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

Episode Date: May 8, 2023

As the son of an ex-policeman turned intelligence (CSIS) officer, Scott D. Clary was a complete novice in the world of entrepreneurship. By leveraging his natural charisma and love for technology, he was able to build up his brand and become a success story. In Part 2 of Scott’s episode, we’ll break down Scott’s ultimate sales strategies and the tactics he uses to build rapport with potential prospects. Scott will teach us how to ask the right questions and listen during a sale.    Scott D. Clary is an entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and venture capitalist. He hosts the popular entrepreneurship podcast “Success Story” Podcast and is the CEO of OnMi Patch, a transdermal vitamin patch that delivers naturally derived, science-backed ingredients to support you through life’s ups and downs. Scott is a well-known sales and marketing expert who speaks globally at industry conferences. He has been featured in Forbes, Wall Street Journal, and The Startup, amongst other publications.  In this episode, Hala and Scott will discuss:  - Breaking down Pattern Disruption  - Scott’s Linkedin sales strategy  - The importance of a buyer’s persona - Why you should talk less and listen more during a sale  - Scott’s “discovery to demo” pricing process - The concept of leverage - And other topics… Scott D. Clary is the CEO of OnMi Patch, a transdermal vitamin patch company, and the host of the “Success Story” podcast, where he interviews inspirational people, mentors, and thought leaders. From startups to enterprises, Scott’s worked with individuals to 10x their businesses using his marketing expertise. He’s sold and marketed to the most iconic F500 / F100 brands throughout his career. His work has been featured in over 100+ news sites and publications, and he speaks globally at industry conferences and has had articles and insights featured in Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Hackernoon, The Startup, and others. Resources Mentioned: Scott’s Website: https://www.scottdclary.com/ Scott’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottdclary Scott’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottdclary  Scott’s Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/scottdclary/ Scott’s Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scottdclarypage Scott’s Podcast Success Story with Scott D. Clary: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/success-story-with-scott-d-clary/id1484783544 LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, Have Job Security For Life: Use code ‘masterclass’ for 25% off at yapmedia.io/course. More About Young and Profiting Download Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com   Get Sponsorship Deals - youngandprofiting.com/sponsorships Leave a Review - ratethispodcast.com/yap Watch Videos - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Follow Hala Taha LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ TikTok - tiktok.com/@yapwithhala Twitter - twitter.com/yapwithhala Learn more about YAP Media Agency Services - yapmedia.io/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Shopify. Shopify simplifies selling online and in-person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com-profiting. What's going on, Yap 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 2 of my conversation with Scott, we focus on sales, namely had 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, Veal 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. 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 gonna give you like a very tangible marketing example of how this was used. One that you would probably know, and it's not a good guy, but he did it well. So Billy McFarlane from, what was the stupid fire fest? So you know the guy that went to jail? Oh, can I get ya?

So an example of pattern disruption is how he marketed fire fest. So how he marketed fire fest is he got all these influencers at the same time to put up an orange screen on their Instagram account like an orange square. 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 and orange square and Ja Rule and an orange square. Like that's pattern destruction. That's the concept of pattern destruction. 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, 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 hay and then the person's name. Like hayhalla, hay Scott, hay John, like hay Sam, like these are, like it just when you're looking through your inbox, that stands out.

So things like that, even putting people's celebrity's 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 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 packs. So if you're email, you know, send yourself a test email. If it looks like everything else,

there's a good chance it's going to be ignored like everything else. So you've got to find a way to make a 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. Yeah, appropriate person. I love that. And then it's like just wondering if you're the appropriate person to act XYZ and then you they always respond because people want to be helpful and they'll either say no, here's the right contact or no, I see the right person and it helps us get in contact or they'll be like, yeah, it's me. What's up?

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, I'll say, no, I'm sorry, I'm not that person, but this person is C-seed. Or please email this person. In a sales context, in a larger, say, B to B sales, you have to get to the decision maker.

And this is a really good way to get to the decision maker. 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. As you probably know, selling doesn't really work on the feed. You've really got to sell on 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 is enterprise B2B tech, it was SaaS or

