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Whether you were born with the “gift of gab” or not, there is no excuse when it comes to why you’re not killing it in the sales game, according to Matthew Pollard. Regardless of your industry, if you’re not prepared with stories to engage your client or prospect, and you don’t know the right questions to ask, then you’re not ready to make the pitch.
Sales is so much more than the slick, loud car salesman aggressively pushing you into buying. The truth is, people love to buy, but they don’t like to be sold. If you can connect with them by offering real life examples of how you’ve helped others in the same situation, you form a trust and a rapport that makes them feel a connection to you.
By preparing ahead of time with your own customized “script” and process, it allows you to then feel comfortable and confident right from the start in what you’re delivering to your customer or prospect.
Rich: Today’s guest is responsible for five multimillion dollar business success stories in his home country of Australia, all before the age of 30. His humble beginnings, the adversities he faced, and his epic rise to success, are inspirational stories of how anyone with the right motivation and strategies can achieve anything they set their mind to.
Today he is a best-selling author whose book, The Introvert’s Edge, has received endorsements from Harvard, Princeton, Neil Patel, and Marshall Goldsmith, just to name a few. He’s been featured by Fox, NBC, Fortune, Forbes, Inc, Entrepreneur, and CEO. And if that wasn’t enough, he’s also the founder of Small Business Festival, which Inc has named a Top 3 National Conference for Small Business. I’m very excited to welcome to the podcast, Matthew Pollard.
Matthew: Mate, thank you very much for having me on, I’m so happy to be here.
Rich: It’s been great, obviously we share a transcriptionist, she put us in touch, and I’m just really happy that this all came together.
Matthew: Me, too!
Rich: Now since we first chatted I downloaded your book, The Introvert’s Edge, off Audible and I listened to it with rapt attention, which is the only kind of attention I like to give. I was especially taken by the story of your own beginning being forced into doing sales when you were an absolute introvert. So what was that like?
Matthew: It was terrifying, I think that’s probably the best word for it. Sales was definitely not something I wanted to be doing, I just kind of fell into it. I mean, you read the story. I took a job at a real estate agency – not to be out selling, but to be in the back office doing data entry – after a really tough high school experience. I had a reading speed of a 6th grader, and while I got diagnosed with this thing Irlen Syndrome, it basically meant that I had the reading speed of a 6th grader in high school and had to work my way to getting good enough grades by the end.
Luckily enough I got diagnosed at 16. I just got to the end of school and I needed a break, I needed 12 months off just to catch my breath and work out what it was I wanted to do. Unfortunately, the world didn’t provide that to me. I got thrown into a sales job because I lost my job just before Christmas, and Australia is pretty different to the United States, we don’t go on holidays for a week at Thanksgiving and a week at Christmas. We take about a month off at Christmas, everyone goes on holidays from the 20th of December and doesn’t come back until the 15th or 20th of January. It’s our summer break as well, so getting a job is pretty difficult.
For me, I went through the process of learning the product like everybody else did for 5 days, and then the following week I got thrown on the street and told to go and sell. No one taught me how to do that. My first door, obviously, I got rejected. Shortly after that I got sworn at, then I got told to get a real job, that was my personal favorite. And then it was door after door until I get to my 93rd door where I made my first sale. I remember I was ecstatic, I made about $70. That glee kind of wore off in about 15 seconds later when I realized I have to do this again the next day, and the next, and the next, and every day for the rest of the year. That really wasn’t ok with me, but that was kind of the situation I found myself in.
Rich: I just want to paint the picture for everybody. Like, you were a complete introvert, you were not really wanting to go out there and meet with people. And I know that a lot of introverts are completely afraid of this. Now really, in the business world, we’re all in sales. We’re constantly selling. We’re selling to our prospects, customers, co-workers, the boss. But I’ve noticed that a lot of people in digital marketing – especially social media – are actually introverts. Do you think that puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to sales?
