Sales | How to Build a Turn-Key Scalable Sales System / Presentation | Mastering Soft-Selling In a Hard World

Show Notes

Sales | How to Build a Turn-Key Scalable Sales System / Presentation | Mastering Soft-Selling In a Hard World

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Checklist of Sales Tools You Will Need:
Scripts
Pre-Written Emails
Pre-Written Texts
Print Pieces
Online Sales Workflow

STEP 1 – Rapport
Install 5 Rapport Building Questions
Website / Online – Build On-Line
Header – What Do You Do?
Social Proof
Testimonials
Header
Gallery

STEP 2 – Needs
What Is the Problem That You Solve?

STEP 3 – Benefits
Solutions Supported by Facts

STEP 4 – Close
Call to Action
Time-Sensitive Special

Create a Frequently Asked Questions Document

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https://www.thrivetimeshow.com/business-conferences/

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Audio Transcription

I’m going to beat all of their competitors’ prices, or I’ll give you the mattress for free. How’s that sound? You look good. Let’s sell some mattresses. Sales for me, you know, it’s what makes the world go round. And it’s my life. You know, when I step out onto this showroom floor, it’s my time to shine. It’s my time to nominate. This is my coliseum, and I’m the gladiator. So look out. Oh! Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Hi. Mary. Mary? Yes. What a great name. That’s beautiful. And you are such a vision. Oh, okay. Oh, Mary. What do I got to do to get you to bed today? You know, really, I just want to serve the people. I want to use my knowledge to better mankind. This is 100% memory foam mattress, okay, with a circle knit top. It comes from our King Arthur collection, and we call it Excalibur. Hop on up, Mary. Oh, no, that’s not necessary. A lot of these guys out there, they’re dishonest, you know? But I believe in truth in sales. This is a limited edition, which means it’s a collector’s item, which means that it will appreciate in value. So really think of this mattress as an investment into your financial future. I just love making people smile, you know? If at the end of the day I’ve made at least one customer smile then I’ve done my job I’ve succeeded. I need them to buy something as well of course because they don’t pay me for smiles but I would be rich if they did. Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show but this show does. In a world filled with endless opportunities, why would two men who have built 13 multi-million dollar businesses altruistically invest five hours per day to teach you the best practice business systems and moves that you can use? Because they believe in you. And they have a lot of time on their hands. They started from the bottom, now they’re here. It’s the Thrive Time Show starring the former US Small Business Administration’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Clay Clark, and the entrepreneur trapped inside an optometrist’s body, Dr. Robert Zunich. Two men, eight kids, co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Get ready to enter the Thrive Time Show. dollar businesses. Well, Thrive Nation, on today’s show I’m excited to walk you through the mechanics of how to build a turnkey sales system. The mechanics of how to build a turnkey, scalable sales system. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to be taking a lot of notes here so you can follow along. Again, we’re teaching you how to build a turnkey sales system that’s scalable. How to build a turnkey, scalable sales system. So what happens is a lot of people that I meet are wonderful folks. They have a great product, and they’re the only one that can sell it. It’s like they have a business, but they’re the only one that can sell it. Maybe you’re listening out there today and you are a roofer, you’re a home builder, you’re a home remodeler, you’re building pools, you’re a dog trainer, you’re a, whatever you do, maybe you sell products online. I’m gonna pull up some examples of some clients that I’ve helped to build sales systems at scale. So one would be the company called Grillblazer. This was a startup, he had never sold any of his torches, of his grill guns. It’s sort of like a flamethrower for your grill. And he’s gone on to sell millions of dollars of these. This is just an example. Another client I’ve worked with to help him scale, they have 500 locations now. It’s called Oxifresh, O-X-I-Fresh.com, O-X-I-Fresh.com. Another one is PMHOKC. I could play this game all day, but I’m just giving you examples. So how does the home builder build a system that scales? How does the outdoor home remodeler build a system that scales? How does the dog trainer build a system that scales? How does the carpet cleaner do it? And how does the online flamethrower slash recreational grill torch guy build a scalable system. Well, there’s four steps, and on today’s show, we’re going to tap into the wisdom of today’s guest. We’re going to go through the four steps, and I want everyone to kind of take notes if you can, or at least, you know, take mental notes as I take notes for you. But you have four steps, okay? You got four steps in the process. Step number one is you got to build some rapport. All right? This is the, we’re working off the assumption that you have a lead, or that somebody’s on your website, or someone fills out your form, okay? So marketing is how you get people to fill out your form or to go to your website. I’m talking about sales. How do you convert somebody from a ideal and likely buyer into an actual buyer? One is you have to build some rapport. So what does that mean? Well, if you’re in person, you wanna have five, you wanna install five rapport building questions into your script, five rapport building questions into your script. If you’re a website, okay. If it’s online slash online, you’re going to have to build online trust. Okay. And we’ll walk you through how to build online trust. The next is you have to find their needs. What do you mean their needs quickly? You got to find what, you know, what is the problem that you solve? What is the problem that you solve? If you don’t, if you can’t define what the problem is that you solve quickly or succinctly, people are moving on. Next is benefits. You’ve got to support your benefits. Okay, these are solutions supported by facts. Solutions supported by facts. And finally, it’s the call to action, the close. You have to have a call to action, and it doesn’t matter how many leads you have. If you don’t sell anything, eventually you’re going to be poor. So we’re going to hone in on a particular client and a great website here. It’s called BunkyLife.com. That’s the brand, BunkyLife.com. And I really think you’re gonna learn a lot from today’s guest and the founder of BunkyLife.com. David Frazier, welcome on to the Thrived Time Show. How are you, sir? I’m doing fantastic, Clay. Thanks so much for having me. So Dave, let’s get into this real quick here. So when somebody goes to your website, BunkyLife.com, we wanna build rapport. If someone was face-to-face and we had a business that required face-to-face interaction, we’d want to build rapport. But let’s focus on your online website here. The things that I look at that build rapport with me is you’ve got a beautiful header, you’ve been featured on many other shows or websites or media outlets, so you’ve got the social proof going for you, you’ve got the great look, you have a gallery that just seems like it really is inspiring some of the different options that you have available. I’d love to tap into your wisdom. What are some of the things that you have in place to build rapport with the online website viewer? So we want to make sure that people get the impression that they’re not going to be our first sale. So you’ll notice there’s a lot of testimonials and pictures of actual client projects and bunkies that they’ve built. So the first step is like, who the heck are we? So if you go to the very top of BunkyLife.com, it’s a very quick, succinct script. I think it says, basically we’re in the building industry, but we’re famous for our small log cabins that can be built in a weekend without needing a permit or a second mortgage. And that’s a tagline that I scripted very hard. I worked on that for probably two weeks to get that down to a very quick, what the heck do you guys do? So that when you go on this website, you can instantly know, am I in the right place or not? So that’s the first thing, is like, just a very overview, like, this is what we do, boom. And then from there, you wanna build yourself as an authority. So you’ll notice the next thing on that homepage is that, so there’s like, what do you do? And then there, for the next part is like, you know, build some authority. So that’s why I had the thing of like, we’ve been on these photos, or these television shows, and these different media outlets, and things like that. That’s, okay, these guys are legit. If you recognize those different stations, HGTV for example, then you’ll go, okay, well then, you know, they’ve done something. And then from there, you can kind of build your case from there. So I think the first thing you wanna hit them with is like, what do you do? Who are you? What do you do? And then some type of authority or social proof. Now, I wanna be very clear, because these mechanics work for every single business I work with. So, Bunkylife.com, and I’m going to try to do this where we can kind of see what I’m saying and then I can show the example at the same time. So this is Bunkylife, it’s very clear here. They’ve got a header that’s succinct, it explains what they do. Then very quickly they have that social proof. There’s testimonials everywhere, they’ve got a great gallery of work there, they’re getting it done. This is how it works, this is what it looks like. Now let’s go to a different company, Shaw Homes.com. Again, they build massive houses. Look at them. They’ve got their header right here, Oklahoma’s highest rated and most reviewed home builder. That’s what they do. What do they do? They’re Oklahoma’s highest rated and most reviewed home builder. Okay. Social proof. What do they have in the way of social proof? Now, this is what they do. They have so many video testimonials. That’s their whole deal is video testimonials. And that serves as their social proof. And we’ve worked with the Shaw Homes now to help them grow from 16 million, just under $17 million to, at this point, they’re on pace this year to hit 170 million. Last year, they went over 150 million. So we’re talking, you know, almost 10 times growth. And again, I can lay out all the strategies in the world for my clients, but if they don’t put in the work, it’s not gonna work. So, you know, previous to meeting me, you’d already got social proof, you’d already done that. Shaw Holmes, they had been around for 30 years before they met me. What we have to do is we’ve got to nail the stuff that’s going to convert. We have to really build the argument like an attorney. You’ve got to build proof that what you’re saying is correct. And so these testimonials, Shaw Holmes doesn’t get just testimonials one time, they get them every time. So if you scroll down here, you can scroll down until your finger gets sore, until you get some type of a carpal tunnel from scrolling too much. These guys have a massive inventory of thousands of testimonials. Now the second step for building a scalable sales system, whether it be over the phone or in person or on the website, is you have to establish that you understand the needs of your buyer. If we go to Bunky Life, where can we go to see the needs that you’re, you’re filling. I think, I think your header, your headline immediately speaks to the needs of the buyer. Um, where else do you kind of speak to the needs of your buyers? Yeah, you just keep scrolling down. So you’ve got the, through the hag bag line and then you’ve got through the social proof of it. And now there’s like, do you need extra space? So there it is, right? The bunkie is a perfect solution, whether it be for your college or home. Our bunkies can be assembled in a few days and will provide you with blah, blah, blah, square feet of extra living space. So there it is. And right here, by the way, folks, full disclosure, I’m in the process of trying to buy one of these from David and I said, trying to buy, he’ll sell me one right away, but this is the deal. I’m working with a local mall. There’s a mall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I’m looking to see if they’ll allow me to install a Bunky Life in the mall because I have many businesses and I think having a kiosk in the shape of a Bunky Life would be the ultimate mall kiosk. Because if you think about it, this is the mall, what’s called Woodland Hills Mall, and that’s in Tulsa. It’s a massive mall, and they have a pretty decent amount of traffic. And I thought, what if we put a Bunky Life right in there? And then what that would do is that would allow me to expose people to the Bunky Life product in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so people can see what it is. I have a great staff of salespeople that are very good at building rapport and answering questions and I could send them to the mall. It is a theory that I’m working on, but it is a working theory that I think we could help grow the Bunky Life brand by having a location right here in the mall. That’s a theory I have. I’m in the process of trying to get approval from the mall. If you’re listening right now and you work at Woodland Hills Mall, please call me back because we can continue to call and email. We will figure it out here. But that’s, so again, but let’s just say that we did get approval to have a Bunky Life in the mall. So we put this in the mall. People are going to walk up to the booth and quickly they’re going to go, what do you guys do or what is this? And we’re going to have to have a sign that succinctly duplicates what his website says. So we’re going to have to say, a sign, big post up stand or something, do you need extra space? The monkey life is the perfect solution. And I’ll say, we’re famous for a log cabin bunkies that can easily be built within a weekend without a permit or a second mortgage. We’re going to have to be able to say that all day. Now, I am of the opinion that we can build a scalable system for this business in the mall. It’s yet to be seen if the mall will approve this idea. But I was thinking about it, and the mall, it costs me about 2,500 bucks a month to have a kiosk in the mall. And I’m thinking, well, if I’m in the mall, if I can sell a certain number of units per month, maybe that’s a great fit. So we’ll see, folks, stay tuned, we’ll see. But this is real life entrepreneurship. As we will understand, even though I’m teaching this system today, I also live this system, I do this system. So you gotta find the needs. Now, the third is you wanna have benefits supported by facts. You want to provide benefits supported by facts. So let me give you an example. If I told somebody our business coaching program on average grows your business seven times faster than by default, you might say, how can you prove that? Well, I’ll do this real quickly. 