Telco or hardware, but it was 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. And what that means is your 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 and I see P and a buyer persona. I see P 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 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 tools. So I'm gonna get to your question as to more specific for LinkedIn, but I'm just sort of outlining the whole sales strategy. So if I was gonna 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, where we connect to automate my email. Apollo is email automation and outreach and sequencing. And we connect is LinkedIn automation outreach and sequencing. Now what I guess to wrap this up, because there's one to give people context for how they actually can sell quite easily. 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 linked in in particular, if you have identified your ideal customer profile in your buyer persona, one strategy that I, I mean, there's a million different strategies. The goal is to get a conversation started. 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 to disrupt, is actually to use video in DMs on LinkedIn. And this would be for my one to few, my one sales rep 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 contact 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 it's like, and you don't even answer them in like a week later, it's like another paragraph of text, anyone can I get a meeting? That's no good. So if you're gonna personalize it, you have to, 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 is 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 with video, it's just a little bit more impactful. I also used video and email, but a lot of people are using video and enough people are using video and email now. Not a lot, but enough where you see those little videos of somebody in a screen or a chord 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. 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 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 that would be my recommendation for selling like a high ticket item through LinkedIn Love it. I love the video tip in the DM strategy. It's a really really good one So let's talk about ICP empires persona really quick because having the right audience is really important A lot of people choose an audience that's like finding a needle on the haystack. They don't know how to find their audience and 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. 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 a new 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 size, the company industry, whether or not the company is in a certain geographical location, it could be the company's public or private, it could be government or private, it could be over a certain revenue threshold, a certain employee head count, it's like any sort of differentiator that can identify your company. And you're gonna immediately say, well, Scott, like I'm just gonna 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 gonna 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 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 or 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 see, 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 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 like 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, but it could be CMO, director marketing, CRO, CEO, VP Finance, director finance, it doesn't matter. CTO, be after identifying 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. So maybe the director of marketing is buying a technical marketing product, but they're have to get sign off and budget from CMO, the CEO, the small company they care and the CTO. 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 in the different types of things that you've noticed about these type of person, the education,

the salary, where they're most likely located, doesn't really matter. There's things that you can understand. It's not everything you can figure out, but you can figure out enough to at least have an educated opinion of if you're going into 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

Velocities 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 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 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, CTO, 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 in this conversation. So to make your job easier, bring them to the next call so we can get alignment across the people

that are the key decision influencers. And that just speeds up everything. And honestly, 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 very helpful, because that person doesn't want to screw up. And that person doesn't want to look at an idiot. Nobody wants to show up at work and look at 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. 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, 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. Young and profitors, do you have a brilliant business idea but you don't know how to move forward with it? Going into debt for a four-year degree isn't the only path to success.

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No fillers, no nonsense, just nom nom. Go right now for 50% off your no risk 2 week trial at trinom.com sash app. That's trinom.nom.com sash app for 50% off trinom.com slash app. That was like such like a rock solid explanation. Like so, so good. I would, it's really, really good. You're so smart. And sales, you need to put out a sales master class.

Like, give all these, my wheels are spinning. I In sales, you need to put out a sales master class. Like, you have all these, my wheels are spinning. I'm like, you need to come present to my mastermind. I can talk sales all day, but yeah. We have. 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 who 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, when you're going on a sales call, your objective should be to talk less. The person who talks more is always a 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 reps 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 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 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. 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 disqualify, 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 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 disqualified 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 if you will want what they can't have. They'll work to qualify themselves. So if you say, like, hey, listen, like, 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 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, it is a priority. Actually, it is a priority. And then you're like, 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 wanna take on.

Like you have to push that person away because they will qualify and not rude, they understand too. 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 reinforce what you're trying to talk to them and then like the call to action is important. So qualify disqualify anecdotes The stories just sort of help 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 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 and fight live on the call.

It's like, eh, 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 week. If you've qualified them properly and you've told these little stories throughout the reinforced body 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, it's super priority right now. I want to speak to you. Can you do like next Monday? 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 of what we spoke about just to make sure on the same page. And then you go from there. I wouldn't, I personally don't like doing the live calendar thing. But the point is you're setting expectations, you're getting verbal alignment of what next steps are,

and then you follow up on that. Yeah, 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 of how you can just like have little stories.

I had Donald Miller on the show, and he was talking about, I love that he's good. He's very good. He's great. He was talking 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 customers do XYZ. They got these results. That would be probably the most important.

I think when 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, same 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 in the efficiencies and the cost reductions and all the different KPIs that they achieve. In literally like 20 seconds, it's just that.

It's not over complicating it. Just having five or six of those lined up ready to go, that's all you really need at this point. There's places for storytelling and sales, but this is not meant to take over the call. It's meant to just think of the story as a period at the end of the sentence. You ask a question, they answer, you reinforce their answer with an exact case study in 15 seconds or less or 30 seconds or less of a similar customer that accomplished exactly what they're trying to solve for.

By the 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 telling them stories, which keeps them engaged and entertained. They're highly engaged throughout the conversation and we'll 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. It's 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 and 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. They closed this much business.

