If You Love (Or Want To Love) Sales, Watch This!

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Here’s your program.

Andrew: Hey, everyone, my name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of Mixergy.com, home of the ambitious upstart. And what can online entrepreneurs learn about sales from the RV industry. Yep, the RV industry. You guys know me, I’m a rabid learner and I want to gobble up ideas from as many different places as I can. The RV industry has had decades to work on its sales tactics. I want to learn from them. I want to know what they do and I want to bring it back to you. And to help us do that I invited Fred Bliss, he is a Mixergy fan that I’ve known for a while now and he happened to have worked in the RV industry. He volunteered to come in here, tell us his experiences and share with us from what he learned.

Fred, welcome, buddy.

Fred: Thank you very much, Andrew. It is an absolute honor to be interviewed by you. I watch all the interviews, so this is huge.

Andrew: Thank you. How many months did you work in the RV industry?

Fred: I worked in the RV industry from January on to November of the same year, and this would be 2006, I believe.

Andrew: So less than a year selling recreational vehicles. Are these the kinds of vehicles that were traveling and people would sleep in the back or they were in a fixed spot?

Fred: Actually both, so you had motor homes and then you have travel trailers, popup campers, and hybrids, everything else.

Andrew: How many did you sell?

Fred: Over the course of the year, unit wise I can’t give you a solid figure of how many I sold. I think I worked the numbers out to be somewhere around the neighborhood of about $250,000 worth of gross sales, based on negotiated prices.

Andrew: $250,000 worth of sales and you told me earlier that you had . . . yeah, we’ll get into it. What you’re seeing me wrestle with is, do we tell the story first or do we get into the tactics first. Let’s go through the story quickly and then the very next question will be about the tactics.

So you told me that you had kind of a rough start in the industry and then you figured something out. Tell us again what was the start like and then how did you do in June, July after that rough start?

Fred: Right. So when I stepped into the industry, I walked into a whole new world. I came from a technical background, was just studying that I needed to get a job and maybe go out and do something I’ve never done before. And so this as showed up in the paper, “Make $100,000 a year,” you know the type. And decided just to go down and take a leap of faith.

So I went there and sat down in the office, met the owner, and the owner was just coming off a cell phone call and said to everybody in the room, “So and so just made a 60 pounder.” So I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but a 60 pounder refers to a $60,000 profit on one single sale. For that salesperson that would mean a $20,000 commission. So to this day I don’t know whether he was actually on the phone or not, because I suspect he was doing that to create a perception of, “You can do really well here.” And there was a lot of that going on, it was all about creating a perception.

So basically, I got interested, I got excited, got into the training program, spent three or four weeks in that including role playing and going through general sales tactics before they put you on the floor and get you on what they call “the tape.” But I didn’t’ do to well. I had a lot of trouble trying to figure out what questions to ask people. I didn’t feel natural. I didn’t feel like I was relating to people. These were people who were interested in RVs and I had no interest in RVs, so that was a difficulty that I had to bridge. And most importantly, I just didn’t quite have the confidence to get out there and to be able to make the right decisions as a salesperson, when to PEP-8 from somebody.

So leading up to March/April, I was brought into the office at one point. I hadn’t sold a single unit. I think this was about a week or two into the process and I wasn’t on The Board, as they say. My sales manager looked me in the eye and said, “You need to sell three units in a week or you’re gone.” So I said okay. So I need to feed my baby, who’s a newborn at this point and I need to just figure out a way to do this. It’s do or die time.

So miraculously somehow, I don’t know what I changed in my process, but I got plus three units that week. And from then on I started to feel like I had a foothold in the industry. I started to feel like if I couldn’t show a real truthful interest in the culture, I could show a real truthful interest in the people I was dealing with. I wanted to help them and that was my sort of inroad into building trust, and to be able to talk to these people. And that lead to the improvements and by the time we got to June I managed to get most units in the entire month, that was 13 units. Got a big stiff for that, a stiff is sort of a bonus on top of what you do. I also got the single highest grossing unit for that month. So I went from zero to hero, so to speak, in a matter of about two months.

Andrew: So an amateur who almost gets fired figures out how to sell and not only learns how to sell, but becomes the number one salesman in a single month.

Fred: Yep.

Andrew: And a lot of what did it is the tactics that you and I are going to talk about here, right?

Fred: That’s right.

Andrew: While I like to gobble up information for my interviews, you gobbled up as much information, as much knowledge as you could about sales there and it turned you around.

So let’s get into some of these tactics. First thing that I wonder is, anyone who walks into a car dealership or an RV dealership or any kind of dealership in the automotive world, they’re not trusting you enough to even, I imagine, to pay attention, they’re not trusting you enough to give them a good deal, to give them a good product. If someone walks in with that distrust in their hearts and minds, how do you turn them around? What do you do?

Fred: There’s a saying that have one mouth and two ears. You listen to them. The first thing you have to do is hear what they’re talking about, hear what they’re interested in, and then start asking them the questions that are within the context of their interests.

Andrew: Give me an example?

Fred: Okay. So I walk into a dealership and I normally prefer a truck, I just don’t know whether I want a half ton or a three-quarter ton. I may not have told you that yet, but give it a few minutes, maybe I’m asking the right questions. I’m saying, “Okay. So what are you going to do with this truck?’ It’s not, “‘What kind of tonnage are you looking for in this truck?” But, “What are you going to do with this truck?” So this is about you. So this is a point where that person might say, “Well, I want to haul jet skis,” or, “I want to be able pull a trailer.” Now we’ve got an inroad and now I can so interest in something. I can say, “Yep, I love jet skis. I’ve never used them.” And I don’t have to lie, but I can say, “I’ve never used them. Tell me about your jet skis.” With those sorts of questions, you’re letting them talk to you, you’re letting them share with you their passion, and that really creates a human connection that is different from the fact that I’m trying to sell you something today.

Andrew: And so you’re going to get yourself sidetracked away from the conversation about the vehicle that they want to buy, away from the conversation that you want to sell to them, and talk to them about jet skis first, and then come back to the vehicle. Why?

Fred: It’s absolutely right. You want to do that because you’re trying to help them meet their needs. They initially are going to think that you’re just trying to take their money. That’s just the natural inclination we have when we walk into the dealership, they’re selling, you’re buying. You’ve got to remove that from the equation to be able to build that trust with them. You’ve got to talk about the purpose for the use, you’ve got to ask about the family, “Are you married? Do you have kids?” I have a child so if I know somebody was married and had kids, we’d start talking about kids. So you’re almost not selling and in fact you are, you’re definitely not selling because what you’re doing is you’re just talking to them as a human being. It’s like you just ran into them on the street, maybe you know them a little bit and you’re just chatting them up. And it really just removes that sense of distrust that people walk into these dealerships with.

Andrew: I want to take a moment here and just think about that because I know that even when I set up an interview here, I jump right into the facts before hand. You and I have now had a pre-interview, and then a follow up conversation, and now we’re doing this interview, I’ve not once asked you about your child beyond the question of, “How quickly do you need to be out of this interview so that you can go be with your child because I want to spend as much time with you as possible.” And the reason that I didn’t do that is because I feel like we’re here to get business done. I shouldn’t waste your time with a conversation about children or about your interest. I also feel like it might be a little off base. You want to get something done specific and I’m showing you that I’m not paying attention to the goal here. If I were to start talking to you about that, in the back of my head there would be a counter that would say, “Andrew, stop it because he wants to move on. You have to move on. What are you doing?” Am I wrong to think this, and how do you get past the timer, the internal need to get down to business already, especially when you know you need to close a certain number of sales to keep your job?

