How to Be Successful in Sales Without Prior Experience with Sales Savage Luke Badman

All right, guys, welcome to another episode of Coffee is for Closers. Due to popular demand, we've actually left Matt out today. I know a lot of people in the comments have requested that we leave him out because of his ugly head, and I totally understand. So we've got a new guest today, Luke Badman. Welcome to the show. He actually runs his own podcast, any PQ for dogs. I believe it's called.

Yeah. Life with your dog. No. Yeah. So, yeah, I'll do a bit of. Of dog training on the side as well.

So, yeah. Cool. Awesome. Well, cue the intro. We'll be back in a second.

If you listen to this podcast, you will make your first million within three years. I'm going to repeat that. You will make a million dollars within three years of the first episode you listen to. We don't want pikers. We're not here to save the manatees. We're here to make podcasts. You really want this, you listen. And.

Put that coffee down. Yeah.

So.

So welcome back. Today we're going to be interviewing, obviously, Luke. He's come to us from being a dog trainer where the. Almost the. The hardest part of sale is getting an animal that doesn't speak English to listen and using the right language and I guess you could say asking them the right questions, such as sit.

More of a command than a question. But yeah, there's definitely a lot of overlap with the psychology. Like, the foundations of dog training are things like operant and classical conditioning. I don't know if anyone knows what that is, but like, you know, Pavlov and all this kind of stuff. So there is like a. Definitely.

You're making my mouth a lot.

There's. Exactly. There's definitely a bit of a crossover.

And Lucas, he's just. The reason we decided to bring him on today is he's recently come onto the team. Probably six months.

Six months. Yeah. This will be my seventh month.

Seventh month. Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong, zero price sales experience.

Yeah, other than the business and. Yeah, other than my own business, like, you know, which isn't really. I wouldn't really argue that that's really selling. It's more like what Matt called order taking.

Yeah.

By the time they get to me, they. They're good to go. There is definitely, like, it's an emotional sale. So there's a little bit of that, but it's nothing like what we do here at Sniper, obviously.

Yeah. Because I remember reviewing some of your calls when you first come in and trying to aid how we could get you some more clients. And I was like, this is terrible.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Before I learned the ways of any pq. And.

Yeah. And six months, like, you started doing a bit of setting for us and Luke is like the prime example of someone that comes into our development systems, takes the right steps, follows it up with a lot of action and ambition, and in a short period of time is very, very successful. If you don't mind me asking, like, where were you income wise, before coming to us and then what are you averaging now?

I mean, I was probably doing the business, the dog business is probably doing. Yeah, it would be on track, would have been on track to do, I guess, between 50 and 80 grand for the year. And now I'm doing more than five figures a month between the. Between here and there in six months. And I've only been on sales calls for. Yeah, like this will be my second, third or fourth month on sales calls. Let's call it the third month of doing like full, full blown sales calls.

And you do it part time?

I do, yeah. I only work 30 hours a week.

So, yeah, it's crazy. You've developed very, very quickly into someone that is your. I don't think, like, your level of income reflects how quickly you've developed and how good you've got. So let's take a, A step back. What was things like, you know, moving from that, coming in and being a DM center, and how did that make you feel from someone being relatively successful, taking that step back in order to move forward? What was that like?

I might go back even a little bit further to, like, how I.

Found.

Sniper Matt's best mate from the army. Pat is like, pretty much the best dog trainer in the country as far as I'm concerned. Most of what I learned from about dogs I learned from Pat through his course. And Matt went on their podcast last year.

Yeah.

And that's how I found you guys. And I was just like, I pay attention, right. And I was like, what is this? And I just went down this rabbit hole. And anyway, you know, and then I joined as a DM setter. And yeah, it was, it was hard at first, but I just threw myself, like, I wanted to throw myself into it.

Yeah.

I was like, what's the worst that could happen?

Right.

I was willing to take a hit on income because I, I'm here for. I think I've heard Matt say this before, like, here for the vision rather than just the money.

Yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, I can see where this, this.

Place is going and like, what specifically about that vision sort of attracted you to want to take a step back, knowing that there's probably a bigger payoff.

