Supercharge Your Sales and Profits with Brian Tracy

0:02Who's ready to rock today, Fire Nation? JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals with great shows like Science of Scaling. Today, we'll be breaking down how to supercharge your sales and profits. To drop these value bombs, I brought Brian Tracy into EO Fire Studios. Brian is a renowned speaker, author, and CEO of Brian Tracy International, specializing in personal and professional development with a focus on leadership, sales, and success psychology. Today we'll be chatting about the most important qualities of successful entrepreneurs, the three most important considerations in building a high-profit business, the keys to high productivity, and how to double your income in less than 30 days.

0:49And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Brian and our sponsors. Imperfect Action, hosted by Steph Taylor, is brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network, the audio destination for business professionals. Imperfect Action is a bite-sized online marketing podcast for business owners who want to get straight to the point. Join Steph Taylor as she answers all your business marketing questions. Recent episodes include five must-knows to sell your online course, program, or membership, and four steps to grow your email list for your next launch. Listen to Imperfect Action wherever you get your podcasts.

1:20Is this your year? Visit thrivetimeshow.com to see thousands of Clay Clark's business coaching testimonials featuring over 2 ,000 entrepreneurs to dramatically increase profitability. It's month to month and less money than an average minimum wage employee. Schedule your free consultation today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Brian, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. I was greatly impressed by Peter Drucker in my early years. And Drucker pointed out that there is a seven-year cycle to business success. The first time you start a business, your business goes into a dive, like an airplane diving toward the ground.

2:03And every business startup is a race against time. Do you run out of money before you go broke? And do you learn how to sell and earn more than it's costing you? And that phase takes about two years. So at the two years, imagine a plane almost crashing and pulling out of a dive, and then it starts up. The next two years are where you learn how to do your business. And at the next two-year point, this is four years now, you have to actually stop your business and put systems in place. I was talking to an entrepreneur earlier last week, and he was telling me that he made the mistake of not putting the systems in place twice and went almost bankrupt each time.

2:46So you have to actually stop and put in systems and put in a strategy and so on. And then the next two years is two years, two years and three years. I'm sorry. The next three years at the seventh year, you hit profitability. So it's two, four, seven, two, four, seven, two, two, and then three. And most people don't understand that. And they're quite amazed at all the problems that they're having and going broke and struggling and everything else. but that's two to learn how to survive, two to profit, to pay back what you borrowed for the first two years. And then the next three years, if you have systems, that's when you start to make money.

3:29We see so many cases where people started a business and suddenly they were successful and became millionaires and jillionaires and so on. But if you actually go back and look, It was two, two, and three. It was seven years before they actually broke out into high profitability. Fire Nation, you could turn this episode off right now and you would already get more out of Brian's words than you will get the rest of the day and all of your conversations combined. But lucky for you, we are just getting started talking about supercharging your sales and profits. And I want to talk about the most important qualities of successful entrepreneurs.

4:09Brian, what are they? The most important quality is persuasiveness, is they have the ability to persuade others to help them, to finance them, to buy from them. And persuasiveness is something that you can learn. Here's what's really important is every key skill for entrepreneurial success is a learnable skill. Just like you can learn to drive a car or ride a bicycle or type with a keyboard, you can learn any skill. But you must be clear, when I started off, I went out and I had no sales training at all. I went out knocking on doors. I wasn't afraid to knock on doors. And I was knocking on an average of 70 doors a day, starting at 8 o 'clock in the morning to 9 o 'clock at night and not making any sales.

4:56And I had a little joke. I said the best weight loss program in the world is trying to make a living in sales without any training. and so I finally realized I needed training and I began to listen to audio programs they had just come out I began to read I began to ask other top people what they were doing and I became an avid student my biggest problem I asked this question what one skill would help me the most to achieve my income goals and I realized it was closing the sale I didn't know how to do it and I didn't agree with high pressure or tricks or anything like that. So I began a full court press on studying the art of closing sales.

5:40That actually became my first program some years later. And I came up with 24 ways of asking a prospect to buy and what you had to do before you asked, what you had to do when they gave you a reply and so on. And my sales went up 10 times in two years. I never earned so much money in my whole life. And there was no pressure, no gimmicks. And when I started to teach, I started to give seminars. The first seminar was the art of closing the sale. And people came and paid$100 and spent three hours with me with a workbook with every single thing that they had to do, plus the 24 sales techniques and exactly the words to use.