Fred: Yeah. Now, that’s a great question. I would say that in contrast to what you do when selling at an RV dealership, your connection to me is much different and so the dynamic is going to be different. You’re being considerate of my time when you’re asking about what I have to do. Although both of those things to share consideration of time, I don’t want to waste their time when were on the lot. I don’t want to waste your time and you don’t want to waste my time. The difference is that when they’re walking in there, there are a lot of other places they can be right now. There are a lot of things they want to do, and they may not want to be there that day. Maybe their spouse sent them down to go scope it out. So when you have that situation and you’re selling something that’s a luxury item, you’ve got to work on the emotional side. You can’t work on, you know, this is our list of tasks. I’m going to establish rapport with you now, sir. I’m going to qualify you on needs and affords. You can’t talk to people that way. It feels too rigid. It certainly doesn’t get them thinking about what they’re going to do with this thing once they buy it, and that’s a big thing that you need to do. So, does that help?

Andrew: Yeah. It sounds like you’re saying that I’m having different interactions than you were with your customers. But there’s still some salesmanship in what I’m doing and more importantly in what my audience is doing and what they’re turning to this interview for. They are sales people and this is an interesting reminder that if you want to build rapport, you want to build trust, you may not want to keep saying, “Well, I work with these Fortune 500 companies and I also work with your friend, and also did this, and I’m also a college graduate from this university.” It might be better to say, “Hey, I notice on your Facebook page you’re holding up a baby, is that a new baby?” Or maybe just find something to relate to beyond that, “I saw that you were on a trip to Thailand. Do you travel much?” You would advise that based on what you’re saying? I don’t want to connect the dots for the audience and say that this is specifically how Fred Bliss’ experience connects to their lives, but does that make sense, what I’m pulling from it?

Fred: Yeah. I understand what you’re saying there. I think the thing is, again, you’ve got to get them to the point where they’re comfortable talking to you more and telling you more about what they want to do with this versus them coming in and just looking for a price. You’ve got to bridge that gap somehow and you not going to do that, and this is specific to the RV industry, this particular thing may not even apply to some of the people who are listening to this, but I would rather buy from my friend than I would buy from a guy that I just kind of casually know, and so the closer that I can get to being your friend when I’m talking to you the better. The reason I’m comfortable talking to you, Andrew, is because I see how you do your interviews and I know that it’s very conversational, it’s not very uptight and rigid and although I’m pretty nervous right now because I want to do a pretty good interview with you, I still would probably not have been as eager to do it if it was anybody else because I feel that you are a warm personality and I identify with that. So again, you get that connection, that thread, that really just makes such a big difference. And it really doesn’t matter what industry you’re in, if I’m selling web development or something of that nature, I want to get to know these people, who they are, because if I can do that they’re going to start trusting me and they’re going to start seeing a consultant instead of a sales person and that’s where I would like to be when I’m in that sort of a situation.

Andrew: I see. All right. So you want to talk to them and one of the things you’re feeling for, you told me earlier, was are they strokers or not. What’s a stroker?

Fred: Okay. So a stroker is somebody who’s coming in and they’re definitely not going to buy anything today. You could pry their wallet out of their pants with a crowbar, and a towing hood, and an elephant, it’s just not going to happen. Some of the people that are strokers are people who are not there with their spouse and you need to find that out really quickly because the buying decisions 99 time out of 100 are made by the person who is not there. I’m trying not to be gender specific, but the saying was that the wife is the buyer, and it’s very true. I just saying, based on my experience, when I walk in I never, except for I think once, sold an RV to a person who was married and didn’t have their spouse there. You could take that to the bank every single time. It was just amazing. So you have to really get a quick sense whether or not they’re ready to buy today without asking them that question right off the bat. So, that’s one of the things, are they there with their spouse or are they single? If they’re single, well, now we’ve got something to work on. You know we could be dealing with somebody who’s ready to buy today.

What’s their price range? Are they living in dreamland? Are they looking to spend $5,000 on a motor home? Yep, it’s happened before. People come in and actually try to do that. So there’s certain questions that you’ve got to ask and there are, of course, pertinent to what your service and products are, really. I mean, beyond that I don’t know. What do you think?

Andrew: You told me once that you guys used to offer hotdogs to bring people in the door. What happened with the hotdogs?

Fred: Okay. So, they would do these Spring sales, Summer sales, Fall sales, and yeah, they would get people in with the food and some people would come in and say, “Where’s the food?” Other people would come in and they weren’t quite so shameless. They would walk with you for a few minutes, but they would answer your questions. You could tell right off the bat that they weren’t engaged with you, even if you were like, again, you’re being a good listener, but they don’t have much to say. That’s kind of a red flag. If they come in and they don’t know what they want, that’s a huge red flag, “Well I might want a diesel motor home and might want a popup.” I mean, you get somebody who’s all over the place, they have no idea what they’re looking for, you know you’ve got to kind of drop that hot potato quickly and go got the next one.

Andrew: I paid for college by, believe it or not, sandwiches door to door in the ghetto in New York to the store owners.

Fred: Wow, awesome. Talk about pounding the pavement.

Andrew: It was something. I’ve got to talk about that one time, but I remember hanging out in these different stores while they talked to their customers and just picking up on the way that they sold and then asking them questions about it afterwards. One of the things that stuck with me is I remember there was a guy in an electronics store who said that if people push him on the features, if they argue with him on what’s the right TV and which one isn’t the right TV, they’re more likely to be buyers. If they accept everything that he says like he tells them, “This has this great remote control,” and they go, “Yeah, well that’s good.” He says, “It’s also 15 inches and it’s got this feature and that feature,” and they say, “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty good.” Then they’re not buying. The people who just accept are not buying. Did you find the same thing?

Fred: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, the more concrete answers you can get the better. We used to do something, and this is really interesting, we used to narrow it down to three units. One we knew was the wrong unit. We knew they were going to hate that unit, but we were going to show it to them anyway because we really needed to see an emphatic “no” from them. We needed to know what not to be showing them. That often worked better than knowing what they liked because a lot of the trailers or motor homes or whatever, have a lot of what they like. They all have certain types of cabinets or windows that have certain features. That doesn’t help you as much as knowing what they hate and it’s usually walking into one and seeing that they don’t like the interior of that one or they don’t like the size, the layout. You can narrow it down way more finding that out than you can getting sort of these indifferent, indirect, sort of flip floppy, waffley answers from people.

Andrew: So want to show them something that’s a definite no, do you do that because you want to hear them say, “No,” and know that they’re really are customers and not just kind of hanging out with you and saying yes to everything or are you showing them a definite no so that you can then show them something great and have them love it more in comparison? What’s the reason for showing them the definite no?

Fred: You show them the definite no because it starts to get the emotion going. Besides the fact that you’re learning something about what they like or don’t like, getting that pain feeling, if you will, and seeing that they don’t want to be in that one, you have the relief right around the corner, so to speak. It’s like you’re giving them the headache, then you giving them the aspirin.

Andrew: Ah, I love that. Okay. This is great. Here’s another counter intuitive thing that you told me. You walk away. You want the business. You need the business in order to feed your family and to keep your job, but sometimes you walk away. Tell me how that works and why you do it?

Fred: So you get a lot of people who come in who are what you might call a “law jockey” and they’ve got chops. They’ve haggled prices a lot, they’ve done this for years. They may be there to buy today or they might just be looking for a really, really good deal on some sort of pushover, if you will. Somebody who’s just really desperate to sell them something, and you don’t want them to think you’re that person. But if they come in and they give a hard time about everything, they don’t want to give you the information, and that’s probably the biggest single factor, is that if they don’t give you the information that’s when you need to know you’ve got to cut bait and you’ve got to be like, “Well, it was great meeting you.” You shake their hand. “I’ll be inside if you need me. Here’s my card but I’ve got to get back to work.” By doing that you’re showing them that it’s not okay to be wasting my time. I’m here to help you. I’ve actually had a conversation directly with people before who have done this because they’ll start to object, they’ll say, “Well wait a minute, what are you doing? Why are you walking away?” I’m like, “Well, I think it’s clear that you’re not quite sure what you’re looking for today. I welcome you to stay here and I’ll get you some brochures once you come back, but I’m here to help people and I need to make sure that I’m not wasting your time or my time.”