Matthew: I think introverts have a real advantage as long as they don’t hide away from sales. I mean, to end that story for you, the first day after making $70 and having that realization, I went away to learn the process to sell. This was a really key point for me, I had to learn a process to sell, which means I had to make an agreement with myself that sales was a process. Something that could be learned and mastered like anything else.
I couldn’t exactly pick up a Brian Tracy or Zig Ziglar book, I had a reading speed of a 6th grader. It would have taken me a year to read them let alone find the information. But I had discovered – well before podcasts – that YouTube had so many videos on the sales process and the different elements of the sale. I mean, it surprises a lot of people that there’s a lot more on there than just cat videos.
So it was for me a situation where I learned and every day I got gradually better. So soon it was 75 doors, and then 48 doors, and then 36 doors, and then 28, and 12, then 8, then 3. Less than 6 weeks in I went from being terrified to sell to my boss calling me into his office and he was blown away and said, “Matt, we just got the national sales report, you’re actually the #1 sales person in the company”, who happened to be the #1 sales organization in the southern hemisphere.
Now for people that are introverted that have flunked digital marketing because of the belief that they’ll never have to sell, they can hide behind their laptop. On my podcast, The Introvert’s Edge, I actually interviewed Ryan Deiss, the founder of Digital Marketer, and I confronted him with that exact question. I said, “Look, you’re probably the most well-known people to teach how to make money on the internet. Can I really just completely avoid having to sell to people ever?” And he said, “Absolutely, as long as you want to go broke.”
So what he said and what he made clear was that for him, when he launched his training product, he used to run traffic and conversion [inaudible]. So this is an introverted guy who will only walk in on a back entrance and leave out a back entrance. Because speaking from stage actually doesn’t affect him that much, but being around people when he goes down and there’s swarms of people around him freaks him out.
So for him, what he did – which is a huge step for him – is he set up launching a coaching product, and for anyone that wants to talk to him about it, he’ll be over there on the back right of the stage and come talk to him about it. He said it was the worst 3 days of his life, he spoke to 100 people in those three days. But the difference was he knew exactly what questions they had, exactly how to answer them, exactly what worked, what stories to tell, and then he wrote the sales copy. Now he hires a bunch of extroverted people – and introverted people who love selling – to go out and do that for him for the big corporate accounts.
But here’s the thing, a lot of digital marketers open up their website, they spend a fortune on digital advertising to drive people, which is something I say you absolutely shouldn’t need to do at the start. But then they get these people to their website and they try to do the whole sale online. There are so many factors you can’t control. When I started my whole focus was get them to my website, and then get them to a funnel, prove that I could close them on the phone, and then automate that part. But there are so many variables, why would you want to take that risk when you’re first starting? Why would you want to take that risk when you don’t actually know what prompts them to buy.
So I would say to all the people that are out there that are digital marketers that are kind of hoping that they can hide behind a computer, for small sales you absolutely will be able to eventually. But at the start, you’re taking it so much further than you need to and hoping to get that real life validation whether the product is actually a good one or not, or what potential marketplaces you can tap into. So what you need to say to people to close the deal, and more importantly, what’s right in the copy to close the deal.
And then for larger sales, the ghostwriter that I worked with to write the book, The Introvert’s Edge – Derek Lewis – he was trying to do a $20,000 sale over email because he didn’t want to pick up the phone. We put the price up to $40,000 and he started to close deals, where he couldn’t close them for $20,000 online. Ghostwriting is a very personal thing and they didn’t feel like they developed a personal connection with him until we got them on the phone.
Rich: Alright, there’s a lot of good stuff there to unpack. I think I want to start with the question around, is there something special about you, per se, because I know a lot of people who are introverts who have that awful first day – although you had that nice little pike at the end – where you’ll just be like, “I’ll just put up with this”, or “I can’t put up with this”, but you actually took steps to get better. And then you actually created a system. So I’m kind of curious, is there something special about what you did that can or cannot be replicated? And then also, what are some of the advantages that you feel that introverts have when it comes to selling?
