Honest Q/A about remote sales, agency life, and online business

We're breaking it all down in this video, guys. I've got this face-tracking gimbal on again. My camera has less battery than I thought it was going to, and so we're gonna, we're gonna speedrun through these. We're gonna get you guys some fast answers. We're breaking it down into 4 topics, and I'm answering every single question that was sent to me on Twitter and Instagram. The first topic we're gonna talk about is remote setting and closing, because a lot of you are probably here to learn about that. The next one we're going to talk about is agency. We had a— we had one question come in about the agency. I said sales agency, online biz, anything, it's fair game. And so we got agency, then we're going to talk general online business, and then miscellaneous. There's some fun ones in here, so I'm going to try to section it off below so you can see where I'm talking about what. But yeah, let's get into it. Why don't we start with a good one? This guy asked how big. Well, remote sales is getting really big. Online businesses, coaches, agencies, service providers, consultants, all this stuff is really big and it's right under your nose. And if you don't think it's big now, like check back in a year or two. It is going to be huge. You guys have seen Hormozi and what he's doing with school and kind of the mass market approach. Like people are starting to share what they know and how to do it online more and more. And if you're a sales rep, it's an opportunity for you. This guy says, we are in a recession. How is remote sales a stable career? I'll be honest with you, man. If your number one concern is stability, go somewhere where you make an hourly wage. And, you know, this, this does come down to what kind of remote sales we're talking about. A lot of what I talk about is the contracted 1099 setting and closing stuff. I'll be honest with you, like, it is not the most stable career. You're in a position where you have 4 kids, car payments, mortgage, Insurance payments, and your whole family relies on you, and your parents are elderly and they rely on you, like, go somewhere that gives you a base pay because this is probably not it for you. You can make a lot of money in it, and this is outside of any kind of recession. Like, people are still buying stuff. We have teams that are hitting record months right now in the agency. The recession doesn't really matter so much when you're selling to people that have money. So stability is your main concern, probably not for you, man. How many hours a week would you say closers in the $20,000 to $30,000 range are working? These guys are full-time. There might be some out there that are working 20, 30 hours per week and they're on really good offers. They've been there for a while, they get good commission splits. But anyone who's making $20K, $30K, $40K, they're working full-time and they're at least working 40 hours, potentially 50, potentially 60. Everything is a range, right? You always talk about the importance of networking, and I have 2 questions regarding that topic. One, as a sales rep with moderate experience, how would you leverage X to network and secure a solid offer? Okay, so this is exactly what I did, like exactly what I did 2 and a half years ago. So I just started posting what I knew. I had a sales background, nothing like 10, 20 years, anything crazy like that, but I was actively in sales, I was actively being the best rep where I was, and I was actively documenting the transition from where I was to where I wanted to be. So I would just start posting, man, like your personal brand or any of these social media platforms, they can become a magnet for the people that you want to surround yourself with. That's what I started doing back then, and it's to the point where the social media followings that I have are some of the most valuable assets. Number 2, if you had zero experience, how would you go about networking to secure an offer? That's kind of a tough one, and the default for me is going to be get into these groups where these offers are sent to people. The fact that if you have no experience, you probably don't know what to stay away from, or at least you haven't experienced that yet firsthand. Unless you wanna waste a lot of time and trial and error doing this yourself, whether it's a free group, a paid group, or your friend knows other people that are interested in having you in there, just get surrounded with people that are doing this. And honestly, like, you can't be super needy when you get into some form of network. It's not take, take, take. You need to give as much as you can, provide value wherever you can, even if you don't have that much experience, and then good will come back to you. What is the best way to improve your skill for closing if you don't have an offer yet? My thought originally is You need to get an offer, and that is where you are truly going to learn what it takes to perform in the marketplace. You can watch YouTube videos, you can buy sales training, and I recommend you do this stuff, but there is nothing that'll truly replicate the marketplace like being in the marketplace. So if you don't have an offer, meet people, potentially consider appointment setting so you can get in the door and, and learn the business