Episode 131 – The New Game Of Selling with Mitch Axelrod

Mitch: Yes, I played baseball until I was 43. I retired at 43. [inaudible] St. Louis Cardinals way back in 1981. Did not get signed, but it was one of the greatest moments of my life, that thing on the field there and getting to play baseball with some of the great. Baseball has been a theme of my life pretty much since I was three years-old. When I got into business in 1978, which is probably even before some people listening to this were even born. I saw something that really changed my entire outlook on my career. That was I noticed that people who were wealthy doing well were all selling something. I thought, “Well, if I could learn how to sell, then I could go at least have a job.” I kind of set out to be self-employed, I've made 5,000 cold calls in the garment center of Manhattan with a company called [Exon] who was selling something nobody wanted to buy and after 5,000 cold calls making zero sales, I said, “Okay, this is it. I'm done. I got to find a better way to do this.”

So I set out on my own career on Halloween 1978. I've been self-employed ever since. So I've been the chief rainmaker in my company, in all the companies that I've been involved with because I was the guy who knew how to sell, but I never liked the way I was taught to sell. That was the thing. All the training back in the '70s and '80s was all, even contrive, manipulative, so I set out to do my own thing and I created my own training. I started to use it in my company, doubled my sales three straight years and then I decided, “This is what I love to do.” So I transitioned in 1989 after losing over a million dollars in a restaurant on the jersey shore and I decided this is what I'm going to make my living at. So since 1989, I've been a full-time speaker, trainer, coach, working quite a few training programs, trained over a million people on the importance of selling, value of selling and how to get past the stigma of selling and that's when The New Game of Selling was created. That's kind of compassed of almost 40-year journey that I've been on and every single day I do this. Everyday I'm responsible for bringing business for my company that requires me to sell and that's true for everybody in business. That's a quick synopsis.

Brian: Great synopsis. I love the book The New Game of Selling and one of the things as a small business owner, I know sales is important, but I like to teach, I like to train, I like to do that stuff. Why is it so important for somebody like me solopreneur, small business owners, to learn how to sell?

Mitch: Well, selling, it is the essential skill that brings in revenue. Whether you do it through an automated system, which a lot of people prefer because they don't want to get into the process of selling, or you do it yourself, or you do it with other people, or you have other people, regardless of who does it or how you do it, it's responsible for top-line revenues. You do look at a company or solo practitioner, small businesses who hates to sell and most people do. I used to do a survey in every one of my audiences, I've spoken 3,500 times and almost every single audience, 90% of the people you ask them, “Who likes to sell?” Nobody likes to sell. Okay?

So what I did is I created a program, a training, a methodology that is not really selling, it's really serving. When you begin by serving and you don't feel the pressure of having to convince somebody, or push somebody, or influence somebody to do something. The context of the conversation shifts. See, we all sell everyday, we just don't know it. Every conversation, you're either being sold or you're selling. Again, I'm talking business conversations. So why not be better at having that ability to elicit people's real strong desires and needs and help them fulfill it? I had the same challenge you do. I love to teach, I hated to sell because the old way of selling was all about you control the interview, you script it, you try to get people to agree with you and then ultimately you do a trial close and a close – very few people feel comfortable with that and buyers don't feel comfortable with that.

What we teach in The New Game of Selling is a teaching methodology that helps you to really identify quickly, “Are you a qualified buyer? Can I help you? Do you have some desire to take action now and are you committed to getting what you want?” I look at it this way. You have something of value that contributes to other people's lives. Even if all you do is invite them to take a look at it, that's selling. So we created an entire process with steps and sequences that's very comfortable, it's very natural, it's very easy, there's no new language, it's simple, it's non-confrontational and it's elegant. When once people start playing the new game, they never go back to the old game. It builds your courage, it builds your confidence to have conversations with people that wind up in the highest and best interest of both parties. When you can come from that context, then you don't have to ever fall into that old game of selling, which is scripting and manipulation and convincing and then feel disappointed when somebody objects. We don't even talk about objections in The New Game of Selling. We show you how to prevent them.

