads in my local area on, you know, PPC, Google PPC." And you're like, "Okay, fine." Um, and then all of a sudden, somebody else runs ads for their plumber plumbing business in in the local area, too, and they're like, "Oh my god, the pie is now cut in half." But it's such a facious way of thinking. It's it's incorrect because the amount of aggregate attention that exists in your area is the total pie. Right now, we're talking about one keyword strain or string on one specific platform as your way of getting customers. It's like you're you're not you haven't you haven't cut the pie in half by having another competitor. You've got one crumb of a hundred crumbs and that one crumb you're a 25% owner of that one crumb. The pie is gigantic. It's like we haven't done radio. We haven't done direct mail. We haven't done email. We haven't done uh outbound. We haven't done DMs. We haven't done um we haven't done uh making content. We haven't done making content on uh you know SEO. We haven't done AEO. We haven't done content for Instagram. We haven't done content for uh Facebook or Meta. We haven't done content on YouTube. We haven't done content on Tik Tok. We haven't done content on school. Like there's all these different platforms that exist. And so you're running Google PPC and you're thinking, "Oh my god, I've saturated my market." It's like, bro, no one even knows you exist. you're inconsequential. The thing your biggest your biggest competitor is irrelevance is that no one knows who you are. And so that is a counterintuitive solution is that when you get to those situations normally your intuition is I should do something different when the much more painful thing that is the correct answer is that you should do more. Um here's a really good one. You're not making enough sales. And so what you think to do is you want to decrease friction. So you say I'm going to remove steps from my process of sales so that I can make more. Ah but here's what's counterintuitive and this is something that I found. So you guys could take this from the the you know the the the holy book of marketing you know whatever you want to say whatever like it's if I had horos laws this would be one of them is that the more friction that you add to a sales process the more money you typically make. And I know this sounds crazy and it's because now you could say well if you put all the friction in the world then no one would ever get through. And that's true. But the thing is is that most people's in intuition is to add too little. And so if you try to add more, you'll probably find the sweet spot rather than go too far. All right? And so let me give you an example. So in the launch for uh money models, we had two campaigns that were running. One that was a leadbased campaign. So it optimizes earlier in the funnel uh meaning we get a conversion event when someone opts in. And then we had a second campaign that was for pre-orders. So it optimized only for people who are going to do pre-orders. Now what's interesting about this is that what do you think the LTV to CAC was on each of these campaigns? Well, I'll tell you. So the leads based campaign, our leads cost us about $4 or $45. And the value per lead from the leads generated campaign was about 20. So we got four or five to one uh on the leadsbased campaigns. Now, how much do you think it cost us to get leads even though we weren't optimizing for leads on our pre-order driven campaign? 17 bucks. What? Yes. $17. So, you're saying there's a $4 or5 campaign that was worth 20 and then there's another campaign that's getting you $17 leads. Okay. So, the question is, what were the $17 leads worth? The answer was $189. And so the question is, are you trying to get the cheapest leads or you trying to make most money? It's counterintuitive because we think, ah, cheaper leads, therefore we should make more money. But again, most of the solutions that I've had that have been breakthroughs in my business have been counterintuitive. I need to spend more for the leads so that I can make even more money because my return was better. My LTV to CAC was better. I'd rather spend $1 and get 11, right? And more specifically, I'd rather spend $100 and make $1,100 than spend $1 to make $2. Get what I'm saying? Get my drift here? And so, right now, many of you need to add more friction to your sales process, more qualifications, more specificity in the targeting, more steps for someone to go through so that you're only talking to better quality customers. And whenever you make this change, and this is the big the the leap of faith here, and this is why it's counterintuitive, is that you have to expect for your lead cost to go up. That's the thing. Your lead cost will go up when you do this, but your returns will also go up. All right. One of the best campaigns I ever ran at gym launch was a campaign called the one year later campaign. And so the whole thing that I was trying to anchor against was there was a lot of, you know, onesie twoosy. I call it method people who they've got they're a one-trick pony. They they've got one little thing they figured out, one little trick, one little hack, one little tactic. And I was like, we're not method people. We're model people. I will fix the model of the gym and then you can use as many methods as you want. And the methods come and go with the times. But the model is the thing that persists, right? And so I was like, where are these guys testimonials from one year later from two years later? I still got people working with me. They don't because they taught the one trick and then they're gone. Or the trick only works for six weeks and then it doesn't work anymore. And so the one year later campaign, this is what was interesting. The one year later campaign automatically selected for business owners who were more mature, who thought over a longer time horizon, who were looking at much bigger before and afters in terms of the the numbers, but the expectation was a year, two years. And so here was the crazy part and the reason that I remember this so vividly is that we almost turned the campaign off because the cost per call was so much higher than our standard uh campaigns that we were running. But then all of a sudden, this is why it's important to have a feedback loop between sales and marketing, which at this point in my career, I don't think I had them unified. And by the way, pro tip, um, at every company probably in the last five or six years that I've had, marketing and sales are are unified from a from a from a communication cycle perspective. It's really just acquisition because otherwise you get this like get us more leads. The leads are [ __ ] Why don't you close leads? It's this constant battle between marketing and sales when they really should just be unified on like how do we make the most money? And so back to the story, the sales guys were like, "Hey, can you get us more of these these specific types of leads?" And when I looked at where these leads were coming from, they were all coming from the one-year later campaign. They were all more qualified customers. And so then, and this is where I only got to look at this retroactively, a year later from my one- year later campaign, those customers paid the most, stayed the longest, upgraded the most, referred the most customers, and they ultimately my CAC was a little higher, but my god, the LTV was gigantic, right? And so this is why it is counterintuitive sometimes in terms of the steps you have to take in order to fix the business. All right. Um, here's another one. So, in order to grow faster, you need to take longer to hire. counterintuitive. You think, "Okay, I have these I've got these seats. I need to fill them up with butts and hands and maybe some brains." But what ends up happening is that when you have to fill your seats quickly, you end up lowering your bar for talent. And be talent costs so much more, especially at the leadership level. It's it's it's it's so hard to comprehend because I'll tell you real story. Whenever we have to turn a leader in in in one of our companies, you almost always have to turn half or more of the team. And it's just because that leader standards were too low. And so they let in other like you know B players hire C players, right? It's like they're even worse and they do like they're negative. They're literally negative value. Like they they then discourage the A players because they're like, "Oh my god, my life has gotten so much worse because this person is now getting in the way of me doing work." And so what do you do in that instance? Uh you have to take longer to make sure that you keep the bar high and you have to be willing to suffer in the short term. And again, you'll notice this common theme of these counterintuitive solutions tend to be things that are counterhuman. It's counter are like the intuitive ones. They make sense and then they're aligned with how we would behave as humans. It's fast, it's easy, it's whatever, right? The counterintuitive ones, we have to suffer longer. We have to prolong the pain that we're in so that we can avoid much larger pain that happens later. The equal opposite of this is that it is it is human to keep somebody who is a star performer that is bad for the culture. And so that's the the equal opposite of this is that we have to fire that person very quickly. Now the intuitive side is or the human side is well I don't want to have the hard conversation and I also have a business case that I can reasonably explain why I don't want to get rid of this star performer. But the thing is is that every time we remove a cancer everything around it grows. And this is something that I've seen especially on sales teams because this is where it's probably most prevalent where people are and entrepreneurs are willing to put up with kind of shitty behavior more because they're directly driving revenue. But every time I have removed a star performer star putting in as you know quotes here uh somebody who does good production but does not obey the way that we do things here in terms of the culture, everyone else just steps up and it's like they never were there and now the culture of the team just picks up and it makes much easier to get and keep better talent. All right, I'll give you another counterintuitive one. If you want to increase demand, cut supply. Huh? So, you're struggling to increase, you know, the the pricing that you have, you want get more people to say yes. And so, the way to get more people to say yes is to not say allow as many people to buy from you. So, if you cut supply, and I learned this when I was at uh Arnold Schwarzenegger charity event, they introduced me to this guy who's, you know, a very very very successful luxury uh watch and