06/12/2021

The Underground Marketer Podcast

Episode 35 – Is Sales Just a Numbers Game?

The Underground Marketer Podcast
The Underground Marketer Podcast
Episode 35 - Is Sales Just a Numbers Game?
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Quantity vs. Quality 

In today’s episode, I want to talk about sales. The reason why I chose this topic is that many people complain that they can’t get clients. While I agree that it’s hard to build customer loyalty, especially as a service-based business, the main mistake here is that these people worry too much about their outreach strategy. They try to find the perfect formula to turn potentials into customers. However, what they should be focusing on instead is having conversations with as many people as possible because sales is a numbers game. 

3 Big Ideas 

  1. Many people wrongly assume that when it comes to sales, the quality of your pitch is more important than the number of people you pitch to. But sales is a numbers game, so the more people you engage with, the more clients you’ll get. 
  2. Ask yourself how to double or triple the volume of people that you talk with. Once you start asking yourself this question, you’ll start to notice the options and opportunities for improvement – it’s a mindset shift! 
  3. Create a sales process that works for your business and focus on automating it and removing yourself from it. This way, you’ll only have to converse with people who are already interested in your services. 

Show Notes 

 [03:09] The biggest problem of not having enough conversations is the lack of feedback. 

  • It means that you don’t really understand what’s working or what you could improve. 
  • The more you overthink, the more you’ll doubt yourself, question your decisions, and won’t get anywhere. 
  • As an entrepreneur, especially in the beginning, you’ll be the one who has to do the outreach, and this leads to overthinking and anxiety. 
  • But for example, a salesman for a company doesn’t have time to think, he always needs to engage with customers. That’s his job – to talk to as many people as possible. And this is what you should do too. 

]05:55] Build a process and pursue quantity. 

  • It’s all about hitting the numbers. The only way to increase your sales is to have conversations with many people. 
  • Too many people focus on the quality of their outreach. While quality is important, they usually neglect quantity. 
  • In order to chase the bigger gains, you need to chase quantity. Ask yourself how you can talk with 10x more people. 
  • In a sales organization, they focus on maximizing the number of calls because it makes sense, statistically. The more people you reach, the more clients you get. 

[08:19] Remove yourself from the process. 

  • For example, you can hire people who will get you e-mail client lists. You won’t have to search for customers, just contact them. You can even automate your emails and remove yourself even further. 
  • All that’s left is to focus on the people who show interest. This will minimize your anxiety. 
  • If you’re the kind of person who tends to overthink, it’s better to build a sales process that’s not dependent on you. 
  • There are many software tools that can really help you. Do your research and automate as much as you can. 

[12:55] Focus on improving the process. 

  • Once you reach your numbers target and you’re satisfied, it’s time to start focusing on quality and improvement. 
  • Many people will not be useful to your business, so over time, you need to figure out how to target the right ones. 
  • No matter how bad of a salesman you are, you’ll still get some clients, revenue, and feedback and become more effective. 
  • Feedback is what will help you improve your process. The more feedback, the better. 

[15:15] Increasing the numbers will guarantee success. 

  • As long as you engage with as many people as possible, you will succeed even if you’re shy, insecure, an overthinker or a bad salesman. 
  • By automating your process and removing yourself from it, you won’t need a lot of willpower or motivation to reach out to people. 
  • Even if you’re afraid of cold calling, at least you’ll only talk with people who are interested. 
  • Nowadays, anyone can make it. You just need to get started and be consistent. 

[19:33] Summary of the episode. 

  • Sales is a numbers game and you need to adopt this mindset. 
  • Focus first on quantity and then on quality, once you have feedback. 
  • You’ll sell more by increasing your volume. 
  • Feedback is very important in the long run. 
  • Automate the process and remove yourself from it. 

