Ryan Dohrn tells Aaron, 25 and new to sales, to build a repeatable process instead of spray and pray. Three pillars: research prospects on LinkedIn to offer genuine help, run client-centric meetings, and keep existing customers, which costs 60-70% less than acquiring new ones.
Hey friends, Ryan Dohrn here, your global sales coach, answering your listener questions sent in to ryan@ryandohrn.com. All right, next question comes from Aaron out in Los Angeles. Says Aaron from LA, unless you're Aaron from Louisiana. I'm going to say Aaron from Los Angeles. How's that? Aaron's question: Hey Ryan, I'm 25 years old. I'm brand new to sales. What is your best advice? Whoa. In only 3 minutes, you want all my advice? No, I'm just kidding. Aaron, I'm excited you have joined a group of people that are passionate about getting out there and helping customers be successful with their businesses or whatever it is. All right, my best advice: find a process, stick with your process, love your process, evaluate your process, make changes to your process. The worst thing you can do is just do a bunch of random stuff. That's called spraying and praying. That does not work in the sales business. All right, let's walk through the process. First part of the process is prospecting. I'm going to reach out to people offering help. I'm going to be relevant to them by looking on their LinkedIn, looking at their company Facebook page, social feeds. Everything I'm going to do is going to be about helping people and being exceedingly relevant. You just need 15 or 20 minutes to talk about how you can help them. Now, if you can help save them time, save them money, or save them energy, that's even a bigger bonus. Prospecting. Second piece for you, Aaron, is about hosting great meetings. When I'm hosting meetings with people, I'm name-dropping those business owners that we've been working with, people that I love, clients I have a great relationship with. I don't just make it all about me and my products. I want to be making it about other clients that we're helping, showing that we're helping people, because what you're doing is you're showing by Talking that you're helping others, you're potentially going to be helping them as well. Super important piece of the puzzle. But Aaron, here's the part that most people aren't going to tell you about. Part number 3, and that's all about retention. You are 60% to 70% more likely to retain a customer than to sign a new one. You're only 15% to 20% likely to sign a new customer. That's about it. Maybe 30% if you're good. 60% to 70% more likely to keep a customer. So because of that, you need a retention process to keep people really happy. You want people to really fall in love with you, fall in love with your product, fall in love with your customer service. Now a lot of you are in businesses where once you sell it, you're out. Hey, talk to somebody about that because if you've got to renew somebody, we've got to make sure there's a lot of love that's happening out there. Aaron, this is really a smart decision. Sales is amazing and you're going to love it. It's going to feed your family for a lifetime. Here's what I can tell you, Aaron, I hope you never are in a position like I was a couple times where I was broke. But let me tell you something, it wasn't a dad writing me a check, it wasn't a rich uncle, it wasn't winning the lottery. It was sales that brought me back from zero. And you— hope you never get to zero, but recognize that sales is a great career you can wrap your arms around, and it will literally feed your family for a lifetime. All right, friends, never forget, if sales was easy, everybody'd be doing it. Aaron, over to you. Welcome to the fun. Hey friends, if I can be of help to you, reach out to me, ryan@ryandohrn.com. Reach out to me, always happy to come and train your team, speak at your sales conference, whatever that circumstance is. Good luck, get out there and sell something. We'll see you next week.
