How To Become A Sales Machine (Make A TON Of Money)

How do you get people to actually buy what you're selling? You know how some people can sell anything while other people are going to let me think about it? I'm going to teach you the truth and the secrets behind how to get people to buy your things. Whether you're selling a client, pitching yourself in a room that could change your life, it all comes down to this one skill. Can you get people to do what you want them to do? AKA sales. So I'm going to break down how we get deals done at Contrarian Thinking and how we do 9 figures in revenue a year. Because if you're bad at sales, don't worry. It isn't a gift like so many people want you to believe. It is a skill. You can learn it if you follow my framework. The thing is, most people are getting 4 things wrong. The first being the wrong mindset, because the wrong mindset will actually kill your sale before you even pick up the phone. Even if you fix the next 3 mistakes, the deal will be lost here. And I need you to really get this because I just went on fire with some of my sales reps about this. If you do not believe in what you sell, quit. Get out of the company. If you do not believe that somebody can buy it at the price that you are selling it at, if you are poor person minded, you will never make a dollar. And I call this selling from your wallet. So the very first step is do not sell based on what is in your wallet. You are not rich enough. And I told my sales team, this is why their lowest performers were underperforming. If you talk yourself out of the deal in your own head first, nobody else is going to pay it. If you think a $10,000 service sounds expensive, but a $10,000 service is cheap if the problem it solves costs $100,000, then why are you obsessed on the $10,000 number? You gotta stop selling from your own limited belief system. You are not selling yourself. You are selling the solution to someone else's problem priced against what that problem is actually costing them. I like to think about it like this. We do not sell price. We sell solutions To problems. If it costs $1 million to live forever, let me tell you what, somebody would pay that to solve that problem. And there are a bunch of studies that show you what it is costing you right now if you undersell yourself. McKinsey actually has this one where they talked about the average company's income statement, and they found that most sellers never do the math on raising your prices 1%. How much does that increase your profit? Anybody know? Well, if you increase your price by 1%, It increases your profit by 8%. Not revenue, profit. That's a bigger swing than cutting costs 1% or growing volume 1% combined. So most sellers are terrified of a number that mathematically is the cheapest way to grow the business. Underpricing is not playing it safe. That's you setting your own money on fire. You're leaving the highest leverage move on the table because it feels uncomfortable and you're not good enough to say the number out loud. Second, I want you to sell from Confidence, not from need. This is really important because your words are going to be this bad mindset leaking out if you have a bad mindset. So before you fix a single phrase in your perfect close, you need to fix where your head's pointed at. Because the buyer, if you are my least favorite thing in sales, thirsty, nobody likes that. My next least favorite thing in sales, non- Confident. They are wanting you to carry what I call the frame. So you have to fix any neediness you have. You have to be on the buyer's side of the table. You have to solve their problem, and you have to never beg for the deal because you're so confident it'll be the best decision that they ever made to buy. Hey, Devin, want to see something cool? I'm late for class, man. Trust me, you'll want to see this.

What's that?

I thought maybe after school we could get a 9-5. I don't do that. I'm a builder. Come on, man. Listen to how the wrong mindset sounds out loud. These aren't bad phrases, by the way. They're symptoms of this terrible line right now. Just checking in. Ugh, gross.

Needy.