6:22And people came back to me and said, it made them a millionaire. One of the most common things I've ever heard, which I love, is you changed my life. You made me rich. you changed my life you made me rich and i was speaking to a client on the uh email on the zoom a couple of weeks ago and i told him you know that more people have become millionaires in sales as a result of my psychology of selling program which by the way is on audible uh now and uh than any other single sales influence and he said well that explains me he said i struggled for years. And then I got that psychology of selling program.

7:00He said, today, I'm a millionaire. I've got 26 people working for me and I have more money than I could ever spend in my whole life. And I hear that over and over psychology of selling is the foundation program to teach you how to become really good in sales. If you can do that, you can make any business successful. If you can't do that, you haven't got a chance. Fire Nation, so much value here. I want to go back to persuasiveness. I mean, this is so key. You're born with it in some ways, Fire Nation. I mean, I have a 15-day-old child right now. And let me tell you, Bo Bear, he is persuasive. When he is screaming his head off, he gets picked up, he gets coddled, he gets fed, he gets changed.

7:45He's persuasive. But guess what? if you don't grow and get older and then educate yourself with words like Brian is sharing and programs and seminars and things along those lines, you will not develop the persuasive skills you need to become the success that you want to be because you're listening to this podcast right now. I mean, I love that. The 24 ways of asking a customer to buy. I mean, it's just brilliant since there are a lot, Brian, of important considerations when it comes to building a high profit business. We're going to talk about three. What's number one? Number one is you have to have a value proposition.

8:22And this is a highfalutin word that means you must be absolutely clear about the value that you bring to your customer that is better, faster, cheaper, easier to use. It has to have an advantage over any other product or service that the customer can buy. Now, here's one of the great rules is there's three choices for any customer. They can buy from you, they can buy from your competitor, or they can buy nothing at all. The biggest single market is the customers who buy nothing at all because you have not appealed to them. So the most important thing is your value proposition. What do customers buy?

9:04People say, well, it's price. Price is everything. Sometimes I will say to an audience, and my average sales audience was over 1 ,600 people, I would say, by the way, price is never the reason for buying anything. And they'll all go, oh, no, no, no, price is everything. I said, all right, let me prove to you that price is not the reason for buying. Is there any person in this audience, 1 ,600, 2 ,000 people who has anything about their person that they purchased solely because it was the cheapest available and not a hand goes up people buy something other than price people ask the price how much does it cost it cost too much it costs a lot and so on but price is simply a form of information it enables them to put your product or service within the context of their world okay Okay, but price is never anything.

10:02One of the things I say when people say, how much is it? I say, well, I think you're going to be very happy when you hear the price. And I'm going to come to that in just a couple of minutes. But first of all, I wanted to tell you and just go right past the price and then loop back and say, and this only costs X. Price is only important if there's a comparison. People will always buy the cheapest if they have no other reason for making the decision. So therefore, if you are offering a product and it's identical to someone else's, then price becomes the consideration. But price is never the reason for buying something.

10:39It's utility. It is the improvement that the product or service makes in the life or work of the customer. So what you sell is improvement. That's the benefit. We say benefit, benefit, benefit. It's improvement. Now, here's another thing. is there are many advantages and benefits from your product, but the customer buys based on one. There's only one. It's the hot button. We call it the hot button. It's the one reason why people will buy from you. And if you don't push that hot button, if you don't know what it is, and the way that you find out what it is, is by asking questions. And really good questions like, if ever you were to buy something like this, Mr.

11:22Prospect, what would cause you to buy it at that time? It's a very simple question. It's low key. And they'll tell you. It's not like holding cards in a card game and hiding their cards from you. No, they'll tell you exactly. Well, if I was going to buy it, I'd have to be sure about this. And then your job is to persuade them, convince them that if they buy from you, this is what they will get. Now, here's a way of selling, which I'll pass on. I started off using it 40 years ago when I was asked. That's awfully expensive to hire you to speak to our management group. And I said, I'll tell you what, I'll give you a guarantee.

12:05If you're not happy with my talk, there's no charge. They said, would you do that? I said, absolutely. You shouldn't have to pay unless you're happy. And so I gave a good talk and they paid me and so on. I thought, from now on, I'm going to give a guarantee on everything and anything that I do. and the guarantee is going to be unconditional. And when I began to speak for large audiences, I would be hired by promoters and the promoters would book me to speak for the full day. Then they go out and sell 1 ,000 or 2 ,000 tickets and many of them became millionaires because they made so much money.