Andrew: And you said actually that whether they give you the information or not is an indicator of how serious they are. What do you mean by information? What information are you collecting?

Fred: You need to know what kind of features they’re looking for, what kind of a model they’re looking for, sizes, things like that specific to the RV industry, mainly features though. I mean, really if you’re going to spread it out across any industry you need to know what’s the purpose of this, and that’s basically what I meant by that.

Andrew: What we do online is we try to collect some way to collect with the person, an email address or at least maybe a Facebook link or some way for us to come back to them. Was there something like that in the RV sales world?

Fred: Mm-hmm, yeah.

Andrew: What did you do?

Fred: Lead sheets. So the first thing that would happen is, this building by the way was specifically design to funnel people through the building past the front desk to have, you can call it, a meeting or an introduction, but really it’s more of a collision with a lot of people. So basically they’d walk in, they’d say, “I want to go see the units out back,”‘ and that’s when you’d the person in, whoever was the next on the tape, to take them. The first thing we always had to do was to get them to just to sit down, you know, “Do you want a coffee or water? Why are you here today? What are you looking for?” And we literally would pull out the lead sheet, you know, it’s standard A4 and it would have a bunch of bits on it, price range, name information, email, phone of course so you can reach back out to those people later, and just get as much information down because, “Mr. or Mrs. Customer, I don’t want to waste your time. Let’s identify this and define it as clearly as we can so that when we get out we can really get down to what we know you want to look at.”

Andrew: And you do that so that you can follow up with the lead?

Fred: Yes.

Andrew: And you also do that so that you know what they’re looking for and what to show them?

Fred: Yes.

Andrew: I understand wanting to get them to write down their phone number, and their name, and a way to reconnect with them. Why do you want them to write down what they’re looking for? Why can’t you just ask them that and remember it or ask them that as you’re even walking towards the RVs that you’re going to show them.

Fred: So, a little role play with you, “Mr. Customer, I see a lot of people come through and, to be honest, my memory’s just not quite as good as I would like it to be, so I’m going to write these things down so that I don’t forget it. It’s really important to me to know what you want so that we’re not wasting your time going out there today.”

Andrew: Okay.

Fred: It’s about caring for the customer, if you will.

Andrew: You present it as way of caring for the customer and you generally do and it does help you remember, but is there any benefit in the sales process beyond that? I mean, you know this stuff so well that if somebody told you what they were looking for in an RV you would remember it. I mean, there are waiters who will remember ten people’s orders at big crowded table and still go take another table’s order before they go into the kitchen. You’d remember this stuff so it’s not just the memory. What is it about having it written down? Are you getting them to commit to it?

Fred: Yeah. I mean, that’s probably part of it too. When you’re writing things down it’s more concrete, it’s not just a dream, it’s not just a want, you’ve got an actual order in front of you now. You’ve got something that you can match to. And, honestly, as much as we knew about the units on the lot, you couldn’t possibly know them all. I mean, we’re human, we’ve got too many things to think about in a day and you cannot possibly memorize everything about those units. So when you’re dealing with 120 different models on the lot, everyone of them has got different feature sets, everyone of them has got different gross vehicle weight ratios, or whatever it is that are pertinent to the customers situation. So the writing down is absolutely critical. In fact, we would get in pretty big trouble if we didn’t write things down because then we’d go back in, we talk to the sales manager, and they’d ask us the questions, that they know we probably didn’t write down, and then we’d get the lecture because we didn’t write it down. So, critical.

Andrew: I see. Okay. I’ve got another note here to ask you about selling the customer versus selling the desk. What’s the difference between those two?

Fred: Okay. So, selling the desk is a term that we used when we in and we didn’t have a really, really good handle on making a sell with that customer. They might be 50% of the way, but we need them to be much more than 50% of the way. Right now what we’re doing is we’re trying to get a good price to entice them. So selling the desk means walking into that sales office, sitting down, and saying to your sales manager, “I might have these people, but they really want to know what kind of price we’re looking.” And the next question back from the sales manager would usually be, again going back to the lead sheet, “Okay, what is it that they’re settled on?’ Have they settled on a unit yet? And if they have and they really like this unit, will they buy it today?” “I think they will.” The sales manager will say, “Did they say they would buy it today if you got the right price?” If you forgot to ask that question, they caught you.

That’s kind of what selling the desk is about. You were trying to sell the sales manager on giving you sort of the easy way out, which was to give you some sort of a price, and walking number to them. They were smarter than us, they know the game, they knew that all these people wanted, in a lot of cases was get the number, and you just couldn’t do it. You were going to have to go back out, you were going to have to go ask some more questions and it starting getting pretty hairy from point on, but you’d have to turn it over to another person then split the sale. It got pretty sticky at that point.

Andrew: You mentioned that the sales manager would ask you if you asked a specific question. Would you buy this if I gave you the price you asked for? Was there a list of questions like that that you had to ask that would lock a customer in? Was there a check list?

Fred: I wouldn’t say so much of a check list, but the general rule, which I’m sure a lot of people in the audience know is, ABC, Always Be Closing. “If we can get the right price for this unit are ready to buy it today,” is a closing question to get that yes of the no, to get the offer on the table. So it really wasn’t sort of a checklist of a series of questions, it was just, always be closing, always look for the end game, always get them to the point where they’re ready to pull the trigger.

No that’s one aspect. The other aspect and more towards what you’re talking about is overcoming objections. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the movie “Boiler Room,” but they mention the file of facts, that’s the objection cards. So, ‘My wife won’t let me,’ or basically a reference that you could go back to and look at that and be able to handle on the phone, in that movie, any sort of objection that you get.

Andrew: So, I see. There are essentially a finite number of objections that customers could have and they tend to repeat themselves. You need to know them ahead of time. You need to know the objections that they’re probably going to have and you need to have an answer ahead of time for it, and you can just pop up an answer as soon as. So for example, “My wife won’t let me.” What do you answer to that?

Fred: Hopefully in the RV industry you’re not getting that question because that was more in terms of the movie, I was just quoting from the movie.

Andrew: I see. Because in the RV industry if you’re wife doesn’t let you, you’re probably not going to buy it. This isn’t more of a thing that you have to do by yourself.

Fred: Right. You can’t hard close these things because they’re going to have to finance these things. You’re not dealing with people who have expendable cash in a lot of cases. I mean, they have some, but they’re probably going to be financing these things and guess what? They’re going to do that together. So if you’re there and you’re getting the “my wife won’t let me,” that person, you’re going to drop them like a hot potato. You’re not going to be mean about it, but you’re going to say to them, “When can you bring her in?” So, I guess that would be kind of a retort to that. So, “Your wife’s not here today, sir. When can you bring her in? Because I’m sure that she would want to be here too and make sure that she loves it as much as you do.” You get that a lot too.

Andrew: How did you remember all these objections and the responses?

Fred: Well, I didn’t really have the time to remember a lot of them. It required thinking on your feet. That’s a skill that I think is learned over a period of years. So I can say for me, I wasn’t really quite as good at handling the objections as other guys were, but by the end of that I think I got a little bit better at it. I usually put more of my effort into molding the perception of what I was selling, beforehand is what I was doing and trying to avoid objections like that later on.

Andrew: Was there a physical book with all the objections in it or a physical rolodex?

Fred: I didn’t have one and we didn’t have one at the dealership, but I have heard that those actually do exist out there, so I don’t know. Maybe somebody in the audience can comment on that.