96% of businesses fail according to Inc. Magazine. That’s 96%. That’s not my stat, I didn’t make up this stat, but 96% of businesses fail within 10 years. And there’s all sorts of stats that show you. 75% of startups fail, 85% of restaurants fail. There’s all sorts of stats. So what I do is I make the statement based upon my results working with clients since 2005, 2006, but then quickly, if you have a brain that works, I know you, the listeners do, you’re going to go, can you prove that? And if you click here right away, and this is just right here on the website, folks, we’ve got testimonials. And not just like one or two, I’m not done getting testimonials, folks. I have over 2000 video testimonials. Let me see if I can pull up here, but I’m not done. I’d like to ask you this, David, why can’t you be done? Even though I have thousands of video testimonials, why can’t I go, yeah, I’m done? Why do I always have to get, even though I’ve got thousands of video testimonials and you have at this point thousands of happy customers, why can’t we be done? Well, have you ever heard the song, What Have You Done For Me Lately? There’s a certain dimension of you go on someone’s website or you go on someone’s social media presence and you go, they haven’t updated their testimonials. They haven’t, there’s no new comments, there’s no new positivity in like two years. Let’s just say two years ago, they have thousands, but they haven’t done anything in two years. What might you start thinking when you see they haven’t done anything in two years, or at least they haven’t got anything documented in two years? You’re gonna start thinking, oh, maybe there’s a new owner. Maybe he started screwing people over. Maybe they’re out of business. Maybe there’s other things going on. So you wanna have it quantity and recency. I think those two things are the magic formula for something to go, oh yeah. Agreed. And folks, one of the things I love about David Fraser and his product is, one, he loves teaching entrepreneurship, he loves entrepreneurship, and he’s actually doing it. I mean, he loves the idea, he loves teaching this, but then he actually does it. Bunky Life is a great product, and I’m telling you, if you’re out there looking for a bolt-on bedroom, it’s a great product. Now that’s me making that statement, but how do we prove at BunkyLife.com, what are the facts you’re providing to prove to me, the potential buyer, that what you’re saying is not puffery? Well I think no one’s going to say it better than your clients, so if you go to BunkyLife, click on About and then click on Reviews. So since I’ve been working with Clay, we started to beefen this section up. So it used to just be a lot of Google reviews here, but now, very similar to Shaw Holmes. It’s this smorgasbord of Google reviews, testimonials, interviews with clients. It’s a whole, it’s just a, this is a, that one there is a feature we did on a TV show. And it’s just a, how many angles can we prove it that we’re not saying we’re awesome, other people are saying we’re awesome. Now, just from a heat map perspective, folks, there’s a tool called luckyorange.com, luckyorange.com. And I’ll talk to you about this offline too, but this is just something. If we have the logo on the left and we could somehow move the reviews button up in place of that home button right there, you don’t get massive action on that button. That’s a newer button we’ve been working on. But if you feel good about it, that’s where I would move it, because you’ve got so many great testimonials now. And we look at clients like PMHOKC, the traffic on the reviews button is through the roof. And we found is that people have to dig a little bit, you know, it’s still pretty heavy traffic. But once we put it right there on the homepage, so like for my haircut chain, once we moved it to right here, it’s just boom, boom, boom, boom. Now again, if you look at PMHOKC, so you don’t think I’m double talking here folks, not double-minded, he believes that these things are important on the top. Well, if everything’s the most important, nothing can be important. So he believes services are critical, hot tubs are critical, pools are critical, 3D rendering, financing. If it was my take, and I express this to my client, and he can decide this is his business, I would replace 3D rendering with reviews. That’s what I would do. To be fair, right underneath there, he’s got 100% financing available, read reviews. So it’s like, it’s pretty top of the line. Yeah, and these are the kind of the things where you as an owner have to make that decision. So look at how many reviews he has. I mean, it’s a phenomenal. So again, I’m just saying, you got to go through and have a checklist. If you’re listening right now and you’re trying to increase your sales, you got to take a checklist, okay? You might want to take these notes today and go, man, this is a good one here. I need to take these because these notes, this is how I do it, and I worked through this, okay? So you have report, needs, benefits, you support those benefits by facts, then you have to have a call to action. Now the call to action, it has to be time sensitive, right? Time sensitive. And it has to feature some kind of special if you can, some kind of time sensitive special. Now, so if I were to get a kiosk in the mall, what I would do is I would say, hey, by the way, we have a special running until this time, and we would have to agree on what that special is and how that works. But, you know, anybody who buys a Bunky Life, let’s say between this time and that time, you get this free thing that comes with it, or you get a discount, or maybe you get an online tutorial webinar included with it on how to do it, or there’s gotta be something. And then after that, if you’ve gone through step one, two, three, and four, then you have to create a frequently asked document, frequently asked questions document. Now, we got a wonderful lady on our team right behind me, right here, folks, right behind this glass window here, who sometimes I feel for the people that work here because of how aggressive I am with training new people. But she has been on our team for two weeks and she’s already learned photography, videography, sales. So photography, videography, sales, and video editing. These are like the four jobs she has. So she works Monday through Thursday, 7 to 3, but every day she has a new job. And she’s on fire with sales. But what’s happening is a lot of people want to come to our business conference and they ask similar questions. People, they go to Thrivetimeshow.com and they go here and they go, I want to come to your business conference. And the first question that people always ask is, where is it? And so she has a FAQ sheet and she says it’s in Tulsa, Oklahoma at Clay Clark’s office here. And it’s seven to three. It’s both, and she has a document. And the people say, what are we going to teach people? Like, what are you going to learn? And she has that. And she has, it’s very common. It’s, you know, what does it cost? People, for the conferences, they ask, what does it cost? We always tell them it’s $250 or whatever you want to pay. That’s how we do it. What does it cost? Where is it? What time does it start? What topics do they cover? And this is a very, these are very common questions. Now there’s questions that are, you know, not in the most often, but 90% of the questions can really be summarized in our kind of top 10 list of questions. So let me get your thoughts on the FAQ portion. You’ve been selling enough Bunky Life units now where you kind of know what frequently asked questions are. What are the most frequently asked questions that you get just day after day after day? So it’s like, how are you going to get the Bunky to me? What, how much is the delivery? Can you deliver to my area? That’s a very common one. And then of course, yeah, I’d say that’s probably the number one is, can you get it to me? Yeah. And people have, yeah. People wanna know that, and you’ve done sales long enough where it’s, what do I mean by scalable? Scalable is where the ability to do all the sales exceeds your personal capacity, that’s what I mean. So for the Reawaken tour or for the conferences I do, the business conferences, we’re going to sell today probably 75 tickets of some kind to somebody, whether it be a business conference, and we’ve been doing that since 2005, or whether it be a Reawaken America tour, we’re going to sell about 75 somethings. And I’m not going to sell any of those somethings. So let me get your thoughts on what does it mean, in your opinion, for something to be a turnkey or scalable system? What does it mean when it’s turnkey or scalable? Well, it has to be, the process has to be set out where anyone can kind of jump in and start doing it and have a reasonable amount of success. So if it’s scalable, it has to be done the same way every time. With McDonald’s, it’s a Big Mac, it’s A, B, C, D, E, Big Mac. It’s not, people get riff on that. They’re gonna build the same way, whether they’re in Tulsa, whether they’re in Toronto, Canada, whether they’re in Florida, they’re gonna build a Big Mac the exact same way. Whether it’s your first day or your 1000th day, you make a Big Mac the same way. So this similar, if you have a sales conversation, it has to be scripted out. Not word for word, because that sounds like a robot, but you have to have the general points that the salesperson has to get to every single time and you have to check it off. Check, check, check, check, check. Now, on the Bunky Life right now, if people want to take advantage of the specials or discounts you have right now, we’ve set up a promo code. How does that work if people want to use the Clay Clark promo code? How does that work? So just go to bunkylife.com slash clay, C-L-A-Y. And then they’ll be taken to a little quiz like, you know, are you a good fit? Are you ready for the Bunky Life? If you answer that quiz, then you’ll be in our pipeline. You’re going to get a call from a friendly salesperson if you qualify. You know, again, it’s BunkyLife.com forward slash Clay. Is that correct, sir? Yep. Okay. Awesome. And the reason why I clarify this, this is a big teaching moment for everybody out there, you have to say things multiple times, not because you, the listener, aren’t smart, it’s because you’re probably driving right now I mean, I can’t tell you how many people listen to our podcast they go Thank you so much for repeating bunky life.com forward slash clay three times because the first time you said bunky life.com forward slash clay I don’t didn’t hear it second time. You said bunky life.com forward slash clay. It sunk into my mind Bunky life.com forward and then the third time they’re like I was out jogging And I was trying to remember the website and because he had said it three times, I was baked into my cranium. And so this right here folks is how to build a turnkey scalable sales system. Now, as far as the systems you’ll need to have in place, this is kind of like your checklist of items you need. I’m gonna fire this off for you. You need scripts, you need pre-written emails, you gotta have those pre-written emails, you gotta have pre-written text messages. You got to have the sales material where you have kind of your print pieces laid out. You don’t want your sales people to have to develop their own print pieces. So in the event that we’re able to put the Bunky Life in the mall, which I hope we can do, I don’t want my sales people to show up and go, yeah, bring your own yellow notepad, make your own print piece on the fly, buddy, figure it out. And you see this all the time. I’m sure you’ve been to trade shows or been to other places where they don’t have the documents made in advance. What happens, Super Dave, if an entrepreneur is phenomenal at selling using a yellow notepad and using just their verbal ability to communicate and they don’t take the time to write the scripts, the emails, the pre-written texts, the print pieces, the online sales workflow, what happens by default if they don’t have these things in place? Well, they’re gonna try to pass it off to somebody else and be like, yeah, just deal with this magical thing I do. And that person is going to absolutely not be able to do it because they’re not you. And they don’t have the same skin in the game. They don’t have the same investment. They don’t have the same excitement generally for someone else’s business. It’s your business. You’re going to be the most excited about it. So you have to make it so it’s just like they can kind of plug in, put on the hat, grab the clipboard and do the thing that you need them to do every single