The Psychology of Selling: How to Make Money in 2024

With sales, the only thing that makes you better is more. I would actually do the opposite of what you're doing. I would obsess on one thing if I was you. What's the process? Are you now the richest of all of your friends? 75% of businesses fail. What makes the 25% that win? Persistence. Here's the good news. Everyone has the same problems. So whether you're just getting started, trying to grow, or even trying to sell for the first time, you're not the first person to be in this position. So today I'm solving your business problems and I'm doing it live with people I've picked at random from my community of 800 plus business buyers and owners asking what their biggest problem is. Welcome to the problem. Profit. How do we make everybody some money around here? What can we do for you today? How can we help?

We are looking to create kind of a pipeline for new clients.

Okay, break down for me. What types of clients? What are we selling? Give me some specifics.

So we're looking for some more commercial cleaning clients. So we're looking for businesses around like 10,000 square feet. The other thing a bit related with bringing out more clients, but bringing more employees.

Michelle's biggest problem is that she needs more customers and she also needs more employees. She's got the two sides of a small business as her biggest issue. We're going to solve part of the customer issue, which in commercial contracting is. Is hard. That's a meaty issue. And then I think this getting more employees is actually way easier than anybody thinks. Let's see if we're right. What's your website? CleanChoice wi.com the lifeblood of small businesses is reviews. It is making sure that when people think, especially from a commercial standpoint, that they're going to change their service, you will crush it. And in a market like yours that's relatively small, you want to make sure that you are standing up at the top from an SEO perspective. And reviews are one of the best ways to do it. The best way to get clients is to have your current clients tell other people to come along because the service is great. 99% of consumers, before they do a purchase, they read a review. If your reviews are below three and a half stars on average, customers will likely not consider your product. And most of the time, something like 95, 96% of the time, customers look for the negative reviews when they search through reviews, not just the positive ones. One of the most impactful things you can do in a small business is try to figure out how to get more people to say nice things about you. How many clients do you have right now?

We have 10 clients.

So I would obsess on one thing if I was you, which is reviews to start. I would reach out to every single one of your 10 clients and with a bit of a handhold, give them a reason to give you guys a review. Probably go walk into them if you can, and go straight to the owner and say, I have such an embarrassing ask. We just took over this company. It would mean the world for me if you would write us a review. I kind of drafted one up right here. Like, I have it on my phone. Can I text this to you? Would you mind? Like, are you. We could workshop it. Just be so, you know, kind of sweet and endearing and my guess is, by and large, they're going to say yes. So you're going to go from 3 to 10 reviews. I love helping business owners solve their problems. It's miserable to go out alone, but it's not always possible for us to be in the same place doing it at the same time. When I can't meet in person, there's only one tool I use for all my conversations. That's this Riverside, AKA what you're listening to right now. Riverside ensures that I can talk to someone anywhere in the world and record it in 4k so the quality of the video actually matches the quality of the people When I post these videos on YouTube. And when you're having a vulnerable conversation, there's no worse way to start than, can you hear me? Can you see me? That doesn't happen with Riverside. Riverside also records separate audio and video tracks so we can cut out those inevitable awkward interruptions that I know are all of our favorite parts about virtual interviews. If you don't want to edit separate tracks by hand, Riverside has already thought of that. They have in platform editing software that edits based off of a 99% accurate AI transcription. And if that's not simple enough, they take AI one step further with their show notes. Summarize all your content into a description optimized for SEO and automatic chapters so you know your audience knows what to expect when diving in. I love tech. I got you guys a deal. If you want to try it for yourself, get the code and link in the description. That's not going to get you one. What you need to get, you need a lot more reviews to do it. Now, you don't do any residential cleaning. Correct.

So we work with, like, the larger property management companies. Usually. So there are like smaller companies within these buildings that see us and work with us too. But that could be a good way to get more people.