Andrew: I’ve actually read books by salesmen ended up running companies that were so big that they had to write or that they felt they had write autobiographies. And I’ve heard them talk about how they would write the objections that would come up and think about an answer for them, and create this little rolodex or directory of objections and responses for themselves. So I can imagine that they might have passed it on to their employees. And, of course, in many industries these books just wander around. You can just get a hold of them and understand them. I know that in the brokerage industry they’ve got those, the objection books.

You also said, “You drop them like a hot potato.” Several times you talked about people who you want to get rid of or just say goodbye and move on with your day. How does it impact a salesman’s career or impact a salesman’s numbers to be able to decide who should be dropped and who shouldn’t and to do that properly?

Fred: In that particular industry that’s probably the single most important thing you can know, is when you’re dealing with a real person or somebody who there’s no chance. And the quicker you can find that out the better because my mistake up front was talking to the wrong people, not asking the right questions, and ending up spending all that time only to find out later on what I could have found out five minutes in that they were just there for the hotdogs that day.

Andrew: I see. And are there enough people coming in the door that if you drop someone like a hot potato and don’t sweat converting them that there’ll be someone else around that you can at least try selling to?

Fred: Yeah, in those particular situations, yes. When you have big promotions like that you can afford to do that. You have to spend a little more time if you’re dealing with maybe one, two, or three people a day, so you have to go a little bit farther with it, but that’s just a day to day thing that you would sit down and talk to the sale manager about that. You would say, “Here’s what I got.” And the more concrete picture you painted for the sales manager the more willing they were to have you stop working with those people, give them some brochures and send them out the door.

Andrew: All right. Single most important thing is figuring out who you should be talking to and who you should not be, who you should move past, who you should drop.

Fred: Yeah.

Andrew: You also said earlier, when I asked you about objections you said that you tried not to even get to the point where there would be objections because you focused on perception. And I wrote that down to ask you, what do you mean by perception?

Fred: Perception. Creating the perception that, right off the bat, I’m there as a consultant, somebody who’s there to help them figure out and meet their needs. And that can actually tie to the next job that I did after the RV industry, I put that to use more, and that was in the high-tech industry, but I was basically selling printer supplies. But it was for a company that did networking and all sorts of IT related stuff. But the thing that I would do because I had to make cold calls is, I would get on the phone and I would not say, “Hi, my name is Fred Bliss. I’m calling from so and so company and I’m looking to see if you need X, Y, or Z.” I would call, I would get on the phone, and I would say, “Hello, Mr. So and So, just really briefly, I value your time, I don’t want to waste your time. I just wanted to let you know what we do, who we are and wanted to just stop in Thursday and do like a 15 minute consultation and see what it is that you’re happy with and what you’re unhappy with in your current solution and see if we can’t help you with that.”

So immediately you create that perception that you’ve got an ability, a skill to not only sell them things, I’m not really selling things at all, but just to figure out what it is they like and don’t like about their current solution, and how you fit into that picture. And I got a really good response from that kind of an approach. And it was a little more eloquent at the time than how I sort of paint the picture here, but that’s essentially what I did.

Andrew: I see. You want to create the perception that you’re the consultant, you’re the person that they go to for advice.

Fred: Yeah.

Andrew: And I do see that in the online world through blogs. People who want to do business with entrepreneurs or want to do business with anyone, they end up creating blogs where they’re the advisors in the space, where they’re to consultants, the teachers.

Fred: Absolutely.

Andrew: And, of course, through that they get the rapport and the trust of the customer, and the order.

Okay. I asked you about that, I asked you about that, I crossed that off my list, let’s talk about the process. In an email to me you said that there are nine gates to the sales process.

Fred: Mm-hmm.

Andrew: We talked about some of them, let’s fill in the gaps here, starting with the first, meet and greet. Is there anyway special about the way you would meet a new customer as he comes in?

Fred: When we were trained, the meet and greet, basically, was just you giving them a firm handshake, looking them in the eye, and being confident and saying, “It’s great to meet you. My name is So and So.” And just start the conversation with them, start asking them questions right away. You want to introduce yourself, you want to talk about the company being a family run company, if it is, how long it’s been around, if it’s got some sort of tenure or some sort of history to it, anything you can do to give them the sense that dealing with a reputable brand, if you will.

Andrew: And you would do that right of the bat, just in the start? Makes sense.

Fred: We would usually ask them, “Have you ever been here before,” which was really important because they might be a “Be Back” for somebody else, you’d want to get them to the right person versus sort of scalping them. You would want to, basically, just say, “What do you know about us? Why are you here today?” And if they didn’t know a whole lot about you, maybe it was just an advertisement in the paper, the first thing you want to do is say, “We’re a family run company. We’ve been around for 30 years and we’ve built our brand on providing great service, and we really take a lot of pride in what we do here.” So you want to kind of beef it up by giving them a sense that you were there and looking out for them, and you were around 30 years for a reason.

Andrew: See, this is interesting because what you’re saying, I can imagine when you’re talking just sounds like day to day conversation that, hey, you’re just sharing what’s going on in life. “This is a family run company that’s been around for 30 years and it happens to be a nice sunny day.” It’s like those kinds of facts, you’re just mentioning what’s around you. But it’s planned, it’s thought out. You know what customers want know and you know how to greet them, and it’s interesting. I would leave it to just, I would expect that I would leave it to chance. When the phone rings right now I don’t have a pattern that I go through with people. When I have a conversation with someone about buying an ad on my site or doing business with me, I don’t have a pattern that I go through, but it’s interesting that you guys do, and it makes sense to. Instead of fumbling around for a conversation, you know what the customer wants, you know how to present it, you get it out there, and you get yourself on the right path.

Fred: That’s right. Yep, absolutely.

Andrew: Interesting.

Fred: Yeah. And by having these nine gates you have manageable phases and you can go back later and do a postmortem, if you didn’t make the sales, why was that? Which gate did you miss? Did you forget to establish rapport? Where you not friendly enough? Where you not asking questions? Where you talking too much? Which was a huge one. People who talked more sold less. It was a very common thing. People who would listen more would always end up doing better.

You have to know the product to a certain understanding. And so, we were continually being told to go out on the lot, do a lot walk, and go into the units that we weren’t so familiar with, that we weren’t selling many of those, so that we were prepared, but that was an ongoing process. And that applies to anybody’s industry. If you’re selling products that are manufactured by somebody else, you’d better know that product otherwise how are you going to be able to figure out how it fits into the potential customer’s needs.

Andrew: What’s your postmortem like?

Fred: Are you talking about for something you don’t sell?

Andrew: Yeah. Or, do you do a postmortem when you do sell?

Fred: Usually don’t do really a postmortem when you do sell. You’ve accomplished the goal, so at that point you’re just making sure that they’re all being taking care of after the sale.

The postmortem on the sale that you miss, maybe you lost it to a competitor. We dealt with a competitor that was literally a mile down the road that was selling different brands, but the same sort of product. So this competition was pretty stiff as you can imagine. But, yeah, we would go through and we would literally talk with the sales manager about what it was that we missed. Would have to go through and have that conversation and then, again, they would do a little more role playing with you once they kind of smoked out what is was the you didn’t do quite right.

Andrew: I want to explain why I’m so interested in the postmortem because I do notice, for example, even in my interviews, when I have some kind of format to them. When I have a skeleton at least in mind when I start out, the interviews end up being a lot sharper and when I don’t do well it’s often because I missed a step and I was just kind of winging it because I was feeling over confident. Like I didn’t script out my intro, I asked a question that didn’t direct the quest but took the burden off of me to lead the conversation by say, “So, what do you do?” Or, “Tell me about your business.” And then the person would wander around in the conversation for five to ten minutes.

