Sales Sniper Mini Series—James Sackl, Sales Sniper CEO

Going up. Hey guys. James here, CEO of Sales Sniper. Today we're going to take you through a couple of things that I do on a day to day basis to help his company grow. First thing is helping guys with untied shoelaces. Want me to get that for you, buddy? There we go. Hey, hey. Up here. Up here. So as you can see, teamwork makes the dream work. Now get out. Sometimes they depoke us. Sometimes I pretend to work while I'm in my office. Sometimes I try and convince people I'm important by carrying a laptop. Other times I even pretend to work from the park. Sometimes I even take up the whole road just to pretend I'm working. As you can see, I found any place to try and pretend I'm working from. We're talking about me. What are we talking about? So a little bit about me. I enjoy playing a little bit of pool to break up my day after. I've had many, many, many hours of work on the calendar. But clearly I'm not that good under pressure because that was an easy shot and I missed it. So a little bit about me. Like, I live in La Peru, Sydney, which is a nice little inner city, but away from the city, coastal kind of town. I've got two beaches within about six, six meters walk from each other and a national park and a golf course in between them. So it's a really good spot to, to be in lockdown. That which we just came out of for the last seven months. I spend a lot of time with my partner and my two dogs. So I've got two dogs, Reggie, a Dalmatian and Covey, who is a, a border collie cross Staffy bulldog. So he's interesting. He's got the brains of a border collie and needs the attention of a staffy. So he makes for an interesting mix. When Covid first started and we went into lockdown, they were the result of an accidental breed and I was expecting the puppy to be incredibly ugly. It seems like a breed that doesn't mix, but he's actually pretty cute. So that's a lot of fun. They keep me pretty busy trying to walk them once to twice a day and take them to the park and spend a lot of time with those guys just because I don't have kids. So they are my children at this current stage in life. Outside of that, for fun, I regularly try and train. I am recovering from some injuries at the moment, so my training plan is very, very different to what it has been in the past. I have a background in powerlifting and lifting a lot of weights and really being involved in high performance. Probably can't tell by looking at me at this stage, but we are working on that and making significant progress. So I've got a home gym set up. I don't tend to go to the big box gyms unless it's with friends and that I like to train on myself and be confined to not being disturbed when I'm doing it because it is very, very enjoyable and stress relief for me. Spend a lot of time in investing in crypto and currently at a stage where, you know, most of my, my free cash is going into investing. I find that funny doing some real estate investing over the coming, coming six months, which should be interesting to diversify a little bit. Other than that, for a bit of relaxation, you know, I try and just not get stressed and worked up as best as I can and try and lead by example there I have a fish tank as well, which I do for a bit of fun. I, I very much enjoy sitting in front of that and relaxing. It's a good way to calm down and switch off. I do find it. I'm very, very dopamine, dopamine driven. So I'm very, very go, go, go all the time. And having, having some sort of outlet that, you know, allows a bit of, a bit of relaxation is a really good thing. So I try and wind down at night, take a whole bunch of supplements and try and sleep like a baby. Get up in the morning and do it all again. So that's a little bit about my personal life. You see that? That's bullshit. I never should have got that. That was luck as well as missed that one. You know, I try and get out and do as many activities as I can on a weekly basis. Me and my partner have like a one date night a week rule outside of weekends. But as often as I can, I try and get out to like, you know, a concert, some sort of activity like a museum or something like that on a weekly basis just to keep things interesting and keep the brain stimulated outside of work. Otherwise I tend to just overwork. So if I can get development and I guess mental stimulation in other areas, that's really good as well. So yeah, we do that quite regularly and thoroughly enjoy weekends and do make the most of them. Yeah. So a lot of my day is like building on that strategy, evaluating a lot of the information that's presented from me, from our team, you know, our guys like Will, Marco, Ben, Tori and then ultimately just making decisions that are going to benefit us having those tough conversations and then working with Matt to put things in place so that when we have ideas they actually happen. One of my other major responsibilities is development for our staff. So what I do is I try and focus on the non technical sales skills and how to implement them. So what we look at is the conceptualization of ideas and then the formation of ideas and application to that so our guys know how to use the training that we do. So for instance Matt and Marco they teach sales as well as Jeremy skills exceptionally. It's my job to piece that together and get the