What's kind of cool is if you Google commercial cleaning Milwaukee, which is usually where I start, the other cleaning services don't have that many. So I see one that looks like it services house cleaning as opposed to commercial, that has like 200 reviews, but the rest of them and another one that has 500 reviews. So there's two house cleaning services that are pretty aggressive, but the rest of them have basically no reviews. And so if you have 13 reviews, plus let's say another 10 underneath that, plus the couple contracts you're gonna do for your family and friends that they can also review you on, you're gonna start ranking higher and then you're gonna have. Then the second thing that I would do is we talked about the referral process just a little bit. You said you're working the problem. What's the process for referrals? Do we have one right now?

Not really. It's been for me to go in and get some more face to face time with the clients. But again, those are usually the ones that we're cleaning for. Not the property managers are kind of who pays the bills. I don't know if I'm even necessarily that'll be good for getting reviews. Probably. It's like creating that relationship. But as far as getting more clients, I don't know if I'm quite talking to the right people.

Do you have any really good relationships with the 10 clients you have right now? Are any of them like you're their really trusted person? You guys are friends?

I have some that are decent, but none that are super strong unfortunately right now.

Okay. So I think that should be mission critical is you don't have that many clients so you don't need a comprehensive process. But I always feel good if I have a plan and I follow the plan. So I'd create like a little one page brief and an Excel spreadsheet and in it a simple plan that's gonna be, I'm going to take out to coffee or lunch or it's probably cold in Milwaukee right now. I'm gonna take them a bone broth. If they're the kind of healthy type. I'm gonna take them like some hot cocoa, whatever it is, to the office and I'm gonna ask them if I could borrow 20 or 30 minutes of their time. Again, you have a benefit that you are a new owner of this business and you all are Young. And so you're gonna be. You're asking for a favor. You're like, remember when you started out and it was tough? You know, we're trying to get some referrals. We're so good at the service now, but we're not so good at marketing. We're not very good salespeople. Can you help me out? And I always kind of do this. Hate to say it works great with men, works awesome with men. You know, you give them a little wink, like, come on. I'm like the daughter you had. That's nice to you still, you know, and so I would use that. That's your first range. The cold calling thing is interesting. I think in the beginning of a business where you all are at, you guys are the best cold callers, and it's great to have a service, but I only usually like to bring in cold callers in my business when I already have a set process. And I have a lot of what's called sales enablement. And sales enablement resources are things like, here's a list of all the testimonials we have about how great we are. Here's a list of the services that we have that's different than everybody else. Here's a list of a kind of client that we serve really well and one that we don't. And we'll refer you to somebody else if you're not that type. Here's what we say when they tell us no.

Right. We like pitch.

Right, Right, Exactly. And so this is all called sales enablement. And you want to have these resources available for your cold calling team, otherwise they're not gonna be very productive. And so I feel like what you guys should be doing first is probably leading from the front. And this is not that complicated. This is like you say, okay, every single day, I am, for one hour or two hours max, I am going to sit down and write out a list of prospects that I think are reasonable, and I'm going to call every single one of them during that time period. And then usually at the end of the day, the next day. Back when I did this, when we originally had some of our businesses, I would keep a call sheet, and I write out who are the names for the next day. And I'm a little bit older, so now you would do this all on a CRM or in your computer, but I used to write it out. And there's something really nice about crossing them off as you go. The other thing you might want to think about here is getting the avatar the 10k square foot thing is good to know. The fact that other people that property managers at the sort of highest level or your target is good to know because what you really want is a super tight avatar. Like right now, do you know who you serve incredibly well? And the answer is probably not, because you only have 10 clients.

Right.

And so whoever does your cold calling, they're only going to be as good as the data that they give you too. And so you need to create some sort of CRM or it can be really simple in a spreadsheet of who are the owners you reached out to, where are they located? What was the square footage of the building? What kind of company was this? Were they interested? Did they take more than a phone call or not? Did they already have current cleaners or were you their first cleaners? All the indicators of what would be a great commercial cleaners Milwaukee client. Right? Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

So you might find out, wow, we do incredible when this is their first time getting outsourcing cleaning, like that's our target. We wanna find them. Or you might say we do incredible with office complexes that have a lot of manufacturing. Like they're really dirty. And so I think you need to narrow down your target avatar. All right. I don't love their sales process right now. We gotta make some major changes to the way that they're going out and trying to close sales. I think violence and speed of action in sales is really important, followed very closely by a systematic way to track every single engagement you're having with potential buyers. And most people fail at the second and they never even try the first. So we got to get them to move faster on going after clients aggressively and we got to get them to track how every single one of their interactions went. How can we help?