jeweler. and uh he was talking to the organizer of the event and he said um you should have uh cut the supply and raised the prices and he was like well we had a lot more interest this year and he's like and that's exactly when you should have cut it and I remember him saying it so violently. It was this uh it was like an Eastern European guy who's an immigrant and he obviously made everything for himself and he said it so confidently I was like I'm going to I'm going to remember this one. Um and I talk about this in the offers book about scarcity but if right now you're not getting as many people as you want this is where having cohorts can be super useful. This is where having weight lists can be super useful. This is why saying there start dates that are delayed or they rotate or if you're in physical products the limited drops like you will sell more from having limited drops than you will from having it always be available. And so the question is how can you maintain or project out the correct amount to limit it at so that you're always a little bit below the supply or rather the demand uh for the stuff you have because then what ends up happening and fundamentally if if this weren't true then scarcity urg urgency would not work and we all know that they work but we don't actually apply them to the business and so yes it is counterintuitive that if we say we will sell fewer people we will end up selling more counterintuitive all right um another counterintuitive lesson give away good stuff for free that other people charge for before asking for money in order to ask for more money later. You will make more net money over a longer period of time by giving stuff away for free first. Period. And again, it's counterintuitive because the intuitive thought is, well, if I give away free stuff, they're already going to get the value. They're not going to want to pay me. Uh if I give away my free stuff, um they're going to steal it or my competitors will steal it. There's, you know, a hundred reasons that people come up with why they shouldn't give away or I don't want to take the time to give away free stuff. Um, for all those reasons, they intuitively they they make rational sense. And one of the things that you have to be careful of when you're an entrepreneur is is buying your own [ __ ] right? Getting high on your own supply. Like you might convince your team that what you just said is true. Like each of those explanations I just gave would be reasonable to believe. They just also are false. And so just because something makes rational sense doesn't make it true. And that is one of the biggest lessons that I've learned in entrepreneurship is that where you get stuck is where the logical solution is not correct. I'll say that again. Where you get stuck is where the logical solution is not correct. And so um who am I I'm I'm blinking. Oh, Roy Sutherland uh has a couple good examples of this. I'll tell you both of them because I like them a lot. But in in uh in the UK, they're getting a lot of complaints around um you know, elevators being slow. And so this is kind of like the dog example I gave at the beginning of this. Um if the elevators being slow, it's like you could try and make the elevators faster, then you have to take out more insurance and that the cables have to be strengthened to a certain degree, blah blah blah blah blah, right? Those are all very expensive logical. People are complaining about being slow. Let's make it faster. The thing is people always want it to be faster and even then they'll complain that it's not fast enough when it's faster than it was before, right? People just always want it to be instant and so they will never be satisfied from a speed perspective. But what is the counterintuitive solution? The counterintuitive solution counterintuitive solution would be how can we make them not realize that the time is going by. And so the counterintuitive solution is just put some mirrors in there. And then people are sit sit there trying to pick their teeth, right? Trying to look at themselves in the mirror, trying to get a get an angle, get a little tricep flex going. And all of a sudden the complaints go down. They go away. And so there there are these these different ways of framing the problem that that are typically the correct solution but not the logical one. Right? And I'll give you uh a final one um which is that you want to you you think when you start well this isn't scalable. Right? I hear this all the time from people who are trying to pick their their first business or first thing to sell. But this also applies to business owners who are starting a new revenue line or new business unit for larger companies is that we think well that's not scalable right but in order to do something and make it scalable you need to do something unscalable first Elon talks about this in the algorithm right uh which is actually not him the books by his president but it it details the process of optimizing any any any um uh manufacturing process or any input output process and so there are first what why are we doing this we question the requirements Second, we uh delete the stupid steps. Then we optimize, simplify. How do we make it as simple as humanly possible? Get the most for the least. Then how do we accelerate it? How do we make it faster? And then and only then do we automate? Do we make it scalable? And so the the problem for the problem with trying to make everything scalable is that you end up making many things that should not have been scaled to begin with, which is actually less efficient than deciding not to do it at all. And so you you actually miss out on the optimization steps that create scalable solutions is by doing things that are unscalable first. And if I can really drive that one home like for the love of God, like this is one that this is one that I'm like I'm presently in this in this right now. Like this is something that I think about on a regular basis which is like because we have a lot of scale, right? We have we have a large brand. We have a lot we have a very large team. We have a lot of companies. Like there's a lot there's a lot going on, right? Right? And so it makes sense to automatically want to start with let's only build something that's scalable. But I have to fight that intuitive solution with the counterintuitive thinking process of no, we're going to go slow to go fast. We're going to do these things the right way, the manual way, and then try and strip away as much from these processes humanly possible, optimize as much as we can. then see can we compress tile lines and then and only then we say okay now let's see if there's a scalable version of this um that works. Now one of the interesting things that you'll also find is that people think about scalability and they think that just because it requires a human it doesn't make it scalable. It's a cost and return question. It's not whether like humans are scalable. I mean for the love of God the like the the open AIs and the anthropics have 5,000 employees. All right. And so like if if employees or humans added or conferred no additional value they wouldn't have them there right and so um it's just that it is more difficult to scale not that it is unscalable and in order if there is an increase in difficulty or complexity we just have to ask the question is is it worth it right like if hiring a 100 people makes you a billion dollars then it's probably worth doing rather than trying to automate it right especially if you can get there faster and so this is the this is the trade-off and so each to the the the solutions that I just went over are things that I've repeatedly had to learn the hard way um in my own business. So, I'll recap them for you for those who are just joining. These are counterintuitive solutions um to the intuitive problem set that you want to solve. So, you think you need to make more money, so you think you should sell more products. Instead, you should sell fewer products. Uh you want to make more money, so you think, "Oh, I should sell to more different types of people." When in fact, you should sell to fewer people so you can be more specific with the messaging and increase price and relevance to your prospects. You think in order to make more money you should get more yeses. So you should lower the prices and make it up with volume. But the counterintuitive solution is that you should raise your prices, have more people say no, and then make more money because you're making significantly more gross profit per and have a lower cost basis because you have fewer people to deliver on. Um the intuitive solution of trying to um make more money with your marketing, for example, is oh I should just do different types of marketing on top of what I'm doing. But the more counterintuitive solution is, well, this is working. I should do I should exhaust every means of more before doing new. The next counterintuitive solution is that oh in order for me to um make more sales I should lower my lead cost and I should remove friction so I can talk to more people. But most of the time you will make more money by adding friction, adding qualifications and adding steps so you have fewer people to speak with. But then and only then you have the qualified people who are ready to buy at the most expensive prices. And of course you have to adjust your expectations of what your lead cost will be. But what we are optimizing around is for return, not for cost per lead. It's cost of acquisition relative, again, not just even CAC. It's cost of acquisition relative to how much money you're going to make. LTV to CAC. It's a ratio. Uh next counterintuitive is um in order to grow faster, you need to take longer to hire. Um and so we do that because the cost of hiring the wrong person is significantly higher than the cost of dealing with the fire in the short term. and kind of dovetailed from there, the idea of I want to solve my high labor costs by cutting down how much I'm paying my people. It is counterintuitive and also correct to pay above market and by paying above market you get the best people. And the best people have the highest return. Again, the biggest issue is that people think about one side of the equation, not both, which is you can't just think about cost. We have to think about cost relative to value, right? There's the I'm paying all my It's like I can't believe you're paying your people 30% above market. It's like yeah, but my people make they make me three times more than a B player, right? Look at the look at the most successful companies in the world. Look at the you look at look at Goldman Sachs, look at Mackenzie, look at look at uh look at Google, look at look at OpenAI, look at these all these different