Sales Strategies That Actually Close Deals (Hala Taha & Young and Profiting Podcast)

A lot of people are just unclear about their target audience. Give us your best advice in terms of understanding how to find out who your target persona is or buyer persona is. You literally can look at your last 50 customers. From those last 50 customers, it's no longer guesswork. You can now find what your ICP is. Then you look, who's a decision maker? That's the buyer persona. And 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. Let's talk about pricing. What's your favorite strategy for pricing? I would usually break any sort of sales process into a discovery and then a demo. I wouldn't actually disclose pricing until I have a really good understanding of what that person needs, the worst you can do is. Let's move on beyond just podcasts. Sales and email strategy. You talk about an email strategy called pattern, pattern disruption. I use this hack too. I love it. Could you break it down for us? So patterned, well, pattern disruption in any, in any marketing or sales context means that you're stopping, you're basically distracting. You're not distracting. You're standing out, excuse me, from the crowd. So I'm going to give you like a very, 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, the stupid fire fest? So the guy that went to jail. 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 in orange square and Ja Rule and an orange square. And that 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. So 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, 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 celebrity's names into your subject line, that that's pattern disruption. It's stopping the person scrolling because there's something new and different that they're not used to expecting. And because you get a lot of junk and a lot of garbage in your inbox and in your, you know, on your social feeds, whatever. So it's just about, like, sort of finding a way to stand out from the past. 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 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. Oh, that's good. So it will. Yeah. And then we just say, like, it makes it sound like it's coming a person. Yeah. I love that. If you're the appropriate person, talk 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 CC the right person. And it helps us get in contact. Or they'll be like, yeah, it's me. What's up? You know, I love that. I've used that strategy. And so 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, is, are you the correct person for such and such? Are you, are you, are you the correct person for making decisions about marketing spend or, you know, tech purchases, whatever it is? And if you phrase it as a question, then the person will, similar to your experience, they'll say, no, I'm sorry, I'm not that person, but this person is C seed or please email this person. Like you get to in a sales context in a, 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. 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 B to B tech, it was SaaS or telco or hardware, but it's 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 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 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 going to 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 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 we connect to automate my email. Apollo is email automation and outreach and sequencing and we connect is LinkedIn automation outreach and sequencing. 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 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 disrupt is actually to use a 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 that's my initial contact point of contact with them. It's not like the you see on LinkedIn, which is like like oh my god, it's like four or five messages of like 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, any what kind of I got a meeting, that's no good. So if you're going to 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's doing and you want to you want to unpack how your problem or your 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 course 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 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 and that's that's the objective and then you can nurture them. But 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 and buyers 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 like really break that down for us and then also give us your best advice in terms of understanding, you know, 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 the 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 B to B 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 is public 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 there's, 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, you know, $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 and my research and candidly, you literally can look at your last 50 customers. And from those last 50 customers, it's no longer a guesswork. You can now find what your ICP is. Just a note on that, funny enough, the company snowflake, huge success or a 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 threats 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, 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 able 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. So maybe the director of marketing is buying a technical marketing product, but they have to get signed 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 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 have an educated opinion of if you're going into new company, that person looks pretty 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, you know, 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 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 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 like 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 sort of dovetailing into the thesis of what sales should be, but sales 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 that 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 to make their life easier. That was like such like a rock solid explanation. It's really, really good. You're so smart. In sales, you need to put out a sales master class, like give all these to my wheels or spinning. I'm like, you need to come 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, right? 