How Nick Cegelski Sells: Throw Your Ego in the Trash

In college,?Nick Cegelski?started his own vending machine company selling supplements in gyms in Southern California.

It was profitable, but Nick and his partner winded it down, as scaling it would require a bunch of cash they didn’t have. But it was a great learning experience that gave Nick exposure to all aspects of business.

His favorite aspect? Sales. And so, after he graduated from college, Nick secured a job as a salesperson and hasn’t stopped selling since.

Today, he’s managed to create another business –?30 Minutes to President's Club, a media company aimed at helping salespeople hit their loftiest goals. Along with creating much of the content for the business, Nick’s also its head of sales, securing advertising deals with prominent B2B brands.

What has Nick learned, first as an entrepreneur, then as an in-the-trenches seller, and now again as an entrepreneur who both sells and interviews standout salespeople?

We sat down with him for our latest edition of?How I Sell?to find out:

1. What motivates you at work, even when you aren't feeling it?

There are two quotes that I think about.

The first I learned on the first day of wrestling practice in high school; it was the first thing the coach said to the team. He stood up and said,?“If you want to be a great wrestler, you have to be disciplined. And the definition of discipline is doing what you don’t want to do when you don’t want to do it.”

That has been burned into my brain. I get mad at him sometimes because there are days I wake up and I don’t want to do something hard. But I think about that quote and I know that to be a great seller or a great partner or a great friend, I need to be disciplined. And the definition of discipline is doing what you don’t want to do when you don’t want to do it.

And then there’s another quote I think about –?“You don’t need to feel good to get started, but you have to get started to feel good.”

That one helps me a lot when prospecting. I see a list of people I need to call and I get that uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, because I have this mountain of work in front of me. It’s hard to get started.

But I remind myself – I don’t need to feel motivated or feel good to get started on this work. Because if I do get started, I do start to feel good. I lean on that a lot.

2.?What's your sales philosophy, in three sentences or less?

Trade your cleverness for bewilderment. Said differently – throw your ego in the trash.

What I mean by that: you don’t need to be this slick, smooth-talking salesperson. You are far better off being yourself.

An example: if a customer says something you don’t understand, you don’t need to pretend to know what it is. Ask them about it. Tell them you don’t understand.

That actually makes you a better salesperson, not a worse one.

3.?How do you make your prospecting stand out?

First is using the right tool for the job. A lot of sales reps hide behind email. Don’t get me wrong, email is important, but if you really want to stand out, you need to go where other people aren’t. And I’ve found that making well-researched, well-structured cold calls still works.

The way you can stand out when cold calling is by weaving your personalization into your permission-based opener. Here’s what that looks like, if I were to cold call a theoretical person named “Dave” who just was featured in How I Sell:

“Hey, Dave, I just finished reading your interview about selling best practices on LinkedIn. My name is Nick Cegelski, and I know I'm calling you out of the blue right now. Do you mind if I take one minute to tell you why I called you specifically, and then you can tell me whether or not it makes sense for us to speak?”

I've done two things here. One, I’ve shown that I’ve done some research on them right upfront. You don’t need to boil the ocean – find something interesting about them and lead with that.

Two, I said I’m calling you specifically because I believe there’s something specific I can help you with. That makes them much more likely to say yes.

What I’ve found is that most people will give me a minute if I open with that. And then we can figure out if talking more makes sense.

4.?What's your favorite discovery question?

The most recent one I’ve been leaning on is based on a?report I saw?that most buyers don’t find meetings with salespeople valuable. In response, I’ve been asking:

How can I make sure the next 30 minutes are a good use of your time?

Before every meeting, I’ll send an agenda, so I’m not putting it all on them. Opening the call, I’ll do a few minutes of small talk, review the agenda, and then ask that question.

The reason – I'm trying to hand the mic to the other person. This gives the other person a chance to edit or disagree with the agenda, instead of me just domineering the meeting. Because the last thing I want is a frustrating experience for the person I’m trying to connect with.

5.?Do you have a preferred closing technique?

I don't believe that there's any magic combination of words that puts the buyer in a hypnotic trance that makes them sign your contract. And if you do use a combination of words that puts them in a hypnotic trance to sign your contract, they're going find a way to get out of it.