Full Transcript 

Read The Full Transcript

Introduction    00:00:03    Marketing, explosive growth, and revolutionary secrets that can catapult your business to new heights. You’re now listening to The Underground Marketer Podcast with your host Tudor Dumitrescu, the one podcast devoted to showing new businesses how to market themselves for high growth.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:00:24    Welcome to the underground marketer. This is the place where we deliver the real truth about marketing and explore big ideas that can help new businesses thrive and grow into big ones. I’m your host Tudor. And today I want to discuss sales and more specifically, I want to discuss the concept that sales is a numbers game. So the reason why I’m choosing this topic is because recently a lot of people have been complaining to me about their problems with getting clients. And these are typically people who run some sort of service business, and they’ve complained about how difficult it is to actually find clients and convert them into, you know, paying customers. So the mistake that a lot of these people make is that they’re too concerned about the effectiveness of their sales outreach, and they really worry about every little detail inside it. Oh, is this the right person to connect with all the time they’re trying to make and to make so many small decisions that it just confuses them.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:01:37    It takes a lot of cognitive power. It makes them lose their motivation and they just can’t keep going. And what they’re not realizing is that it’s not about what they say to the customer so much as it’s about having more conversations with people they’re having, they’re talking, let’s say to one person per day, and they’re worried that their sales activity is not working out well. I mean, talking with one person a day, of course, it’s not surprising that it’s not working out. It’s not surprising that you’re not getting the results that you want. And it’s not surprising that you’re not motivated. You know, if I was speaking with one person a day and that conversation didn’t go well, you know, day after day after day, I would also get demotivated. Who would it, I mean, it’s normal to get demotivated because it looks like it’s not working out, right.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:02:25    You’re not getting any sort of feedback loop started. So if you don’t think of sales as a numbers game, and instead you adopt the mindset that it’s about the quality of your outreach and what you’re telling them and finding the right words or whatever you are going to have the wrong mindset. And it’s going to take you down a path that’s where you don’t really have a fair feedback loop going and you start getting depressed and everyday it’s harder and harder to maintain your sales activity. And when that happens, it’s not going to be long until you’re actually going to give up and stop that, right. It’s only normal and it’s only human that you feel like that. So, um, the biggest problem of not having enough conversations in a day is that you have no feedback loop and that’s the source of your problems.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:03:20    And it also means that you don’t really understand what’s working, what’s not working, what you should be improving, what you could improve. And you spend a lot of time overthinking, thinking against yourself, questioning your own decisions, questioning your own sales script and really not getting anywhere. You know? So if you find that this is you and you getting in your own way, when you’re trying to do it, because a lot of people, when they start with sales, they try to do it manually, right? I mean, if you consider the way entrepreneurs, you know, when they’re first starting their business, let’s say that they have a marketing agency, right? And they’re doing their outreach manually. They’re, let’s say Googling people around them, emailing them cold, calling them whatever. And they’re doing that whole process manually. What ends up happening is that they experience a whole lot of differences throughout the way between one customer and the next.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:04:17    And they start creating ideas that aren’t really relevant in their mind. And they lose track of what’s actually important, which is hitting that line and calling on one more person, one after the other, after the other, after the other, if you compare this entrepreneur type with a guy who goes on a sales organization. The guy in the sales organization, his phone rings on autopilot. You know, he doesn’t even get a chance to think of “who should I call next door?” Maybe this guy is not right to call. No, he just goes, you know, the phone rings, the guy answers. He has to talk. And if he fucks up and he messes up well, too bad, you know, the it’s the next one and the next one and the next one. And that’s the attitude you have to adopt. You know, why do you think they’re doing that in sales organizations?  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:05:07    Because they know that people overthink stuff, they know that people are not going to do it. If you leave it up to them, that’s why they make the phone ring by itself. And the phone rings and the person just has to speak. They don’t have to think about what they’re going to say. Every time they have a script, it’s in front of them, they can read off that script or they can go off the script if they want, but they have that as a fallback. You know, if they don’t know what to see, they go back to the script, you know? So what if they mess up, you know, and the customer screams at them or whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Right? And it’s the same thing for email marketing, for those who do call the mail. It’s the same for those who do outreach via social media and so on, you gotta hit that line over and over and over again and build a process out of it.