Startups
7 Ways For Your Startup To Dominate In Sales
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing one of the greatest entrepreneurs to come out of Australia, Andrew Morello. Andrew has a Tony Robbins, state changer, type quality to him and after hearing him speak you just feel awesome!
Andrew is an all round nice guy and has one of those addictive personalities that everyone wants to be around. He also exuberates a type of confidence that we all wish we had and that every sales person aspires too.
His business ventures include The Entourage (with more than 70,000 business members) with fellow friend Jack Delosa, Bellagio & Co Jewellery and Head of Business Development for Mark Bouris’s Yellow Brick Road. Andrew shot into the spotlight in 2009 when he won the Australian version of the popular television show The Apprentice (the format is similar to the US version with Donald Trump).
Last year he spoke in 19 countries and you will typically see him out and about at entrepreneur events such as the Entourages Unconvention and Scaleable & Saleable, as well as pretty much every entrepreneur, Financial Services or Real Estate related event. He prides himself on being an ex-auctioneer and just a simple boy from Moonee Ponds, and every startup can learn something valuable from him.
“It’s not about the education someone has or where they grew up; it’s more about the sort of person they are”
Below are the top tips from our interview, and there is some cool stuff in there that hasn’t been shared anywhere before. Get into it, get amongst it and get excited!
1. Know your 30-second “Why You At 3am”
Andrew gets out of bed every morning because of his 30-second answer at 3am. As the entrepreneur in your startup, it is your job to drive a sales culture, and that starts with you knowing your why – without knowing your why you can’t inspire your sales team. Imagine this, if someone came to your home in the middle of the night and dragged you out of bed, put a gun to your head, and said why you, what would you say? Why do you continue to try and put yourself in the 1% of the population and be an entrepreneur? If the answer is not good enough then you’re dead.
This concept might sound extreme, but the crazy thing is that this happens every day, all over the world. The Nazi’s in the 1930’s, Korea in the 1950’s, Vietnam in the 1970’s, Yugoslav / Bosnia in the 1990’s and Iraq & Syria today. Because we live in the greatest country in the world, Australia, the land of opportunity, we forget why we wake up in the morning and what motivates us.
Andrew’s why you is “ he wants to make lots and lots of money, to pay other people really well, to do the things he doesn’t want to do, so he can do more things he loves doing, with the people that he loves.” Remind yourself that you are in the 1% and within that 1% there is a 0.1% and in order to get where you want to go you must know your why you.
“If you believe in what you do, even if you are the nerdiest guy in the world, people will be inspired by your vision. You don’t need to be a great salesman; you just need to be passionate and believe in what you’re doing“
2. Use your startups strengths
The advantage of a startup is that you are nimble. You can evolve your product or your service overnight, which a big company can’t do. This only works though if you’re prepared to evolve.
Andrew has had people come to him and say things like, “I have a client, and I thought they were going to move forward with my product, but then they told me they wanted something completely different, and I told them that that’s not what we provide.”
This is the wrong thing to say, it’s what you provide now. If that client is prepared to write out a cheque tomorrow and get started, then you do what you need to do to generate income and serve that customer in anyway you can.
“Play to your strengths and work on your weaknesses”
Remember to remove your ego because if you’re going to be in the world of entrepreneurialism then you do what the market wants and what your clients want. If you’re not prepared to make those changes, then you might be better working for a large organisation.
3. Build sales confidence
Life around sales is a game of building confidence. The more door knocking and phone calls your sales people do, the more confident they get. A great way for startups to get their employees to build more confidence is to gamify the sales cycle. Get all the guys to stay on a Tuesday night to make prospecting calls and give out prizes and trophies so that they compete against each other and forget about that they are doing sales.
Build a culture around the relationship and make your sales people know that this comes first, and the transaction comes second – this helps recession proof your business. Andrew believes that if you build a culture around your sales people acting with a Boiler Room (sales movie) or Wolf of Wall Street style, you’re destined for failure.
4. The way you hire sales people matters
You should always try and hire sales people on culture and enthusiasm – don’t hire on skillset or experience. Make sure their core values and beliefs are in line with yours, and your startups – you can always teach someone about your product. Many startups are scared to send sales people out on the road who haven’t got experience in something like IT. Andrew says that in the early days you can send them to a client to do a fact find / client analysis, get them to fill out a document, and allow a relationship to be built over the course of the meeting.
A couple of days later they can come back with a tailored proposal for their business. If the sales person is enthusiastic and prepared to go above and beyond the call of duty, no client will expect them to know something complex like a cloud-based product. The client will expect them to represent their business, be on call for them and be prepared to grow with them on the journey of their business.
Gone are the days of pressure selling, we are in a world of permission selling. You need to win over the prospect and form a relationship with them.
5. Three traits to look for in salespeople:
Humility –someone who treats everybody equal and tries to do the right thing by people (Andrew did this by being the simple boy from Monee Ponds and staying grounded)
Empathy – someone who understands where people come from
Resilience – someone who can handle getting a lot of no’s especially in the early days when they will get the most.