What I don’t do is the postmortem after these interviews and I’m interested in how you would do it. And I don’t do the postmortem enough on anything and I realize that people who are really good at things analyze after they do it. They know what they need to do and then they stop and they look at the video tape if they’re golfers I guess or in the case of swimmers even, they’ll have a camera underwater and they’ll look at it afterwards and say, “What did I do with that stroke?” So I want to understand how you do it. You have these nine gates of the sales process. You walk into your sales manager’s office and I guess he walks you through them and he says, “Hey, the first step is meet and greet, how did you meet these guys? What was your introduction to them? Tell me that. Let’s role play that.” Or would he go through them all and say, “Was there one that you missed?”

Fred: Yeah. They usually ask you to figure it out first. But if you weren’t really quite sure what it was that you did wrong, that’s when they would say, “Okay. How did your meet and greet go?” They might listen to you repeat it back to them. So you would just take it through each one of those and usually by Step 8, which is negotiate, they’re involved in the loop so at that point they know if you didn’t negotiate. But really, if you’ve got somebody to the point where you put an offer on the table and you were negotiating with them, at that point if things get difficult you would have the sales manager come out and talk to them directly and they would try to close the deal for you because certain time you just couldn’t come to a meeting of the minds when it came to prices. But, yeah, leading up to that point, the first through the seventh step, they would be grilling you and really asking you what you think went wrong and then asking you to sort of play it back, if you will.

Andrew: Okay. I’m trying to put myself in your place afterwards, would you do this after every single sale that didn’t close?

Fred: Depending on how much time you had that day, yeah.

Andrew: Really, okay.

Fred: Yeah. For me that was a good thing. That helped me more because at that point that’s like ongoing training. And you had to willing to go in there and take some lumps and say, “I need to work on this aspect.” One of the biggest ones that people tended to fall flat on their face with was the qualification phase, not asking enough questions about what it was they wanted and then trying to get them to buy something they didn’t truly want. And that’s usually where most people got hung up and at the end of the day people walked out the door because they really didn’t have a good handle on what it was that they wanted.

Andrew: I see. Right. That’s step number three, you want to qualify their needs. You want to really understand them and even have their needs written down as you described earlier.

Fred: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is why such a set in stone sales process? For me, now, being in the service industry and doing some product sales it so much different. I don’t really use the nine gates in this particular industry that I’m in now. The reason it was so important in the RV industry was because the profit margins were shrinking, the competitor was right down the road. People were willing to drive pretty far because they were dealing with pretty significant purchases, same thing for the auto industry.

So really they got it down to as much of a science as they could, to try to quantify everything that is significant about a good sales process and try to recreate that every single time.

Andrew: This is why this is so fascinating to me. I’m also just in general fascinated by checklists. On the one hand, I have Seth Godin telling me that you don’t want a checklist life. You don’t want to tell your people that they have to take specific steps because that’s how you kill creativity. On the other hand, I see that business often gets done and people improve when they have checklists. And I know that they’re both true, I don’t know how to merge those two understandings. How do you get creative and at the same time have a checklist that ensures that stuff just gets done?

All right. But I want to go through this, that might be a philosophical question for another time. For now, I’ve got to gobble up, as I said earlier, as much knowledge from your head, Fred Bliss, as possible.

Step Number One or Gate Number One, meet and greet. Gate Number Two, establish rapport, that’s as you talked earlier, you introduce yourself, you introduce the business. Step Number Three, you qualify their wants, their needs, what they can afford, and that’s partially when you go through that documents with them that they fill in the information, the leads document.

Fred: Oh, yeah, you better have that price range, that was key.

Andrew: Price range, that’s good too, okay. So you know what key information you need from them in order to qualify them. You make sure to get that and get it on paper.

Number Four, you select potential products. And you told me earlier that when you’re selecting these products you’re looking for one that’s really bad, one that’s a good fit, and did you say the third one was an outstanding fit, or a stretch sale?

Fred: Yeah. Basically that one that you knew was not going to be right for them. Then you had the one that was going to be outside their price range, the “Gee whiz, that’s amazing, but that’s totally beyond what I’m looking at today,” and then the third unit. And things were done in threes like that a lot. There’s a strange thing about the number three when it comes to sales, when it come to really a lot of things if you think about it. We used do to do three trips back and forth with the sales manager because by the third time the psychology going on in their mind, and they’ve actually studied these things and I can’t give you an actual reference to a book or study, but the verbalization to me was that the studies showed that the third time was the one that made people feel the most comfortable and they translated that in the sales scheme to three unit, to three trips to the sales manager, three prices, to get to that one that made sense.

Andrew: I love that. All right. So you show them the three products, that’s Step Number Four. Step Number Five, you say, “Do the F&B on the product.” F&B means your Features and Benefits presentation.

Fred: Right.

Andrew: Let me read this, actually, out loud, “A good salesman can paint a feel-good picture during their F&B that gets them wanting the unit.” How do you do that? How do you describe feature and benefits in a way that gets people to really want what you’re selling?

Fred: Well, let’s start by contrasting it with the way you don’t describe those features.

Andrew: Okay.

Fred: So you don’t go up to it and say what’s obvious. You don’t, you know, “Real rubber tires, it’s 27 feet long.” They probably know those things by the time you went out to it. You are to actually do a walk around. You’re going to talk about any particular feature that find on that that might stand out against other items that they may have been looking at. You will say, “This particular product has this whereas the one you mentioned earlier does not.” And whatever that might be. It might be something trivial like a battery cover, or a propane cover, it’s just anything that you can point out that showed that this was a really thought out product was really what you wanted to do. But, like I said, you didn’t just sound like you were rambling off a feature sheet. You wanted to paint a picture of being at the campground, being on the road. “Wouldn’t it be awesome to be in the Rockies. You’ve got your awning out. You’ve got your fire going.” You get the sense of what I’m saying though. I mean, basically you paint the picture. You try to get them in the moment and try to say, “Are you guys getting excited yet?” You try to really get them whipped up into some sort of emotional frenzy so that they can, you know, they’re not being healed by Jesus her, but you do want them wanting what you’re showing them.

Andrew: And is this about painting a picture where you actually walk them through the story of what they’ll get to do with the product? Like, “Imagining at the end of a long week, you’re done with work. You get in your car and the thing just starts, unlike your current beater right now. And this RV takes you off on the open road. You end up at this campground and because it looks beautiful you’re not embarrassed when you’re walking away from it. You might even have to answer some questions. I know I do every time I take mine out.” And you point out this and you point out that and you just tell them a story.

Fred: Yeah. But, again, you work more questions in during that process, too. You’re saying, ‘Where are you guys going to take this when you buy it?’

Andrew: Oh, brilliant.

Fred: You can do things like that. Sometimes you can get them to laugh. I mean, if you can get them cracking smiles and stuff you’re doing really good. So you find any sort of humor that you can in what you’re doing.

Andrew: How do you find humor? I’m pretty stiff, I’d like some tips on that.

Fred: Self deprecate.

Andrew: Like what?

Fred: Make fun of yourself. Say, “You wouldn’t believe, but this one time I was in this popup with these people and I forgot to put the jacks down in the back, and guess what happened? We all tipped to one side.”

Andrew: Gotcha. I see.

Fred: And things like that. And those things happen so you’re not just BS’ing them, but you might tell a story about somebody else who did that. “We better put these jacks down otherwise you guys are going for a ride.” So those are the things that break the ice. Or going back to self deprecation and saying like, “You don’t want to do this,” and demonstrate something that you did that was pretty boneheaded. “You don’t want to walk into the awning like I did last week.” So those are the things that sort of get people loosened and just feeling like they might actually be having a little bit of fun with you. If you can do that, again, there’s your rapport.