They got in this magazine. Like it's so easy to put these and plant 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 brains as a reason. And you can listen to another one of Hollis podcasts to why story stick, but they're 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 have accomplished. They're going to go check it. They're going to be 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 the 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. 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. You walk through the actual process of what you do for clients.

That's when I would discuss pricing. I would discuss pricing, but I would actually, 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 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 over quote, doesn't matter. It just sucks. You can't do it. In the discovery call that, and you can start talking pricing, you could psychologically anchor at a higher rate in your discovery call to prep them for a 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 gonna 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. 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, price is 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 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 others 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 .99 or a .97, it seems budget.

Think about this, for example. You see a 4.5.00 on a website versus a 4.4.97 or a 4.4.99. 4.4.99 in my mind's 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 .00 or like .40.00, 4, 5.00, they'll do increments of five or 10 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. We spoke about a little bit of pricing. Respiracy. Respiracy is a really good one. So, reciprocity literally means you're giving somebody something and you're not expecting anything

in 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, due to 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 Telaco for the first year, I was dealing with cell phones.

I started in Amal, and then I moved into corporate. 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 that 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 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, 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 email. And you'd probably convert significant amount of clients, because they trust you now.

And they're like, I'm not doing this shit for myself. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors. Hear that sound, young and profitors? You should know that sound by now. But in case you don't, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that's revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. Whether you sell edgy t-shirts or offer an educational course like me, Shopify simplifies selling online and in person so you can focus on successfully growing your business.

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Kelly is an inspirational entrepreneur, and I highly respect her. She's been a guest on YAP. She was a former social client. She's a podcast client. And I remember when she came on Young and Profiting and she talked about her conviction marketing framework, it was like mind blowing to me. I remember immediately implementing what she taught me in the interview in my company and the marketing efforts that we were doing. And as a marketer, I really, really respect all Kelly has done, all Kelly has built. In the corporate world, Kelly secured seven promotions in just eight years, but she didn't just stop there. She was working in nine to five. And at the same time, she built her eight figure company as a side hustle and eventually took it and made it her full-time

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Masterclass.com slash profiting. 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 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? I think it really depends how you show up and what you actually give them. I think it can be if you use properly, yeah, for sure. Anytime you give value, it's going to be considered 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 complete, because you won't be able, if you're selling a service, you can't fix everything in a discovery. 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 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 rep rep Reproduce Speak like an hour So as a frosty mixed with like building rapport and trust. And it's like, it's just like this compound effect, like 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 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 is because if I do one right, my two 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 gonna 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. 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 podcasts, 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 then in three months, 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 got. 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 profitor 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, find a way to leverage it. Because anyone that's ever built anything 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, top-tall, fiber, they're with even fractional talent in North America, hiring somebody part-time as a gig economy 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, leverage, there's even tech that allows you to build out SOPs that will allow you to deliver those SOPs to your workforce. It's based anywhere in the world that will allow you to deliver those SOPs to your workforce. It's based anywhere in the world that will allow you to 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 asked 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 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 in whatever it is you do, and that's when you're profiting. Amazing. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. My, my, my. What a great episode. I loved learning about sales from Scott. Sales, and 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 this episode was when Scott broke down what he believes to be the purpose of sales. And he said, sales is all about helping somebody buy. It's not about pushing a product. It's about helping somebody buy better, 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, 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. 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, you 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 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 and profitors, 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. 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 Podcasts or your favorite podcast platform. If you like watching your podcast videos, you guys can find us on YouTube and you can also find me on Instagram at YappwithHalla or LinkedIn by searching my name, it's Halla 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. I want to take a moment to think my YAP Media production team, you guys are doing awesome work, really appreciate all that you do. This is your host, Halataha, aka the podcast princess, signing off.

Are you looking for ways to be happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative? I'm Gretchen Ruben, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week, we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben, the number one best-selling author of the Happiness Project. And every week we share ideas and practical solutions on the Happier with Gretchen Ruben Podcast. My co-host and happiness guinea pig is my sister Elizabeth Kraft. That's me, Elizabeth Kraft, a TV writer and producer in Hollywood. Join us as we explore fresh insights from cutting-edge science, ancient wisdom, pop culture, and our own experiences about cultivating happiness and good habits.

Every week we offer a try this at home tip you can use to boost your happiness without spending a lot of time energy or money. Suggestions such as follow the one minute rule. Choose a one word theme for the year or design your summer. We also feature segments like know yourself better where we discuss questions like are you an over buyer or an under buyer? Morning person or night person, abundance lever or simplicity lever? And every episode includes a happiness hack, a quick easy shortcut to more happy. Listen and follow the podcast. Happier with Gretchen

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