RWL072 Unlock Sales Mastery and Entrepreneurial Success with Steli Efti

The Power of Sales and Entrepreneurship

Speaker 1

0:00

So, hello everybody, welcome to another session of the Remote Summit. And I've got with me today somebody who's a hero of mine. He doesn't know that, but he's been a hero of mine for a while now. Because when you're a freelancer, when you're in a startup scenario, whether you like it or not, whether you like it or not, you part of you has to embrace the aspect of sales. So when I was doing my own research in terms of building my own freelance side of things, but not just that when I was doing my, my day-to-day work, I happened upon YouTube and I typed in certain things relating to sales and Steli's video came up. And I tell you now, Steli's video, steli's channel, is one of the go-to channels, I would say, or the best channel I've found where sales is concerned, because he gives so much, he gives everything, he doesn't hold anything back and Steli is an expert in sales, no two ways about it. To the extent that now Steli has developed since 2012, I think it is Closeio, which is a CRM system. It's an all-in-one CRM system which is essentially dedicated to helping you to get better sales. But, as I said to you before, there's much more to Steli than just Closeio. He's just so passionate about what he does and I just had to have him on here today.

Speaker 1

1:37

So, steli, thank you for being with us. Wow, what an intro. Thank you so much for having me, no problem? No problem, steli, I want to explore more about. Well, there's three areas I want to cover today. I want to obviously find out more about you. I've got you on the phone or on Skype. I want to find out more. I want to help people to sell better. Like I said, whether you like it or not, every aspect of literally every job that you have is going to involve some aspects of sales, especially if you're in sales. And then, thirdly, I want to find out as well about selling oneself, you know, in terms of getting into a business. So, steli, tell us more about you and how you got to this point. You've been in the entrepreneur space since the age 17, right?

Speaker 1

2:24

Yes, up to this point you've been in in the entrepreneur space since the age 17, right?

Speaker 2

2:26

yes, um, so I'm originally from greece. I grew up in germany. Um, those are two very different cultures. Both places are europe. They could not be more different.

Speaker 2

2:39

Um, and so I grew up in a factory worker family, single mom with three boys, and nobody in my family ever received a high education, and I was determined to keep that family tradition alive. I hated school with a passion and I got very lucky, honestly, where I kind of stumbled over this thing called entrepreneurship. When I was 16, 17, I realized that there was that to start a business, you didn't have to get a PhD or something right, you didn't have to, uh, be academically successful, you just needed to work really hard, uh, create value in the marketplace, and the ceiling of how big the business could be or how much you could accomplish was just determined by your creativity and your hard work versus, you know, somebody else's approval or other things. So once I once I realized that there was this how entrepreneurship worked, I was like, all right, this is it, this is gonna be what I'm gonna do with my life. And so I dropped out of school pretty, pretty young and started my entrepreneurial career and, honestly, I've never had a real job in my life. I've always kind of started companies to employ myself. I always tell people I have zero credentials and nobody could ever hire me for anything or would want to, and so if I had to pick a entrepreneurial quote unquote superpower, it was always selling.

Speaker 2

4:05

Although I didn't know it early on, I just had certain talents and I had to use any of them, and all of them to move my life forward and to try to make my business succeed. And one of those talents was that I was somebody that loved other people, somebody that people trusted, and so I started becoming better, better communication and what I call result driven communication, which really is what the definition of sales is. It's communicating with an end goal in mind, trying to accomplish something, trying to get consensus, to get a decision, to get a conversion, and that's really what I've been doing. Almost all my professional life is selling in one way or another to have people join my companies, to have people invest in my companies, to have people write about my companies and to have people purchase the products and the services and the things that I offer in the marketplace. And so, over time, I became better and better at it. I studied more about it and then eventually I started teaching and sharing what I'd learned with the world, and today you know I'm considered an expert and a thought leader in this space.

Speaker 2

5:14

But that's really how it started was the desire to be my own boss, the desire to do something great without having to get approval, be successfully from an academic point of view. And then, when I started my first business, I needed customers. So I started selling right, without even knowing that I was doing that, because I don't know anybody who has grown up dreaming about becoming a salesperson right, like even me. Honestly, alex, when people started referring to me as sales expert, I resisted that right.

Speaker 2

5:44

I resent that. I was like wait a second, I'm a CEO, I'm an entrepreneur, I have so much more to offer than just being some sales dude. So I at first didn't like that tag, but eventually I got over myself and I just went back to saying what is the way that I can create most value? And if sales is a topic that I can create a lot of value and people refer to me as an expert who cares, my ego is not really the main goal here. The main goal is to create value in the marketplace. So I've been selling my whole life and building sales teams and I've been teaching a lot of people how to do sales. And here I am.