Andrew: Fred, I love my live, that I get to do these interviews. We’re not done yet. I just got to tell you, I’m sitting back here going, “There’s something about this kind of conversation that this is just always me.” I’m the person who, like I read “Influence” as a kid, before there was anything I need to influence anyone about. I just wanted to learn how is it that Cialdini bought that candy bar, even though as he said in the book, “He likes dollars and doesn’t like candy, but he ended up buying a candy bar with dollars that he likes.” I think that the story that only people who have read the book will understand. What I think my whole audience will understand and I hope you do too, Fred, is that there’s something about this whole process that makes me feel that the world is within my control and that if I can master a few elements or it I can do much better in the world. And when you tell me, “Tell a story,” I can tell a story, I can walk people through how they can use a product that I’m selling. I could even probably walk them through a RV. If you tell me in the middle, “Ask them questions.” Even though I’ve never sold an RV or really been inside an RV, I could ask questions. I might do something like, “When would you guys take your RV out? Oh, on a Thursday because you guys don’t need to work Friday. Great. Imagine on that . . .”

By the way I have to work not just Friday, but Saturday and Sunday because I goofed up last week here, but whatever, I’ve got to work on my humor part. But ask them that question.

So Imagine on that Thursday you take this RV out for a drive. “Where do you guys usually go? Perfect. You go down to this extra place that you love and you’re in this new RV and . . .” I love it, I could do this.

Fred: It’s easy, it’s just asking questions. Again, two ears and one mouth, and that is so critical to this whole thing. And that’s just a really small tweak. That’s not like you have to have all the information in the world, you just need to show interest in these people. If you can’t get interested our excited about the particular unit that you’re dealing with, and believe me it’s easy to not be excited about these things, the people are really what you need to focus on. And that’s the passion factor. That’s what you need to take to anything you’re selling.

And here’s the other thing I wanted to say about that. People are selling all the time and they don’t even realize it. I mean, you’re married right?

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Fred: So you’ve sold your wife at least once. Right?

Andrew: Yep.

Fred: So, me too. And the point is that at some point she had to believe that you were the right guy, and that’s probably the biggest sale anybody has to make. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, but it’s kind of true. I mean, you put a lot of time into a relationship and you’re going to get out of it what you put into it, and that same thing applies to the sales game. But it’s the human connection, you’ve got to have that in place to be able sort of knock down the walls that people build up around themselves when they don’t know you and when they don’t know if you’re really looking out for their best interests.

Andrew: You’re reminding me, I need to sell Olivia even more because at this point what I’ll say is, “Hey, let’s go catch this movie. I really want to see the movie, it’ll be great.” What I should say instead is, “Hey, imagine we go over that E Street theatre here in D.C. where as soon as we go inside we see that they sell wine and we pick up a bottle of wine, and we sit down in there and . . .” You know, like, I should tell her a story about how great it would be.

Fred: Paint her a picture?

Andrew: Yeah, paint her a picture, Step Number Five.

Fred: I have a good example of that, very mundane. I told my wife that I wanted to make some space in our basement, eventually, for this model train set I started when I was a kid and I figured, ‘Well my son’s will like it,’ even though we don’t have a lot of room in the basement. So I said, instead of just, “Gee, I want to just use a quarter of the basement for this thing.” I said, “I want to build this train set and here’s the cool thing about it, it’s three dimensional art that you can play with.” And the thing being there is that she has a creative streak, she used to paint a lot and things like that, and I said, “You know, the modeling part’s awesome and I think you would totally love it.” Because I know her and I have the rapport, she’s listening to me and I’m consulting to her. Instead of just saying, “I need a quarter of the basement for this thing and we’re going to have to find room for these other supplies.” She actually got interested in it. She’s like, “That sounds really cool.” Totally different reaction.

Andrew: The thing is that I always forget to do it. I don’t live. What I do is I try to use it like a tool instead of living it as a lifestyle. And Dale Carnegie helped me do that, what you talking about is, expressing interest and seeing and expressing things from the other person’s point of view. There are some people who are just naturally good at that. I have to stop myself and say, “Wait, don’t follow your instinct, don’t follow your instincts here and demand what you want and bullet point why you should get. Stop, see it from her point of view and now present it from her point of view, and maybe one of Fred Bliss’ stories, and take her through it and ask questions.” I’ve got to try this. I’ve got to try this.

All right. Let’s move on to Number Six. Six is, you settle a unit that makes sense. Is there anything especially different about that or counterintuitive there?

Fred: Six is more of a passive step. If you’re doing the other ones correctly, Six will fall into place. And that’s another thing about the nine gates is that you could get to the next one successfully before you took care of the other ones. So it’s not just a willy-nilly process, you started with One and you went through ordinally. So that’s basically it, Six was more of a result of One through Five. But you would know at that point, if you can’t them on unit, you may not have something on the lot. So our company at the time had a second lot in Connecticut, and at that point you had to figure out whether that person was serious about making a purchase because you might have to take them down to that second lot and it was down about 45 minutes from where we were. So at that point you would say, “Obviously we’ve looked at a lot of units here. I don’t want to waste your time, but I think I might have something on our other lot that would interest you and I would hate to let you guys go today without us taking just a quick trip down there to take a look, and make sure that we’re covering all our bases.” And that would usually get people enough, but again, if you’re asking the right questions you would know whether you even need to go that far because, honestly, as a salesperson, to take that time out of your day to go down there and not be totally sure that could get them to make an offer would be a bad use of time. So you had to be careful.

Andrew: What about this, there’s a great movie about car sales called “Suckers” and in the movie “Suckers” once the salesmen picked out a car with the customer and the customer liked the salesman would just walk over to into his office and not look back at the customer. The customer would just follow because he was expected to. And you’re nodding, that’s part of the process too. You found it and you go, “All right. Let’s go to the office,” and you just walk and never look back because if you do, they’ll stop and you’ll have a conversation there.

Fred: Yep, absolutely.

Andrew: I see.

Fred: That’s sort a, I’m trying to think of what we used to have a term for that, it’s sort of the power of suggestion there. Also, nodding a lot when you talking to them was another power of suggestion thing. So they would really literally tell us, ‘If I can get them to agree to this price you buy this unit today?’ That kind of a thing when you’re presenting an offer.

Andrew: You’re naturally nodding as you say that, “If I can get them to agree to this price would you buy this today?”

Fred: Right. And see what’s happening here.

Andrew: I see.

Fred: Yeah, and it’s a very infectious kind of thing to do. If somebody starts nodding, you’re not going to start doing this. Everyone starts being bobble headed.

Andrew: And when you nod, right. You want to be in harmony with your body and your statements want to be in harmony, and so if you’re nodding you’re more likely to say yes.

Fred: Right. You don’t want to go against the grain, so to speak, and that’s, I don’t know, maybe herd mentality. It’s just part of our human nature to do that.

Andrew: Number Seven, ask for the sale, get the commitment to buy, and you’ve got a quote here, ‘If we can get a number from them that works, are you ready to buy today?’

Fred: Yeah. And actually that question’s completely worded wrong, so I screwed that one up.

Andrew: Okay.

Fred: That should be, ‘If we can get them to agree to this price or a price that you’re willing to pay for this, would you be ready to buy today?’ So would want to get the offer from the customer. You never want to go in there without an offer to the sales desk if you can help it. At the point you have a price in front of you that’s the MSRP plus whatever they decided to jack it up to make it look more expensive, which personally I don’t like that. I think that was always sort of a disingenuous way to do things, but they always wanted to be giving money to the people in the sale so they would always put those prices really high, same thing in any MSRP situation. They always want you to feel like you’re getting money back.

So we would go in and they would say, ‘Okay. This unit,” and you’d be writing this down by the way, “this unit lists for XXX,XXX. So if I can get you $500 off today, would that get you excited enough to buy this?” And you would start with that and they would just sit there and either be ready and you would be ecstatic to take that kind of an offer in or they would say, “No, that’s crazy. Bob’s Discount RVs has it for 20% less. There’s no way I’m touching this thing unless you can get me 20% off right now.” And then you would say, “Okay. So you’re saying that you will make an offer at 20% less and I’ll give that to them today?” And you would kind of get into your close mode at that point. Again, a little more eloquence than I’m demonstrating, but the point would be to get them to give you a $100 bill or something of that nature, some sort of cash, and have the number on there. Have them sign their initials below that number, and take that offer into the sales desk.