So in my vending business, I have a significant challenge with locating they need more sales. So the primary issue is the presence of a large distributor. Right. And they do vending on the side. My advantage is that I have higher quality machines, I have higher quality product and a better customer service. And so I'm trying to figure out how I can overcome the competition.

They've got vending machines, they've got the operations, but they don't have enough revenue. We're going to see if we can figure out how to get this guy more money in the door by getting him more locations. Do you have to compete for the same business? Is there a way to tier the end user that you are going after that wouldn't be really that interesting for your competitor?

I do go for both. Right. And a lot of the cases that I go into, there's already bending there. Things that I hear from people that I do end up taking over from them is that they offer poor service, they don't stock the machines. The machines are broken half the time they're. They don't work. And so that's when I can really get in there. But they're under contract.

Wait, let me ask another question. So what's your hit rate or your success rate on somebody already having vending with one of your competitors and they all have contracts, how often are you convincing them to come to you?

I don't know. I'd have to reach out to maybe 30 or 40 places to find one that would actually that isn't under contract or is able to move on.

What's your hit ratio if you find a spot that doesn't have vending in it right now and no competitors are in?

I haven't closed one that doesn't have vending yet.

Interesting. So. So it's actually a higher ratio of converting current users than converting people who don't have vending. And you talk them into it. What's your sample size? How many have you reached out to?

I have reached out to probably largely around maybe 100 different businesses in the area.

So we're not dealing with really a big enough sample size. Because if you only reached out to 100 and you're getting let's say three of those 90, do you know what percentage of the hundred are currently using vending machines as opposed to what percentage are not?

Yeah, I would say like 95% have vending.

So basically how many have you reached out to that don't have vending?

Literally it's probably been like three that I found that don't have vending. So like for me to identify that they don't have vending, I have to like physically go into the location. So I spend days just driving around and I see how many cars are there and I walk in and, and I ask them if they have vending. That's one of my first questions. Then I just continue to call, you know, and you know, it's usually the decision makers and thin or, you know, like a lot of these are kind of remote run businesses. So I'm not necessarily dealing with the decision maker at the first go. So I have to continually reach out in hopes that I reach them at a time when the decision maker is actually there.

The biggest thing you can do in sales is turn sales into a statistical numbers which means you need to document every single phone call you make. You need to document who said yes and who said no. You need to document how long it took from the moment that you called them to the moment that you closed them. With sales, the only thing that makes you better is more information and decreasing the knowledge gap. What I find with most salespeople is they instead feel like there's some sort of, if they use this word, it'll work out really well. Oh, they used this close. And so that worked. Actually. You don't sell anybody anything. You find the people who already want what you're selling and you just figure out who are those people better. And then you don't have to sell them because they are waiting for the thing that you have. And that's a mistake I made many times in my business. And so I think he needs more numbers, but he also needs to track who are the type of people that already want what he's selling. Let's take it a step back for a second. What do most of these businesses look like that have vending, that have become your ideal clients? Are they strip malls? Are they small multifamily apartment buildings? What's the the profile?

Basically either like an office complex or just like a factory where there's lots of blue collar workers that are there. Like ideally It's a be 24 hours. So like I think about facilities, manufacturing facilities that have, you know, multi shifts.

Your process right now is really individual listings that you find and you either drive to go see them or you reach out via email or phone call to a set number of listings. Is that the process right now?

Pretty much. It's brute force. Yeah.

Yeah. And where are you located?

I'm in Corpus Christi, Texas.

