10 tips for the closer looking to ascend beyond closing

Hey, I'm Dylan, and this is the High Ticket Sales Podcast. Since 2017, I've been completely consumed with the idea of making an online income. And believe me, since then I've tried and failed at my fair share of businesses. In 2022, I quit a 6-figure sales job to go all in on this remote closing thing I had heard about. Fast forward a couple of years into 2024, I took home over $400,000 as a fractional sales manager, all while running another business in the space that actually did better than that. This industry has allowed me to achieve one of my biggest goals, which is to earn well and do so on my own terms. On this podcast, you can expect me to share what's working right now for sales reps and sales teams, nerdy deep dives on topics that are interesting to me, and conversations with my friends. Minimal edits, no sales pitch, no script. If you do like this pod, make sure you drop a like and subscribe so that you catch the future episodes. Now let's get into it.

Welcome to the Las Vegas airport. Missed my flight this morning, got an evening flight, but I'm at the airport way, way, way early and I got this nice little Desk at the very end of the terminal where nobody is. So I decided let's record an episode of the High Ticket Sales Podcast.

Why not?

Right? Hopefully the airport music isn't too loud here. Let me get my tripod set up here. I wanted to just come on here and chat about a dinner that I had with someone who's in the space, younger dude who's crushed it, built up his resume, done well. And now he's like in the middle of launching his own thing, going through his own offer. And honestly, it's a conversation that's relevant to a lot of people that I know. So I want to make it. You're a sales rep who has results in this space and you're wondering, what is next? Where do I go to get more leverage than just being on sales calls? Beautiful reality is there is no right or wrong answer, but there are a ton of options and you should definitely know what's important to you before you pick an option that doesn't suit you, doesn't meet you where you're at. If you've been a high-level setter, you've been a high-level closer, you've probably been around a lot of things that taught you how these businesses operate. You've seen what works, what doesn't work. You've seen what you like and what makes people's lives easier and harder and brings outsized returns. So I'm just going to riff off some points based on recent conversation, what I see other people going through, and then what I personally experienced. Number 1, if you can do it yourself, do it yourself. 50/50 partnership can be a force multiplier. It can also be what holds you back or creates a business that you don't even really enjoy. These big decisions lead to a stalemate. Businesses don't grow when they're in a stalemate. They actually decline. It's very rare that you're the person that likes doing all aspects of the business. But I think what you should try to do, if you're going into sales management, growth operating, you're running webinars for people, whatever model you're running with, push through the hard parts, the ugly parts, the stuff that you don't like. And then just hire into that role very early, as soon as you can, cutting into your profit if you need to, versus starting a business with somebody just because you don't really like doing this thing. Because come to find out, if you're a competent person who can make the business meaningful, you'll actually probably just have a better experience If you have full control over the stuff that you don't like versus leaving it up to somebody and hoping that they do it to your standard. Another thing I want to talk about, and it was a conversation I was having this morning as well with someone that I know who's crushed it in closing, is the whole growth operating thing, or basically like being responsible for sales and marketing. So a lot of the people I know are really good at sales, and it's just a natural thing to add marketing into that. If you can sell to one person, you can sell to many. The issue with sales in this industry is it's commission only. So if you don't control the marketing and the flow of leads, then your commission only or your rev share or whatever you've got is going to be basically zero unless you're on retainer, which is hard when you're starting out. So a piece of advice that I gave the gentleman that I met with last night for dinner is like, make your entry offer just one thing. Because if you're doing too many things, you're doing the written marketing, you're doing the video, you're doing the sales team, all these things that we know you're capable of, but you're like making content and trying to pitch all these things, you're doing yourself a disservice. So what I would do is lead with the most top of funnel offer that you're willing to promote. In this case, I think I recommended like the written content, basically written content. Once they fix that, they solve the lead problem. They have more leads. What problem comes next? Be ready to fix that. It might not be an easy sell, but in this case it was like, we're really good at posting content and we're really good at running sales teams. Should we promote both? I vote no. I vote we should only promote the written content one. And then once that sales team problem starts to arise, like we can even get ahead of it, then go and pitch that as the next solution. You're already going to have the trust built up. You're already going to be integrated into their team. The issue with doing so much all at once is