companies. What do what do you think they have in common? They have an exceptionally high bar for talent and they pay people goss and gobs of money. And you may have heard of some of the crazy salaries that these people are getting and some of the crazy bonuses and stock options and all this stuff. It's like, do you think these companies that became so incredibly wealthy did that because they're idiots or do you think they know something that we don't know and that we're not act actively using, which is that they're optimizing for return, not for absolute cost. Uh counterintuitive, cut supply uh in order to increase demand and increase how much money you make. So again, you think, oh, I should just make it available all the time for everyone. when in fact we should make it available selectively for only a few people for specific reasons. Um, next one. Counterintuitively, I don't want to give away my best stuff because I'm afraid of my competition or somebody copying it or my customers or prospects not needing me. When in fact is the opposite. When you give your valuable stuff away for free, then they are more likely to want to buy your other stuff that is for paid. Um, and then finally, uh, you think that in order to make something scalable, you need to build it scalable first. when in reality you need to build it correctly first and then figure out how to scale it. So those are the counterintuitive solutions for bisn bis nasty and uh let's open it up for for some A's and Q's for definitely Q's and maybe some A's and while the team does that um I will [snorts] I'm going to get naked for you guys. It's getting hot. All right. That's right. You guys didn't know you were in for a uh for a full show today. That's right. All right. Uh my team, can you pull up some pragas for me? That is espanol for uh for questions. If you guys are here for Spanish 101, I'll also be here all day. Um okay, here we go. My name uh and I'll give you some theme for the questions after I answer these first two that came up and then I'll uh [snorts] what theme should we do today? Which what theme? So we did we did a marketing theme. Um we did a sales theme. I mean to be fair, I mean it's not like there's that many different types of things in business. Um, let's do and yesterday we did a a life and generic theme. Um, let's make the theme of today h let's make it sales motion. All right. So, what does that mean? So, it's what is the process that you have to take someone through in order to get them to buy from you. All right. That is a sales motion or a sales process. Let's target the questions around that because I'll bet you many of you guys have because a lot of the things that I discussed uh earlier here were very sales motion driven. Sales motion and pricing driven. Um and so that probably thematically works. So let's let's focus on that stuff. Um in the meantime, let's go uh this first question. All right. My name is Yasser. I'm 20 years old. I run a business selling peptides. Okay. Uh in the UAE. I built it from nothing. Uh now it makes 350,000 a year. Great. Enough that my family doesn't live paycheck to paycheck. Awesome. What's stopping me is that my once killer ads that were gez 404 to1 LTV CAC that's pretty pretty wild. Um have stopped working after a month of having my ads banned. Okay, that makes sense. I want to do right by the public by giving access to quality in both info and product. I love what I do. It's all I've studied for years. The idea that gets stripped away from someone else less qualified pains me. How do I keep my business running in an industry where the rules around advertising and regulation keep shifting underneath me? All right, here's the here's the reality slap for you. Yeah, sir. The reason that you have the absurd LTV to CAC that you have is that you're in the Wild Wild West. There are there are always businesses that have higher regulatory scrutiny and risk associated. So, this is a very clear example of high risk, high return. And so, you have these crazy high LTV to CAC numbers because you're in a space that has the issues that you're dealing with. like other people don't want to deal with these issues and so they don't play and the people who do play deal with this volatility. Now that being said, um there are advertising rules of the platform and if you disobey those rules and it is that platform's prerogative to not allow you to play games on their platform anymore. That's their prerogative. You can advertise in a hundred other ways. You can do outbound, you can, you know, like there's there's literally you can make content on it. There's there's so many ways to get customers. Um pick any of them. If you are concerned about the volatility of the ad platform, if you understand the volatility of the ad platform and realize that you may be breaking platform rules, then observe the platform rules and start new accounts like anyone else would and then try to maintain yourself within the box. If they if you are actually breaking the rules, then you should expect to get shut down and then you're just going to play this whack-a-ole game for for the rest of your life. And good for you that like what you did worked um you know for you and your family and I'm hoping that you're doing something that's ethical, not weird. Um, yeah, this is just the nature of it. It's like if you were selling guns, uh, uh, Facebook doesn't allow that. And so they don't want you to run ads for guns. And if you ran ads for guns and it worked, it's probably because you're not supposed to. And there's a short window before they figured it out. And so, um, yes, my TLDDR is find the platforms that allow you to advertise in that specific way. If you want the long-term solution, if you want this kind of high-risisk, high reward thing, then expect the volatility. And when you have a good month, bank it knowing that you might have a couple bad months that follow. Okay, let's see. Ponta numero dos. Um, [snorts] my name is Fernando. I sell packaging and labels to cannabis brands. Actually, here we go. Another another high-risisk category. Um, we're based in Austin. I keep a stock of premium jars in California since that's where a lot of customers are. It's easy to pack from there. Okay. Problem is I live in California, but I moved to Austin focus fully on the business. Get her running better. Now, my girlfriend is pregnant and she wants to have the baby in California. That means that I need to be in California from November through February. Okay. So, I'm stuck deciding. Do I open a second location in California where I'll be living the next part of the year anyways, or do I stay fully focused on Texas while I'm there and do my best running things remotely from California when I have to be there? I would not encourage you to start a California store uh when you have a new baby on the way and you're also going to be shifting to be being a remote manager of the brick and mortar that you have. That's two changes already. And so, I would encourage you to make the remote model work. see how profitable it can be without you being there. If you can maintain that, then you no longer have to even open in California at all. Basically, if you prove out the remote model, then you could open anywhere. And that way, you can open in the absolute best market rather than the one that's most convenient for you. And so, two changes, two new things is already way too many for me. Just make the the current thing work in the new setting. Probably be there for your kid and your girlfriend. Um, let that stabilize and then I would consider opening your location. And then you have to look at the whole US because played out the other way. Let's say you do that. You open the second location in California. Your your Texas one starts going down because you're not managing it well. And now you're split between two and it's this big it's big nightmare. If it works out then you don't have to even open the one in California. You could open another one in Texas. Uh and I think there's more more more advantages there. [snorts] Okay. Let's do uh let's do Pontas. Okay. Sales motion questions. Albin 5960. How can I shape my sales to prove my product actually gives value to customers rather than creating more manual review work for them? I don't even know what that question really means. So, Aan, I will let you do one follow-up clarification because I don't know what the hell you sell, man. Um, I'm going to leave it at that. Okay. The flipping schmidz. All right. Does does demo based selling put too much emphasis on your product and not enough on the result or is the way to balance that? Yeah, I'm actually I mean there's there's a I'm not against demo based selling. Um but it has to be clean and super tight. And so I think what it's more times than not demobased selling ends up becoming a feature vomit session that becomes techno jargon to the prospect because they don't care about the features. They care about the thing they get from the features. And so the only reason to have a demo should be to prove a point that getting that outcome is easy, not to show all the stuff that it can do. And so fundamentally, if we're having a sales process, the beginning questions of intro, you know, from the intro and then discovery is to narrow down the field of all the potential things we can do versus the thing that this person wants us to do. And so the reason this person is like the reasons oneonone sales calls still work versus just having people automatically buy is that people come in for a variety of different reasons. And we have to figure out what it is. So I'll give you an example um that I like um that I actually read in the algorithm book, which is a lot of different reasons that people buy a Tesla, right? Sometimes people buy Tesla because they're want to be conscious of the environment because they're more electric, you know. Some people buy it because they want the performance because they love the 0 to 60. Some people buy it uh because they want to save money, right? They don't like doing, you know, paying at the at the pump or they want to save time by not having to go to the pump. Um some people do it because they like the way that it looks. Like there's five or six reasons that people might buy a Tesla or that it fits seven kids or whatever the thing is, right? And so in order for you to get the customer, if I have a Tesla and I'm selling a prospect on a Tesla, I'm probably not going to say it's good on the environment and it saves you time at the pump and it's also really fast and it's also really safe if you have a family. Like I'm just going to say, "What got you interested in a Tesla?" And they're going to say, "I've got kids and I need a place for them." And it's like, "Was there