Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Scott D. Clary: Sales Strategies That Close Deals | Sales E222 | Part 2

Starting point is 00:00:13 What's going on, yeah, fam? You're listening to Part 2 of My Conversation with Scott Clary. Scott is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, investor, and host of the popular entrepreneurship podcast Success Story. He's also a well-known sales and marketing expert. In part two of my conversation with Scott, we focus on sales, namely how to define a buyer's persona, pricing strategies, and the psychology of sales. If you haven't heard part one yet, we talk about Scott's come-up story and how he was able to kickstart his career by launching a side hustle and a personal brand via LinkedIn and his podcast. Without further delay, here's part two of my conversation with Scott Clary. So let's move on beyond just podcasts, sales and email strategy.

Starting point is 00:01:09 You talk about an email strategy called pattern disruption. I use this hack too. I love it. Could you break it down for us? Well, pattern disruption in any marketing or sales context means that you're stopping, standing out, excuse me, from the crowd. So I'm going to give you like a very tangible marketing example of how this was used, one that you would probably know. And it's not, it's not a good guy, but he did it well. So Billy McFarland from, what was the stupid, FireFest? So, you know, the guy that went to jail? Oh, that guy, yeah. So an example of pattern disruption is how he marketed FireFest. So how he marketed FireFest is he got all these influencers at the same time, they put up an orange screen on their Instagram account, like an orange square.

Starting point is 00:01:55 So if anybody was scrolling through Instagram, all they saw was like Kim Kardashian and an orange square. And then they saw like 50 cent in an orange square and Jha Rule and an orange square. Like that's pattern disruption. That's the concept of pattern disruption. So this is like you can use it for email, but you can literally use it for quite literally anything. If you're trying to apply pattern disruption to an actual email that goes out to somebody,

Starting point is 00:02:19 you just want to make sure your subject line doesn't look like every other subject line. It's very simple. I've had good open rates with hey and then the person's name. Like, hey, Hala, hey Scott, hey John, like, hey Sam. Like, these are, like, it's just when you're looking through your inbox, that stands out. So things like that. Even putting people's celebrities' names into your subject line, that's pattern disruption. It's stopping the person scrolling because there's something new and different that they're

Starting point is 00:02:49 not used to expecting because you get a lot of junk and a lot of garbage in your inbox and on your social feeds, whatever. So it's just about like sort of finding a way to stand out from the pack. So if your email, you know, send yourself a test email. If it looks like everything else, there's a good chance to be ignored like everything else. So you got to find a way to make it stand out. Something that we do at Yap is we'll send emails with no subject lines. Oh, that's good, actually. And then we'll also do emails that say like it just says appropriate person question mark. Yeah, it makes it sound non-commercial, right? It makes it sound like it's coming from, yeah.

Starting point is 00:03:22 Yeah, appropriate person. I love that. And then it's like, just wondering if you're the appropriate person to talk X, Y, Z. And then they always respond because people want to be helpful. And they'll either say, no, here's the right contact or no, I CCD the right person. And it helps us get in contact. Or they'll be like, yeah, it's me. What's up?

Starting point is 00:03:38 I've never said appropriate person in a subject line, but a sales strategy that you can actually use to get to a decision maker is in the actual body of the email. This is no longer pattern disruption because technically once they're in the email, their pattern is not being disrupted per se because it already has been if they've opened it. But what you can do is you can say, are you the correct person for such and such? Are you the correct person for making decisions about marketing spend or tech purchases, whatever it is? And if you phrase it as a question, then the person will, similar to your experience, will say, no, I'm sorry, I'm not that person, but this person is C-C'd or please email this person. In a sales context, in a larger, say, B2B sales, you have to get to the decision maker. And this is a really good way to get to the decision maker.

Starting point is 00:04:25 And it's not just because you can't find their email. Because I said before, you could find anyone's email online. But what it is is the referral, which is stronger than you just, like, laser beaming into somebody's inbox with no context. Yeah, I love that strategy. It really does help. So let's talk about LinkedIn sales strategy because I know you're huge on LinkedIn. You have like 160,000 followers. a lot of people are trying to sell on LinkedIn.

