The Secrets of Referral-Based Sales with Cameron Herold

I think that's where the entrepreneurs need to have that DNA of a little bit of the narcissism and a little bit of the tenacity. Right? You're always going to get pushback, but you have to trust your gut. You have to trust the market. You have to go out and look at what other people are charging in your space and then position yourself accordingly.

Plug into the mind of the world's cutting edge innovators, visionaries and thought leaders who are rewriting the rules of sales and success. It's your time to make an impact. I am your host, Jason Mark Campbell and this is the Sell With Love podcast. Well, hey, listen everybody, here you are on the Selling with Love podcast. I'm here with Cameron Herold. If you've been on the show or listening for quite the years, he's a third returning guest. I love to bring the people that bring so much value back. And Cameron's always been very, very generous with the wisdom that he delivers when it comes to operations, pr, sales, business growth, all of it. And most excitingly, has, as he mentioned, put together a quest on Mind Value's platform about vivid vision. So if you are in business and you're trying to understand what are pillars that need to be put in place for you to have success, whether you're setting it up, scaling it up or selling it towards the end, he's been part of the cycle of every organization and always brings wisdom also. That is why he's known as the CEO Whisperer. And here he'll be whispering to the audience about Selling with Love because quite frankly, I think Cameron sales as a particular domain. Have you written extensively about it? Is it something you usually get questioned about?

That's funny. No, I've never really written about sales. Rarely do I even get asked about sales. But sales is a fairly strong core competency of mine for a few reasons. I'll give you kind of the backstop on it, one of which starts in Ottawa, Canada, where you're from and where I went to school. I got involved in an organization called College Pro Painters, or in Montreal it was called Les Pent a Dion College Pro. And at College Pro Painters I was awarded a franchise when I was 20 years old. I ran a franchise for three summers and then I went and worked for the head office for four years, recruiting, training and coaching franchisees for them. And sales was such a massive part of my role that I really did learn about sales. Selling to homeowners, selling to recruit people to come and work for me, selling to the Paint stores and suppliers to give me better discounts being able to handle, you know, we were painting when I was a franchisee, I was painting probably 80 to 100 homes in a summer, which meant I had to go out and do estimates and sell to customers 160 to 180 times. So we got a lot of training around sales and then when I worked for the head office, we had to go out and sell these university students to join us to be franchisees. That's when I recruited Kimbal Musk, who's Elon's younger brother. Back in 1993, I recruited him from Queen's University and also his cousin Peter Reeve, who went on to build SolarCity. I sold both of them to join College Pro Painters as franchisees and then I had to train them and coach them. But we had to sell 800 franchises in four months every year, which is pretty unheard of in the franchising world. So then from there I did it in the auto body business where I was selling people to franchise. I was getting them to sell their companies to us. So I was selling them on the opportunity for us to buy them. And then building 1, 800 got junk. It was press play again, right? Selling, you know, in that whole genre, I've done direct sales, I've done computer software sales. Then in building the CO alliance again, it's all selling. So I'm not sure why nobody's ever asked me about that. But it is a huge, A core competency. But B, it's critical for every business leader to be good at. I don't think you can be a CEO and not be good in sales.

Yeah, I don't think you can be much and not be good in sales. Like even, okay, maybe some hardcore technical field where like kind of path is already drawn and there's like no business involvement aside from doing your technical skill. But even then to get the job is the interview process is still a sales process. And so. Yeah, well, I'm glad I get to break the ice for you. And then here we're going to talk about sales.

Let me give you a quick thought around sales as well that I've said for years and that is that every salesperson has to be amazing at customer service, but not every customer service person is good at sales. Right? To really connect with your customer, you have to understand their needs, you have to be able to listen, you have to be able to help them problem solve, you have to be able to kind of say no in a delicate way to some of their needs. That Maybe aren't, you know, going to happen. It doesn't happen in the customer service. Customer service people aren't necessarily great at sales at all. The other thing that I've noticed about sales, there's not a single HR person that likes salespeople because we're so wired so differently. Right. Salespeople are shooting from the hip, they're winging it. They make it up on the go. They're quick problem solvers, they're big energy. And then HR people tend to be policies and procedures. You know, follow the rules, regulations, you know, follow the playbooks. And there's no playbook in sales like you. There kind of is, but you kind of have to really bob and weave the whole time.

