← Making It with Jon Davids
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I made $27,000 this morning on a sales call. And I did it in the dumbest way you can imagine. Well, it's dumb on one hand, but really it's kind of simple on the other and actually really, really effective. And it's all based on a strategy that I call the anti sale. Now, there's a lot of research that shows why this works, but honestly, I didn't read any of that research. I don't care about any of that research. I'm just doing it because it works for me. And I didn't even do it on purpose, but works even if you do it by accident like I did. So today I'm gonna tell you about the anti sales strategy and how you can use it to sell a whole lot more, make a whole lot more money in your business. And by the way, I am not a sales trainer. I am not a professional salesperson. I have lots of great salespeople that work for me. But this is something that I've been doing, and I'll tell you why in a second. My name's John Davids. I'm the founder of Influicity, where we help a lot of companies get a lot of customers. And you can get my best stuff to your inbox@john dav.com. You're listening to Making it with John Davids. So, guys, let me give you some detail on how I figured out the anti sales strategy. Now for background, influicity launched a new product line earlier this year, and it really created a step change in our business, took us to a whole new level. And I'm not going to talk about that today. In fact, I'll probably write a book on it and how we did it at a later time. But for this story, I just want to say that our growth happened so quickly and so suddenly that I had to jump back in personally to the sales calls because there was just not enough time on the calendar for my sales team to handle all the calls that were coming in. Now, I haven't been on sales calls, honestly, in years. Google Meet Zoom calls. Taking calls from cold leads and cold customers who book meetings one day and then we jump on the next. I'm a little bit rusty at doing that kind of call, but obviously it's a bit easier for me because I am the founder of the company. So I have the advantage that I can jump on a call and rely on my expertise and my raw conviction to sell. So I've been doing okay. And this morning I hopped on the phone with a New prospect, let's just call her Jenna. So Jenna runs a 20 person insurance company. So she books a sales call with Influicity, wants to get some more information on how she can work with us to grow her business, get a lot more customers. And so I get on the Google Meet and I launch into my first question. And my first question usually goes something like this. I'll say, so how are you getting clients today? And what's not working as well as it could be? What's maybe a challenge that you're having that you want to fix? And so Jenna starts giving me her answer, and she tells me some stuff they've been doing to get clients. Running ads on Google and running ads on Instagram, email marketing, a few other things. And one thing she said kind of catches my attention. And so I pause and I want to dig in a little more. So I say, okay, wait a second, wait a second, Jenna, tell me more about that thing that you just mentioned. What did you do exactly? And she goes into a little more detail, explains what she did. And I pause her again and I say, okay, well, you said you tried it like this. Have you tried it like that? And she comes back and says, yeah, yeah, we've tried it like that. We did that. It didn't work so well. And I said, okay, well, what about this? I gave her another alternative. And again she says, yeah, yeah, we tried it that way. Here's what went wrong. It just didn't work. And so I went back a third time. Okay, well, what if you tried this and this together? And she said, yeah, we thought about doing that, but it would take too long. And we kind of just want to get this done and fixed. And I really just want to understand what you guys do and how you can help us. And so what's interesting about this is I was literally trying to genuinely help her fix her problem without having to buy anything from us, without spending $1 without changing anything she's doing, literally just giving her advice on how she could fix it, how she could solve the problem that she has today with as little change and as little reinvestment as possible. And the more I pushed her, the more she kept pushing back, telling me why that wouldn't work and why she really just wanted to work with us and hear how we could help her. She was asking how she could hand over her money to us in exchange for us deleting that problem from her plate, just getting rid of it. If your business is doing a million bucks a year or more in sales and you think you could be growing faster? Head over to JohnDavids.com grow I want to show you the growth system we've used at influicity with over 200 clients in just the last year. Go to johndavids.com grow watch the short video and if it sounds like it could be helpful to you, book a call on that page. And one more thing, guys, if you already have a marketing budget, spending on Google Ads, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, TikTok, LinkedIn, do not skip this. Go to johndavids.com grow and I'll see you there. Now, to be totally clear, this person Jenna was cold traffic. So it's not like she knows who I am. It's not like she listens to the podcast. She doesn't know Influicity from before. She doesn't follow me on Instagram or Facebook or get my emails or anything like that. She literally booked a call from an ad and then within 24 hours she was on that call talking to a guy who was just trying to help her fix her problem. There was no pre existing trust because you could easily say, well, if she already knew me, then there was a lot of trust and she came in ready to buy. It was nothing like that. She was cold traffic. I was trying to solve her problem. She was trying to spend money to get that