the best of the best teams don't want to outsource that much of their business right away to strangers. And the people who do don't make enough money to make it make sense for you. So start with one core offering, pierce the market with that, and then add the à la cartes as you wish. Okay. So while I told you tip 1, don't partner with someone right away, tip 3 is a play off that kind of don't partner with someone just because you're like dreading a certain part of the business, but do pay people who have done what you are trying to do or who might have expertise over the part that you really don't want to do. Like pay them for consulting, pay them for coaching, pay them for a build and release, pay them for whatever you can to cut down the learning curve. Maybe that part of the business isn't even something that you hate that much. You just don't understand how to do it at the highest level. And if you did, maybe you wouldn't mind doing it. Boom. I don't know, making numbers up. Boom. 20% more profit and more control over your business just because you figured out how to do this better. I was talking to the guy at dinner and we were talking about buying courses because we both bought courses. Courses like changed our lives basically. And it's just kind of crazy how like the public has a sentiment around buying courses. It's usually pretty negative and selling courses, but like a lot of the most successful people that I know, like 7 figures plus, have bought courses. Like they bought a course and maybe the course wasn't the thing that made the direct 7 figures, but it was like, it helps you at minimum cross out all the things that you know you don't want to do. Through buying these courses, honestly, the more likely thing to happen from buying these courses is that it's that you find out, oh, I don't like this, or I don't want to do this, or I do want to outsource this, or I want to change the direction. It's very rare that you buy a course and then you just like 100x ROI, but it's all a step in the right direction when it comes to cutting down the learning curve. And the winners condense time. They condense time with information, leverage, employees, outsourcing, all of these things that cost money a lot of times that the average person isn't willing to spend on. So avoid partnerships as much as you reasonably can, but do pay for information from people who have been there and done that. In my mind, When you're coming from a sales background, you're a setter or closer and you've learned how this sales stuff works. Maybe you've done some managing. There's really 2 areas of focus that make up the next level of business as it pertains to overtaking an entire sales operation. It's either the operation, the automation, a lot of the boring backend wiring stuff, or you're front-facing, you're client-facing, you're rep-facing, you're coaching, you're reviewing calls, you're building the culture and maintaining the culture of the organization. If you're watching this, you probably fall into one of those 2 categories. Hypothetically, I've thought of starting up some B2B management work, but I do not like managing reps. I don't like being on people's ass. I don't like being in Slack, being on meetings just for the sake of doing so, for maintaining that culture, even though I acknowledge it's important. So if I were to do this again and I were like, okay, let's, you know, let's bump up the cash flow. Let's manage 3 sales teams. What I would do is I'd basically hire in managers to help me do it. Managers to lead the client communication, managers to lead the team, and then all the All the while I'm in the backend getting all the data I need to make the decisions to push us forward. So tip 5 would be to like visualize what you like to do, visualize the duties and how they support other people that you'll need to hire in and then hire smart. Pretty much, in my opinion, more of the front-facing person can't really do their job unless they have all the backend data. We talked about this, like if you're in the position to go and run someone's sales team and you want to outsource some sort of work like meetings, team management updates, whatever it might be, clients might have hesitation that it's not you doing the thing. So you have to do what you can to empower your people. You have to reassure them like, hey, if I'm on the backend, like that's the stuff that's actually moving the needle. Cause this person only does their job because I can give them data that's actually meaningful. In our community, I've had a handful of different sales reps and team members, and they're always received very well when people come and pay me a high-ticket price point, because I empower them and I make them seem like they're better at their jobs than I would be at that job, which is true. So build up your team. Sell the team. You need to make it a plus that they're dealing with your team instead of you. Managing one sales team very well is a full-time job. To do that across 2, 3, 4, 5 teams, that's an undertaking. With AI, we can get a lot of help with data interpretation, but there's something about perceived value and time spent and communication had you just can't replace with AI yet. There's all these sales coaching softwares and all these things, and sure, like they're good, For the reps, it's better to do it than not to do it. In most cases, some clients are going to want to spend time with you and that's how they're going to interpret value. Some sales reps are going to want the same. So when we do get the team in, make sure we're empowering them so that when we remove ourselves, the