Angel Investor Secrets With Jim Brandt
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Let’s say you’re a brilliant founder of a startup company, looking to make a difference in technology with all the plans and blueprints for success laid out – except for an investor. You’ve met with dozens of angel investors but none of your pitches have impressed them. How do you get investors to say yes when you pitch for funding? Jim Brandt, who has raised funds for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, and who has invested in hundreds of companies including Slack and Skopenow, opens the secret world of angel investors. Learn more about the exact factors they’re going to look for in a potential investment.
Listen To The Episode Here
Angel Investor Secrets With Jim Brandt
Our guest is Jim Brandt, who is involved with the Tech Coast Angels both as an investor and sitting on their executive committee. He has invested on over a hundred companies, including Slack. He goes into the details on what he looks for when he has a pitch, why the team is just as important as location is to real estate, how to stand out and be extraordinary when you pitch or meet investors like Jim. He is really all about showing you’re smart, you’re passionate, and you have people skills. That winning combination is what gets you a yes when you pitch for funding. Jim, welcome to the show. I always like to ask my guest to take us back to the story of origin of when you decided along your career you wanted to be an angel investor.
Back in 2007, I got involved in the then Senator Obama’s campaign for president. In connection with the fundraising for President Obama, I met a boutique venture capitalist focused on healthcare and environment in an event called Opportunity Green at UCLA. It was a Friday, Saturday, Sunday event. It was full of startup entrepreneurs and angel investors and I had no idea that that world existed. By Saturday, I knew I was hooked.
What has been one of the best pitches you’ve ever heard and what made it so great?
Let me start with the second question first. What I look at primarily is the quality of the team. It’s like real estate. The three most important things are location, location, location. As far as I’m concerned, the three most important things with the angel investing is the team. The person who pitched me was absolutely exceptional. He was actually a serial entrepreneur. It wasn’t his first startup and he seemed to have all of the right qualities. He was clearly very bright. He had a very interesting idea and obvious people skills. That’s very important to me as well because the majority of startups fail for any number of reasons, but the leading cause is that the team implodes, which means that the founders got to have very strong people skills. This particular founder did indeed impress with that.
What is the mistake when you say the team or the founders implode? I’ve heard lots of stories. Is there one or two things that you see happening over and over again? Is it a fighting over equity? Is it disagreeing on the vision? What is it that causes founders to implode?
There are so many different challenges that founding teams face when they launch a startup. I would liken it to getting married. You really in for the long haul with a lot of very, very substantial challenges. The relationships are profoundly stressed again and again. It’s really is a matter of how well the founders can handle those stresses. It’s also interesting because many founders understandably found with family or friends is statistically the least stable startup team. The most stable startup teams are the ones that have worked together in the past. In between is a team made up of a relatively recent and acquaintances.
When you hear a serial entrepreneur pitch, obviously they’ve got confidence and experience under their belt and that comes through in the pitch, I’m assuming. Yes?
Yes, absolutely.
They’ve been able to express a vision, I would imagine, that caused them to assemble a great team. Ideally what I’ve heard a lot, and I’d love your opinion on this, is you give bonus points in your head going, “This team has actually worked together before on another company or another startup.”
Yes. The most stable teams are ones that have worked together previously.
Angel Investor: The most stable teams are ones that have worked together previously.
Yes. Let’s talk about one of your more famous companies. You’re an investor in Slack. How did you come to hear about them and what was that pitch like?
I think everybody has heard about them.
At one time, everyone’s invisible. You’re a seed investor, so I’m guessing you got in before it was a household name or did you come in after?
It actually is an outlier in my portfolio of Angel investments. Typically, I invested in the Angel level and I didn’t really invest in Slack up until recently. I got in at a Unicorn valuation. The reason I decided to get was is the team is extremely impressive and I’m confident. I think the set of collaboration tools are exceptional, the team leading the company is exceptional, and even though it’s already valued now at about $5 billion, I’m confident that there’s a lot of room for growth and that’s why I made that investment.
What Jim means by exceptional, because that word means a lot of different things to other people, exceptional means you’ve worked well together before. Maybe you’ve had other successful exits and you can handle high stress things happening multiple times. Is there anything else you can give us more specifically about what makes the Slack team so exceptional, so that someone listening could say, “That’s what I need to do to become exceptional?”
That’s a great question. I think the fact that they’ve grown it as quickly and as large as they have really speaks for itself.
The ability to show fast traction. Can you tell from looking at the team what is it in their skillset that allows them to grow that fast? Is it good marketing? Is it some kind of tech advantage? Is it creating brand ambassadors? Anything you can share that you think is the key to their success that made you want to invest in them would be helpful.
I think they really got all those skills across the board. How many companies launch and within a matter of few years after launch becomes so large? Statistically, it’s an exceptional success. It’s breathtaking and it’s rare that you’ll find a team. Even a team with a great business model and a great vision, execution is really everything. It’s clear that the Slack team excels in all the necessary ways.
Is barrier to entry for a competitor one of the key criteria that you look for whether someone like Slack that’s at the Unicorn level or a seed investor?
Yes. A sustainable competitive advantage is really important. Back in the 1990s when the Internet was just beginning to warm up, being first to market was a great advantage. It’s very difficult to come up with a truly original, creative idea that will afford a company a sustainable competitive advantage and a meaningful barrier to entry, the larger, much better capitalized companies. Yes, to the extent that you can identify a startup at angel investment opportunity that comes with a competitive advantage, that’s really desirable.
Can you give us an example, either from Slack or one of your other investments, that had a competitive advantage so the listeners could have an example in their head to go, “Now I see what that is?”
The first company that comes to mind is a company by the name of Neural Analytics. They’re developing software and hardware that will revolutionize brain health. They’re working in the space of stroke, concussion, and Alzheimer’s. They develop cutting edge or leading edge hardware and software. There’s a lot of intellectual property. They’ve got some very meaningful patents. There’s also a substantial amount of trade secrets that they’ve got so it’s enjoying a fair amount of success and it’s looking very promising. They’ve been doing it for quite a while. I would think that any large pharmaceutical company, if they like what this company is doing, I don’t think it would be a question because Neural Analytics is such a meaningful barrier to entry that it really would leave any potential acquirer to just buy it. It’s would be just a question of how much are they willing to pay for it.
Let’s talk about one of your many seed investors. What made you decide to say yes to them at the startup phase?
Usually, when someone comes to me with an idea, it’s pre-mature. I like to see something much further developed in an idea. Ideally, I’d like to see some traction which implies product market fit. I’ll go back to the company that I was talking about earlier or rather, the entrepreneur. His name is Eric Futoran and he founded a company called Embrace.io. He had been a founding partner of Scopely, which just raised a six figure round and the valuation is close to a billion dollars at this point. Eric is a very dynamic guy. I think what happened was after being at Scopely for five or six years, he saw that there was a good place when it comes to mobile user experience. I’m sure you experienced it from time to time, an app that freezes or abruptly closes or slow to navigate or of course, the dreaded endless spinner.