So a couple things I think about when I'm trying to do a sales strategy is first I always ask myself, what if it was easy? So if I ask myself, what if it was easy, what would it look like? And in your case, if it was easy, I think something that would be really great for you is what if you could get to all the owners in one place for your three types of target markets? So you're, you know, let's call it factories and industrial complexes, your office owner types. And then maybe you think it could be something like these absentee stores. So like, what if I could get into room with those three types of people? And so I would actually do the opposite of what you're doing. What I'd want to do is I would want to go get relationships with big groups where you can be in the center of influence pool. So I don't know if you've already done this, but typically when we try to sell any of our B2B products, we go to trade association. So almost immediately, I'm looking up, where is the, like, industrial real estate meetup? Corpus Christi. Where is the office owners? Office real estate investors, Corporate Corpus Christi. Whereas the small business owners, you know, SBA Corpus Christi. Because what I actually want to do is I want to just meet the owners. And if I. I believe that if I meet more owners than anybody else, even if they themselves do not have the facility for you to go into, you're going to develop a friendship, you're going to tell them what you do, and you're not going to try to pitch anybody. You're just going to start explaining your business. Yeah, we have an incredible business. We almost have more demand than we can handle. And it works out because we have vending machines and we charge nothing to put in and maintain the vending machines in people's locations. We have, I think, the best customer service out there. And it's wild. We pay people a percentage of what we sell. So it's like free found money. So I'm almost. I'm kind of like beating people off me, actually, to place my vending machines. And then you would say, what do you do? And if you're in the Corpus Christi Real estate investors group, you know, they're going to tell you, I own this, I own this. You're going to go, do you have a vending machine in all of yours? And they might go, yes, no, maybe. So who else do you know who I should talk to? And I would basically build my entire business off of networking at center of influence events. So I don't know if you've thought about doing that yet, but you just have such a higher hit ratio if you can get in a room where all the players already are and you can label yourself a player. I think a couple good places to start are. One, Facebook groups are wild. There's a Facebook group for everything. So I would actually look in there, especially probably most of these people who are owners who are a little bit older. And then the second thing that I would do is I would go to a forum like BiggerPockets, because real estate investors are gonna be probably one of your best target markets. And BiggerPockets has segmentation by every city in the country. And so I'd be trying to find who are like, what if it was really easy and there's like five to ten guys you need to know in Corpus Christi who know all the guys who own all the real estate in your spheres. How do you get to those 5 or 10? You become best buds with them. You almost do unfair deals for them. And because you did that, everything else starts spiraling from there. And so I'm gonna shut up for a second, but that's kind of idea number one. Is that helpful?

Yes, I like that idea. I never thought about, but yes to your point, like get everybody in one room. That would be perfect.

What else would be helpful for us to discuss?

We've been trying to figure out what works really good for us to bring on those like hourly low, like lower wage kind of employees. And the way to do it is definitely not just setting up interviews and hoping people show up. We have no luck with that. The best way we found is actually to, to start like creating a relationship with people. But I would like to give them a little bit more of a view into the job, I guess, rather than just like a phone conversation of you're going to be cleaning a business and you know, blah, blah, blah. Like I try to create more of, I mean, a millennial culture of like, you can show up when you want as long as you're there from, you know, for this many hours. We have a ton of flexibility. You could pick up extra hours. Like it's more under their control now.

When it comes to employees. I actually think this one we're going to figure out, she basically has an issue where she can't get more employees in the door. And then if she does get them, they don't show up. Every small business owner has this exact same thing. Do you have good employees right now?

Yeah.

Do you ask them for referrals and incentivize them with bonuses?

I do not. I mean, I ask them if they know anybody, but I don't have any incentives.

Almost always in every one of my businesses, the best employees, you either steal from somebody else or they're referred by one of your best employees. And the great part about if they're referred is then there's a much higher likelihood they're going to keep showing because that's somebody else's responsibility. I would do two things. I would institute a company wide policy for referrals and bonuses. For if somebody refers somebody to the company and they stay longer than X period, whatever you want that period to be. And I would make the bonus not immaterial. You know, make it, yeah, make it something that would make them excited. And then I would go to two or three of your best employees right now. And I would sit down with them and say, I'll pay you for this hour of me sitting down with you. Would you help me think through who you might know or who other people might know? That would be a good fit for our company. I want to pay you to think about referring for me. And I will also give you a bonus if any of these people come. And then if you can get one or two of them to refer, you make a really big deal about the referral and the bonus. So everybody else, you go, incredible. Stacy gave us a referral. Stacy gets something cute, you know, make her feel really special. And then she also gets the X dollar amount bonus. And you do that a couple of times. And maybe even you keep a list every single month. The number one referrer is here because what gets measured gets managed. And what people have in front of their face is usually the thing from a recency bias they continue to pay attention to. And so that's where I'm starting too.