and how it works. And role plays are good, but I think if you have sales experience, role plays aren't going to help you land a better offer. Applying to more offers will help you land a better offer. How to get started in the game? It's a good question, man. This is like very general, very broad, and for the sake of time, I'm going to say it's probably the first or second link in the description below is a 51-minute free training that I put together for For exactly whoever asked this question and anybody else who would be wondering that. Any roadmap to get in the industry, entry-level position, etc.? Same thing, man. This is a topic that I've jammed on a bunch of times on this YouTube channel, but if you guys can go to the second link in the description, full training there for you. How long do you take before you call it quits on an offer? This is, this is very relevant because if you're in the game, you've been in the game for a while, unless you got lucky or you were fortunate. Your first offer probably wasn't the dream $20K+ per month offer. So how do you know when you call it quits? Well, first, and I actually had this conversation with someone yesterday, like yesterday afternoon, I first want to identify objectively and like I can, if I am the problem, I will do my best to realize that and move accordingly. But I try to objectively look at this and say, is this me or is this the offer? The first thing that I look at Is, are there other people on this team doing what I wanna be doing? If there are, it's probably you. If there isn't and you don't have support and timelines are getting stretched out to get you the stuff that you need to perform, or they really don't care if you perform and there's no pressure or there's no positive accountability there to help you perform, it might be cooked. Because if you are being fed leads or sales calls and you're not converting, then that's an issue for the business owner. And I take it if you're in this limbo of like, hey, I don't know if I should stay or I should quit, you should probably go find something better. But while I am an advocate for sales reps aggressively going upmarket into better and better and better roles as you gain experience, I'm not a fan of jumping offers just for the sake of jumping offers because you think something's going to be easier. How to vet the offer before joining? Some job posts have $20K per month OTEs and more if you are savage, etc. But once you dig deeper, their top closer is making like $6.8K with a lot of exclamation points. So it's very simple. I think I have another YouTube video on this, and in my community we have an on-target earnings calculator that all you guys will use. I want to know, I think it's 7 things for closers. We'll talk about foreclosures. Okay, so we're gonna get advertised OTE, and we're gonna, we're gonna hold that number over here. And then we're gonna go revenue last month or whatever time frame you'd like. Then we're gonna go average ticket price, get a feel for that. Current number of closers, working days per month, expected calls per day. Is show rate, expected close rate, and then commission. With all that, there's a way to put it together to basically see if what they're advertising is realistic based on the number of closers that they have. In a lot of cases, it's not. You can also just get revenue, cash collected, number of closers, how much are they making, top and bottom. So it's really, it's data-driven. That's how you avoid the poor roles. From your perspective, what are some things sales reps can do to make themselves even more valuable to their company and stand out? Go above and beyond. Do— I mean, if you're a closer, take the sales calls, but then if something could be better in the pre-call sequences, do that. If you feel like the appointment setters could be doing a better job, like, help train them. If you feel like the onboarding systems can be better for a smoother client onboarding, do that. Just go above and beyond and perform at a high level. How much can you make starting out? You can make a lot of money. You can make no money. I know guys that have come in and done $15K months in month 1. They had a sales background before, a pretty extensive one. I know guys that come in and they struggle, man, because they don't get around the right people. They don't get the right support. They try to lone wolf it. And so much of success, I feel like, in this space, even with us at the agency at this level, is who you know and the reputation that you have. Is success in high-ticket sales more about skills or offer? Good question. If you don't have good skills, you're probably not going to get the good offer. I would say If you're capable of doing $8K to $10K a month, maybe even $6K to $8K a month on an offer, you are also capable of doing $20K, $30K, $40K a month with a better offer. In a lot of cases, not all cases. A lot of this does depend on the offer. We have guys that come into our agency, they have— some have more experience, some have less, but they have other attributes and reasons why we bring them in, and then they crush $20K, $30K months. So you need to have the skills, but if you don't have the skills, you're not gonna get the offer. But the offer is— The offer is everything. The deciding factor, I'd say. How much do setters make