What A Billion-Dollar Government Bailout Can Teach You About Business

If you call someone within the first hour of them downloading your thing, you're going to make that sale. I can guarantee with DMs, you might spend three or four days messaging people and have no sales calls booked.

There was a specific example they implemented someone just to call the leads as soon as they came in within the first minute. And they were only doing 2 to 3 calls a day and they made 500k return on investment. All they did was call the lead as soon as it came in. That was it.

That person has just downloaded the thing, which they have a problem of. And now you've called them in the first six minutes to ask more questions about that problem that they have and you booked me for a call. In the next 48 hours, you're going to make that sale. I can guarantee you.

Foreign. Welcome to episode 92 on the success School podcast. Super excited to be here with you guys today. Just a huge favor, if you're here for the first time, please subscribe to the show on whatever platform you're at. That is our most important metric and we really appreciate it. Steph, how are you feeling?

I have had a busy few weeks, I'm not gonna lie. I'm gonna go straight into my personal update.

Okay.

I've had a busy few weeks. We don't talk much about like personal stuff that's going on the podcast too much. But recently my mum got. Became quite sick and has had to move into a care facility where she's been careful 247 around the clock. My dad has recently moved into an aged care facility in the last four months as well. And so the last few weeks. I'm an only child, guys, in case you didn't know. The last few weeks has been me packing up their house and my gosh, what a job. It's a big job. We've actually had a garage sale all day today running. Thank God that we are sourced, that we outsourced to our family. Thank you to our amazing. To your family, actually thank you to your amazing sister and family and parents and stuff like that. We're super grateful. But it's been, it's been a really big job and one thing that I really learned throughout this process was you don't need more shit like that is definitely something that I learned was like you got to Marie Kondo your stuff right up there because like there was just, I'm talking like skip bins full of stuff, junk that just junk that they thought was valuable that no one else wanted to buy and that, you know, One day you can't take it with you guys. And, you know, you might say it has sentimental value, but it really doesn't because, you know, it's only sentimental to you. But then the minute you pass away, it means nothing to anyone. Right? So, you know, do yourselves a favor. If you guys have children, please start planning for your retirement and aged care. And try not to just leave a whole house full of stuff to your kids to back away.

Imagine all these women out there being like, steph is so inspirational. Well, for going through that, you know, I. You're so alone.

This is Tim just, like, telling. I'm taking the piss. Guys, I've been very, very supported by you, by your family. I'm very lucky.

I feel for you.

Thank you.

So I woke up on Friday morning. This is my personal update. And I had a call. I attended the call, seven o'. Clock. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to take the day off the gym. A couple hours went past and I had a hard word with myself, and I realized I had the in me. And what I mean by the bitch in me. I was being a. Yeah. And I have been a lately. Ever since I sold my gym, I definitely haven't been training as hard. My body feels great for that, by the way. I'm not like, deadlifting and squatting crazy all the time and doing nut stuff, but being a bit of a lately. And I decided that day I was going to stop being a. And I started training really hard. And I don't know if you noticed, but am I more muscular in one day?

I definitely noticed it. Yeah. Obviously insanely huge now. And the thing that I loved about it, though, was that, like, I just. I love the ferocity in which you attack things.

Yeah.

You were like, steph, I didn't train this morning. I need to start training harder. So I'm gonna write myself a program now. I'm gonna go to the gym at midday. I'm just gonna fucking send it. And you did?

I did.

I love your tenacity.

And then I thought about hiring a marketing VA and hired one.

Yeah.

Yeah. A couple hours later.

Literally three hours.

Incredible. So, guys, if you're feeling like you've got the bitch in you, what do you need to do? Because good things happen and your business will grow if you get that bitch out of you.

Yeah, Just, like, motivating.

All right, guys, we're going to get.

Welcome to Tim's TED Talk.

Yeah, welcome. All right, guys, we're going to get to our sales topic. Today we're talking about sales hacks and fun, some stuff that you guys can implement in your sales process. Right now, if you're someone that's scared of sales, don't be scared of sales. Best thing you ever do, most money you make and most impact you ever have by dominating your sales process. So we've got a couple of points here. We've got five points on things you need to know or implement or hacks right away. I will start with the first one. Don't allow more than 48 hours for someone to book a call. That might sound very counterintuitive, but the reason is that show rates exponentially decrease the longer the time horizon on the call. So when we first started successful, I think had like 30 days, was available for a sales call. We're like, why are all these people not showing up for sales?

Course, you can book call anytime this month.