problem solved. So what was actually happening here? Well, again, it's what I call the anti sale, which is making the sale by trying to provide a lot of value upfront such that the person on the other side doesn't even feel like you're trying to sell them. You disarm them and then you exhaust all the options that they could possibly use to solve that problem. It's like, okay, well if we burned every other bridge, then I guess if you're open to it, I can tell you how we would solve this problem. Now let's be clear. Anybody who has ever taken a sales training course, and believe me, I've taken them all, you know that this is actually a tried and true sales tactic that sales trainers or will teach people. They actually call it in some curriculum, they call it burning the bridges or asking people to explain what they've done and why it hasn't worked. And you do that in an effort to get them to sell themselves on why they need to buy your product. I'm not talking about any of that. That's not what I'm talking about. First of all, the way a lot of sales trainers do it is pretty manipulative. It's Actually kind of gross. Also, when you do it in a sales trainer type of way, you're doing it with leading questions, you're leading the convers, leading the witness, as you would call it in a courtroom with a series of questions that are destined to get you to a natural result, to a pre planned result where you want them to go. I'm not talking about doing any of that. I was genuinely trying and hoping that Jenna wouldn't buy my product. And if you want to know the honest reason, it's because my fulfillment team is actually kind of slammed right now. We've got like a waiting list two and a half months out anyhow. So I'd be totally fine not making this sale if I could get her to solve the problem herself, build some trust, actually genuinely try to help this person solve their problem and really stress test if they really even need our product. And I get that that's kind of a champagne position to be in. Most people just need to sell to pay the bills. I get it. And that's totally cool if that's the position you're in. I've been there. But when you do it with the anti sale, you actually will probably sell just as much, maybe even more. And there's a few reasons for that. Number one, you break down the fourth wall that exists naturally between you and a cold prospect. Someone who doesn't quite trust you yet. They don't know you, they just see you as another salesperson, just a vendor. They have a wall up, which means they're on guard. It sort of feels like they know they're about to be sold to or manipulated in some way. And they just have a guard up the minute you come at them with some value, some real value, and say, hey, what if you just did this? Didn't buy my thing? That right away is very disarming. The second thing is you actually learn more about your prospect in that process. If in the end you do wind up working for them, it's good to know what they've tried, what they failed at, where they might have some preconceived notions, where they have limiting beliefs because of past experiences and past failures. It just educates you on this person you're talking to, which of course helps. And it works because of what I said earlier. By recounting all the ways they've tried to solve this problem and have failed to solve this problem, you're just laying out the options, you're putting them all on the table, you're allowing them to choose which one will work. Best for them, honestly. If you have faith in your product and this person is genuinely the right fit for your product, there's a good chance they're gonna choose you anyhow, because you've just quickly built up that trust. You've just laid the cards out in front of them. If nothing else, you are now a trusted advisor. And they're gonna like you. And that's important. Why is it important? You guys have read my book. I'll pull the book out here. There it is. Marketing Superpowers. I always have a copy handy. Klt. You wanna be known, liked, and trusted, you gotta have klt. Those are the ingredients to building a brand that people care about. And you're doing brand building here at the same time because you're actually building KLT while you're trying to make the sale. All right, so that's the theory. Now, let me tell you how to actually run this thing in your business, because it's really easy to sit here and listen to a story and go, cool. Be nice to people. Got it. Okay, cool. And then hop on your next sales call and pitch like a maniac. Anyway, so here's the sequence. First, you want to open with a real diagnostic question. This is how you should open any sales call. A real question. How are you getting clients today, right now? And what part of it isn't working as well as it could be? And then you actually want to listen to their answer. That's the whole thing. You have to actually want to know the answer. If you're selling lawn care services, you might ask, how are you maintaining your lawn today, and what's not working? It's no different, by the way, than when you go to see the doctor. When you visit a doctor, the doctor's not thinking, what pill can I sell this person? At least I hope they're not thinking that. You should probably change your doctor if they are, they think, hey, what's wrong with you today? What brought you in? What's not feeling so good right now? They listen. And then from there, they work off that diagnosis. And if that leads to them selling you something cool, and if not, that's cool, too, because they've just built trust with you. So you actually want to have some version of that question for your business. A diagnostic question. Second, when something catches your ear, stop and dig with Jenna, she rattles off five things, and one of them makes me listen up and go, hold on. So I stop her and I say, tell me about that thing you just said. What exactly went wrong? And now we're in. Now she's explaining the thing to me in detail. And she's