12:39And I would sell products from the stage and let's say they paid me$20 ,000 for the day and I would sell products and I would always sell$50 ,000 or more and I'd give half to them. So they would get 50 % of the product sales and I would pay for everything else on my side. So I realized that if they hired me and paid me$20 ,000, they would get$25 ,000 minimum back from the product sales. So in effect, I was free plus a profit. Free plus a profit. And that booked me fully worldwide. I've spoken in 84 countries. I've spoken more than 3 ,000 times. I live in a very nice house on a golf course in Southern California because I was free plus a profit.

13:31Now, the reason I'm telling you this is because your product should be free in that the advantages and benefits that your customer receives from using your product are in excess of the cost. not only does your product pay for itself or your service but it gives additional benefits so you are free plus a profit once i could convince my audience i would say here are all my programs here's what you will learn in each one and i say then we have a special offer today they're all free and the audience would go yeah i said now i have to tell you it's a special form of free and then they go oh and we just like it was like playing an orchestra like music and we're and everybody's laughing everybody's smiling because now they want to hear how they are going to be a special form of free i say you i said take the programs as many as you want buy them listen to them and if they don't more than pay for themselves and turn out to be free you can send them back to me and i'll give you 100 of your money back no questions asked but at least give yourself a chance because i've already told little success stories about each program sometimes i would talk to explain as many as 10 or 12 or 14 from the front of the room i only give one presentation and that was somewhere in the morning and they would buy products all day long because they were free and if for any reason you're not happy send the back will give you your money back.

15:10Do you know how many we got back? One in 400. Now, here's another thing is I read a study which had a great impact on me is what does the guarantee period have to do with a sale? Well, if you give them a seven day guarantee, you'll get 50 % back. If you give them a one month guarantee, you get 40%. If you give them a three month guarantee, you get 10%. So I found if you gave them a year's guarantee, you get nothing back. And so I finally said, oh, the heck with it. And I give them a lifelong guarantee. If you're not happy for any reason, for the rest of your life, you give it back to me, I'll give you 100 % of your money back.

15:50No questions asked. And I sold millions and millions of dollars worth of product with that free plus a profit presentation. And so I passed this on to our friends because if you can structure your offering to the customer and show that the benefits they get are well in excess of the price they pay, the sale is automatic. It's just like taking candy from a baby, if you like. It's just so easy. And if your product isn't so good that you are not willing to give that kind of a sweeping guarantee, well, then you should revisit your product. You should revisit the product. So it's got to be free plus a profit.

16:29And your product has to be superior in at least one important way to that of your competition. Fire Nation, I know you're taking notes because I'm sitting here taking notes up a storm. I'm literally changing my own presentations as Brian's talking because this is such valuable stuff. These are proven methods. Brian's been around for decades upon decades doing this, perfecting this, proving this. Learn, Fire Nation. We are all standing upon the shoulders of giants. Brian is standing upon the shoulders of giants. And we have so much more to talk about when we get back from thanking our sponsors.

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19:24Then Clay's team of talented designers, videographers, web developers, workflow mappers, and accounting coaches will help you to implement that proven plan. See over 2000 verified success stories and schedule your free one-on-one 13 point assessment with Mr. Clay Clark himself today at Thrivetimeshow.com. Knowledge will not attract money unless it is organized and directed through practical plans of action. Become the next success story. Schedule your free 13-point assessment today at Thrivetimeshow.com. I wanna now talk, Brian, about the keys to high productivity. And specifically, you have a method to double our income in 30 days or less.

20:04let's get into details about this. I would often start my audience and say, well, thank you very much for being here. I promise you a great day and we're going to cover a lot of great things. I'm going to give you a couple of ideas that you can use to double your income as we go through the day. And the reaction would always be, no, we want to hear it now. I said, does everybody here want to double their income? And they'll say, yes, yes, would want to double her income. In other words, they didn't want me to come to it later. They wanted it now. So I said, well, here's a very simple technique.

20:41It's guaranteed to work for anybody, anywhere, in any market with any product or service. Are you ready? It's the average sales professional in our society, according to the research, makes two new calls on prospects each day. It's an average. Some are above, some are below. Some make only two new calls a week, but the average professional makes two calls a day. So if you want to double your income, you simply double the number of calls and you call on four new people each day. You keep very careful notes. You write down the name, address, phone number, and so on. And then the notes, what did you discuss?