Yeah. That brings that kind of creative element that I do enjoy, or at least the creative liberty that you get to have in sales. I find that's fascinating, what you're saying, especially with customer support, because I remember this moment in mindvalley where we looked at customer support and we realized that they're the ones that are the front line when everybody ask for a refund. This is actually a sales opportunity. Like, if someone asks for a refund, there's a dissatisfaction with the product. So there's maybe a way to actually bring value in a different way. And there were these kind of policies that we're trying to put in place that would empower the customer support teams to actually take on a sales role. And that was met with so much resistance. It was, like, not even comprehended that, hey, if someone's asking for a refund, there's a problem to be solved. They're like, this was a high anxiety point. So when you look to hire in your scaling organization, is sales competency something you look for across the board or only in specific departments?

Yeah, not across the board. I look for strong leadership. I look for an obsession with core values. I look for people that are vibrating when they read our vivid vision. But I don't think sales across all functions in an organization, like, not necessarily in finance, not really necessarily in it. Maybe if you're in the leadership role, like a VP or a C level, you need to be good at selling to recruit people in and to work with other business areas and explain your ideas. But I think sales is critical on the op side, on the customer engagement side, on the marketing side, for sure.

I love it.

Sorry. One other part on that. We actually built out a call center as part of 1-800-got-JUNK. We had 148 people in our call center when I was There as the coo, and that was one of the divisions that reported to me. And in building out the call center, we actually really recognized that there was probably 50 or 60% of our call center agents had to be salespeople, and then about 20 or 30% had to be customer service people that couldn't sell to save their lives. But they were truly there to assist the clients, to help the clients. But, yeah, if it was a cancellation or an upsell, it was always passed to a salesperson. And then on the management side, they had to be good at sales. But, yeah, there was definitely a component that we recognized that we had to recruit for different kinds of people.

I'd be curious to know what would be the kind of first things you would look for when it comes to hiring someone to recognize their sales acumen.

A little bit of narcissism.

Go on.

A little bit of good energy. You can tell in a group who the salesy people are, right? Because they just tend to capture the attention and the imagination of the people in the room. So what we do is we do a group interview where we'll interview six to eight candidates at the same time in person or over zoom, to try to find out who vibrates like, we need them vibrating so you can kind of see who stands out as the top one or two people in the group. And then you bring those people in to see if they have the actual skills. But you're looking for the traits in the DNA. And so in a group interview, you might say, you know, what do you do for fun? Everybody answers the question, what are the biggest problems you've ever solved? Everybody answers a question. I rarely care about what their answers are, but I listen to their tone. I watch their body language. I watch the way they can engage. I watch their use of humor. I watch the way that they maybe match or raise the energy level in the group just a little bit, and you can just see it happening. I had one guy, one time, we were hiring for a telemarketer. And, you know, telemarketing is a tough job. You get told no 99 out of 100 times. Well, in the group interview, I said, if we were hiring two people, you plus somebody else, who else in the group should we hire? And this guy Frank stands up. And Frank was this kind of little weaselly little dude, but he stood up and he's like, actually, you should only hire me. And then he bursts into this kind of comical review of the other seven people at the table. Like, you can't hire Jason because His hair looks too perfect and nobody will take him seriously because of his French accent. And you can't hire Cameron because he's got too many gray hairs. And like he literally made jokes about each person. But the whole room was in hysterics laughing. I'm like, dude, you fucking win. Like, because to be a telemarketer, like you need to be able to build that quick energy. So we really looked for that. It was like, what was their energy? Like what was their belief in our core values? And what was their belief in our vivid vision? And then the skills can often be trained, especially in the early people, but it's yeah, who are the leaders? And then you can also look to see, like, who are the ones that were the ringleaders, right? Who are the ones that got their friends together to go for drinks? Or who are the ones that organized their friends together to go play Ultimate? Or who are the ones that salespeople have been selling their whole lives? Whether we're selling our friends or handling objections with their parents or you know, figuring out ways around problems. Like, another trait we look for in salespeople is tenacity and it's the dog like work ethic to get over, under or around any obstacle put in your path. The salespeople need to have that tenacity because you're going to get hit with brick walls all the time. But you can go over the wall, you can go under the wall, you can go around the wall like, but you're going to get another brick wall. Another trait is can they regulate their emotions, right? Do they have that fundamental ability to handle short term pain for long term gain? Right? That's handling the rejection. It's their CRM breaking down. It's, you know, whatever those are things that we might look over.