Andrew: All right. There’s a lot there, I want to unpack it. The first thing is, you’re not saying, “If I can put you in this motor home for $40,000, will you buy today?” You’re saying, no, “If I can get you $500 off of the sticker price, will you buy today?” You want to talk about how much money you’re taking off. I see. You don’t want to talk about what the price is?

Fred: Yeah, exactly.

Andrew: I get that, okay. That’s interesting. The second thing you’re saying is, you want them to give you money and sign. You want them to just give you even $100. Why do you want them to give you money when they’re making the agreement?

Fred: It’s a gesture and you would literally say this to the customer, “Just so they know that you guys are seriously interested in this, if you have a check or a $100 bill, let’s give that to them, let’s show them that you really want to do this.” Because at that point you’re creating a perception with the customer that they’re lucky if they get that off. You see, that’s the whole thing there and that’s how you would hold gross on these units, by holding gross meaning keeping the profit margins up. So by having them make them make the customer make the first move it puts you in a better negotiation position versus you saying, “Well, we’ve got it for this amount off.” Because people are always going to ask for more. They always feel like they’re somehow, “Well, you’re giving everybody $2,000 off. Well, what about me, I’m special. I deserve $2,500.” And right away you’ve given $2,500 when you may not have even . . .

Andrew: So it’s a $40,000 sticker price RV, I would say, “If I get it for you for $2,500 off, would you take it?” And I nodded as I say it. I’ve got to get . . .

Fred: Yeah, very basic, you can do that although you would want them to come up with a number that would make since, so you would ask them, Again, ask another question, ‘What’s the right price for you today? What are you getting so excited about in terms of the price that you would literally buy this unit? We know you love it. I know you can see yourself traveling to the Rockies in this in the Fall, seeing the foliage and everything. Now’s the time to get excited because we can make this work and I know that we can work together and get a really good price from my sales manager.’

Andrew: So Mr. Customer comes back with the number for you on that. You don’t commit to it, you say, “If I can get my sales manager to do it, will you sign?” They say yes. I say, ‘Okay. I’ll take it to them. I think it will go a long way if you put some money to show that you’re really serious about it. Can you write a check for some portion of this? Even if you give me a $100 and I walk in with $100 and say, ‘Look, these people are serious, they’re not just talking. Here’s $100.'” I see so you get that commitment from them that they’re willing to start paying. You take it to the sales manager, the sales manager he kicks it back. He’s not going to take the first offer, is he?

Fred: No.

Andrew: So even though you have their $100 bill, you now go back in with a different price, do you hand them their $100 bill back?

Fred: You don’t. They usually take the $100 bill right off of that offer sheet and they keep it on their desk, in the sales manager’s office. So at that point you’ve got the collateral, so to speak, for what’s going on. Because what happens if you say, “Well, I want $2,500 off.” And you go into the office with that and they immediately say, “Yes, that’s awesome. You’re holding a lot of gross and we’re going to agree to that.” You go back out there, that customer thinks they just lost a huge deal. They psychologically feel like, “That was way too easy. I must have left a lot of money on the table.” So again, going back to the rules of three, if you do it once they feel like they’re getting screwed, if you do it twice, at that point they’re not quite there feeling like they’re about to win this thing. It’s the third time when you come back and they agree. That’s when they get that sense of gratification. They feel like things are complete, so to speak.

Andrew: Okay. And then Step Number Eight is negotiate. It sounds pretty much like that’s a negotiation right there, right?

Fred: Yes. Yep, absolutely.

Andrew: And Number Nine is close, anything special about the close? Why is that its own item? I would assume that it’s just a natural part of Step Number Eight?

Fred: Yeah. Well and basically what we did is we rolled those two steps together in that little scenario there. So again, that goes back to the 1, 2, 3 idea. The idea that the third time, that’s when, you know. And if they say yes, you go out and get their signature and either the sales desk accepted the offer or the customer accepted the offer, or the customer didn’t and we can’t come to a meeting and then we pull the sales manager in to sit down and give them a fresh face to work with.

Andrew: Let me see if there’s anything that I . . . I know, my head was going to, what happens after the sale to make the customer feel really good. I think it was the Robert Cialdini book ‘Influence’ that says that in the time share business they would often send to flowers to customers the day after they made the deal to make them feel really good about it and to counteract any buyer’s remorse that they might have. Do you have anything like that that you do get a customer to buy?

Fred: We did not have anything in particular like the company didn’t do that, although they probably would have benefited by doing that, especially because what you said, which is buyer’s remorse, a huge problem. You would get people who would call back the next day, sometimes in a panic, and say, “I can’t afford that. What was I thinking? I need my deposit back.” And so there would be a lot of potential for that. One of those sale people I worked with actually had 13 deals in a roll fall through over a period of about two months in the spring. And some of those were because people couldn’t get bought for their financing, but other ones were people who called back and were in a panic and decided that they made the wrong choice.

Andrew: What do you do to keep people from doing that? Do you do anything?

Fred: We, in that business, we really didn’t do much of anything. We would have to get them back in the store if we could, so that we could talk to them again. At that point it was out of my hands. As a salesperson I wasn’t involved because I had already done my job, that was then left up to the sales manager and the finance and insurance people to do, the F&I guys, as we called them. So I don’t have so much knowledge about how they would retain those customers or how they would get them to not want to let go of that purchase. But it would happen.

Andrew: Fred, I’m looking here at my list, well first I should sum up that we just went through the nine points, people I know have the whole thing. I should also say that I’m looking at my list here and you did so much great fricking homework on this interview, which is why it ended up being so good. But it’s also why it hurts my right because I’m looking at more notes on things that I want to talk to you about.

Fred: Yeah, this is a lot.

Andrew: Maybe we have you come back here and do another interview. I want to be fair with your time and with the audience’s time. I want to know also from, and I’ll find out what you’re doing in a moment and why you left and we’ll wrap this up neatly, but I want to explain, too, why you and I are doing this. It’s not so much because we want to grab our audience by the lapel and say, “Sell online the way that the RV industry sells.” To me it’s important to just talk about sales in this space. I feel, as Internet entrepreneurs we don’t talk enough about sales. As entrepreneurs in general people talk more about the vision thing, they talk more about the grand life of an entrepreneur, you get to do whatever you want. Like all those things get talked to death, but we don’t talk about sales.

The only time we seem to talk about sales at all or about dollars at all is when somebody gets funding and so we cheer the funding they got or the exit that they got and we don’t remember that the reason these fundings will make sense or the exits will pay is because there’s a sale somewhere. The value of a company it the present value of its future earnings, right? That’s bottom line basics of business. Well, how do we get to those earning? Well we get to them by making sales and how do we get good at sales? By learning how others do it, by bringing ideas from their experiences into our world. And every time I talk about sales, I know that I lose some respect of a portion of my audience, the funded companies who want me to talk about the big ideas and don’t want me to talk about sales. I’m happy to lose that respect because the payoff is better. If they’re listening to this interview and they end up with a little idea that they can bring into their business then I think we’ve done something great for the industry and them, and they’re going to be grateful to us.

And we’ve got a mission here. We’re not here to make everybody love us, we’re not here to make everyone love the fact that we highlight the latest funding. We’re here to train real entrepreneurs, the people who have to go to bed at night feeling proud of their days, the people who have to go to bed at night feeling like they could, not just survive a day but build a real business. And the way to build a real business is to build real business skills and this industry, the RV industry, had done it and I’m so fricking grateful to you for coming here and talking about it. This is not the kind of thing that’s easy to get people to talk about. It just happens and most people want to distance themselves from it or it happens they’re just not ready to talk about it. I don’t know. I want to talk about it. I want to learn from it.