anything specific about why you made it for kids? So, is it the the safety or is it more like the the getting a smaller kid in and out or is it that you just need lots of kids? Well, it's actually more the safety and getting kids in and out. Great. Now, my demo is going to be purely targeted on let me show you how getting how easy getting kids in and out is. Great. Do you want to try it? Okay, cool. Then, do you think you'd be able to handle that? Great. Do you think that'll help you solve your problem? Awesome. When do you want to get started? Right? Like again, the whole point of the the the discovery part is just so that we don't have to talk about everything. Discovery is there to actually save you and them time and get very focused on the few things that matter most because most buyers are single issue voters. All right, this is a massive misconception for both salespeople and marketers. People don't buy for five reasons. They buy for the one that matters to them. So just because a marketing or a pitch might give five reasons. So, if I have to pitch Teslas, right, if I'm slinging Teslas and I've got a group of 100 people, I'm going to hit safety. I'm going to hit performance. I'm going to hit green. I'm going to hit saving time and money at the pump. I'm going to I'm going to hit on each of these because I have to check off boxes for different um ponds uh inside of the audience, right? But if I am selling one-on-one, the advantage is that you can completely t cater your solution to them. And so the TLDDR is I'm all for demo based selling as long as it is super targeted to paying down the risk that the person perceives around not getting what they think the product will deliver. I think that was pretty well said. Okay. Uh buckas I just wanted to say that. Okay. What trust or proof elements most influence the buying decision? Reviews, certifications, guarantees, before and after pictures. um technical credentials. Great question. They all do. So what we have to ask the question is to answer your question, we have to ask a different question which is what is the what does proof accomplish? So proof accomplishes basically creating a relationship between them before and what they want after. And then we make the connection between these two points, your widget, your thing, your product, your service. And so the stronger we can make that connection between before and after, which is by the way why before and afters are so compelling because they're so compelling that they're regulated, right? And so you can you can always know the stuff that really works because there's laws around it. All right? And so proof is the most compelling way to sell. And so you want to demonstrate as many different types of proof as you can based on the nature of the prospect. Now, is all proof created equal? No. Live proof is better than recorded proof. Inerson proof is better than uh digital proof. uh someone who's identical to you as the prospect is going to be more uh powerful than somebody who's different than you. Uh somebody who has a bigger outcome is going to be stronger than somebody who has a smaller outcome, right? Like each of these are like you could like I call them fight me statements like yes, of course a live demonstration is going to be more powerful than a recorded one, right? And so on these degree I wrote about this in my proof playbook from the launch. Um I think there's 11 or 12 different vectors I think that I identified. I have I don't remember them off the top of my head. I just gave you five. um that each of them oh volume a few small amount of proof or you know thousands of of pieces of proof right um generic versus personalized. So if you just say five star reviews or would recommend versus a narrative that relates more closely to the prospect and more specifically describes the outcome that will be more compelling. And so the idea is again not all proof is created equal. We want to have as much proof as humanly possible that is in the most relevant form to the prospect. Recent proof is more valuable than 10 years ago proof. Like you know, Alex helped me scale my business 10 years ago versus you see a guy today right now who just said that I did it yesterday, right? And so recency is another one. That's why you always have to keep collecting proof because you always need to be recent. And so hopefully that answers the question like which of these is better. It's really just which of them is the closest approximation. And then when you find it, you want to basically blow it out to all these settings. I want to be live. I want to be relative to them. Now, to that point, I'm going to have proof that different avatars are going to resonate with. So, weight loss is a simple one that everyone understands. If I want to help, if I'm able to help a woman lose 20 pounds and 200 lb, then I need to have proof of a 20 lb person or somebody losing 20 pounds and somebody losing 200. And so, one of the big other mistakes that I think marketers make specifically or entrepreneurs who are marketing their businesses is that they think that they should only show the big ones. You want to show the ones that are as closely related to the vast majority of the prospects that you are talking to. And so if the majority of your people trying to lose 30 pounds, then have a shitload of 30 pound testimonials, right? If the majority of your people are trying to get ads to spend profitably at $10,000 a month, then have that be the majority of uh the proof that you're demonstrating. All right? So hopefully that makes sense uh for you in terms of uh you know, which is the one that influences the buying decision, the one that is most relevant to the prospect and you show a lot of different versions in all the different ways that is outlined. Okay. Ranier sales motion for home services businesses. How to sell more in a higher rate? Okay, great question. So, there are two levers to building a sales motion. You have qualification, which is making sure that they are the correct person to talk to. They can afford it. They have the u they have the authority to spend the money. Now is a good time and they have a specific need for the product. That's bad. But authority, you need timing. On the second level of sales motion is education, which is friction. So, these are the two elements of friction in a sales process. Qualification and education. The education side is typically done in either presentation style that is either live or recorded uh or conversation one-on-one. So basically you've got live and recorded on this axis and then you've got um oneonone or one to many. And so the idea is we want to build sales assets that are recorded one to many so that we can send them to people in the sales motion. And so I'm preferencing the answer uh for you for the home services business which is that if someone it depends on where the lead's coming in but assuming let's say it's a uh Google PPC lead. All right. So you strung keywords plumber near me whatever. So they go to your page they should see a video. When they opt in great after they opt in they should see another video which further sells them gives them even more proof. Speed to lead. Great. We contacted them. Let's book the appointment. Before we show up we make sure that they saw the thank you page video. We remind them to watch it. When we get on site, we do our tour. We do the education on site. And then when we go out to the truck, we say, "Hey, watch this video while I go do this thing." And then I go pretend to give you, you know, come up with my magic calculation for the quote. And then when I present the quote, what you do not do is email quotes. You always present the quote and go for the close on the spot. And so if for some reason you're feeling like it is difficult for you to close on the spot, it's because you have not put enough friction or education prior to the sale and and or you did not qualify the prospect enough to make sure that the decision makers are present so you can actually close. All right. So whenever you have a sales motion that's less efficient, it's either a qualification issue, an education issue, or both. And qualification issues, if you want the problem solving for this is, am I talking to the correct people? Like are these people qualified to buy my thing? If I'm talking to the right people and they feel cold, we need more education. If you're talking to the wrong people but they feel hot, right, then we need more qualification, right? So that's kind of the equal opposite of qualification, education. Um, and that's so you can know how much you need. But my rule of thumb is I want to jam as much education as I possibly can in a sales motion at the points where you have the lowest cost. So for example, right before an opt-in, very expensive. Right after an opt-in, very cheap, right? You already have the opt-in, so you giving more education, super cheap. There's it's almost zero downside to doing it. Before you have an appointment, making sure someone watch that video. Very low downside to doing that. More education. If you have them on a call or you have them in person and you say, "Hey, before I come out, watch this video real quick. It's seven or eight minutes. Give you more outline of how we do our stuff and a shitload of proof. You go do the thing, you come back, you gave them more education." And so I want to stick as much education as I can in the lowest cost ways. And if I am going to put it in a high-cost area where I'm going to actually dramatically decrease potentially uh my throughput, I want to make sure that that is super worth it and arguably is typically there as more of a half qualification, half education. It's kind of accomplishing two objectives. So Rier, I hope that uh very thoroughly answered your question. Uh clip casserole. Okay. How do you craft a sales version that loops back into the grand slam offer being that the offer is king? So um you ask where to incorporate the offer but the offer is going to be present oftentimes at multiple parts in the sales motion. So from click to close the offer is going to be repeated throughout. So it's likely that that promotion or that offer will be run on the advertising side or on the outbound side depending how you get customers or on the landing page probably get reiterated inside of the videos that you have to describe the thing. Um, and then when you actually get on the sales presentation or sales pitch, you're going to be restating it. And so, it's very common for it to get woven all the way through. So, it's not like when's the right time. If you have the right offer, you want to say it as much as you can. All right. David Sling, uh, what would you say your hiring process for salespeople should look like? Good