#CreatingClosedCircuitSelling

To completely understand how I came to the realisation of the uh huh moments with #DarkSocial, #ClosedCircuitSelling one must first appreciate the journey of discovery that shaped me to get there.

Sure you may now see me coining phrases, methodologies and collaborating with some of the biggest global brands and entrepreneurs?on LinkedIn, Twitter and on global critically acclaimed podcasts, but it’s important to uncover how did we get here.?

In order to do so, we really must appreciate like with anything in life we learn more from the no’s than we do from the yes’s.

So before we get into the title of the book, #CreatingClosedCircuitSelling.. Let’s establish a baseline of understanding, of what shaped the life learnings to get here.

From a young age I realised the power of influence and emotional ties to why someone else would need or believe they needed, what I had.?Growing up in a family by all accounts that would be considered poor, like all kids my brother sister and I, longed for being able to buy lollies from the local store like the “normal” kids.

I devised a plan, to collect rocks from the beach shoreline that was close by. I door knocked to retiree’s and explained what luck these stones would bring them, and their home, and like that on a few occasions I,?realised the power of selling, granted in this instance it could have also been within the realm of possibility that they were paying me for my effort given I was on foot and only seven years of age.

Throughout school, and tertiary study for that matter, all I really knew was I hated rules, boundaries and being told we must operate between set patterns and structures, knowing it didn’t align with how my soul wanted to flourish.

By age twenty one had modelled for some of Australia’s most elite fashion houses; I had represented in track and field at a national level, I had played basketball in the United States on a high school exchange and competed in junior bodybuilding at Australian level.

I was also, well on my way of fulfilling my childhood dream of playing AFL football. With the constant support of my childhood hero, my father I found myself training with Carlton Football Club (Northern Bullants) by age twenty four.

Now earlier I mentioned the obstacles and no’s are as important if not more important than the yes’s and they help shape who and what we are and will become.

What felt like days after my twenty first birthday, my idol , my father passed from stomach and colon cancer after a secondary battle which at the time I could have dealt with better.

Weeks prior to this, I had lost a long term partner, to a lung fluid issue. It’s safe to say, I felt extremely lost and isolated.

Through training the mind and going within I was able to find true strength. I was able to apply this into my physical training and get into the best shape of my life at that point.

Through this very reframing I noticed I was also able to positively affect others with mindset, clarity and what it takes to take desired action.

This provided the mindset to ask myself, “ this has happened, but what have I learned?”. This sentence is important as we get into the pathway into sales learning you will see why.

Almost as quickly as my fathers and my childhood dream of playing football was within my grasp my 2006 preseason was over briefly after it started. Falling from a rooftop party onto a concrete driveway can do that, and so I learned.

I woke in the Alfred Hospital three days later, with a broken lower back, coxic, hip, pelvis, seventeen breaks to my right lower leg and ankle, twelve to my left, broken feet, broken ankles, broken wrist, and both shoulders had been dislocated. The doctors suggested I was extremely lucky to be alive, waking and passing out in showers of pain, I sure didn’t feel it.

I quickly learned the prognosis was that I would never walk again. Or stand, or live any type of a normal life. The gut check, that this has on a person when that is all they know is immeasurable.

Questioning again, how could I defeat the odds, how could I find a way. How could I find the strength.

I decided then and there that there was no way known that I would not walk, run and play sport and be considered normal. I think, the doctors thought it was great to see positivity but numerous times they suggested it would be better to manage my own expectation.

The?path was by no means easy. Had it not been for my long term partner and her family at that time, I wouldn’t have had adequate support for me to force myself to recover. It’s important to note, this was not instantaneous. This was years in the making.

This started, with a continual utter self-belief, that although to start I could only slide my feet five centimetres at a time, shivering in pain while trying to stand. But five turned into seven, and seven into ten.

I appreciate I am making this sound far easier than it was. To be brutally honest, it was a matter of, practicing to stand once a day. Once a day, roughly 8 months and 6 changes of leg casts later, with a walking frame for only 1-2 minutes at a time.

?Already relying on prescription medication to enable this to transpire?as without I could black out with pain at any moment.

Prescription medication is not something that you want to become reliant on for recovery and normality I just couldn’t move without them. Spending most of my time in my electric wheelchair, daily doses of endone, codeine and anti-convulsants.

Let me make this real for you, you become a quite patient person that relying on communication if at any moment you may need to wait for your next dose to enable bodily movement so you do not blackout in pain.

Now I appreciate how this sounds. But understand, the majority of your body pulsing in pain, and you not being able to do a thing for yourself without slight relief, let alone practicing to stand or slide ones foot.