not in sales call mode anymore. We're in problem solving mode. And number three, and this is where the anti sale comes in. You got to give them an answer. You got to provide some value. Now listen, if you sell a solution to the problem that they have and you truly believe that solution is the best answer, then of course you can talk about that. And if there's something else that would genuinely help them and be a better fit, tell them that. You know, I've had people plenty of times come to Influicity and they want to grow their brands. And I say, well, why do you want to grow your brand? And they say, because we want to recruit more talent, better talent. And I say, okay, well, what are you doing on the recruiting side? Like, do you have a talent recruiter in place? And the answer is no. And I say, okay, well, having a great brand will certainly help you if you want to compete for the best talent. But step one is just having a recruiter. So, yeah, I could sell you something today and you have plenty of money to pay for it, but you're better off taking that money and just going and getting a recruiter first because you're going to need that recruiter with all the talent you're going to get once I start building your brand. Right? So I'm totally happy to tell them that the thing I sell is not right for them right now and but it will be right later. And the first thing you should do is just in this case, get a recruiter. And I always find it silly when people are afraid to provide other solutions or even to explain how to do the thing that they're trying to sell you to do. Because here's the thing, if they could do it themselves, they would have done it already. So either they can't do it themselves or incapable or they frankly don't want to do it themselves. They'd rather just hand over their money and have you do it for them. Which, by the way, is why we buy most of the things that we buy. Every time you go to a restaurant, you are saying, with your dollars, I could make these scrambled eggs, I could make a steak, but I'd rather come here and have it done for me, probably a little bit better. So it's not that people aren't going to buy your thing if they know how you do it or if they have some sense, they could do it themselves. They want you to do it for them at a level of Professionalism and a level of convenience that they're not going to do themselves and they're willing to pay up for for it. If by some small, teeny tiny chance there's a simple and cheap and quick solution that could actually solve their problem, then just give it to them. They're gonna find out anyhow. This way, at least they'll trust you. And when they encounter that next problem where your product actually could solve that problem, they'll come right back to you. All of this, by the way, only works if you're genuinely okay with them not buying your product. If they are not a fit. And it's a mindset shift. It comes from a place of operating in abundance rather than operating in scarcity. Abundance, my friends, think about abundance. That's how to live. I believe that in any business, if you have a great product to sell, there is an abundance of customers to buy it. Always there are a surplus of buyers that you can help. And because of that, if you've identified the right customer, that perfect buyer who's going to benefit the most from whatever it is you do, you should just focus on them 100%. You shouldn't even want to waste your time with anybody else. If you spend any money on Google Ads or Meta Ads, I've got something that you're going to love. It's Influicity's AI ads generator. And you can get it right now for free@johndavids.com ads. So here's the deal, guys. We took a decade of our best ads that we've been running for clients at Influicity. Literally something like 6,000 different ads that have all crushed on Meta and Google over the years. We put them into a database so that you can make ads that are just as good. Seriously, we use this thing internally all the time to come up with copy ideas and it's so good. So if you spend any money on Google or Meta ads, I want you to head over to johndavids.com ads, get it now for free. The other benefit, by the way, is that when you do all this, you can raise your price because you get down to a level of specificity, a really, really zoomed in level of we help these exact kinds of people who have these exact kinds of problem in this exact kind of way. That's how it works. That's why you got a mattress company like Hestan's. I think I'm pronouncing that right, right. Hestan's, they're a Swedish mattress brand that sells mattresses. For like $60,000, $100,000, $175,000 for a mattress. And people buy those mattresses. And then you've got mattress brands like Sealy and Serta and Tempur Pedic that sell mattresses for a hell of a lot less than $60,000. Maybe. Casper. Ooh, Casper. That didn't work out so well, did it? But you got those brands that are selling mattresses for a lot less. And by the way, that strategy works too. If you want to go totally mass market and try to be everything to everyone and you've got a ton of money to invest, sure, you can do that. But if you want to have a business that provides a lot of value and gets a lot of value in return and at least has the flexibility to charge a lot of money, then you can be Hestons and you can charge $100,000 for a mattress too. Okay, guys, let's take this out of the sales world and bring it back to marketing, because this is where it actually scales. Everything I just described about the anti sale is what you can do in one to one selling, but marketing is one to many. That's the great power of marketing. And you can do it before anybody knows you, before anybody's booked a sales call, before anybody has even realized they have a problem. Your marketing is doing the work. So most business marketing sucks. It just does. Let's be honest. And the reason, one of the reasons it sucks so bad is because most business marketing is offer