question. So, I think one of the larger mistakes, especially if you're hiring a bigger team, is to try and do one-on- ones too early. So, I'm a big advocate of uh tryyouts in group and then only doing one-on- ones like kind of at the kind of job offer stage uh and beyond. And so, this is kind of my reasoning, which is I it's very hard to tell sales aptitude from resume. And even past people who have sales experience, sometimes they have bad habits. Um, and so I don't necessarily confer a huge amount of value to that. Um, and so I want someone to number one send me a video that's 30 or 60 seconds so that I can get a vibe for them. That's thing one. After we get the video, then I would say, "Hey, here's a script. You can practice it before we get on a group call." They hop on the group call. We have each of them go through the first minute or two of the script. That'll also tell you who actually prepared um for that call. And you can also give feedback in real time because one of the most important things for us is coachability, right? Can they take feedback and then immediately change, which is also sign of intelligence. And so it's like we get to test intelligence and ego in a couple minutes in real time in a group setting. We can also see who's a team player because the people who are team players root for each other and the other ones try and [ __ ] talk or just act weird. And so in that group setting, we can already see how they're going to act on a team. We can already test their intelligence. We can also see if they did their homeworks. There's a lot of things that get checked in that box. Then only then we can have a one-on-one for the people that we think are good. Um and then we talk, you know, job offer stuff. But this way we can have a much wider uh front side of the funnel. And then uh on the on the inside or further on uh we're only talking to the most qualified people. So that hopefully should help in terms of the sales process. Okay. So um can you tell us how to dig into the pain in the sales call? Great. This is a great question. So there are nine steps in discovery. I'm not going to go through all of them, but let me give you the two magic questions. All right. So the two magic question after you've asked somebody like, okay, you know, what brought you in today? What's the problem you're trying to solve? Okay, how long you been dealing with that for? Got it. Okay, we've got we've gotten those ones out of the way. Now, the the the digging questions are oscillating between two things. These are so good. Can you give me an example of that? And tell me more about that. That's it. You literally just oscillate back and forth between. Can you give me an example of that? And tell me more about that. So, someone says, um, uh, hey, you know, uh, what what brought you in today? Um, you know, my business isn't growing as much as I want. Okay, tell me more about that. Oh, well, you know, it's uh you know, it's just not growing as fast as I'd like. Can you give me an example? Well, um you know, I didn't I didn't get any, you know, as many leads as I as I would have really liked last month. Okay, tell me more about that. You could just [ __ ] go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Oh, the leads. So, um yeah, they just weren't they weren't the right quality. Huh. Can you give me an example? Oh, well I mean some of the leads were, you know, for bigger house owners and some of the leads were for smaller house owners and big house owners are the ones that actually are worth the most money. Ah, so it sounds like so now I've got I've got the piece I need. So it sounds like you have any a lead quality issue, not necessarily volume issue. So that might be a messaging and avatar thing in terms of your targeting. Does that sound about right? Boom. We have the meat. And so you don't need to do this that many times, but you can see how natural it is to just go, can you tell me about tell me give me an example of that. Uh, tell me more about that. Can you give me an example of that? Tell me more about that. Um, and as a 2011 sales tactic for the for the sales pros in the room, um, giving commands automatically, subconsciously positions you as an authority within the sale. Tell me more about that. It's command. >> Um, and so nifty. So, anyone can use that if you're not getting enough meat or pain. And this is the most important part of the sale. Like the discovery process is the most important part of the sale. I probably said this about all the parts of the sale, but it's also the most important part of the sale because the discovery process is what motivates action. So like if we think about sales as you're a motivational speaker like at the most basic level we're trying to motivate action right and so if we're trying to motivate action then we need to give someone a carrot that they're going towards or we need to give them a fire that they're running away from. And so we do both with the sales motion but people are far more motivated to be loss averse or pain driven than they are about pleasure or gain. And so the discovery process is significantly longer than the pitch when done correctly. Right? So, it's like if I can accurately depict to you in as excruciating detail as possible the pains that you're suffering from, you will almost always believe that I can help you solve them if I can describe them with enough color and visual to your specific situation. And mind you, anyone can do this without being an expert. That's the beauty. I don't even need to tell you what the solution is. I just have to know the problems. And I'll give you another 2011 version of this is that once you understand how to sell a specific prospect, the product becomes irrelevant. I'm going to say this again. You You must learn to sell the prospect, not the product. I can promise you if I have a lady who's in front of me who's 35 years old and is trying to lose weight after a second kid. I the sale the conversation is the same. The sales conversation is the same. I'm going to start with clarify where they're label them problem. Okay, you're you're 180 and you want to be 140. Got it. So it's 40 lbs difference. What are you doing right now that you can't you know that that that's hurting your life because of this? Okay, what can you not do as a result of this 40 pounds? Okay, got it. You can't go on vacation. Tell me more about that. Hm. Can you give me an example? Right. Dig. Right. Can you give me an example? Oh, well, this last summer we had the Huh. Tell me more about that. Well, you know, I was out with my family and we did. Right. You're just [ __ ] there. But it's not hard to ask. Just boom, ping pong back and forth. All right. And if you want to add a third one, you can, but I just teach those two and they [ __ ] work great. Um, and so yes, I think I hopefully answered the question. Can can you tell us how to dig into paint on the sales call? There's nine steps to discovery. That is uh one of them which I call pooling teeth. Um okay. Voy voa. You said if you had to make a lot of money in a short amount of time, you'd sell a service and have someone else fulfill. How do you frame a services premium to sell it at a higher price? Okay, good question. Um it depends if you're going B2B or B to C. All right. If you are selling business consumers, so you're selling consumers, then it's a very emotive sale. So when you sell something that is non ROI driven, you have to sell around the emotions and the experience and and basically play up the value of the experience to the prospect and how shitty their current experience is um with their current situation, right? So it's not an ROI driven sale. Um and most of that from a consumer perspective is actually very heavy on qualification. And that's I would say like if you want to sell expensive stuff to consumers, it's 8020 on qualification versus education. If you have a room full of millionaires selling the expensive health thing, it it's actually the same pitch as you'd give to to poor people. It's just that everyone in the room can afford it. So, on the consumer side, on the business owner side, um I would say that qualification matters a lot as well. Obviously, like if you're going to sell a $10 million thing and it's a $100,000 year business, probably not going to work, right? Um and so I guess qualification is probably more important than both the situations but under the assumption that you had um the correct uh people in the room then framing something as premium. So 80% of the work is making sure the right people are there but framing as premium is really about on a B2B side just it's a deal right like everyone is buying a deal period. Businesses are buying a deal in terms of typically money. They're getting a return of some kind. the deal that a customer like consumers will typically buy is time, right? And so if you have richer people, their time is worth more. And so you want to sell time or you want to sell experience if you're if you're selling uh to consumers. And so a lot of it is making sure the right people in the room. That's why I say sell to the rich. Um and then digging into the pain. I think I got that. I think we nailed that one. Wed Masani. Hi Alex. Sales motion question. I run these are fun. Are these cool? I think these are good. These are fun. This is really good. I'm glad I'm glad we did this guys. This was This was good. I run a business that sells AI workshops to businesses. Okay. We're now doing 300,000 profit a year. What do you think the best sales process to get enterprise clients? Um I mean there's a lot of ways to get enterprise clients. Um it's probably going to be it's outbound and demonstration. And when I say demonstration, I mean more proof, not like a demo. Um so it's saying like here's company X. We cut their call team from 30 people to three using AI. Right? So, it's you want to have demonstrated cost savings for someone who's as similar to them as humanly possible. Um, but it would probably be like if I were going into this, I would probably go outbound as my first and cheapest strategy. I would make content organically that is only targeted for enterprise clients. Um, and then I would say tertiarily, um, I would consider going to trade shows. It depends on the size of the enterprise client you want. Um, but if you have especially a niche of enterprise client, then I think trade shows and conferences are among the highest return if you know how to do it right. You could absolutely printed those. Loi beats collective. How to get sales where one- on-one sales don't work. Have a checkout page and then do a presentation one to many before that and then tell them to go by there. I mean, I think one-on-one sales always work. It's just they might not be worth it. If they're