A slight fall from grace, for a guy who use to measure food, workout twice a day and go for a night run for fun. To then total reliance on others and pain medication to be able to function.

Pushing myself daily to the limited that I would not let this beat me, I?was released from the rehabilitation centre hospital ahead of schedule.

I then must express a great deal of gratitude to a large business that gave me the opportunity to apply my selling skills in an office based role, although I couldn’t walk properly or sit for long periods without extreme pain.

Days would come and go, throughout this journey where my body would shut down, my legs and back would swell up with fluid and I couldn’t stand or physically move. It wasn’t always the easiest conversation to have of why I wouldn’t be in that day.

Humbling probably isn’t a large enough description of occurrence that transpired here. The times I was made?fun of, a then overweight guy that limped on both legs, and couldn’t rotate at the hips, feet or ankle, in their defence probably was an interesting sight.

Just as things started to get better, my long term partner left me. As I was no longer the go getting athlete that I once was. But a shadow and echo of my former self, now fifty kilograms up in weight and could do little for myself.

As with long term relationships, that then provided me with nowhere to reside. A close friend, offered me a space although more than one and half hours from work, I graciously accepted.

Utilising the travel time to better equip myself, with what skills was I learning I found focus in utilising their workplace calculations off script to show visible patterns of how we could improve in the workplace.

I moved interstate to South Australia, thinking I would have more family support in my original home state. Although that proved to be nothing further from the truth, it provided me access to a school of learning fast tracked within financial services.

I now had a purpose to learn as much as I could, whilst undergoing, physiotherapy, personal training, hot stone therapy, remedial therapy, dry needling therapy. Three years had passed, by the time I could walk and run properly. But still, with a great deal of pain.

I then started coaching a local football team of which my younger brother was a part of, with the view, I could maybe make a difference.

We finished last the first season, however it gave me access and the platform to start training again, in the sport I loved after being told I’d never stand just five years prior.

I not only played, but was a contributor on the field. The momentum this gave me, was unparalleled as this gave me energy to learn more and more at work, and the confidence to work from the space soul lead activities.

At work, I wrote a paper on how we could be more business efficient, pretty ballsy given I had never worked in the industry, they love the efficiency I got promoted.

Now this ties into my journey into #DarkProspecting and everywhere I am now, as if I didn’t disrupt outside of the rules and have the confidence and delivery of writing that paper they wouldn’t have seen me how I truly was.

The company was acquired by a larger company. I was told that I earned too much to be the manager on one side of the business, so I needed to apply for a sales role on the other side of the business that would meet my current salary expectation after the acquisition and corporate flattening and restructuring.

Once in that department, in new business I wrote a paper on process and how we could close more deals. Before long I was heavily encouraged to teach, coach, and lead staff double my senior.

It’s important to note the level of learning and delivery skills necessary to undertake such a feat, not only with the gap in physical age, but also how quickly even back then the new business landscape was shifting.

Pulling in two operating arms, and essentially three companies of processes and bringing them altogether was nothing to sneeze at, but I did that and was nominated as most inspirational leader of not only that company but all their umbrella companies, before age thirty two.

It was around this time, I ran a proposal past my mentor, Mark Reval, on how I believed in 2011 that business development and marketing would intersect with prospecting videos and exposure rate on Instagram and snapchat. Although he thought I was quite crazy he humoured me and asked how I came to these conclusions. I showed him the patterns I had recognised in behaviours of how buyers buy.

Later this very story, was discussed on Sales Today with Fred Copestake.

Given this level of excitement and exposure with new and existing clients, it didn’t take long for head hunting offers to come my way from key competitors.

At the very same time however, my then long term relationship fell apart, as I realised through continual growth it wasn’t what I wanted in life, this again was a big learning lesson as lost everything here, and not for the last time!

However as a Segway to get there I worked in HR Recruitment sales briefly for which I am eternally grateful for. The reason being, this is where I first realised one aspect of #ClosedCircuitSelling, that if I found highly skilled applicants first, and used them as reverse market for high placement roles it’s a lot easier conversation to have with companies we have never done business with..

Now although I had worked on a methodology in that role which was smarter not harder, utilising an ABM tactic (reverse market)?A better opportunity within the financial space competitor was offered to me.

In lightning pace, I negotiated getting out of my lease packed up and cleaned up the house, and took off across the country in my old BMW packed to the brim with my white American Staffordshire, Chucky.

I quickly learned at this role, that although a step back in title there was a lot of opportunity here to make a real difference in a blended business development, and key account management national role.