led. It's literally, it's always like this. If you're this kind of person, we can help you solve this kind of problem, right? You've seen this ad a hundred times, some version of it. If you're a business coach who needs more clients, we can help you fill your calendar. If you're a car dealership that wants to sell more cars this month, or we can bring you more buyers. If you're a lawyer who wants to get more cases, we can help you fill your docket. It's just a sales conversation in disguise. It's an offer message at the very beginning. And marketers today honestly are frankly obsessed with offers. They're drowning in offers. Now. I'll give you my really, really high level take on this. Here's my real sauce. I think offers are completely overrated in the way people think about them. Offers only matter at the very last minute before you make the sale. Before that, no one gives a shit about your offer. No one cares about you at all. So why would they care about your offer? You see, marketers hear the word offer and they think that that should be the first thing that they talk about. That should be the thing they start with. It's garbage. And this is exactly why we don't do this at Influicity. We've never done this. We do marketing for lots and lots of businesses. People are amazed at how cheap we get the cost per leads, how high we get the roas. We watch these numbers like ninjas. Roas, by the way, return on ad spend for all you newbies out there. These are metrics we watch very, very closely. And if you're in business, these are the only metrics that matter for growth. What is your CAC times your aov? You give me those numbers and I will give you the maximum growth that you can possibly achieve. You guys remember CAC and roas? CAC and roas. It's a very catchy tune. But in order to get the best CAC and ROAS customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend, you need to lead with value. You don't lead with an offer, you don't lead with a sales message unless you want to be ignored. And this is also the anti sale for marketing. It's the same tactic. If you want to see what this looks like, by the way, you want to see what it looks like in action, just go to my socials, look at what I do, go to my Instagram, my TikTok, my Facebook, my LinkedIn. I never ever talk about my business because nobody cares. I don't promote what we sell on the front end. I talk about that on the back end. Once you're hyper qualified, if we think that you're somebody we can help, then we'll introduce some kind of sales message to you when you're already bought in. I'm not doing that on the front end. Nobody would care about me. I do it on the back end. We get, I don't know, 30, 35 million organic impressions a month on my personal socials. And there's plenty more if you include the non John Davids branded socials. And it's all the same concept. You lead with value, you lead with entertainment, engagement, interest, education, something that's real. Don't sell anything on the front end. Get people down a path and only introduce an offer when they actually care. By the way, once you see this, once you start operating like this, once you bring the anti sale mentality into everything you do, you realize you could apply it everywhere. You can apply it on your pricing, tell people honestly why you charge what you charge, and frankly, why they probably shouldn't pay it if it's not worth it for them. Companies will work with us, for example, and they'll pay $18,000 for one thing. Maybe it's 25, 30, 40, a couple hundred thousand dollars for certain services that we offer. And we're only doing this when we can show them on a calculator that they're going to make three to ten times their money on that investment with a high degree of certainty. Right? So if I can help you generate $275,000 in net new revenue over the next 12 months, and it's going to cost you $19,000 right now, what's the problem? Would you pay me $19,000 if I was going to make you $270,000 with a high degree of certainty? Of course you would. So just be honest about the price. This is what it costs. This is why it costs this, and this is what you're going to get out of it. If it doesn't sound good to you, that's cool. Move over. The next guy will buy it. It's the same thing I do with candidates who want a job at my company. Hey, this part of the job is going to be kind of difficult. We have this really bad process in place. There's a bunch of band aids here that's holding this thing up and you're going to have to rebuild it from scratch. It's going to be a headache, and it's going to be your headache. And there's also this really good stuff that you get. Do you want the job when you present it like that? When you lead with the bad or the anti sale, you get a lot of respect really quickly and you get a lot more done. This anti sale, by the way, can be applied to so many areas of your business and your life. And really all we're talking about here is just leading with the truth, leading with that little bit of information that, you know that would be super helpful. Helpful to somebody else that they would be very grateful to have known now and not in the future when it's too late. So that's it, guys. That's how I stumbled into the anti sale. It works for me. Maybe it'll work for you. Think about how you can apply it to everything you're doing. My name is John Davids. Get my best stuff to your inbox@johndavids.com if you sell B2B products or services and you want to generate more qualified sales opportunities, I want you to head over to johndavids.com grow I'll show you the growth system we've used at influicity with 40 B2B companies in just the last year. Go to johndavids.com grow and watch the short video. And by the way, if you're already spending money on LinkedIn and trade shows and sales enablement and all the rest, this is even more important because it could give you a huge advantage in the marketplace. Go to johndavids.com grow and I'll see you there.