not worth it because it's not worth paying the team, then you're pushing people to a checkout page and you educate them ahead of time via ads and presentations. That's it. Either live or recorded. That's kind of the jam. Becoming Alexander. All right, let's not get carried away here. Uh, I've seen base pay for salespeople help reduce commission stress, but also plenty of success in commission. What is your view on comp structure? I'm looking to start recruiting and not just sell myself. Good question. I see compensation. There's I say two types of salespeople. We have um self-gen salespeople, meaning they're actually getting the business and bringing it from click to close. So, if you have somebody who's a true hunter who's knocking doors and just bringing business in, that is where more upside, more performance makes the most sense. And the people getting into that make the most money because they own the entire process and they are absolutely directly revenue generating. In the other setting are sales people that are getting some element of acquisition taken care of for them. So that you have a marketing team or you're generating leads or you're paying for conferences or whatever it is, right? Like you are doing some of the steps in the sales process for them and you're bringing them leads etc. In those situations, I prefer to reverse engineer compensation from market value. So what does that mean? If I think the level of skill that's required for this person is $200,000 a year, then I like to have a 5050 split between base and performance. So, they're going to make a h 100red grand a year or 80 grand a year. And they're going to have variable that's going to be another 80 or $100,000 a year if they're hitting the goals that they that they should be hitting. And so, for me, it's kind of like uh too hot, too cold, just right. If you're below the KPI to a degree where somebody's making 120,000 with a hundred thousand dollar base, you're not going to be on the team long because you're just below KPI. If you're at 160 and you have, you know, an 80K base, then you're doing great. You're right where you need to be. If somebody's got even more variable on top, then it means they're just knocking it out of the park. But I then just reverse engineer how many deals I think that a reasonable salesperson with the correct skill set should be able to accomplish given the lead flow I'm feeding them. And the reason it has to be split is because some element of their success is not up to them. If your out account get shut down and they don't have any more leads. Like that's not on them, right? Whereas a self-gen guy, he can just go knock on more doors. And so I if it's inbound or you're feeding them sales, I like the 50/50 split and I make sure the added up number is relative to the skill for that specific job. If it's selfgen, then it's basically whatever you can afford. Um, and then the, you know, the bigger the comp, the more more absolute savages that you will bring in. Um, I'll I'll give you a great analogy for this though that I think is really good. if you want to build a sales motion. And so as somebody who's built a lot of sales motions and I think I'm really good at it. Uh it's one of my most valuable skills is you want to think about it like golf. Okay? So imagine imagine we have this, you know, green behind us. If I need somebody who's going to be able to play on a pro level and hit par, right? They've got to be able to to to drive. They've got to be able to hit irons and woods and chip shots and out of sand dunes and, you know, overwater. Uh, and then when they get on the green, they got to be able to putt, you know, for big greens and lots of land. So, there's a lot of skills there that I need somebody to do. Now, think of the other extreme. Let's imagine I've got somebody who's 6 in away from the hole and I drop the ball six inches away from the hole and they just have to learn how to do this, just 6 in putts all day long. How much skill is required for that second guy versus the first guy? Way less skill. How how long do you think it takes me to train that person? Way less time. How hard do you think it is for me to find that person? there's way more people who could do six-inch putts, right? And so when you have a properly designed sales process, you've already brought the ball six inches away from the hole and you're dropping in front of them for them to just chip for them to just tap in. And so typically you have when I see sales as a very high percentage of revenue, it typically means that there is an underdeveloped sales motion, sales training, and sales process within the business. So they have to overcompensate by spending way more to get these pro golfers when if we just had the motion dialed, we could get people who could play putt putt and still win. And that's a much more valuable business. It also drives more margin because the team is more scalable. You can ramp uh reps up much faster. Um and ultimately uh you can sell and have total sales compensation be a smaller percentage of total revenue which drives profitability. You guys want an advanced answer? That's an advanced answer. All right. Hey man, we talk about sales motions. It's not beginner [ __ ] So, this is this is actually a lot of fun for me. I don't really get to talk about this as much. Um, okay. How do you Okay, I've seen Okay, that one. Okay. How do you effectively build value during an AC system replacement sale when you know your competitors are charging significantly more? Also, I end up doing more and do a better job than them. All right. Well, first off, man, if your competitors are charging more than you, then just charge more. And if you're the one doing the job, then you probably are supply and trained as is anyways. So like just do the same conversation, just say the bigger number. This is one where you're probably just afraid of hearing no um more than making less money. And so you need to be more afraid of making less money than hearing no because if you raise the price, you'll probably sell the same amount of people and make more money. Um so I would do that. But in terms of building value, when you have a commoditized product, you want to build the value around everything else. All right? So number one is local versus global. Meaning, if you do a better job, that means that there's a long-term higher cost of having somebody do an inferior job. And it means you have to communicate that. And so, it's like, hey, locally, this person might be cheaper now. Right now, you're literally undercharging and doing a better job, which is ridiculous. All right? But you're saying, "Hey, these other guys are today cheaper, right? But right now, they're more expensive and they're going to cost you more later, too. They're costing you more now and cost you more later." Um, ideally, we want to say, "These guys are cheaper today, um, but they're going to cost you more over time." And that's why I have this premium. So, that's number one is local versus global. The second is we want to look at all the other components of value. Right? This is what the value equation is all about. How can we make what I do faster? Right? So at every step from from the time the lead comes in to me seeing them, the first person who goes on site has significantly more chance of getting the business than anybody else. Uh first contact to lead all the way through. And then even when I'm on site, do I email or do I try and close them on the spot? Of course I try and close them on the spot. If I say that I can start in an hour versus in two weeks, who do you think gets the business? uh I can start sooner. On top of that, who finishes sooner? I can finish in an hour, I can finish in two weeks, the guy can finish sooner. And so you want to optimize around all the other components of value, speed being one of them. Um to get uh more people to buy at a higher price. Same thing is like what are the inconveniences? Do I have do they have to tarp their house out? Do they have to move into a hotel for a few weeks? Like each of like are we going to track mud into the house? Are the guys going to come and use a porta potty outside? Are they going to use the the are they going to put are they going to walk, you know, mud through the kitchen? It's each of these micro things that then enhance the value overall um in the sale that allow you to charge the premium. So you just have to think what are all the things that suck about getting an AC replacement and let me fix all of the other things and then in so doing and have my business processes dialed meaning I'm going to get the leads faster etc. And then when you do that you can sell for a higher price than your competitors rather than a lower price. Clipping tick uh I sell ebooks and I want to get more sales. I post four times a day. I have no capital. I can spend. What do I do to get more sales? I mean, you're doing it. You just got to be better at the content you're making. Um, got to be better at the content you're making. Probably need to I would consider adding in some sort of service. This is like make the unscalable thing like add some service with your your ebook. Give them a call. Give them two one-on-one calls, whatever. Um, to make your thing more valuable. And um, you could also consider just outbound. Like the two cheap ways of getting customers are outbound. you reach out to people one-on-one um and you make content. Those are the two cheap ways of getting customers if you're getting started and you have no money. And so the other thing that you're not leveraging is you're not making a grand slam offer an ebook. It's not a very compelling offer no matter how good it is. And so it's always going to be priced very low. And so you'll be able to have like if you really want to make more money today, I would call all the people who bought your ebook and then offer them something significantly more expensive. Bingo. All right. Bango Lobo. Does that mean banging wolf? Y'all are crazy. I'm writing this from Mosamb beek. That makes sense. Uh, the market is tiny and purchasing power power is reduced. I don't really know where Mosmb beek is to be honest with you. I'm guessing it's not in the United States. Um, [laughter] my product is a virtual reality uh service for entertainment and virtual tours in 360. How can I improve my sales process? You have to demonstrate how having a 360 tour makes them more money. So said differently, you want to be able to show before and after of other customers you have who once they started using your process of doing the 360 tour, their clicks went up, their bookings went up, etc. And so then you can frame them not having it as the opportunity cost. And you can extrapolate that over a year, for example, and