I could. I could definitely sense the culture that you guys have here even without having joined. Like, you know what I mean? Looking from the outside, before I joined, I was like, the. There's definitely something there, and I wanted to be part of that. And then it only confirmed my suspicions. When I got here, I was like, yeah, this is an awesome place to work. And obviously we have a lot of fun. Like in. We start. Yeah. We do podcasts, like, on a Friday afternoon. We, you know, we. We sell. We. We talk. Talk with the boys. And it's good fun.

Yeah. Play pool occasionally.

Yeah, exactly. Is. This place is like a giant man cave, really.

It is. Yes. You can check out the office tours.

Yeah, yeah, we've probably don't.

I imagine we have. So. Yeah. Well, miniseries coming soon, Right? Okay.

So there we go.

You jumped into the dms. Like, what was the hardest thing about coming in and then adjusting from someone who's never learned sales to being thrown into a world where it's like, here's a script, here's how we do it. Like, how did you get yourself in a position to one be able to actually learn that so quickly and then apply it to increase your income?

I had to be comfortable with getting uncomfortable. I know that's a bit of a cliche, but, like. And it is cliched, but, like, you guys put me. Paired me up with Dan, Right. And if you watch this YouTube channel, you've probably seen Dan floating around a few of the videos. He's trained me very, very well.

Like, did he teach you how to burn out properly?

No, he's. If anything, he gave me a lot of tough love at the start and, like, really slapped me around a bit. We got basically hung up on the very early stages of the script. Like, we. We were role playing and I would just. I'm definitely, like, a bit of a perfectionist. And I was. I had to get past that.

Yeah.

And he's like, how we ever. He had a Cuban. He's like, how are we ever going to get past this if you can't do problem awareness? And I was like, yeah, you're right. One day I just woke up and I was like, no, no. Like, we've got to do this. Like, got to look past the DMs. Dan told me, don't major in minor things.

Right.

And so even though my job at the to dm, if you only focus on that, you can't, by definition, you can't go to the next level.

Right, right.

And so we started role playing a lot. Even though my job at that point was not to be on the phones or on calls, I had to take that development into my own hand.

Right.

And then the same thing. To go from, like, triages to sales calls, like, just kind of had to throw myself into it.

Yeah. Okay. At what point, like, did you actually transition into triage goals? Maybe a month.

Well, Marco basically just threw me into it. He's like, come on, I want you to start doing triage calls. There's another thing. Like, just be like, I, My initial reaction was like, a little bit, oh, I'm on the spot here. But like, it's like anything you do a few. Yeah. You stuff up a few. And then after a while, you just.

Yeah, I, I, if I remember right, I don't think that was planned. We just had someone pull out of the role we put them in.

So we're like, oh, yeah, right, Right.

Time. Let's just put badminton. And. Yeah, the Darcy. And. Yeah. Took with both hands. Right. Another cliche. Just took the opportunity with both hands. Full credit to the boys.

Yeah, yeah. Full credit to the boys. No, yeah. There was definitely. And, like, I would count myself very lucky, even within Sniper Globally to be here in Sydney. Like, I feel very lucky that I just happened to have. I mean, I grew up here, but, like, the fact that the Sniper HQ is here, I would. I'm sure that's helped my development. Having access to you, Matt, Marco, Dan, like, on tap, basically.

That's. That's been very good for, like, the younger guys. And this is like, I could have an opinion on this, but it would be irrelevant because the perception. So do you feel like it's smarter for some of the guys to move to being that environment initially to start learning or. At what point do you think, like, some sort of move would pay dividends in development?

You mean physically moving?

Like, yeah, like, to be here in an office?

I definitely think so. Because personally, like, and we're at this point now where we've come through lockdown and I've got this sort of good hybrid model. I'll come in two or three days a week.

Yeah.

I'm not the kind of person who, I know for myself, I couldn't work remotely 100%. It just wouldn't work for me.

Yeah. Get lazy.

Yeah. I just like being amongst people. So I definitely think if you have the opportunity to be around, like, we're humans, we're social creatures, right? Yeah. We went through a pandemic and Zoom's great and all that stuff. Like you guys have built a business on it. But we do function better I think around people and like I know, you know, snipers, building a sales office in the States and that kind of thing. So anyone who has the opportunity to actually go and do that, I'm sure that they would grow fast.