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:05:57    You know? And it’s about hitting those numbers. That’s really what it is about because let me put it like that. Let’s say that you have a, let’s say that I have a, a closing ratio of 5%, right? I convert, let’s say 5% of the people that I speak with to customers and you convert five times as much, you convert 25%, right? But you speak with one person a day and I speak with 20 a day, who’s going to win out. Who’s going to make more sales? I’m going to do it right, because I have the bigger volume. So instead of focusing so much on every new entrepreneur and all the sales books that you read and all of that, all of that is about improving the effectiveness or the quality of your sales calls. It’s not about improving the quantity and you need to focus on improving the quantity because that’s where most of the gains are.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:06:52    You know, most of the gains, they’re not in improving your effectiveness by 5%. That’s not a realistic, realistically meaningful game. You need to chase the bigger gains. And in order for you to chase the bigger gains, you need to chase Quanta. You need to ask yourself, how can I speak with 10 times as many people as I do in a day? You know, how can I get my email out to 10 times more people? How can I call on 10 times more people? Those are the questions where you can make, and you can actually see tremendous differences in your sales productivity. And again, because you’re not working in a sales organization, you don’t get to learn about this. And I mean, this is the type of stuff that sales organizations do from the start here. They do training every now and then, but their process is focused on maximizing the number, of course, because they know statistically that even if you’re a bad salesperson, you’re still going to close some people.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:07:49    If you just speak with enough of them, you’re still going to close. Some of them. It’s very important for you to realize as an entrepreneur, because there’s nobody sitting with a stick behind you, making sure that you are actually doing your sales activity. There is nobody, and maybe you are somebody who is shy and you have some anxiety. So, you know, you don’t really have much motivation to do it either. And if that’s you, what you need to do is that you need to create, basically get out of your own way. And you do that by removing yourself from the process as much as possible. So email, right? You have tools like Mailshake, you can hire a VA for less than $5, an hour of Upwork to find your email lists of the right kind of people. You can tell him exactly how you Google search for them.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:08:33    Exactly who to look for, how to get email addresses, send him a Loom video, showing how you do it. And he will know how to do it, and then set him off and get him to do it. Maybe you can even tell him, look, I don’t want info. Ad emails, office, add emails, whatever your process ends up being. So once you do that, you’ve removed yourself from having to prospect, from having to search for customers. And that’s good because if you’re the, if you’re the kind of guy who’s not motivated to do that, or maybe you read gets you anxious or whatever, you are a drag on the process. You don’t. So if you can remove yourself from the process, do it and replace yourself with an automated solution. Further down the line, you have software like Mailshake that you can use to automate sending your emails.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:09:20    Why don’t you use it? So use it. And then you just have to plug in your templates, literally upload your email list that you get from the guy who gets them for you. And the email sent by themselves. All you have to do is deal with replies. When you have a reply, you know, the sequence is going to stop in Mailshake and you’re going to have to take over from there. So you’ve removed yourself from the volume generating part of the process. And you’re just at the end of the process now, where you have to schedule calls with people, reply to their emails and whatnot. But this is very helpful. You know this, if you remove yourself from the process, you get out of your own way, you can hit bigger numbers and it doesn’t depend on you anymore. And it’s the smart thing to do.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:10:05    It’s how you can actually scale out your sales process. And let’s say that you’re not doing email, right? You’re doing social media. Well, you have software like duck soup or LinkedIn helper for LinkedIn. You have a software that’s called pepper for Facebook. These are softwares that again are going to magically find the people that you want to. You know, you don’t have to do anything. For example, on Facebook, you go on a group and you just tell it, you know, add members of this group as friends request them. And if they accept the request, send them this message, wait two days, send them that message. Do this, do this, do this. And you create your whole sequence in advance. And you just hit the numbers. After that, You don’t have to do anything. You just wake up, you handle just people who reply. You try to get them on a call with you.