Matthew: Absolutely. So in answer to that question, and I think you asked it differently the two times you asked it. The first one was, was there something special about me. The second was, was there something special about what I did. And I think the answer to both questions, “yes”. But it’s not something that’s special about me that can’t be duplicated. And it’s not something special about what I did that can’t be duplicated. Just most people don’t do it.
So what’s special about me is I come from a foundational mindset of, where most people will come in and go, “Sales isn’t learnable”, or “You have to have that gift of gab”, I had to come into it from a, “If I could do it, how would I do it?” I had to come from a point of I’m going to do this anyway. I think it came from more of a fear of going home and telling my father, who had broken his back 80 hours a week trying to support us in not a wealthy family, that day one was too tough and I wasn’t going back.
So it’s not about just this blind mindset. For me, I needed to find a way to make this work. And by saying, “What is it that I can do to make this work?”, all of a sudden I said there had to be a system. And then the second thing I guess that was so special about what I did that anyone can duplicate, is saying let’s have a look at all the things that are out there and then start to put together a process.
The thing I guess I really focus on, my whole business career I built 5 multi-million dollar businesses from the ground up before I turned 30, but they’re all bricks and mortar telemarketing sales. And then when I moved to the U.S. I started by wanting to create an online business. I didn’t even know how to change the word “the” to the word “they” on a website, but I then became a student of online and for 2 months I synthesized everything I could find online, validated it, and built it into the system. And I think that’s one of the most important things that introverts and extroverts alike can benefit from. It’s actually spending the time doing the research, doing the work, doing the practice.
I mean, I talk about the fact that I went from zip to terrified, to the #1 salesperson in 6 weeks. I didn’t say it was a fun 6 weeks, yet when I speak to a lot of people that are struggling in sales, that are struggling in their business, about how much time they spend. Oh, Abraham Lincoln has this amazing quote, “If I was given 6 hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend the first 4 sharpening the axe.” But what most people would do is just keep on chopping.
The key to what I did was I spent 6 weeks – 8 hours out in the field selling, 8 hours at home practicing, weekend and more practicing, and that’s what got me to where I was. And I think this brings us to the answer to your other question which was, “Do introverts have an advantage?” Well I think we do in a lot of ways for sales.
Firstly, we love to prepare. Preparation is the key for us. So when we’re talking about preparation for selling, most people think you just learn by the school of hard knocks and you just go out and keep doing it. That’s like hitting with a blunt axe. So for me, I spent a lot of time learning and preparing those strategies, learning the things that I needed to be more successful the next day. And I think introverts are great at that.
The disadvantage that extroverts have is, one might say they’re not the best listeners in the world. And that’s something that they can do training about to fix, but yet don’t. But preparation, because they have this gift of gab, because it’s not as hard for them, they don’t do that preparation. For us introverts, we know we suck as selling. So therefore we look for a system, we hold onto it for dear life, and we keep wanting to get better and better at that system as opposed to just fly off the cuff, as some might say.
Now the other advantage I think introverts have is active listening, we’re amazing listeners. And because of that, a lot of times when we’re selling to people, people will feel like we have deeper and stronger relationships. So if we can prepare in a way that we get our sales process past the awkward parts in the beginning and that awkward part at the end – you know, that thing we call “closing” – which for me should never be awkward, it should be this natural step by step process that leads there.
In the middle, introverts are amazing. We’re great listeners, we’re hugely empathetic, we show a huge amount of compassion, and a huge amount of understanding. Ivan Misner is a good friend of mine, he’s the founder of BNI, the largest networking group in the world. He did this survey for all of the networking groups – 8,000 membership groups across the globe – and he said the #1, 2, and 3 qualities that people love in networkers surprisingly were not extroverted characteristics, they were introverted. The ability to ask questions, the ability to actually care and show compassion. And the ones at the bottom of the list were those salesy techniques, and that’s more aligned with extroverted behaviors.
Now that’s not to say that an introvert and an extrovert can’t both learn a system and do the preparation. The true introvert advantage is that we actually do it.
