Jason: Welcome back to another episode of The Sales Experience Podcast. My name is Jason Cutler. I’m so glad that you’re here. Very excited that you’re tuning in. This is part two of my conversation with Rylee Meek. We continue the conversation talking about all things sales related and how that is important to so many different things in your career.

And so without any further ado, this is part two where I left off in part one. If you didn’t catch that, make sure to go back, listen to that episode first. This is the continuation and enjoy.

Rylee: You know, we’re measuring all of those because I know at any given point if I need to pivot or what I need to work on with that client because you know it should be, we’re just constantly sifting the sand and it’s that continual funnel to find those few sales each week. And if at any point that funnel is out of whack, we know what we need to work on and how we can coach them to be better.

Jason: And I think what’s applicable, because you and I talking today, this is the first time I’ve heard of a organized strategic approach to this. Yes, financial planners have been doing it and maybe real estate investors and you know, many of those types of things, but not from a, like you’re helping clients do this and scale their business this way. So obviously there’s probably going to be a lot of people like myself who aren’t thinking of this or they’re not in that business. They’re their phone sales or retail, whatever that might be. But really it’s that same thing. We’re always, the goal should be having the marketing, the lead generation, the funnel down to putting you the salesperson in front of the right ish people because you don’t want to be too narrow because you don’t want to prejudge too much and kick aside some people who could qualify, but filtered down enough where then you can have some quality conversations instead of like just massive number of conversations depending on your business model, but more quality so that you can move the right people forward.

Rylee: Yeah, that’s, I think that’s huge. Yeah. And that’s always just within any campaign. We always start with the end in mind of who is my true client avatar, who is it? Is it you know, five foot, eight to six foot, three blonde hair, blue eyes, women or you know, if we can get extremely specific, the data that’s out there is I think kind of scary, you know. But for sure the ability to get that data to identify, okay, who is your in some it’s amazing that a lot of business owners and sales reps don’t even know. They don’t know who that is. And so why I love, you know, even taking on or engaging clients is cause I geek out to this stuff. This is like what I love. What’s your client acquisition costs, you know, who is your client avatar? And if we can identify that, we can probably shave off marketing dollars.

Rylee: Just finding, you know, trying to just see what’s, you know, throwing something on the wall and seeing what sticks. It’s like we want to get pretty specific. Again, not too specific where we’re not engaging a certain population, but we want to get specific because we know where our numbers are, our best or where our marketing dollars are going to be best allocated. And so we start with that and then we create a message or an invitation that’s ultimately going to get that person to take action. We do a ton of direct mail, believe it or not. I mean, I would believe it. Yeah. Yeah. And so in partly from a measurable standpoint, you know, knowing our numbers, it’s really one of the most purest forms of knowing what my true response rate is. If I send 5,000 invitations and I get 50 responses though it’s easy.

Rylee: It’s easy math for me to be able to calculate. But also just that I’ve tried virtually everything but you know, online, Facebook, SEO, I mean all sorts of different things, billboards, but the highest ROI that we’ve ever received as simply from good old fashioned direct mail. Early on, I didn’t know that. And you know, I didn’t realize you could get super specific with your client avatar and who you’re inviting. And so I wasted a lot of money, but thankfully I was falling into sales as I was learning in this process until we could really kind of perfect this system. Now that we really feel we’ve got it got this thing dialed in now for numerous different products and services.

Jason: Yeah, and that’s the interesting thing, right? It’s 2019 again, people think maybe direct mail is dead. Most people don’t check their mail or they don’t open their mail very often or very regularly. In fact, and this is what I tell a lot of clients and different people, is that there’s, even the U S postal service has an app you can download where literally you can see a scan of your mail before it hits your mailbox. You know if you need to check your mail. And even with those things that are kind of anti direct mail in this day and age where everything’s digital, sending direct mail to the right people with the right message, anybody who responds the intent is amazing because they are looking for whatever you’re providing. And then like you said, it’s just a numbers game. If 50 out of 5,000 respond based on the cost of the direct mail, now you’ve got that call that lead, that client, that person that’s showing up, whatever that is, right? That may be $50 or $60 per person to show up, let’s say at your event, and then how many do you need to close of that? That’s your cost per acquisition and then how do you just do that over and over again?