As a startup, having so few sales people and manpower is a big advantage for you. If you’re not a good sales person, don’t try and be. Go and find someone who is and hire them. You need to sell this person the dream (legitimately) and tell them that you can’t pay a lot of wages but that you will give them great commissions. If the business reaches certain revenue points, you could give them a chance to earn in at a discounted rate or buy into the business. This way of thinking will attract good talent and help make them an owner in the business and have skin in the game. If you sell the dream to 10 people, you may only find that one in ten will reach the set targets or want to pursue this path.
It’s also a great idea to sell this same dream on the operations side too. You might think that you can never afford to pay these people good money or that they would be interested in an earn-in, but that’s not true, these types of people are dying to work with someone who is a great sales person. The idea of them working with someone who is a visionary and an inspiration helps these operations people to do what they love doing which might be maintaining or building the product. Even if you can’t remunerate them greatly at the start, it’s important to sell the dream and show them that their hard work could help them become an owner in the business.
6. Once the sales model is right, know how to scale it
A great way to scale a good sales model quickly, is to let a strong sales person build out their own team and run it as a business within your business (this is the intraprenuer model we hear so much about these days). If they were to take three people under their wing and mentor them, then you could offer them a 2% commission on anything these three team members produce. If this goes well, you could also offer them equity later on.
Another model for scaling the sales model quickly is to partner with people. This model can be a recipe for disaster or a recipe for massive success, so you need to have some quality agreements in place so that you can end the relationship quickly if things don’t work out. Don’t be disheartened if this doesn’t work the first time, just evolve quickly and find the next partner.
7. Don’t make these mistakes with your startup
One common mistake that startups make is that they try and sell the big package. In financial services, that could be trying to sell the home loan, insurance, financial planning and income protection all on the first contact. The client needs to get to know you and like you first. Try and sell them one product or service first, and then win them over, get a couple of referrals and then look to see what else you can sell to them later.
Giving up too early can be another fatal mistake in sales. Andrew tells some sales people that they need to make a hundred calls a day to test them. Shortly after, they come back and say it was too hard. Andrew asks them how many calls they made over the last two weeks, and they might say 300. They could of at least tried 50 a day as a bare minimum but at just 300, they give up. You must be prepared to take the no’s and be resilient.
Andrew also shared with me a story about a guy that had 30 appointments and didn’t get a single sale out of it. He came to Andrew and said I don’t think this is for me. The guy had made a very large financial commitment in the business and left a big corporate role to go out on his own. They went back and did some work on his relationship building and discovered that he needed to win the client over first.
Having originally been in a corporate role he hadn’t done client facing, so he had the mindset of just wanting to get the appointment out of the way in 15 minutes. Through the process of coaching with Andrew, he began to realise that prospective clients just wanted him to listen to them and that the appointments needed to go for longer in order to achieve this. Half the time he didn’t even needed to say much, it was just a matter of listening and genuinely caring about their situation.
By talking more with his clients about their families, sporting interests, the charity work he does in the community and his very personal story of his son who had autism, the prospects could see he was being genuine and showing a bit of vulnerability. The business has now turned around, and he is in the top 10% of his field. In his case, he was doing all the right things he just needed to talk with his prospects about them.
“If you’re not that type of sales person then find someone to represent your business who is”
Final Thought
Make sure that you as the entrepreneur and your sales team, stay humble, be prepared to work hard, concentrate on the relationship, and the sales will come as a by-product of all of that. Australia is one of the last western countries in the world where you can arrive on a boat, as a refugee, and if you’re prepared to work hard, you can be as good as the most successful person in Australia.
One of the best books that Andrew suggests you read (I suggest it as well) is “Think and Grow Rich”, by Napoleon Hill. It might sound a bit cliché, but a lot of the concepts in this article are represented in this classic book.
Andrew was also lucky enough to train with Deepak Chopra and learn a number of concepts such as the 7 Spiritual Laws of Success. What he learnt from these concepts was how to let go of the outcome, practice present moment awareness and embracing uncertainty – don’t try and plan everything otherwise you will achieve nothing.
Tony Robbins courses were another one of Andrews learning’s through his business journey. The main lesson Andrew uses from those teachings is “energy trumps all.” He was on stage the other day with one of the most well-known people in the technology space who has amassed a large fortune, but Andrew won the audience over because he had them standing up, in a peak state and cheering. The content is not always the most important thing; it’s the energy in which you deliver it.
Andrew has seen this first hand with his own mentor, Mark Bouris, who is turning 60 next year and has more energy than most twenty-year-olds. Often Andrew is asked how he gets so much done in the boardroom without a university level education, his answer……he has more energy in that board room than anyone else and when he’s asked what he’s on, he tells them life, and then they get their chequebook out.
Andrews’s philosophy on life, “if something is no longer fun, I’ll go home”. His philosophy has held him in good stead throughout his entrepreneurial adventures.