things outside of the technicalities right. That is the mindset how we go about things getting congruent with our day to day life and teach that full as a concept and really show people how and get them in touch with how they can learn and how they can understand concepts. Refreshing a lot of people don't realize. Me and Matt met probably about 10 to 12 years ago now. I was running a PT business at the time. My job, I just come out of uni doing exercise science, human movement, biology, chemistry, a whole bunch of things. Molecular biology. I was looking at going into a PhD. I was working in high performance at the time with Melbourne Storm. I was lucky enough to get an internship there, learned a lot there and then was lucky enough to really excel and be given my boss's job the next year which I stayed in for a couple of years and finished university at the same time starting my own PT business. In that PT business I didn't really know what I was doing. Definitely didn't know how to sell and in fact I shit myself the first time I got on the phones. I was a frozen scared little boy. Didn't know what to say. It was pretty funny. I'm sure most of the sales guys watching this have experienced that. Originally definitely not there now. At least I hope not. Maybe some stages. If I ever have to pitch Jeremy then all bets are off. Right. Ended up being introduced to Matt and he happened to be running a fitness sales and marketing course at the time. Which is ironic because he was shit at it at least by comparison to where we are now. And it was just really funny. But we got some basic skills like he didn't know what he was doing in sales then. It was very very beat him up but he definitely knew it a lot better than me and had some had developed enough to weed out those poor natural tendencies and I started working with him and then you know, after that course we did a lot of one on one stuff together and I hired him as a mentor around the marketing, the running of my fitness business, and particularly in sales. Then we connected together a few times on another projects, opening gyms together. One of the funny stories is we did a grand opening for a gym. It was just myself and Matt on the phones. And I'd never really sold anything in a high capacity, meaning at volume, because in PT you only really need to sell 20 people total to keep your books full. And we had targets of 250 sales. I think likely the goal was at a 50% conversion rate with 500 leads, which is difficult if you've ever been in that environment. This is a story that Matt doesn't like to tell, but I sure as hell like to tell it. We actually competed to who could get the most sales and I beat him by about 10. And his tail has been in between his legs ever since. And he's never really admitted who the alpha is, which is me for beating his ass in a sales competition. So if I can do it, you can do it. I dare you to challenge him. You should. I dare you. Just do it. Don't really. You'll get an eye out now. Yeah, we did that together and decided to go into business. As he left a previous organization that, you know, that we were involved in together, he had the idea of selling fitness for other companies because that's all we really knew how to sell it that well. He knew how to sell it that way. Not very well either. And I came on board with the idea is like, yeah, not a chance I'm doing that. But it came up with the idea is like, all right, well, I think there might be some legs on this. So you have a whole bunch of strengths, but you also have a whole bunch of weaknesses. And luckily, like, I have the opposite strengths and weaknesses, but we also have similar strengths, similar weaknesses. But the main weaknesses that I have, Matt makes up for and vice versa. So it made sense to partner in something and which we did. And this is where we are. So that's how I think started. And we've never really looked back. Me and Matt have regular conversations on a daily basis. Probably not as much now as what we did six months ago. About six months ago. We'd probably spend, particularly when we weren't in the office, a good three hours a day on the phone, just going over various things as we've brief operators to take over a lot of the duties that we were doing. Those conversations don't require us to need to have as much time on the phone on a daily basis. Because we've got people giving us briefs. His total amount of time on the phone has been cut down, as has mine. And a lot of the interaction that we have is usually through meetings. We try to sit down every morning and have coffee provided we don't have a meeting. And that's with like our full staff in the office. We usually sit down, have a bit of breakfast at, you know, between 8 and 8:30, just depending on when people's free. They're really good brainstorming sessions as well. Then me and Matt probably spend, you know, half an hour to an hour personally on a daily basis just going over things. And then at least once a day or twice a day we have meetings with, with other clients and managers etc etc to, to be briefed on things for us to be able to come together and make some decisions about things. That's my interaction with Matt on a daily basis. At this stage it's not as high as what it used to be. If it was, I'd be very worried that we're not moving in the right direction. We would