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:10:54    And that’s pretty much it. That’s how you’re generating leads. You, you now have a sales system that doesn’t depend on you. Because again, if you’re the kind of person who gets anxiety about this or who doesn’t like it, frankly, I’m such a person I don’t like this. Then you have to rely on your system. You can’t rely on yourself. The same thing you can do on LinkedIn, the same thing you can do on other social media channels as well. You know, so research for the softwares that you need and use them in, create the outreach, create the messages, create the sequences that people are going to get into, get a reply from them. Take the conversation from there and try to get them on a call and then finally sell them on your service. And if you’re working just on the back end of your funnel, Andrew, not because here’s the thing.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:11:40    Most people they’re not anxious, or they’re not so anxious. I should talk about speaking with somebody so much as they’re anxious about initiating contact with somebody who’s cold. If the system does it for you, there’s no anxiety. You know, you’re just speaking with people who already want to speak with you because they’ve replied to you. The anxiety is much less. You’ve created a system, a system that makes sales into a numbers game for you. And you just have to keep hitting that lie. You know, you just have to keep replying to them beyond tie on those, stay on top of it. And that’s pretty much it. That’s how I recommend that you approach sales. Again, it’s removing yourself out of the process as much as possible. If you’re doing cold calling, try to look for an app that makes you put in the list of people in any, just call one after the other, after the other so that you don’t have time to think.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:12:33    You don’t have time to question yourself. You don’t have time to think, oh, maybe this is not the right person. Or maybe his website is not the kind of business I’m looking for or whatever. You know what? If you’ve decided on the criteria and you follow that criteria, you’ve got to call everyone and you’ve got to see what’s up. And of course over time, you’re going to focus on improving those systems. So you don’t just hit the big numbers, but you hit more meaningful numbers. Maybe you’re going to identify that a certain segment of the people that you’re reaching out to isn’t really useful to your business. Well, if that’s the case, you’re going to end up replacing them and targeting more of the ones who convert better, but that’s the sort of stuff that’s going to happen in the long run, you know, and over time for you, the most important thing is to remember that sales is ultimately a numbers game.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:13:25    And this means that you’re going to get much better results by focusing on improving your volume. Then by focusing on improving your quality, remember that even if you’re a bad salesperson, you’re still going to close some people, all right? And you should just speak with enough people and have enough conversations. You’re going to get some of them to give you money. Even if you do bad by doing that, you can already get some revenue. You can get some feedback loop going and you’re going to feel better about it. And you’re going to actually become better as a salesperson. And you’re going to be more effective when it comes to your outreach. By getting more feedback, you also get more insight into what’s working. And what’s not. When you’re speaking with one person a day, it’s very hard to get any sort of meaningful feedback because whatever feedback you’re getting, right?  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:14:18    You don’t know if it means anything. You know, the numbers are too small and it actually deceives you because there’s a lot of variance. You know, if you hit small numbers every day, there’s a lot of variance. So you get mistaken ideas about what’s working and what’s not working. You know, maybe just by luck and approach I worked with the first two people. And then doesn’t work for the next 300. And you have no way of knowing this quickly enough. If you just go day by day, what happens is you go the first two days and you suddenly, now you get the mistaken idea while this approach is great and you end up sticking with it for a very long time, big, and you’re asking yourself, oh, why is it not working anymore? And other, such questions, which you wouldn’t ask yourself. If you had just gone big from the get-go, you got a lot of feedback on that approach and a lot of numbers that you can actually use to improve the approach.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:15:14    So once you turn sales from a game of quality and whoever is the more persuasive guy and whatnot into a numbers game, then suddenly it’s sort of an even playing field and you can make it work, even if you are shy. And even if you’re anxious, because again, if you have those drawbacks, it’s about removing yourself as much as possible from the process so that you minimize the effect on the process of your weaknesses, right? So, I mean, if reaching out to people, cold is a weakness for you. Try to eliminate that as much as possible, try to automate as many steps of the process as possible so that when it comes to actually doing it, you don’t need a lot of your willpower and motivation and whatnot to do it. You just wake up and you see that, oh my God, three clients have responded to my email.