Because we don't even have any, like regular communication between all of our employees. Usually it's just up to them. They don't even know each other. So setting up, you know, even like a little employee newsletter to kind of let them know what's going on could be a great way to share that information.

100%. Yeah. And you know, some of the fun things you can do in an employee newsletter in the beginning is like if you don't have that many people at the end, put like a $5 gift card, like, did you make it all the way to the end? That's awesome. Here's a little something that you get and then what you're doing is it's Pavlov's dog, right? We all are incentive driven machines. And so we only do the things that we are that are positively charged for us to do more of. And so if you can give them a little endorphin rush from the activity that you want, employees will tend to do more of it. And I don't think you have to go overboard with this. You can do like those one to two different activities and you should get some results. When you treat employees well and when you pay them well and when you treat them consistently the same way over time, they end up staying and they tell other people about it. Happy people bring along other happy people. So I think they are going to solve this and this business will do well as long as they can get more customers. The second thing that I might consider doing is there's a lot of junior people that one are interested in the vending machine space that just like the vending machine space. And something kind of magical happens when a young hungry kid goes to like older tried and true vets and asks them if they'll take a chance on their business. And what I found is often we use those, we use them as deal sourcers in our business but people will tell them things and people will give them access that sometimes they won't give people like you or me because I don't know, there's some guard up or like maybe a little bit more on their level. If you had like a niece, a nephew or whatever and you could teach them the door knocking portion and you could, you could say you have skin in the game in this business with me because I will give you a percentage for as long as you work with me of X that you do and let me set you up and I want you to go on these routes and here's how I want you to do it and I want you to do it from a perspective of I am a naive young kid and I actually have this business that I'm working on with my friend and you know, we're really good, we partnered up with a serious operator. But would you guys take a chance, you know, on a young kid who wants to do something like this? And that's also really hard to turn down. And then it's not an apples apples comparison of like here's a big guy versus you. It's do you want to take a chance on somebody who reminds you of yourself 20 years ago or not?

That's really fabulous because I actually run this business with my daughter who's 17. It's a great opportunity for her to learn. So she's been with me throughout this whole journey. And that's kind of a big selling point from like on my website is about hey, this is a father daughter endeavor and it was meant to bring us together. Right. And so I would just have to work with her getting past the hurdle of talking to people. So not that it's unsurmountable but kids these days don't seem to want to talk to adults. And so but I also have an ambitious 18 year old daughter who is definitely the talker.

So yeah, you could send the two of them out. Let the one who's not the talker be like the logistics and kind of she might be really good at keeping the other one on focus and making sure she does, you know, the amount that she wants to do in order to close. But I love that that could be a really cool additional little venue for you. I love that this is a father daughter business. I work with my dad. He actually is employed at this firm and was at one of the others that I ran previously as was my mom and bro actually. So I think it's really cool. Also this is a great starter business for a 17 year old. It's not that complex. It's pretty low scale. You're not going to have a ton of expenses called capex in order to run these businesses. And so I like vending machines. They're like a gateway drug business. I think if you're young and hungry, starting with something like a vending machine is an interesting way to see what does it look like to have a P and L and to run a business day to day. I think they'll be successful in this business because he's putting in a lot of work and he's bringing in other people to help them. I think at some point this business will seem too small. They'll probably sell it. Maybe he sells it to his daughter and it's her business that she runs and then he goes and tackles a bigger business. Maybe the last idea I have for you and then we should circle back. I like to have a guy in a city and so, you know, I'm thinking of Rob Bildt because he's in Houston. But I might try to find a like, who is the sort of like influencer or somebody who talks about real estate in Corpus Christi, if there is one. And can you befriend somebody like that who in a small market, everybody might actually follow them. I did that with Rob. And so now if ever I need something in Houston or also if I need something in tiny homes because he kind of specializes in tiny homes and Airbnbs. He's my go to and he can get to almost anybody in the industry. So you might, depending on how big your business is, want to do something fun where you're like, you know what, I want to give you a vending machine. Like me and my team are actually going to run it. But I'm going to give you like three machines. I'm going to give you and buy it. I'm just going to give you the affiliate revenue, you know, on it. And if I sell, you know, this particular portion of the business, you can get something from it, but we could create content around it and you could talk about, you know, how you're serving the neighborhood or whatever. And I might Consider trying to find a center of influence online too. But I think the first two ways are better than that last one. That last one could maybe just be more fun for your daughters.