Yeah. Because the reason I ask is we've had a lot of guys, whether they're in Canada, the uk that are wanting to move over there and I'm hesitant in letting them one because it's such a big commitment, particularly it's the younger guys that that environment is really, really high pressure in a lot of cases. So I think it has massive benefits. But I wouldn't even consider letting certain people go until they've developed to a level where that I know that you can sustain your income and you're not going to take a step backwards whilst you've got all these additional expenses whilst we obviously chip in. Yeah. Like you got rent, you've got commitments.

And you know that plus moving costs. It's a new city. You might not know anyone.

Like you might freak out, you want to go back to mama.

If there's one thing I've learned from following your guys story and Matt's story and all that kind of stuff, having definitely, you know, listened to what you just said, then I do think like this like burn the boats, burn the bridges kind of mentality. If you give yourself a back door, you'll find it and you'll use it rather than just giving yourself only one way out which is to succeed.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I'm of the opinion it's probably 80% of the guys that works for the other 20, maybe not. And whether it's not gambling on their livelihood where you can see some people are so eager but they haven't yet done enough to prove that they can sustain that. And it's like maybe we take it a bit slower with you with your development and that way we can individualize things for different people depending on skill set.

There's definitely different factors too. Right. We've got, we've got such a age range here as well. I'm definitely one of the oldest guys here. I'm 35.

You're a lot older than what I expected.

I'm 35.

Right.

And I, I was just about to say as well, like it sort of depends what's on the line. Like there's guys who already have kids who Are already married. They've got mortgages. Like, I don't have kids. I'm getting married next year. But like, so I was pretty much like, I want to have kids probably within the next couple of years.

Yeah.

So this is. It was pretty much now or never. Even with the dog business. Like, that's only sort of a year and a bit old.

Right.

And so like, it's very hard to make those kinds of, you know, go for a few months without making much money when you've got big mortgages, kids to feed, all that kind of stuff. So I kind of. This was kind of like the last portion of my life where I could really make a good, like change.

You've got to figure it out.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. So all in. Okay. Right. Then that's cool. Cool. And we moved in sales. What? Like, there was obviously a lot of changes that happened to one get you comfortable, ready to do that. What are like the biggest things that you felt allowed you to come on and immediately be successful with it?

I think definitely the. The burn the boats thing again, like just. You just got to make it work. Don't overthink it. There's a few probably, let's say younger guys and girls in the company who are like still very young, 18, 19, whatever. And maybe they feel not as confident in themselves. And a couple of them have asked me, like, you know, what's development related questions. Yeah. And I'm like, just don't overthink it too much. You've just got to trust the process. Throw yourself into it. We have no shortage of access to training resources. Like I go to probably hard. I go to Matt's coaching call every week. Like the inner circle one. I go to all kinds of coaching calls that are other people. Like if they're our clients, they would pay for that.

Yeah.

I set that aside to go and do that stuff then obviously got to do the sales goals to make money. But training and development is definitely a big part of it.

How do you like? I have a pretty set structure on how I like guys to develop and I've been working on this with Spencer who's going to roll it out to a lot of our team in far greater capacity than I can. He's just. He's going to take it from my brain and apply it. I like to have our guys find like the biggest thing that they need to work. Worker. Yeah. Whether that's objection. Handling. It's. It's tonality, it's structure. Right.

Like a bottleneck in their development.

Exactly. Like A bottleneck, the. The lowest hanging fruit that if you solve that one problem, it would give you the biggest return roi. Yep.

Makes sense. Right, so it's like what level is going to move the needle the most?

Yeah, exactly. Right. And. And what I do is because it sounds like you do a lot of everything, but I get them to focus 70 of that time on fixing that one problem. And then the remaining 30% of that time. When I say time, I mean development time. Right. If you got five hours a week, you're doing four on that one problem an hour and everything else. And the reason I get them to study that 30% of time is because you make massive improvements in that one thing.

That's like the 80, 20 rule.