Starting point is 00:04:47 As you probably know, selling doesn't really work on the feed. You've really got to sell in the DMs. So I'd love to understand what is your approach for selling on LinkedIn? Is it similar to email or how would you describe it? So when I run a sales campaign, and my background was enterprise B2B tech. It was SaaS or telco or hardware, but it is all tech. So the totality of the email or the sales campaign was it was actually called a one to few and a one to many.

Starting point is 00:05:13 And what that means is you're a sales rep and your one to few means you have your customer list that is most likely to buy. In sales, you have what's called an ideal customer profile, an ICP and a buyer persona. ICP can be like industry company size, revenue size, something like that. And buyer persona can be like CMO, CRO, VP sales, VP finance, the actual person within the company. So you have your ideal list and that's your one to few where you're writing personal, personalized emails and personalized LinkedIn outreach against that list. And then you have your one to many. And the one to many is automated against people that were not the perfect fit for your product, but like they could be a good fit. And that's where I would use automated tool. So I'm going to get

Starting point is 00:05:59 to your question as to more specific for LinkedIn, but I'm just sort of outlining the whole sales strategy. So if I was going to use this strategy, I would be personally as a sales rep emailing with a sales intelligence tool, some personalized emails to my one to few list. And then I'd be using tools like Apollo or WeConnect to automate my email. Apollo is email automation and outreach and sequencing. And WeConnect is LinkedIn automation outreach and sequencing. Now, I guess to wrap this up, because I just want to give people context for how they actually can sell quite easily.

Starting point is 00:06:32 And this is like a very straightforward B2B sales process that you could literally emulate right now. So again, Apollo, We Connect, plus then you're doing your outreach personally as well. And this type of strategy will work for literally any product as long as you identify your ICP and your buyer persona correctly. Now, LinkedIn in particular, if you have identified your ideal customer profile and your buyer persona, one strategy that I, I mean, there's a million different strategies. The goal is to get a conversation started.

Starting point is 00:07:00 One strategy that I do use in LinkedIn, which actually I haven't used in a while, obviously, because I'm not selling B2B enterprise stuff, but it is a pattern disrupt, is actually to use video in DMs on LinkedIn. And this would be for my one to few, my one sales are up to my highest profile best fit for my product or service customer list. So I would be recording a 30 second video myself and that's my initial point of contact with them. It's not like the shit you see on LinkedIn, which is like, like, oh my God, it's like four or five messages of like paragraphs of text. And it's like, hey, can I get a meeting? And then you don't even answer them. And like a week later, it's like another paragraph of text. Anyway, can I get a meeting? That's no good. So if you're

Starting point is 00:07:44 going to personalize it, you have to stand out. And you can stand out by referencing something that a machine wouldn't know. Like, for example, what their last tweet was and why it's so funny and relevant to you and why you want to talk to them based on a problem that you've seen, for example, maybe you saw a news article about what their company's doing. You want to unpack how your problem or your tech or your service can help solve that problem. You can do that with text, but if you do it with video, it's just a little bit more impactful. I also used video and email, but a lot of people are using video. Enough people are using video and email now.

Starting point is 00:08:17 Not a lot, but enough where you see those little videos of somebody in a screen or cord saying, I'm trying to sell you this product or service. In LinkedIn, it's still not used that much. And even myself, when I get a LinkedIn message, when I get a LinkedIn message at the video, I'll at least watch the video. When I get a LinkedIn message that is like four or five paragraphs of text, I delete it immediately. I don't even bother.

Starting point is 00:08:37 So if your messaging is right, your ICP and your buyer persona are dialed in, you record a video, you make it relevant, meaningful, and it's not just boilerplate, and it's going to the right person, there's a good chance that person will respond back. Or at least that person will be aware of who you are. That's the objective. And then you can nurture them. That would be my recommendation for selling like a high ticket item through LinkedIn. Love it.

Starting point is 00:08:58 I love the video tip and the DM strategy. It's a really, really good one. So let's talk about ICP and buyers persona really quick, because I'm not. having the right audience is really important. A lot of people choose an audience that's like finding a needle in the haystack. They don't know how to find their audience in mass. A lot of people are just unclear about their target audience. So I'd love for you to really break that down for us.

