The Sales Game

Been almost 3 months since we’ve listed the business and there’s been a lot of time pondering what I’d do next. There is some itching feeling that it hasn’t sold even though we are only halfway into the minimum timeframe we hoped for, and 1/4 of the more realistic timeframe. Shows me I still have some work to put into thinking on longer time horizons. Maybe even the fact that I’m selling it is als...

If I had to sum up the book Play Bigger in one thought, it’s do something different, not better, different. A lot of ideas in this book I can see has inspired or confirmed Russel Brunson’s thought on creating forward based movement (POV in Play Bigger) and category design of creating a product/service that identifies a gap in the market, solves a problem people aren’t aware is a problem or can be...

Shane and I have revamped a commission structure for ourselves which has got us both more motivated to do sales. We’ve also been having steady results with our salesperson on commission only and he’s been excited about the potential with it. We decided to change up the way we pay our employee salesperson aswell and she’s been pumping with joy.

I don’t believe that by the way haha. Not that I don’t believe it, it’s that I think it’s a very broken idea in all of its context. I just thought it made a catchy name for a podcast. I’ve been tracking my days with my partner just to break out of the memory fallacy that comes with thinking about the past, and how our thoughts or feelings can be so swayed by small moments of emotion, either from t...

I have been having conflicting thoughts about whether I really wanted to keep this podcast going and why.. Pros, like getting outside of my own head and sparking me to think in a certain way and holds me accountable Cons are sometimes I just really don’t know what to talk about, and it makes it hard to find the motivation to make a podcast. Maybe it’s because I’m putting pressure on myself to make...

The paradoxes of Wanting what you can’t have and also not working harder because you already have something that just does the job, path of least resistance perhaps..

-have been putting a lot of effort into my health and body and it’s been very rewarding -wanting higher energy levels, better physique, more strength but also on some level I believe it makes it visible that you have a solid work ethic and value results, so there is a respect level I would like aswell as I believe when I look at these entrepreneurs that are well built it commands more respect and...

-I’ve been enjoying the freedom to think about what I’d really like to do with my time and money outside of the business with Shane -I am forming a stronger picture in my head of what direction I’ll be going, and it feels the best fit to think about doing sales with/for other businesses -Part of me wonders if/how much I’ve held myself back be doing business with Shane, and how much progression was...

Maybe it’s All Gonna Work Out -leads have started to come through and sales person has started to make sales -he’s now back to break even for us so it’s not costing us anything to keep him on, so we’ll give him some more leads now he’s fully trained and see how it goes -looking our emotional reactivity to situations, and our ability to think on time horizons -lots of business enquiries is very pos...

-applying for loan to move away from Amex and into cash position -need to track weekly costs better across lead sources and salespeople -few enquiries on the business’s for sale listing -Shane and I looking to gear up for one last hurrah through summer before selling hopefully -still unsure of what to do with the sales person, we haven’t moved him onto comms only just yet, caught between decision...

When you start your profitable because you have low overheads do you’ve just solved the problem, unreliable acquisition, as you scale and focus on one reliable acquisition channel, cost of impressions go up, have to market to colder audiences, and cost of things go up, which all chew margins Invisible hand of word of mouth to help your margins, The above three are all reasons why Shane and I didn’...

Business is being listed for sale, we’ve filled out the forms and had the valuation redone at 450k, not bad for something that 12 months ago we were thinking of walking away from without anything! They’ve added both wages into the net profit and then done a 2.2 multiple on net profit, which is better in our opinion that the other broker who was leaving one wage and doing a higher multiple on the l...

We’ve listed our business up for sale! I’ll talk about some of the reasons why, what direction we have been drifting, what Shane and I are thinking about it. What areas of the business we would prefer to focus on, and maybe bring that to front of focus on the next challenge. Sales team has been doing really well this week, we’ve dropped our pricing down a bit for some specials, given our team limi...

Being a business owner, or even just a human, but most certainly adding some extra flare to that by being a business owner, has its ups and downs. One thing that’s really helped me lately is thinking about things on a larger time horizon. We’ve recently hired two sales people and a customer success person, and have our alot of energy and effort into them, but things don’t always go the way you exp...

Starting to understand the concept I’ve heard various people, including Alex Hormozi, discuss about how things aren’t good or bad, they just are, and how we define them is what makes them good or bad to us. I was thinking about the way I delivered news to Shane about not being able to take a big chunk of Victorian leads from our lead supplier due to politics, and how I delivered it as bass news ra...

We’ve got a few things on the go at once, and with our size, dividing our efforts amount them all is quite a challenge and to some degree we may be doing a few things okey, rather than one or two things really well. We’ve got 3 new people who’ve just started, 2 in sales and 1 in customer success, we are testing Facebook marketing, testing the work from home method direct from onboarding (which we...

Building a business that is failure proof, or at least extremely failure resistant. Lately Shane and I have been talking about our overall business model, the way we train people, the people we work with, and the vulnerabilities of our business, like lead sources, reliability on sales peoples conversions and our seemingly “market dependent” volumes, I put that in quotes because I’m learning that t...

How we train at the moment, and is there a better way? These are the steps we get into with a new salesperson: Day 1: Product Technicals Day 2: Systems Technicals Day 3/4/5: Sales Calls Week 2, Solo with catch ups Week 3, same as week 2z I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking about whether there needs to be improvement in our methods, and have come to the conclusion that yes, there does. I’ll cove...

I’ve started mocking up a proper training program to run through, because it’s been quite chaotic in the past. With our sales process, we want our sales team to be experts in solar, to have the information and knowledge to be able to handle any question, solve any problem and outsmart and customer or any salesperson feeding the customer bullshit. The overall idea is so that the customer has an awe...

Plans to start building my well before I’m thirsty as Russell Brunson quoted. I’ve started putting myself out there in Facebook groups for door salespeople, and plan to starry broadening that out. I’ve been considering a side project, and just trying out how I like the feel of building my well on Facebook in this style, or maybe I’ll look at getting some larger sales for us in over 50’s villages o...

Some awesome news about results in getting larger margins across multiple sales with a lot of traction building with our presentations! Quick update about where our new team members are at, sales and customer success, what we’re doing with our new sales team member coming on, some ideas we have for culture, when to implement them, and what we are doing with our leads! Also looking at incorporating...

Reporting back in the progress of the salesman we’ve hired, and also the customer success. These are the people we hired through our little recruitment hack we thought of a little while back, and the results have been excellent. Still early days for the customer success but our operations manager has reported back very good things so far. Also our salesman made a sale already in his very first wee...

I like to do things to 1000, but I also want to have more sustainability in my life, and I think that comes down to making sure I am doing things that are high on my values, as my own choice, not as something I “should be doing” according to values in my head that aren’t mine. I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I do know that business’s is higher on my values than I ever though, because...

I’ve been thinking alot on how to create a new opportunity with our frameworks in our solar business. How can we present our offer in a way that hasn’t been done before, or find an area of our market that isn’t being served? Solving a problem that people haven’t thought to solve yet, or didn’t think was possible to solve, and making it seem effortless. It’s an idea I’ve been toying with since firs...

Interesting thoughts about wether it’s easier to avoid things that you shouldn’t do, or to focus on things that you could do. Looking at links between causality and results of the survivors who actually made it, vs the people who didn’t. Was it really just a combination of the ‘right’ things to do, or was there something else that made them successful. In the spirit of avoiding tragedy, I’m just g...