Right, exactly. And then if you're doing a whole bunch of other stuff, like let's say it's tonality, you do four hours of tonality work a week, you get significantly better at tonality when you're focusing and you have that much intention on it. But then if you do 30, you do a little bit of a Jackson handling, a little bit of structure, a little bit of articulation, whatever. Because you've had such an improvement on that tonality, you feel like you've got that same improvement on those little things that don't make as much of a difference. Exactly. Right. So for you, is that kind of like a philosophy that you go by or like, how does that work for you?

Yeah, I, I try and be pretty well rounded. Like, I try and do not too much development. And I think some of the more junior guys may get too caught up in that. Whereas if they, you know, I found it better for myself anyway to just focus on the next level in turn, but like actually not just sit there and passively, you know, read. Watch a portal or whatever it is. Watch a video, but actually a port. Yeah, no, actually practice it.

Right.

Treat it like an actual sales call.

Right.

Rather than like, yeah, again, your job is the DMing. But then, yeah, go and practice that next level like it is a real call. That makes sense.

Awesome. Yeah, I, I agree with that. Unless you're not that good at DMS yet, then if you're ever gonna transition.

Your mileage may vary.

Right. Precisely. Right. Yeah. No, no, 100%. We're pretty much on the. The same boat. Okay, so coming in, learning that skill set in sales and doing it rapidly, how does that transition into everyday life? Like with the dog business, like communication with your.

Yeah, my.

Soon to be.

Yeah, any bq, honestly, just train teaches you how to Talk to people. And, like, it teaches you how important language is. Very specific words, like the 1% changes in a sentence or the way you say something is very important. Again, it's that like, 80, 20. It's like 20% of the changes you make to words make 80% of the changes to the outcome of what you're trying to get.

Right.

Like, if you learned any pq, the worst thing that could happen is that you get better at sales. Do you know what I mean? The least. The least. The least outcome you got out of it would be that you get better at sales. Whereas I found that applies. It just kind of seeps into the rest of your life. That makes sense.

Has it been easier for you to sign up dog train clients?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, Absolutely.

What's the close rate?

My close rate is on the dog. On the dogs? Yeah. It'd be over 90.

What's it in general on the.

On here?

Yeah, yeah.

Like, I'm on. I'm on the actual NEPQ account. I'm closing at, like, 60 at the moment. I think I actually just checked it the other day.

It's pretty good. Yeah, yeah, it's six months.

58 to 60, something like that.

58. That's.

That's weak at about 60.

Yeah. But obviously we need to have a serious performance.

That's why you've sat me down here.

Anyway, so would you guys like to see that on a podcast? Me roasting Luke for an hour, but yeah. Okay, cool. Anything else that you want to chat about today?

I just want to thank you guys for, like, the opportunity to actually be part of this, because, like I said, I came here for the vision, I think. And I can see, like, between you and James. You and James, you and Matt, I.

Meant to say, I mean, really the most important people.

James and James. So like that for me. That's exciting. I like to be part of something that's.

If you got a troubled dog, maybe one you throw a stick, it doesn't come back. Maybe one that's a little. And chews up anything.

I mean, we helped you with your dogs.

Oh, you. You did? If. If that's you. And I know a lot of salespeople there. They love their animals. Most of them don't like people, even though they speak to people on a daily basis. Love animals. If you want to learn about how to make your dog better and have a more enjoyable life, where can they.

Find life with your dog? Podcast. So we're in all the platforms. You'll be able to find us just Google Life.

Put a link in the description.

Yes.

All right, well thank you for your time Luke and please, it would be really appreciative if you can like comment, subscribe, all that good things. There'll be links down here, there'll be links there, there'll be links everywhere with upsells down sales, cross sells, whatever you want. Guys leave a comment if there's any questions for Luke directly about anything that he spoke about in his development, please put in the comments. I will make sure that he goes in there, checks on and responds. I will and if he doesn't let me know and we will film a follow up episode because that's not what we do here and that's not good enough.

We are strong and follow up here.

Yeah, follow up every day. Okay thanks guys and have a lovely day. Bye. Put that coffee down. Coffee's for closers only.