You talked a bit about that kind of trained skill portion and what I was going to ask earlier is the fact that you've been highly exposed to these environments around direct selling from the college pro painters and, and all these different organizations. How essential for anybody kind of tuning in, wanting to refine their skills? How essential do you find going into a path of direct sales or any kind of these entrepreneurial, highly sales focused ventures to support you in being more successful later in life?

I'll tell you, some of the most successful individuals I've met in the business world came out of an organization called Cutco or Vector Marketing. I've talked to a lot of those, man. They just consistently impress me. And in fact, if you want to get a few guests on Your show. Let's get John Rulin, who's the biggest, most successful Cutco salesperson in history. Millions and millions of dollars a year doing knives. He's got a book out called Giftology. Get Brad Wymart, who did very well in sales. He runs a company called Easy Pro Direct. He does all the payment processing for Tony Robbins, like for Big, you know, Grant Cardone. Get Hal Elrod, who I co authored the Miracle Morning for entrepreneurs with. These are all former Cutco people. So what they learned was referral based sales at Cutco. And that's a really interesting art, right? You've got direct sales, you got handling objections, you got dealing with price stuff, you've got managing the sales flow or the funnels and using CRMs. Those are all good skills to have. But the ability to generate referral based sales is gold. Because if you're constantly sitting waiting for the organization to give you more leads. Right, the Glengarry Glen Ross. Here are the leads that only goes so far. But if you're able to take every happy customer you've got and turn those happy customers into more referrals, that's power. I think there's a, not a science behind it, but I think there's a script, there's a playbook. You can put playbooks in place to generate referrals.

And I think that was the beauty about that organization is the whole like sharpening of the knives giving you a great reason to get back in front of your past customers for those referrals. That was genius.

Oh, they also started the referral process at the very beginning, even before they were selling the first client. They said, by the way, when I come to your home to demonstrate the knives, I'm going to be asking you for five to seven referrals. So get your address book out. But you're going to be so wowed with our process. I will be asking you. So they haven't even started selling and they're telling you they're asking for referrals. Because what they recognized was selling a set of knives to one person was not as valuable as getting that person to give you seven referrals. It was all referrals. Wow. Hardcore. Yeah, well, they seeded it. They used persuasion. They used small little gifts. Then they'd be like, okay, you've given me five, if you give me five more, I'll give you this cheese grater or a apple peeler. Like a $5 gift if you give me five more referrals. Right?

You know, it's amazing when you see Sales scalability by design, like this playbook just was designed for success, right? And when you've worked with a lot of your organization, like even when 800 got junk, how much were you involved in designing the sales systems to make sure that it allowed the company to scale?