Starting point is 00:09:20 And then also give us your best advice in terms of understanding if you've got it right or how to find out who your target persona is or buyer persona is. Yeah. To find the ideal customer profile, day one, you're making a lot of educated. guesses. I mean, you can look to the market. I mean, you can look at and do competitive research to what your competitors are doing and you can see who they're targeting. But the ideal customer profile is, and by the way, this does not have to be just a B2B enterprise thing. This is just, again, to your point, the audience that you're selling to. So in enterprise sales, it can be the company. So the company

Starting point is 00:09:55 size, the company industry, whether or not the company is in a certain geographical location. It could be the company is public or private. It could be government or private. It could be government or private. It could be over a certain revenue threshold, a certain employee headcount. It's like any sort of differentiator that can identify your company. And you're going to immediately say, well, Scott, like, I'm just going to sell to the biggest companies. But you have to think, I'm selling a product or service. If I'm selling to a company that is public and has over $500 million in revenue, well, there's going to be a longer procurement process. If I'm selling to government, I have to go to RFP. So maybe I know, based on my data,

Starting point is 00:10:35 and my research, and candidly, you literally can look at your last 50 customers. And from those last 50 customers, it's no longer guesswork. You can now find what your ICP is. Just a note on that. Funny enough, the company, Snowflake, huge success story, unicorn, they built this process where every 50 customers, they would reevaluate their ICP. So it was like a constant feedback that they built into their sales system. They would always reevaluate last 50 enterprise customers. But say you even do it once a quarter. Look at your past 50 customers. You identify the common threads between the companies that you sold to,

Starting point is 00:11:10 and that is your ideal customer profile that you have to sell to. And then within that company, then you look, who is the person who made the decision in that company? Who's a decision maker? That's the buyer persona. Buyer persona is quite literally the characteristics and the job title of the person who's buying, signing on that PO in that organization. So again, I mentioned before, but it can be anybody, obviously,

Starting point is 00:11:31 but it could be CMO, director marketing, CRO, CEO, VP Finance, director finance, it doesn't matter, CTO, you have to identify who that is. And then once you have your ideal customer profile and your buyer persona, the literal individual is going to make the buying decision, then there's going to be other things that you should think about, like decision influencers, not just the decision maker. Buyer persona is very similar to the decision maker. A decision influencer in a company, for example, say your buyer persona or decision maker is director of marketing, the decision influencer could be the CMO and the CEO and the CTO.

Starting point is 00:12:07 So maybe the director of marketing is buying a technical marketing product. But they have to get sign off and budget from CMO, the CEO, the small company they care, and the CTO has to make sure there's no security issues. So you have your decision maker and your decision influencers and what you can actually do to get sort of alignment across your organization, you're creating these avatars and you put faces of people in a deck or in some sort of database that represent these people and the different types of things that you've noticed about these type of person, the education, the salary, where are they most likely located, doesn't really matter. There's things that you can sort of understand. It's not everything you can figure out, but you can figure out enough to at least

Starting point is 00:12:45 have an educated opinion of if you're going into a new company, that person looks pretty damn similar to the last 40, 50, 60 buyers that I've actually dealt with. So I know that that's probably the person that I want to be dealing with. And the reason why it's so important to know that, first of all, you have to make sure you're speaking to the right person and you're not speaking to just a decision influencer. But if you are speaking to the buyer persona slash decision maker and you want to increase what's called sales velocity, technical term meaning that you want to increase the time from when you make contact with the company to when the actual deal closes, which is what everybody wants to do. It's also called sales cycle. You want to reduce your sales cycle. You start to educate that person on who else has to be involved in the deal because that person doesn't always know.

Starting point is 00:13:29 So new director of marketing, say that's your buyer persona. They don't know that in the past 50 deals, you've also had to bring in CEO, CMO, CTO. They have no idea. This is their first purchase. In the first call, you're going to be educating them. And you're going to be saying, hey, listen, in our past 50 deals, these three people had to be involved in this conversation. So to make your job easier, bring them to the next call so we can get alignment across

Starting point is 00:13:51 the people that are the key decision influencers. And that just speeds up everything. And honestly, like, I want people to understand that for the buyer, that's not invasive and it's not threatening and it's not pushy, it's like very helpful because that person doesn't want to screw up and that person doesn't want to look like an idiot. Nobody wants to show up at work and look like an idiot. So the more you do to help them do their job and buying is part of their job, that's why you're talking to them.