It's a whole different way of going about the game and I created it because I was exactly like you. I hated to sell, I love to teach. So this is really what I found to be the most effective way for people who hate to sell to actually get really good results at attracting, converting and keeping customers.

Brian: One of the things I love about your system, my book and my philosophy is relationship marketing in a social media world. That's my platform. One of the things that you talk about is – and I love this, you say attract hungry fish – it's really using selling more like inbound marketing where you're focusing on somebody's needs and being at the right place at the right time so that you are the product or service of choice at that time.

So can you expand just a little bit in the selling way? How does that work?

Mitch: It's one very powerful shift – moving out of your selling cycle and moving into the buying cycle. Think about this, if you are in front of hungry fish – think about fishing, look at this for a game of fishing for a second. I'm not a fisherman, but if I were to go out and want to catch fish, where would I want to go? I want to go where the fish are hungry. Very many people I've met, over a million people I've trained and probably 60%-70% have no idea or clue where the hungry fish are in their business. They're out there throwing their net everywhere where as if you can do something like called “Go doink” – I actually invented that phrase, “Go doink.” What it means is if you identify who you are really best-suited to serve, who you want to serve, who you enjoy serving, who gets value from being served by you and you develop a picture of that person – and you can do this by going back to your 10, or 20, or 30 best customers and finding out the commonalities of not just why they bought your product, or service, feature, benefits, advantages, why did they buy from you?

We're so busy trying to get product knowledge that we don't really see that the game is people knowledge, people skills. So for me, it's all about finding the hungry fish. Think about this, if you were in front of people, whether it's automated, or face-to-face, or on the phone, but you were talking to and having conversations with, people who are ready, committed, willing and able – and by the way those are the four words that qualify a buyer – a buyer has to be ready, committed, willing and able. If one of those four is missing or more than one of those four is missing, you are not going to convert a browser into a buyer. So why fare if you were to take four simple words and encircle these four simple words as your qualifier, I'm looking for hungry fish who are ready, committed, willing and able to _____ and then fill that blank in, all of a sudden you're now in a whole different game. You're going to get in front of a hungry fish and when you combine that with what we call “rejection-proof networking” that 30 years ago I was dropping out of my financial planning business that I decided to take a millionaire to lunch. He was a millionaire but he was wealthier than me.

I developed this little strategy taking a millionaire to lunch. In two years, I went from $15,000 to $100,000 in income. It all came down to three phrases and those three phrases, I ultimately turned into what I call “rejection-proof network” where we can show you how to eliminate rejection for the rest of your life in 30 minutes or less, guaranteed [inaudible] 100% of the time never fail. Why? Again, words, language, system, simplicity. Just those four words, if you look and say, “I want to find a hungry fish who are ready, committed, willing and able to buy what I sell.” Chances are good, you're not going to have to go finding people, they're going to start coming to you. So how do you strike your tuning fork in a way where you vibrate people who resonate with what you do vibrate and you can walk up to the center of the bullseye and go doink instead of shooting at your target from a mile away with a blind fold on? That's what The New Game of Selling shows you how to do.

Brian: Mitch, that's some awesome advice.

Now let's dig a little deeper. One of the things that I think a lot of people struggle with is they're really great at going out and finding new customers, but I think they tend to neglect the current customers in the sales cycle with them. What kind of advice can you give for people to follow up with customers that have already bought from them?

Mitch: In The New Game of Selling, about 25 years ago, I was having that same challenge, is that once people will be getting clients, I want customers, I wanted to have a follow-up system, but I didn't want it to be idle chit-chat. We developed and then tested a sequence of question. I'm going to give you the first question. We call it the “Five Questions in Service” and when you integrate these five questions in service, you could always go back to your existing customers. There is a gold mine of opportunity. In fact, what we show in The New Game of Selling is that if you make a second sale to a customer, even half the size of your first sale, you can increase your profit anywhere from 300% to 900%. That's astounding. When people stop and think about all the cost of your acquisition that goes in for sale – so whatever your first sale is, you have to back out all your acquisition cost, come out of the first sale. For some companies, their first sale is marginally profitable, for other companies, it's not even profitable because they know the key is the second sale.