On the franchise sales side, I was the one who designed the system. So because I was the only one who'd ever done franchise sales. So there was a guy there named Wayne Millett who was our first franchise sales guy and he was doing a good job. But prior to that, prior to him joining, I taught Brian how to do what I called the reverse sell. So how to script the interview to get the candidate to be selling themselves. How the franchisor can't be overly excited or keen because then they get nervous and run away. So I taught them the interview process and the sales process and the recruiting process. And then as we started getting busier, as we transitioned from Wayne into Laurie Baggio and we were selling more franchises, we talked about creating urgency. And so we would never answer the phone, right? The phone message said, sorry, we're really busy. I'm sure you've seen all the media about us recently. We never said what the media was about, but because we were landing so much media people took it as real. Our email replies would be like we, like we literally would have an automatic email reply to every email saying, sorry, we're really busy right now. We'll get back to you within 24 hours. We've been slammed with some recent media. All that did was it created this urgency and this fear of loss and these franchise partners wanting to sign up. So I was part of that process for sure, part of the scripting of the in person sales days. Not very heavily involved at all. In fact, I don't think I was at all involved in the call center side of sales, but for sure on the franchise side and then also very heavily involved in the interviewing of candidates. I trained everyone in the company on how to do job interviews and certified them on doing interviews. In the first interview it's 80% interviewing, 20% selling, but you have to use the reverse sell. In the second interview it's 50% interviewing, 50% selling. But you have to use the reverse sell because if you're interviewing a candidate and I'm selling you on how great the company is, you're going to start getting a little bit nervous and you're going to start wanting to back away.

I would be very curious to know where you draw the line in the sand. It sounds like you Design amazing persuasion vehicles, especially when it comes to the way that you handle the voicemail as well as the email reply. And I wanted to understand where would be your position as. Where do you put these strategies? Like, let's say in a container of like, is it ethical to do that? I'll open it with that. Tell me more.

Because, well, at the end of the day, like, if you're selling something to someone that is a really good fit for them that they're going to do really well with, then it's almost irresponsible not to sell them. Right. It's very irresponsible. If you're selling somebody something they don't need and you're using these techniques and you know that three days later they're going to have buyer's remorse, then, no, that's not a good thing. But at the end of the day, we knew our franchisees made really good money. By the way, we wouldn't sell a franchise to someone if they weren't going to be successful because we knew that if we sold them a franchise and they failed, they would validate poorly, they'd end up on our disclosure documents, we'd have lawsuits, we'd lose momentum. So it was about identifying the right candidates, helping them make the right decisions, and also removing the normal seven objections that people always have so that they actually are ready to buy. And there's a system and an art to be able to do that. So, no, there's nothing in the article.

In my book, you know, I talk about the five loves of selling. One of them is love the process of selling. And one of the reframings I want to make sure everybody gets to reinforce, as you hear these techniques, is that it's not manipulation, it's empathy. It's speaking a language that's necessary for people to make change in their life. Like, to make a change demands energy. And I think it's in our best interest when we have a great product that we want to do a positive impact, that we use these tools at our disposal to make the maximum impact.

Totally. I mean, listen, without leaving you, who is one of the absolute best speakers in the world at selling from the stage?

Harv Eker.

Yeah, don't love him. On the ethical side of.

Yeah, you didn't ask about the ethics, but Tony Robbins, I'd say, is one of the big guys.

Yeah, yeah, Tony Robbins. Right. And some people say Tony can be a little bit culty, but fuck, man, people love his stuff. They really, really love his stuff. They love the events they value it. It changes lives. He sells hardcore from the stage in his emails, in all of his methods and he embeds all the kinds of neuro linguistic programing in there to sell. He runs long days with air temperature control like the whole thing is a model on selling. But I've never heard anybody, not one. In all of the years that he's been around, I haven't heard a single person say I'm pissed off that I bought from Tony and didn't like what I got. Not one. So is that manipulative selling? No, he's just, it's irresponsible to not help change these people's lives. I'll give you an example. We have something right now for our COO alliance. So I run an exclusive mastermind community only for the second in command. And we have what we call our 10x guarantee. So it costs $8,900 for someone to join for the year. We guarantee they'll get at least $89,000 in value over the course of 12 months. If they don't, we'll give you your money back. We've had one person in six years ask for their money back. Just one. And I kind of don't even think that person really gave it a good shot. But I'm not going to sit and argue with them. But what we're doing is removing the obstacle for somebody to buy. Right? So that's selling. That might be manipulative, I don't know. But man, everybody seems to be pretty happy. We had a positive 80% net promoter score at our last in person event.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of Jay Abraham and so I love his risk reversal type of stuff. We've had him on the show as well and that's the biggest thing. Like how do we remove the risk from the person buying and put it on ourselves so we can take that responsibility of delivering something Excellent. I know with everything you do, you do that excellently.