time. Now, if you’re out there today, folks, I mean this sincerely, I am in the process of looking at determining how I can acquire a Bunky Life in the office here. I really believe in the product. And what you’re doing is you’re building distributors, I believe, right? So other people who can sell the product who are not you. Is that accurate? Yep, so we’ve got someone that’s essentially licensing the Bunky Life brand. They’re gonna buy Bunkies from us at kind of a wholesale cost and then sell it to their audience in a completely different market, not Canada. And that starts this week. So they’ve already had a number of sales and it looks like it’s off to a good start. That’s great. And so again, I mean, you’ve refined the system to the place where you feel confident that it will work. And I just encourage everybody, that’s where you want to get to right now. So you’re listening today and you’re saying, man, I don’t know what to do with this information. Let me give you a strong call to action. Let me give you three. One, if you’re going, it’s hard to listen to my show because my mother-in-law is always interrupting me. Maybe you need a bolt-on bedroom. And if you do need a bolt-on bedroom, you just want to go to bunkylife.com forward slash clay. That’s the move right there. And then there you could get your bolt-on bedroom. Second, if you want to attend an in-person Thrive Time Show workshop there every two months, we do them every two months. You can name your price. You can get those tickets at thrive timeshow.com. We happen to be America’s highest rated and most reviewed business workshop. We’ve been doing them since 2005. It’s a two day interactive workshop. Or if you want to schedule a one on one business consultation with me, we do free 13 point assessments to see if you’re a good fit. I only take on 160 clients and so I want to make sure you’re a good fit. Then on part two of today’s show, we’re going to be introducing you to an interview I did with the author of a book called Soft Selling in a Hard World. And he is just such a phenomenal sales trainer, was a phenomenal sales trainer, may he rest in peace. Jerry Vass, a phenomenal sales trainer, and I want to encourage you to listen and take notes. And if you haven’t picked up a copy of the book Soft Selling in a Hard World, I would encourage you to buy that. That’s Soft Selling in a Hard World. It’s by Jerry Vass, and it’s just a phenomenal. Soft Selling in a Hard World. What? I can’t tell you how many sales people I’ve met over the years that own a copy of this book. It’s like the secret weapon for building a sales system. It’s Soft Selling in a Hard World by Jerry Vass. David, thank you so much for carving out time for us. We’ll talk to you next week. I appreciate it, Clay. Thanks for your time. Bye-bye. Two men, 13 multimillion dollar businesses, eight kids. Now enter the Thrive Time Show. Thrive Nation, there are very few legal ways to get rich quick. Your chance of finding one of those opportunities is very, very slim or about twice the odds of getting hurt in a commercial plane crash twice. Now the bright side is that getting rich slowly is actually fun and will yield you thousands of adventures in the process. And on today’s show we are interviewing a guy by the name of Jerry Vass who wrote a book called Soft Selling in a Hard World where he explains in great detail that there are only three ways to really make exceptional money as an entrepreneur. One, you got to work in a place where no one else wants to be. I had a buddy of mine years ago that was an Alaskan fisherman fishing in Alaska. Sounds like a lot of fun. No it’s not. I had one of our employees years ago that worked on an oil rig out there in the Gulf of Mexico. Rumor has it we have a couple of podcast subscribers located in the Gulf of Mexico who listen to each and every show. And I know you guys probably don’t enjoy the time away from your family and living on a floating city that smells like oil, but you get paid well, right? The second way to get rich is you can perform work that no one else wants to do. Sales. No one seems to want to do sales. I like doing sales, but a lot of people fear sales. They’re scared of sales. They just don’t know how to sell. And when you can’t sell, your business will just go to hell. And the third way to get rich is to do work that no one else can do. Well, Steph Curry can do that, and you’re pretty awesome at it. Leonardo DiCaprio could do that, and he’s pretty great at it. I mean, Oprah, I don’t know how many people could do what Oprah does. Serena Williams, Venus Williams, I mean, there’s a lot of people out there that are LeBron James that can do things that I frankly can’t do and that’s why I like to pay people with that kind of skill. I like to watch them. I like to vote with my dollars and say, yeah, Brad Pitt, you’re a better actor than me, Mr. Tom Hanks, you’re better than me. I like to pay to watch your movie.” So again, the three ways to get rich are you could work in a place where no one else wants to be, you could do work that no one else wants to do, or you could perform work nobody else can do. And it’s really the last two conditions for making extraordinary money that we’re gonna explore on today’s show. You see, learning to sell softly isn’t only about money, it’s about enjoying the process of sales. This little manual called Soft Selling in a Hard World is all about reality. It’s about a survival guide for the strange mastering of persuasion. It’s a kind of a strange road to learning how to master persuasion. It shows you the mechanics. Soft Selling in a Hard World teaches you the mechanics needed to sell well. That’s what the book is about. The book is designed to teach you the specific tactics, not the strategy. To walk you through the step-by-step process that you need to take. And the whole system, what’s great about it, is you can learn the whole system and implement the system and write all the scripts and utilize the system in a way where other people can do what you can do. You can make yourself repeatable and duplicatable. So you can create not just a job, but you can create a thriving business that can create both time freedom and financial freedom for you. My friend, selling is the highest paid profession in the world. I mean, our leaders in politics, business, and research, and the arts, they’re all great salespeople. It’s just a lot of times you don’t realize that they’re selling. I mean, you see presidential candidates, heads of companies. I mean, Steve Jobs was legendary for his annual presentations. Warren Buffett, you don’t think of Joel Osteen as selling, but he’s trying to convince you to become a Christian. He’s trying to share with you the love of Christ. You might not think of Oprah as a salesperson, but he’s trying to get you to vote for him. He’s trying to get you to vote for his ideology. So if you’ve ever struggled to sell well, this show is for you. Or if you’re very good at sales, but you’ve ever struggled to teach a team of people with no experience to sell well? If you’ve ever struggled with learning how to personally sell or how to teach an army of people to sell you are going to absolutely Love today’s show as I interview a great man a wonderful friend of the show Jerry Vass Jerry Vass at the age of 83 is now retired enjoying the high life there I live it in Florida enjoying his home in Jacksonville and the fruits of his efforts. But he decided to come on to the show. My friend Jerry Bass decided to come on to the show and to share with us the answers to so many questions that I had as a result of reading his book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. If you don’t have the book, get it today. Get out a pen and pad. You’ve got to get a piece of paper. This is a show where you’ve got to take a lot of notes and I would encourage you to get soft selling in a hard world today. With any further ado my exclusive interview with Jerry Vass. Also just a quick disclaimer I apologize for the audio quality of this audio only interview but his phone was kind of cutting out a little bit we tried to edit it the best that we could and so with any further ado here’s Jerry Vass. Alright Thrive Nation welcome back to another great conversation. On the Thrive Time show today, Chuck, I could not be more excited to have the man that I would consider the godfather of systemic sales. You see, back in the day, Eric, I started working in the world of commercial real estate. One of my clients wanted to go into commercial real estate listings for one-third of downtown Tulsa. That’s roughly 33 percent. And do you know, do you know what sales book we use to build our scripts, our systems, our process, the entire system that we used at Fears and Clark when representing Canbar Properties and roughly one-third of downtown Tulsa. Do you know what system, what book we read Jeff? What book was it Clay? Soft Selling in a Hard World by you Mr. Vass. How are you sir? I’m perfect thank you very much and I want to tell you I’m flattered by all of this I’m not used to doing this anymore because I’ve been out of the training business for 10 years because I had old and my mind went I took a vacation so that but we’ll do the best we can. Well I appreciate you, and you are much sharper than I am. I aspire to be half as sharp as you think you once were. Your book is amazing, the book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. In that book, Jerry, you wrote, if you aren’t selling up to your potential, you probably don’t understand that selling is a game. Most people don’t. Those who do make 85% of the money become executives or run their own successful businesses. This book is about fulfilling your potential without resorting to motivational and inspirational beliefs. As in sports, you find that certain mechanical moves need to be mastered before your inspiration or genius can shine. Like a dog, a dog can be inspired to chase a car, but doesn’t know what to do with the car once it’s caught it. This knowledge is about what you do when you catch the car. That thin slice of face-to-face time with the buyer when persuasion really occurs. Jerry, I’d love for you to expound on this. That’s such a beautiful excerpt from your book. I’d love to get your thoughts on it. Surely. Well, I use the word game in the sense of a professional sport. And just as any professional sport, one has to understand the game, develop and polish the skills needed, and have a plan for the big contest. In selling, that translates to getting your story together, getting your tools practicing your delivery and putting it all together under pressure in front of a prospective client. You may hear someone say, ìIf my job doesnít work out, I can always sell.î You never hear them say, ìIf my job doesnít work out, I can always be an NFL quarterback.î Right. Right. I think the preparation that you teach in your book is what allowed me to be successful. Because, Jerry, when I was sitting down meeting with somebody about listing their commercial real estate, they would ask me directly, how many other listings do you have? And I would tell them, we have this many listings. And they would say, what makes you different than the competition? And I had it all on a one sheet. I had all my sales presentations. I had all my testimonials, all my statistics. I had a system for it. I had incorporated all seven of your selling moves and it helped me be proactive so that I could lead the conversation, build rapport with the buyer, find their needs, deliver benefits supported by facts, and close deals. Jerry, in your book, Soft Selling in a Hard World, you wrote that sales is a profession identified with the worst of its practitioners. On behalf of that group, I apologize for anybody who I did a poor sales presentation on years ago. Not the best. It happens because they sell so well. The public doesn’t identify those that are at the top of the cultural heap. The politicians, the movie stars, the talk show hosts, the televangelists and the business leaders, the world doesn’t view these people as salespeople, as outstanding salespeople. They’re rarely caught practicing the selling trade. The best of them are so good that people simply like their quote-unquote personalities because people easily confuse skill with personality. When you study the best you find that they make many mechanical selling moves right. Is this due to practice or coincidence? Natural talent or learned response? Only they know for sure how much is talent and how much is learned. The results are the same. They convince, move ideas, create change, and solve problems. We love them for it, and we reward them with the best our culture offers. Fame, fortune, cool clothes, and a big house. Jerry, share with us about what great selling is and what bad selling looks like. Well, great selling is problem solving, pure and simple. You find the buyer’s real problem and work with the buyer to solve it. You work together. To do that, you have to ask intelligent questions and listen intently. Bad selling is vomiting your stuff, talking, pitching about your stuff, and seeing the whole transaction only from your own point of view. As in any activity, when someone is really good at what they do, it looks easy, even effortless. It’s transparent. And whether it’s running a podcast or playing tennis or skiing or selling, we all think we can do that, I can do that, until we try and learn how difficult it is. Oh, that is, you know, the one thing, Eric, that happened to us years ago is we were approached, Jerry, by the Scripps Radio Network. They produce HGTV, the travel channel, and they said, Clay, we’d like to have you produce a show that we’re going to air in various markets throughout the United States. Now I had heard a lot of Rush Limbaugh in my life, a lot of Glenn Beck, a lot of Tim Ferriss, a lot of Gary Vaynerchuk, a lot of the big names. I have been a production person. I ran an entertainment