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 and any of your philosophies around that? Yeah, Pam, registration for my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass is now live. Learning what took me five years and just two days in a live workshop directly with me, where I teach you the ins and outs of the LinkedIn platform. You might know me as a podcast princess, but I'm also the LinkedIn queen. I wanted the top influencers on the LinkedIn platform. And I also run Yapp Media, which is an award-winning social media agency and the number one LinkedIn marketing agency. I've created influencers over and over again the last three years. Now you can learn all the strategies that I use for me and my clients and leverage them for yourself. In my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, I teach you how to develop a personal brand. This is a personal brand that you can take off LinkedIn as well. You actually leave with the voice guide that we do together in class and I'll go over the psychology of design, copywriting hacks, the LinkedIn algorithm, engagement hacks, and how to convert your following into sales. Because at the end of the day, we all want our live from what we're doing on LinkedIn. If your target audience is on LinkedIn, you need to take my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass. So whether you're a corporate professional who wants more job security, a solopreneur, freelancer or entrepreneur who wants to grow their small business, you need to understand how to grow your following on LinkedIn and then how to convert that following into sales. Learn how I grew. Yap media to $5 million in revenue with zero paid ads all for my organic content on LinkedIn. I credit LinkedIn to all of my success. Honestly, I wouldn't have this top podcast. I wouldn't have my company and my big team if it wasn't for LinkedIn. So if you want to learn more about my LinkedIn Secrets Masterclass, you can go to yapmedia.io-course and use code masterclass for 25% off. Again, that's yapmedia.io-course and use code masterclass for 25% off. 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 is before you go into that call, you have the information 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 wholesale 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 the account manager, to fulfillment, and order processing, and every single thing that person touches in your organization, if you don't have, if you have not qualified them or disqualified them properly, it's going to screw everything up. It will truly mess everything up. And by the way, psychologically, customers love to be disqualified. They do. They want the product more. They'll work to qualify themselves. So if you say, 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 in 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 want to take on. Like, you have to push that person away, because they will qualify and not rude. But you have, they understand too that there's only so many hours in a day for your sales team. They have to focus on the people that will actually convert. So yeah, yeah, I think that answers your question. 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 to me, whatever. But like at least set expectations. So you can say, hey, you know, the next step in this would be to talk to an account manager or to give a demo, whatever it is. I want to, I want to speak to you sometime next week. And if you've qualified them properly, and you've told these little stories throughout the reinforcements, 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, super priority right now. I want to speak to you. Can you do like next Monday? I 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 of what we spoke about just 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. He's 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 customer do XYZ. They got these results. You hear that sound, young and profitors. You should probably know that sound by now. But in case you don't, in case you're a new listener, that's the sound of another sale on Shopify. Shopify is incredible. It's an all in one commerce platform that is revolutionizing millions of businesses worldwide. You can use Shopify for any business, whether you're selling homemade jewelry, physical products, cookbooks, or a digital course like me. Shopify is selling online and in person so you can focus on successfully growing your business. Shopify is packed with all these industry leading tools and integrations to ignite your growth. They have everything from on demand printing to accounting to even chatbots. They have everything you need to totally revolutionize your business and running a business means that you need to get all the insights you need wherever you are. Shopify has a dashboard that you can log into and you can see all your analytics. You can manage orders shipping payments from anywhere. No matter where you are, Shopify covers every sales channel as well. So whether it's an in-person POS system and you're selling something in person or an e-commerce platform, they even sell across social media like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram. And thanks to 2477 Help and an extensive business library course, Shopify is there to support your success every step of the way. So I actually personally use Shopify. I love Shopify. I've been using it for over six months now and I launched my LinkedIn secrets masterclass using the Shopify platform and it was super easy to use. It took just a couple days to turn out my website. We have a backend and a really nice looking front end. And we've already made over $200,000 leveraging Shopify's capabilities to sell my masterclass. So really, I think the key thing with Shopify is because it does all the heavy lifting for you when it comes to setting up your store and collecting payments and the data along with it and the tracking along with it. It really enables you to focus on the things that matter like your product, making sure your product is the best it can be. For me, it's my course. I really had time to just focus on my course. It also enables me to focus on the marketing and make sure that I'm driving leads to my Shopify page. So Shopify lets me focus on what I'm good at and Shopify does what it's good at. And damn, Shopify is really good at what it does. Shopify and logging on to Shopify is always the highlight of my day. I'm really not lying when I say this. I mean it 100%. I'm addicted to going onto the Shopify platform because it's just so much fun. It's really easy to use. I can go in there. They have got like a chat bot. I can answer any messages if somebody chatted us. I can go see who signed out how many orders I got. I can go see our conversion rates, how we're doing. I can see where the leads are coming from and what marketing channels need more help. I can also see a global view of where everybody is logged in from, like all the potential customers, where they're logging in from what part of the world, what stage of the buying journey they're in. And I can actually see when people are about to check out. It is such a dopamine rush to see like four or five people checking out at one time. And Shopify is so cool because if people don't end up closing out and not purchasing and they just abandon their cart, Shopify will actually notify you and suggest that you send an abandoned cart email. Shopify gives you all these little tools and tricks to close more sales and they're really by your side. I love Shopify. If you want to start your small business, if you want to start that side hustle, this is your sign. It is your turn to get serious about selling and try Shopify today. This is possibility powered by Shopify. