The 3 Cold Hard Truths About Sales

Hey guys, what's up? Today I'm going to tell you the hard truth about sales. So there's a couple of hard truths around selling. Selling is a very interesting industry, but the truth of the matter is that not everybody will succeed. You can say that pretty ubiquitously about everything. But it's especially truthful in sales because sales is a 100% meritocracy. You will only be successful if you are really good at it and you will be moderately successful if you are moderately good at it. And you will be not successful at all if you're not good at it. It's really not about anything else but how good you are and how one, how hard you're willing to work, but to the skill sets that you have and then how well you can apply those skill sets. Sales is very similar to most sort of performance based injuries where, you know, 10% of the people earn about 90% of the income. This has some good flow on effects and some bad ones. Okay. And I'm going to kind of break those down for you. So I've made a lot of money over the last couple of years selling different products and services. There's some interesting things that kind of come from that. The first of all is that people really only see the outcome. They don't see the process that got the person there. And so I think like whenever you see people like myself or a Jeremy Miner or even like a Ryan Serhant or whatever, anyone who's like very, very accomplished in sales, all you're seeing is like a lot of times the culmination of all the hard work. And you think like, oh, well, you know, look like Matt only got into high ticket sales three years ago and look what he's been able to achieve. And it's like, well, yeah, but I was in sales for 10 years prior to that where I was slogging it out, dialing for eight hours a day. And I've made no secret of that. I'm very, very particular in trying not to sell the dream. Like that's not something we want to do. I don't think you can replace your nine to five income and be a six figure earner in six weeks. It's not gonna happen. At least for a vast majority of people, it's not gonna happen. So like, what I'm gonna do really quick is I'm gonna break down how much money I've spent on coaching over the last 10 years and the number is $284,000. So I added up all the coaching programs that I've done over the last 10 years and I worked up to $284,000. Okay. So now if we take a look at that and we do it over a 10 year basis and we draw the line, it's about $28,000 a year for the last 10 years, every single year, I've spent $28,000 a year on coaching. Now I was basically broke until three years ago, probably even two years ago to be honest. So that's $225,000,000 of the 280 that I have spent on coaching. Where essentially I had no business buying those programs. I couldn't afford them essentially for the most part, like that's the part of the process that people don't see like me making incredibly uncomfortable decisions and working, you know, eight, nine hours a day, just dialing and spending a massive chunk of my income on coaching courses to get better. You guys don't see that. All you see is the end result and you want to replicate it. But people generally don't want to do that bit, right? That really unpleasant eight year bit. People don't want to do that part. They just want the last two years, which is understandable because that would be great. Okay, so does that mean that you need to go out and spend that much money? No, it definitely doesn't. Like that would be ridiculous. You don't have to spend nearly $300,000 on training to get good at sales. And a lot of that stuff was not about sales. It was business or fitness or like whatever it may be, right. The truth is like it's, it's about the willingness to become extremely uncomfortable in order to achieve one's goal. But that's really what it's about. So it's like what are you doing to make yourself uncomfortable in order to achieve your goal? Now if you guys do like this kind of content, can you, can you comment Hard Truth down below and then from there, you know, I know that you guys are enjoying it and a sub to the channel would be great as well. Hard truth number two, replacing a 9 to 5 income in three months high ticket closing is not going to happen. Right? It's just not. I mean, unless you don't make much money working 9 to 5, then it could definitely happen. So sales is an art form that requires a few things and one of them is to be armed with the right skills. Now the right skills, it's hard to know which, which of the training companies or which of the books are going to give you the right skills. But I think that anything applied well will probably work. Now, my belief is that any pq, which is Jeremy Miner's methodology, is the best because it's what took me and all my sales guys to the next level. And I' done a few of the other ones. And some of those other ones, their salespeople are trained by Jeremy. So being armed with the right skills. Now, the second thing is that you need time. And one of the most frustrating things when you're learning something or when you're young or when you're trying to adapt and make money, is that time takes time. It's an incredibly frustrating thing to hear, but unfortunately it is the truth. Sometimes you just haven't had enough reps and you haven't made enough mistakes to be able to navigate a situation well enough in real time to be able to get a consistent outcome. There's some things that training just can't help. Like you get a really random prospect and although you might only feed that prospect 5 or 10% of the time, like over a hundred calls, you're going to see that 10 times. And if you don't know how to