company, so I’ve done a lot of audio production. I realized going into it how hard it was going to be because I’ve been up close to it. I can’t tell you how many people have listened to our podcast and have told me that they tried to produce a daily podcast for about four days in a row. Maybe. And they ran out of things to think about or talk about because they weren’t aware of the level of preparation needed. And so I think it’s really hard when you don’t know. And that’s what I love about your book, Soft Selling in a Hard World. Everybody needs to own a copy of it because you break down the science of how to sit down with the prospect and build rapport. And it’s very specific about what questions to ask. You break down how to listen intently. Then you explain how to find their problems, how to find their needs. Then you teach how to solve the problems, how to support it by facts. The book is so linear and it breaks it down where I think the world looks at people who are great at sales and says, yeah that’s probably natural. Natural talent. But it’s not natural, it’s a system. And Jerry, we work with hundreds of business owners all over this great country, and we often find that many of them seem scared of making sales calls. What would you say to somebody out there listening right now who is an entrepreneur or who wants to be, who’s afraid of picking up the phone and making sales calls? Well, I have told them often when I sit down with management, I say, look, you have a right to be scared because poor selling skills down the line are a message to your market. It’s your message to the market. And it is a waste of your money. And you trash the market as you go. And no business and no person likes rejection. The real problem is that all sales people, and I stress all, I include owners and managers here can see the upside of every possible transaction. This could mean $10,000 to my company. And they also sense the downside, no sale, wasted time, expense, and they don’t have the skills they need to control the downside and wait the transaction in their favor. Most of the time, they don’t even know such skills exist. And they often confuse personal magnetism with selling skills and a signed contract with being liked. Neither of those is true. What is true is that buyers would buy from a donkey if he could solve their problem. Chuck, that’s why I’ve done so well. People are buying from the donkey. Yeah, we’ll use that word. That’s a good word to use. Not the other one. Chuck, come on, seriously. I can self-deprecate myself. That’s you deprecating on me. That’s just mean, isn’t it? In your mind, Jerry, why does it seem like so many business owners are scared of rejection when it comes to sales? That fear, the fear of the word no so much. Why? Because the real process is unknown to them. They’re walking into a situation thinking, I have a good product, but they don’t know one thing about the client personally and very little about the client’s business. So what would you say to a business owner, I see this all the time, they want to delegate their sales to an employee without actually using the script themselves first. They want to delegate the sales process to an employee when they personally have not used the system and or created a system. The owner wants to delegate their sales to an employee without them actually first creating and using the proven systems. What would you say? Well, not to be cute, but I’ve run up against this quite often. I just say, look, you wouldn’t put a player on the field just because you liked him or her. You’d insist on training and practice and lots of it. Managing salespeople is one of the most difficult aspects of running a business. I mean, I’ve been in business since I was 17 years old. I’m now 83, so you can count it up. Partly because salespeople take their cue from management and many managers are not themselves trained We’ve often trained salespeople where the managers would not come into the room with them And so the salespeople ended up knowing more about sales than the managers did which caused conflicts You know in sales to me because the people are going whoa, whoa, whoa Wait a minute and the managers going this is no this is what we’re going to do. The more years involved they are with their product or service, the shallower the presentation becomes. The senior salesperson is often the worst person to teach others down the line. They’re often product oriented, make a few new calls, and sell through their old connections. So they don’t like being told they don’t know what they’re doing. Business has changed now and businesses that keep on selling the same way will eventually fall behind. You know, Jerry, in Soft Selling in a Hard World, you wrote a statement that blew my mind the first time I read it and I just kept reading it again and again. It says, there are only three ways to make exceptional money. To work in a place nobody wants to be, that’s one. To work in a place where nobody wants to be, that’s one. If you’re writing this down, Thrive Nation. To work in a place where nobody wants to be. Two, to perform work nobody else wants to do. Or three, to do work that nobody else can do. So as we’re kind of thinking about that, uh, Chup, I DJ’d hell gigs at the Holiday Inn Select, Jerry, I was a disc jockey, seven days a week at the Holiday Inn Select for impersonators. So one, I was doing work in a place no one wanted to do it. Two, I was doing work that nobody else wanted to do because no one else wanted to be a DJ seven nights a week for impersonators who pretended to be Neil Diamond and Michael Jackson. And then three, I did work that nobody else could do because who knows how to host four shows in a row that are exactly the same saying exactly the same jokes and pretending like you care while bringing the heat every single every single time Jerry people would pour in I’d say folks welcome to the incredible holiday and select you guys are in for a treat we’ve got Neil Diamond in the flesh and everyone’s going you know and I had to tee it up every time I was like as Ed McMahon I mean so it’s so true that is such a true statement. So I ask you Thrive Nation, how are you going to get rich? Now you have to perform work that no one else wants to do, to perform work no one else can do or to work in a place nobody else wants to be. Jerry, talk to us about the importance of facing the reality that these are the only three ways to get rich, unless you’re a unicorn example. Yes, or a drug dealer, or a liquor distributor or something. I’m going to write that down. These are the financial conditions we all cope with daily. This book is about dealing with the second and third ways of doing what no one else wants to do and what no one else can do. As you have said, people are scared of selling, and many don’t have the skills to close deals. deals, learning to sell well allows you to bravely meet both of those conditions where you both want to and can do. Jerry, I love when you write in your book, you say, this book is about mechanics. I’ll preach it. It is designed from the street up tactics, not strategy. You won’t find any magic here. There is none. There’s no underlying motivation or belief. Here’s my favorite part. It says, it isn’t about something larger than yourself. You don’t have to believe in it to make it pay. You don’t even have to believe in yourself. You just have to use mechanics. Jerry, I want to pile on there, Chuck, because when I was selling commercial real estate, I didn’t care about commercial real estate. I would say the vast majority of the business ventures that I’m involved in right now are in industries and things that I am 100% dispassionate about. But my friend, why is great selling really just about mastering the mechanics of sales? Well, done well. Selling is a profession, and learning a profession isn’t something that happens naturally or in a vacuum. It takes an awareness of errors and learning from those errors and correcting the errors and in doing so, you eventually learn the profession. Persuasion as a profession is no different. It requires attention, troubleshooting and practice. Jerry, I think that it seems so simple. You almost feel like, is that it? Is that it? No, but listen, it’s not Thrive Nation, it’s not a one-time event, it’s a process. And so, Chuck, we have our sales meetings every single week at Thrive, every Tuesday, Jerry, because of you and your book, Jerry, you caused this problem. We train our team every single week, and in that meeting we record the calls, and we play back the calls of actual sales presentations. We watch actual videos. And while reading the script at the same time. And while the actual salespeople, Jerry, are in the room. So the sales people actually get to watch themselves physically presenting on video and on audio every single week. And we do it every week. Jerry, for somebody out there that wants to do sales training like one time, why does it require ongoing training? Could you share that? Why does sales require ongoing practice? For the same reason that football players have to practice and every Saturday and several times during the week in order to stay sharp. There are only so many responses that are available to the buyer, both in role plays and in reality. And when you hear them enough times, you go, I know what to do with this. So it takes a surprise out of the transaction for the seller. seller and you just get better and better. I have to say having your sales meeting once a week and doing role plays, I did that with my brokerage in Colorado for 30 years and I role played my people every Monday morning at 7.30 much to everybody’s pain and we control 30% of the total market, two of us. And so it’s one of those things where you go, when this comes to this, this is what you do, this is what you do. You run down, you go for the long pass, or you go for the short out, or whatever. So practice and all of that is a very serious and rewarding activity for the business owner. So Jerry, can you explain to the listeners why you believe that sales is, that soft sales is a learned skill? Why do you believe that? Well because it doesn’t come naturally to us. For 30 years we taught a course in unnatural acts and for because the stuff doesn’t, it’s just not a natural response, it is a learned response. So for the soft sell, one has to put away the ego and let the buyer do the work. Well believe it or not, it is very difficult for people to allow the buyer to do the work. We live in a culture that tells us we sellers are the center of his or her own universe. Salespeople should talk more than 40% of the time. The buyer should talk 60% of the time. Great salespeople are all above average listeners. When we taught people to do shortlist presentations in front of committees and buying groups and so on. We taught them how to give a mission statement, open with a probe, and then sit back and watch the action, rather than talk and talk and talk and do slide after slide and get into And this is, we teach this, basically we did a course in civilized conversation, which is allow those people to do the work. I love it. I love it. I totally believe in the rule of conversational generosity. Let the prospect, let the buyer talk the majority of the time. Now, Jerry, there’s another knowledge bomb from your book that I highlighted and underlined multiple times and it read if you have a world-class idea and you want to give it away for the good of humanity you will have to sell the concept and if you can’t sell it you’ll be stuck with your idea poorer for your brilliant brilliance and generosity it seems unfair but even freebies must be delivered with a certain salesmanship or the receiver does not perceive the true value of the gift. Jerry, why do so many people push back on the idea of learning how to sell effectively and resort to saying dumb things like, this product is so good it will sell itself? Well, because they love this illusion. It is a cultural thing in my estimation. It is maybe 2% of the time it’s true that something will sell itself. But if your stuff sells itself, and it’s not really selling, it is order taking. We all love the idea of the financial miracle, winning the lottery or unexpected inheritance from a rich aunt, and we’re all looking for the magic bullet, whether it’s weight loss or closing deals. Those are myths too, and they’re fun, but selling is a skill. There are no shortcuts to getting good at it and no quick fixes. It may not be the fun you’re looking for, but the profession is very lucrative. The highest paid people in our culture are salespeople. I agree with that. I think that there are many, many people out there that want to just state my product is the best, therefore it’s going to sell itself. And Jerry, in your book you write, puffery is hot air. Webster’s dictionary defines it as flattery, publicity, exaggerated commendation, especially for promotional purposes. In selling, it is claims that are unproven as stated. As stated, typically puffery words and phrases are, we’re number one, we’re the best in our business, save big money, a lot, high profits, and the fastest, et cetera. Can you explain for our listeners the profound difference between attempting to sell using puffery versus attempting to sell using representation, benefits, and facts? Well, in a downscale market, we buy puffery all the time, but I happen to be in the executive sales training business, and so we were teaching people to sell at the very highest levels, which of course also works at the lower levels. The less sophisticated the buyer, the more likely they are to buy puffery. But buyers view puffery as lies. They may not be intentional, but the buyers don’t believe them. First, they make all the salespeople sound the same. So everybody in your business then sounds the same. And when you get killed on a price negotiation, you have no defense. And second, they set up conflicts with your