Expert Advice On Getting Excited About Your Business from David Shands
The best way to sell your business is to get excited about it. If you are chill about your business, how can you engage others to take action? In this entrepreneur, Q&A David sits down with Morning Meetup Members and gives them masterclass answers to their business engagement concerns.
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Jayda: I am not a salesperson. I have an upcoming webinar with 200 hundred people signed up so far. I want to make 40K. How can I make that happen?
D: I'll give you something that works. You're going to need two parts to the webinar—the information that people need right, but you're going to make an offer at the end. The first part of the webinar isn't just information on your subject you have to prepare their mind to buy.
Communicate in the webinar that they're going to have to invest in themselves. Explain how accomplishing what they want will be an investment in time, energy and resources. This preps their minds to be prepared to invest in what you're about to sell.
Secondly, if you're not a salesperson, find someone to close and do the sales "ask" for you. Typically, they're going to want a percentage. For example, I've done a closing for Donni and she's done a closing for me. In this case, we didn't charge each other anything, that's us. She did the closing pitch for me so I'm good!
Nya: Could I piggyback off that? I reached out to you last week because I'm doing the same thing: a webinar event to kick off the VP Club my virtual podcast membership club.
David: Yes, could you tell more about that?
Nya: My virtual podcast membership club is a virtual experience right, so my clients currently I record their podcasts virtually using Zencastr. Whoever joins the membership will get four recording sessions a month, transcripts, show notes, unlimited audio space, and logo branded content, etc. Essentially we put together the whole podcast virtually and they're also going to be a part of a virtual community which is backed by the Black Podcasters Association, an organization that provides resources to black podcasters.
My membership cost is $2950 for six months. My question is I want to have a webinar with 30 attendees and I want a 50% closing rate. I'd like to ask you David to be my sales closer.
David: A closing rate of 50% is high. I don't know if I can do that.
Nya: My coach told me I should strive for 60 attendees. Maybe I should listen.
David: You need to have 300 attendees. But, to get to 300, you have to have a thousand people registered.
The presentation or program I think is good, but your presentation of how this webinar is going to turn out, I'm not confident that it's not a waste of time for me. I think that is your one mistake.
It's not a waste of time if there's a thousand people on the webinar, I mean, a thousand people registered 300 people on the webinar and then I start to calculate 300 people on the webinar if I can close 60 people at 2500 and I get this percentage. I'm with that, okay, but you don't seem really confident in the outcome of this webinar.
You basically didn't have much excitement. You didn't come to me saying, "I have the most amazing podcast community and you teach podcasters right, David? I'm about to give you an opportunity, I wouldn't give anybody else because I'm pushing this thing hard! We're going to have 60 people, but these 60 people are people who specifically want to start a podcast. This isn't like some other type of audience, right? I'm about to give them an offer that they can't refuse twenty-five hundred dollars for six months. You can't run a podcast for five thousand dollars for a whole year. I want to let you share in that. This is my strategy."
So a lot of it is in the presentation and making me making me or anybody else feel comfortable to be involved. The sales piece that we talked about is struggling a bit, but it's not even selling piece it's you being excited about it.
"When I get on the line with my team about an idea that I have, I'm not trying to sell them on anything because when I have the idea, I'm just excited that we're about to execute this joint."
- David Shands
So when I get on the call it's like, I got it! "Yeah it's up!" That's how I talk, "Yo it's up I figured it out."
I figured it out because I'm genuinely excited! It's not about being a salesperson. You got to get that apprehension out of your voice and get excited! In your head you know the product's good, it's got to transfer to your heart and from your heart out of your mouth.
It's not here quite in your heart yet.
Once your business is in your heart, then it's UP from there!
Q: Going back to what you said about getting excited about a business what if the business just isn't an exciting business? I sell commercial appliances. That's not like a sexy business.
David: You know why it's not sexy for you? Because you haven't made any money from it. If you're making money from it, it'd be super exciting, okay?
Somebody who absolutely loves the craft and loves the outcome or loves that your client's life is going to improve with a new refrigerator will make their work sexy.
You have to live it, you have to love it.
When I was working at the Cheesecake Factory, I was never in love with being a server there. Something changed when I stopped going to work for a paycheck. I started to go to work because I wanted to become a better man, thinker and become more positive.
I don't know what happened specifically, but one day I came to work and I was just excited to be there. Being a server is not exciting, it's hard work.
Jas: David, when working in a service-based industry where you're exchanging your time for money constantly, I'm feeling stuck because I'm at the point where I don't want to do that anymore. I have a skill that's hard to be taught. I offer higher-level services. At this point, I feel stuck and burnt out.
David: There's a few ways to scale a business. One is to charge more. Yeah, so I know this isn't the number, but let's say it's a hundred dollars. If it takes you 10 clients to make a thousand dollars if you charge 200, it'd take you the same amount of time to make the same amount of money. So for the same amount of time to double the money so you can scale that way.
You can also acquire more customers, but to acquire more customers, you need more people to handle customers. So the biggest problem now isn't the business model. It's the fact that you can't train people. That's what you have to work on, your ability to train people.
When I got the job at the Cheesecake Factory, they didn't check my passion level. They just want me to do this, do that and we'll pay you this.
It's a job, yeah they know I'm not going to be there forever.
So you need to like to read more books on leadership, and how you transfer information from you to them.
That is something I'm still struggling with! How I talk to Reese and how I'll talk to Lynnette is totally different okay because they're different people.
You have to have that sort of awareness that you're talking to different people. The biggest thing in leadership is you have to know how to get people to want to do the thing that you want them to do. So it's not just to get them to do it, but how do I get them to want to do it?
We hope you found value in this conversation. Catch the rest of the episode here!
We'll see you in the next upload.
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