Instead, I want the buyer to suggest, “Hey, we’re ready to move forward.” And the way that I will typically do that is, as we get deeper into the sales process, I will consistently ask the question, “Do you have any other reservations about our ability to help you with X?”.

I'll keep asking that question in multiple meetings because I want them to air their reservations because we can usually address them. Perhaps they need to better understand our reporting capabilities; I’ll set up a demo to show them our reporting capabilities. Or, they’ll say they don’t have a clear sense of what implementation looks like. I’ll suggest we meet with the implementation team to talk through everything and share our onboarding plan.

At a certain point, they're going to say, “I think that's it; let’s move forward.”?

I think a lot of salespeople get into trouble when they fixate on the close. It’s a mindset shift. A deal isn’t done even when it’s closed, even if that’s when your journey ends with them – it’s done when the customer solves their problem. Signing a contract is just one step in that process.

6.?Is there a habit you have outside of work that helps you sell better?

Since I’ve been in sixth grade, every single night before I go to bed, I write in a journal. What's been powerful about it is it helps me reflect, and it also helps me make micro-adjustments to my behavior the next day.

What I’ll do specifically is the first page I’ll write out basically a brain dump of how the day went, how I’m feeling, etc. And then, on the next page, I write out everything that I have going on the next day: the meetings I have, what I’m looking forward to, the workout I’m doing, on and on.

What I’ll see doing this is, say, I have a negotiation meeting tomorrow. I’ll know that on Monday, I had a tough negotiation meeting and I didn’t handle it the way I should have. So, I’ll implement those learnings in the meeting tomorrow.

What that’s allowed me to do is make these micro improvements over a long period of time, and I think it also makes me more self-aware. It’s been a huge piece of my personal and professional development.

7.??How do you use LinkedIn when selling?

There are two different ways that I think about using LinkedIn – one on prospecting and one on multithreading to push a deal over the line.

On prospecting –?I sell to marketing leaders, most typically demand-gen marketing leaders. But I don’t have a big network of those people.

Instead, the way that I'll get introductions to them is I have a database of almost 40,000 people who have attended?30 Minutes to President's Club?webinars or are on our mailing list. And so, I'll find salespeople within that database who work at companies who I believe will be a good fit for advertising with us. And I’ll reach out to them on LinkedIn and ask them for an introduction to their head of demand generation.

What I found is most people will say yes.

The other thing I do – once I get introduced to that head of demand gen, I’ll try to understand who is on that person’s team and their org structure. And then, I’ll connect with their team on LinkedIn, because I want them to be exposed to my content as well.

Because if the marketing team starts seeing 30 Minutes to President's Club content, they start to say, “Wow, there's a lot of influence there.” And then, I'm going to hit the bell button to follow them, and from there I’ll engage with their content.

The whole idea is I want them to feel like they know me and I want to feel like I know them, even if we haven’t met.

This way, if the head of demand gen sees an ask to advertise with 30 Minutes to President’s Club, it’s not this random company nobody has ever heard of. Their team has heard of it, maybe even their boss has heard of it, and they see the influence it has. That makes it a lot easier to move forward.

8. What has been your biggest failure in sales, and how did that experience transform you?

When I was a new salesperson, I had this picture in my head of what a great seller was: good-looking, nice shoes, slicked-back hair, smooth talker. And I'm not that.

And so, on one of my first discovery calls ever, I thought I had to sound like that person. I memorized all of these stilted questions like “What would you do with all of that time back on your calendar?” and even practiced how I would say it.?

When I got on the call, I did not sound like a human being with this person — they were confused and put off. I even started getting this sick feeling in my stomach because I could feel how off-the-rails the interaction was going.

I felt really crummy. Not only did I not get the results I wanted, but I wasn’t me.

What I've realized from that is you should still understand sales best practices and frameworks and how you might structure things. But you should say things the way that you say things. And, if you sense something, say it. If you feel something, say it.?

If you're confused, don't think that you need to be that slick-backed hair person. Just say, “I did not understand what you just said; could you help me understand?”.?

That discovery call has been burned in my brain. It’s one of the most awkward interactions I've ever had, but it taught me it’s okay to be myself.?

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