buyer. I want to ask you this, Jerry. This is not about the sales process, but it’s about you, the sales wizard. How long did it take you to write that book self selling in a hard world, which is the Bible of sales? That thing is amazing. How long did it take you to read that or to write that thing? That thing is awesome Well probably around six months If it’s a funny story, we don’t have time to do it here someday when we’re sitting over drinks I’ll tell you the funny story about you tomorrow But it was one of those things. I wrote it as part of a software program I was developing at the time because I had my own bit-rich scheme about how to build a playbook on a computer. And so we were developing that in the very early, early days and that book was just part of a package of teaching people how to sell using computers. So it was really an ancillary program, an ancillary project, I’m sorry, to this larger idea, which the larger idea failed, but the book was residual out of that and it’s now sold about, I don’t know, 80,000 or so. It’s been on the market for 30, we figured out the other day, 32 years or something, it’s been on the market. So it’s been back with us for a long time. It’s kind of one of those books there that I run into a lot of high-level salespeople that have read the book. Oh, yeah. But it’s not a book that everybody… If you’re listening to this podcast, you should own the book. But if you’re working for a company and you’re selling burritos and you have no curiosity about how sales works, you should read the book, but you probably won’t because it would require a lot of work and thinking. But that book is awesome, Soft Selling in a Hard World. Jerry, I want to go back now to asking you some of these questions about specifically the closing move. Can you share with us what the closing move looks like to you? Sure. Actually, the closing move is the last move of the seven selling moves that is explored in depth in the book. In fact, most of the course that we teach or used to teach had to do with covering the seven selling moves. It took three days. It just encompasses this entire idea of how to do persuasion from the buyer’s point of view. In selling, this move is called the close. This is the move that scares everybody to death. And it’s not just you, it is where people go, my God, what do I do now? In selling lore, this is the scariest move. However, this seventh move is the simplest move at all, but only if you have set up your whole meeting from your first words to close can be as simple as, well, how do you see us working together to solve this problem? Or where do you think we should go from here? Or something along those lines, and let the buyer do the work. Now we often get a comment when we teach this, well, they never said yes. Well, they were never required to say yes. It was all assumed that they would say yes and if they answered this question, where would you like to go from here, you don’t need yes, no, it just doesn’t come to that. You know with our wedding photography company and then with real estate, people ask me, they would look up Fears and Clark online and by the way, if you’re out there at Thrive Nation, take the challenge, type in Fears, F-E-A-R-S, Clark, and then Kanbar. Maurice Kanbar, there, Jerry, is the guy who invented Sky Vodka. And after selling Sky Vodka for $600 million, he purchased one-third of downtown Tulsa, and he asked me to list and market his properties for him. And people would ask me all the time, Clay, when you’re signing all those leases, what did you say to close the deal? How’d you do it? I said, well, I won. I’m using my Jerry Vass moves here. So I’m never going to say, well, do you want to go ahead and lease the space? I’d say, well, how much space do you need after you’ve looked at it? You want 12,000 square feet or 10? I’m sorry, I stepped on your line, but that’s what I was looking for. I would say that, and then I would say now, okay, 12 or 10, okay, 12. Okay, and then when would you like to move in ideally? The 1st or the 15th? Okay, great. And we need a security deposit here. Do you want to do debit card or credit card? Okay. You want to sign right here? And then I would walk in to the office every time, and Braxton was there, and Buena was there, and Tanya was there, and our team was there, and every time they’d go, did you get the deal? And I’d say, guys, this deal was kind of tough, and so they could only pay with a credit card! And I would just get a deal every time, I would close every deal. I am not kidding, I went, Jerry, in 2007, when I ran my company DJ Connection as a result of your book, Soft Selling in a Hard World, I went the entire year. We booked 4,000 weddings, and of all the appointments we set, I only had one person say no the entire year. Whoa. One. Shannon and Clark. You still remember him? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh, he shut me down, Jerry. He said, everyone in town’s using you, so I decided to use somebody else. Well, go ahead. That move works. Now, Jerry, you write in your book that trickery in closing is like trickery anywhere else. It’s short-lived. What do you mean by this? I mean, people teach, and I won’t drop names, but you know who they are, who say, well, there’s the puppy dog close, and there’s this kind of clothes and there’s this reverse clothes and I’m going, no, that’s bullish. That is not right because it takes away from the buyer’s attention. The buyer hates that kind of stuff because they know the tricks, the tricks fall flat and it just turns the seller into this shuck and jive guy. Instead of being somebody that you would want to do business with, you go, well, if he’ll shuck and jive me here in this transaction, what’s he hold for me down line when we’re in a serious business? That’s why trickery doesn’t work very well. And if you are in low street sales, pots and pans and that sort of thing, perhaps you can get away with it. But if you’re going to be a legitimate, professional salesperson, don’t use trickery. I love the phrase, shuck and jive. Chuck, I’m going to begin using shuck and jive and shenanigans as words on the show more often. I agree. Hold me accountable. Why have I not said shuck and jive? You’re practicing shenanigans and you need to cut it out. Jerry has a better master of the English language than I have. That’s the whole issue I have here. Now, Jerry, I want to brag on Paul Hood, who’s on the show today. Paul and his company, hoodcpas.com, if you’re checking it out. By the way, we’re number three right now on the iTunes charts. No puffery there, Jerry. In the business section of iTunes, where number three out of 530,000 podcasts, according to the Wall Street Journal, in all categories, I’m talking comedy, sports, I’m talking about comedy, sports, business, we are number 26 as of the time of the recording of today’s podcast. So, Paul’s been a sponsor the entire time, and Paul, over there at Hood CPAs, if somebody comes in and they meet with you and they do a consultation. You have multiple packages that the customer can choose from. Can you kind of explain, not necessarily all the specifics, but about the idea of having multiple packages and just letting the customer choose the options when you go for the clothes? You bet. One of the reasons we did that, it kind of ties in with Jerry’s book, is Law of Clarity, where he says if you can’t explain your product to a 10-year-old, then you don’t know your product very well. You’re not a very good salesman. And so what we have is we basically try to break it down into three decisions. And also so that they, it’s not a decision between yes and no, it’s a decision between which of the three do they want. And they go from a very basic, comprehensive where we’re just doing some consulting type work and meeting with them once a month to the next, maybe if it’s a business, we’re doing accounting plus all the consulting. The third one would be if we’re doing payroll and accounting and consulting. But it breaks it down to where, all right, Mr. Potential Client, which of these three do you want? Which best fits your needs? We’re doing textbook, the soft-selling close. That’s right. Now, Chup, I want to teach Jerry a word here on this next question. Jerry, you’ve brought us back to shuck and jive and shenanigans. So I’m going to give you a word. I’m a huge New England Patriots fan, and the word I would like to teach you today is wicked awesome. Wicked. Wicked awesome. And that’s one word, and if anything is great in Boston, it’s wicked awesome. It’s not hyphenated. It’s just wicked awesome. So Jerry, I would like for you to break down your wicked awesome bonus move on page 119 of soft selling in a hard world. You write about this wicked awesome move called cross-selling. What is cross-selling all about and why is it so wicked awesome important? Well it’s wicked awesome important because many if not most salespeople have several things to sell and after the buyers first agreement because you’re going to be closing incrementally and after the first agreement, the salesperson now has a proven performer in the buyer and must move on to the second and third sale and so on. Some businesses can’t even survive without cross-sells. Successful cross-selling cuts across the cost of sales and increases profits. You run into it very often when you buy something and you say you want an extended warranty with that or fries with that burger, you need to add on accessories for that car. Well that’s where the real profit comes. Add-on sales really is the profit center for many of these businesses and a way to survival for them. You know, Best Buy… The cost, though, always starts with a probe, too, by the way. Always starts with a question. And so, you can just continue on. I remember I was trained early on, and I was selling mutual funds in one of my many careers, and I didn’t know what I was doing. I didn’t know a damn thing about mutual funds. I didn’t know anything about that business, but I was taught how to sell it, and I went out and I just kept selling until I ran out of things to sell. I finally had to shrug my shoulders and say, ìWell, thatís it for me. Iím done. I donít have anything else left.î So cross-selling can be pretty high adventure, particularly on high-end stuff like high-end real estate. Iím talking business buildings and that sort of thing because I taught that for 30 years and these people are making a million and a half, two million, three million dollars per sale. They practiced all the time. And when they practiced, they were serious men because there was serious money involved and these were serious, bright, educated people. And they were wonderful to teach. Now this is something I want to hammer home on here. Because Chuck, this great selling doesn’t, as Jerry has mentioned in his book and then on today’s podcast, great salespeople don’t even look like they’re selling, Paul. It’s happening. And I’ll never forget this, Jerry. I called the book a cruise with Karen Wheelock. And if you’re out there and you know Karen Wheelock, say that Clay Clark is bragging on her because she was good. And if you are Karen Wheelock, Clay Clark is bragging on you. Oh, you’re the best, Karen Wheelock. So I went to book a cruise, you know, and Karen says, well, great. Yeah. And I said, how much are the cruises? And Karen said to me, this is the first cruise I went on. I insisted on being the cheapest price possible. And I had a small boat, got motion sickness the entire time. So the second time I call and I said, Karen, how much do you charge? How much would it be? And she says, Clay, do you? Let me ask you, what are you looking to do here? What’s the big occasion? And I tell her and she’s, oh, oh, so you’re going to surprise her. Oh, really? Well, so let me ask you this. What are some of her favorite activities? Next thing you know, she’s got the probing questions going on. Next thing you know, Jerry, she booked an appointment. She got me to commit not to buying something, but commit to the appointment. Within 72 hours, you know, kind of within that window of time when I’m still interested. I met with her and she just continued asking me, well, if you’re gonna be here, don’t you want to at least have like a balcony? Or don’t you want to get this, you know, room service? Or what about tickets to that? Have you thought about a catamaran tour? And Jerry, somehow that $1,000 cruise, I feel like that $1,000 per person cruise turned out to be about $5,000 per person, but it was wicked awesome. It was really good. So the cross-sale, I mean, that is, whoo. And one thing, Jerry, that you’ve talked about is during your years working with thousands of salespeople, you’ve noticed that salespeople will instantly freeze up and seem to almost have kind of like a panic attack. I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. It’s a salesperson has almost like an anxiety, immediate panic attack. It’s like their brain shuts off as soon as a buyer inserts any objections whatsoever. Why is it that most salespeople need to learn to overcome objections? Well, quite frankly, if you can figure out what the problem is in the objection, you’re about halfway to an answer just on that part without doing anything. So when you hear an objection, the first thing you have to do is figure out what the real objection is. English is a very complex language and what you think you heard and what the buyer really is saying can be quite different. So So the first move is to ask a question, something simple as, why is that? Or help me understand why you say that or what is going on here, et cetera. We’re now assuming salespeople have playbooks, so they will have practice the answer to this objection. But it takes practice and you’re on the money having people practice, particularly in front of recording devices, cameras and so on, because people cannot simply believe how bad they are until they see themselves on camera. It’s just