You're circling back because you have nothing of value to add. A confident seller says something else. Hey, I thought of you and this would be valuable for you. Let me know if you're interested. No, no, no. That's you handing them the work because you're afraid to lead. A confident seller says, Does option A or B make more sense for you? Wrong mindset. We can discount it. That's you admitting that you never believed in the price in the first place. A confident seller says, well, we could always make it more expensive. They say, actually, do you see what your return on investment is for this? Unconfident people, I just want to be considered for the role. No, you're not trying to be picked. This isn't dodgeball in middle school. A confident seller says, hey, based on what you've described, here's exactly why I'm the right person. And these are not word tricks. They are simply the right mindset and showing you how to say the words that agree with it. There's actually a study by this company called Gong that found that top performers use you, your, and your team about how much more often? 29% more often than average reps. This is a big difference in your mindset. The top reps are not thinking about I, they're thinking about Y-O-U. And so these average reps are thinking about themselves, their commission, their wallet. So a lot of times people will say, that's too expensive. What I would say is, well, what happens to you if you don't solve this? What's the cost to you not actually getting the solution to the problem that you have today? How expensive is that problem that you have? It's not just one question you're going to say. You're going to take them down a question rabbit hole. So if you say to me, hey, Codie, it's too expensive, your construction company coming in and redoing my house, I'm going to say, well, what does it cost you right now if you don't fix this and you continue on with the contractor you told me about who's taking way too long? Well, I guess every month it costs me another $10,000. Because, you know, all these fees that are piling up. So if you wait another 3 months, that's $30,000. Is that right? Okay, well, uh, didn't we talk about how my services are $25,000? So wouldn't you actually save 3 months plus an additional $5K if you went with our service instead? Or am I not understanding the math? So you're going to ask a question, ask a question, reframe their words to them, ask a question, reframe their words to them, ask a question. And that is the way you do it. I like to think about it as Ask Q. Then they're going to say words. Then you're going to reframe words. Then you're going to ask Q. And you're going to do it again and again until you die or close the sale. Now, most people argue discount, go quiet. No, no, no, no, no. You're not attacking or defending. You're just asking questions. You're just a curious buddy over here. So you're not going to fight the customer ever. You're going to redo their words, into your next words and then ask the question again. At the end of this, you actually get the buyer to sell themselves. Okay, let's talk about the wrong message you can have in sales. I want you to think current state, then I want you to think future state. Then we're going to talk about the bridge between the two. Picture 2 versions of your client standing side by side. This one has a bot, tired, overpaying, doing it the hard way. This one, bot, he's got it handled, happy, making more money. It is the same person, but your entire job is to show them that this gap exists. Not selling them across it, showing them it's there, making doing nothing feel really expensive. That's it. Nobody thinks about their car until they sit in someone else's new one. Now they're still getting home through the same route, except the seat is nicer. There's a giant screen. The car looks fancy from the outside. Nothing about your car changed as far as a ride is really concerned, but you got what's called mimetic desire. Somebody else made you want a thing because they had a thing.

thing.

Here's where most reps blow it. They see this gap exists, so they start selling it. Wrong order. You don't actually tell the buyer that their gap is there. You get them to tell you. So this study published by Ohio State University showed people are more persuaded by arguments they generate themselves than by the exact same argument coming from someone else because self-generated reasoning doesn't feel like being sold. It feels like their own conclusion. This is the exact thing my team uses for many of our companies, and it starts by getting the client to reveal 3 things about themselves. Where are they at right now? What is the future state they wish they were at? What's the bridge? Now, the current state. This is where your potential customer sit in today. We get them to reveal this, like, what is painful? Who's involved? Where are you losing time, money? How much time, money are you losing? The more specificity, the more you win here. If you can get a prospect to admit something's not working, that really works. It could also be time. The richer people are, the less they care about money and the more they care about time. But let's just say that your prospect cares the most about money. I like when we can have a number out loud. So maybe your prospect is a business owner, like people who come into Boardroom, and you're like, wait a second, you're a business owner and you haven't done a P&L review? So you don't know where the money's hiding in your business? How much money do you think you're actually spending? that you shouldn't be spending? Or how much money do you think you could be making if you knew where you invested a dollar, it made you $5 or $10? Then you have them do that math. So usually they'll be like, well, I have a million-dollar business. I think we're probably overspending here. I don't know if advertising is working. So what if you did more advertising? Oh, that's about $100,000. Okay, so the math is $100,000. Once they've said it, they own it. I also really like to write it down, and I also usually show it to them. Oh, so you said $100,000? Bam. Next is future state. This is where we learn our prospect client is wanting a certain situation they're not at today. So we might ask, where do you want to be? How do you want it to work out? What would happen if this was already working in your business? Again, you're not pitching your solution yet. For people who come into the boardroom as business owners, it would be like, if my business right now knew how to spend money, what our return on ad spend was, if I had a great COO, or CFO in my business, I would be making more money. God, I could probably go to Johnny's football or baseball practice, or if I actually had a chief of staff who was helping me. Okay, I'm starting to paint the picture in the future. I'm not pitching anything yet. You're still just asking questions. It's kind of like Socrates said, I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think.