Lisa Zasevich talks about her irresistible offer. Right. All of those tools are, I think critical to understand and if companies don't embrace that, they're missing a huge opportunity to scale. Let me tell you something else about selling that I think I'm very unique at. I told my sales guys about a year and a half ago that they needed to use a CRM. I said, I don't care what CRM you use. I will have no login or password for the CRM. But it's irresponsible for you not to use a CRM to help you manage your flow, to manage your funnel, to help you manage your leads. But I'm never going to check it, but please fucking use it. I'll pay for training, I'll pay for the system, learn it, use it, whatever one you want to use. But I'm not going to be logging in, I'm not there to manage you. But I will help you understand how important that tool is. And I think so many other companies try to use a CRM to manage somebody. The what I use to manage them is their desire to make more money. Right. If you really want to make 300 grand, a CRM is going to help you get there. Here's how.

Yep, I agree with that. I mean, and it's so fun now that CRMs actually support you so well and don't add a burden to you as a salesperson. Like I remember 15 years ago, like CRMs were a burden, but now, okay, they perceived as a burden because they asked for extra effort. But the long term gain was building the good habits. Now it's almost seamless. So it's like there's no reason not to.

And they're a tool that are helping you to automate and optimize your processes too, right?

Yep. Cameron, it sounds like you've gotten a chance to work on large projects scaling sales team. But I actually have some of my members that listen into these conversations live and I had Jose who actually wanted to ask something that's maybe more on the ground level of starting up. And this is for anybody who might be out there as like a financial coach or any kind of coaching or expert consultant and they're trying to position themselves in the market, attract more clients. As someone that's really good at helping businesses grow, what is the usual advice you give for people at those early stages?

Yeah, I'm going to give everyone some advice. If you're going off as a freelancer who's going to have multiple clients and it's related to how you're going to make money. So let's say that as an example, prior to you going out on your own, you used to make $150,000 a year, or let's call it $100,000 a year. So you made $100,000 a year doing whatever job you were in. That effectively is $50 an hour, right? $50 an hour times 52 weeks a year, times 40 hours a week, that multiplies out to 100,000. Okay, so let's say you make $200,000 a year, that's a hundred dollars an hour. So whatever. You need to know what your hourly rate was in your job. When you're starting out as a freelancer or a financial coach to lots of other companies, you're only going to get paid about 33% of the time. A third of the time, you're going to be doing sales and marketing to find clients, right? You're going to be out there doing outreach, doing whatever you can to find more clients, and no one's paying you that 33% of the time. Another 33% of the time, you're going to be running your business, doing some marketing, doing some sales, doing some admin, doing some paperwork, dealing with emails, dealing with your accounting, talking to your bookkeeper, managing time, organizing schedules, all this that you have to do. And no one pays you for that 33% of your time. So if you're only going to get paid 33% of the time, you need to charge three times what your effective hourly rate used to be. So if you used to get paid $50 an hour to make 100,000 a year, your billable rate now needs to be at least $150 an hour so that you get paid 13 hours a week, times a 50 weeks a year to end up at the hundred. Most people don't price themselves high enough, so that's why they don't actually make the money. So it's different from how you're going to position or find people. Start off by making sure you're charging correctly. And then I would even say to increase that billable rate even more so that you have the money coming in to spend on marketing, to spend on branding, to spend on positioning. Because if you don't, you're never really going to be able to deliver. When I walked into 1-800-got junk in the first seven or eight days that I was there, I raised our prices across the board in all 12 cities we were operating in by 40%. Everyone thought I was crazy, but I'm like, no one's making money. The company isn't making money. Brian's not taking home any money. Our franchisees aren't making money. We're not paying the guys out in the trucks enough to make money. No one's making money. So we're going to charge 40% more so that everybody has more money and we can pay more, we can deliver more, we can have better branding. Six and a half years later, when we were operating in 330 cities, we were probably charging 40% more than I'd even raised our prices by right we were up about 80% more six years later. Charge more and deliver a premium service for a better price with more margins and deliver on your promises to your customers.