Rich: So a lot of good stuff there and so many questions I could follow up with. But you mention a couple of real pain points during the sales process, and I know introverts struggle with some of these things. You mentioned the very beginning and the very end, so let’s talk about the very beginning. It’s that awkward how do I start this conversation, do I ask about their kids or the fly fishing rod on the wall. What kind of recommendations do you have for kind of breaking the ice if you are an introvert? That’s got to be a painful, scary moment for a lot of people out there.
Matthew: The answer is, don’t try it and go in without preparation. Have prepared responses to what you say when you first walk in. For me I found that the awkwardness that was created at the beginning was my fault until I fixed it.
Now one of the things I want to be clear here, is when I say “your fault” – and you can’t blame yourself for anything you don’t know up until the point that you know it – it’s totally your fault.
And what I mean by that is am telling the introvert that is listening today that the awkwardness is created by not preparing things to say when you first go into a person’s house or office. Something as simple as when I walk into a person’s home I always ask if they want me to take my shoes off. And that sounds weird, but people go, “Wow, this person is really respectful”, and it would create instant rapport and instant trust, which will make the whole closing thing easier.
Secondly, it generally starts a dialog about how tradespeople will come into their house and trample around in their boots and their always making a mess and how disrespectful that was and they don’t really appreciate it. And other people will say, “No, that’s fine”, and I start talking about how my wife didn’t like people traipsing around the house in boots, so I always am compelled to ask. Culturally you’ll find sometimes you get into a cultural conversation, some cultures are very much focused on shows off at the door and others not.
Other times I go into somebody’s office and people would ask me if I wanted a cup of coffee. And as soon as it hit 12:00 I’d have a pre-prepared story where I would say, “Oh gosh, if I had another coffee I’d be bouncing off the walls. That’s the trouble with doing meetings like this every couple of hours is you have way too much coffee if you’re not careful.” And then I would go into, “These days I’m actually starting to give up coffee because I’m moving more to mate tea. Have you ever heard of that?” And then I get in to this whole dialog about mate tea and how it’s same caffeine and it’s very popular in South America.
So I can create these dialogs that allow us to have a conversation that I had every single time I go into somebody’s office or home, but it’s the exact same every time. Which means I don’t have to be looking and do that fake, “Oh, you support that football team, I love that team”, which is completely incongruent because it’s inauthentic for an introvert to behave that way.
Rich: Right. And if you said that football team they’d probably see right through you anyway.
Matthew: Well, you’re talking to an Australian that didn’t really gravitate to Australian football, and now in America doesn’t gravitate to American football. So it’s not a safe topic for me, period.
Rich: No. But the takeaway here is that you have a few prepared scripts that kind of take some of the nervous energy and places it elsewhere. Because you don’t have to worry about picking up small talk as you go along, you have the scripts and you can ease into a regular conversation depending on what the response is from your prospects. Correct?
Matthew: Absolutely. For me one I actually loved having these pre-prepared scripts because I saw extroverts who would every now and then not hit gold when they noticed something in the office or the house. My stuff always worked and it worked the same every time, which means I could predict that when I talked about coffee they would say, “Yeah I’m the same, sometimes having a coffee machine on is not a great thing”, or, “No, I have not heard of mate tea”, and we’d get into this whole joke about how they could never give up coffee.
But it was always the same, which means I could feel comfortable in my skin and not be stuck in my head about what am I going to say. That’s the really important thing, that the preparation is absolutely critical there. While as I said extroverts do have an advantage at the start because they do have that gift of gab and can survive a lot more effectively, especially at the introduction of any sort of sales process. An introvert, once we have these things, we are the masters because we know exactly what the customer is going to say and we get better and better at recreating that same scenario every time, which allows the customer to feel they just connected with us as soon as we walk in the room. And that’s the real power an introvert can have.