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So once you have the current and future state, now we're going to start revealing the bridge from where they are currently to how do we get to the future. This is the only place where your product shows up. Not here, not here, it's here. So here's how we get you from what you described, potentially having a business Where you're missing out $100K a year. Also, you really would like to spend time with your kids and family, but you haven't been able to because you haven't made some of the right hires. What if you had a process to help you find the hidden dollars in your business every month with the P&L review? Do you think you'd make more than 6 figures on that? Great. What if you had a process and an operating system to get everything that you do into a single SOP so that by this point, You can go to as many basketball games because you have somebody else running the plays for you. You've got a team of operators you can trust. Now I'm starting to talk about this business, right? So if you've done this right, the current and the future state, the bridge starts to write itself because you're just restating their own numbers back to them. And then you're attaching, hey, the solution for you guys is Vorgrip. And this is also why it's really important to make sure you're talking to the right avatar. Because if I'm talking to somebody who does not own a business for Boardroom, then it doesn't matter how good my sales pitch is. It doesn't actually make sense for them. If I'm talking to somebody who doesn't want to grow their business, they actually just want their business to stay flat. They're happy as is. There's no problems in their business. Then Boardroom is not going to work for them. This is also where we can discount it goes to die. Because here it's like, no, no, no. Well, we could discount it, but why does that even matter? You're talking about $100K ROI. and time with your kid, are we really going to talk about discounting that? You're talking to them about real value. You're quoting them back what they're going to get from your offering. So let's get more specific. Let's say that the client says, I actually need to scale my business. I want to grow. I say, okay, well, what do you think is the number one reason why you can't grow? Well, I don't have the money to hire people. Why don't you have the money to hire people? Well, probably because you don't know where the money's sitting and where to invest it, right? Which is why you need a P&L review. They would actually tell you that. And you also feel like you want to go to Johnny's little practice, but you can't. Why? Because you don't have anybody to fill in with you, which is why you need our operating system for creating SOPs in your business so that other people could actually run them. Then once we do that, you could actually hire that chief of staff eventually that you've wanted to do. But if you don't have a P&L, if you don't have standard operating procedures to follow, if you don't have a system to execute on finding the money in your business, you probably cannot get to the promised land of $100K in savings plus your chief of staff that you want to hire. Now, everything I just showed you, from finding the buyer whose pain is already expensive to knowing what you're selling and how, none of it matters if your pipeline's empty. You can have the best sales system on earth and still stare at a slow month thinking, I need more customers. And guess what? You probably don't have a lead problem. You have an asking problem. You're not getting in front of enough of the right buyers and you're not following up when they go quiet. That's why my team and I built a free growth kit with HubSpot. It's called 2X Your Customer Base. The link's below. Because distribution beats product, referrals beat advertising, and a simple, consistent follow-up cadence beats marketing every time. Here's what you get. 3 proven lead source channels with exactly how to start each one this week. A follow-up tracker so leads stop falling through the cracks like mine did, and instructions so AI writes you some cold emails and call scripts for you. You're going to learn how to build referral partnerships that turn other businesses into your unpaid sales force. I want you to run cold outreach that actually gets responses. And reactivate past customers who've gone quiet. My favorite part is the kit's follow-up tracker because deals don't die from a bad pitch. They die from nobody following up. Fix that and you'll outearn competitors twice your size. The right buyer can't close themselves if they never hear from you. So fill the top of your funnel, then run the system. This is all free, made by my team at HubSpot for you who's sponsoring this video. Go fill that pipeline with the right customers.

All right.