part-time? Setter make part-time? I mean, setters part-time, like, you could make $3K to $5K a month. You could also make that full-time. Like, it really, really depends on the offer. I have an interview in our community member interview playlist of our guy Noah. He's a DM setter in the military, was overseas on deployment, and was making like $5K a month working like less than 10 hours a week. Legit. So you can make a lot, but I mean, sales is a competitive market, right? Not everyone's gonna make that top income. Fitness sales, yay or nay? Depends what kind of fitness sales we're talking about. My first closing offer where I recreated $100,000 per year income and more was a fitness coaching offer. And I was a closer and it was difficult, but I was making money and I was part-time. That's something to throw in there. Like, I hit that $100K a year after quitting roofing sales, but I was working 3, maybe 4 hours a day with 1 meeting per week. for like 30 minutes. So fitness sales in person is a different thing. I think it's good to cut your teeth, but online it's an opportunity as well. How to get into sales full-time while working a demanding full-time job? I have sales/SDR experience. Okay, this is something that I might have a contradicting opinion on, but it's just not possible. Like something has to give. It's probably gonna be that job if you really want it. And based on your situation, your living expenses, how much runway you have, how capable you are, how much experience you have that can parlay into a good role off the bat, There's a lot of variables here. I would just say get surrounded by the right people that can fact-check offers when you get them. Make sure that you're applying to the best offers that you can. Make sure that they have the validated numbers, what we just talked about earlier, like run the numbers and make sure they make sense before you jump into something. And then there will come a point where you are going to have to go all in and it's going to be scary and you can't look back. And a lot of people don't get to that point. I don't blame them. It's scary, but yeah, something's gonna have to give and you just need to do as much due diligence as possible before you make that transition. 'Cause once you make the transition, you gotta see it through. Okay, so now we're getting into the agency questions or the agency question. There was one, I think this is about the agency. How are you and/or others optimizing your online marketing to gain sales? Good ad creatives and good ad buyers. Be honest, like a lot of the people that we work with that run our ads, they've been doing it for a really long time. They have really good results. That's why we work with them. And they're really good about spinning up new creatives when others fatigue. And buying ads is a lot of work, buying Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Twitter, TikTok, whatever. So we have a marketing team or a sales team. We don't really do much of that ourselves. Now, general online business questions. Do you think financing is a good way to scale a high-ticket offer? Yeah, it's a really good way to scale a high-ticket offer. Most of like literally 80, probably 90% of the biggest offers out there got there because they have financing. So I know some people feel certain ways about financing. I'm never someone to push someone into financing that's gonna put them in a spot where they're borderline crippled after that. But financing can be awesome. And I know a lot of guys that came into the remote sales space financed some community, some course, whether it's ours or someone else's. And then they get in there and they are making $5K, $10K, $15K, $20K per month. So financing, when used right, is good. Why do some people say the high ticket is gonna disappear to the subscription model? Because, well, first off, it's not. It's not. There's a use case for both. It depends what you're selling, who you're selling it to, and how many resources does it require you to get the result that you're selling them. Based on those 3 things, there is room for both because what we do with our community, we used to run it as a subscription, a low-ticket offer, and then we just added so much more to ensure that people were getting results to where we could not operate as a subscription model unless it were like an expensive subscription, not like a $50 a month. It started at $9 per month like 2 years ago, but now high ticket. There's gonna be a place for it. There's always people that have money that wanna spend it, recession or not. What's your take on AI? And I really don't know what this question is, but I'm just gonna talk about AI for a little bit. AI is going to help those that learn how to use it, and those that don't learn how to use it are not going to be as efficient. I don't think you're gonna be completely ruled out of the game. At least not yet. We're a good ways away from that. But use it to your advantage. We're using AI in some of our stuff when we're writing resumes and all that stuff. So use AI, learn how to use it, don't get left behind. Make a low-ticket community or high-ticket community? Why? Good question. Who are you serving? If it's people with a lot of money, consider high-ticket because you can scale a lot higher with high-ticket. What are you serving