Do you know how would you go about finding those influencers in your area like that?

I think what you can train your algorithm pretty quickly. One, I would stick your 18 year old on it. She's going to be better at this than either one of us. But typically they're on Instagram, easiest to find and you just google around for like Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi real estate. And once you start like kind of following accounts like this, your feed just gets redirected to them non stop. And so that's I think where I would start. But I also don't think you should do too many tactics at once. You know, you already have one tactic, so now you get to pick one more to add and do aggressively for the next 30 to 60 days and highly document it and then you add the next one, the next 30 or 60 days. When I ran our sales team in Latin America at First Trust, I allowed our sales teams to have two big tactics that they try consistently. And so at any given time you might have two new ways you go to sell people things. The reason why sales tactics don't usually work isn't even the tactic, it's the commitment. Do you stick with it for 60 to 90 days? Do you track your progress and are you actually progressing in it or are you jump skipping and hopping from tactic to tactic because none of them have immediate results? Get a program, stick with the program, change it if it doesn't work after 90 days. That was my plan. I hear you've had some like exciting happenings since we last chatted. So I wanted to hear kind of what's going down for me too.

After a conversation, one of the key one items that I kind of clawed into was the, you know, had sending someone younger out to go out and try to see if they can't get this location. And my daughter is visiting me from college for the month and so she's got a lot of time on her hands. And I was like, hey Maya, do you want to earn some extra money? And so I am paying her per machine that she placed and so we put together a strategy and then she went out.

That's amazing. So you're making your daughter do all the hard work. So it's been happening here?

Yeah, she's more successful at it than I am.

So, so what happened? You went out, Maya, and you closed some, some vending machines.

Yeah, I did. First day, actually. We closed the first one, so it worked out really well. Got some. A couple leads at some other places that we're waiting here back on. But, yeah, so we. We got one for sure. First day.

Oh, that's huge. Wait, so tell me what that was like. Have you ever done anything like that before?

No, I haven't really. So I was honestly really nervous. I didn't really know what to expect, especially because I don't know as much as my dad does about the whole vending machine business, so it was definitely a learning curve. But he gave me a list of potential places to visit, and then I just drove around and kind of gave a little pitch, and that's amazing.

What did they tell you? Were they like, yes, we're in, or did they say, we want more information? Like what? How did that go down?

Yeah, so I got a lot of no's at first, and then actually, the. The one we got a. A solid yes on was the last one that I was gonna go stop at. And so I went in. There was a nice person up at the front desk, and she was like, here, let me get someone to talk to you. And he came out, asked for some more information, gave him as much as I knew, and, yeah, so he seemed interested. And then I gave him our contact information. And then, yeah, my dad reached out to him the next day and gave them all the extra information. I didn't know.

So did you guys do a dance when you got done? At the end of the.

I was pretty excited.

Yeah.

And then the most important question I think now, Maya, is, are you now the richest of all of your friends?

Definitely not the richest, but I'm one step closer after getting that one vending machine place, so I love it.

Well, that's really cool. I think it's awesome, Ross, what you're doing with your daughter, teaching her the ropes real time while you're in it. It's really cool. Thanks for sharing your story with us. We have a belief that you can't be what you can't see, and I had no idea you could do stuff like this when you were young and that I could have done it when I was in college. So I think it's cool that you guys share your story so that the next gen gets to see it.