I want to talk about the wrong proof. This is the thing most people get wrong. It's not a testimonial. It's not a quote with no name and no photo. When you get the right proof into what you're selling, it makes a reasonable person feel a little silly for doubting you. And you can't prove something if you haven't actually defined it. So most reps talk about value. That means like it's something specific. But actually, that's not what we want to say. You might say in your business, we clean homes better than others. How can you prove that? It's an option. There's nothing attached. So instead, what would good proof look like? Well, good proof would have a name. It would have a face on it. If you're going to do a testimonial, it would probably have a photo of like a before and after of something you guys have actually done. It might be a Stripe payment link that actually shows the dollar amount inside of it. If it's clean homes, it's the dirty home. Then it's the really clean home. If it's the happy customers, it's a text message from Sarah saying, God, look at this amazing before and after. That would be even better. And maybe even to show more, you, you link it to her social media account so they can check and see that she's a real prospect. So really what we want is for you to have a way to sell at a premium. You need to show that that's a claim you can prove. I like to think specific problem, specific solution, specific return. Okay, so once you have what you're actually claiming, the worst thing you could do actually is just have like nondescript words with no image of a person and no name saying you guys are the best. That would be a fail. I really want you to think about what is good, bad, and great. Let's say you're that cleaning company. The bad version of this would be there's no name. It's generic, aka doesn't look like a screenshot, and there's no photo on the testimonial. A good one would have a photo and a name and maybe a screenshot so it looks like a text. A great one would have a photo, a name, a screenshot, maybe a photo of before and after, or the holy grail, which would be a video of them actually talking about it. Bad proof? Vague. Good proof, real, and can kind of see why this would be hard to fake. Great. The other person is actually doing your selling for you. When my team built the Boardroom, we didn't tell people we were the best. We actually showed them a real business and real revenue with real names like these. We let the results talk so we didn't have to. Let me show you one of the real pieces of proof that brings more people into our Business Owner Circle than anything else. I'll give you the sauce. Here's a real one from our community. This guy's name is DJ Stir Fry, which is super fun. I like talking about a DJ because this is like one of the harder businesses to scale. And yet we took this guy from about $500,000 in annual revenue to more than $1 million within a few months in the community. His name is Steven Rice. You can see it right here. Look at this tweet that we put out there about it and that he even confirms it at the bottom of the thread and says, these guys are amazing. I'm so grateful for what you guys did. Okay, great. Then we also show a photo of him, as I said, and we show the real steps he took. He goes on to pile on about the difference and how before he was in the boardroom, he didn't have any systems and processes. And now that he's in it, look how he's going to scale. And then he ends with, I'm just getting started. We have so many of these that it is almost hard to have proof against us. One of the best things you can do is turn your proof and testimonials into stories. So look at this. Go to Contrarian Thinking articles and look at all of the articles about people we've helped buy businesses, people we've helped grow businesses. All of them have a photo attached. They have a story. They usually have numbers attached because you want to stack enough proof that you don't have to convince anyone of anything. You just make them look a little dumb for disagreeing with you. But the other thing that I would say that's really important, also make counterclaims. Like, I love to say I can't help everybody. 99% of people will do nothing. And even if they come in and learn my process, they will take no execution. And so because of that, I have no idea if I can grow your business. If you do nothing, even with all the things that we give you, you will make $0. So the average person does not run a business, does not grow their business, and for that reason should probably not come into the boardroom if you're average and you do nothing. And why that's really important, that's called an anti-sell. And so I want to make sure that you are doing not just the real sell, but telling people, don't come to me too if you're not So if you aren't closing deals, it may not be your fault exactly. You may just be selling to the wrong person. One of the best lines in sales that's made me 9 figures multiple times over is this: you don't sell anyone anything. You find the people already predisposed to want the thing that you are selling. This is not about your product. It's about finding the right avatar for your product. So stop trying to convince people. Find the ones who are already in pain. Unlike dating, this is where I can fix them mentality actually wins. Find the person drowning in the exact problem you solve. If they don't feel the problem, they're going to buy what you're selling. This is what we call wrong person, but I call this the magnet and repellent avatar. I'm pulling this directly from my book, which comes out on September 18th. You're going to want to be at this launch. We are giving away $1 million in cash and prizes, plus we are giving away things that we've never before seen done live for entrepreneurs only. If you run a business, if you want to run a business, you're going to want to be there. Plus, I'm going to reveal all the secrets inside of this book. So basically, a good avatar looks like this. They're financially ready. They can afford and value what you're selling. They're reliable. They show up and do the work that you're asking them to do. They're the right fit. So they match the playbook that you have because they have the pain you're looking to solve. And they're energizing. The conversations actually feel good. A bad avatar is stretched. They can't afford it. They're chaotic. They ghost and push scope. They're a misfit. The situation doesn't fit and they're draining. You dread seeing their me. That is the difference between a good and a bad avatar. If you find a good avatar, you will win. If you have only bad avatars, you will lose. Okay, so to take this even further, I want you to run this diagnostic during your assessment and ask yourself, is what I'm selling oxygen or dessert? Oxygen means something breaks if they say no. A burst pipe, a missed payroll. Dessert means life goes on fine either way. If you're selling dessert to someone who thinks they're buying oxygen, you'll wonder why the deal that felt so good on the call goes cold a week later. Nothing was actually on fire. So we really want to think about how do we find more painful problems, and then they will find a budget to fix it. If my customer doesn't buy from me in 30 days, what happens? My roof falls in. Oxygen business. Inconvenient problem. If my roof isn't cleaned, it doesn't Look nice. That's not very much budget, an inconvenient problem. So this is really important if you want to sell more. Now, all of these skills come down to this. Shut up long enough to let somebody else do the selling for you. You are solving someone's real problem, not trying to convince them of something they don't need. That works whether you're closing a client, negotiating a raise, or pitching yourself in any room you walk into. Fix these 4 and you will hear a lot less, I'll think about it, and you will start closing. Okay. By the way, I have an entire proof vault for you. If you want to see exactly what good proof looks like, click this link right here. You're going to want to show up live to this event. I'm going to give you all the free juice and I'll give you exactly what proof you can copy that's led to our 8 and 9-figure businesses.