Speaker 1

6:27

So with you? I mean, it sounds like sales for you is innate, right, it's part of your dna um, but for me I I'm and probably for a lot of people out there they probably don't really want to consider themselves as sales people. This is, I don't know, some sort of dirty word attached to being a salesperson. I don't know why that is.

Speaker 2

6:48

Well, actually I do know why that is because there are. Yeah, I think you do know why that is. I know why that is yes.

Speaker 1

6:52

So I think that's why people don't necessarily want to consider themselves sales or sort of admit that they need to do sales. But do you think sales is nature or nurture?

Authenticity in Sales and Entrepreneurship

Speaker 2

7:04

I think it's both. Um, I don't think and I think that's true in life in general. I don't think that anything is only nurture and I don't think anything is only nature. It's always a combination of the two, right, um, and you can I. I do think, though, that that if I only had to choose one of the two in any area of life, I would always choose nurture. Right, I would always choose, you know, I think, hard work, determination, persistence, consistency. You draw a long timeline. I'm going to crush anybody who's more talented than me in any area if they don't work as hard as I do. It just might take me a while to get there, but I do think it's both.

Speaker 2

7:40

And honestly, alex, I think that one of the things my least favorite thing about speaking about sales being on stage is that a lot of people will look at my personality, and when I'm on stage, I've even you know, kind of another part of me comes out and more of an entertainer part. I'm like even louder, more outrageous than I am in a one-on-one conversation. But the thing I hate is that a lot of people will look at me and go this is not me, like. I'm not as loud, I'm not as obnoxious I'm not like. This is not my personality, hence I cannot do selling or sales is for me, which couldn't be further from the truth. So now, a lot of times when I give a presentation presentation, I start with a slide of a person that looks incredibly. It's the most nerdy person I know and I've lived in silicon valley for 13 years, so that says a lot. It's a friend of mine who could not be more different from me, who could not look more different from me, who is a very kind of a very nerdy, nerdy person, very smart, very an engineering background, nothing. The two of us could not be further apart in terms of our personality and our nature.

Speaker 2

8:51

But he, you know, he was a freelancer. He became a developer, that was a founder, and he at some point, very rationally figured out wait a second, if I want to be an entrepreneur, if I want to build products and I need people to buy them, I need to learn how to do marketing and I need to learn how to do sales. And he studied sales and he went about it very like all right, there's certain mechanics, there's certain tactics. This is not rocket science and I can follow this and follow these strategies and succeed, and he has a very different style about how he does it, but he just just follows certain proven tactics and strategies and has seen incredible success with it.

Speaker 2

9:28

So I always highlight you don't have to be like me, you don't have to be loud and you don't have to be from the get-go, a people person, and I'm also 50-50. Part of why I'm good at sales is nature, for sure, it's part of my personality, part of it is nurture as well. I studied the topic of communication and selling and psychology for many, many years and there's a part of me that is, you know, I'm either super outgoing, but I'm also somebody that needs to be alone and at times doesn't like to be social at all, which is a side of me that nobody obviously sees because that's not publicized. I don't video that, no, of course. So a lot of times I do have to force myself to do certain things. That is required to succeed, although it doesn't come natural to me or I don't feel like it. So I do think you can learn selling and I think there's two parts for why people don't like sales.

Speaker 2

10:25

One is that a lot of people in sales traditionally and historically have just been assholes, right and douchebags, mostly the man in the space right. And why? Because the old model of selling was hostile and strong, right. These people were, you know, kind of the wolf of Wall Street types right Out there to crush the competition, to take away all the money from the customers, to get rich and wealthy, to feed their ego. The problem is these people succeeded because they were strong and they bullied prospects into submission. They bullied people into saying yes. The moment they said yes, you felt violated because you gave this person your money. They made you decide something. These people could get away with it, right, and they just bullied one customer at a time and so sales got a bad rap for a very good reason Part because the type of people that were in sales a lot of them were not that ethical in the way they went about things. I think this is changing because the world is changing. But I think there's another part, to be honest, that I want to just briefly highlight why people don't love sales.

Speaker 2

11:32

Because selling inevitably pushes you to do two things that most of us really don't want to do. I don't think anybody really wants to do. One is you have to embrace rejection. You have to deal with rejection more frequently and more directly than in almost any other activity you could participate in, and we don't like that. None of us wants to go through rejection.