Yes, you have to shut down your whole computer and you can’t even figure out how to do that because everything is spinning.
It’s very frustrating. I’ve gotten to know Eric while he was still at Scopely and I was so impressed with him that I said to him, “If you ever decided to leave Scopely and start your own company, please let me know. I’d love an opportunity to consider investing.”
That does not happen very often. If it does, know that you’re doing something right. I’m just going to take a guess, Jim, that of all the founders you meet and all the pitches you hear, maybe you say that to less than five percent or even smaller people. Would that be accurate?
I would say a smaller percentage of founders. I don’t work a lot. I’m out probably at least two nights a week in West LA at different events, meeting entrepreneurs. Once in a while, I’ll meet an entrepreneur that is so impressive that I will invite him or her to reach out to me if and when they’re ready.
If you put yourself in the shoes of the audience, Jim, and they want to be in that one percent of people that you’re so impressed with. Anything you can do to describe what those characteristics are, either as a business person or a characteristic of that person as a person that makes you sit up and take notice and want to work with them would be so helpful.
Again, I would liken it to getting married, because when you invest in a startup, there’s no liquidity and it’s really a long-term relationship. I guess chemistry plays a part in it. You meet somebody and as you speak with him or her, you get a sense of how intelligent, how driven, how committed they are, and also how strong their people skills are. Of course, if they’ve got a vision, how compelling that vision is. I would say most often, I’ve only said that to a handful of people in the last ten years. Each of the person I was talking to is a serial entrepreneur, someone had proven his or her ability in the past. It’s very rare.
[Tweet “Passion, vision and people skills are key”]
You come across smart, you come across passionate, and you come across as someone who’s got great people skills. That’s where the unique magic is from my observations of all the people I’ve met, is if someone’s really technical, smart, and maybe even can articulate a vision, then nine times out of ten they don’t have really great people skills and vice versa. You can have really charismatic people that have this great vision, but they don’t have the technical expertise or don’t have people on their team to execute it. When you have that combination in one person, it’s almost left brain, right brain combo. That’s what people are attracted to. I think so many people, when they pitch an Angel investor like you, get confused and think, “I’m going to wow him with my demo,” and don’t even think about the people skills aspect of it. “I just want to have them hear it from the horse’s mouth,” so to speak, you, that the people skills are just as important if not more important than whatever your product demo is.
The bottom line is not one thing is more important than another. It’s that it’s so difficult to birth a company, nurture it, grow it, build it large enough and make it interesting enough to be acquired or to go public that really you need it all, and that’s rare.
The majority of exits seem to be getting bought versus IPO. Is that still the case today for you that you see?
I think it’s the case not only for me but generally. When I was growing up, it was like the go go 1960s, where all you needed was an idea to go public. Today things have changed dramatically. In fact, a really diligent angel investor will be just as focused on what’s the potential exit and who would buy this company as he would or she would be with the other considerations because the odds of a company of this startup going public are extremely remote. Of course, the odds are most startups are going to fail and the startups that succeed hopefully will fly. You want to know who are the natural acquirers and why would they acquire your company instead of some other company.
I don’t want to discourage your listeners who are aspiring entrepreneurs. I think it’s really exceptional for anybody to be an aspiring entrepreneur and make the leap and make the commitment to launch a company, but you really need a lot going for you in order for it to succeed. Not the least of which is good luck and absence of bad luck. We’ve all seen enough startups and enough really gigantic startups grow into something very dramatic and world-changing, and so that brass ring is worth reaching for.
It’s also the awareness that when you’re pitching someone like you, it’s really important if someone can put their empathy head on and realize that what’s important to someone like you is that you’re going to get your money back. There’s going to be a good chance of some kind of strategy for an ROI, that you’ve done some thinking on who could possibly buy your company that would make your initial seed round worthwhile.
Private startup companies, there’s no liquidity and the only reason that an investor invests is in the hopes of getting a return on investment. Although I will say that I made investment where the likelihood of return is less than I would generally make and that’s in the area of environmental, because I care about those things. I want to tolerate more risk, the biggest of which is I won’t get a return or if I do get a return, it will be more modest than what I’m generally looking for.
When you’re looking at your overall portfolio, do you allocate a certain percentage? Do you say to yourself, “10%, 20%, I’ll have some social impact influence in my yes or no decision?”
You would think I would do that, but I don’t. The reason I don’t is that it’s very difficult to identify a startup that I think is investment worthy. I only consider the issue when I get very excited about a company and I decide with each possible opportunity, “is this is one that I want to write a check for?”
A lot of research says that angel investors like you tend to invest within 50 miles or less of where you’re based. But when I look at your portfolio, I see LA and New York. Is that fair or is the majority here in LA?
Angel Investor: When a company is in your back yard, you can be much more effective with your diligence efforts.
The vast majority are, almost the lion’s share. Virtually all of them are in LA and there’s a reason for that. Number one, when a company is in your back yard, you can be much more effective with your diligence efforts. You can spend more time with the team, you can meet customers. Then once you write a check, these startups run into trouble for one reason or another. As I said earlier, there really are so many existential threats along the journey. When the company is in your backyard, it’s a lot easier and you can be more effective in terms of helping your portfolio company to overcome whatever challenges. When your’re distant, we do live in an information age so it’s not impossible but it’s not as efficient or effective when companies are in your backyard.
Jim, how important is a warm introduction? I know you’re out two nights a week to different events, but if you don’t come across somebody at that point and they’re just submitting and going through the Tech Coast Angel’s applications standpoint versus someone you know a little bit or trust a little bit or have some kind of relationship where they could say, “I think you might want to meet this person or at least take a look at their pitch deck.” How much does that weigh in for you?
A lot. At this point I’ve been Angel investing for about a decade. I have at least a hundred portfolio of companies. I’m on LinkedIn. I’m on AngelList. There’s a reasonable amount of awareness about me as an Angel investor. As a result, I get countless inbound solicitations and candidly, I just don’t have enough time to seriously consider each and every one of them on its merits, so a warm introduction from one of my Tech Coast Angel’s colleagues or someone who’s not a member but a colleague of mine who I respect then makes a big difference, then I will have a very close look at a company.
If you could give the listeners one big piece of advice when they pitch. It could be, “Don’t have too many words on your slide, don’t talk too fast, be sure you know your numbers, have a good story,” those are just some things I’ve heard in the past. If you have one piece of advice for people in order to get a yes when they hear a pitch, what would that be?
The first thing that investors typically see is a deck. I would make sure that if I’m going to be doing it, that my deck would be a very compelling presentation. Because investors like myself and other active investors, we get so many inbound decks that the deck has to be really, really well put together. The problems got to be set forth right up front, the solution has to be clearly spelled out, the team. It’s funny because in terms of frustrations with the deck, sometimes there’s too much information on a slide. Sometimes there’s too little information. I think in an entrepreneurial zeal to communicate how fabulous their vision is, they use fonts that’s so small that you really can’t read it. When I come to a slide where I see a couple of pictures, not sure exactly, there’s always an iPhone display and then they’ve got font that’s so small, I can’t read it.