So what we teach is go for the second sale. Everybody goes for the first sale. We say, okay, go for the first sale, but then don't look at it as closing the deal because that shuts down the relationship. Look at it at a gaining commitment and if you help somebody to gain commitment to get what they want, the very next thing you can do is turn around and just ask out of curiosity [inaudible], “Why did you buy from me?” The single most powerful question that not one in 100 companies ask, but if you start asking this to every single one of your customers, “Why did you buy from me? How do you feel about the work we've done?” And you start to get that information, what you'll discover is that that first purchase was the beginning of a long-term relationship if you care enough to go back and have a conversation about what's next with people. If you serve them on the back end, you will have to attract fewer, and fewer, and fewer on the frontend and your profitability goes up with every additional sale you make to an existing customer. You no longer have to back out in cost of acquisition, it's almost pure profit.

When we look at that pivot point and why we don't talk about closing a sale, we talk about gaining commitment, is because if you go from a track, qualified, convert and you start doing it all over again, you're repeating the most expensive process and least profitable. Where as if you go from a track, qualify and convert, and then you move to keep, multiply and reactivate, you're going down a much more profitable path. Even [inaudible] 1/3 or 1/4 existing customers buys again, it could still be more profitable than going out and just finding a new customer. So we look at how mature are your customers. Is there more opportunity for them to buy more? Buy something else? And for the most part in every case, there's opportunity for referrals provided that you serve them after you serve them after you sell them and that's your really key.

So there's a goldmine of opportunity and the first question that gets you engaged with people is just out of curiosity, “Why did you buy from me?” That one question will tell you exactly what your unique service advantage is and then you can start putting that unique service advantage out front when you market to people. You say, “Hey, Brian, my customers tell me that this is what we do really well.” Now all of a sudden you're resonating with your existing customers, what they tell you, with the new customers, what they would want from you. That's my suggestion. Get back to your existing customers, ask every single one of them, “Why did you buy it from us?” And in my book I actually outlined the “Five Questions of Service.”

Brian: Awesome. So do you suggest picking up the phone, doing an online survey? What are some of the best ways to get that feedback from people?

Mitch: It depends on your business. There's really no best way. It's funny, when people use the word, “What's the best way?” The best way is the one that works, really. You almost never know what the best way is until you do a way. I'm a phone guy. All right? I realize social media is much more leverageable. Whatever your preferential medium is, but I'll tell you this especially if you have a higher ticket item, get on the phone and talk to people. There are so few meaningful – I'll tell you this. I've had people tell me over and over again not hundreds of times, thousands of times that our conversation was the most meaningful, exciting, exhilarating conversation they've had today and in some cases in weeks. People are starving for meaningful conversation.

If you become a conversationalist, not just to call them to selling something to give them an idea, call them to check in, call them to see if they're on course, call them to see if they're using good products, call for feedback. Do you get upset if somebody calls you and really wants to serve you?

Brian: Absolutely not.

Mitch: You can't. We're so afraid. Most business people unfortunately are operating on fear. It's sad to say that we're operating in fear. One of the reasons I wrote the book and created an entire training around The New Game of Selling, is to get people over the fear of having conversations with people and to prepare them for the realities of business which is heart break, set back, people lying to you, people signing agreements and never fulfilling them, promising they're going to pay you and they don't – and you can go on and on. Who tells you about these things when you get into business? Everybody paints this beautiful picture of how easy it is to be an entrepreneur as long as you follow our system. Baloney! I could give you the greatest system in the world. I could give you the best set of golf clubs.

