SFB Newsletter #17

Hey 👋,

Today in the newsletter we’ll be taking a deep dive into sales.

Allow me to set the scene here…

The two biggest mistakes I see in small business are;

1. People Skipping Over the Sales Pillar.

2. Bringing On Too Many Staff Too Soon.

Overall these problems come down to playing on the surface of the pillars and not going deep enough to build real systems that use high leverage to produce cash flow and growth.

The cause of the problem is allowing un-entreprenial incels who’ve never scaled a business to where you want to go to influence your business.

It’s incredible how common this is… and also how quickly these cash sucking vampires can sneak up on you.

You see the mass of people think sales is dirty, wrong or unjust in some way.

They think that because they have money issues that they project onto sales people.

Don’t believe me…

Walk outside and ask 10 people to say the first word that comes to mind when you say ‘salespeople.’

One of my mentors ran a version of this exercise with me one day…

He asked me to imagine a person driving past in a Ferrari.

Once I had the image - he asked…

‘What do you think of them?’

Sharing my honest first thought, I said…

‘I think they’re a dickhead.’

As soon as it left my mouth I’d already started to realise how stupid that was.

We had a conversion about the likely work the person was engaged in, how they may have generated the money, what stage of life they were in and by the end of it - I realised that I had just accepted the mindset of the masses in relation to wealth…

I’d accepted a belief that in some way wealth should be dirty and unjust by default.

It was a projection - and a weak one at that - that was holding me back from becoming wealthy myself.

People do the same thing with sales.

How you respond to being sold influences how well you sell.

How you think about sales, influences your cash flow.

The truth is this: Sales is the most efficient form of transaction we’ve created as human beings.

It’s as old as time will allow us to see.

It’s timeless - because it’s based on the principle of fair exchange.

Sales is about serving people’s needs and asking for fair exchange for the service.

Sales is the difference between you helping more people and achieving your mission and… being the person who’s constantly talking about change, but never truly get’s around to it.

You see ‘being altruistic’ doesn’t work as well as you might think.

A few years ago I ran a personal development program.

In the way we launched it we sold 2 people at full price. We discounted another 3 and we let 2 people in on a scholarship…

Guess who the two people were who said the materials didn’t work?

…

Yep…

Those scholarships.

And guess who gave us amazing case studies recommending us to others?

The two who paid in full.

I learnt something very important about money that day.

‘Energy goes where money flows’

If you want to get great results for your customers and clients make sure you charge and don’t give things for free.

When you allow un-entrepreneurial people from the outside to influence your business you simply won’t achieve excellent results in your business.

You only have to look at the average sales conversions for most businesses…

20% in a business is what ‘most people’ are happy with.

But what I often encourage for my clients is to get away from the average… And focus on what’s best instead.

What to aim for in sales?

50% is the historical average I’ve been able to help my clients to achieve.

And for myself I’ve averaged 65% as a sales conversion for the past 8 years, and I’ll let you know when I first started I was soooo bad at sales.

I hated it - until I discovered a simple system that wasn’t reliant on objection handling, language patterns or any other skills.

It was based on a simple system of pre-handling the 5 objections.

Now inside this edition of the newsletter I’ll focus on selling services as a pose to selling products.

In fact if your business is under $50K/month in income - I think it’s wiser to focus your energy on selling services as a pose to selling products…

Reason being service businesses are more simple - they are less operationally heavy, they can be run with less staff and they are typically more profitable.

Where Sales Fits Inside the 6 Pillars.

If you’ve been following along so far you’ll know I use the 6 Pillars as my framework to grow and scale not only my own businesses - but also the businesses I advise.

I believe these pillars are in order of mastery.

So the first and essential step of starting a business is working on yourself. Once you build enough confidence then the next step is to sell something…

From there you will want to keep optimising - you see the big mistake people make is they try too hard to create various products etc… But the reality is that sales comes first.

I believe there are three levels that you pass through on the way to build a 7 figure business.

Level 1 = < $10K / Month.

Here it’s important to sell everything that you can, it’s mission critical to study sales intensely.

If you’re not closing more than 50% of your hot leads you need more work here.

Level 2 = Between $10K - $50K / Month.

Here you could consider bringing a sales person and delegate it - however I think it’s wiser to focus on selling higher value services that can unlock more profitability for your business and try and keep things as lean as possible.

Level 3 = Beyond $50K / Month.

Here I think it’s wise to either delegate or automate your sales process and to invest money to do so.

Here you could look to bring on a sales team and even build an outbound sales process to scale up your business.

But if you follow the prior steps you will do doing so from a position of mastery not weakness.