Speaker 2

11:58

It doesn't matter how good you are in sales. You could be the best salesperson in the universe You're going to get rejected. And if you're really universe, you're going to get rejected. And if you're really good, you're going to get rejected more often than you're going to get a yes right, because you're pushing yourself to bigger, bigger, crazier, crazier, harder and harder deals. So you're going to have to deal with an incredible amount of rejection and you're going to have to create a lot of moments of truth right, when I ask you for your money, it's a hard moment of truth. You can't just be nicey-nicey to me and I leave and it's like this was a good business meeting and I think they really liked it. I can't stay in that dream world that things really like. I had all these meetings and calls and I feel like something happened today. No, in selling, I have to create moments of truth. I have to ask you for your money, your credit card number, are you buying, yes or no? And I have to get rejected.

Speaker 2

12:46

I think that we all like to avoid that. I don't like to get rejected either. Even after a long career of sales, I still don't like it, but I've gotten better at it, I got more used to it. It's easier for me to push me to get rejected than it is for the average person because I have so much practice. I never enjoy. I never, ever, truly like, like the feeling, and I think that that's also a really big part that we need to be honest about. We don't like selling and thinking about sales because it's very inconvenient. It is going to force us to get rejected, to hear no, to have to deal with the ugly and unpretty truth sometimes, and we all like to avoid that as human beings, and that's normal and it's inevitable.

Speaker 1

13:27

Isn't it, steli, that you're going to get rejected? It's inevitable, I mean, and I think the way I started to deal with the fact that I needed to get into sales and sort of get my sales head on was that was that first thing. I was going to get rejected at some point. You know, but that was that wasn't at the forefront of my head. The second thing was is that what you said earlier on? It's it's? It's about? You know, it's a bit cliche, but building a rapport isn't it's about communicating to the point that you can actually, um, I suppose, people by people. There's another cliche there, right, but it's about what I felt was it was about actually getting those tactics that you had mentioned on your videos and building them into my own personality so that I could actually then transmit it in a way that was comfortable and natural, right.

Speaker 2

14:20

Yeah, authenticity is really important, right? I think that you know, having self-awareness and self-acceptance are two of the most valuable things a human being can develop over a lifetime. And it's so underrated, right, it's not something new and cool and flashy, but if you have self-awareness, if you know who you truly are and if you can accept that, it doesn't mean that you don't want to better yourself and work hard on yourself, but it means that you don't reject who you are trying to be somebody else. Most human beings, you know, are not fully self accepting and not fully themselves. I'm not. They'll watch a video of me and I'll be on stage screaming at people, saying motherfucker, 100 times, and then they are like all right, I want to get as successful as Steli. Let me buy a leather jacket, walk around and scream at people and surely money will come my way. And obviously that's not how it works, right? Because we can all spot, um, people who are authentic and themselves and people who aren't. And most of the times we deal with with people that are just trying on a personality or trying on a certain type of tactic, and it just when you hear it, you can just feel it. It's sometimes hard to verbalize why you think this person isn't themselves right or honest or truthful or authentic. But you can kind of feel it. There's an internal compass that goes I don't know this person, right? So two people can do the exact same thing, and one person you're going to be cool with it and the other person you're not going to like, right? So two people can do the exact same thing and one person you're going to be cool with it and the other person you're not going to like, right. And what is it? It's authenticity. Is it truthful or not? So, and coming back to your comment on like selling yourself, at the end of the day you know to purchase from somebody.

Speaker 2

16:02

I'm going to grossly oversimplify this, but there's two really important main ingredients. One is I need to trust you, right? Because if I don't trust what you're telling me, it's going to be very, very hard for me to buy from you, right? If I call, no matter how great the information or the things are that you're telling me, if I don't believe those things, it doesn't matter, right? So if somebody calls me now and tells me hey, congratulations, you won 20 million dollars, I'm a prince somewhere in the world, all you have to do is give me your banking information. I'm not going to be excited. The content of that phone call is actually incredible, right, but I don't trust any word I hear, so it doesn't really matter what the content is of what I'm hearing. So I need to trust you to be able to truly listen to you and then, be you know, buying into you.

Speaker 2

16:53

And the second thing that I need is I need to need to trust you and I need to believe that you're an authority or that you have some level of expertise. So I want to follow your advice or I want to buy into whatever your premise or proposition is right. And so if you have a level of honesty and authenticity paired with confidence and clarity, right, then, um, I think you're really unbeatable, and to me, that's the new model of selling what I call friendly strength. Right, you want to be strong, you want to be confident, you want to create clarity, because, as human beings, we're all looking for somebody who knows what the hell they're doing, that can tell us what to do here. Right, we're all looking for somebody to lead us in certain areas in life. Right, we all need certainty, because it's such a rare thing in life, and so certainty and strength wins at the end.