them? Like how much, how many resources does it take you to serve them that thing? Is it a lot or is it a little bit? Factor that in. And then how many people want it? So example, if I was selling how to make money, how to make money with TikTok Shop, and I have a million followers and they're all like college kids, I would go low-ticket subscription because sure, you could make money with high-ticket, but I would go low-ticket subscription because it could hit a lot more people. You could make recurring money, which is nice, and it's easier buy-in, not so hard to deliver. If I was selling real estate coaching on how to flip your first 3 properties in the next 2 years. That's going to take a lot of resources to deliver at scale, and the person who's buying that probably has at least $50,000 put away if they're even considering flipping houses. So there's room for both. I've run both. I'm, you know, I don't run any low-ticket subscription now, but every day I look at it like the, the girl in the red dress. They both work. Miscellaneous questions, last section here. Where are you holding the meetup in September? That is Austin, Texas. September 27th, 28th. High-ticket sales reps, business owners, it's gonna be a grand time. I will link that below. It's probably gonna be the first link in the description. And yeah, you don't want to miss it if you are in this space, you want to be in this space, you want to learn about it, you want to progress within it. You got to be here. We had one last year. It was awesome. This one's gonna be way, way, way better. Boats, cigars, dinners, rooftop spots. Like, it's gonna be way better. If you were 20 years old and start again to get rich, what would you do? I would just get into sales. Like, might seem like a biased answer, but knowing what I know now, if I didn't want to go into school— and I, I have a 4-year degree from D1 university in construction science— if I didn't want to go be a lawyer or engineer or doctor and make a good amount of money doing that, if I wanted to skip school altogether, I would go into sales. I'd go sell door-to-door solar. I'd go sell door-to-door pest control. Or I would consider the remote space. I just think the remote space is a little bit easier to crack once you have something that you can Under your belt. Not to say it's not possible, but if you want to see the fastest results, I've seen these 18-year-old, 19-year-old kids clear like $30K commission months. Yes, it's hard work. Yes, they're going to take you to Tennessee or somewhere completely random, but I've seen guys like get the most solid foundation ever by doing that. If you restarted from a high school grad, what would you do different career-wise? Same thing, man. I would just get into sales sooner, and I was not the type of person to get into sales. I did not have the personality. I didn't think I was even Capable of selling things, but that's what I would do. I'd get into sales sooner. I'd go sell something very low barrier to entry where I can make the most the fastest, which is door-to-door solar, pest control, or this remote stuff. If you do care for that autonomy right off the bat, honestly, man, to me it sounds kind of fun to be 18 years old, nothing to lose, shipped off to a random city with the boys and just go hard and stack bread. Like, that sounds sick. Last question here: advice on getting better at public speaking? It's a good question directed to the wrong person because I have never really been a public speaker. I took a speech class in college. I think I got like a B, maybe an A, but I just got the job done. Actually, at the event, we're gonna have a speaking panel. I'll probably be up there. I'd assume I'd be up there. So we'll see how good I am at public speaking then. Besides like hosting our community live calls, sometimes we got 10, 20, 30 people on depending on who's there, what's going on. I don't really have much advice. I think just genuine conviction in what you're doing. Is gonna help you. And obviously reps, like reps with everything, with sales, with speaking, the gym, anything, man. Reps always help. So we're gonna wrap up the video there. I answered every single question that I got. I did not skip any questions. Probably run this back again if you guys would like to see that. Leave it in the comments. Let me plug a few things. If you are in the remote sales space or you're not in it yet and you want to be, the Cereal Sales Community, been running for 2 years, insane results. We have a playlist that has like 30 one-on-one interviews and we're about to have like 35. Like we have a bunch lined up. And then you're a business owner. If you're a business owner, you need help selling more of your stuff, whether it's some coaching, some consulting, you need a new sales team, whatever it is, we could help you. If you wanna come to Austin, Texas, September 27th, 28th to have the time of your life and write it off and meet a bunch of cool people. As of recording this, it's August 6th. There are, I think, 33 out of the 95 tickets left and we're still like 2 months out. So they're gonna go fast. Don't wait. That's probably gonna be the first link in the description. And yeah, guys, in the comments, let me know how you like this video, if you wanna see more like it, if you have any ideas, and we'll go from there. Later.