Yeah. So eventually brought that into two weeks, one week, and now we're down to two days, and we have a 75% show rate in only two days. And if it gets out any longer than that, our show rate decreases to 30%. And what happens there is, is people are rebooking, but they're not actually showing up again. They're just reschedule. So it just eliminates the people that aren't actually serious about having a call with you, which is incredible.

Let's say you sell by chatting somebody. You're trying to get them booked in for a call. They're like, oh, you're kind of like, hey, would you like to have a call? I can, you know, jump on a bun. We can chat it out. And they're like, oh, yeah, maybe next week. They're not that keen anyway, you know, so what you're better off doing saying cool, or, how about I touch base next week and I'll get you booked in? And if they're really serious, they'll be like, yeah, man, I'd love to jump on right now. And if you cannot get people onto a call in the next 48 hours, then you probably need to work on some urgency in your conversation to even get them booked on a call. Right. But it's been huge for us. I think it's going to be captivating for anyone who's listening to this episode. The second one is to defeat objections when they arise. I've got a couple of cool little hacks here that I think you guys are going to love. But basically, people already know what their objection is before they get on the call. Okay. And so you Know, for example, if I'm getting on a call and I know that Tim is probably going to want to check in on my purchase, but this actually is not our relationship, by the way. We can buy whatever we want. But let's say there's new earrings. Yes, they are actually brand new. I did not approve. So let's say that I was getting on a sales call, though, and I knew that I was going to want to run something past Tim before I purchased, but Tim wasn't available to be on the call. Okay. Within the first five or six minutes of that conversation. Because subconsciously I am aware, even though I'm not consciously aware, maybe in the moment of that conversation, subconsciously I'm aware that I'm going to probably have to run this past him. I'm going to throw up or bring in the subject of my husband pretty early in the conversation. Whatever objection you get at the end of the call, I can guarantee you you would have had within the first 10 minutes of the call. I'll give you an example. Another example, though, it's really, really common, is that if somebody knows they have no money to be able to invest in a program, they're going to tell you in the first 10 minutes. They're like, oh, money's really tight at the moment, or Costage is going out, or I'm just really struggling to get by or make ends meet. You have to handle the objection then and not wait for it at the end of the call. Because I can guarantee you that if they've said it there, that's the objection you're going to get at the end of the call. So the best thing you can do if someone's giving you a financial objection at the start of the call, it's just to say, cool, let's talk about your finances, like, what's happening there right now. How's that working out for you? Where are you spending your money? Oh, yeah, I totally just want to get an understanding of that, have that conversation there. And then when they give you the finance objection at the end of the call, you guys can do some fun math and you can find out how they can afford it because you already talked about it at the beginning.

The third one, guys, and we have implemented this recently, is a daily sales huddle. Okay? So what that is is a 30 minute meeting with the whole sales team. You go through wins, losses, what you need help with, any objections you have and just update on where sales are. The reason it works is because it's really good accountability for the team. Sales teams can get inherently lazy if they're not managed. And I mean that by no disrespect to anyone. That's like anyone if they're not manage. You can do this with different departments. If you have marketing department, you have client success, whatever it is. I know that most people listening to this wouldn't have a sales team, but getting into a cadence of maybe reviewing your calls, going through stuff, you could get better every single day can be a great thing. Or even following up the leads, setting a time for that. We had massive objection to even starting this because we were like, why do these people need managing? Like they should just be self starters, they should just be making sales, cutting deals, doing stuff, growing the business. But people really need management and this helps a ton of.

Yeah, I mean I need management sometimes. So I totally hear that. So guys, the fourth one is that calling the leads still beats DMs. DMs are just a nightmare because you just cannot control what they're seeing them. They're going to others folders, they're getting marked as spam, they're seeing them and they get busy and they forget to look back at it. But if you call someone within and guys, you really do have to get pretty fast at this. But if you call someone within the first hour of them downloading your thing, double dial them, I can guarantee you, you're going to get some answers and I'm going to guarantee you that some of those are going to book in sales calls. With DMs, you might spend three or four days messaging people and have no sales calls booked. If you just give yourself an hour every day to call the leads. And the clients of ours that do this always make money, right? If you give yourself an hour a day just to call the leads, you have to do this for a little while because eventually you can outsource it, right? But an hour a day just to call the leads, I can guarantee you get sales calls, book you'll make sales, it'll be fun.