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:16:10    I have to write them back something, right. That’s much easier than going, waking up and being like, oh man, I need to write another 10 emails today and send them. I need to find who to send them to, oh my God. So hard. How am I going to do this? Right? Don’t be like that. And there is no reason to be like that. You know, when you can build a system, that’s going to take care of your weaknesses. And these days you have software that can help you. You know, you, it’s very easy to create a system nowadays back 10, maybe even 15 years ago, it was damn hard to create a system to help you with your selling. But now it’s easy. You know, now anyone can do it. And that’s the second part of this. You know, you have to start instead of asking yourself questions like what sales book should I read next?  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:17:02    And any sales book that you read is going to help you improve your quality, right? You’ve probably already, you know, if you were the entrepreneur type, you’ve probably already read a lot of sales books. The percentage improvement that you can get from extra training is very small. Maybe you can improve five, 10, maybe even 20%. But the extra improvement that you can get from a bigger volume is huge. You can probably double your effectiveness just by doubling your volume, you know, and you can double your volume by being smarter about it, but you can’t double your quality of sales very easily. You know, it’s going to take very long and a lot of reading and a lot of practicing to double the quality in terms of sales, but doubling your volume, that’s much easier to do, right? It doesn’t take anything except setting up the correct systems very often.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:17:55    So ask yourself the question and try to figure it out, brainstorm on the, ask the question. How can I reach out to two times as many people as I do currently, you know, whatever your system is, maybe you’re already using software to reach out to people. So ask yourself, how can I reach out to twice the number of people on LinkedIn. Maybe you’re already reaching out to people on LinkedIn and you’re doing it with one single profile. And you’ve maxed out the limits per day, that you can connect with people and what not. You’ve maxed out the number, but ask yourself the question. How could I reach out to two times the people? Because once you start asking yourself the question, you’re going to consider different options, oh, maybe I can hire a VA who is going to use a separate profile and is going to install my system on it.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:18:50    And then I just have to handle those conversations. There’s an idea. You know, now I can reach out to twice as many people. In fact, I can reach out to 10 times more people if I want, right? And once you start asking yourself how you can expand your volume and how you can increase your volume, you get into the mindset that sales is a numbers game, and it’s a mindset. And this mindset is a lot more powerful and a lot more effective than the mindset that all, let me be promoted, more persuasive, more charming or whatever. It’s a lot more effective than that mindset. And you’re going to see huge gains in your business once you apply this mindset. So remember the key lessons that we went over here. So sales is a mindset, it’s a numbers game. And this fact is a mindset you need to adopt the mindset that sales is a numbers game.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:19:43    Remember that if you focus so much on the quality of your sales outreach, there’s only so much that you can improve in terms of quality. And it takes a long time, but everyone can improve the quantity of their sales outreach. The number of people they speak with per day. And by improving that, they’re going to massively improve the number of sales a lot more than they would prove that they would by focusing on improving their sales skills, which takes a lot of time, and is slow. Remember that issue, not hitting a large volume of people per day. You also don’t have a feedback loop, which means that you’re more likely to get depressed, more likely to get demotivated, more likely to give up and obviously more likely to overthink yourself. And finally remember that if you’re the kind of person who gets anxious doing sales, or maybe you don’t like it, you don’t have to actually do the whole process.  

 

Tudor Dumitrescu     00:20:37    You can remove yourself from the process as much as possible by automating it using software or maybe other people sometimes to take over the process from you so that you don’t have to do it. And you just handle people at the end of your sales funnel. You no longer have to handle people cold, right? You handle just people who already respond to you, and that can be a lot more helpful. So, um, that’s pretty much what I wanted to share with you for today. So remember, stay tuned for the next episode and until next time, keep growing your businesses and providing massive value to the world. Remember you are the reason why we’re all growing richer. Our freedoms are expanding and we’re all living in greater prosperity. Thank you. 

 

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