One of our best students, he's a 71-year young guy named Steve, and Steve, he gave his best analogy. This is what happens when you talk to your customers. They will tell you everything you need to know. I said, “Steve, what makes the new game different? What makes us different than everybody else out there?” He said, “Mitch, let me tell you this. I'm a scratch golfer and I love to talk to people about golf.” He says, “When I ask people, ‘If you wanted to be the best golfer, would you rather have the best set of golf clubs in the world or the skills of the number one golfer in the world?'” Every single person answers and say, “No. Give me the skills of the number one golfer in the world because I can only find the best golf clubs. Right?” He says, “That's what you do, Mitch. You teach the skills to be the number one player in the game and everybody else is selling golf clubs.”

Brian: I love that analogy.

Mitch: Is that great or what?

Brian: Yes, it's great. It's fabulous and it's so true because I am a golfer and I was golfing one time and it will be like a 10-15 handicap. I'm not great, but I'm not terrible. But I was golfing with this and probably in his 70s. He had knee braces, arm braces and all these other stuff and the guy hit the ball 150 yards and he hit it 150 yards, 150 yards, put it on the green and potted it in and the dude scored a 74. It was too over par. We're struggling to get the ball, we spray the ball everywhere. The bottom line is he had that simple system down and it works so well and it was amazing, it blew me away. Yes, it's a great analogy.

The final question I want to ask you is you talked about fear and that comes from a place, I think from everybody. It's fear of losing business, fear of cold calling which you said you did 5,000. I hate that, too, I'm not a cold-call guy. What are some of the biggest fears that you've seen throughout all of the years of training all these people? These billion dollars of sale? What is holding people back from getting out there and making those connections?

Mitch: I'd say fear of rejection right at the top of the list, which we show people how to get rid of, so that's conquerable. Believe it or not, fear of disappointing others, this is something I talk about. We have a tool that measures values. It's called “value profile” and it measures fear, believe it or not. We can measure five different kinds of fear and one of the fears that shows up in 80% of the people we profile is a fear of disappointing others. Another is the fear of not being worthy. This is huge. The fear of not being worthy of success, financial reward, the fear of selling, the fear of repercussion. The fear that somebody is going to dislike us, that's huge. You could go on, and on, and on with this thing about fear and I've been dealing with it my whole life. It's something that were always operating within us and we're born with only the fear of blowing and the fear of loud noises.

So if you think about it, ever other fear were learned through conditioning, and domestication, and culture. We're taught to be afraid and so if we're taught that way, we can be untaught and part of it is deeply ingrained that, “I don't want to get to the therapy side of it.” So I look at it as if you can have tools, and skills, and language, and an approach that you know cannot be rejected, you won't feel rejection. If you have an approach where you understand that no matter what you do, you will disappoint others – actually you don't ever disappoint others. Others get disappointed.

It's important to manage your outer game. We teach the outer game skills, but we spend a lot of time on the inner game, on managing your emotions, on aligning your mindset, your motivation and your methods on what it takes to be a high performer, on how to conquer your fears not so much by overcoming them like killing them, but accepting that that's there. [inaudible], “Look, I'm scared to death to talk to you. I am really scared to death to talk to you, but I'm going to talk to you anyway, but I just want you to know if I'm stumbling around a little bit here, this is early in my career. I'm scared to death to talk to you because I have this fear of rejection.” And it was amazing what happened when I admitted that to somebody. It was like the whole thing just disappeared. He says, “Just relax. There's nothing. We're just going to have a conversation.”

That's why I keep coming back to conversation, conversation, conversation. The minute we move into the context of selling, all of a sudden the conversation shifts. So what we do is we try to create a different content, so the content of the conversation is not fearful, it's not overwhelming. When you think about the cost of poor selling skills, or tools, or belief that you don't need them, or belief that you don't deserve to be successful, this is all inner game stuff. So we work much on the inner game. We do coaching every month. I do it live and then we keep our coaching archives and they're not coaching archives, we have 1/3 of our coaching archives are about the inner game and managing your emotions, your attitude, your belief, your expectations, handling disappointment, and heartbreak, and set back, resiliency, bounce-back ability – all those things, they don't teach you in the entrepreneur courses. It's all about plugging the system and you'll be successful.