And the fifth and final hack, guys, is speed to lead. So I saw a post online about this on speed to lead. But there's a 308% increase in conversions. And there was a specific example, I think it was a doctor's surgery and they implemented someone just to call the leads as soon as they came in within the first minute. And they were only doing two to three calls a day. And they got paid 50 grand just to call the leads within the first minute. That's all they had to do. And they made 500k return on investment from that 50k. So 10x return on investment. They did was call the lead as soon as it came in. That was it. That was their entire role. But they made a 10x return, which is incredible. So 308% increase in conversions. When someone calls within an hour, within 60 minutes, if you want even faster than that, then obviously it's under.

I think it's like a four times chance of getting the sale booked and making the sale in the first six minutes.

Damn.

Yeah. So if you can get to them in six minutes and again, you can hire someone to do this, you are going to be. Because that person has just downloaded the thing which they have a problem of and now you've called them in the first six minutes to ask more questions about that problem that they have. And you booked me for a call in the next 48 hours, remember? Because that was the first point. You're going to make that sale. I can guarantee you.

All right, guys, in summary, things you need to implement here is don't allow more than 48 hours to book a call, defeat objections when they come up in the sales process, daily sales huddles, or checking on yourself with some accountability every day. Call the leads. Don't just dm, all right? You want to hit them everywhere and then speed to lead on that.

I'm just to wrap the segment up, guys. I just, I really, really want to push in. Most people here listening to this podcast are focused so much on marketing, but they forget the sales is literally the thing that makes your business survive. Okay. And if you are not focusing on making your sales process this good or trying to make it this good in some way, shape or form, then that is why you are probably struggling to get the amount of sales that you need to be able to have the income that you want in your business.

All right, guys, we're going to get into a news discussion today. So, you know, Steph loves these and we put her on the spot all the time with these.

I have no idea. Sometimes. And then Tim just throws them at me like, I guess we're having this conversation. This one's interesting though.

So WA Western Australia, aka center of the world energy giant Synergy, seeks nearly $1 billion bailout amid renewable transition struggle. So I'll explain what that means.

Yeah, please, like, make that noise. Jargony English.

So there's the big green push for renewable energy because, you know, save the trees, like all that stuff, which we agree with.

Yes.

But it's very expensive to roll out and now they're seeking a bailout from the government, AKA taxpayer. You and me, we're going to have to bail out this private company. So what happened here is Synergy was a government agency, then they sold it off privately. But I'm quite annoyed as the taxpayer because why would you sell a company and then get government bailouts after selling a company private?

Why do they sell it privately?

They wanted to make it more efficient and cheaper and it was just less for, you know, they thought that a company could run it better than the government, which they probably do. But what's the point in selling a company and then the taxpayer bailing them out anyway?

A billion dollars.

A billion dollars. So my question here, Steph, is should. I got two questions. So should the government be bailing out private companies? And then what are some lessons that we can learn from this in small business?

Look, I'm probably not going to weigh in on the. Should government be bailing out private companies? But look, if government is going to start bailing out private companies, I want some money. Can we have some money, please?

Yeah.

Thanks so much. If you guys could just stop charging yourself.

I don't need a billion fricking tax.

That'd be amazing. Yeah, I'm not asking for a billion. I'll be happy with a milk. Thanks very much. Just a nice little tax refund. It'd be nice. The thing that annoys me here is that this business has not been run effectively. It's pumped all this money into these renewables without having done proper research, without, like, because just talk through here why the renewables haven't worked. So what is renewable energy just for anyone who.

So wind, solar, those type of things, they have thermal as well. So there's a big push on that versus nuclear at the moment. So it's a big debate. So we did discuss this on the car on the way here to the studio today. But wind turbines only last 15 to 20 years and solar or so they have a life expectancy around very similar for solar panels. But nuclear costs more to set up, but lasts a lot longer. Australia is very anti nuclear because of what happened 60 years ago on ancient technology, which I think we should be looking at it rather than just going through this whole like solar and wind is the only thing that we should do.

But yeah, yeah, back to like the business side of it. They need to do their due diligence and if they haven't made good business decisions now, obviously we can't allow synergy to go under. I think this is the problem. Right. Is that the government actually relies on synergy. And so, and, and the world at the mom, or Australia especially is relying on synergy. So the problem is that, you know, now the taxpayer is spending a billion dollars to bail this company out. I just hope they do better. And I think that there are a lot of lessons here for business, but.

Is there going to be another billion as soon as the solar panels are like dead and then we've got all these wind turbines that are just.