Rich: So let’s now skip forward to this close, because I know – I’ve been doing swales pretty much since I was 21 years old, probably before – for a lot of people the close is really difficult, it’s really awkward, and I think for introverts that’s go to be an even more intense feeling. Like, have I done enough, should I ask for the sale, is it too early, is it too late, whatever the case is. So what tips do you have for all of us, but especially for introverts, on closing that sale? Because I know a lot of our listeners are out there and they’re like, “That’s great, but how do I get them to sign on the dotted line?”
Matthew: Absolutely. So firstly I know we all care about closing, it’s important. If we don’t close we don’t make money. But you need to be indifferent. You need to be indifferent when you talk about pricing, you need to be indifferent about when you’re talking about moving forward. Because if they see you’re terrified about asking the question, that makes you uncomfortable, it makes them uncomfortable, and then the sale is dead.
So we need to make ourselves feel more comfortable. Firstly, I’m a big believer that sales is not a confrontation process. The true definition of sales is derived from the Scandinavian, “to serve”. So if I feel like I truly served somebody, then the product of service I’m offering shouldn’t be the benefit to them. Which means, asking them to do something that benefits them should not be awkward in any way, shape, or form. But I want to tell you that it’s going to be completely awkward if you don’t do the sales process correctly.
One of the things that I believe in wholeheartedly is every one of these elements that I’m talking about as part of the sales process, a lot of times will give you some benefit individually. But it’s the step by step nature of them that creates a rapid growth business or a great salesperson.
So one of the things that I always try and help people understand is this close with give you a better benefit, but it works more effectively if it’s combined with asking great questions, which I find nobody tends to ask well. Telling great stories, which allow you to build rapport and people remember 22 times more information when embedded into a story, and it switches off and short circuits the logical mind and speaks directly to the emotional mind. So if all of the other factors are in place, then getting to the close should be this natural step by step process that just leads there in a comfortable way.
Now what I tend to find is I don’t like asking for business, so I don’t do it. So there are two different ways that I go through this process. One is that when I’m going through the act of speaking to somebody – and there are a couple of different options that I could speak to them about – I actually turn around and I’m basically going to ask them permission to sell to them.
So what I do is, I might be on a phone call and I give them some advice and then I might say something like, “Now at this stage I can really do one of three things. I can talk to you about some great free content that I created to help you create your unified message and discover your niche of willing to by clients, all on your own. I can talk to you about an Academy I created for like-minded service providers all in that same path towards rapid growth. Or I can talk to you about what working with me looks like. Do you have a preference?”
Now what you’ll find is the people that you haven’t told enough stories to, asked enough questions, understood their situation, will pick the free content. That doesn’t mean that’s the end of the sale, it means you’ve got more work to do. So offer them a huge amount of explanation and free content, and then ask them if they want to hear about any other options.
The people that picked the Academy or the one-on-one have selected that because they want to buy something from you. People love to buy, they don’t like to be sold. I gave them a choice, and that makes it so easy.
So then I get the option to explain everything I do and say, “Does that sound like something that would work for you?” It’s super easy because they just said that they wanted to buy. The other option – this is what I call a “trial close” – it’s like sticking your toe in the water to see if people are interested. So back when I was selling education I would simply say something like, “Now would a day or a night course suit you best?” And the customer would be like, “Oh, a day course.” And I’d reply, “Perfect.” And I now knew they hadn’t said “yes” to me, however, they’re about 90% of the way there. If they say they’re not ready to make a decision right now, I’d say, “Oh, I wasn’t asking you to, for me I just need to know it it’s a night or a day course because the format is different and I want to make sure that I explain it well to you depending on which direction you want to go.” Now they feel awkward because they think they’ve called me out and they realize they haven’t, and now they feel bad trying to say I’m a sales person and I now know I’ve got some more work to do. So I go back and tell some more stories.
Then when I get to the paperwork element and I explain the pricing and I’ll go through those details, then I’ll say something as innate as, “Now just to confirm that you qualify for this, I’ll just need to check if you have a ABN #, or a EI #, or a Driver’s License #.” And they’ll say, “Yes”. When they come back we’re filling out paperwork. That’s what’s called an “assumptive sale”.