So either way, as a business owner - no matter what your goal is sales is essential to study and understand.

Step one of that journey is to deeply analyse your beliefs about money and sales - because if you bring imbalanced ideas and projections into the sales environment you’ll be dominated (and rightly so.)

Now that’s we’ve covered some of the beliefs and psychology let’s talk systems.

There is one Universal Law I’ve uncovered about sales that has served me immensely and is the key reason I’ve been to make 26,000 sales over the past 8 years to business owners just like you.

There are only 5 objections you can get in the sales environment.

These 5 objections are the reasons why people don’t buy.

Yes! Only 5, and once you know them you can build a system to ‘knock down those dominos’ before you make your offers.

Now I’ll mention here also that when someone says no, they don’t want to work with you that’s not an objection it’s a decision.

Objections are when someone uses a excuse based on one of these 5 reasons for not working with you and claiming your offer.

Here is the way these objections come up.

Each objection has a few different forms so I’ll list them out.

1. Money - I’d love to do it but it’s not in my budget / I don’t have the money right now.

2. Time - Can I get started next month? / I don’t have the time to commit to this / Can I have some time to think about it?

3. Information - Can you send me an email with all the details.

4. Trust - I don’t give card details over the phone / Can I talk to your clients?

5. Partner / Third Party - I need to speak to my business partner / husband / wife - There is also another form - I’m waiting for the event / thing / grant to happen then I’ll be able to invest.

Now you my have heard about ‘sales systems’ based on objection handling. I’m not an advocate of objection handling - because once they come up - you need to be very skilled to be able to solve them, and it’s simply not a pleasant thing to do.

If you rely on ‘objection handling’ you’ll constantly be in competition with your clients, which I feel is an ugly starting point.

As mentioned I like to handle them before the offer.

Here is how I do that.

Firstly I send people through a two step sales system before the call. I call it ‘The Inbound Sales System.’

Now your leads will come through a variety of lead sources. It could be via email, a video you posted online, they could be via facebook chat, a referral or perhaps even a podcast interview you did.

From your lead source drive people into an application form. For this I use Typeform as a tool and I’m a big fan of their product. I’ve been using it for 6 years now and it’s an excellent software.

One thing I love about Typeform is that you can do conditional logic so if someone enters a specific answer you can take them into a different arm of the form.

You can also automatically qualify in / out leads based on what they answer. It’s a super power for automating your lead qualification.

Now the key things that you want to start to solve with your application form are the money, time & partner objections.

This is where you address these things.

Here is a video of me progressing through my form to give you some insight into the way it’s structured.

You’ll notice the form is broken down into two sections.

In section 1, I simply ask for personal details: Name, Email, Phone, Country.

In section 2, I dive into business details - now for me I obviously work in the B2B market - Depending who you serve, here is where you’ll dive into the specifics of your prospect.

The main things you want to capture here:

• Where are they in their Life/Business?
  For me this is (Business Revenue, Profits, Staff, AOV, Current Marketing/Sales System, Problems Faced)

• What is their goal - Where do they want to go?

• What’s blocking them from achieving it?

• How urgent is the goal? How much do they care about it?

• What’s the financial situation? You don’t want to come out and ask how much money is in the bank - but you can surmise if you ask the right questions.

• Verbal confirmation - They’ll show up on time.

• Bonus marks: If you can pick up some of their values and traits. I usually ask for their website for this and I can check them our beforehand to see. You could also ask for social media profile.

Essentially the form gives you a pulse check on the objections, after you read it you should be able to score the likelihood that any objection will come up out of 1-10.

I also have a series of non-negotiable questions that I ask in my form. These are immediate DQ’s in my process.

For example…

You’d be surprised - some weirdo’s answer no to this question.

And I love them for it because it just tells me they have a time objection that’s NOT worth trying to overcome.

Sometimes the objections aren’t even worth trying to remove. I’m not trying to close every single person who comes through the system - I’m trying to find people who I resonate with and I feel I can help.

There is also a financial DQ question;

Now you’ll see here inside Typeform you can loop a persons answer back into a question - which is a great feature in this context.

What I’m really asking here is:

Where are your finances?

The answers are;

1. In a good place.

2. Not perfect but I have a growth mindset and want to fix it.

3. Horrible and I don’t have a growth mindset.

The third one is a DQ for me.

I’ll always work with #2 because I’ve been in that position more times than I can count - If you’re only working with people who can afford to pay upfront you’re probably leaving hundreds of sales on the table.

What I’m saying here is don’t over-qualify on finances.

From here I also check in on the application subjectively - I see how they’ve answered the form. I also have a few industries that I don’t work in. I’m not into MLM’s, Brothels (yep I’ve had a few come through my forms over the years) or any other product that has advertising restrictions.