performance doesn't dip, the perception of value doesn't dip, and we gain leverage over a part of our business that we don't really love. So we're also talking about monetizing content. So the guy that I had dinner with is partnered with someone who pushes a lot of content online. And he was like, dude, we have all this traffic. We've monetized a little B2B. We know there's demand for B2C. What should we do? What should we lean into? Because we could realistically do both at a high level. Short answer, I told him to lean into B2B. B2C is always going to be there. You're always going to build up as you're building an audience for either one. You're going to pull in the other. You guys know info versus agency, legit businesses like info is a little bit more shorter lived. The longer we can delay cashing in the goodwill, the bigger it's going to be. What I recommended was leading with the B2B services like written video content sales agency on the backend, but then having like a very easy to fulfill or low fulfillment, like mid-ticket B2C offering. That B2C offering is actually going to help you generate quality talent to work in the agency for the B2B clients. It is going to generate straight profit to the bottom line of the agency. And if you want to down the road, you can just go full B2C, but I feel like it would be a shame to go full B2C when you're an operationally sound person and you have a track record that would be very valuable to business owners. A lot of people get into business because they want leverage, they want outsized returns. And I feel like an agency long-term can get you that, especially this type of like marketing and sales agency, because you can really hire in the right people to remove yourself at the end of the day and focus on high-leverage things like client acquisition and doing so in a way that's you know, not as scalable for a newer agency. That's how when I was running my agency, you know, we would sign really, really sound clients, but not through like paid ads or cold email or anything like that. It was through like going to an event or getting an intro from a high-level person in a casual way. And we wouldn't have had those opportunities, one, without the track record, but two, without having the space to breathe and to receive those opportunities. So if you're pushing content super broad for a skill that could be both B2B B2C, you sell it to the businesses, you sell it to the people who want to do the business model. I would try to do the delayed gratification with B2C. It'll always be there as long as you're pushing the content. B2B, you really only need like 3 good clients to make $50 grand a month. That's on a rev share basis, obviously. And you got to work out your deals. You got to be good at what you do, but I've had clients and I know clients that have profited 6 figures for an agency like that. And so that's why I think instead of the also info can be somewhat of a hamster wheel, especially when you're mass market, I like predictable revenue. So that's why I lean B2B. This guy that I was talking to yesterday, he's 22 years old and he's done far more than I had at 22. And he's at like a really pivotal point of his career where he basically left a dream job for a lot of people, including himself, to take a bet on himself and see what he can make happen, see if he could retire by 30 or be in the position to retire by 30. And we were talking about how at this point in his career, like unless he just has catastrophic failure, he does something just extremely detrimental to his future self from here on out, it is all about picking between multiple good options. He's a smart guy. He's a driven guy. He works hard, good connections. It is literally just about focus and continual progress in this direction. So if he goes content marketing, if he goes sales agency, wherever he goes, as long as he goes down that path, sees through the path for an extended period of time and starts to build that compounding, he's going to be all right. I was talking to another guy that I know this morning who's starting to do like growth operating stuff as well, was a closer. A really good one. And one piece of advice that I gave him was like, when you're working with someone that already has a big audience, if I could go back in time before I had an audience and started selling things, I would start selling behind closed doors more. That means email lists. It's a private group, something like that. So that my public social growth wasn't stunted because I'm selling so publicly. And so I've kind of shifted towards that now, but I was like, you want to get like lead magnets or groups or things that on low ticket can compound and just run through socials for years. So that way you're not always scrambling for like the next low ticket product to sell or the next lead magnet to put together, especially if there's like continued fulfillment with that lead magnet or with whatever you're hooking people in with. You don't want to be known as the guy that starts something and then 2 months later stop it. So piggybacking off the idea of just like gradually making good decisions and not catastrophically failing, doing that with like a front end I don't like free communities, but doing that with like a lead magnet to your email list and then getting people behind closed doors where you can kind of nurture them is like one thing that I wish I did way, way, way sooner. And this could be for both the agency and B2C. When I say agency, I just mean anything B2B. It doesn't have to be an agency. It could be a sales agency. It could be a different kind of