How To Sell To Anyone | Sales in 2024 | B2B Vault - The Biz To Biz Podcast | Episode 266

You are now watching the Biz to Biz podcast with Allen and Justin. Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz podcast powered by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Brooks Robinson of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. And in today's question, we'll be asking, uh, you know, the, the good old how to sell to anyone. Can you sell to anyone and everyone? Yeah, it's a tough one. But how you doing, sir?

Doing good. How you doing?

Can't complain. No one wants to hear it anyway.

Okay. So you want to dive— want me to dive in?

Whatever you want to do, man. Well, real quick, today's date is August 15th, 2024. It is 11:32 AM. On a Thursday.

One thing I always say about sales is, is you got to have, you know, if you're just starting out or you're in it for a while, you know, I'll talk to sales reps that work with us and, you know, a lot of times they're complaining about not closing deals or not finding enough deals. And basically, whether people want to say it or not, it's a numbers game. Okay? And you got to fill up a pipeline. If you go, I would hire people years ago, when we were really into doing everything door to door back in the dinosaur days. And I would hire people, they go, I went to 10 businesses. And 10 people threw me out. You didn't go to enough businesses. You need to go to 100 every day if that's what you need to do, because for all that you get paid to hear yes, so you're going to hear a lot of nos before you, before you hear yes.

And that's when gas was cheap.

Yes, gas was much cheaper at that point in time.

Trying to go to 100 businesses, this is today and you getting told no, well, it's the same. You not making no money, how the hell are you going to even—

No, no, but I'm just saying it's the same thing as making phone calls. If you're doing telesales and you're making phone calls or you're sending out emails, you're going to have to send out a high volume of emails.

You're going to have to send out a hell of a lot more than 100 cold emails, right? You're going to have to send out 10,000 cold emails.

Yeah.

And you're gonna have to make 10,000 calls.

Yeah. I mean, because, well, I'm just saying, you gotta go, you gotta, you know, you have to think about like, where are you selling?

My argument with all that shit, yeah, it's, you know, I get it, like, that's right, you know, it's, it is what you got to do, but why wouldn't you just, instead of going straightforward, you know, like shot in the fucking dark part of me, why wouldn't you actually try to know the business, like know your customer, right? Like for me, when I was finding customers and clients for Digital 1380, you know, I realized no one wants to talk on the phone. And business owners don't have time to chitchat. They don't, they don't want to, you know, they don't want to talk about their website. They don't want— so you got to catch them at the opportune time.

That's with anything. Well, for sure.

But you walk in at— what I'm getting at is, is if you're providing a solution to a problem, yeah, you can sell to anyone. Once you find this— if once you find out the problem that that business owner is having, you can find the solution, right? But it's you doing the diligence of actually going out and knowing your customer. Like, you— Allen and I argue, and I'm getting ready to toss this whole office some days because it's like, we, we offer Nationwide Payment Systems office services to, to every business known to man. And I'm saying that— he'll disagree— but at the end of the day, if you're processing over $50K, $25K to $50K a month, We want your business, right? So on, as a marketing perspective, it's damn near impossible. Okay. And when we try to get like down to the nitty gritty to find a niche, right, to find some low-hanging fruit that we can just bombard, I'm talking like World War II Blitzkrieg bombard, right? The industry. Okay. And I'm not saying we stop selling to all the other people, but what I'm saying is if you focus on a niche and you know that they have problems in a specific area that you can fix, that is your win. That's your in. That's how you, you, you can sell to every business type because if, if most, more than likely that business type, they have the same ills. It's because it's— industry typically runs the same, right? Like, they— not many— it does. Obviously, there's, there's unique businesses inside of an industry. But typically that industry, they all get their same products, their stuff from the same places, from the same regions and stuff like that. So once you can figure out that, okay, this company ABC has a real big problem with accepting payments with their guys on the road, you know, and average ticket sale is like $1,000. Okay, get after them.

Yeah, the whole—

find a solution. Okay, we got the perfect— we got the mobile dongled.

Yeah, you'd be surprised. We have a lot of clients, like, they're in, in businesses where they could use like the mobile readers and they don't want to— they, they don't want to— they don't want to figure out like how to do it. Like, I was talking to a guy yesterday, he's like, I don't want my employees, um, using those things on their phones. Great, no problem. What you do is either go give them all cell phones, which you don't want to do. You could get MetroPCS Dirt cheap, right? Or Cricket or whatever, the cheapest phone possible.