Speaker 2

17:53

But if you pair that with friendliness, friendliness means being authentic, being truthful, truly wanting to make, create value in the life of your customers, truly telling your customers what they can expect and what they can't expect. Tell them some unpopular truths. Hey, I know you want X, but I can't give you X. X is bad for you, right? I'm an expert. You need Y, and here are the reasons. And if you want to get healthy, you go with what I'm telling you. If you want to just get what you want, you need to go somewhere else. I cannot participate in giving you something that's going to be bad for you, right? That level of both being friendly and wanting the best for your customers and clients in the business, but not coming at it from a place of weakness, because a lot of times you have these two divisions you either are friendly and weak or you're strong and hostile. Right, and I think the middle, the friendly and strong, are where the future of sales is going to be Friendly and strong.

Speaker 1

18:46

I like that Because it's got, like we said, sales has got the tag, that tag of being, like you said, the wolf of wall street type thing. And I think what you've done and what you're doing and that's probably this is probably why people are calling you a thought leader is that these, these elements that you talk about authority, trust, honesty building. You talk about authority, trust, honesty building. You know that. Authenticity and friendliness and storytelling as well, that's another thing that that you you talk about quite a lot. That's something that is becoming um more to the fore. I I think because it, when I was um doing my sales training all those years ago, it was all about like what you said you know, don't let them get off the phone, you know, make sure they um, you know, make sure you book the appointment. And it was all about like what you said you know, don't let them get off the phone, you know, make sure they, you know, make sure you book the appointment. And it's all about pressure, wasn't it? It was all about sort of increasing, amping up the pressure to get the sale and to get the appointment, and I think even back then.

Speaker 1

19:41

Actually, I want to talk a bit more about Closeio actually, because there's whether you're sort of a freelancer or a business owner, or in fact there may be people on this call who are actually transitioning between roles as well you've got to find mechanisms to actually put all of those things that Steli mentioned into place, because it's not just about randomly doing something, it's about systematically doing it and having a system in place to do that.

Selling With Empathy and Persistence

Speaker 1

20:12

Steli has developed a system called closeio and you know I would recommend that you use a system like closeio because you know you can't put everything into memory. You've got to sort of automate certain things. Steli, you mentioned on your website that you couldn't've got to sort of automate certain things. Steli, you mentioned on your website that you couldn't find anything that sort of covered the basis in terms of the system systematization of sales. Tell us a bit more about Closeio and how that helps to actually would help a sales manager to actually, you know, close their deals or systemize what they're doing to actually, you know, close their deals or systemize what they're doing.

Speaker 2

20:53

Yeah, so you know, I think most most crm, crms are customer relationship management software, right, and basically it's the main tool that most sales people will use um to keep track of their deals, their prospects, their pipeline and and try to keep view of what's going on. Most of these tools were built by developers who had very little empathy, understanding of what the end user, the salesperson, is going through on a day-by-day basis and were sold to high-level management that also had very little empathy and understanding of what salespeople and the job of selling really was. So you had the people that build it and the people it was sold to. They had nothing to do with sales and then it was forced down the throat to the individual sales rep, and that's why most CRM systems they're really just a database that forces you to type in a lot of information to then get some kind of a high level reporting and forecasting of revenue, but it's not really that useful and that powerful in helping you sell better and sell more and get your job done. So when we started, we just wanted to build something that was awesome for the salesperson, right, and it was built with an empathy and a point of view for whoever was selling. It doesn't matter if it's a founder, a business owner or a sales rep or a sales manager.

Speaker 2

22:09

So we built Closeio with a few premises in mind. We wanted it to be simple, simple to use, simple to understand. It can't be that you have to go through three weeks of training before you can use a piece of software. That might work if you work at a massive Fortune 500 company and the first year you don't really do anything right Other than training programs and courses. But if you're a freelancer, if you're a small business owner, you can't afford to study for three weeks to use a piece of software. You can be able to figure it out in like 20, 30 minutes and start using it immediately and getting value out of it. So we wanted it to be simple. We wanted it to be communication focused.