[Tweet “The problems got to be set forth right up front, the solution has to be clearly spelled out, the team.”]
I just go to the next slide and then what I find is there’s not usually enough information about the team. There have probably sixteen members on a single slide. They’ll say college and the most recent company, but it really doesn’t give a lot of information. It doesn’t say what their position was at the prior company or prior companies. I think I’m not alone when I talk about how important the team is. If you’ve got five people on your team, make two slides so that you can have enough text under each picture, so the person looking at the deck and the slide can get a real sense of who the team members are and what they’ve done.
That’s great advice. Do you like certain areas, artificial intelligence, mobile, virtual reality, that you like to invest in, so the people know that, “What I’m doing isn’t the kind of thing he typically invests in,” or “I’m a good fit, I should figure out how to get in front of him.”
That’s a great question. Let me talk a little bit about Tech Coast Angels. We’re really vertical agnostic. We’re one of the largest and most active angel investment organizations in the country. We’ve got over 300 members across five regional networks. We invest in internet, software, life sciences, consumer products, hardware, really across the board. We don’t invest in movies, but we’re pretty diversified in the nature of our investments. We don’t just write checks, we bring experience mentoring, operational assistance. We bring valuable connections, and many of our portfolio companies have gone on to raise lots of money. Collectively, our portfolio has raised at least a couple of billion dollars in funding.
Jim, how can people follow you on social media? What’s the best way to keep in touch with what you’re doing and what your Angel Group is doing.
Look at my LinkedIn profile, my AngelList profile. Candidly, I’m not that active on social media. I think I’m a little bit older to navigate on social media on a daily basis.
We’ll definitely look at your LinkedIn profile and see what your next big unicorn might be that you’re going to be part of, because that’s certainly an indication for people that you’ve done your due diligence on them. Jim, thanks again for being on the show. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks for sharing your insights and wisdom.
Thank you, John for having me. I appreciate your giving me the opportunity to share my experiences and my thoughts.
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What Is A Success Mindset? with Joanne Chen
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
When it comes to successfully making a pitch, you need to establish your own success mindset – and that involves not letting rejection affect you more than it should. Learn how to spot the characteristics of a founder: grit, tenacity, and of course the ability to tell a good story, which is what the successful pitch is all about. Joanne Chen, a venture capitalist at foundation capital in Silicon Valley, talks about this in a discussion of her journey, and how her company is transitioning from being one of Netflix’s early investors to getting a head start in the future of artificial technology.
Joanne Chen’s passion for technology developed very early. Her parents taught her how to program: her dad, who was a mathematician, and her mom who specialized in computer science. By the time Joanne was nine, she turned that into a business, making her first webpage for a client. This glimmer of entrepreneurial ability soon sparked as she began her career as an engineer at Cisco Systems and then later at a mobile gaming company. She spent many years working at Wall Street at Jefferies & Co. She had also been an angel investor for two years, and now works with passionate entrepreneurs who want to disrupt businesses by leveraging data assets.
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Our guest is Joanne Chen who’s a venture capitalist at Foundation Capital in Silicon Valley. I had the pleasure of being on the Coca-Cola CMO Summit panel with her and she is smart and fun. She will talk about the mindset you need to have when you pitch which all boils down to not taking rejection personally. She looks for two characteristics in a founder: grit and tenacity, and the ability to tell a good story which is what The Successful Pitch is all about. Enjoy Joanne’s journey and how she and her company were one of the early investors in Netflix and what they’re doing in artificial intelligence.
Listen To The Episode Here
What Is A Success Mindset? with Joanne Chen
I’m thrilled to have Joanne Chen who is at Foundation Capital in Silicon Valley. She and I met at a Coca-Cola CMO Summit and I instantly knew I wanted to have her as a friend, as a guest on this podcast, and let you hear what she is doing with her life and in the tech startup world. She has a passion for technology that she developed very early when her dad, who is a mathematician, and her mom, who is in computer science, taught her how to program. By the time she was nine, she turned that into a business and made her first webpage for a client. That entrepreneur blood was in her from the beginning.
She began her career as an engineer at Cisco Systems and then later co-founded a mobile gaming company. She spent many years working on Wall Street at Jefferies & Company in which she helped tech companies go through the IPO and the M&A process. She has been an Angel investor previously to joining Foundation and she works with passionate entrepreneurs who want to leverage data assets to disrupt businesses. She knows what she’s doing and she’s worked a lot with people in SAS, drone tech, and virtual reality. In fact, some of the other companies that she’s worked with include Zen Gaming and something we’re going to ask her about called Mya. Joanne, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s my pleasure to be here.
Can we start by taking us back to those early days of your childhood when you were nine years old and watching your parents as you say, “I’m going to learn how to code and start a business?”
Thanks for bringing that up. It’s always a fun story. My father left China to pursue his PhD at the University of Montreal. He was initially supposed to be in Montreal for just a year to do a study abroad. Then what happened was the whole Tiananmen Square incident happen and then he decided to stay. Eventually, my mother and I was able to join him in Montreal and we lived the life of an aspiring PhD student. We were in this one-room apartment in Montreal in this terrible neighborhood and that’s how they started their careers in tech. My father was initially a professor; my mother was a programmer. Both of them eventually moved into the industry. At a very young age, I was influenced by both their passion and their tenacity in the space as well as content-wise. I was very influenced by computer science and tech.
When the first version of the internet was available, we got this clunky and slow computer and we got online. My mother taught me how to use file systems, access DOS, and play very simple games. Eventually, when webpage making became a little bit simpler, she taught me how to use HTML. At the same time, I was working part time at Pennysaver. That was the only job that you could get as a nine-year old, delivering newspapers down the street. As part of the reward for delivering newspapers, they let me post one ad of my choice for free and so I thought about that.
The other experience and realization I had at the time was I created this terribly ugly website that I brought to my second or third grade classroom. I showed this to my classmates and teachers and not a single one of them knew what it was. That sparked an idea in my mind which is, “We’re early in this evolution. I’m sure there’s probably a lot of people don’t know what this is, or if they do, they don’t know how to make it.” I decided to post the ad offering my services around website development. A week later, I got my first client.
You then went on to get your BS at the University of California in Berkeley and then went to get your MBA at the University of Chicago School of Business. I’m from Chicago and I know the contrast of the weather from Berkeley to Chicago. That must’ve been a shock to your system.
It was certainly very cold. I remember there were two days during the year where the school advised us not to go outside because more than two minutes outside would have given us frostbite.
When you were getting your MBA, did you know then that you wanted to become a venture capitalist?
Success Mindset: Never give up. At some point, someone will see the beauty of your business.