That is beautiful. I highly suggest that advice. Now, I'd be curious to know in your experience when you have done that, because I feel like our fear starts kicking in and there's kind of a, oh my God, what are people going to think? Have you actually had a lot of pushback and what did you do when it did come in?

Well, I think that's where the entrepreneurs need to have that DNA of a little bit of the narcissism and a little bit of the tenacity. Right. You're always going to get pushback, but you have to trust your gut. You have to trust the market. You have to go out and look at what other people are charging in your space and then position yourself accordingly. So if you're going to be a financial coach, find out what all the other financial coaches are charging. Take a look at the different tiers of like small, medium, large financial coaches, or, you know, the mid level or the bronze, silver and gold, however you want to determine them, but figure out what they charge. You know, my coaching, as an example, I charge 96,000 a year to coach someone and they get a 90 minute call with me every month and I have a group call with my other clients that they can join every month and that's what they get. So I'm priced at about $5,500 an hour, but my effective hourly rate is even more than that. When I do a paid Zoom event, I'm 10 to 15,000. I do an in person event, it's 40,000 plus travel. So I have to be able to price myself accordingly. So that's what I would be focusing on for everybody is figuring out your pricing and figuring out your market to know where to price yourself. There's coaches out there that are more expensive than I am. Marshall Goldsmith is $250,000 a year and he does one or two calls with you a month. That's two and a half times what I charge. But he also has coached, you know, Steve Jobs and Jack Welch and, you know, coaches at a different layer.

Fair enough. Cameron, I feel like we've just scratched the surface, but there's so much that you've been able to deliver in our little chat here today. For me, the biggest thing is just understanding how referral power is actually something we should not underestimate and making sure that we have that into our business plan and we're not afraid to go out there. I love how having sales design into your recruiting design as well. If you're doing partnerships, that's gotta be in place and sales is everywhere. If we nurture that skill, it's gonna help us so much and if we're gonna be rec in our companies that we're going to have to look for some sales acumen in a lot of the key roles. Not necessarily all of them, but it definitely helps when you have people with these skills. So go out there, get comfortable with sales, keep listening to this podcast. And for anybody who's operating a business and wants to get more insights from Cameron, my God, he has so many books, including free PR Vivid Vision, Double Double, and he has a COO alliance. For those of you who are in operations within companies, we'll make sure we have links to all these resources in the show notes. And of course, Cameron, I know you've been on the show before, but that was back when it was Superhumans at Work. Now that it's Selling with Love, there's a question I ask every guest, which is, what does Selling with Love mean to you?

All right, so, and by the way, also check out my Second In Command podcast, because if you're listening to a podcast now, check us out on YouTube or anywhere you listen to podcasts. The Second Command podcast is huge. What Selling with Love means to me is to remember that everyone that we're talking to is just going through the same process that we are as humans and we're all just walking each other home. All of us are struggling with something. Everyone that you're selling to has a problem in their personal life with their relationships, their kids, their parents, financials, their health. And to be cognizant of the fact that none of this shit actually matters. This is just what we're doing to make money. And if we can connect with people on a human level and really care about them, not only are we going to have that stronger human connection, but they're going to buy from you as well.

I like that. With all the technology that's coming as well, I think our humanity is what keeps us to have a soul in the way that we operate. So I appreciate that, Cameron, once again, thank you so much for your time, your wisdom, and for everybody tuning in. Make sure you go and listen to the Second In Command podcast as well. We'll add that into the show notes. And of course, keep Selling with Love. I am your host, Jason Mark Campbell, and this is the Selling with Love podcast.

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