say, listen, I like people who have these get 25% more bookings. And so you currently are getting I don't know 100 bookings a month, you got 1,200 bookings a year. 25% more bookings for you would be 300 more bookings. So you'd be at 1500 bookings per year. And the average, you know, value of a booking is a hundred bucks. And so 300 times 100, it's $30,000. I charge a third of that. So it's nine grand. And there's your pitch. So you just have to demonstrate and just give them a lot of proof that that's true. And if the thing that you have does not have demonstrable value, then you should consider finding ways to make it have demonstrable value. Loi Beats Collective. Hi, Alex. Hello. Uh, I own a music SAS. I know for sure that my customers need it. Problem. Oneonone sales don't work in my industry. How do you get sales where oneonone sales don't work and not make content or ads? Bro, this is this is silly. This is a silly question. I mean, I can give you a solution for this, but I just like I think I think the the constraints you put on yourself are incorrect. So, it's just like, how could I how could I let people know about my stuff because advertising doesn't work? You know what I mean? Like, no one can find out about my thing. How do I get people to find out about it? It's like, what are we talking about? Honestly, so many more of you guys are limited by this [ __ ] than actual reality that it is baffling. But, I mean, I could still solve this little problem for you, but I still think you're wrong. um which is that you can reach out one-on-one to sell affiliates as in people who already have a base of your customers and then do joint promotions with them where they get a kickback um from your music sass thing, right? But if you've eliminated content and also you're like, I can't make content. What do you can't make content? Of course you make content. How does content not sell musical SAS? Right? And I'm guessing you're saying ads because you don't have the money. Fine. Right? In oneonone sales, you're saying it doesn't work. But does it not work because it's not worth it? If it's not worth it, maybe you're mispriced, right? like the the the premise that you started with is like there's probably three or four problems with your premise which you're accepting as truth which is actually what's limiting you not the fact that this is reality like you have distortions of reality which is causing you to not make money. That was actually a pretty good answer. That probably affected more than just you. Okay. HBI 1994 bootstrapped solo DTC founder using pre-orders. Okay. Is adding wholesale to reli a reliable way to fund manufacturing or just a major distraction at this stage? >> [sighs] >> I'll give you a great frame from Ila. Is leaving this door closed preventing us from having this opportunity or will this opportunity only be bigger in the future? When you frame the questions like that, it will help you figure out whether you're solving a problem or this is a opportunity that is not actually being missed. Is this an irreversible thing? Like why can't we start this in next year? You can always start it next year. And if your brand's bigger next year, then your wholesale will have more leverage, right? And so in the future now play out the reverse, which is that you get distracted with this wholesale and then DTC goes down and then wholesale doesn't work as well as you thought it was going to and then all of a sudden you're you're [ __ ] right? And so I think if you have a way that's getting customers, I would take the argument of like why don't we do more first and keep doing more until eventually we cannot do any more than than we are right now. And then we've got wholesalers knocking on our door, banging down our door. Now we have more leverage in the negotiation so we're not getting ground on price. So we can actually make more gross profit and we don't get terrible payment terms because they're like, "We'll pay you net 90, net 180. You can front us the product and then only then if it sells, we'll we'll pay you." Like the terms are a huge part of this when you're going wholesale. So hopefully that helps. Muhammad sales motion in finance consulting how to convince clients to sign me whereas there are big consulting firms providing the same service at three times the price but clients still choose them. Yeah, they just don't believe you, dude. They just don't believe you. You might also be underpriced, which is a fun one. You might actually have the opportunity to get people to spend more money with you in order to believe that you will actually be able to help them. You might be so low they don't even believe it. And so I would consider number one raising your prices. Number two, every competitor, every competitive position in the market has an advantage, right? If you are the small guy, then you're saying, listen, you're not just getting because like this is how I would sell against a bigger consulting firm. I would say listen, you're not actually getting Bane or Mckenzie. Like those guys are dead. You're getting some partner who's going to give you 5% of his time. And then you're going to get uh one kind of lead who's going to give you 50% of his time. And then you're going to get uh an two analysts that are fresh out of college that have no experience that are just going to grind through an Excel boot camp that they trained up in 12 weeks. All right? That's what you're actually buying. So you basically have to demystify. You have to de you have to take off the brand wrapper and all the narrative and all the story from the competitor and then you wrap your own on and say with me you get my cell phone. I am of the equivalent level of these top guys. And not only that, I actually am good enough to go out on my own. So, they aren't good enough to go on their own. I am. And you're going to get me directly in a 100% of my time rather than some fractionalized version with me pushing out the vast majority of the work to analysts who have no idea what they're doing, right? So, you just have to pull back the curtain, show them what they're actually buying, and then the sale becomes much more real. It's a pretty good answer, my friend. Um, and of course their position in the marketplace, by the way, is going to be this guy's, you know, single guy. We have an established track record. We've been doing this for 80 years. We've got hundreds of customers in your specific market. We know what's going on. We know best practices. And our processes is why we have the business that the sizes because we are good at what we do. This guy's unproven. And so, if you want some guy in his mom's basement who's claiming to be an expert, go for it. Right? Each of you has a different angle. And it just depends on who can sell better. Razwa Shafra. Dude, some of these names, bro. Okay. Sales Motion. We run a marketing agency primarily uh creatives for e-commerce. Uh we do 20K a month right now and our biggest bottleneck is finding leads. We've been burnt so much by lead genen agencies. Dude, if you run a marketing agency, go run ad like you have to learn how to run ads for yourself. Like if you're a small business owner, like you have to learn how to get customers. Like outsourcing the ability to get customers is just not smart business. All right? Like I don't know how to say this differently. Like there's nothing that you are currently learning that is more valuable to your business than knowing how to get customers. So you have to do it. Big, borrow, figure out what you sign up for the seminars, sign up for the courses, watch all the YouTube videos for free, listen to all the podcasts, listen to all the trainings, like headhunt from the people who are already doing it at at the agencies that you're trying to run it. Like it is not hard to run ads to get an e-commerce brand to find out about your stuff. I also think that making some content nowadays is probably a pretty good idea or almost a requirement especially in an expert based industry like you're in. Okay. Pleosur, I'm solo dev making a keyboard-based calorie tracker for PC. Why? Any advice especially around pricing? It's a onetime purchase because it's offline. Dude, I'm rooting for you, man. But like why? Like just there's there's unbelievable free options that are available like on mobile and on desktop and there's also like AI which can count your damn calories. I just I I don't know what I don't know what the TAM would be here. Um, so this isn't me trying to like make you feel bad about your about your business, but like you're competing against significantly better funded people who are free. Uh, so you have to have a really significant wedge that's somehow special. And maybe you do, maybe you do. Um, but yeah, you're going to have to do some sort of one time. I mean, my advice on pricing is just going to be test it. You're going to run ads and you're going to test it and see if people buy. and you're going to just look at what your CPCs are. Basically, your EPCs, your earnings per click and see if you can get it high enough. It's going to be very tough though, man. That's going to be a very tough business. And I think you might wonder like, why isn't this working? And it's just because like I don't know if it's it's a very old like my fitness pal's been out for like a thousand years. So, just something to consider. All right. Uh, Solar Chap Jordan, can you define sales motion to a business owner who doesn't understand sales fully and improvements to sales process? Sales motion is just the steps that you take a prospect through in order to maximize the likelihood that they buy. That's all. And so if for example someone like just think click to close. What are all the steps and you have to go as intricate details as human possible. What are the emails? What are the videos that get sent? What are the touch points in terms of phone calls or conversations or meetings or appointments. It's basically the aggregate steps of communication that go from click to close for prospect. and a well-designed sales motion maximizes likelihood that the maximum number of qualified prospects buy. There you go. Osand cold calling us roofers. Okay. Tools and pipeline are set, but I'm still at zero sales. From your gym outbound days, how did you decide when to keep grinding a sales motion versus kill it and change the approach? Great question. If you're getting them on the phone, then you've already done like 80% of the work. So, if you're not getting them on the phone, then you don't even know if it's working or not. So, you have to keep going until you get them on the phone. Once you get them on the phone, then it's usually an offer issue. So, you have to do big fast value first, typically something free um that