Yes, the reason why I went to business school was to think about that career transition. I had always known that I wanted to be in tech. I studied Computer Science at Berkeley and Electrical Engineering. The first exposure to venture capitalists was at Berkeley, not University of Chicago where I had no idea what venture capitalists did. Berkeley had this competition called The Venture Capital Case Competition. As part of that, we had to submit a company that we were excited about, I was maybe nineteen or twenty years old at the time, and present to a panel of VCs who will judge how we did as VCs. Three friends and I got together; all three of them eventually became entrepreneurs. We knew one of the early people at Mint.com which was one of the first, modern-day fintech companies and proposed that Mint as an investment candidate.
The funny thing was I believe Mint was in stealth mode at the time. It wasn’t a company that most people knew about, but a few of the VCs were looking at Mint as a potential investment opportunity in real life. They were impressed with how we found this company. We eventually won the competition. That stuck in my mind. I enjoyed the process. I thought it was very easy to get to that point. A couple of years later, Mint was acquired by Intuit for $170 million, which was at the time a huge acquisition in this space. At the back of my mind, I had always thought about venture capital ever since that experience. After working at Cisco as an engineer, working on Wall Street advising tech executives, starting my own mobile gaming company, I thought about the combination of my experiences, what I really loved, and decided that I wanted to give it a try at investing.
Fintech was your first expertise level and public still continues today and the kinds of companies you invest in?
My firm, Foundation Capital, is a very strong investor in fintech companies. We have lending club, lending home, and financial engines back in the day in our portfolios. We’ve been very lucky in the sector. For me personally, I focus primarily on B2B enterprise companies that leverage data and machine learning to create hopefully self-driving software that sells into different functional units or different verticals. I focus on that world.
What lessons did you learn about what a good pitch was when you were first being exposed to that because you’ve been on both sides of the table, it sounds like?
It’s very enlightening to get the investor side, especially when I first started as an Angel investor in 2012. Lessons learned? Let’s see.
What makes a good pitch?
You’re the expert on this topic, but for me personally, a couple things that I look for in a 45-minute to a 60-minute meeting for an entrepreneur, one is that he or she has a very interesting problem statement that they are communicating and that this problem is either large today or going to be large very soon in the near to mid-future. This is a problem in market size description that’s compelling. The second piece of it is a reason why this person or this team of people are the right folks to solve this problem, some secret sauce or insight that they have.
Perhaps it’s them as individuals or as the team, perhaps it’s their experience and therefore relationships and networks in the particular domain, or perhaps it’s because they’re amazing technologists who are just better than everyone else in the world. Some secret about them that lets them solve this problem. Third, it’s their ability to tell the story in a compelling way. We are story-driven creatures and they have to be able to tell the story to me, to potential customers, to potential people they hire in a compelling way, especially when data is not there in the very beginning. Those are the three things I look for in a 45 to 60-minute meeting.
That storytelling element is everything. Most people think, “Let me just show you how this app works,” and they’re not telling you a story as it relates to what problem they’re solving for people. It’s like, “Isn’t it cool that this would work?” You’re like, “Yes, but would anybody want to use it and why? What problem is it solving?” If you haven’t thought that through, then the technology works without understanding what’s important to someone like you, which is how am I going to get my money back? Is this market big enough to scale, is someone going to buy you, or are you going to go public, or whatever the issue is? That’s important. Is there one mistake that you typically see when people pitch that you could share with us to make sure the listeners avoid doing it?
I don’t think this is necessarily a mistake, but more a frame of mind that people, in my opinion, don’t consider as much. I believe investing and picking both entrepreneurs and investors is like a dating exercise. The reality is there is a big percentage of it in investor’s decision that’s rational and there’s a significant percentage of the decision making that is not rational. It’s based on chemistry or emotions or something else, just like dating. That part of it is hard to predict, hard to control, hard to necessarily filter for. As an entrepreneur, I would not take rejection as necessary correlated with the business entirely. It could just be because of the personality fit or a lack of chemistry or something. That is an important element that entrepreneurs don’t think about as much.
[Tweet “Don’t take rejection personally.”]
I talk about this a lot. Don’t take rejection personally, whether it’s a date or a no from an investor. It doesn’t mean you need to start rejecting yourself or your business model or your idea, it just means it’s not a fit. If you’re going to get up and start talking to someone else at a dating situation or as a potential other investor, you have to hit the reset button every time. It’s almost like, if you go on a date with somebody who just broke up or got divorced and all they talk about is their ex, that’s a horrible date. You have to clear your mindset that that wasn’t a fit onward and start remembering the times when you did get a yes.
I love that you brought that up because it hits my sweet spot of what I like to do when I give keynote talks to companies, especially when I talk to people in sales. It’s the same thing. You cannot take rejection personally. For me, the big lesson is never reject yourself just because someone has said no to you. We tend to do that. Even if people say, “It’s hard not to take rejection personally.” I tell people, “What’s the cost of taking it personally?” You’re depressed and you’re down for however long it takes you to shake that off, so it’s important to develop some skills. Let’s dive into some of the companies you said yes to, starting with one that I’m particularly intrigued about called Mya.
Mya is a company that is in the recruiting space. What they offer is an AI-driven conversational solution to help recruiters become more efficient. They are a recruiting assistant, if you will. If you think about the problems in recruiting, especially around hiring high turnover, high volume jobs, like staffing Amazon fulfillment centers or Nike hiring retail store associates, they can’t hire more than 10,000 retail store associates per year, for example. It’s a massive problem because there aren’t enough recruiters and recruiter time to go through these candidates in a timely fashion. At the same time, there isn’t a shortage of candidates that are interested in these jobs. Mya is able to source, screen, and place these candidates into an in-person interview, eliminating 75% of the grunt work that recruiters typically have to do. In addition, it delivers a better experience to these candidates because it’s able to tell candidates, yes or no, this or that, right away.
If you’ve ever applied for a job online and not heard back, it’s frustrating. You just assume it’s a no. It’s like dating again. There’s no response. It’s killer.
Mya is able to make judgments within milliseconds of having these conversations.
Does it apply for bigger companies that maybe have to hire some quality, high-skilled labors as well?
It certainly applies to the high-skill labor market as well. The challenge in the high-skill labor market is a little bit different from the high frequency, high turnover talent pool. In the high frequency, high turnover talent pool, there isn’t a shortage of supply. In the high-skill labor market, there’s a huge shortage of supply. The matchmaking there is much more difficult because you had taken fit and personality and social data and a bunch of other things which makes someone a good candidate. The focus areas are different, but Mya is totally applicable to both. They started off at the high frequency, high turnover market and they’re going to be expanding more and more into the high-skill labor market.
What was their pitch like? Do you remember anything that made it stand out that you went, “This is for us?”
I met Eyal the CEO in early 2007. He is one of the most articulate, crisp presenters of this problem statement and what he’s envisioning. I liked his storytelling capabilities. The second thing that I was very impressed by is Eyal grew up in the recruiting world. His parents ran agencies that did exactly that, and as a kid, he followed them and shadowed them. He helped them source and screen candidates. Even though he’s only 30 years old, he’s intimately familiar and had over a decade of experience in this particular space.