21:21So that if I were to ask you, what did you do on Wednesday six months ago, you could pull out your notebook and you could read exactly who you spoke to and what you talked about. Well, I learned this from the very best sales organizations like IBM and Xerox and so on. That's what they do is they train their people to take careful notes and to focus on getting face to face with customers. So if you want to double your income, instead of making an average of two, make an average of four calls. And you cannot tell when or where the sale is going to come from. But if you speak to twice as many people, you'll make twice as many sales.

22:01And I've had people come up to me and say, that's a bunch of BS. That's not true. I've been in my business 10 years and you can't just double your income that easily. So I said, well, and this is my favorite question. Why don't you give it a try? Why don't you give it a try? If you hear a good idea. Don't sit there and judge the idea. Just give it a try. Now, here's something I learned from my dear friend, Charlie Jones. And he said, remember this. He said, the most important secret in life is that nothing works. Nothing works. He said, at least it doesn't work the first time and usually the second time.

22:40Now, what we found is that the average number of times is four. You have to try something new, an average of four times, sometimes more, for it to work, for you to figure out how it works. So therefore, if you're going to double your income, make a decision that you're going to try and you're going to speak to as many as four people or more each day. And then people come back to me and they write to me and they email me or they come up to me in seminars. And I said, you know, I was at your seminar a year ago in Dallas. And when I heard you say that, I said, that's a bunch of BS. This is just motivational claptrap.

23:17And but I thought, well, I'll give it a try. He said, I couldn't believe it. Within 30 days, I was earning twice as much as I'd ever earned in my life. I couldn't believe it was so simple. So what I call this is FaceTime. FaceTime. What do you get paid for? You get paid for the amount of time you spend face to face with qualified prospects. Now, here's another great number is that you should be able to determine that this person is a prospect for what you sell within 17 minutes of first meeting that person. It's amazing how many salespeople are almost like they're orphans and they're happy that somebody will give them a place to sit and talk to them for an hour.

24:01but the person has made it clear they don't have the money and they don't have the time and they don't have the interest because many people that you call on are bored and you come along and you're a nice person you're well turned out you're cheerful you're friendly you've got a good sense of humor so what they'll do is they spend an hour with you and sometimes you go back and see them again and you're always welcome have a cup of coffee and so on no you only spend time face-to-face with people who can and will buy and pay for your product or service within a reasonable period of time. Your job is to ask them good questions.

24:37You know, sometimes one of the questions that I would use, Mr. Prospect, if this product was free, would you take it? And they'd say, well, yeah, if it was free, I would take it. And then I would ask, why? what is it about the product or service that you would take it for put the price aside and they say well i would take it because i need this or i want that or i have this problem and so on and they will tell you the hot button they will tell you the value proposition of what they want then your job is to persuade them that if they do buy your product or service then for sure they will get the benefit that they want.

25:21Now, what is the best way to persuade them? It's success stories. If you have three success stories, you say, you know, this reminds me of one of my very best clients. Always talk about your clients as though they're the best people in the whole world. One of my very best clients or customers. And he was really, really reluctant to go ahead with this. And finally, he decided to roll the dice and buy the product. This is what he told me last week. And then you tell a success story. People are overwhelmingly influenced by success stories by other people like them who bought and used your product or service and experienced a positive change that turned out to be free plus a profit.

26:06Jeez, this is not so hard. And therefore, if you have three stories and there are three stories and it's always something similar to the person you're talking to and similar company, similar industry, similar age, similar size of sales and so on. So always tell stories. People love to hear stories. And whereas facts will activate the left brain, stories activate the right brain and trigger the person at an emotional level. So you could deliver facts all day long and nobody will buy, but you tell one good story and that stays in their mind and they remember. And once they bought the product, you know what they do?

26:48They'll go and tell everybody else in the company that they bought it. Let me tell you the story that he told me about a happy customer. And they'll tell the story to everybody. And everybody will want or desire the product. Fire Nation, again, if you are not worn down to the stub of your pencil, taking notes here, then check your pulse, rewind this episode, listen again, one of my major takeaways here of so many was the question, if this product was free, would you take it? I love that question for the very reason Brian shared. You get to find the hot button topic. You get to find what it is they really want or need or interested in about this, and then you find the way.

27:32So man, that was brilliant. Man, that was genius. And Brian, Man, we could talk all day, brother, but I want to keep respect for your time, for your energy, so let's do this. Give Fire Nation the one key takeaway that you want to make sure our listeners get from this conversation, then the best way that we can connect and learn more from you, and then we'll say goodbye. Let me give you just a quick response to that. It's a three-part response. Number one is that there are no customers in the office. There are no customers in the office. If you are in the office during the working day, you are not working.