John Collins, founder & CEO of OmniiX and Recovery Rush, has ideal clients that are incredibly costly to target. After taking almost 70 calls with no closes, he realized the problem wasn't with the sales person (him and his co-founder,) the problem was with his sales process. And he discovered that by “inverting” he was able to get much better results.
With the conversion problem fixed, he now had to build a team to scale his sales. But because John was producing so much revenue taking all the sales calls, the opportunity cost would be too high for him to stop doing that to focus on recruiting sales reps. That's why he reached out to Coaching Sales.
Watch as our CEO Mike Mark interviews John Collins on his experience working with Coaching Sales.
Take What You Know From the Outside World and Apply It To Your Business…
“My background is in the finance world. And prior to me getting into e-commerce and being an Amazon seller, I was at a company called Merrill Lynch. When you look at the ways their business is set up, there are some things are really great in terms of bringing on a team of people to go and actually acquire the clients”
Sometimes… Closing clients isn’t a “you” problem; it’s an “approach” problem.
Changing his approach to sales is what ultimately got John to where he is today.
He was running a full service Amazon agency, but he wanted to be able to niche down faster, and more aggressively, and work with more brands as a result.
Having learned from the techniques implemented at Merrill Lynch, John wanted to replicate the process to build strong relationships and ultimately, grow the client base. He decided to bring on a team and train them himself… creating a new coaching program altogether.
Swap Your Offer For… A Coaching Program?
How can building a coaching program or product allow you to actually find the customers and clients you want?
Hiring from this pool of closers was a massive success for John…
“We have hired sales positions internally before in a “traditional” way. And I'll tell you, it's just entirely different in terms of the energy that we have now. That energy, that kind of motivation, those guys are ready to go.”
There’s something to be said about hiring people you’ve coached and trained yourself…
“By building the training program, you've triggered something innate where now the clients have investment bias. They've put skin in the game up front and they have to earn that back. The way that they show up is different from someone that you're going to sometimes recruit and train or hire”
But in order to do this successfully, (especially when it comes to Amazon) you have to set yourself apart from the others…
“I didn't want to just be another Amazon selling a program. Not saying there's anything wrong with it, but I want to do something a little bit different than that.”
By choosing the approach he did, John made himself the “category king”. He unlocked a percentage of the market that had been sitting on the fence, trying to figure out getting into Amazon, but hadn’t quite figured out how yet.
The Inverted Sales Technique That Almost Guarantees Your Close Within 5 Mins
When it came to his sales process, John felt like he was wasting time. He’d get to the end of a call, drop the price of his program, and the prospect’s jaw would drop. No close. One hour down the drain.
To save everyone’s time… John tried the “inverted sales technique”.
“I really felt bad that I'd teased them with something this entire time, when they did not know what the pricing was. I just put this offer to them on a silver platter and then let them down at the end. I also felt like I wasted my time.”
Finding how to change this… is ultimately what led John to be able to close calls within the first five minutes.
Close A Call Within the First Five Minutes?
“We have our rapport building at the beginning of the call. Afterwards, I simply say to them ‘Hey, here's what this training's all about. It's going to include this, this and this. And by the way, the cost of that training is this’. At the end of that, I will say, ‘Is that okay with you, is that something that you feel that you'd be able to participate in at the end of our call?’ And they'll give me a response. Now they know what that investment is. They themselves are now invested. They've seen the VSL, they've jumped through the hoops of my application form; and now, within the first five minutes, they know whether or not this offer suits them. I've saved my time and theirs: I can answer a couple of questions for them, but it saves me 45 minutes of going through our actual strategy session… They're able to listen to the rest of that call better without the glowing sore thumb of ‘how much is this going to cost me’ throughout the entire call.”
Using this technique completely changes the energy of the call. There’s no more uncertainty. No more wondering whether or not it will end in a close – you’ve already increased your chances of closing by such a huge amount by simply moving the “killer question” to the beginning of the call.
You Probably Don’t Need Better Salespeople. You Probably Need Better Processes…
A lot of people that come to Coaching Sales tell us; “we need someone who’s good at selling. We’re not doing as well as we want to be”. In John’s case, it wasn’t about hiring good salespeople, it was about changing the sales process. Once the process was fixed, so was the outcome.
“In the beginning, you need to be on the calls as a founder, so you can deliver on your promises. A lot of people that are trying to get something off the ground, try and shortcut that part of the process. It's a huge mistake. Even if you're 70 calls in and you haven't made a sale, there's still hope. If you just stick with it long enough and keep experimenting, then you'll find it where it clicks. A lot of people short change the amount of work that's required to find the right person, not just for a sales role, but for any team member. Hiring out employees and team members is nothing that's new to us. We've hired many, many people – but just to be able to do that and understanding that, finding the right person for a particular role is a very time-consuming, very complex and there's a lot of layers there that I think many people miss when they initially start trying to hire. Between myself and Rick, we had so many other things to focus on in our business. That was what I needed Coaching Sales for. To take over the process so I would have more time.”
A Team That Builds Itself Up Internally
“Our salespeople are now helping each other, they're listening to each other's calls, they're giving each other critiques. I think that there's truly a synergy there that's helping these guys all individually get better.”
Why Coaching Sales?
“We’ve had a tremendous amount of success… I'm now able to shift my focus to a different area of our product. My biggest priority is making sure that there is success for our guys that are coming in the program.”
If you, like John, need to re-inject some life into your sales process and figure out how you can turn your sales process into a money making, client generating machine…
Click the link here to book a call and we’ll walk you through what we can do for you.