Starting point is 00:14:14 They have to buy something to improve something about what they're doing or make money or do something. There's a reason why they're looking at your service or your product. So help them buy your product and help them make the decision and help them involve the people that have to be involved and help them understand why companies struggle to buy your product in the past, switching costs, legal terms that are confusing, whatever it is. Sales is all about, this is a, we're sort of dovetailing into the thesis of what sales should be, but sales is all about helping somebody buy. It's not about pushing a product. It's helping somebody buy better,

Starting point is 00:14:45 helping somebody buy easier. You are truly the consultant, but I think that it's not just on the product, it's on the whole process, but you have to educate the individual. So when you identify your ICP, your buyer persona, that's just getting the knowledge to target better. So you have the right conversations with the right people and you have the right information that make their life easier. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors. At YAP, we have a super unique company culture. We're all about obsessive excellence.

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Starting point is 00:16:22 Young and profiters. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character of law that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing.

Starting point is 00:16:47 When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work. work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius. The working genius assessment or the six types of working genius framework was created by Patrick Lensione and he's a business influencer and author. And the working genius framework helps you identify what you're actually built for and the work that you're not. Now, let me tell you a story. Before I uncovered my working genius, which is galvanizing and invention. So I like to rally people and I like to invent new things. I used to be really shameful and had a lot of guilt around the fact that I didn't like

Starting point is 00:17:25 enablement, which is one of my working frustrations. So I actually don't like to support people one-on-one. I don't like it when people slow me down. I don't like handholding. I like to move fast, invent, rally people, inspire. But what I do need to do is ensure that somebody else can fill the enablement role, which I do have, K on my team. So working genius helps you uncover these genius gaps, helps you work better with your team,

Starting point is 00:17:47 helps you reduce friction, helps you collaborate better, understand, why people are the way that they are. It's helped me restructure my team, put people in the spots that they're going to really excel. And it's also helped me in hiring. Working Genius is absolutely amazing. I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20% off, you can use code profiting. Go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's working genius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. That was like such like a rock solid explanation. Like, so, so good. It's really, really good. You're so smart in sales. You need to put out a sales master class. Like, you have all these, my wheels are spinning. I'm like, he needs to come

Starting point is 00:18:29 present to my mastermind. I can talk sales all day, but yeah. Let's talk about the actual process conversation. So there's a few things that I want to talk about. The first is the importance of questions. A lot of people think their job as a salesperson, especially new salespeople or people are just starting side hustles. Everybody has to sell. Once you become an entrepreneur or have a side hustle, your job becomes sales, at least part of it. And so a lot of people make the mistake that they think they have to be the one talking the most on their sales calls, when in fact, you really should be listening and asking the right questions. So can you talk to us about the importance of asking the right questions, any of your philosophies around that? Yeah, sure. So

Starting point is 00:19:07 when you're going on a sales call, your objective should be to talk less. The person who talks more is always the customer, and there's even tools at a much larger level to gauge this. Gong actually listens to calls and reports back on who talks more and talks less. And the sales rep should always be talking less. So you're asking questions. You are actively trying to either qualify or disqualify the customer and really trying to disqualify the customer because there are always more customers out there. So what I mean by that, and when you go into a sales call, you have the information

Starting point is 00:19:42 that you have to get out of the customer, so there has to be boxes that that customer has to check to move to the next stage in the sales cycle. Other things that you should have are little anecdotes and stories that you can interject into the conversation that in 30 seconds or less

Starting point is 00:19:58 will very tangibly articulate how the product or service that you're selling has helped a similar customer in the past. So you interject these stories to make the things you're speaking about a little more tangible. It sounds off the cuff, but these are all prepped. So you have your questions, your anecdotes, and your stories, and then you have your call to action. And that's really it.

Starting point is 00:20:20 That's what you go into a discovery call with. And when you go into discovery call with those questions, again, you ask the questions, you want to qualify or disqualified. Disqualification is almost more important than qualifying in a sales process because if somebody is not qualified, meaning they don't have the budget, there's no meaningful event, meaning they don't want to buy it right now, but maybe they're going to buy it in a year from now. They're not the right person. There's a million reasons to disqualify somebody. You have to focus on disqualifying because if you don't disqualify ruthlessly enough, that person is going to F up your whole sales cycle and every single person that deals with them after you. So everything from, say it's like a cold