Yeah, I mean, I hope that they're finally looking at a different way, like, and guys, your business will fail. Like they've made it. This has been a failure. Yeah, I hope that they can say that this is not working, this is not sustainable, because the only way that they are actually going to be able to make this better, guys, is to charge us more for electric and electricity prices are already out of control. And so, yeah, they've hit a point of what we would probably look at is a failure in business where the product market fit isn't working right. And sure, the government's bailed them out this time, but I just really hope they learn from it. It's okay that you fail. It's okay that you make a mistake. It's okay that it didn't work out the first time, but you have to like learn from those failures and then choose different next time. And I just, I really hope that they make that decision.

My business lesson from this is, guys, and I know this isn't a direct carryover, but you have to know your numbers in business. And you know, we've been speaking to a lot of clients this week and the one commonality that all of them have that are crushing it and like going up consistently every time is they know their numbers and they track their KPIs. Like you have to know how much profit you're earning, what like a budget is, is for the project that you're doing, what the revenue is, how many clients are getting, sales calls, all that stuff. You have to be on top of it every single week.

And the bigger your business gets, the more in depth your KPIs get. Like, we have clients that, you know, bordering on the 1 million mark. And they know exactly what percentage efficienc each team member is and exactly how much profit each team member brings to the business. The bigger your company gets, the more deeply you have to look at your numbers. So if you're at the beginning and you don't have to look at that level, obviously at the beginning, but at the beginning you do have to track your numbers and anyone who has fast growth. Like you said, all about clients, they're tracking.

So we're gonna get into our listener question. We're gonna do a little bit of an explanation. And I think Steph and I have different ideas on this one as well. Maybe you probably come at this one a little bit more heart and soul than I would. So. It's from Laura. A client has prepaid bunch of sessions and is now requesting a refund. Legal terms state that refunds are only provided if the sessions cannot be delivered. If the refund is denied, it may impact the client's perception of future sessions. How would I handle this professionally? And Steph, what would you do in this situation?

I am so deeply with you on this. I know what you would do. I think the way of handling it, there's two ways. So at the end of the day, the client, you know, paid for five sessions, hasn't booked any, is now requesting a refund. Two things that immediate. The first thing that popped into my head was you need better systems.

Yeah.

That client should have not been able to not book their first session. As soon as they paid. They should have been invited to book their first session. They haven't booked within 48 hours. If they haven't booked in 72 hours, like there should be things in place. It should be fail safes to make sure that that doesn't happen. Okay. Now this particular client is in what I would call an avoidant industry. So an avoidant industry typically finances relationships. One of those things, guys, if you're an accountant, people don't want to talk to their accountants. And they will actively avoid talking to their accountants. If you're in like this lady is in the relationships or dating industry, people are going to be avoidant because they uncomfortable. She's a relationship counselor. She's gonna be uncomfortable. They're gonna be uncomfortable with this. So they may feel the pain at the time of paying. And then in two weeks time, they've convinced themselves that it's no longer a problem because everything at home has gone okay again. And so they sweep it under the rug and they pretend it's not happening. In my opinion, the best way to handle this is to say you have this problem. This is an underlying problem that is still not gonna be dealt with. Whether it's today or in six months time, this is gonna rear its ugly head. You cannot afford to sweat this under the rug, otherwise you will head for divorce. Let's just get on the call. I'm not going to let you out of the contract because I care about you enough to not let you out of the contract.

You summarize that perfectly. And I'm not going to be able to do as good of a job explaining that, but I'm just going to give you my personal, unfiltered opinion here. I fucking hate when people ask for refunds.

Yes, you do.

And I just say no every time. Because if you sign a contract and we are delivering, or anyone is delivering what they said they were going to deliver, then there is no chance or any reason for a refund at all.

We would never ask a refund. And we have have wanted to. Yeah, because we haven't felt like we got what we wanted, but we never did because we signed the fricking contract and that's our due diligence that needs to be fixed.

My takeaway is, guys, just honor the commitments. If you signed up for something, see it through. If you signed up for something for 12 months, 24 months, whatever it is, you don't just ask for an out from your mortgage or whatever it is. Like, honor your commitments. This refund pisses me off so much. All right, guys, if you got some value from that episode, hit that subscribe button. Whatever platform you're on, YouTube, Spotify, wherever you're at, send us a message on Instagram. We do love the feedback at Real Tim Ferray at Stephen Gorton might not.

Be Steph Gordon by the time that goes.

We'll see.

We'll see.

All right, guys, we'll see you soon.

Bye.