So much so, talking strategy with the then general manager he asked me to present how I sell the benefits at the AHRI conference in Melbourne, where through doing so I was able to eventually be offered a bigger and better role to build out a new business team at one of the worlds largest FMO’S.

I was able to teach and engrain my sixteen consultants what I lived and breathed and that the magic is in the #CircleBacks, we actually started a football team the Circle Back Beavers as a result. I have many times told, Ryan Reisert this very story.?

In my spare time, I would always hypothesise what part of the sales process could be changed to give a better or faster result, and I constantly questioned, do we really need to work within what we know to be true?

I knew my vision of what sales and customer experience could be, and this wasn’t it. I saw a clear pattern in my head of how to be in continuous improvement mode.

Although extremely grateful for the awards I won there, I take more from knowing I was able to pull apart silos in a global organisation, refine a process, present to a strategy council on why it would work, and then deliver it, much to their disbelief.

I had been consulting in my spare time, always wanting to test my theories with friends who owned companies or friends who would refer me to CEO’s who would not only listen to my concepts, but comfortably remunerated me. So this is a slight caveat to being paid for the advice I am now known for speaking on LinkedIn in 2022, back in 2015.

I knew I couldn’t take all of my vision to this employer, however I also knew that many of the CEO’s I had helped would be very grateful for my now fulltime input.

#ClosedCircuitRealisation

What happened next was the lightbulb moment for me, I started thinking in terms of how can I get a prospect who doesn’t know me or trust me to listen to my proposal if they?pick up the phone barely.

Sure, we are taught to get better and better at getting to the meeting from cold outreach, and you could still do very well at that, if that was the measure in which you lived. But what about end to end service delivery? And why use tactics to only get better to get them to the meeting? Surely there was a way to cut down on the churn, and that being a requirement, I felt.

I devised a plan to be disruptive but genuine, placing myself in the prospects shoes, what would I need to hear to say yes to doing business. What would be so compelling? And hard to say no to?

It couldn’t really be that simple. But knowing that hard selling one call close in large enterprise deals and blanket messaging isn’t going to work, what could I do??Yes before the naysayers jump I realise even in 2022, some organisations still push these tactics.

I sat there looking at my presentations, thinking about the other side experience, death by PowerPoint?or bore them to death with a bid document.. If it’s truly about their experience not ours, show me who likes to go through this?

Then it hit me, if I could turn my presentation into a script, and the script into a sales copy I could animate it as a cartoon. If I could do that, I could also tailor what I know their biggest problems are, and how our partnership would solve those very problems.

So I essentially created my first door opening proposal customised to companies who have that exact problem, the energy was electric watching it over and over. This was 2015.

However as I didn’t have permission to do this delivery methods was an issue.

I couldn’t make it public to share, smart links didn’t exist yet, so I was stuck and also wondering how could I get the prospects to watch it, as emailing a video will be flagged as spam, or deleted as no one likes cold email. And they still don’t.

#PatternDisrupt

Then I thought what if I ask? So I made a call sheet, I cold called eight customers, and said exactly this.

“I know you don’t have time to talk to me right now, but I will send you a short video on how we could help you and your company win,?after viewing you tell me if it makes sense to continue the conversation”.

By the time I got to the eighth prospect, some had already emailed me back, saying when can we meet.

Seven out of eight prospects, in a row said the same thing. Now I don’t care who you are, 87.5% cold contact to meeting to discuss commercial supply contract is a decent rate.

So taking the reverse marketing concept that had helped me think of #ClosedCircuitSelling years before in HR, into this example it couldn’t possibly be this easy I thought.

Admittedly, HR can’t take all the credit, years prior my mentor Mark Reval, would teach me how to “reverse” a financial quote to show the benefit estimation of reflective rate of “better off”, to clients and customers in B2B and then B2C. Which was kind of impossible to ignore if you had any financial acumen.

So excited by what I had discovered, refining the sales process to make it easier for companies to say yes, and harder to ignore I was on a mission to teach others what I had found.

Companies found the methods too advanced and too far from what they had been taught to believe was true. Which was fine, as this was only market sensitive to New Zealand at the time.?

I thought teaching companies to fix all parts of the sales process to get more business with ease of use would be easy, but what I found without me doing it for them, they couldn’t bridge the gap between my delivery and their learning. They would often look like deer in headlights.?I was too early.?

I used the same strategy in an FMCG company that was almost bankrupt and created a closed circuit of demand. Taking them to eight times revenue in eight months.

What this gave me was proof of concept, of #ClosedCircuitSelling B2C to B2B commercialisation access gates in HR , insurance, financial leasing and now FMCG.?