Well yes, if you're a systems person, you can plug in with systems, but we know that 2/3 of people based on a profiling are not systems people. So if you're trying to take somebody else's system and you're not a systems person, you're dead in the water before you start because you're not adaptable enough to somebody else's system, and if that system isn't adaptable to you, it's game over before it starts. That's why I will call The New Game of Selling a system, know our systems within it, but The New Game of Selling is a way of thinking, it's a way of doing, it's a way of being in business that transcends systems and formulas. When you embrace that, when you embody that, you don't have to worry about the system so much so we've kept it really, really simple so that just about anybody who really has a desire, remember the four words, you're ready, you're committed you're willing and you're able. If you're ready, committed, willing and able to change your game, elevate your game, up your game, then I promise you The New Game of Selling was designed with that exactly in mind.

Brian: I love what you have to say and I think one of the other things that you brought up earlier is you can buy just about any kind of system, you can implement any kind of system, but the problem is, is people aren't buying systems. They're buying from you because they know, like and trust you and they have a relationship with you, and you're committed to their success, you're focusing on them. So I love all of those concepts. It's such a smart way, a paradigm shift of selling. It really is solid.

So you have a way of helping people to better-understand how to work through all of this, how to become a better salesperson to understand working with people, to define the needs that they have and really connect them with their perfect customer. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Mitch: Yes. About four years ago, I realized that people wanted to have me coach them, but unless they were a private client or a corporate client, I didn't have a place for them to go to be coached and play The New Game of Selling. They could read the book, they could buy a training program, so we started doing monthly coaching. Every month, I do coaching where I have theme of the month and then we open it up to our members and our members ask any questions about selling inner game, outer game. So I have now 37 years at this game, 75,000 hours, $1 million of research and development and $3 billion of revenue generated. Basically what we did is I learned it, I tested it, I organized it, I built it, I recorded it, we created a platform and a community for it, and now every month we do coaching and we have about 18-20 recorded sessions in our archive.

I kind of use the analogy here of the movies. We don't think much when we go to a movie. What an amazing, amazing experience it is for very little money and when I started going to the movies like you did, it was like $0.25 to get in for a movie. I won't date myself that much, but $0.25 to get into a movie, now you pay what? $10, $12, $15, $20. It's a lot of money and it is, but think about it, think about what your experience and all it took to create that finished product on the screen and all you have to do is put the money down and go and sit in your seat and and absorb it, and experience it. So what we did is we took all of this with the 75,000 hours, I hold it down to six parts on The New Game of Selling and each month we cover one or more of those six parts, we call them game plan. My thinking is very simple and this is what I'll leave you with because if you can embrace this little formula, your game will change. It's called ROI, Return On Investment, ROI times two.

When I was a financial planner, the first question that came out from people about investing was not, “How much am I going to get on my investment?” But the first question came up of, “When am I going to get my investment back?” So if you go out and spend $2,000 or $3,000 on a course or a training, you have to make $2,000 or $3,000 to get your ROI 1, Return Of Investment. The you start to get Return On Investment. My game is how fast can I get you Return Of Investment because if I, like in gambling, if you go play cards or the blackjack table, you win your first hand. What most people will do and experts will tell you, “Pull back your money and play with the house money. You're winning.” So how fast does a Return Of Investment can I get you so that from that moment on, it's all Return On Investment?

We decided rather than put people into debt for $1,000 or $2,000, not using a percent of who might not get their investment back, we decided to lower the barriers to entry. Fast return of investment. That's what we've created. It's called the “Players Club,” The New Game of Selling Players Club and you can read more about it in the link that's attached to this message.

Brian: Great stuff.

Mitch, if people wanted to get a hold of you, what is the best way for them to do that?

Mitch: You can go to Mitchaxelrod.com. There's actually a lot of good stuff out there too and there's a big “contact,” a blue contact button at the right side and send your message and it will come right to me.

Brian: Awesome.

Mitch, man, you dropped some great knowledge bombs, some sizzling stuff for my audience, so I really appreciate you coming on the show. It's been a pleasure learning from you and thanks so much.

Mitch: My pleasure, Brian. Thanks for having me.

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