I mean, you can order wholesale phones, right?

Or let's say that they will be in locations where there will be Wi-Fi. You could just go buy any used iPhone or Android phone.

Why do they need a phone?

They could use a tablet. I'm saying they're on the road.

Just use the little, the little—

because it needs to work with a phone. You need to have conductivity. Those things, don't have a cell phone, then you get your—

get a hotspot, right? That's what it is. There's— that's a simple fix.

I'm just saying, like, I'm just saying, people got to think out—

you have to think outside of the box. That's that old mentality of not wanting to use technology. And I don't want to do that, I don't want to do that, I don't want to do that. Well, your business is going to fail. That's all I'm gonna— like, this is 2024, dude. Yeah, if you're not utilizing technology to advance your business model, like, you will not survive the next 10 years. The next 10 years are going to be hell for small businesses. Yeah, if they don't adapt and learn how to, you know, get with the—

it's the same thing, like, customers need to get with the shits, man. It's like, customers don't want to give you their credit card number over the phone. They would prefer you send them a link. But I have tons of clients and they're like, no, we only want to take the card over the phone. That's the way we've been doing it for the last 15 years. And they get— and I say, you're going to have pushback from younger business owners. They're going to say, hey, just send me a link so I can pay you.

Right.

You got to change with the times because people are in traffic, man.

They don't have time to be like pulling out their wallet like In this age of, you know, this day and age, like, everything is already loaded on the phone, bro. Like, you send me a link to pay, all I have to do is click that link, show my face, and it's paid, right? So like, the processes that these companies have, a lot of it is just like infrastructure. And what if you could get in there like as a business consultant.

Yeah.

There's a— I'm sure that's a great business right now. Like, probably revamping like whole companies and stuff. But I mean, we're getting off topic, bro.

No, but at the end of the day, sales, like, you—

for me is to know your customer, know who it is you want to sell to. If you provide a solution to that problem, go out there and tell people about it.

So here's some things I say about sales. One, you should always read sales. You've got to read a couple of sales books. There's some that I recommend. We can get into that later. But, uh, you know, sales, you know, the thing you have to understand is you're either— there either is a need or you're creating a need. Okay.

Yeah.

With your product, does your product solve a problem? So an example would be, you know, during the pandemic, customers were wanting— a lot of customers were calling us up, oh, we don't want to touch people's cards. We need tap and pay. Your machine already does tap and pay. Oh, what do you mean it already does it? Yeah, it's on the— the little thing is on there. You just never used it before, right? You never used it before. And then they go, oh wow, it does work. They go try it out. And, you know, and we see, you know, an increased amount of people using the tap and pay, the Apple Pay, Google Pay, and all that. When we first introduced it in 2015, literally the only— we had a guy, we had a customer at the time at 150 shoe stores, and then their clientele was all younger. And the guy couldn't believe how many— he goes, nobody's going to pay with Apple Pay. More than 50% of their transactions were a tap, not a tap card, but Apple Pay or Google Pay. And they couldn't even believe it. And we proved it. But the other thing is, when you're talking to a business is, okay, what are your pain points? We talked to a restaurant the other day. Guy said, oh, what's your biggest problem? Oh, my POS is, I bought this POS. It's very basic. We're doing all this online ordering from 4 different companies. None of that goes through the POS system. We don't have a way to reconcile it. Well, you need a better POS system. And so, you know, now we're getting in there, you know, saving money. Everybody wants to save money. So if your product, you know, saving money is not just about saving dollars, sometimes it's about saving labor time. Like how much time are you spending reconciling all these orders that are coming in from these outside ordering companies? Versus spending $99 a month on having it integrated to your point of sale, you know. So you got to remember, like, those are things. But here's some, here's some interesting closing techniques if you're doing sales. So we'll talk about closing techniques. One of my favorite ones, you know, because like when you first get into sales, people tell you like, oh, different closing techniques, or you read books and they tell you So one of them is the— this classic, the Ben Franklin close. And this is where, you know, you go, okay, I'm gonna— you make a list, and then here's the positives and the negatives. And you do that with the customer. What's the positives you're going to get out of this? What's your negative thoughts on this? And hopefully you build a better— a bigger list of positives, and the person says, yep, okay, gonna and they're going to buy because you got to convince them sometimes. Urgency is another thing. What's their level of urgency? Is their point of sale system broken or their website guy disappeared from the Philippines and their whole website is messed up with a bunch of dead links and errors and no one's there?

