Selling Yourself Rather Than The Product: Interview With Ace (Part 1)

Kale:?Today my special guest is Ace, who is the owner and the chief of business development for the Vision Acquisitions Group, as well as being a jack of all trades when it comes to sales training.

Ace, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate you taking the time.

Ace:?Absolutely, brother. How are you?

Kale:?I am fantastic. Please tell us a little bit about your sales training, and then talk to us about the Vision Acquisitions Group.

Ace:?Ironically I didn’t intend to do either. It just evolved into that. I really set out to be a business coach. That was my original intention after doing life coaching for years, wanting to get more serious into business coaching.

As that started to get clearly more defined on like what it is and how the application of it is, that’s where we came into mergers and acquisitions. Buying and selling businesses. That’s what we do in the Vision Acquisitions Group.

Then as a business coach, I have been in sales for many years. I have managed many sales teams. I have coached many people in sales, and people started to ask me to come to be a sales trainer for them.

I actually don’t even like to call myself a sales trainer. You have been through my sales training ironically, so you would understand this.

I teach people how to think and act like business owners, not to sell. I teach you how to stop selling and start closing deals. I didn’t really intend to be a sales trainer, but once I hit the sales market, I realized that what I teach is what people really need to learn.

Kale:?Which is the best teaching. It’s actually practical. You and I are of the same ilk with that.

Now talk to me a little bit about how you went beyond just the closing aspect of sales. You think of yourself as an entrepreneur and a business person. Is that your approach to sales in general?

Ace:?Absolutely. I always say from the top, a business sells a product or service. The marketing’s job is to sell a solution or an experience, but your job on a phone call and when you are talking to someone is only to sell yourself.

Kale:?Can you expand just a little bit about that for those that may be not familiar and that have a very traditional view of a salesman?

Ace:?Absolutely. The buyer has gotten smart. Their transactional sales don’t work anymore. Most people had a bad experience being sold to, usually by a used car salesman.

They told themselves: ”I’m not going to go through that dance ever again.” As soon as you try to sell them, their resistance comes up.

However, if you just get to know them, you find out what’s going on and what they actually need. You sell them what they want, but give them what they need. I look at it like I’m a doctor prescribing them a solution.

The way that I look at sales is these people have cancer. They have cancer of the wallet, they have cancer in their relationships. I’m going to find where they are suffering and then prescribe them the cure for it.

Therefore I have an ethical responsibility to guide them to that solution, regardless of all the objections they are going to throw at me. I know that what I’m giving them is going to save their life.

Kale:?It’s not about trying to convince them of the product anymore. It’s more just helping them help themselves.

Ace:?Absolutely. It’s empowering other people. It’s really what it comes down to. The reality is people want those things. People want better health, they want better relationships, they want more money.

What’s stopping them is usually their ego. Your job is to help them get past that.

People want to buy, but they don’t want to be sold to.

Kale:?Exactly, and you have made a business of not selling to people.

Ace:?That’s right, and teaching people how to not sell to other people.

Kale:?Which is more difficult, would you say, teaching people to do it or doing it?

Ace:?Definitely teaching people is more difficult, because you are not only now battling with the client’s egos, but you are battling with the person’s egos as well. What most people don’t realize is they are bringing their stuff to the call too.

I can work on my own, but if I got to work on yours, I got to coach you through it.

Kale:?As a young salesman, if you have never bought something that’s $80,000, whether it be a solar package or a new car or whatever, if you have never done it yourself, it’s actually pretty difficult to try to convince or help somebody else do that.

If that’s a lot of money to you, then that’s going to be a lot of money as you present it I would imagine.

Now you mentioned quite a few different industries. Were those all industries that you have been in and gone through, whether it be under the Vision Acquisitions Group or with past jobs or experiences?

Ace:?I have been bounced around several industries really since I was 10 years old.

I started selling candy and baseball cards, so I call myself a young entrepreneur. I have sold everything from mortgages and houses, to businesses, both brick-and-mortar and digital.

I have managed businesses in event production. I have been in the cannabis industry. I have been in the auto parts industry. I have sold solar. I have sold lots of coaching programs. Pretty much a jack of all trades, like you said earlier.

Kale:?Just out of pure curiosity, have you had a favorite or one that you won’t go back to ever again?

Ace:?I love-hate teaching coaches. I have a very love-hate relationship with coaches. Right now I love teaching coaches, because I really have an ambitious desire to change the world.

I’m not dumb enough to think I can do it by myself. I know that the coaches are those frontline workers, so to speak, that are going to make that difference. The people like you and all the other coaches out there.

I’m very heavily invested in helping those.

On the flip side, they are very difficult people to help.

Kale:?Can you develop on that point?

Ace:?They don’t know how to ask for help and genuinely, a lot of times, they are trying to do everything themselves and they still think like an employee, not like an owner.

Kale:?How do you get through to those types of people, and get them out of the employee mentality and into taking ownership and responsibility?

Ace:?I start really honing in on what it is that you are great at. This is where my coaching, whether it’s in sales, in business or whether I’m talking to coaches, really varies from a lot of the industry.

I don’t like to talk about what’s not working in your life, what’s broken, why your dad left you, etc. Although it’s important, we can spend hundreds of years talking about it and get nowhere.

I like to talk about what it is that you are great at. Let’s double down on that and let me help you hire everything that you are not great at. Hire your weaknesses. Don’t try to learn all these things that you are not great at.

I am dumb when it comes to tech marketing. I know the language, but I could not do anything myself. I partner and hire experts so I don’t have to do it. I double down on what I am good at.

Kale:?Absolutely. Stop trying to fill your holes yourself and just catch them with somebody else.

Ace:?The reality is everybody’s great at something and the way our business economy moves is by supporting other people with what they are great at.

Kale:?Now, this is a leadership podcast, so let’s talk about your leadership journey. You’re no longer 10 years old, you have had so many experiences, so many varied experiences.

Are there a couple highlights that you have learned, whether experienced from yourself as a leader or versus somebody that’s been a leader of you?

Ace:?Absolutely. There is one big thing that was a harsh lesson for me. I had a lot of success, chasing my ego and chasing money. I was very successful at it, and success can be very blinding as a coach.

I started to tell myself that I can coach anyone into success and I started pouring my time, energy and leadership into getting D students to be A students.

At the end of the day, although they ended up being C students, I ended up being myself a B student.

Because of that proximity, it brought me down. What I focus now more on is letting me help the B students become A students. The D students aren’t even ready yet. Let me not chase my ego and prove to myself I can take a D student to an A student. It’s exhausting.

It’s very hard to break people of their habits and their mental beliefs, where they see themselves.

It’s a projection. At the end of the day where you see yourself in life ultimately is where you end up, as much as I might believe more in you than you believe in yourself.

Kale:?I’m actually hoping you are going to contradict me on this, but have you found, as people get older, that you are seeing fewer D students? Or are they just worse D students?

Is there an age going along with this or is it just even across the board and across the industries?

Ace:?I find that if you are already a D student, if you are already stuck in your mentality from a young age, the older you get, the more hardened that programming becomes and it becomes harder to unravel it.

So actually, if you are a D student and you are still young, it is the absolute best time to correct the course.

Start to surround yourself with millionaires, because if you are around nine other millionaires, you will be the 10th.

If you are around nine other drug addicts, you will be the 10th no matter how hard you try to fight it.

Please share with us if you ever got stuck in that employee mentality. What did you do differently to finally achieve the entrepreneur mentality?

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