Speaker 2

22:47

As I said, sales to me is nothing else than result-driven communication. So we said what is the main thing that's happening in selling? People communicate to try to get to an end result or conversion right. So we build in calling out of the box, so you can make and receive calls within the software and everything is automatically tracked. You can send emails and receive emails and write automated follow-up email sequences and all that stuff. So we built a bunch of tools that just help you be more productive, communicate more and better and ultimately close more deals as an end result.

Speaker 2

23:19

I think that if you get serious about selling, if you're doing it not just like once a year, once in a while, whenever it has to happen, but you really have a systematic approach, you go okay, this is the amount of new clients I need every month. This is the amount of activity, the amount of prospecting, the amount of work I'm going to probably have to do, the amount of meetings I have to book to get to this number of new clients. At that point, choosing a CRM system is probably going to become inevitable sooner or later. And and in that there's thousands of options we just try to build the best option for small businesses, for small business owners a product it really helps you with the closing of deals versus helping a hundred-thousand person company with tracking, reporting and forecasts. Like that's a different, different problem to solve for a different type of company. But that's what we do. That's where we try to be helpful so that's um closeio everybody.

Speaker 1

24:17

I recommend that you go and have a. Have a look at that, because you know, one thing I've found is that and then stelly's alluded to as well is that you especially if you're a small business or you're a freelancer, you have to. There's so many things that you have to think about during your working day, so you've got to find some way of doing things in a logical way and doing things in a system that can be replicated, and Closeio enables you to do that. One thing actually, steli, that you mentioned quite a lot on your videos is, um, and one thing I never used to do probably as much as I do now is the follow-up, is following up right, yeah, and I've learned, you know, over the past, you know two years, actually a couple of years, two or three years that it can give you. So you know it can give you so much in terms of your results. It can improve your results so much more.

Speaker 1

25:15

What I used to do, for example, whether I was, I don't know, pitching for a freelance gig or even, you know, a job before I started to do freelancing I never used to actually follow up. I would send out an email with a CV or send out an email or make a phone call and then I might get that rejection or that sense of actually no, they don't want it or they're trying to back me off and I wouldn't follow up. But when I started to follow up I found that people would open up a lot more. They would see that you're serious right, and for me that's something again. Go over to Steli's channel. You learn a lot about that, the importance of the follow-up, and are there any elements of sales as well, Steli, Any other sort of other than the follow-up key things that you see as being sort of I don't know really important for success?

Speaker 2

26:09

Yeah. So first of all, let's just share a little bit of like behind the scenes with the audience. This interview wouldn't have happened if you didn't follow and I'll send you a free copy. But the beauty about the follow-up is that it's one of those areas that nobody competes with you. So if you do it, you're going to win, and it's really 9 out of 10 times. It's not even just that. Some people will realize that you really mean it and you're honest and you really care, but it is that it's just timing. You can say the right thing at the wrong time and you're honest and you really care, but it is that it's just timing. You know you could do, you can say the right thing at the wrong time and you're not going to get my attention right because I'm just I'm distracted, I'm busy with something else. So the follow-up gives a person you're trying to reach the chance to hear your message at the right time and then either reject it or not. No is good, yes is better, obviously. But maybe is where everything good goes to die. It's when you send out an email. You never hear back and you don't really know what happened, right. So I like to follow up and follow through until I get to a result. I think there's just three steps to selling, and selling is really not complicated. Tactically. It is difficult emotionally. Right, it's a difficult. Oh yes, and that's the beauty of it as well. It is a. You know, sales is kind of a full context.

Speaker 2

27:42

Sport in the sense that you have to show up every single day. The score goes back to zero and you have to perform again. And it doesn't matter how great your last month was, it doesn't matter how terrible your morning is, it doesn't matter how you feel. You have to show up and perform right. Think about an athlete. It doesn't matter how successful that athlete is, it doesn't matter what's going on in their life. When the game is on, the score shows 0-0. There's a whole team of people that want to crush you right and dominate and you have to perform in that moment. And it doesn't matter if you've been a champion for five years, it doesn't matter if you had a huge fight this morning, it doesn't matter if you're sick, it doesn't matter if you have a life crisis and you're depressed. You're on the game. It's 0-0. You paid a lot of money. You perform right now.

Speaker 2

28:33

That's the difficulty is that mental side of it, where you have to perform every single time, no matter how you feel about it, and I think that that's really the emotional, difficult part of selling, but the tactical part. There's really three steps in an oversimplified way you have to show up, you have to follow up and follow through and you have to go for the close right. That's really it. Showing up is the easy part, right? Easy in the sense that it's the most crowded part.