Don't throw shade at the guys in the Philippines, dude. Those guys ain't shading you.

Okay.

It's the guys in the United States that are dipping out on you.

No, I'm just saying the person dipped out. And the website's broken. Now I need someone to fix my website. Is it— if it's urgent, then there's an urgent— an urgency to buy. Or there's a special deal and you're gonna, you know, you know, here's the special deal is on now. It's only good till for the next 2 weeks, you know, and you create urgency. So urgency comes in 2 ways, you know, when you're talking to the owner, like, okay, well, this product gonna save you a lot of time And don't you want to have your time back? Everybody wants their time back. So if you have a product that saves you time and it's not— and the expense is reasonable, you're going to do it. You know, another closing method is the menu close where you go, okay, well, I have 3— I'm selling websites, I have 3 packages. We have the starter package. The silver package and the gold package. Which one do you want? They know they want a website, but which pack, you know, now you're going to make them a sale. It's just like you go into a restaurant, you can get a hamburger, a New York strip, or a filet mignon.

Yeah, I stopped doing it. I mean, it obviously is still that way, but it's not the same for the budget. It's just like, yeah, either you're going to get McDonald's, you You're going to get, what's a step up from that? P.F. Chang.

Or In-N-Out Burger.

And then what's the step up from that? I mean, I'm not a big—

Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.

New York Yankee Steakhouse.

Okay, the New York Yankee Steakhouse. Rocky likes New York Yankee Steakhouse because they got a steak with a bone and I bring him the bone home.

Nice.

So he likes that. But I'm just saying, you have to see by reacting with your customer. One thing I also learned about sales is You have some people that are— when you're talking to customers, some people are visual and some people are audible. So if they're audible, they want to listen to you explain things. Sometimes they'll be asking you a question, oh, do you want to see a visual? And that's when you're doing— running them a demo or showing them examples, right? Because are they— you got to figure that out when you're talking.

I think now prospect— I think now you kind of got to run those concurrent.

Well, yeah, but you have to see sometimes you might be dealing with somebody like we had first dealing with somebody that's 97 years old and we had a guy, we had a guy and he's like, I want to see the point of sale system working. Great. Here's a restaurant. We'll take you over there for lunch. And they went for lunch and we told the manager the guy was coming in and they saw the point of sale system working and now they want to use it. You know, also, you know, This is one of Dave's favorite. He liked the puppy dog clothes.

Can you just do that for me?

No, the puppy dog clothes is like you actually like have the credit card machine in your hand and you're like, well, you know, and back, back in the day, like we would go into places when we first started selling and you'd see like a credit card machine, a printer, and a pin pad, 3 separate pieces of equipment. And now you can just get one piece to do all that. So we'd walk in with this. One piece.

A friend of mine said he just would literally ask it like, what? He'd be making sale, try to make a sale, and he'd be like, can you just buy this for me so that I can not, not make quota? And he, he said, bro, you would be surprised. The pity sale. Yeah, he called it.

Yeah, do you have that too? That's like the urgency sale. You're creating an urgency. I could win a vacation if I make this sale. I need to make 2 more sales this month.— that qualify for the vacation.

That's the type of shit he would pull all day.

So you have to see what can you do. Another one me and Dave used to use a long time ago is the magic wand. We'd wave that, we'd go in their business, they'd have a credit card machine on the counter. We'd wave a magic wand over it and go, or a pencil and go, this is a magic wand. What's the guy go, what? Yeah. If you waved the magic wand over it, what would that do that it's not doing now? Then they tell you, or you say the same thing. Oh, you have your point of sale system or your website, whatever it is that you're selling. What is it not doing that you want it to do?

And that's where I say know your customer's problems.