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash profiting. Again, go to Shopify.com slash profiting. And by the way, that's all lowercase. Profiting is all lowercase to take your business to the next level today. Again, that's Shopify.com slash profiting. Yeah, that would be, I mean, that would be probably the most important. I think I think what I'm alluding to is more testimonial style. I can try and think of something up top in my head, like just like an example story, but that's what I would actually, but that's what you're thinking of testimonial. So it's like 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, 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 like KPIs that they achieve. And literally like 20 seconds, it's just that. That'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 and sales, but this is like not meant to take over the call. It's meant to just 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 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. So you know, if that buyer is trying to same example, trying to migrate from on-prem data center to to cloud, they have like costs in mind. There's like, they want to get rid of like a warehouse is 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 exact same thing. It just realizes and materializes. They're like, oh my god, I'm not crazy. This is the 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 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 stories stick, but they're going to stick in their brain and they're going to go look at it. And they're like, oh, they're going to look at one of Hollis clients and be like, look at what they have accomplished. And Hollis don't lie. Like if like, David's like public stuff, like you have to tell the truth. Like if this person was like in Forbes or whatever or got their podcasts at this ranking, they're going to go check that they're going to be like, she's a real deal. Yeah. Yeah. And and I love to do that. I do that all the time on my discovery calls. I will go look and see like, what 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 know I personally do never give out pricing on the first call. No, I know what your favorite strategy for pricing. So I usually break, yeah, I would usually break any sort of sales process into a discovery and then a demo. And the demo can be like, 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. And then in the discovery call that 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, you know, budget required is, I don't know, say a hundred K a year, okay? But when you actually present the price because you've anchored at a hundred K a year, it's actually going to come in at 60 K 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? That's a good question. Human behavior. Well, we've allude it to many. A lot of the things that we spoke about stories. We talked about stories. I'll give out what 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. Pricing at an odd. So, so, 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, I'm going to say something though. So, every piece of advice that you get, you do have to take it with a grain of salt. And 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. So, for if I'm looking at a product that I think in my mind is premium 99 or dot 97, it seems budget. But if I'm like, if I so think about this, for example, you see a four or five dot zero zero on a website versus a four four dot nine seven or a four four dot nine nine, four four dot nine nine in my mind signals that there's a discount. I'm not 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 best. And you'll actually notice that premium brands do not they have whole numbers. They have round even numbers that are like dot zero zero or like so like four zero dot zero zero four five dot zero zero. They'll like doing increments of five or ten or whatever. But they won't do discounts. I think it really depends on the market that you're serving and the precedent that you're saying. So, other, okay, so we spoke about, excuse me, we spoke about anchoring. We spoke about, we spoke about social proof stories are social proof. We spoke about, we 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 return. But there is a human psychological condition that when you give something to someone, they want to give you something back in return. So, I mean, this is what you see 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 Telco, like, like for the first year, I was dealing with cell phones. Okay, I started them all. And then I moved into corporate and I worked my way up. But I started like selling cell phones in them all. 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 like, 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, you know, 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 for myself. Would you consider, so like the two step discovery to demo, 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 reciprocity at all? I think, I think it really depends how you show up and what you actually give them. I think that I think it can be, if you use properly, yeah, for sure. Anytime you give value is 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 you can, I mean, maybe you can point them in the right direction and help them educate themselves a little bit better. I would say, yeah, totally, like any point where you can provide value, like take it, take it a thousand percent. You know, you can even, 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, these are all not tricks. These are things that just happen when you give to another person. People think they're tricks. They're not tricks. When I'm giving to someone else as much as I possibly can, things do come back. And I do believe, yeah, that's a great, great point. I never thought about it like that explicitly saying, and this discovery call, it's an opportunity to give, but it totally is. And you should take it. 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 is personalized. I cannot ever do one and done personalized as much as I would love to. And then you get 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 spend 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 you then in three months, then they're super happy with you, then you're converting all the other services at a much higher rate. And I don't know your conversion numbers at all. But I'm just saying to me, that would make the most sense. Yeah. So I ask two questions of the end. I showed all my guests got. And the first one is what is one actionable thing are young and profitors can do today to become more profitable tomorrow. One thing that a young 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-tal, fiber, they're with even fractional talent in North America hiring somebody part-time as a as a gig economy worker to fulfill a certain role in your company, leveraging money, leveraging 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 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 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. Has to be beyond financial. Like I asked I asked everybody what does success mean, right? And it's always freedom. And I think that I do believe I mean maybe I'm 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. And 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 and everything that you do. And again 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.