Starting point is 00:20:58 collar inside sales rep to like the account manager to fulfillment and order processing and every single thing that person touches in your organization, if you have not qualified, them or disqualify them properly, it's going to screw everything up. It will truly mess everything up. Yeah. And by the way, psychologically, customers love to be disqualified. It makes them want, they want the product more. People want what they can't have. They'll work to qualify themselves. So if you say like, hey, listen, why are you looking at buying this tech right now or this service right now, or do you have budget for it? And if you say, well, why don't you come back to us and such and such? And they're like, no, no, no, it is a priority. Actually, it is a priority. And then you're like,

Starting point is 00:21:34 Okay, so if we can confirm with decision maker that this is a priority at this point in time because of this reason, there's this meaningful event, then we'll have a conversation. But you have to say candidly, like, if you're not going to make a decision for six months, I'm happy to give you all the information. But right now, this is not something that we want to take on. Like, you have to push that person away because they will qualify. Not rude. They understand too.

Starting point is 00:21:55 There's only so many hours in a day for your sales team. They have to focus on the people that will actually convert. Yeah. So, yeah, I think that answers your question. And then like the call to action is important. So qualify, disqualify, anecdotes and stories just sort of help or reinforce what you're trying to talk to them about. And then call to action, like on the call, set expectations for next steps. I think just hanging up a call and not setting expectations is a big, it's a big issue. Like don't just leave it to the email after. Like get

Starting point is 00:22:23 verbal commitment. And you can take it a step further. I don't like doing this. Some people do it. They like actually make you accept the calendar invite live on the call. It's like, eh, to me, whatever. But like at least set expectations. So you can say, hey, the next step in this would be to talk to an account manager or to give a demo, whatever it is. I want to speak to you sometime next week. If you've qualified them properly and you've told these little stories throughout that reinforce why they should be buying it, it should not be like you're trying to force them to take a next call. They should be like, yes, actually a super priority right now.

Starting point is 00:22:53 I want to speak to you. Can you do like next Monday? Like, you know, I'm free from like three to five Eastern, whatever. And then you say, okay, no problem. I'm going to send you the invite after this call and I'll send you a summary what we spoke about. Just make sure on the same page. and then you go from there. I personally don't like doing the live calendar thing,

Starting point is 00:23:07 but the point is you're setting expectations, you're getting verbal alignment on what next steps are, and then you follow up on that. Yeah, a couple follow-up questions. So in terms of the stories that you're telling throughout the call, I know that people retain information better with stories. This is how the brain works. Just throw out some examples, quick examples,

Starting point is 00:23:24 of how you can just like have little stories. I had Donald Miller on the show, and he was talking about... I love Donald. He's good. He's very good. He's great. He was talking about... about storytelling and sales how important it is, but I'd love for you to just give like any little example. So testimonials, I think is an obvious one, like help customer do X, Y, Z. They got these

Starting point is 00:23:42 results. That would be probably the most important. I think what I'm alluding to is more testimonial style. It is pure testimonials. I don't need to tell stories outside of what the customer is trying to solve. So I'm literally thinking like, okay, so say like my customer is, I'm going to make up a customer. Like say my customer is Walmart. And they wanted to, it's a ridiculous example, but whatever. They want to migrate their services from on-premise data centers to cloud data centers. And my person on the call is target, whatever. And I'm just, I'm literally walking through the process and the results they achieve by migrating their servers from on-prem to cloud and what that accomplished and the efficiencies and the cost reductions and all the different like KPIs that they achieve in literally

Starting point is 00:24:29 like 20 seconds. It's just that. It's not over-complicating it. And just having like five or six of those lined up ready to go, that's all you really need at this point. There's places for storytelling in sales, but this is like not meant to take over the call. It's meant to just like, think of the story as like a period at the end of the sentence. Like you ask a question, they answer, you reinforce their answer with an exact case study in 15 seconds or less or 30 seconds of less of a similar customer that accomplish exactly what they're trying to solve for. By the way, way, this conversation is so engaging for the prospect because they're being asked questions. People love to talk about themselves. People love to talk. Hear themselves talk. Then you're

Starting point is 00:25:08 telling them stories, which keeps them engaged and entertained. They're highly engaged throughout the conversation and will remember everything that you said. And they're starting to visualize what success looks like. If that buyer is trying to, same example, trying to migrate from on-prem data center to cloud, they have like costs in mind. There's like they want to get rid of like a warehouse. is just going to save them like whatever thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars. So like you walk through the results that were literally achieved by someone else that was trying to accomplish the exact same thing. It just realizes.