Yeah, but that's the thing. You have to use different techniques to get there, to get them to open up to you. You have to figure out which thing is going to get them to do it. You know, and then the other thing is, you know, oh, do you qualify to work with us? Oh, we want to qualify your business. It's a great way to make— what do you mean I have to qualify? Well, you know, we only work with certain businesses. You know, you have to do at least $50,000 a month for credit card processing to qualify for our service. Oh, what do you mean? Yeah, I do way more than $50,000, you know. Yeah. So there's ways to do things to make people feel like, oh, I have to qualify? Yeah. Or the other one, this is something like FOMO, fear of missing out. Oh, well, if you don't get this, you're going to be missing out on the greatest thing ever. Yeah. FOMO, the fear of missing out.

I definitely used that a lot when I first started my business. Selling websites.

Yeah.

Because, you know, I mean, this is only 15 years ago. So, well, this was 15 years ago.

Yeah, 15 years ago, a lot of people still didn't have a website.

And it's crazy because today people still don't have a website. But yeah, I would, I would say you're going to be missing out, man. You know, like I Googled, like I would do this all the time and it would kill people. I Googled, hey, what do you, you know, what you're known for here, right? And, uh, what was, uh, what's, what's, what's a quick example? Um, Black Eyed Peas, right?

Right.

And Rice. And I Googled it like near me. You know how you Google?

Yeah.

And I, you know, and I'd show them, be like, bro, no one's finding your restaurant.

I mean, how many businesses do we go look up when we're doing— when someone's applying and we don't even find— we We barely can find their website and they don't even have the Google My Business page, or they have a website and it doesn't work.

Um, yeah, I mean, I think— I don't know who the media or whatever, because I remember a point in time when it was, it was really hard to sell websites, right? Like, we were having a really hard time, so we had to pivot. And, you know, that's when SEO started really making a That was my moneymaker, right? Um, so I don't know, like, it was like transitioning, transitioning into this weird phase of where, like, it was Facebook. That's what it was. It was like, I don't need a website, I'm on Facebook, right? And we would be like, what the hell are these people talking about, dude? And like, you know, and then I'm like, all right, this is gonna, this is, this is gonna phase out, right? Because that was all a push from like social media, Facebook. It was like, oh, you know, set up your business profile on Facebook. And it was that like, like this, you know, this big hype around it, like, oh, if you do this, they will, if you build it, they will come type shit, you know what I mean? And it was not true, right? Like, it's just like any, any other scheme to, you know, it's like when Wix came out, right? You know what I mean? Like Wix came out and the DIY era. Yeah, we loved that shit because all these businesses, they would spend out, oh no, no, no, we're gonna, we're doing it ourselves, we're doing ourselves. Two months later, hey, uh, do you guys— yeah, man, but you know, it's going to be, you know, you got to get put on the, the list, you know what I'm saying? Prices specials over, you know what I mean? Like, so yeah, that fear of missing out thing, that did work for a long time. And, you know, I think now more days when, as like we talk about technology all the time on the podcast, and I really think that these businesses that are stuck in the late '90s, early 2000s, I don't see them lasting another 4 or 5, shit, I would say 2, 3 years.

You gotta make changes and people like not monetizing their business correctly. And not thinking about monetizing it.

I mean, just the question—

the, the—

I'm not going to talk about the opportunity that we were talking about yesterday, but I mean, the fact that you can't go somewhere and buy those replacement parts—

yeah—

now is befuddling.

Yeah.

You know, that's—

even the manufacturer doesn't sell.

How the hell—

in a shopping cart—

how the hell do you not have an e-commerce shop? That is a huge revenue stream.

Exactly.

I went home, I I was at the gym thinking about it, like, dude, what? I'm sure there's how many of these out there?

Thousands, bro. Here's like, what a—

what a— that, that is just— you're dropping the ball.