So thank you first of all. Let me stop here with my little rant and say very clearly, Fred Bliss, thank you for doing this interview. Thank you for spending all this time putting it together.

Fred: My pleasure. I really, really appreciate the time to come on and be able to talk about it and I would absolutely, by the way, love to more of these. I feel like it started off. We were kind of finding our way and now I feel like we hit a lot of the important things we wanted to hit. And I think, like you said, there’s a lot more to talk about here and probably more getting into some of the finer points of some of this stuff.

Andrew: If you don’t mind me saying, I felt like, and you did say it, in the beginning you were nervous and I know that you noticed me, I was too excited. I need to find that medium as a personality and it can’t be the low when I sometimes feel like I don’t know my way in an interview and can’t be the high when I’m so excited about it that I’m going to drown out my guest. There needs to be a medium that if I’m feeling a little quiet, I need to bring myself up to that medium, if I’m feeling a little energized I need to remind myself there’s a reason why I need to come back to that medium and have a real conversation not just spout excitement into a microphone.

What are you doing now?

Fred: Well I’ve got a few different things going on. Primarily I work as a web development specialist, the technology side, a lot eCommerce work. My big passion now is something called Isotope eCommerce, which is an open source based eCommerce package based on an open source content management system framework. And that tool, I can talk about that in many interviews because there’s just so much and I put two years of my life into that with another colleague who’s another developer, and then a third who’s a designer and we’ve all been working really hard on that one.

So I take everything that I know that I’ve learned up to this point and I apply it. And it’s a lot easier for me to talk about that stuff because I’m so passionate about it. And going back to that point that we made before about you have to find some sort of passion in what you’re doing to be able to be effective, whether it’s sales or vision, or whatever it is.

Andrew: And you’re a techie, that’s why you left the RV industry. You want to get back into technology.

Fred: That’s part of it. Also, the other part of it was that there were certain things that I didn’t want to compromise of my own personal integrity in that particular sales industry, that I felt like I could do a better working and applying that however I could back to the tech side of stuff which is where I felt like I could help the most.

Andrew: Can you paint a feel-good picture for us about this business? First of all what’s the website? Let’s give it very clearly to people.

Fred: Okay. Isotopeecommerce.com.

Andrew: Isotopeecommerce.com. All right. Now paint a picture. Let’s see it working in a tech company.

Fred: Okay.

Andrew: I don’t mean to put you on the spot here, but now you’re on the spot.

Fred: No, that’s okay. That’s okay. What I like to say about Isotope eCommerce is that aside from every other eCommerce tool out there that is sort a self managed package, this is a frame work. This is not an implementation, it’s something that is built to spec for each individual client that we bring in, too. So it doesn’t matter what kind of product or service that you’re selling is because we build the model to fit that. So might have some nets calculated differently versus fixed price. You might have dimensional like yards of cloth that you want to sell. We can build those things really easily and really efficiently. And by leveraging this CMS open source framework that use, we can basically use all the benefits of the CMS, things like letting people manage their content, letting designers better execute their brand identity. All those benefits come into the picture. Whereas with other self managed packages out there they kind of lack that.

Andrew: I’m sorry to interrupt, but this is where my experience as an interviewer has to come in and I’ve got to like the hard part, which is to interrupt you and say, Fred, tell it to us in a story or paint a picture for us. Maybe use me as an example and can pretend that I’m running my current company or use me as an example and pretend that I’m running a different company. But let’s do it in a picture, the way that you would sell an RV.

Fred: Okay. So I know that you want to sell digital products.

Andrew: I do. I want to sell courses online.

Fred: Yeah, courses online. Now that’s something that’s going to be hard to find unless you find somebody to do a large amount of programming for you, do it at a high cost. You not going to find a platform out there that doesn’t assume that’s your only product because you may have other things you want to sell down the road. So what you need is something that is flexible enough to expand moving forward, but also something that’s going to serve your needs now. So you need something that come deliver this content, that can allow people to have access to premium content and have this all managed within a single clean, reliable package. And open source means portability so you are not going to be locked into some sort of lengthy contract when you work with a package that’s an open source framework like that. And you so you have the power in your hands to take it and move it to whatever hosting company you want, to be able to take it to a different provider and have them provide better service than maybe I can. So again, it’s putting power back in the hands of the person, like yourself, who runs the business. And also reducing the operational footprint, the requirements of how many people you need on staff to use that thing.

So the question to you, Andrew, is, does that sound like something that would help your business?

Andrew: Yes.

Fred: I do my best. You put me on the spot there, but . . .

Andrew: It’s almost is unfair when I put people on the spot, but I hope that you feel good about it, and I do want you to feel good about it, but I don’t care if the audience doesn’t see a perfect presentation of what we talked about here. I know that in their heads they are seeing this in a story or they’re finding a way to rewrite this in a story just I know, and I feel bad about this, that an hour from now you’re going to say, “Why didn’t I tell it to him in a story in a different way? I know I could have done it differently.”

It just is what it is. We’re not looking for perfection here. We’re looking to give people great ideas and sometimes putting you on the spot and having you do it not 100% perfect, in my audiences head it’s going to force them to come up with you should’ve said and that’ll help you come up with the perfect solution.

Fred: Right. And I think everybody can relate to not being 100% perfect, I know I can.

Andrew: I’ve got to try this. I’ve got to try this with Olivia for a movie. I’ve got to try this with people and the challenge is to keep authentic because if I become the person who nods all the time when he’s asking for something and does all this stuff like in a rout way then I’m going to come across as inauthentic and no one’s going to trust I word that I say and they’re not going to listen to me. But if I use this as an opportunity to really be authentic with people, to take interest in like if they bring up that a child coming in the that you did, and I stop and I say, ‘Wait, he’s telling me about the child for a reason. It’s okay if we take 60 seconds and we talk about it, and the timer in the back of my head doesn’t tick of every 60 seconds, it’s actually leading me in the right direction. If I allow that to happen then I know that I’ll be more persuasive and I’ll have better relationships with people.

Fred: That’s right. Well, you’ve just got to care about other people. I mean, that’s really what it all comes down to.

Andrew: That is true. My problem I care about single parts of other people sometimes, like I care just about will their businesses be up and running and nothing else. Actually in the interviews I think it’s okay, but off the interviews I’ve got to be more of a human being. In the interviews it’s okay if we focus.

Fred: Oh, I’m sure you do fine. Just being self aware is half the battle. If you think there is something that you can improve, as long as you’re willing to accept that and work on it you can’t do anything wrong.

Andrew: I love it. I’ve got to tell you, there’s something about self improvement where, you know, I love novels, but at the end of the novel I fell enriched, I feel smarter, I feel happier, but I don’t feel like I have any super powers. At the end of a good nonfiction book if I learn how to do something I can use it instantly and I feel like I’ve got more control over the world, I feel like I’ve got more skill, I can go further. And that kind of power, that kind of knowledge, power just feels great. And then once you feel it a little bit, you want to do more and more and more and more, and see how much better could I be.

Fred: Yeah, absolutely. I can promise you one thing, I’ll never do a worse interview than this because this is my first one.

Andrew: This was, I’m telling you. Guys, I always ask my audience, email or tweet up my guests and tell them what you thought, thank them. I urge you to do it especially now with Fred Bliss. Fred, I’m going to link to you.

Fred: Okay.

Andrew: I’m going to ask my audience to thank you. I’m going to ask them to connect with you. Is there an email address? Do you feel comfortable giving that out?

Fred: Yeah. They can contact me at fred.bliss@intellegentspark.com.

Andrew: All right. Awesome. Fred, thank you for doing the interview.

Fred: Excellent. Thank you very much, I appreciate your time.

Andrew: Thank you, guys, all for watching. You probably like this, right? Good interview.

Thank you.

Fred: I think so.

Andrew: Bye, everyone.

Fred: Bye.