Rylee: Exactly, and one of the beautiful things that I found early on when I wasn’t doing this, it was selling one-on-one door knocking, buying leads. The beautiful thing about this program is these leads are exclusive. They’re, this is somebody who’s out there buying leads right now. You’re usually like one of eight people. You’re either gonna be the lowest bid or the quickest one to it. It’s so frustrating where these are exclusive leads that we’re developing specifically for your business or your, you know, your product that you know, even if you don’t sell them at the actual event or off of that, at least you’re now creating your own database of that. You can go back to because timing might not work for them right now. You’re at least developing your own existing database of clients that you can call on in the future.

Jason: Yeah, that’s awesome. And it’s interesting and whether it’s direct mail or anything else, I mean it’s figuring out that key. How do you find that people you want to talk to and then how do you replicate it, right? It doesn’t do any good to do at once and then you can’t do it again. Especially if you’re in the business of generating sales in the organization, then it’s about what can you replicate, systemize and then scale such that, you know, whether you have two reps or you have 10 and your goal is to get the 50 or a hundred reps or you know, have a consistent that, you know, kind of funnel. How do you do it or what do you have to put in place. So that’s just, you know, over and over again with some testing. I mean, I’m sure you’re always testing messages, doing some percentage of your campaigns that are tasked, but fundamentally the rest of it’s just, you know, how do you scale it?

Rylee: Yeah, exactly. It’s really what, again, why I love this system from a scaling standpoint. The beautiful thing about this, if you, let’s say this actually recently happened with a solar company that we were working with. They had a good brand awareness in Florida. They were crushing it. We were hosting events for them doing millions of dollars in business and they wanted to grow. They wanted to move up into the Carolinas, but they had no brand recognition. They didn’t have any existing customers and no referrals coming in or anything like that. And to, you know, set up a brick and mortar store or develop, you know, billboards or whatever. However you’re going to go about developing your brand, that’s expensive. Yeah. They asked if we could help and certainly, I mean I literally, we picked a demographic lead. We knew who their client avatar was, so we ran some demographics and, and we chose a few towns to send our invitations in.

Rylee: We filled up I think six or seven events over a couple of week time period for them. They literally drove in, did the presentation in, developed a couple hundred thousand dollars in sales before they even had a brand or anything with Austin state. And so that’s a, the power of this system from a scaling standpoint is throw a dart at a map and I can probably find a venue or we’ve done events at a local venue in that area and I could have a readily available audience free to talk to, you know, within a few weeks if that was something that somebody was looking to do.

Jason: That’s awesome. Okay. So I want to shift gears just a little bit and have the conversation regarding some questions. So for the season two, for my guest episodes, what I want to do a little bit different is I have five questions that I’m going to ask every guest that comes on and you being the first one. Uh, I did not give you any prep whereas others might know these questions in advance and so we’ll see how this goes. Uh, you get a pass in case this isn’t the greatest thing because you didn’t know in advance at first. The other ones knew the questions on the test. I just want you to share your experience, you know, both as a business owner with what you’re creating. Also what you see with your clients, what you’ve seen in the past with business. You know, again, the goal for our conversation is to help business owners, sales managers, sales leaders, sales reps with their sales experience and their process, which you have a lot of experience with and developing. So the first question is, in your experience, what does a great sales experience look like? Either at your company or with your clients? Like what does that experience look like?