Now if they selected and item from the trial close and they’re engaged through the whole presentation, now you are going to get 1 out of 100 that come back and go, “Why are you filling out paperwork? That’s not something I’m ready to do right now.” And you say, “No, no, that’s no problem. I’m just putting everything on the forms because I like to leave this with every client so when they’re going through the process of thinking about it and talking to their wife, they know exactly what they’re deciding.”
However, more often than not, people will come and give you their Driver’s License and what you’ve done is you’ve short circuited their brain and they think that if they did jump up and grab their Driver’s License, than they really must want this. They actually now will convince themselves that they did actually agree to move forward. And you fill out the paperwork and you just continue on.
So the trial close to an assumptive close works amazingly. And also, asking them permission to sell them something works amazingly. It depends greatly on whether you have only one thing to offer or several things to offer.
And one of the things that I talk about so much in a lot of the social videos that I put out is, you shouldn’t have a cheesecake menu offering, but you also shouldn’t just have one thing. You need to package in a way that just allows you to offer a choice. Because choice is always better as opposed to, do I want to do it or do I not want to do it.
Rich: Makes a lot of sense. And at the same time you don’t want to overwhelm them with so many choices that they tell you they need to think about it.
Matthew: Well a lot of introverts especially will do that. A lot of introverts, they love the craft they’re currently doing. I work with a guy, Alex Murphy, out of Austin, TX. I have to tell you, he’s an amazing videographer, but he’d sit down with somebody and he had a chronic stutter, so it was already difficult to communicate. And he’d feel the meeting would go really well and then they’d ask him to do a proposal, he’d spend 6 hours putting it together and send it to them, and then he’d wait and never hear back.
The reason why they were asking for the proposal is when he sat down and asked what they were trying to achieve, he’d give them so many options, he felt they needed an education. But he basically was fitting 20 years of experience into a 30 minute meeting. They were overwhelmed and that’s why they asked for a proposal. And then they went with a company that made it simple. They said, “Here’s exactly what I would do. Now do you want this option or this option?”
And a lot of times introverts feel – and extroverts feel – that they’re doing a client a favor by educating and helping them make the decision. The reason why you’re in the room is they want somebody they can trust to make the decision for them, maybe give them 1-2 options.
Rich: Right. You’re the expert and you’re supposed to be guiding them. That’s usually how I look at it.
Matthew: Absolutely, that’s exactly right. And the reason why I talk about…you know, I just got back from 10 keynotes for Oracle where I was talking about the power of story. And the reason for it is because a lot of times they would go in the sale and the customer would say what they want and fill their head with all these options and technology choices and industry acronyms and software names. And the customers were mind blown.
If you just go in and somebody says they want something specifically, you just tell them the story of someone exactly like them that wanted the same thing. And then you provided them this thing, which you’ve embedded into a story to tell. Stories are wonderful for educating and inspiring while helping people see you as the only logical choice. And these are all pre-prepared stories. I always tell people to have pre-prepared stories that they can leverage. And that’s why one of the biggest tings I talk about frequently is you have to pick a niche and then focus on the three stories that work with that niche, it just makes it so much easier.
But you then tell them a story about someone just like them that wanted this specific thing, how you provided it to them, how you got them the ROI or outcome they were looking for, and why they’re so happy that they worked with you. And the customer just thinks, “Oh, I want what Alex had.” So therefore, they go about doing it. And that’s the easiest way to get a customer from, “I don’t know if I trust this person or they have the caliber to be able to provide me this service”, to “Oh, he did it for Alex, he could do it for me.”
Rich: I think the thing that I’m hearing from you throughout this is that while introverts may not feel comfortable doing this especially right off the bat, developing the system – and you’ve developed this system already – you break it down in 7 steps in your book, I’m sure your online course is as well and in your trainings. But if you follow the system then it takes a lot of the anxiety out of it and it will help you close at a much higher rate than you did before. But it’s about following the system and really understanding and telling stories and maybe asking questions.