Speaker 2

28:58

And showing up just means making the first step to start a human connection to then turn it into a conversation and a conversion. Right. So showing up could mean sending an email, making a phone call, tweeting at somebody, going to an event, shaking somebody's hand, saying hi, like it's making that first step to start a connection and a relationship. That you'll have to do right every single day, and that's what you could call prospecting. Right, you create new early relationships that you might turn into business sooner or later. The second part is the follow up and follow through. That's the hard part. That's where nobody competes with you. Yeah, right, because everybody just shows up and has this short-term view where they think I showed up, I shaked hands, I talked, and if the deal doesn't happen right now, then you know I don't have any energy more for this.

Speaker 2

29:43

That used to be me Right Versus the that used to be me as well at some point. Right Versus the people that learned that you have to be persistent and consistent and follow up and follow through and check in and check in, and check in and do anything necessary, champ, in the relationship until it gets to a result, yes or no. That's the second part, right, and that's the sales part for most of it. And the third part is going for the close. That's creating those moments of truth. Asking for the money. People ask me all the time, stella, what is your closing? Your best closing tactics, hacks, what are some magical things I can say that will make everybody give me all their money? I don't have anything right.

Speaker 2

30:25

My closing, all my wisdom around closing is very simple Do it often. Do it early, right? Don't think of it as this once-in-, this once in a lifetime event where people don't ask for money. That's the biggest mistake I see is people don't go for the clothes. They don't ask, hey, are we ready to get it? Do you have your money, your credit card handy? Let's do this, right? They don't ask. Why don't they ask, alex? Because they don't want to hear. Yeah. The answer exactly. Because you know seven out of ten times the answer is no, yes, so, so they don't want to hear that no, and so they don't ask for the question. They just you know those presentations, those meetings, they all end in something like super ambiguous oh well, this was really great. I'm gonna send you more information and, whenever you're ready, you just let us know what the fuck is this? Right? We spend an hour together.

Speaker 2

31:19

I am convinced now that you should be in business with me. I can truly help you from a friendly place. Once I'm convinced I can help you, once I truly understand you and I know you know this is going to be a good fit. I not asking, I'm telling. Right, I'm the expert. Now I'm coming from a point of strength. I'm going to tell you you're buying, you're buying this amount of quantity in this time period, and here's how we're doing this. I'm not even. This is not a debate, right? And if people say no, which they do most of the time, the first time I asked for money, they'll say no to me. That's exciting.

Speaker 2

31:52

I learned to go oh, no, right? Huh, that is surprising. What did I miss? Oh, are you ready to buy? No, then most people will deflate and go oh, my god, I knew this is never gonna work right. Instead of doing that, I go oh, now we're creating a moment of truth, right, and I'll, and I'll tell them. That's amazing. I obviously missed something. It seemed like we had everything figured out to be ready to be in business. You're telling me that's not true, so I missed something. What am I missing? What do we need to figure out to get in business? What's missing for you to say yes To me? That's a beautiful moment.

Building Confidence in Sales

Speaker 2

32:33

Now we can talk, real talk. We can talk about the difficult things, the challenging things, the problems, all the things I need to know about to be able to address and get you to become a customer. I can't get you to be a customer if all I allow you to talk about are the nice things, although you are thinking about some bad things as well, or some problematic or challenges or objections. I need you to get everything out of your system. I need honesty to understand what's going on and to understand how to make this happen.

Speaker 2

33:00

So asking somebody for money and then getting no is normal. The no is really the beginning of an education and a truthfulness in the conversation where you can figure out okay, what are the obstacles to this deal? What are the problems to this and can we address them or not? Right, and so I think people don't like to ask for money, ask for the deal, because they're afraid to hear no, because I think once they hear no, it's done and over with, so they never go for it. If you ask for the, for the money and expect, you know, expect the yes, but embrace the no, right.

Speaker 2

33:34

When, when somebody tells you no, you don't go. Oh, my god, everything is terrible. You go. Ooh, an opportunity to learn, an opportunity to create a more truthful relationship, an opportunity to uncover what needs work to make this deal happen. If you go about it in this attitude, you don't need slick language, you don't need hypnotic patterns to you know. You don't need some kind you know patterns to you know. You don't need some kind of oh, you say this and that, like a yes stream. You just get them to say yes a hundred times and then they'll surely say yes, some magic spell taking your mind. Yeah, you don't need any of that rhetoric, bullshit, right? You just need confidence, you know confidence, and you need to be honest and really want the best for them and believe you know what's best for them, and then you're going to be fine.