Rylee: I think it definitely has to be, as I mentioned before, it’s an emotional time. It’s an emotional decision. And when we’re doing a presentation or providing a call to action to get them to make that buying decision, we’re always taking them on that emotional journey. Well, nobody remembers eight, but everybody remembers nine 11. Right? Right. Where they were at at the time, but nobody, I couldn’t tell you where in the world I wasn’t even at on August 11th but if we can attach something emotionally to it that is going to allow them to retain that information and to remember it forever because we can emotionally attach something to it. Now the trick is to have it be an emotional decision, but backed by logic as we had mentioned as well, because that’s going to prevent any cancellations or anything from taking place. It’s sometimes it’s easy to get mesmerized and, and you know, in a hypnotic kind of site, all of a sudden you’ve made a rash decision and you’re regretting it. Like you said, waking up at two in the morning. But what we have to do is within our sales meetings, it’s the sale after the sale. As you know, it’s like we’ve, okay, we’ve closed the deal, we’ve got the yes, now we’re, we’re laying it out. Why? It was a logical decision for them so they don’t have that buyer remorse or the regrets after the fact. So emotion is everything to a sale. But if we can back up by logic, that’s what’s going to allow it to stick and have a longterm customer.

Jason: Got it. So the next one, which I think we’ve kind of touched on already, but the second question would be is how did you build out your sales process and that sales experience? Like where did that come from or how did you arrive at this being the right way to do it and you know, for the clients that you work with?

Rylee: Yeah, well it was a ton of trial and error, a ton of reading and books. You know, my background was mainly selling one-on-one. So I understood the process of getting, you know, building that rapport and taking people through this kind of sales process. But I didn’t have a true mentor or anything along those lines starting out when I was young. So it was constantly just reading and trying to better myself. And then it was just trial and error and writing down every objection that I ever got. I would, before I pulled out of a driveway, if I was making a house call, I’ve gotten to my vehicle and wrote out what actually happened there and then was able to process it and go back to my sales reps and, and work with them on how would we overcome this objection or what should I have done to not have that even be an objection.

Rylee: I mean part of why we’ll do all of our presentations is I’m overcoming every possible objection. So by the time I’m meeting with them one-on-one, it’s how much is it? Can I afford it? And then that’s, that’s what it is. Cause if I go to a sales call, after I’ve done my presentation and I start to hear, I have a common theme of questions or concerns, I know exactly what I didn’t spend enough time on in my presentation. And all of that has just been through trial and error, but constantly working on my business, within my business. And as a sales rep, I firmly believe any sales rep, if you’re a commission-based, you own your own business within somebody else’s business. And if you don’t take ownership of that yourself and know your numbers and are working on it after the fact, I’m not just in the sales call. That’s the only way you’re going to be able to Excel and truly be the best sales rep that you can be.

Jason: I think what’s interesting too, what you’ve said in there is about creating your presentation, right? For you guys. It’s an in-person presentation, but you know the presentation that you’re talking about could also be whatever’s on the phone. It could be the marketing because also your direct mail or your social media, whatever that is, is a presentation in itself. You know, answering enough questions to overcome the objection so that somebody will move to the next stage, right? So it’s all part of that sales presentation. And so I think it’s very important that you know, you have to build it. And my style is the same way, right? So I bring up things and educate or tell somebody the kind of common stuff that I know will trigger some objections or them to kind of say no or, or you know, worry about it. Or where that fear starts to kick in.

Jason: And I think it’s also important for anyone listening to this, be careful because sometimes reps take that too far or managers take that too far and then they make this giant monologue that brings up a lot of stuff and can actually cause more issues where they’re bringing up stuff the prospects weren’t even worried about, but now they are worried about it. Right. And so there’s a delicate balance and a delicate dance between educating and overcoming objections in advance. So talking about maybe the terms you have and the conditions or whatever that commitment looks like or whatever the financing or the cost or payment, whatever that looks like that you know, you know, people generally ask versus also bringing up everything and freaking people out about too much. Right?

Rylee: Yeah, absolutely. I see that a lot, especially with new younger sales reps. They want to educate them on everything and make them think how great they are. But really you just got to keep it simple and just deliver the information that you know your manager has delivered because obviously they have a system that works. And I think that’s important for new sales reps to not overcomplicate things if there’s a system that works, stick to the system.