Overall I choose my battles here. If the client has a clear objection I can read in the form that has a low % chance of me being able to overcome it - I’ll DQ them.

I value my time. I’m not a doormat. This is an important principle of sales that I call ‘protecting the energy.’ You have to make sure you set clear boundaries - and never ever break them.

If you do it will certainly come back to bite you.

If I’m sure that during the call I can reframe them and help them see that the goal / problem & solution are worth investing into then I’ll take the call.

Now you’ll notice we haven’t spoken much about the Information & Trust objections.

The reason being these are marketing objections.

Money / Time / Partner are all ‘Sales Based Objections’ meaning you focus primarily on them in your sales process and on your sales call.

These objections are much easier to solve ^

Information & Trust are ‘Marketing Based Objections’ meaning you NEED to solve them before the call.

If these come up on the call - you’re simply dead in the water - unless you’re a real master sales person, and I’m not sure that’s the best approach to be honest.

I’d rather not have to move KG’s of material up a hill. I’d prefer to jump into the wheelbarrow as it’s going down the hill.

In short these two objections are much harder to solve.

That’s where phase two of the Inbound Sales System comes in.

The Pre-Work Page.

When someone fills in my application form they receive this exact message from me…

On the pre work page there are three specific pieces of content.

1. Information Objection - Here you share the systems you use to produce results for clients. This system should be in model/infographic format.
   
   A mentor of mine once taught me that there are two sides to the coin of trust - ‘character and results.’
   

2. Trust Objection # 1 - Personal Story - Have a video sharing your personal story and where you’ve come from as the owner of the business. In almost 100% of the sales systems I’ve seen this one piece is missing from the system and it’s the reason the trust is low - People need to see your character - not just your results.

3. Trust Objection 2 - Results - Have a video or a series of videos sharing the results you’ve been able to achieve for clients. Even better if it’s directly from their mouth.

For reference here is the page I use for this.

Well, well, well… I started this email at 3pm today and it’s now 8:57pm on Friday night here in Paris - I had the full intention to continue this into my ‘5 Sections of a Sales Appointment’ and show you how to run your sales calls.

Whilst we’re already at 3,224 words I was fully intending to take it another 1,000 words further at least diving into this next system here…

But here is the thing I have a social life that’s been developing over the past few years.

I’m joking… To be honest, I’m actually socially retarded but my girlfriend Gio is incredibly social and is constantly inviting me to do things with her friends - who have now become my friends also 🙂 

So here’s what I can agree to do…

I’ll finish this off tomorrow and sent it to you by this time tomorrow at the latest.

And great for me in that I’ll get two opportunities to offer you something of interest at the end of my lengthy emails..

They’re really more like blogs aren’t they…

I also apologise because I don’t have time to spell check this and I’m sure there's at least a few errors.

Anyways here’s what we’ll cover tomorrow…

• The 5 Sections of a Sales Appointment

This is the exact sales system that I’ve used to close over $5 million in sales.

It hasn’t changed in 8 years now - I’ve been using it day in day out.

We’ll also cover the following…

• Making Offers in the Sales Environment

• How Mindset Impacts Sales

• Quantum Closing

When I write these newsletters, I literally just dot point out the key systems and things I want to share and then I start writing ^ these are those dot points.

//

Now to the most important part of this newsletter!

For now there are two ways I can help you to install these systems into your business to ensure you get your sales conversion up to 50%, and simply close more sales.

1. This week I’m running a ridiculous offer on my ‘LeadFLOW Implementation Program:’ this is my 6 month group mentoring program.
   
   For the next 48 hours you can claim it for 60% off. After this weekend I’m hiking this price back to the original price and I promise you - you will NEVER again see my mentoring program this cheap.
   
   Here is the link to learn about this offer >
   
   If your still trying to get proof of concept with your online business, if you want to grow an audience of at least 20,000 people for your business or if you want to make an extra $10-50K / month this year… this is the best place to go ^
   

2. If you’re a bit more established in your business and you and/or your sales team are not closing more than 50% of your calls.

   
   I can help you to do that inside the next 45 days.

   
   In fact I guarantee it. I’ve now helped hundreds of my clients to get their sales conversion %’s beyond 50% and I’d love to help you too.
   
   The cool thing about sales is that it’s so strategic - you can change things now - and benefit from it on your next call. It’s the fastest of the 6 pillars to solve problems in.
   
   If you’re over $20K/Month in your business and you know that a 50% sales conversion would add serious cash to your business - let’s work together to up level your systems.

   
   Here is the application form >

Talk soon,