Starting point is 00:25:37 It materializes. They're like, oh my God, I'm not crazy. This is a great idea. Look at they've done this before. And this is like, you know, take an example that you do. Like you work with people that want to grow audiences. Like literally, the story should be like, hey, I worked with this person. We grew them from this to this.

Starting point is 00:25:51 They closed this much business. They got in this magazine. Like, it's so easy to put these and plant these. these ideas because then it makes it real. Because in that person, the customer is going to hear that story. It's going to stick in their brain. There's a reason. And you can listen to another one of Hollis podcast as to why story stick. But there's going to stick in their brain. And they're going to go look at it. And they're like, oh, shit. They're going to look at one of Hollis clients. And be like, look at what they've accomplished. They're going to go check it. They're going to be

Starting point is 00:26:15 like, shit, she's a real deal. Yeah. And I love to do that. I do that all the time on my discovery calls. I will go look and see, like, how can I find a person who's similar to them? And I'll have that top of mind to be like, this is a person who's a good example for this client because they have, they both started at 20,000 followers or they both are speakers and authors and you kind of go into that. So let's talk about pricing. At what point in the process, I personally do never give out pricing on the first call. What's your favorite strategy for pricing and giving out pricing? I would usually break any sort of sales process into a discovery and then a demo. And the demo can be, I've seen your demo. It's awesome where you walk through the actual

Starting point is 00:26:56 process of what you do for clients, that's when I would discuss pricing. I would discuss pricing, but I would make sure that that person has an expectation of a certain budget that they'd like to commit to this project, but I wouldn't actually disclose pricing until I have a really good understanding of what that person needs. And I would probably understand that a little bit better in a full demo. So you do have, and I mean, if it's a smaller item, you can combine these things, of course, but I like a two-touch approach. So you have a very quick discovery, so you don't waste too much time. Discovery can be 15 to 30 minutes where you, again, you have your qualifying, disqualifying

Starting point is 00:27:33 questions. And some of that can be budget conscious, but not going into the actual hard numbers because you need the information to quote accurately. The worst thing you can do is under quote or overquote. It doesn't matter. It just sucks. You can't do it. In the discovery call, that's when you can start talking pricing.

Starting point is 00:27:47 You could psychologically anchor at a higher rate in your discovery call to prep them for lower price, that's a psychological trick, saying, well, on average, budget required is, I don't know, say 100K a year, okay? But when you actually present the price, because you've anchored at 100k a year, it's actually going to come in at 60K, and that's a little bit of a psychological trick. But still, I wouldn't quote them out until the second call and they understand everything that I'm doing for them. My literal next question is, I love psychology and sales psychology. What are your favorite hacks in terms of sales psychology and human behavior? That's a good question. Well, we've alluded to many. A lot of the things that we spoke about.

Starting point is 00:28:29 Stories, we talked about stories. I'll give out one. While you're thinking, I'll give out one of my favorites. Chris Voss taught me this. And he always says prices at an odd number. So he never does even numbers because odd numbers make people think that there was some cost analysis done behind it, whereas even numbers, people think you pulled it out of the sky. So always give an odd number for your pricing. So I'm going to say something, though. Every piece of advice that you get, you do have to take it with a grain of salt. I have a couple of things I'm going to mention, but the reason why is because for premium products, whole round numbers convert better than fractional numbers. If I'm looking at a product that I think in my mind is premium, a dot 99 or a dot 97, it seems budget. Think about this, for example. You see a 45.00 on a website versus a 44.97 or a 4.99.

Starting point is 00:29:22 44.99 in my mind signals that there's a discount. What if it's a premium product? I don't want there to be a discount. I want this to be like the best of the bet. And you'll actually notice that premium brands do not. They have whole numbers. They have round, even numbers that are like dot zero or like four zero or zero or four five dot zero. They'll like do increments of five or whatever, but they won't do discounts. I think it really depends on the market that you're serving and the precedent. Anyway, so we spoke about anchoring. We spoke about social proof. Stories are social proof. You spoke about a little bit of pricing strategy. Reciprocity. Reciprocity is a really good one. So reciprocity literally means you're giving somebody something and you're not expecting anything in

Starting point is 00:30:02 return, but there is a human psychological condition that when you give something to someone, they want to give you something back in return. Content is reciprocity to a certain degree. White papers, YouTube videos, all of that is some level of reciprocity. Take it way back in my career, A very simple example. When I started working in Teleco, like for the first year, it was dealing with cell phones. Like, it started in a mall. And then I moved into corporate.