The domain knowledge was incredibly attractive. The third part that I was very impressed by is Eyal started a company called FirstJob before he created Mya. With FirstJob, he ran the company for a number of years and grew it to quite a nice size but realized that the bigger opportunity lied in Mya. He made the hard decision to pivot despite growing FirstJob to a sizable company. The tenacity, that desire to succeed and keep going and go for the bigger opportunity is a trait that all successful entrepreneurs have and that he exhibited.
Success Mindset: The tenacity and desire to succeed and keep going and go for the bigger opportunity is a trait that all successful entrepreneurs have.
It sounds like, in addition to being a great storyteller and having tenacity, he also was able to zoom out and see the big picture and not get caught in the weeds that he didn’t see the need to pivot. Tell me a little bit about Tubi TV.
Tubi TV is an interesting one. They are a company that has a long history with us. What they offer is, think of Netflix, they offer a free Netflix, ad-supported TV network, the replacement for cable, if you will. For the consumer, it’s free. For advertisers, they can advertise on Tubi TV. For content providers, like MGM and Paramount, this is how they view as next generation cable television. If you think about the trends that have been happening at the macro level, it’s fascinating because on the consumer side, I know that I prefer streaming and on-demand and a place where I can watch where I want to watch and when I want to watch it and control what I want to watch. Tubi is on IOS, Android, Apple TV, Amazon, Roku, pretty much everywhere where you want to consume content. It’s an experience dictated by the consumer. Consumers are more and more interested in that and less and less interested in subscribing to cable. Cable is dying. Linear TV is dying. On-demand streaming is on the rise.
From the content providers’ side, it’s an interesting opportunity because if you think about where studios and these content providers monetize, most of their revenues came from movies and cable television, historically. Now that cable is dying, they have fewer opportunities to monetize. Netflix, which was one of our earlier investments and very successful, invented the new business model which is that they unbundled all these different shows and created this subscription service for consumers. In the early days, these studios would be able to sell their content to Netflix, and Netflix will use that and offer it as a subscription. What has happened is Netflix is becoming more like a studio, like a content provider, as they’re making their own original programming, etc. For these traditional studios, like MGM, they’re thinking, “I have fewer opportunities to monetize via Netflix as well or the likes of Netflix.” Now they look at Tubi TV and they think, “This is the next generation cable television that I can partner with and monetize my content under.” That’s attractive from a content provider perspective as well.
Tubi TV is never going to be competing for an Emmy like Netflix or Amazon, correct?
That’s correct. They don’t have any original programming. Think of them as the replacement for shows that you will see on afternoon cable television.
Anything about that particular pitch or the founder that stood out that made everybody go, “This the right team.”
Farhad who’s the CEO of Tubi TV is incredibly gritty. The context there is interesting because Tubi TV was spun out of a different company called adRise which was selling software to studios and content providers. This was in the 2010 or 2011 so quite a while ago. In 2014, Farhad decide to pivot the company from a B2B company into a consumer offering, realizing the big opportunity behind creating Tubi. He’s been doing this for quite some time. It’s been seven years that he’s been working on this and he hasn’t given up. After the pivot, we looked at his performance and what he’s been able to achieve with this new product and decided to double down and co-lead this $20 million round along with Jump Capital earlier this year. His tenacity from a pitch perspective stood out.
[Tweet “Tenacity and grit are the keys to success.”]
It’s a combination of tenacity and grit. That’s a similar theme coming across here. The last one I want to ask you about is Localytics, the mobile app marketing engagement that’s so popular right now. I would love to hear what is it about that platform that made you and your team decide that that was a winner?
Localytics is a company that I work with, along with my partner, Ashu, who’s a board member there. Localytics is a mobile analytics engagement platform based in Boston. If you think about consumers, we spend a lot of time engaging with our apps. The app provides a better experience because it’s able to personalize and send push notifications to us and do a bunch of things that are interesting to the individual user. Localytics enables brands to be able to do this at scale, both sending the messages to consumers as well as personalizing that experience and then serving analytics to these brands to help them understand how their consumers are behaving.
Are there any final tips that you have for people who are saying, “Is this the right time to be pitching?” Are there any suggestions you have for them on trying to figure out timing? I know that’s very important.
Timing is a difficult question. The most important part is to understand yourself and your business first and foremost. Understand what it is that you need from a cash perspective and then give yourself a 50% buffer because something’s going to go wrong. Let that dictate when you fundraise and how much you want to raise. You want to plan for 18to 24 months. That’s a time period in terms of cash needs for every single route. Be sure to be internally-driven, first and foremost, versus externally-driven. That’s the first thing. The second thing is fundraising is going to be one of the most difficult processes that an entrepreneur will go through. I rarely hear that people love pitching for a fundraising. At the same time, it’s a very good experience in terms of reflecting what investors think about and what are some of the business fundamentals and perhaps even longer term vision of a business.
[Tweet “Tell a compelling story of why you and why now.”]
The second most important tip is never give up. At some point, someone will see the beauty of your business. I still vividly remember this one entrepreneur who did not have a network in Silicon Valley who wanted to get a meeting with me and with my partners. As a way to get noticed, he sent us this envelope that he created out of a Lumascape, which was a landscape of different companies in a particular space. It was marketing tech. He wrote a letter with this envelope telling us why he deserved fifteen minutes of our time. I remember that very clearly even though I didn’t think his business was the right fit. I called him and gave him advice on what he should do in the future with investors. Eventually, he raised money even though his starting point was perhaps more challenging than other folks. Never give up. Always have the tenacity and then things have a way of working out.
And being creative, it sounds like, a little bit. What you touched on about being internally-focused versus externally-focused, if we’re externally-focused on feeling good about ourselves, that’s when we take the rejection personally. If we know who we are, we’re internally-focused and our mission and our why can keep us on track. Joanne, thank you so much for being generous with your insights, your stories, and your passion for making the world better through technology and getting entrepreneurs to make their dreams become a reality.
Thank you, John.
Links Mentioned:
- Foundation Capital
- Joanne Chen
- Zen Gaming
- Mya
- Mint.com
- Eyal
- FirstJob
- Tubi TV
- Farhad
- adRise
- Jump Capital
- Ashu
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How To Become Millionaires At Make It Happen University With Spencer Lodge
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
It’s not rocket science. The real reason people don’t buy from you has nothing to do with price or time; it’s because they don’t trust you. If you want some real insights on how to build up your confidence up to your first million, Spencer Lodge has some great tips on how to do that. He shares his expertise in selling at Make It Happen University. He’s also a leader in the international financial services and sales industry with over 24 years of experience although if you look at him, you would never know it. Spencer has personally trained thousands of people to build some of the largest and most successful financial consultancies. His university, “Make It Happen”, was born to give entrepreneurs and employees the tools they need to succeed, literally training people on how to become millionaires. Feeling skeptical? It’s your call. But just so you know, Spencer’s journey started with a working class kid from a working class environment. If that kid with limited resources made it, then with your current assets in business, so can you!