handle that, that's 10 sales you're definitely not going to make. But they're sort of odication. So training for that is weird. But you just all of a sudden after you've done it 30 or 40 times, you just understand now in order to do that you'd have to have thousands of calls. So it's just kind of the way it is. Unfortunately, time takes time. I'll give you an example. I failed my first sniper course. Right? Sniper course. A lot of people fail. About 40 or 50% of snipers fail their first course. It's a really difficult course that's designed to fail. The point is like we all have struggles and you know, I think overcoming and perseverance is a great thing to have. And just because you fail at some doesn't that you stop doing it. I think one of the weird things about sales is like there's a constant carrot being dangled because like you might have someone in your account that's crushing and making 30 or 50 or whatever how much money they're making per month. And you're sitting there making two or three and you're just frustrated. Why? So there's like a constant carrot being dangled and that doesn't mean that you can get the carrot. Yes, you definitely can, but you don't know what that other person who's done that has done. You don't understand what their process has been until you really ask them about it. And maybe they've done things that you're just unwilling to do. And that is fair enough. But also, like, I don't think comparing yourself to other people is very useful. Like, you know, I tell people all the time, comparison is the thief of joy. It's just, you know, if I've been in sales for 10 years and you've been in sales for two and you compare yourself to my numbers, it's ridiculous. Like, I've been doing it for longer, I should be better than you. If I'm not, then if you're doing better than me, then I need to have a good hard look at myself type thing, right? So you wouldn't walk into a gym, put 200 kilos on a bench press and then be angry when you couldn't lift it because somebody else was lifting it. Like you just wouldn't do that. But for some reason, people think that they should be able to walk into a sales position and crush it day one. I know that that would be great. But again, we don't live in the, you know, fairy tale of unicorns and rainbows. Like comparison is the thief of joy. Again, comment, hard truth, if any. This is resonating with you. But point number three, a lot of the people watching this right now in 12 months won't be in sales, right? There's a very, very high turnover rate in sales. And the reason is because it is a meritocracy. And I think people forget that you're only paid on performance and you're only paid on how much money you can make the business. That's it. That's your only metric, right? Culture. You can be a fantastic cultural fit. If you can't make the business money, then you do not deserve to get paid anything because that is your job. Your job is to make the business money. That's one reason why people I think, are sort of, you know, chewed up and spit out sales. Also, a lot of people generally are very bad at managing salespeople, which is why at Sales Sniper, we have an entire product which is us, just us managing sales reps, right? Management training systemization of sales processes and sales reps to make sure that we keep the good ones long term and to make sure that there's a process in place for those sales people can actually be successful, right? But in the day, if someone's a savage, they're going to be successful no matter what system, no matter what management they're in. But some of the people who are kind of mid tier, they might really struggle and they might be held back by a system now. Yeah, like, I want to be really clear. Like, I never had to worry about that as a sales rep because I was very good. And so like, the systems didn't really matter. But bad sales managers can create poor team performance for sure. Those are like the three hard truths of sales. And sometimes, you know, this isn't the funnest video to watch or the funnest videos to make. But I think it's really important that we understand that sales is a very difficult place to make money because again, it's performance. Basically, it's the athlete division of business. If LeBron James wasn't putting up crazy numbers, he wouldn't get paid the money that he is. We just have to remember it in that way. And it's like, what are the things that make great athletes great? What are the things that make great salespeople great? And they're very, very similar. And what are the things that make a mediocre sale salesperson and a mediocre team player? It's just, it's the same things. It's work ethic, it's skill set. So you might have the work ethic but lack the skill set. So you have to go out and get that. You might have the skill set but lack the work ethic. I know a lot of very, very talented salespeople who don't make that much money because they, they don't have the work ethic. And I know some, some fairly average sales reps that make really good money because they grind, but they never make as, as much money as the guy who's high level of skill, high level of work ethic. If you like this kind of content, make sure you let me know. Comment hard truth down below. If you like the channel, make sure you subscribe to it. If you like the video, make sure you hit the like button. And make sure to go over to our Facebook group, the closing code, okay. Where you can get more kind of good content. We have exclusive content going on into that group, which is actually a lot of the time taken from my one on one sales coaching calls. All right, guys, thank you very much and I'll see you in the next, next video.