Starting point is 00:30:29 I worked my way up. But I started, like, selling cell phones in a mall. And the people that I convert and, like, close deals on were the ones that came in with, like, a broken phone. They couldn't fix it. And then I fixed it, and then I still bought a new phone. It's so simple. Like, you fix the problem, or you give them a solution, or you point them in the right

Starting point is 00:30:44 direction, or you do as much as you can for free, and then they'll always come back. So for you, if I was going to say, how do you incorporate reciprocity? I would give people free, like, LinkedIn audits because you know you're not going to do, they're not going to do it themselves. You could literally give your LinkedIn masterclass for free. And then you can say, listen, this is everything you got to do. By the way, if you don't want to do it, here's my, you know, here's my email. And you'd probably convert significant amount of clients because they trust you now.

Starting point is 00:31:13 And they're like, I'm not doing this shit for myself. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Happy New Year, Yap, gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts. And fresh starts not only feel possible, but also feel encouraged. And if you've been thinking about starting a business, this is your sign. There's no better time than right now.

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Starting point is 00:35:31 It's interesting that you say that because when I do my discovery calls, I usually do the demo in the discovery call. The first 10 minutes, I'm doing discovery. Then I go into the demo. Then I do pricing on email. So very different, a little different than what you do. described, would you consider that initial discovery call, which is basically all about the customer, a level of reciprocity that you're giving your time just trying to figure out their problems and listening to them? Do you think that is reciprocity at all or no?

Starting point is 00:36:01 I think it really depends how you show up and what you actually give them. I think it can be if used properly, yeah, for sure. Anytime you give value, it's going to be considered there's going to be a reciprocity component to it. So I would say, how do you give value? in that 15 to 30 minute call. Find a way to do that. Like, I don't know what the answer is, but find a way to do that. Find a problem that your customer has that you can not completely, because you won't be able, if you're selling a service, you can't fix everything in a discovery.

Starting point is 00:36:30 But, I mean, maybe you can point them in the right direction and help them educate themselves a little bit better. Totally. I would say, yeah, totally. Like, any point where you can provide value, like take it. Take it 1,000%. Like, this has actually helped me. When people use this on me, it helps me make a decision to go with them.

Starting point is 00:36:45 when they tell me who their competition is and what I should be looking for in a good vendor, it's strange, but I always go back to the person that references that because I trust them the most. So there's like repropos. I can't speak. I'm speaking for like an hour and a half. Reciprocity. So reciprocity mixed with like building rapport and trust. And it's like this compound effect.

Starting point is 00:37:09 Talking about psychological tricks. These are all like not tricks. They're just like these are things that just happen when you give. to another person. People think they're tricks. They're not tricks. It's like when I'm giving to someone else as much as I possibly can, like things do come back. And I do believe, yeah, that's a great point. I've never thought about it like that, like explicitly, you know, saying in this discovery call, it's an opportunity to give, but it totally is and you should take it. Yeah. And I do like, the only reason why, by the way, to your point, why I like breaking up the sales process into one and two

Starting point is 00:37:40 is because if I do one right, my two is personalized. I cannot ever do one and done personalized as much as I would love to. And then you give overload of information if you don't do a personalized because I'm just like, this is all I do, is all I do. And then the person's going to be like, okay, that's great, but like overwhelmed. Versus wedge strategy. Wedge strategy means you start with one product or service and expand wallet share, expand the amount of money over time the customer spends with you.

Starting point is 00:38:07 Wedge strategy means you go in like super surgical, like super precision on like the thing they actually have to do right away for your example, for you. Like maybe they have to grow their podcast. You don't talk about anything else. It's like a footnote. That's it. But you talk about the one thing they got to solve for. You close that deal and you then in three months.

Starting point is 00:38:25 Then they're super happy with you. Then you're converting all the other services at a much higher rate. Totally. And I don't know your conversion numbers at all, but I'm just saying to me that would make the most sense. Yeah. I love these strategies. So I ask two questions at the end of my show to all my guests, Scott.