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Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Spencer Lodge, who’s an expert in selling. He has got a whole university called Make It Happen for a reason. He said, “When you write a book,” which he’s written a new one called, It’s Not Rocket Science, “you’re creating content that’s valuable to read versus creating something valuable that you want to share.” It’s all about not taking criticism personally. He has some real great tips on how to do that. He said, “The real reason people don’t buy from you has nothing to do with price or time. It’s because they don’t trust you.” He gives us insights into how to build up our confidence and more importantly, being aware of how people receive what you say when you say it.
Listen To The Episode Here
How To Become Millionaires At Make It Happen University With Spencer Lodge
I’m honored to have my guest, Spencer Lodge, who is a leader in the international financial services and sales industry with over 24 years of experience, although if you look at him, you would never know it. He looks like he’s just out of school. He’s personally trained thousands of people and help them build some of the largest and most successful financial consultancies. He delivers expert advice for clients and investors around the world. He’s dedicated his career to building and training people to achieve their full potential. In 2015, he decided it was time to spread his wealth with people who want to learn about the recipe to success. Make It Happen, his university, was born that give entrepreneurs and employees the tools they need to succeed. He’s done so many amazing things. He was the top regional director for seven years running, he’s a top wealth manager globally for multiple years, and he’s literally trained people on how to become millionaires. Spencer, welcome to the podcast.
John, thank you for that lovely introduction.
I had the pleasure of being on your Facebook Live show. I’ve had guests from Australia and Israel but never anybody from Dubai, so you’re the first. Would you take us back, Spencer, to your own story of origin? It can go back as far as you want in school. Did you always know you wanted to “make it happen?”
The journey starts with a working-class kid from a very average working-class environment. To be honest with you, I was bullied quite severely at school and suffered trauma but was very grateful in the end because the bullying taught me resilience and taught me that, “I’ll show you. I’ll prove it to you,” type of mindset. I wasn’t very good at school. I never missed a day. I wasn’t one of those kids that played or anything but I wasn’t very good at school. I left school. I wanted to become a ski instructor. I did that.
One August when there wasn’t any snow, my mother kicked me out of bed and said to me, “It’s time to get a proper job or proper career.” I was like, “I have one, mother. How dare you?” She said, “No, seriously, it’s time.” She ran a recruitment consultancy back in London and so I didn’t have much choice but to go for some interviews and find out what I wanted to do. I fell into selling and then going for a job interview with these two guys. I had no idea what to do or what to say. It was the first suit I ever bought and worn. Remembering back, it was something like dark green, a horrific color. God only knows what people must have thought of me. The guy took one from his pocket and said to me, “Sell me this pencil.” I was like, “Are you serious?” He was like, “Yes, sell me the pencil.” I don’t remember what happened but on the back of that, I was very lucky to get offered the job. I was the trainee photocopier, an office equipment salesperson.
Make It Happen University: Financial service is interesting because everybody wants to make money, so you could appeal to people’s sense of greed.
I worked in London. It was a competitive environment, but I didn’t know what competition was. I didn’t know what tough was. My life was knocking on the doors of 100 companies every morning and my patch said, “Easy 31 Postcard in London.” Every afternoon, I had to make 100 cold calls and 99 people would say no or they would swear at me. One person would say yes, and that one person was enough. I was taught to understand the 99 noes led always to a yes. That’s what happened. I then became okay. I wasn’t a massive success. I was young, in my early 20s. I was earning decent money, better than most of my friends were earning, so I was quite pleased with myself. Then the opportunity came to go and work in financial services in the Far East. Because I had some experience overseas as a kid, my dad worked in the oil industry overseas, so I’ve been to where he was living and spent time with him, it excited me to go and see a different country and work in a different country.
I then went to the Far East to Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong, across the Africa, Europe, South America and now the Middle East, so ten countries all through those years. What I found along the way is that first of all, financial service is interesting because everybody wants to make money, so you could appeal to people’s sense of greed. When you’re prospecting, when you get 99 noes and one yes in the photocopier industry, you would often get 50 noes and 50 yeses, because people were interested to learn more. Getting your foot through the door back in the early ‘90s wasn’t as difficult. Then I learned my craft. My boss said to me, “None is going to trust a 23-year-old kid looking like you. They are not going to trust their money with you, so you have to make sure that you’re a hotshot.” I went and studied and studied. He used to give me a book every couple of days and he said, “Unless you’ve the read and you can tell me about it, I don’t want to talk to you.” I was busy learning.
About six months into the role, I knew more about financial services than most people who have been doing it for ten years because I’ve taken time as part of my learning experience to study. I wasn’t given an option, so whether it’s was the equity market, the commodities market, it didn’t matter what it is, I knew about it. I was this youngster with limited life experience but a lot of essentially theoretical and academic experience and knowledge in financial services. Then I went on to be pretty successful at that. I then became successful at that and was one of the best in the industry that I was noted to be. I built various sales teams. What happened after all of that massive success, something else kicked in, which was the cause of the biggest change in my life, and that was my ego. My ego grew out of control. I became arrogant. I thought I was above others. That was an ugly thing. I remember I sat down with my boss one day and he said to me, “After sixteen years of working together, you’ve become too big for the company. You have to go.”
It was truly devastating when that experience happened to me. However, it was the first time in my life that I’ve got time to sit and reflect. Whilst I was recovering from my ego being bashed, I looked back at all of the things I’ve done and I worked out the things that I enjoyed and the things that I probably didn’t enjoy as much. I’ve been teaching people for years how to sell, “Is there a way that I can put it into some form of format and structure so that people can learn themselves?” Then I came up with this ridiculous idea of producing an online sales training university. That ridiculous idea was in a studio recording 400 videos about selling, literally everything from what you wear, how you wear it, all the way through to how you present yourself to how you prospect, how you market, how you use social media, how you close the prospect, how you look after your clients, everything in there, A to Z of selling. I launched it in December 2016.
What I find so interesting is you talk about learning through reading a book from your old boss and it’s one of the sales behaviors that is now in Make it Happen University where you were talking about where you’re talking about reading a book a week. You have a new book coming out. You went from reading a book to now writing a book, so that’s always an interesting journey.
Writing a book always sounds like a great idea until you start. There is a lot to it. You have to find out and think it through. It is not just a case of downloading your memoir. You have to put stuff together that’s valuable for people to read rather than valuable for you to share.
[Tweet “Create content people want to read versus what you want to share.”]
That’s true whether you’re writing a book or creating content for an online course or going out in a sales pitch or pitching to get your startup funded. Whatever it is, what you’re saying here, Spencer, is make it about who’s reading your book or what the audience is and not about what you think is important. Would that be accurate?