has real value. And so, it's usually like what is something that people are charging these guys, call it $500 to $5,000 for. How can I automate it to a large degree and give it for free in order to get basically hook them in the call and provide value? Allow me to have a second call, put a VSSL in between, and then I'll start selling, right? And especially if I can deliver the value of the thing. Um, I'll give you the the the highest converting outbound offer that I've that I've that I've seen that was like pure cold call phone team was um a guy who had basically automated uh map listings and was really good at it. And so he could get basically any business into the top five on their Google maps in seven days. And so his offer was, hey, um, I'm just going to get you to top five in the next seven days and I'll call you back in seven days and if you want to still keep it, uh, let me know and we'll start billing you. and if we don't then don't worry about it and he [ __ ] murdered because he would just get them there and they're like oh my god I want to lose it right and so that he just got them and then he would keep it at like three 400 bucks a month and he just printed still is printing so the issue is number one as long as you're getting the right people on the phone then you've done the majority of the work and if the right people on the phone and they're not moving on then you need to improve the offer and typically start with big fast value and that's the part that's missing Julian Daruna dude The days the the names today are just unhinged. Okay. I run a US tree service meta ads agency. Well, that's a niche. Cold calling feels saturated. Gatekeepers are hard to get past and AI is increasing competition. If I make 300 calls a day, is 10k a month real in six months? Uh, yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, it depends on your price point, but like yeah, if you have I mean, it depends. Again, depends on your price point. I don't know how big the US services are, but I would imagine you're going to be probably in the $1,500 to 5,000 a month range in terms of your price point. So, can you get four customers in 6 months making 9,000* 6? Uh, what's that? 9* 6. I should know this math. 45. Is that what it is? Yeah. Uh, no. Is that it is? Am I losing my mind right now? No, it's 54. Jesus. So 54,000 dials, do you think you get like four or five customers? Yeah, probably. Also, as a as a big obvious one, if it's just you solo, like give service away for free for the love of God. Read the leads book. Get your first five clients. Give service away for free. Give them three months free. Who gives a [ __ ] Get people in. Get practice going. Oh, what do I want to value my time? It's like, dude, no one values your time right now. No one values your time. So get people to value it enough to at least work with you. And if you want, you can say, "Listen, it's it's free, but you got to turn X, Y, and Z. You got to put a card on file. So if you don't do it, I'll bill you. And it's not because I want to bill you. I want you to just do the thing so that I can prove to you that I can help." There we go. Some of you guys are too afraid to give away free [ __ ] Give away free service. Like, no one trusts you. Prove Prove yourself. Prove yourself. All right. Fritz Horstman. Currently running ads to my health coaching offer. I have a $500 CAC, $5,000 LTV. Um, but I'm not selling to the rich. I'm selling to the middle class. Okay. Is this still scalable or should I increase my price? You have a $3,500 AOV. I mean, that sounds that sounds fine, man. You've got, you know, right now it's 3500. You got a 7 to1 LV to CAG. If you have a backend back end and it's getting to 5K, you've got a 10 to one. Scale it, dude. It's fine. I mean, 10 to1's super strong. Uh, come for onset. I sell ergonomics to film crew. Uh, I started going live a bunch to generate lots of genuine organic content, but because of the daily lives, people have been unfollowing and running away. What what what is everyone? [laughter] I feel like I mean, that's the worst scenario. You're like, I'm working more and somehow I'm making less money. Um, I don't know what people are talking about. Or maybe like people think you suck for some reason. I don't know what it is. I'm I'm not trying to make you feel bad. I just think it's kind of funny. Um, I think you just got to demonstrate the stuff and do it. Again, people are just so afraid of giving stuff away for free. You don't have to give the products away for free. You can have people try it and send it back to you if it's super expensive or or drive out to sets and have people use it for a day or two and if they like it, then you can start selling that way. Um, I'll bet you outbound is probably a pretty decent way to do this. you know, in addition to your organic content. Um, but the people unfollowing and running away seems very odd. If they were like, "Oh, they when everyone got to know me better, they didn't didn't want my thing." It's like, well, that's not good. Um, I need to know more than that. But I think the big thing that's probably missing is you need to demonstrate how it's going to actually help them and that you're not just like spamming them. All right, I'm going to do two more. All right. Robin Cramps. Hi, Alex. I help Christians uh lose weight and get in good shape. I'm struggling with limiting thoughts to sell my offer for $5,000. Can you help me, please? Well, you just heard of another guy who's selling for $5,000 and he was trying to go up. So, here's the thing. There are there are rich Christians and there are poor Christians and there are rich Muslims and there are poor Muslims. If you are selling expensive stuff, you can be in the Christian niche, but you still would want to target the people who have more money. Like, I'm just being purely just practical here. Like, if you want to sell at a higher price point, which you will probably have to in order to sell a service, um, then you'll have to target the people. So you probably have a qualification issue and maybe some education that's missing in your sales motion. So right now I would probably ask bant questions budget authority need timing. So you have the money spend the authority spend at the need right now and is now a good time to get started. Those are the bant questions. And then education wise you're probably missing some sort of VSSL or multiple VSSLs in the sales process um to educate them enough to be willing to purchase on that first call. All righty. I have monthly, six month, and yearly SAS plans. Yearly users are more active. Should I focus on more yearly subscriptions or keep monthly affordable? Yeah, dude. You just play with the pricing. If more people, if if yearly are your best customers, then you just have to look. Again, this is just a pure LT. This is a math question. This is not a Alex question. This is a put all of them on an Excel sheet. Look what your LTVs are. Look what your conversion rates are, and then move pricing so you can maximize earnings per click. And if you have if you're raising money or you want to have exit someday then you can factor in enterprise value. Um because if your monthly people turn at a higher percentage for example then you might want everyone to be at annual. Now my only caveat to this and this is my warning is that if you switch everyone to annual you will always get a lift in uh retention. It's normal right because you automat like you can't cancel. You already prepaid for it right? But the thing is is that you don't you start you lack the signal from your customers to know what's good. And so I would encourage you to keep the monthlies for you know basically keep them until you can keep driving down churn until eventually the churn is sufficient that then at that point it makes sense to basically gas the whole thing and just make everything annuals to the degree that you can. Obviously, it depends on whether you're B2B or consumer, but like if you were like a lower ticket consumer item, very common to once you fix churn at the at the user level. Um, going to like if you were like a $10 month subscription, having like a $99 annual plan, super common as the primary form and just do 7-day trial into an annual and it works very well. All right, bonus round, last one. Uh, Alex, we sell B2B signage to franchises like Subway. Cool. Uh, you guys are a racket by the way. Every time I buy a sign, I'm like, "How how is this thing $10,000?" Jesus Christ. Um, I'm kidding. Lots of love. Okay. How would you structure grand some offer that turns a zerorisk first install into a recurring high margin do retainer? I don't know what that means from day one. Um, what you're probably going to want to do is look at the home services play, which is you sell an annual maintenance plan, which would include the bulbs, fixes, and cleaning because stores don't do it. and it has a big effect in terms of like how the store looks from the outside if you see one of the letters is not, you know, right. And so it probably be one of those like it's a $10,000 thing or a $5,000 thing, whatever the sign costs. And then you charge like a $15 a month uh membership which you can bill annually uh or semianually or whatever. However, how however often you go out is the amount of times you want to bill um as a rule of thumb. And the beauty is you can say, "Listen, most people need a new sign every five years." And so when you do this recurring with me, I'll take the $15 a month and we'll credit towards your next sign. That was [ __ ] good. That's what you do. That's how you do it. And that way they all are like, "Listen, it's a foregone conclusion. You're going to buy another sign. You're going to need to clean it either way and you need to get it fixed. So I will clean it and fix it. And then all the money you pay me towards cleaning and fixing, I'll just put towards the next sign. It's what I got. It's what I got. All right, everyone. Was this uh was this fun? Look at this. Look at this view. This is California. Look at that. Not pretty. Not bad, right? Yeah, I know. Like the more the more the landscape is in it, uh the more people will join the live. So maybe maybe I should just talk to the side of this thing and just kind of like occasionally peek in and just answer questions like this so you guys can look at this lovely lovely view. Yeah. And if I get in then it's like this whole thing's ruined. Um anyways, you guys are awesome. I hope you guys enjoyed the uh the Q&A. This is the 30 for30 uh 30 for 30ish 30 daysish in 30 days of live streams. Uh and I'll tell you guys at the end of this little experiment um what we learned and uh it was awesome. We vibe with you guys too. Cove, appreciate you. Ismatic, Sunnylicious, appreciate you guys.