I'm gonna tell you the craziest thing that happened in, in business for us in 2000, like '14, and like 2000, even, even earlier than that. I posted a video today on my Facebook that was from 1985 or something, or not— yeah, or '95, and it was all about EMV cards, right? Oh yeah, we're gonna have these EMV cards, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So EMV became mandated in the United States in October of 2015. Leading up to that, right, there was a lot of BS machines being sold, and they had the EMV slot, but none of it worked because there was no software. And these things require injections. Like, when we used to buy a credit card machine in the old days, you would just buy a plain box I could program it to any company I wanted. And if they wanted debit, we had to get a side PIN pad and you would just order those and get it, you know, as you needed them. Okay. Right. And then came the EMV. With EMV, every machine, the serial numbers are locked down to whoever bought it. They're locked down in the system. They're injected with the, with what they call these keys. So they're injected with keys, then they're injected with the EMV injection that ties it to that credit card processor and then the debit injection. So they can't— they're basically, you know, if you switch companies, the machine's no good. You can't do anything with it. Might as well just send it back to them. It's just, it's junk. It's a big doorstop.

Yeah.

And so EMV was coming, right? And they're, you know, and EMV were telling everybody, and I took a big gamble. I bought a couple hundred machines and had them sitting at the at the equipment place that was doing the deployment. And all of a sudden, nobody was buying these machines. And then all of a sudden, it starts hitting the news. If you don't get these EMV machines in your business, you're going to get chargebacks and you're going to lose tons of money. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Man, we sold more equipment from October of 2015 to December than we sold in like 5 years. Nice. No, but I'm just saying, like, that's the—

Oh, sorry. Pardon me.

But that's what it is, you know, sales, you know, sales, you know, sales has never changed. The only thing that's changed in sales in the last 20 years is that people buy more online. So having an online presence is super, super important. And if you could sell your product online, um, and you can figure out how to do that, that's even more important.

Yeah, I mean, I have some quick notes, you know what I mean? A lot of the stuff we kind of already touched on, you know, I, I, my number one is customer needs. Um, you know, find, figure that out. Trust and support, building that for yourself. Um, highlight the benefits and not just, uh, the, uh, you know, what they get, you know what I mean? Right, you know what I mean? Um, create a sense of urgency. Um, be confident, know your customer. Know what you're selling. Like, I cannot— I do this all the time. I let people sell to me over the phone constantly to see how they do.

Okay.

And I will tell, like, most of the time I'm like, yo, I listen to you just to listen to you. And I'm going to tell you right now, you need to work on your pitch. So I'm done. And then I just hang up. So yeah, I can't tell you that. Be an expert at what you're selling. No one wants to talk to somebody on the phone and they'd be like, well, I really don't know. I don't know how that works, or, you know, I'm gonna have to look into that a little further. I don't want that answer.

The best thing to do if you're a salesperson and, and you had— and someone's—

he's gonna say, yeah, I don't know, let me get somebody that knows better. That's fine, but when you're out in the field, you don't got time for that shit. So my best answer to you is know what you're selling. Be an expert. Be an expert, bro. Know what you're selling. And tailor your pitch to yourself. Be, be yourself. Don't be a—

one thing I learned in Dale Carnegie is, like you said, be the expert. You really have to be the expert and make— and you need to believe you're the expert so that when you're out there doing a sales presentation or you're networking, that you tell them, oh, I'm an expert in credit card processing.

Dude, I can't tell you how many arguments I've gotten into with people. Like, how are you going to tell me how to build a website. Do you want to build the website? Can you build the website?

Right.

Don't tell me I am the expert. You hired me to do the job. I, you know, whatever. Like, I, I'm— I, I was an asshole a lot of times in my life. Yes, I am that guy. And I will tell you, you don't know what the hell you're talking about. So, but yeah, man, that's, that's the pod.

Let's go make some sales, everybody.

Watch Boiler Room.

Boiler Room, great, great movie.

What's another sales movie?

Another sales movie besides Boiler Room? Glengarry Glen Ross. That's an old-time movie for sales. You know, listen, there's— I'm trying to remember. Now you put me on the spot. Sales movies.

Boiler Room is the only one that really comes to mind to me that's like—

well, they're doing phone sales, they're doing all kinds of scamming.

Yeah, it's just Just business.

Don't scam.

No scammers.

Yeah, don't be a scammer.

Death to you scammers. Well, not death, just maybe you lose a couple fingers. Tired of you Twitter fingers.

No, you gotta, you know, have an online presence, have a LinkedIn. Believe it or not, you're gonna call people, they're gonna go to— they're gonna go right online and see if they can find what they can find out about you, your company, or who you work for.

That's a fact. So, all right, man.

Peace out.

Subscribe to the channel for us, please.

Peace.