Spot on, absolutely. You’ve got to create something that people want to get engrossed with. When you pick up a book and you read a really good book, you are one chapter in and you cannot put the thing down. That’s a good book. It doesn’t matter what the subject matter. That, to me, is a good book. That, for me, is what I’m trying to create with the book that I’ve got coming out because I wanted it to be something that people would be drawn into as they start to read it. They could learn a bit about my story but how I accomplished what I accomplished and the basic principles that I’ve used along the way and essentially the skills that I’ve learned and how I apply them.
What’s the title?
Because I’m well -known for saying this and have been known for saying this for 25 years, the title is It’s Not Rocket Science.
I love it but there is a science to it. You don’t have to be a genius to understand is the takeaway I get.
Everything I know is literally skills-based. I’ve learned skills; there are soft skills, technical skills, the process-driven skills, the stuff that everybody can learn, which I did. I hear a lot of times, and you would have heard this, John, people say, “I can’t be a sales person. I’d never make a sale person. I don’t have the gift of the gab. I’m not an extrovert character like you.” When I look at successful salespeople that I’ve been inspired by over the years, some of them have been incredible introverts. A lot of salespeople are like standup comedians. A standup comedian is an entertainer on stage when he is performing and then when they come off stage, they become somewhat withdrawn and into themselves. They are not so gregarious when they are not digging with their clients. When I look at brilliant salespeople, it is not about what they say, it’s about what they learn. Invariably, if you are going to see people for the first time, your job is to try and find a solution for people’s problems. Your job is not to come in with your briefcase full of products and try to sell you product. That’s what the stereotype is, isn’t it?
Like the Fuller Brush man here in America back in the day, or the knives or whatever it is, people selling jewelry on the street with their coat. It’s that mindset that turns so many people off. You’re changing the perception of what it’s like to think of yourself as a professional salesperson.
At the end of the day, it’s a profession when you think about it. If all of us salespeople resigned at every company across the world, the economy would collapse overnight. The stock market would collapse. Wars would end because nobody would be selling guns. The automotive industry would stop. The oil industry would come to a stop. When you think about it, people would not be able to travel because flights wouldn’t be sold, and so it’s such an important skill to learn, yet where does people go to learn it? That is the reason for putting the university together. It came from that. We need to learn how to do this. In this modern age where we don’t want to go and sit in a classroom or we don’t want to go to a seminar, people want to be on their mobile phone and they want to do it in their own time, on the subway or in the car or wherever it is they’re going and want to be able to learn on the go, and so the university was put together to enable people to learn on the go through their phones or whatever device they want to use.
Make It Happen University: Some things that people say to you aren’t meant in the way that you are defensively receiving it.
You also mentioned that after a certain point, you’ve got a little arrogant and one of the things that you have on your course is the ability to accept criticism and they’re tied together. Can you explain a little bit about what’s in the course under that topic, accepting criticism?
The problem with people in many respects, whether that’s constructive, destructive or conflictional criticism, people don’t break it down. They look at it as an attack on them before anything else, so regardless of how it is positioned, a lot of the times, they take it personally. What I try to teach people to understand is that criticism is good, that someone who is taking the time to say, “You are not as good as you should be or maybe you could improve this area,” when actually they don’t need to, they can let you be. They can let you wallow in whatever environment you’re in but they are taking time to say, “You could be better by doing this or by doing that.” To me, that is a positive thing, “I don’t like the way you X or I don’t like the way you Y.” Think about what they are actually saying. They’ve taken 30 seconds, one minute or five minutes out of their time to try and add some value to you. It may be their own way. We all have to remember is it is not what we say to people, it is how people receive what we say. If you remember that, sometimes you will then remember that some things that people say to you aren’t meant in the way that you are defensively receiving it. It may have been meant in a more positive manner.
That’s everything, especially when you’re getting objections from the client. It’s one thing if you’re getting feedback from a co-worker or your boss of some criticism on how you can improve, but when you start getting feedback where the client is criticizing you or your product. Any tips on how to not take that personally?
At the end of the day, if someone is criticizing your product or you’re selling an external product, then you didn’t make it. It’s not your product, if you’ve invented something. It’s just that a lot of people would have taken it personally. Why would you take something personally if someone is taking the time? If people are saying nothing to you and you know nothing about your product that is negative or could be improved, and then you don’t make any sales because there is an obvious flaw in your product or your presentation or your ability to communicate, then you’re going to run out of steam pretty quick. It’s almost like a little bit of indirect tough love.
What causes a lot of burnout is taking all that rejection personally. You learned how to not do that back in the day, cold calling.
When you’re nineteen years old and you’re told by your boss, “You’re going to get 99 noes, but in there somewhere is going to be a yes, so look out for it,” You are conditioned as a nineteen-year-old kid. That’s it, you’re such a sponge, you go, “Fair enough.” Every time somebody who says no or swears at you, which many times happen, you’d be like, “That’s one of my 99 noes, I will move on.”
[Tweet “Selling is not rocket science.”]
One of the things you have in Make It Happen University that I find fascinating is this concept of, “Dominate, don’t compete.” Can you explain what that is?
A lot of the time, you hear people talking about their competition. What’s that all about? If you’re in a market, if you’re in an industry, surely the best way to be in that industry is to be the dominating business within that industry. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. If you think about it, who dominates the space for us to watch movies online?
Netflix.
That’s right. Who are they competing with? No one. They don’t have any because they’ve nailed it. They’ve dominated their market. If you and I want to park down and get some fried chicken, where will we go to get fried chicken from?
Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Right, so that dominates that market, that industry. There are examples everywhere of people dominating their marketplace. We don’t even call something by the name of the service. Sometimes we call it by the brand.
Kleenex is a great example of that.
We Google something. We clean it, we get some Kleenex. We Xerox it. That’s what’s being said over the years. There are a million different examples of that. You have to be careful to say dominating. Blackberry is a great example. When Blackberry first came out with emails on mobile phones, they completely wiped the floor with everybody else. Nokia was the go-to mobile phone before then, but again Nokia didn’t keep up with their research and somebody came in and knocked them off. Dominating isn’t something that once you get there, you just sit there and say, “Fine, we are here now. We are the champions.” Netflix will have somebody to challenge them. What’s my point about this? If you’re going to be in business, you should want to dominate the market that you’re in. You should want to be the market leader and dominate, and not looking at what anybody else is up to. Just focus on being the best you can possibly be at what you do. If you do that, then you’ll find that you don’t get sucked in to using energy, negatively and positively, worried about what’s going on over your shoulder.
I’m all about focusing on your own progress and you win. I have a whole story around that in my keynote from swimming, instead of turning my head to the side and staying focused on the wall and the competitor looked to see if he was ahead or not, that little extra half a second of looking, taking the eye off the prize caused me to beat him, so it’s a fascinating.
I want to ask about your insights into why people don’t buy. The most common ones are no time or no money, and you go into how to handle all of those. Do you want to give us a few tips that will intrigue us enough to say, “I’ve got to sign up for Make It Happen University now because that’s my biggest challenge?”