humiliating. I mean, I watch myself on camera and I just hang my head and cry. much about how salespeople can truly make a fortune if they understand that the profits are in solving the problems. I repeat, Chuck, the profits are in solving the problems. Chuck, I’m not sure if I’m communicating. Maybe my mic is cutting out. You say the problems are in solving problems. You get what I’m saying? The profits. Let me try it in Spanish. El profits. El profito. El profito are in… In El Solving El Problemo. Right. All right, so can you talk to us about what you mean by that? Sure. When we circle back to the top of our talk today, selling is problem solving. When selling to executives, there are really seven business problems that seem to be universal, as we discovered in learning from our students. They’re outlined in detail in my other book, Self-Selling to Executives, and they pop up over and over again. They are to acquire and manage capital, acquire and manage people, find and fill markets, meet and exceed the competition, improve quality and lower costs of production, maintain sufficient and predictable cash flow, maintain control and predictable overhead. When you’re selling into this stuff at the business level, life goes pretty well. It’s just that because we’re not going to argue with these say look we’re here to help you pick one cut your overhead or meter exceed the competition or Found and fill a new market or acquire and manage your people or or or your or your finances there So when you hit the business level For Upscale clients, that’s where the money is. And really selling becomes consulting at that point where you really are genuinely bringing value, true value to your client. I want to make sure that the listeners get a specific example of this. So Jerry, if somebody out there listens to our podcast and they reach out to us for business coaching, here are just some of the problems that we can solve. I’ll just kind of list them out and Paul you can chime in if there’s something I’m missing out on but hey I got a quote here it’s a business guru if you’ve got a problem you all solve it check out the moves well my DJ revolts it thank you for quoting vanilla ice the business guru Jerry are you a big fan of vanilla ice were you big fan of the early 90s rapper vanilla ice okay so this is the thing though people say what do you guys do? Well, we do all the search engine. So what’s the problem we’re solving? How do you get to the top of Google? So we’re getting you to the top of Google. We help you make a workflow. What problem does that solve? It helps you create time freedom. Paul, sales scripting, what problem does it help for you when our organization helps you with sales scripting? How does that help you, Paul? Well, it helps by creating a duplicatable system that can be scaled so that it’s not all dependent upon the top salesperson, me. Videography. What problem does that solve, Eric, for our listeners out there? Yeah, we’re oftentimes educating the customer on who we are, what we sell, and we’re showing them happy previous clients and testimonial videos as well. A lot of our clients can’t afford a videographer. Right. They can’t do it. So we do the videography, the photography, the web development, the sales scripting, but we have to think about it in terms of the buyer. What are the problems we’re solving for you? And the problem for you, the average buyer, is you have a small business, and you don’t have the ability to, you don’t have the money to hire a full-time videographer, and a full-time photographer, and a full-time web developer, and a consultant to make it all happen. And so for $1,700 a month, month to month, for less money than it costs to hire a $10 per hour employee, you get all that stuff. I think, Jerry, a lot of us, we can become so experts of what we’re, we can become such an expert and a guru of our industry that we can’t explain it to anybody. That’s why I love the chapter of your book where you talk about the importance of positive self-talk and really sharing with yourself on an ongoing basis this positive, intentional self-talk and coaching yourself up so when you head into the presentation you’re saying, I can do this, I’ve got it, I’ve prepared, I know what I’m doing. Jerry, can you talk to us about the importance of being intentional about what you say to yourself as a salesperson? Yes, yes. Because all of us, I mean I have never met anybody who sold who didn’t have fear at some level. And I mean, I’ve walked in many, many boardrooms to sell our services, and I knew exactly what I was going to do and how to control it, because I had studied it and written a couple of books about it and all of that. But even then, I mean, it’s pretty easy to get tense in those things when it goes out of control when when suddenly the answer to a question Ends up over in left field someplace and you’re looking at it and going what the hell do I do now? Right, so it’s easy for us to talk ourselves out of selling when all we can see is the stress of it Preparation knowing exactly where you’re going and what you’re you’re taking the buyer can change that. There are many more problems than problem solvers. So it’s kind of incumbent on the salesperson to keep an eye on the problem. What is the problem? You could continue to go, what is the problem? And if you know what the problems are when you walk in, I mean, I would open with those. I would go into the boardrooms of big firms and my opening shot, I would just take a look around the room and say, �Hey there, my name is Jerry Hess, and when your people walk in to sell your services, they don�t know what they�re doing.� So they have one rec right after another, often three recs before they get to the end of the first sentence. Right. And they go, whoa, because you can prove it. There it is. And they know it. Somewhere in their heart, they know that I am telling them the truth. And let’s take the accounting business. Ninety percent of new businesses fail within three years. That would be my opening shot. Ninety percent of businesses fail within three years. So right away, it gets the attention of everybody in the room, and you can prove it. And it’s provable, and it’s researchable, and it’s all there, and it scales up, depending on your perspective, it scales up to that 10% is remaining, but it’s like half fail within the first year, and there’s some long-term ratio goes like that. So and more fail within the second year but by the third year is only 10% left. And it’s pretty easy once you’re aware of it it’s pretty easy to watch it happen in real time and somewhere in your heart of hearts you know it’s true. Okay so when you’re when you have a reputation as a problem solver the opportunities just naturally flow your way. It becomes, it isn’t effortless, but it certainly at a greatly reduced effort. Salespeople and managers worry a lot about losing clients. I’ll tell you, when you solve a client’s problem, you can’t get rid of them. I mean, they stick to you like glue. This is so true. If you’re out there, there’s one gentleman that I met here about two months ago, Paul, at a conference. And he said to me, he says, I am a, this guy was in Florida, okay, in Florida. I won’t give any more details. I just say he’s in Florida. And he said, what I do is I’m a social media marketer, Paul. And I said, that’s cool. So what kind of problems do you solve for your ideal and likely buyers? What kind of problems do you solve?” And he says, well, what I do is I generate leads. And then I said, do you? That was my question. Do you? Is it provable? And he said, well, yeah. So it’s like, how does that work? He said, well, you pay up front for the first three months. You got to pay for the first three months. And it was a huge fee, Jerry. It was like $6,000 or something. And I said, okay, and then what happens? He goes, well, then if you want to cancel, you can after like the third month, because it’s only like a thousand a month after the first three months, the big upfront fee. And the guy, I said, well, could you show me an example of maybe a client you’ve ever worked with where they get leads, maybe just one? And he’s like, well, Paul, there’s kind of too many to name, you know? I mean, it’s got a lot of them, really. He’s fishing around. And I wasn’t trying to, I was trying to help the guy. And then he pulls me aside at our workshop and he goes, I’ve got to be honest with you, I’ve never actually done this for people before. And I said, well, dude, that move doesn’t work. What you should say is, hey, I’m a social media marketer. I believe in my product and you’d be my first client. And so I’m going to do your first month for free. And then if you’re happy, then I’ll charge you this much per month. But you have to be direct and honest. You’ve got to use facts, but you also have to get in front of the decision maker or you’re not going to have a conversation anyway. So the decision maker, Paul, if someone’s trying to go to Hood CPAs, they go to hoodcpas.com, they listen to our podcast, and they show up at your office, the chances of getting to you, unless they have an appointment, are pretty slim, probably none. Yeah, virtually none. Because you are a decision-maker, therefore you’ve set up systems in your life and processes to make yourself unreachable. So Jerry wrote in his book here, you write, in your book the decision-maker is often as elusive as true love. Can you explain this, Jerry, why the decision-makers like Paul are always so elusive? Because they hate salespeople. Because salespeople waste their time. And our view is that you should be able to go in, make a complicated presentation, close the deal, and be gone at the executive level in 15 minutes. So that means that everything is quantified, it is provable, there it is, you have a lead, you got a story. The problem here is that salespeople spend a lot of time talking into a receptive ear, which often has no decision-making responsibility. It’s because salespeople often prefer to meet someone at a lower level who’s more interested in the features of what you sell, and salespeople are often intimidated by executives who are interested only in benefits. What is in this for me, for my business? That’s all they’re interested in. And so that would then dictate that you would walk in and say, my business is to increase your bottom line, your net profits, by 2% annually. That’s what we do. Well, we can discuss that, you know, and because we’re talking the executive language. So people don’t understand that executives are not interested particularly in features. That’s for the people down the line, the kind of computer or the app that they’re using or some relationship that they have with them. That’s not what they’re talking about. They’re talking about the wrong stuff. Once you know what your product or service does for buyers and how you impact their company, you are way less likely to be intimidated or willing to waste time with someone who can’t say yes. It is a question. How are decisions like this when you’re talking to anybody in the firm. I mean you’re just I mean you are talking to the receptionist or you’re talking to the janitor. You’re asking questions. No decisions like this made inside this firm. I had a really good person today that asked me that Jerry, a very skilled person, and for our Christmas party it’s gonna be $55 a head you know this year for the party. Every year Jerry it always is going up. Inflation you know it’s always going up there. This year it’s $55 a head. We have a staff all in between Z and I. There will probably be 400, getting closer to 500 people there this year. There’s a lot of people. And if you take 400 or 500 times 55, that’s a large number. And so a person asked me today, they said, how are decisions made for you guys, your holiday party within Thrive? How do you do that? Well, my wife decides the budget for the party. That’s what my wife does. She decides that, and so you’ve got to talk to her. And I think it’s so important, because if you would have been pitching to me, I don’t care how good the pitch is, even if I would have loved it, Jerry, I don’t have the budget authority within our organization. We decided that 18 years ago, that my wife would make all final decisions on that holiday party, because I always want to swag it out and you know spend money on things we shouldn’t be buying and Vanessa is very good with the budget and so it’s such a wise question ask people who is the decision-maker how are decisions often made Jerry that is so important well if you ask them who the decision maker is they’re gonna say that’s me that’s me and so you have to come you have to come in a side door on that our decisions made my view is and in asking questions in probes, you start every one of them with how. I love it. Everyone. And once you’ve mastered how, you can move on to some other things like maybe what and who. How is so good. It’s so good. Okay. So anytime you ask somebody, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to correct you, but this is what I do. When you have decisions made inside the company, you’re going to get a different answer from who is the decision maker. Well, I’ll say this. I’m not going to argue with the sales wizard. I want to make sure we get this. The reason why we’re doing this podcast and this next question I have for you, Jerry, ties into this is once you’ve read your book, right, three times, okay? Once I’ve read the book three times, once you’ve read your own book, Jerry, 400 times. You have to make a playbook then, and you have to write down the specific questions, because you just pointed out you would prefer to ask how, which is a great question. And the thing is, off the cuff is a bad way to go. The pros prepare. They got to have a playbook. So you and I are having a conversation here, but you’re going to, after you’ve read that book, and you’ve outlined and you’ve taken notes. You have to make an actual playbook, because you and I both know the devil’s in the details. Can you explain what it means for salespeople to truly make a sales playbook? Right. Well, it’s on a basic simple theory that if you can’t write it, you can’t do it. Self-selling is an action plan, and writing comes first, then practice on the street. The playbook is a working document. It changes over time as your business, your products, your services, your competition all change right in front of your eyes. So after each call, make notes of what didn’t work and what you would change, regular reviews of your playbook for review and upgrading because life is a continuous upgrade path here. It becomes an archive of the best of what you do. It’s also an excellent teaching tool if you’re called on to train new hires. Well, it’s not priceless, but it is very pricey in the sense that it keeps you from making as many bad moves in a live presentation. Oh, it’s so good when you take the time to do this. It’s so good. Thrive Nation, take the time to make a sales book. Now, Jerry, why do you think that most people never do take the time to make their sales playbook. None of our listeners, but other people on other planets, other parallel universes, other countries, not our country, other planetary systems, they will listen to a podcast like this and then they won’t actually make the sales playbook. What’s going on, Jerry? Why won’t people ever take the time out to make the playbooks? Well, they don’t understand, this is my assessment. They don’t understand the importance of the act of the creation and design stage. Actually what happens is people learn a great deal about their own business in the act of putting down the words and what they think they say. And so what you think you say, when you write it down, it changes in front of your eyes. It’s like studying for a play where you read the words and you say the words and do the words over and over and over on the script and then one day, they change right in front of your eyes because you go, �Oh, I got it.