The simple reason for this is, this will work in any industry, if you know and understand where the leverage is, and how to get it. I don’t care who you are, no company on the planet says no to additional frictionless increases to baseline revenue.

But the core components of this leverage is tied to the area, community of that very support to demand you can drive. It relates, to the impact you can create for them, and their why and buy into that journey.

Now, twice while this was going on and helping others to succeed I created a new financial product for the New Zealand market.

I had financial evidence, I had buyer intent and proof, I had a three video presentations of impactful the return would be and why it would win.

However the majority of the venture capitalists said it was brilliant, but too advanced, or so advanced they admitted they didn’t get it.?The ones that did, wanted to own it, and all the ideas in my head along with it.?

But why didn’t this work, and why was it too advanced? Market fit, I was too far ahead for product market that didn’t exist, and I had no proof to build the financial tech for government approval.

All made note however of how on earth did you obtain the governing bodies to provide legal evidence that I was correct, that I could create this industry legally within the existing tax code.?

I laughed, that was actually the easy part, I replied to papers online they had written and asked them pointed questions so their responses provided due diligence on those portions of the code, to substantiate it was not only possible, but completely viable.

But what I had learned from all the industries I had led sales teams in, and the pattern disrupts to grow industry sectors, was actually a framework of how to do sales marketing and revenue alignment better, in a more customer centric manner.?

Adding to that the learning of the VC route, although I couldn’t get my dream of that platform and industry created, how I got to the table again and again, was something substantial.

I looked heavily into what Aaron Ross did with Predictable Revenue as an outsourced business development company, thinking amazing things were accomplished here but I already felt a massive shift in this modelling, that was not causing some issues with GTM.

I loved the culture and enthusiasm that Graham Hawkins was driving with Salestribe, utilising ABM and demand marketing techniques as part of the business development process.

Chris Walker was making waves absolutely everywhere with such common sense with Refine Labs, showing everything we thought we knew was wrong.

The rise of the revenue ops movements as an outsourced service appeared to be more and more aligned with my thinking, or genuine delivery, however it only solved the problem that was caused by the siloed skills we had created by the split out modelling that started circa 2011.

But how could we even contemplate in being able to fix all of these problems, if existing structures existed. You couldn’t. Because department heads simply will not allow, as they will fight for relevance.

Okay but from a simple lense, what would happen if the structures didn’t exist?

And that’s the key, if we break down what we think we know, and start over from best business outcomes on both sides of the table what would actually happen?

I saw companies heavily looking into #BuyerPatternPersona like White Rabbit Intel, which has taken my visual realisation and links of #DarkProspecting into a scale of likeliness completely next level! Unfortunately for them their cost to operate was too high, perhaps they were too far ahead for processing cost of the times.

Coupled with verification and validation modelling, and companies winning and social indexing.. This has now got my attention.. As used in the appropriate manner, as part of the process this allows the manual processes I had created, to be accelerated.

All of this is great however, but it still is gated by the fact company structures will not allow end to end service delivery as it minimises their very existence.

Where we are fought with statements like “We have always done things this way”… And “you can’t improve what you can’t measure”.

I’d challenge that simply because these silos are built, to record, measure and micro manage outputs, not outcomes to maintain relevance. Showing a simply smoother, faster and more cost effective delivery causes such disruption they can’t even look at it.

Forget structures, what would need to happen to achieve the desired outcome. Start there.

True?#ClosedCircuitSelling and #FutureofSales isn’t calculated on who does what part in silos that no longer make sense.

I was lucky enough to explain some of these very concepts to Jonny Stofko on his live show #Ungoogleable… Which came about, after starting my own podcast to promote others and their key messaging to their key target audiences, Better Business Building.

The success of my show on #Ungoogleable led me to also featuring on Sales Today with Fred Copestake. That show alone received and overwhelming amount of views on LinkedIn, which resulted in a lot of offline text messages as a result.

However, the show that took my vision to the next level was Down The Rabbit Hole with Rob Turley.

At the same time, my own show Better Business Building was averaging a few thousand views on each LinkedIn post, which was a lot of momentum from where it started.

Which also led to conversations with Ryan Reisert, Phone Ready Leads, Collin Mitchell Salescast, a continuation of my Sales Today conversation with Fred Copestake, an unbelievable episode with Patrick Linehan. Who have all arguably done simply amazing things in their pockets of paradise in growth and scale.

The practical applications of #DarkProspecting and #ClosedCircuitSelling. Are now being discussed by some of the biggest organisations and talent in the world. And gaining considerable attention on some of the most prestigious podcasts globally, at the start of 2022.