Speaker 1

34:18

You've said the magic word. Actually there's lots of things in there actually, because there's so many things that are probably going through people's minds when they're on that phone to that sales prospect or I don't know, in some sort of sales situation. There are emotions going on right, and there's a sense of probably even fear as well. You mentioned confidence. I think this is why that whole aspect of sales and confidence have to go hand in hand, right. So that's why I was saying to you that aspect of nature and nurture at the beginning. How do you actually, how can you nurture that, um, that confidence if it doesn't come naturally to you?

Speaker 2

35:00

I mean, I don't know, uh is the honest response? But here's some things that that I've done myself or I've seen work for some people. I think that, um, I mean, you have to. You have to sell yourself first before you sell anybody else, right? So this means, in this case, you have to start selling yourself every day on why you're great, on why you are going to be good for your customers.

Speaker 2

35:28

Especially, you know, I find that people that lack confidence usually have a little bit too much self-awareness and a little bit too self-critical. So if you are very self-aware and if you're very self-critical, chances are you're going to be good to those customers, right? You're going to be honest to them. You're going to try your hardest for them. Those are the people that lack confidence are never the evil people, right, are never the people that are the scammiest that are going to steal money. Those people don't lack confidence. The people that lack confidence are the nice people. So if you're nice and if you lack confidence, you need to start selling yourself.

Speaker 2

36:05

And this could be as silly as it is. Maybe you have to write down the 100 reasons or the 10 reasons every day why customers should buy from you, why they should be glad to be in business with you. Maybe you have to record it and listen to it. Maybe you have to tell it in front of a mirror. I don't know what works for you, right? Maybe you have to just find a good friend and have that person tell you this every day for a while, but you have to start selling yourself, brainwashing yourself with a different story, right?

Speaker 2

36:32

The reason why you lack confidence is that you keep telling yourself that you're not good, you have not accomplished this, you don't know this, they're not going to like you. You're telling yourself all these negative things again and again, and again and again, and that obviously now has gotten you to a point where you believe this shit, right? So what is the antidote to that? Is to start telling yourself a different story, and you might go. Well, I think it's silly to sit there and tell myself I'm great. Well, you didn't feel it's silly to sit there and tell yourself you're shitty and you're terrible. You're doing that all day long. It's so effortlessly, you don't even think about it, right? But do saying nice things about yourself. That seems awkward and weird and and feels kind of like yeah, it just feels like just dumb. Well, it feels different, because if you want to feel confident, you're gonna have to do something. That feels uncomfortable and different because what you've done up to this point is has not built the confidence.

Speaker 2

37:26

So I would say, come up with all the reasons why you're great, why people will benefit from being your customers, and then tell that story to yourself again and again and again. Find some customers and help them. Tell that story to you. Ask your customers why do you like being in business with me? If you had to give me a reference, what would it be? And then read those every morning, every night, like read here's the quotes of my customers, why they're telling that working with me has been incredible for them.

Speaker 2

37:52

And then get yourself to a point where you go yeah shit, I am great, I am good to these people. These people can be grateful for being in business with me. I'll never lie, I'll never steal, I'll work my butt off and I'm going to create a lot of value and help them. And whatever it is for some people, it's sports, it's music, whatever Do things that make you feel good. Remind yourself why you're great and start telling yourself this different story and then you'll see more and more proof of that, because with that kind of energy and attitude people will respond better to you, will say yes more often, and then that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy and a new kind of loop that starts playing automatically in your head.

Speaker 1

38:30

That's great, that's great, no, that's great, and I well, for me that's again that's something that I got from from your videos on on on youtube is is that you know, telling yourself that you're, you're great, not just well, and, as well as that, listening to people as well, I suppose, because it, you know, what I found is because I've interviewed quite a number of people myself when I've been hiring, for example is that people, perhaps, I don't know they begin to compare themselves to other people in terms of their you know, they use other people as their barometer, when they should be their own sort of barometer, and I think that advice is great. It's just looking within and seeing what's good about yourself. So that's that's great. Sally, thank you, and I know as well, um closeio is, um is a you, you are a remote business, right. You, you do everything remotely. Was that a deliberate, um, a deliberate sort of step for you, or something that was, was accidental?

Speaker 2

39:35

um, it was a little bit of both. So when we started the company, we were what we called semi-remote, in the sense that we had we were a small team of six people. We had an office.