� So that’s what a playbook does. It allows you to get it. When building it, you’re going to eliminate puffery and develop proof statements and quantify your benefits and find the unique benefits that you sell and design a mission statement for both your firm and the upcoming call. You’re going to develop each of the seven selling moves, which we’ve only touched on briefly here as explained in the book. And that is the seven selling moves. It’s really the central theme of our three-day hard selling course because we end up developing a selling book, as we did, in class and then sent him home to do homework. And there was two or three hours of homework every night in order to work on the playbook. So it’s kind of a pain to do, it is time-consuming, and it will tax your brain because you have to shift your thinking over to how does the buyer think about this? We know what we think about it, how do they think about it. And you will eventually develop a return on investment for the buyer of your services or your products delivered. So the ROI at the higher end of selling, when you’re selling larger ticket stuff, the return on investment becomes a very critical thing. We can say, look, you’re going to give me a dollar, and I’m going to give you $10 back within 90 days. Well, I mean, that takes away, that takes care of a whole lot of selling problems right there, and you can prove, if you can prove that, which we could in our case, we can, you say, you know, it comes. I want to, this, this, these final two questions, I am very, very, very passionate, Chep, about this next question because I falsely believed, Jerry, for a decade previous to knowing you, from age 18 to about age 20, I guess it was age 17 to age 27, age 26, somewhere in that time frame, I believed that sales was about motivation. So I would send my team to sales conferences all the time. And I would go to these motivational conferences. Now, let me tell you the kinds of things they would teach. And when I took notes, Jerry, I’m a note-taker. These are the kinds of things they would write down. They would say, everyone stand up right now and say right now, if I can conceive it, I can achieve it. And they bounce the beach ball. The music’s playing. And they’re saying, everybody now, and everyone’s yelling. They’ll yelling, they’ll have you stand up on a chair and say, I can’t sell! And they would talk to you about feeling it, and they would talk about aligning your vision, Chup, with your goals, and they would talk about the power of discovering the infinite knowledge that you could find by tapping into the universal knowledge. They would never call it God, but it became almost like a religion, Jerry. There’s all this motivation. And I went to one conference, and I met these people, and I thought, why are all of the jackasses here? And then I thought to myself, why am I here? And then I realized, I also was a jackass, and I was going to the Jackass Festival, and I kind of liked it for the first four or five times, because it was a jackass festival. But over time, I realized, all of those people were always looking for the new get-rich-quick move. Their companies weren’t working, and things were going to hell because none of them could sell well. So, if I’m out there saying, okay, I’ve been to all those conferences, I’ve been to all those woo-woo things, I’ve walked on hot calls, I’ve watched all the motivational—Jerry, you’ve seen it, all the videos, I’ve done trust falls with my team, I’ve gone to ropes courses. Hot calls. I’d like to get your thoughts on how salespeople can overcome their fears and the best way to train your team. Well, it sounds to me like you have much of this ball of wax well under control, but it The question about the violin player, the violin player asks, how do I get to Carnegie Hall? And the answer is practice, practice, practice. And the sales are the same way, and it is not a glorious motivational-driven craft anymore. You can be a motivated football player, it doesn’t keep you from getting your head knocked off out there. I feel the same way. If you know how to defend yourself with knowledge, then you can defend yourself in every circumstance that you run into, except earthquake and bombing, but you’re never afraid. And I was terrified for years and I’ve been selling for God, 150 years. Fear doesn’t exist well in the face of extensive preparation. It just doesn’t. And the way you work your people, and I think it’s the way you’re working them, which is you find a buddy and you role play every presentation. You don’t wait for a perfect presentation. presentation, you just start using the skills and perfect them as you go along because it is a lifetime skill. It isn’t something you’re going to do for a year and then leave because if you go for a year and leave and you know your business, you’re going to make yourself $100,000, $150,000 and nothing makes you feel quite as good as having a nice, fat bank account and there’s no time like the present to begin to do that so do it now and I absolutely agree with the motivational ideas because I think people do need motivation and particularly people who work alone, they get bummed, they get disappointed and they get disappointed greatly in sales because they don’t have the skill to close deals that are walking in their door every single day, and those people turn around and walk out. I owned a real estate brokerage in the mountains, and I trained my people. People would come in and say, ìWell, we want to see whatís for sale.î And I had to train my people to say, ìWell, come back to my office and sit down here and talk to me about that. And the first question from our side was, what would you like the real estate to do for you? And that then began to greatly narrow the inventory about what you were going to talk about. And you just went along that whole line and you qualified, qualified, qualified, until finally it narrowed it down to where you had, I got two or three properties that we could look at that’ll do what you want. You didn’t guess. You asked those questions. It’s so powerful. Yeah. Well, this is out of my experience I’ve had to have in some trades and some of them worked and some of them didn’t. I mean, actually I’m a man known for his failures more than his successes. Well I think your biggest failure is agreeing to be on our podcast. That just shows a lack of judgment there, but thank you so much for making one more poor decision. I agree. I agree. All right, now… So far, this has been miserable. It’s been miserable. Okay, well, Jerry, I have a final question here for you. You’ve literally worked with thousands of salespeople all over the world. people just try to make things up on the fly as opposed to implementing a proven path? I think a good part of it is laziness. I mean there’s two things, these are harsh words, but it has to do with laziness because it’s work and with a big W and it’s time-consuming and people often do not even know that there is a proven path other than whatever the senior sales people told them who gave the new boy everything that he knew, which really wasn’t very much on how to make the sale happen. The guy’s been doing it for 30 years and so he is wired to accounts that he has been courting for 20 years. And so he confuses people when they say, let’s watch him work. And he goes out and he says, hey, Bob, I’m here to pick up our order for this month or for this year or here to move you over to that other place. And so when you want to get started, well, because the trust is already built, it looks really easy, it’s very deceptive. Many people do not understand there’s an underlying structure to successful human communication and persuasion. And working without a structure or a plan is a design for failure. And in this profession, there’s no magic bullet in this profession or any other one that you can think of or will run into in your lifetime. I think what you just said is so powerful. There’s no magic bullet. There’s a proven system. It works. It’s called soft selling in a hard world. Paul, I wanted to see, and Jerry, if you, if Paul no longer asks political gotcha questions, he no longer asks religious questions. He no longer paints our guests into a corner as one of our proud show sponsors. But he is a real entrepreneur with thousands of real customers. He has real employees. Paul, do you have a final question for the Wizard of Sales, Mr. Jerry Vance? Well, yeah. I apologize if this is a selfish question, but I would just like from the sales guru out there, Jerry, to, do you have any advice for me? Because I can say I’m in the wisdom business. And I read a long time ago, I can’t remember, I read it out, if you sell somebody, you break rapport, but if you educate them, you build rapport. But then I’ve got to balance that side of things, the hard sell versus not creating too much of a wisdom-based or, you know, like you said, vomiting my product or my wisdom or my knowledge all over them. What kind of advice could you give to me for that middle ground that I’ve got to educate them somewhat in that 40% that I speak, but I don’t want to vomit all over them like you said earlier? Well, it sounds to me like you’re doing it right. I mean, there’s always a balance that has to be achieved, and there’s a balance between advice and persuasion and knowledge and experience and wisdom. I mean, there’s some kind of a balance, and I don’t know what that balance is, but I do know that it is there because, I mean, what we just did here in this podcast is that I have worked hard to balance advice and wisdom and knowledge that I have gained doing this for most of my adult life because it takes all of it. It’s kind of the whole mcgilla, the whole package. So frankly, I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. I would do what I’m doing. If you’re successful doing it, I do not believe if you can afford to give away a new car with every sale and you want to do that, for God’s sake, do it. But if you can’t afford that, you’re going to have to figure out something else. And so it’s one of those things where you go, I don’t like to try to change people people from what they’re doing now, if they’re successful now. I work with people who are less than successful than who are less successful than they should be. Given their talent, their education, their preparation, their time and rank, their education in the market, when they’re still losing, then you can use this information to start cleaning up their act and getting successful again. Most people have been successful at least once, but they wandered off. They forgot where the center of the universe was. The center of the universe is communication with buyers and potential buyers. They forgot that, and they started doing other things. I mean, I’ve done it. I mean, I had nine man years in a software program because I lost contact with reality, actually. I lost contact with reality. I was going on this $10 million deal that I knew that it was gonna be superb and I was gonna be rich for life and be able to buy myself a good used car. But I was wrong, I was wrong. And because I wandered off from the basics. So, I don’t think I’m the right guy to ask about what you should do differently. If you’re successful doing what you’re doing, for God’s sake, don’t change it. All right. Thank you. Jerry, I appreciate you so much for taking the time to be on today’s show. Where are you physically located? What state are you in? I am on the beach in North Florida. In North Florida? Yeah, in Northeast Florida, 40 miles south of Jacksonville. I’m looking at the beach and the ocean, and it is part of my success package, shall we say. That and my partner of 25 years, Iris Heron, who actually is a co-author of the second book I wrote, which is a soft selling for executives. And so anyway, it’s a very happy circumstance. Is soft selling in a hard world an in print for the people that want