probably speak less and less as it's needed as the company grows in any way that it should. But I don't see it ever getting less than half an hour a day. Guess me, every time the business started to grow, we had many, many, many failures at that stage and were really unsure where to go or how to do it and how to make this successful. Then we were working with a lot of gyms. We definitely took on capacity higher than what we should have in many cases. We delivered a bad service in instances. But these were all like real learning curves and figuring out what we're good at, what we can do, what we can't, you can't do. How to manage a team, how to manage expectations, how to deliver results. And it sort of all came together. We were offered to do the sales for one of the agencies that were supplying us with gyms. They had marketing and I think at the time they offered us about 3,$300 a sale. And I remember they, Matt had that conversation and he called me immediately saying, hey, they're going to pay us this much and we're like idiots. How can someone pay someone that much for a sale? And then we've never looked back and we wouldn't accept anything even close to us to that price. Went to do sales at this current stage and where we're at in business, yeah, from there we started growing. We had a lot more gyms come on. We had a few more sort of fitness related Businesses. So a lot of fitness coaching and similar. At which point we bring on Marco to do sales because we had stepped out of actively doing sales in the fitness area that we bring Marco in, and he crushed it. And then he moved into some high ticket sales and then I had to spend six months convincing him to be able to become a manager and do what not. And, you know, that was a long process of getting him to agree to that and step out of sales. And he's taken that role with both hands. And, you know, we were so lucky to come across another person to add into our key management team that had the work ethic, the skill set and the drive, as well as the ambition to really, really get somewhere and grow this and really push the boundaries. So with us three working together, we picked up some other key hires along that way. Will Odoms, Jimmy Reese Hopkins and a few other guys at that stage, before really growing to the next level and landing some more social influencers. That really gave us a bit of credibility being Vince Del Monte, you know, Ryan Sirhant and then eventually Jeremy Meyer. Yeah, at that stage we developed a bit of a reputation for closing high and coming on with that level of velocity because we act super quick and we act with trying to maintain the hugest amount of standards. And there were times where we, we absolutely failed and that didn't do things well enough. At this stage, that doesn't really happen anymore because we've built the processes, we've built the culture, we've built the structures to be able to cope with that and replicate the success fairly easily by enforcing very, very heavy standards as well as a value system to our staff that adopt it from day one as they come in. And after we sort of landed those clients, you know, there became a bit of renown going around that, you know, we developed people so well because there was a couple of guys there like Ro, Tony Gurn, that we had taken from being, you know, okay, sales reps to kill us and making huge commissions. And it was at that point other people saw that people started to become aware of our culture and wanted to be involved. And from there everyone was coming, throwing their resumes at us, asking for jobs to be developed at that same high standard. The team grew immensely. And from that we're able to continue to attract bigger and better clients, but also outside of the coaching and consulting industry. And then as we've refined that, we've simply been able to, myself and Matt have been able to exit out of that area of the business. And we've left it in the hands of, you know, our Marcos, our Anthony's, our Will Hinksons, Sean Ray Belindt, our CTO Banner, our CT coo, Tori, our cfo, who have come on and allowed us to step out and look at the bigger picture, which moving forward, we're playing very heavily in the mergers and acquisitions field of, I guess, sales and doing what we do. But we've also developed some really substantial lead generation systemization and acquired a few other assets that really bridge and work well with our sales to allow for scale on a brilliant level. And with that comes a lot of mergers and acquisitions into sales Sniper. So we can continue to grow and grow at a rate that faster surpasses where we currently are. And by building a team and building a culture, has allowed us to step out and focus big picture on where we want to go and then allow Matt the time to be more visionary and allow myself to go out and be able to execute and put the right people in the right places to make that happen at a really, really quick rate. And that's been incredibly exciting. I hope that gives, like, a really good insight of, you know, a sales sniper from day one to two years from when we've started, roughly. And then it'll be really interesting to review this in another two years and look back and go, amateurs. Because going through this story, looking back at where we were, that's all I can think is amateurs. So thanks for listening, guys.