Speaker 2

39:49

But, um, all of us are heavy travelers, right? So what would happen in actuality is that maybe once, one month out of the quarter, everybody was traveling and working remotely. One month out of the quarter we'd all be, some of us would be in the office, some of us would be traveling and being somewhere else, and then, once a quarter, we would all travel together and do a retreat for a week or two and work from a different place together. So there was always the sense that the office is a place we can go to work at and can work together at, but it's not where, it's not the only place where work happens, right, and people are going to be in different time zones and traveling.

Speaker 2

40:26

And then, once we started hiring, we just organically look for the best people and people that were that we had known for many years and we're not living in the bay area.

Speaker 2

40:36

So all of a sudden now, with a few people in an office and a bunch of people that are remote and it's kind of this kind of a middle ground, and I think at that point we started realizing, you know what, we need to go all in on one or the other. We don't really want to have this two class society where the founding team and all the managers are in this office and everybody else is remote. Yeah, um, and since we're traveling so much, and since a lot of us, a lot of the six people that were originally in the bay area office wanted to move away from the bay area anyways, uh, we decided to go all in on remote and being a fully distributed team, and and that's really what happened, and today we are a little over 30 people in 11 different countries and the original six people that were in the bay area there's not a single person that lives in the bay area anymore out of that the team, right, and and we wouldn't have been able to retain some of these people some of the most important people that were part of the founding team wanted to move back to their families and build a new family and wanted to move in a different place, and if we said it's only the bay area or nothing, we would have lost some of the most important people in the company. So we love being a remote team and what?

Speaker 1

41:43

what kind of roles typically, uh, do you do you hire for usually?

Speaker 2

41:49

I mean we hire through throughout the bank. I would say the the biggest part of our team is the product team, for sure. So we hire developers, designers, product managers all that you know engineers. Basically that's a very big part of the team. But then you know the other part is from marketing to sales, to success, to support. You know we hire throughout the bank in all roles, hire throughout the bank in all, on all roles and right now, actually, if you go to closeio, that we're hiring for tons of positions with lots of big plans in 2019. So if you're remote, if you're looking for a cool company to work with, check us out in case you missed that, because we had a bit of a breakup there.

Speaker 1

42:26

It was closeio forward, slash jobs. So it's closeio forward, slash jobs. And my, my final question to you, stelly, because you've given, you've been so generous with your time again, as as ever, um is if somebody is looking to to come and work for you, um at at closedio, what could be, I suppose, the the biggest thing that they could do to impress you?

Speaker 2

42:59

it's a good and a bad question, um, because I really don't want people to impress me, right? I don't want people to do crazy things. I don't want people to do all kinds of things. Really, in our case, I think the best thing you can do is to take a little bit of time to truly understand the company, the culture, what we're looking for, and ask yourself am I truly the right person for this? Am I really the right person for this? Can I really create value in this company? Because many of the people that we're hiring are very senior people.

Speaker 2

43:34

Our team is not a team that has a lot of super young early in their professional career and then nurtures and trains them. We're hiring people that are really already quite far in their career and are very, very experienced in what they do. And so if you think that you're a good fit and you have a track record and you think that you're a cultural fit, you just communicate that. Communicate to us why you're interested in us and why you think we should be interested in you, and do that in a specific way as possible versus being as generic as possible, right? Oh, I love companies that do innovative things and you are obviously innovative and I am a hard worker and you surely are looking for a hard worker.

Authenticity in Hiring and Sales

Speaker 2

44:12

That's meaningless to me, right? That doesn't mean anything. It just wasted my time. So be specific why us and why he? Right, and if you show a level of understanding on these two parts, then we're interested. But I would avoid a lot of people they'll try to do all kinds of crazy stunts to impress me, and I appreciate the effort and I get it and I was that person when I was in my 20s, right, but but, um, that's not really gonna convince me. Uh, because that is to me that's a lot of like smoke and mirrors that can be impressive for the moment. But I'm gonna try to get rid of all that and be like who are you, yeah, and why do you want to be here and does this really? Is this a good fit right now? And if I can't answer these questions with yes, it doesn't matter how awesome your stunt was, it's not going to really impress me stelly, you know what.

Speaker 1

45:00

I've got so many more questions that that I could ask you, but, like I said, I don't want to take too much of your time. You, it's been great, it's been absolutely wonderful speaking to you, glad to have you on here. As I said, everybody, anybody listening, whether you're looking at getting your next CRM, you need to go to closeio. Or if you're looking to get your next opportunity in 2019 and beyond, it's closeio forward slash jobs. So, steli, once again, thanks again and all the best with closeio.

Speaker 2

45:33

Thank you so much, Alex. Thanks for having me. This was fun.

Speaker 1

45:35

Thanks, Steli.