Matthew: Absolutely. I mean, if you look at Alex as an example, he was struggling to make any money. When I told him he had to learn a sales process and practice these stories until he could say them in his sleep, he drove his wife nuts by learning these stories. But he was really uncomfortable. He was like, “You mean you want me to read a script. I don’t want to sound like a robot, my brand is based on authenticity.” And I was like, “Well what movie did you watch recently?” He said it was Gangs of New York, so I said, “Leonardo DiCaprio was great in that movie, wasn’t he?” And he agreed, “Yeah he was amazing, he just embodied the part.” So I said, you know he’s reading from a script. And he looked at me weird, and the difference is that somebody that reads from a script or practices this.
I mean firstly he had to remember something that wasn’t even him that embodied the part. These are your stories, this is your business, so this is all really close to you so they’re your words. So if you go through the process of learning the difference of when a person sounds robotic and when they’re acting, you just embody the part. They’ve learned it, they’ve embraced it, they’ve practiced it so that it rolls off the tongue. And if you do that, then your sales process will work and your sales will go through the roof.
Now one of the things that I always tell people is, I know we’ve talked about my book, but one of the things that always frustrates my published is I’m always telling people that you don’t need to buy my book. In the first chapter, which you can download for free at theintrovertsedge.com, I actually outline in detail the full 7 step process. Because for me, part of the reason why I founded the National Introvert’s Week, I’m on this mission to help introverts realize that they’re not second class citizens. We’re amazing sales people, we’re amazing public speakers, and we’re amazing networkers.
So in the first chapter I literally outlined the first 7 steps. If you just write down the chapter headings, and then look at what you’re currently saying to a client and then put that into the 7 steps. Soon you’ll realize there’s a bunch of stuff you’re saying that doesn’t fit. Delete that, you shouldn’t be saying it to customers. And then you’ll realize that there’s a bunch of gaps, generally around stories and asking great questions, and a bunch of other little elements that are missing.
If you do nothing more than build those gaps and then learn that process and practice it for a small period of time, you’ll double your sales in the next 60 days. When you think about how much time you’re spending networking, prospecting, writing proposals, it feels like you’re doing more for your business because it feels like instant gratification, you’re actually achieving things. Nothing will give you better business outcome in the short to long term than writing down that sales process and practicing it so that you’re in control of the sale not the customer, or worse, nobody.
Rich: Very good stuff. And you may not say it but I actually think everybody should pick up a copy of this, I really enjoyed The Introvert’s Edge, and where you go into a lot more detail, a lot more stories. For people who want to learn more, Matt, where can we find you online?
Matthew: Absolutely. So you can go to theintrovertsedge.com, that’s where you can find a bunch of different ways to buy the book. Also for people that do purchase the book, I actually put together a whole video training with a free bonus you can access in the back of the book. It takes you through video by video how to actually implement the sales process into your unique business. But you can also find me at MatthewPollard.com, which is where I provide a huge amount of other content.
And find me on social media, you can find me by typing my name in Google, I think I take up the first page. In social media we put out over a thousand videos in the last year and a half on sales process, we put a huge amount of videos out there if you’re a small business on the topic of what I call “the rapid growth process”, which really talks about sales as step 3 and why you need to get yourself out of the commodity market so you stop fighting on price first, by creating a unified message and discovering a niche.
So find me on LinkedIn, find me on Facebook, find me on Twitter, find me on Instagram. Whatever you fancy, whatever your favorite social media profile is. But just start the process. There’s so many videos out there that I’ve created because I want to share what I learned because I feel it’s important to give back the same way.
Rich: Awesome. Matt, thank you so much for stopping by today. I really appreciate you sharing your expertise with us.
Matthew: Absolute pleasure, mate, I’m glad we could do it.
Show Notes:
According to Matthew Pollard, there are no excuses when it comes to succeeding in sales. Learn his proven process for success regardless of your industry or whether you were born with the “gift of gab” or not. Definitely check out his website, and his insightful new book.
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 20+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.