Sabri Subhi argues that selling is everywhere: convincing your boss, solving client problems, even personal relationships all use sales skills. He started cold-calling at 17 in a boiler room, became top salesperson by treating it like a game, and learned persuasion by studying how great communicators work.
Founder Sabri Subhi joins me now in the studio. I really look at business as an incredible vehicle to really like make good and make change in the world. In this video I'm really going to be addressing, you know, that everybody is in sales and that's really the elephant in the room at this point. You might be thinking about, you know, I'm not an extrovert, you know, I don't go out there, I'm not really loud and like speaking to hundreds of people or anything like that. And you might be thinking of this, this sales racket is really not for you. And really what I want to bring it back to is that every single person is in sales whether you like it or not. So you know, whether you're, you're a full time employee or you're a creative type, you're an introvert. Everything that you do in your day to day life is a sale, right? Whether you're speaking to your partner in your personal life and you want to go to a certain restaurant or go see a certain movie, you're essentially selling your agenda and the things that want to do in order to reach an outcome. Or if you're working a part of a team and you're pitching ideas, you are pitching, you're selling, you're selling your ideas, right? That is the single most important skill that you really train and the muscle that you build on is being able to really, sales at its heart is being able to effectively communicate your message, your value proposition or your agenda. And really what people see is like, oh look, I'm introverted, I don't like speaking to people. You know, you really need to kind of get your head around that. This is not some kind of, you know, high pressure sales environment where you're gonna kind of be working in a boiler room or anything like that. You basically nothing happens until a sale is made. So you really, in order to basically solve problems for your clients and solve problems, you need to effectively communicate what you're doing, effectively communicate your value and essentially make a sales pitch to some varying degree. At this stage you might be wondering and thinking, you know, why should I take, you know, why should I learn about Sal from Sudbury? Well, to give you a little bit of a background of my story is that I started in sales when I was 17 years old and it was my first real full time job. It was certainly my first job in sales and I'll never forget it. It was like a group job interview. There was like 20 of us, we were sitting around in a circle and we would basically hand in a sales script and we were told to read the script and then they would give us some feedback after we done it. And based on how well we took that feedback on and how coachable we were was whether or not we made it to the next. So out of the 20 people, basically two people got the job. I was fortunate to be in those two people. However, that's where it really started getting tough for me. I had never done sales before, and here I was, a 17 year old, you know, kind of in the cold face of capitalism, making a hundred cold calls a day. And it was really a rude awakening, like a cold slap across the face. And I struggled. I absolutely sucked in the beginning. And, you know, it was a process of going through, being coached and really finding out about, you know, how things work in the world and how to communicate things. There's nothing that will teach you something more quickly than making 100 cold calls to strangers a day. And I did that. And, you know, I was still struggling. I was definitely lower and I was doing worse than the rest of the people. However, the owner of that business saw something in me and they kind of gave me a shot. And I never forget, you know, I had a really rough day and I came home and I was thinking, like, why, like why isn't this working for me? Do you know what I mean? Like, why is it I'm just not seeing the success that other people are doing? And I kind of made a decision that day that I was going to basically approach it as a game. And I was just going to go out there and I was going to game the system. I wasn't going to care about anything. I was just going to come out guns blazing. And I went back to work the next day and I did that and I came back and literally it was like a click. Overnight, I became their top salesperson. You know, there was 20 of us sitting in like this old shipping container converted into an office. It was, you know, we were using the old handsets and we were making so many calls we wouldn't put the phone back on the dial. It was, you know, a real kind of traditional boiler room. And I did that. And then, you know, since then I've traveled all around the world selling face to face, door to door, over the telephone, one to one and one to many. And I've been the top salesperson at every single company that I have ever worked for every week or every month that I've worked there. And it was there that I really made the decision to become a master at sales. I studied all the top leading experts in the field. I looked at speakers from Mahatma Gandhi to Adolf Hitler and seeing how they communicated and how did they use this tool of communication as a way to really convey their message to the world, whether good or bad, I really made that decision to master it. And since then I've been in the trenches on the front lines selling everything that you can imagine, from telephones to wills over the phone, you know, everything that you can imagine, I have sold in every single environment. So I'm not just coming to you as I've just read one sales book or some esoteric thoughts or I've watched a few YouTube videos on this topic. I truly believe that I've been in the field on the trenches and sharpening my sales ability to become world class in this. And everything that I teach you is purely as a result of actually trialing this stuff through trial and error and years and years of perfecting this. Hey guys, if you enjoyed this video, make sure that you click the like button and subscribe. We're dropping a video on YouTube every other day and if you've got any questions about any of the content that I covered in this video, just basically leave a comment with heysubree in the comment section. And every week we're also trying to go through all those questions and get them answered. So go ahead, click subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.