Starting point is 00:38:40 And the first one is, what is one actionable thing our young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? One thing that a young and profiter can do today. I would say learn about the concept of leverage. I am a big believer in leverage. Leverage money. Leverage people, ethically. Leverage systems and processes. Leverage technology.

Starting point is 00:39:03 Find a way to leverage it because anyone that's ever built anything has lived. has leveraged and has not just done it themselves. And we spoke about many opportunities for leverage in this call right now. But everything that you do, you can leverage it to a degree and make your one input equal 10 output. So understand that concept and look for those opportunities. I mean, they're with talent, Upwork, TopTal, Fiverr. They're with even fractional talent in North America hiring somebody part-time as a gig economy

Starting point is 00:39:33 worker to fulfill a certain role in your company. leveraging money, I don't love raising money, but if you have to, leverage VC money. If you want to buy a business, we just touched on that why you could buy a business versus start one. You could leverage the bank's money and get something that's already sort of built out and leverage that. Leverage tech, leverage AI, leverage automation tools. There's even tech that allows you to build out SOPs that will allow you to deliver those

Starting point is 00:40:00 SOPs to your workforce that's based anywhere in the world that will allow you to live. leverage people. So like look for leverageable opportunities. And I think that's like the number one trick that will really take whatever it is you're doing to the next level. And then the last question is, what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can be beyond just financial profiting, however you want to take it. It has to be beyond financial. I ask everybody, what does success mean, right? And it's always freedom. And I think that I do believe, I mean, maybe I've been indoctrinated with that answer because so many people have said it. But I think the goal should be to achieve freedom. I think that what freedom means is what you're doing whatever you want to work on. And I think

Starting point is 00:40:41 that that's when you start profiting in life. When you start living life is when you are, when you feel a certain amount of energy and excitement in everything that you do. It's agnostic of what you're working on. It could be charity. It could be family. It could be building a business. Like, it doesn't matter if it's classified traditionally as work or not work. It's that you have freedom and whatever it is you do and that's when you're profiting. Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. My, my, my, what a great episode. I loved learning about sales from Scott. Sales, in my opinion, is one of the most important skills for entrepreneurs, hands down. You need to learn how to sell if you want to make it. That's why I love to talk about it on Yap every single chance that I get. And one of my favorite quotes from

Starting point is 00:41:33 this episode was when Scott broke down what he believes to be the purpose of sales. And he said, is all about helping somebody buy. It's not about pushing a product. It's about helping somebody buy better, helping somebody buy easier. Some other key takeaways I had from Scott regarding sales was to talk less. In any sales conversation,

Starting point is 00:41:52 you should be talking less than your potential customer. If you're talking more, there is a problem. When you're having these conversations, you should be asking questions that actively qualify or disqualify your customer. And again, you want to make sure they're doing most of the talking because this makes people feel in control.

Starting point is 00:42:10 It makes people like and trust you more because people love to hear themselves talk and feel important. And when you do talk, ask the right questions, use stories, and anecdotes. I love that Scott stressed to actively try and disqualify your customer in conversations. This is so important so that you don't waste time and cycles. And in fact, I have an upcoming sales episode

Starting point is 00:42:33 with the world's number one negotiation expert, Chris Voss, and we talk about disqualifying your customers at length. So if you want more sales material and learning, make sure you stay tuned for that episode. It's a really, really great one. While Young Improfiters, this episode was jam-packed with tactical sales advice. I have no doubt this conversation is going to help you close more deals. And let me know if it does.

Starting point is 00:42:56 Thanks so much for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast. If you listen, learned, and profited, be sure to share this episode with your friends and family and drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcast or your Facebook. favorite podcast platform. If you like watching your podcast videos, you guys can find us on YouTube. You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Taha. But if you want to reach out to me directly, I highly advise that you DM me on Instagram because my LinkedIn messages get pretty flooded and it's really hard for me to follow up.

Starting point is 00:43:27 I want to take a moment to thank my YAP Media Production team. You guys are doing awesome work. Really appreciate all that you do. This is your host, Hala Taha, aka, the podcast princess signing off.

Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Scott D. Clary: Sales Strategies That Close Deals | Sales E222 | Part 2

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