Why don’t people buy? The reason they don’t buy is they don’t trust you. It’s not that they don’t have a need. I will give you an example, you walk into a car showroom, a car dealership in the States or UK. Tell me what percentage of interest do you have in buying a car? You either have 0% or you have between 1% and 100% interest? If you have 0% interest in cars or buying a car, why would you go to a car showroom? There must be 1% of you that says, “I’m interested.” It may not be a big interest but it’s interest. That’s the first thing to consider. Why do people take the time to meet somebody who is selling something if they have no interest?
A simple fact is they do have interest. Do they have an interest in buying the product or service from you? Maybe not. That’s down to your skills. The reason invariably that people don’t buy is that they do not have a good level of rapport with you. They haven’t built up a sufficient level of trust that you know your subject and they don’t believe that you care enough to look after whether it’s a financial investment or an emotional investment in them. It’s as simple as that. It’s about mastering your craft. Let’s say you and I are in business together and we say, “We need to shop for an accountant,” so we go and find an accountant and we go and meet three accountants. How do we choose the best one?
Make It Happen University: The reason invariably that people don’t buy is that they do not have a good level of rapport with you.
Usually by reference or who we like the best.
I may sound a little bit naïve, but I don’t know much about accountancy, but we will go and sit down with three accountants. Let’s say we’ve never met any of them and we haven’t been referred to them and each one of them charges exactly the same amount of money. How do we decipher? We will go with the one that you and I connect with the best. That invariably is the person probably who asked the most questions, probably the person that found a way of creating some common ground with us, and probably the one that has taken time to make us a decent cup of coffee. We come out of that meeting and we walk back to our car together and we go, “I like him. Do you like him?” “He is good, isn’t he?” There you go, we’ve made the decision. That’s because that person has been trained well enough to understand us or to try and understand us.
A lot of it has to do with asking good questions about what’s our criteria but a lot of people don’t even start with that. They just start talking. This concept of trying to figure out whether someone’s going to buy from you or not and you get those objections, “I need to think about it. I trust you, but there’re other people who have to decide,” all the delay tactics that we hear, whether it’s selling a car or signing up for anything, do you find there’s any tactic that people should avoid because you’ve written a whole blog on that?
What we’ve got to understand is that selling is exactly the same as being a lawyer, an accountant, an engineer, a pilot, whatever it may be. It is a skill, an industry, and it is something that you’re supposed to learn properly. The reason that most people get it wrong is because they haven’t studied selling. They haven’t taken the time to learn. They got into selling by mistake or they got into it because they heard instant cash. They’ve had some random innocuous training, they’ve had someone leaning over their shoulder giving them a few tips and tricks. Lawyers have to pass the bar exam to go and defend someone in court. Accountants have to become CPAs. They have to be qualified to do it. Most salespeople are unqualified to sell because they have not taken a professional course in learning to sell, and so that’s a lot of the time the problem.
You can sell anything to anyone, but everything has to be aligned. When everything is aligned by you knowing everything you need to know, that is when the decision-making process becomes very easy for the person that you’re dealing with. You’re not just selling a product or service, you are the best product that you can sell. How on earth do you get a job when you go for a job interview if you can’t sell yourself?
Many people get so uncomfortable and talk about the lack of preparation. You know you’re going to be asked about yourself and you don’t have something ready to go. That’s crazy, isn’t it?
Even when you and I were younger and we would go to the bank to get a mortgage, we sit down with bank manager at his big desk, and he would sit there looking down at you on chairs that are lower than his, and he says, “How can I help you?” You are like, “I would like to borrow some money to get a mortgage,” and he would be like, “Let me think about it,” and he would ask you questions. You’re selling yourself to do business with the bank where they make money from you, which is nuts, but that’s how it used to be. How do you present yourself when you walk into the bank covered in paint and in a pair of ripped jeans? Would you have a better chance or worse chance than if you were dressed in a suit and became more appealing to that person? For me, you’ve got to understand that selling is a prerequisite for everything you do. Dominate your market is important. Understand that sales is a skill that you need to learn and if you learn it and you use it well, then it can be applied in all aspects of your life. I promise you, every single person in the audience, if you think you’re good at sales, great at sales or rubbish at sales, like everything, always start by learning. Nobody has monopoly on good ideas.
[Tweet “Don’t take criticism personally.”]
Compare it to someone like Tiger Woods or Meryl Streep. They’re still rehearsing, they’re still practicing, they’re still being coached. You have something in your eBook, How To Win, that talks about how to improve your confidence. I know from everything you’ve said that preparation is definitely one of the techniques to improve your confidence. Do you have anything else you want to leave us with around confidence?
Where does confidence come from when you think about it? We get confidence from people feeding us information that is positive and from having little successes. A lot of people lose confidence because they give themselves something that is too big to achieve, so they lose their will and they lose their way. Winning is all about little wins, small wins, because if you have small wins, it will enable you to build small amounts of confidence and you can have small wins consistently. The winning is giving yourself three things to do tomorrow. You go out and you do all three of them. They don’t have to be massive things, but if you get all three, there’s a win. A little win, back in the car, go and do something else. The next day, “I will do four things today. What are they going to be?” Small things, “I’m going to make sure I see this prospect and I get this referral from this prospect. I’m going to make sure that I book two appointments. I’m going to make sure that I spend an hour learning my presentation.” Whatever it may be, give yourself the opportunity to feel good about what you’re doing. Give yourself an opportunity to take small wins, enjoy and relish it just for a few minutes because it will do so much for your psychology, you wouldn’t believe.
That’s all about having integrity with yourself. The more we do what we tell ourselves we’re going to do, the more confident we have. That’s my big takeaway from what you said. I love it. The book is called, It’s Not Rocket Science. The university is MakeItHappen.University. I highly recommend both. Spencer, any other tips on how people can follow you on social media or buy your book?
On YouTube, there are over 100 videos you can go to see me doing various interviews, doing sales training, and different stuffs. If you go to Make It Happen Spencer Lodge, you will be able to find me on YouTube. It’s training stuff that you will make it happen. Spending a lot. If you go to my Facebook page, which is @MakeItHappenSpencerLodge, you will be able to find a bunch of videos and stuff there for you to get an idea of what I do and how I do it. If you want to follow me on Instagram, you can, which is @MakeItHappenSL. By all means go to the website, have a look, go on YouTube, comment, engage with me, ask me questions, go and find me on LinkedIn, go and ask me questions and I promise you I will answer questions for you. I will give you as much value as I possibly can to demonstrate to you what I’m all about and hopefully show you the kind of willing that I’m prepared to make for you as you should make for the people that you live with.
Spencer, you’re walking your talk. I love it. Thanks so much for being a guest.
My pleasure.
Links Mentioned:
- Spencer Lodge
- Make It Happen
- Facebook Live show – John Livesay interview with Spencer Lodge on Facebook Live
- MakeItHappen.University
- Make It Happen Spencer Lodge – YouTube
- @MakeItHappenSpencerLodge – Facebook
- @MakeItHappenSL – Instagram
- Make It Happen on LinkedIn
- https://www.makeithappen.university/
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