to get a copy? I’ve been buying them off of Amazon. Is there a certain place you’d recommend all of our listeners to go to, to get a copy of that book? No, Amazon is the place that the stuff is bought. And so that works. Well, Jerry, thank you so much for being on today’s podcast. If you see a pale male, the big white moose walking up and down the beach in Jacksonville, that’s me, because we’ve been to Jacksonville a few times. And I am the most pale man in the history of our planet. So just look away. I don’t want you to burn your corneas or anything. And when you see the… I like reflect light, don’t I, Chop? I mean, it’s truly Casper-ish. Handsome. Right. What is the scream? Don’t look at it. Don’t look at it! That was Jerry Vast, right here on the Thrive Time Show on your podcast, Download. And now, without any further ado, 3, 2, 1, boom! The number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. We are Jared and Jennifer Johnson. We own Platinum Pest and Lawn and are located in Owasso, Oklahoma. We have been working with Thrive for business coaching for almost a year now. Yeah. So, what we want to do is we want to share some wins with you guys that we’ve had by working with Thrive. First of all, we’re on the top page of Google now. Okay, I just want to let you know what type of accomplishment this is. Our competition, Orkin, Terminex, they’re both 1.3 billion dollar companies. They both have two to three thousand pages of content attached to their website. So to basically go from virtually non-existent on Google to up on the top page is really saying something. But it’s come by being diligent to the systems that Thrive has by being consistent and diligent on doing podcasts and staying on top of those podcasts to really help with getting up on what they’re listing and ranking there with Google. And also, we’ve been trying to get Google reviews, asking our customers for reviews. And now we’re the highest rated and most reviewed pest and lawn company in the Tulsa area. And that’s really helped with our conversion rate. And the number of new customers that we’ve had is up 411% over last year. Wait, say that again. How much are we up? 411%. Okay. So 411% we’re up with our new customers. Amazing. Right. So not only do we have more customers calling in, we’re able to close those deals at a much higher rate than we were before. Right now, our closing rate is about 85%, and that’s largely due to, first of all, like our Google reviews that we’ve gotten. People really see that our customers are happy, but also we have a script that we follow. And so when customers call in, they get all the information that they need. That script has been refined time and time again. It wasn’t a one and done deal. It was a system that we followed with Thrive in the refining process and that has obviously, the 411% shows that that system works. Yeah, so here’s a big one for you. So last week alone, our booking percentage was 91%. We actually booked more deals and more new customers last year than we did the first five months, or I’m sorry, we booked more deals last week than we did the first five months of last year, from before we worked with Thrive. So again, we booked more deals last week than the first five months of last year. And it’s incredible, but the reason why we have that success by implementing the systems that Thrive has taught us and helped us out with. Some of those systems that we’ve implemented are group interviews, that way we’ve really been able to come up with a really great team. We’ve created and implemented checklists so when everything gets done and it gets done, right? We it creates accountability We’re able to make sure that everything gets done properly both out in the field and also in our office And also doing the podcast like Jared had mentioned that has really really contributed to our success but that like is of the diligence and consistency and doing those and that system has really, really been a big blessing in our lives, and also, you know, it’s really shown that we’ve gotten a success from following those systems. So before working with Thrive, we were basically stuck. Really no new growth with our business. And we were in a rut, and we didn’t know… The last three years, our customer base had pretty much stayed the same. We weren’t shrinking, but we weren’t really growing either. Yeah, and so we didn’t really know where to go, what to do, how to get out of this rut that we’re in. But Thrive helped us with that. You know, they implemented those systems, they taught us those systems, they taught us the knowledge that we needed in order to succeed. Now it’s been a grind, absolutely it’s been a grind this last year, but we’re getting those fruits from that hard work and the diligent effort that we’re able to put into it. So again, we were in a rut, Thrive helped us get out of that rut, and if you’re thinking about working with Thrive, quit thinking about it and just do it. Do the action and you’ll get the results. It will take hard work and discipline. But that’s what it’s going to take in order to really succeed. So we just want to give a big shout out to Thrive, a big thank you out there to Thrive. We wouldn’t be where we’re at now without their help. Hi, I’m Dr. Mark Moore. I’m a pediatrician. Through our new digital marketing plan, we have seen a marked increase in the number of new patients that we’re seeing every month, year over year. One month, for example, we went from 110 new patients the previous year to over 180 new patients in the same month. And overall, our average is running about 40 to 42% increase month over month, year over year. The group of people required to implement our new digital marketing plan is immense, starting with a business coach, videographers, photographers, web designers. Back when I graduated dental school in 1985, nobody advertised. The only marketing that was ethically allowed in everybody’s eyes was mouth-to-mouth marketing. By choosing to use the services, you’re choosing to use a proof and turnkey marketing and coaching system that will grow your practice and get you the results that you’re looking for. I went to the University of Oklahoma College of Dentistry, graduated in 1983, and then I did my pediatric dental residency at Baylor College of Dentistry from 1983 to 1985. Hello, my name is Charles Colaw with Colaw Fitness. Today I want to tell you a little bit about Clay Clark and how I know Clay Clark. Clay Clark has been my business coach since 2017. He’s helped us grow from two locations to now six locations. We’re planning to do seven locations in seven years and then franchise. Clay has done a great job of helping us navigate anything that has to do with like running the business, building the systems, the checklists, the workflows, the audits, how to navigate lease agreements, how to buy property, how to work with brokers and builders. This guy is just amazing. This kind of guy has worked in every single industry. He’s written books with Lee Crockerill, head of Disney with the 40,000 cast members. He’s friends with Mike Lindell. He does Reawaken America tours where he does these tours all across the country where 10,000 or more people show up to some of these tours on the day-to-day he does anywhere from about 160 companies. He’s at the top. He has a team of business coaches, videographers, and graphic designers, and web developers. They run 160 companies every single week. Think of this guy with a team of business coaches running 160 companies. In the weekly he’s running 160 companies. Every six to eight weeks he’s doing Reawaken America tours. Every 6-8 weeks he’s also doing business conferences where 200 people show up and he teaches people a 13 step proven system that he’s done and worked with billionaires helping them grow their companies. I’ve seen guys from start ups go from start ups to being multi millionaires. Teaching people how to get time freedom and financial freedom through the system. Critical thinking, document creation, making it, putting it into, organizing everything in their head to building it into a franchisable, scalable business. Like one of his businesses has like 500 franchises. That’s just one of the companies or brands that he works with. So amazing guy. Elon Musk, kind of like smart guy. He kind of comes off sometimes as socially awkward, but he’s so brilliant and he’s taught me so much. When I say that, like Clay is like, he doesn’t care what people think when you’re talking to him. He cares about where you’re going in your life and where he can get you to go. And that’s what I like him most about him. He’s like a good coach. A coach isn’t just making you feel good all the time. A coach is actually helping you get to the best you. And Clay has been an amazing business coach. Through the course of that, we became friends. My most impressed with him is when I was shadowing him one time. We went into a business deal and listened to it. I got to shadow and listen to it. When we walked out, I knew that he could make millions on the deal. They were super excited about working with him. He told me, he’s like, I’m not going to touch it. I’m going to turn it down. Because he knew it was going to harm the common good of people in the long run. The guy’s integrity just really wowed me. It brought tears to my eyes to see that this guy, his highest desire was to do what’s right. And anyways, just an amazing man. So anyways, impacted me a lot. He’s helped navigate. Anytime I’ve gotten nervous or worried about how to run the company or, you know, navigating competition and an economy that’s like, I remember we got closed down for three months. He helped us navigate on how to stay open, how to get back open, how to just survive through all the COVID shutdowns, lockdowns, because our clubs are all closed for. I’m Rachel with Tip Top K9, and we just want to give a huge thank you to Clay and Vanessa Clark. Hey, guys. I’m Ryan with Tip Top K9. Just want to say a big thank you to Thrive 15. Thank you to Make Your Life Epic. We love you guys. We appreciate you and really just appreciate how far you’ve taken us. This is our old house. OK. This is where we used to live a few years ago. This is our old neighborhood. See? It’s nice, right? So this is my old van and our old school marketing. And this is our old team. And by team I mean it’s me and another guy. This is our new van with our new marketing and this is our new team. We went from four to fourteen and I took this beautiful photo. We worked with several different business coaches in the past and they were all about helping Ryan sell better and just teaching sales, which is awesome, but Ryan is a really great salesman, so we didn’t need that. We needed somebody to help us get everything that was in his head out into systems, into manuals and scripts and actually build a team. So now that we have systems in place, we’ve gone from one to 10 locations in only a year. In October 2016, we grossed 13 grand for the whole month. Right now it’s 2018, the month of October. It’s only the 22nd. We’ve already grossed a little over 50 grand for the whole month and we still have time to go. We’re just thankful for you, thankful for Thrive and your mentorship and we’re really thankful that you guys have helped us to grow a business that we run now instead of the business running us. Just thank you, thank you, thank you, times a thousand. The Thrive Time Show, two-day interactive business workshops are the highest and most reviewed business workshops on the planet. You can learn the proven 13 point business system that Dr. Zellner and I have used over and over to start and grow successful companies. We get into the specifics, the specific steps on what you need to do to optimize your website. We’re going to teach you how to fix your conversion rate. We’re going to teach you how to do a social media marketing campaign that works. How do you raise capital? How do you get a small business loan? We teach you everything you need to know here during a two day, 15 hour workshop. It’s all here for you. You work every day in your business, but for two days you can escape and work on your business and build these proven systems so now you can have a successful company that will produce both the time freedom and the financial freedom that you deserve. You’re gonna leave energized, motivated, but you’re also gonna leave empowered. The reason why I built these workshops is because as an entrepreneur, I always wish that I had this. And because there wasn’t anything like this, I would go to these motivational seminars, no money down, real estate, Ponzi scheme, get motivated seminars, and they would never teach me anything. It was like you went there and you paid for the big chocolate Easter bunny, but inside of it, it was a hollow nothingness. And I wanted the knowledge, and they’re like, oh, but we’ll teach you the knowledge after our next workshop. And the great thing is we have nothing to upsell. At every workshop we teach you what you need to know. There’s no one in the back of the room trying to sell you some next big get rich quick, walk on hot coals product. It’s literally we teach you the brass tacks, the specific stuff that you need to know to learn how to start and grow a business. And I encourage you to not believe what I’m saying. And I want you to Google the Z66 auto auction. I want you to Google elephant in the room. Look at Robert, Zellner, and Associates. Look them up and say, are they successful because they’re geniuses or are they successful because they have a proven system? When you do that research, you will discover that the same systems that we use in our own business can be used in your business. Come to Tulsa, book a ticket, and I guarantee you it’s gonna be the best business workshop ever and we’re gonna give you your money back if you don’t love it. We built this facility for you and we’re excited to see it.

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