agency, but you're just like B2B service provider, basically. I know people who have an email list with less than 1,000 people and they've used it to create million-dollar businesses because it's a very, very curated person that they add onto the list. So make sure that the marketing channels, both top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom funnel, are things that are actually going to compound. YouTube compounds, email lists compounds, Instagram can compound. It can also go away really fast. Someone could pay $3,000 and have your account taken down overnight. You can have years of progress wiped out. So owned media, let's lean into it. I prefer selling a little bit more behind the scenes. We need to start building a pool of people that are open to the idea of buying something from us or working with us. And if you can compound both the business that you're running and the pool of people over time, it becomes a lot harder to fail. I mean, I've hit that with the community that we run, but I'm also like 4 years into that. I think you could do it a lot faster. I got one more tip for you guys. You don't have to start your own business yet. I do some consulting for people that are looking to do sales management or like sales agency. And one of the best pieces of advice that I've given and what I've seen turn into actual valuable experience, resume, All these things is just going and working for someone else's business that's already doing what you want to do. But if you're doing it as a contractor, you can kind of get in, do your own thing, learn, get out, and then spend the rest of your time doing what you want to do, building your own company, whatever. So example, for these sales agency guys that I'm consulting, a lot of them right now in the earlier stages are just managers within another sales agency. They've been assigned 2, 3 accounts. They're making good money, but they're learning the ropes. of this business further. So the step between setter closer, single manager, and running an agency, running multiple teams, is just working in that agency. The cool part about this is a lot of these account managers or sales managers, it is still like a very entrepreneurial job. It's not like you just get in and you press buttons for 40 hours a week. Like you're having to figure shit out. You're having to problem solve. The only thing you don't have to do is client acquisition. So you're getting paid like A fair market value to learn. It's like an extension of the whole internship idea that is high-ticket closing, because closing gives you access to the sales teams. You get to see, you get to earn. This is an extension to get you paid. And then slowly you can start stacking your own clients, or you can even bring clients. Like I, this past weekend, I was at a wedding in Vegas here. Basically all the managers of the agency that I got bought out from were there. It was my first time meeting some of them. And a lot of them now at this point, they just bring clients to the agency. And when they do, they get a bigger share of it. They get responsibility of the account and they get a bigger share, that's more synonymous with ownership. So you don't always have to just full send like from a job into wild, wild west business ownership, hope you can sign clients on big rev shares. You'd be surprised how many of these people that already have these businesses are looking for people that have the skillset but aren't quite ready to start that thing for themselves yet. Now, when you're going to these companies, you might want to position this very particularly. Because you don't want it to sound like, oh yeah, I'm here to learn how to run this business, then I'm out. You know, I would definitely, if I do take this route, I would definitely go and work for someone for a considerable amount of time, enough time for you to see cycles of clients and like good marketing and bad marketing performance, but not short enough of a time to where you tarnish your reputation because you came in, took responsibility and left right away and left them high and dry. I would not recommend doing anything like that. I think that's all I'm going to talk about on this podcast. There was like 7 things in there. If you're In this space and you're looking for the next level, hopefully one of those seven things resonated with you and helped make something click. I was telling the guy that I had dinner with yesterday, I'm under the impression that I could learn something from everyone, whether they're new, kind of experienced, really experienced, or levels above me. So by you listening to these podcasts, I'm not hoping that you just like listen to it and everything that I say is absolute truth and it supersedes everything that you thought true to this point. I'm hoping that you grabbed onto one nugget and you take it and you run with it. Right now my GoPro is overheating. I gotta go. GoPro's overheating. Thank you guys for watching this episode.

Well, you made it to the end. Thanks for tuning in. If you like this episode and you want to catch future ones, be sure to like and subscribe. I'm kind of just releasing these when I feel like I should. As of now, there's no formal schedule for new episodes, but if you think there should be, comment down below.

I want these to be fun for both of us.

Last thing, if you have something cool to share, or you want to be a guest, or you want to recommend a guest, or you just want to complain about how bad this episode sucked, you can email me at dylan@serialsales.co. Thank you again for watching. I'll see you next time.

Thank you.

See you next time.