Hi, my name is James Shepherd and today I want to talk to you about how to make $400
an hour selling merchant services.
Now I realize that title sounds a little bit grandiose and arguably it could be for many
of you, but I want to talk to you about my experience in sales today.
Because I really have been challenged by this the last few days and week talking to sales
people, who are not achieving their potential.
They are not making the money they should make.
It’s sad because they are really good at sales.
Like many of you, there are several days in my life or moments that I can point to when
I realized I was really good at sales.
My first one was actually my very first job in high school.
I worked at a pet store called The Ark Pet Store.
Our big ticket item that we sold there were these salt water aquariums, where you have
a reef and coral and beautiful color fish and all that.
I’ll never forget a day when I had gotten pretty good at it.
I was reading a lot of books about it.
I was really into it.
A potential customer came in.
They were looking at you know getting a starter tank, just something inexpensive to try it
out, but I could just kind of tell they really wanted something nicer.
I could tell they were qualified to spend a little bit more money.
About an hour later, they walked out of the store having spent a couple thousand dollars
on fish and aquarium and filters and fish food and all that stuff.
I went home that night and I really remember that just stuck with me.
I think about sales lessons that I learned that day, when I realized wow, I think I could
do this.
I can talk people into stuff.
I can help people make buying decisions that are good for them.
A couple lessons that really stuck with me, I remember thinking about how I was honest
about what we had to offer.
I was honest about the shortcomings and that made them trust me.
I realized that all the work I had put into really learn about aquariums and learn all
these things, that really helped me because that gave me the trust of the prospect.
I remember realizing that wow, for some people $2,000 is a lot of money.
For other people, $2,000 is nothing.
It is pocket change to them.
It just really gave me these kind of core lessons.
That helped me to realize the potential of sales.
Then I move over to my next job.
My next job was selling lawn care services.
I had been there for a little while kind of learning the ropes.
At that point, I was really into sales.
I was reading sales books constantly, every sales book I could find.
I was talking to my co-workers, who were more talented and had been there longer than I
had and getting tips.
After a period of months, I’ll never forget the day when I realized that I really knew
how to sell.
My manager came out, my sales manager, he had an office, one of those offices with the
glass windows and the door where you can of see into it.
He walked up to my desk.
I was on the phone calling.
He’s like, “James, I’m going to have some, two or three of these new hires, these
new sales people,” I don’t remember how many, but “I’m going to have them in my
office and I’m going to monitor your next phone call and put it on speaker, so they
can all hear you sell.”
He is like, “So just do your best and try to really sell this next person, so they can
kind of hear objections and rebuttal and stuff.”
The next guy who picked up the phone, it’s funny because I can still actually hear his
voice a little bit in my head.
It stuck with me so much, but older gentleman.
He had no interest in lawn care, none whatsoever.
I remember in my mind thinking, “All these people are listening to me.
I’ve got to deploy all of my sales ability on this call.”
I mean this guy almost hung up on me 10 times.
It was a constant back and forth.
Those of you that are really good at sales, you know what I’m talking about.
You get into that conversation where you realize, “I can get this person.”
After about 15 minutes of that, I realized that this poor guy, he really had no need
for our services at all anyway and I was really just keeping him on the hook as entertainment
for these new sales people.
So I let him off the hook.
Hung up the phone after, “Hey, thanks for your time,” and all that.
I’ll never forget my sales manager walking up to me.
He looked at me and said, he walked out with a big smile on his face and is like, “James,
that was awesome.
That may be the best sales call I’ve ever heard.
Don’t ever do that again.”
The idea was somebody that doesn’t have a need for the service, let’s not push them
quite that hard for quite that long.
I was just doing that for the benefit of the new sales people, but something clicked in
my mind where I realized, “Wow, my sales skill has gotten to a point where I can literally
talk someone into something that they don’t need and don’t want.”
That’s dangerous.
I need to make sure I don’t ever do that, but you know I want to sleep at night.
But at the same time I realized, “Wow, I’m really, really good at this.”
That was kind of the frame of mind I had when I came to the merchant services industry.
I’m amazing.
I can sell anybody anything.
This is awesome.
After a few weeks, I had to look at my sales numbers and go, “What’s going on?”
I made a couple thousand dollars.
I thought I should have made ten or fifteen thousand.
I was like, “What’s the deal here?”
I’m just not making the money that I thought I should have made.
That day and what I really learned that day was equally as important as what I learned
the other two days about my sales skill.
I realized that the reason I was so successful in these other jobs is that yes, I had sales
skill, but these other jobs had given me the structure and the accountability and the monitoring
to make sure I was applying those sales skills on a regular basis.
I realized that no matter how good your sales skill is.
What is sales skill?
People say, “I’m really good at sales.”
What does that mean?
What it means is you are really, really good at talking people into things.
Right, and helping them make a good buying decision.
That’s what that means.
I realized that no matter how good I was at that, there is no way I was going to make
any money unless I applied that talent by talking to prospects that are qualified.
When I actually looked back in the last few weeks and looked at my data base, I realized
that I only spent a total of 5 hours actually talking to qualified prospects.
Five hours, you think about it.
A lot of times you are walking into, you might walk into 15 businesses before you have a
qualified prospect, so you might burn an hour and a half, or an hour and then you have a
conversation for five minutes you know.
Then you follow up and you have a conversation for 10 minutes.
I was like blown away.
Whoa, I was actually making $400 an hour.
The problem is I wasn’t putting very many hours into talking to qualified prospects.
So what you have to do is you have to track that.
So I started to track that and improve.
The amazing thing that happened to me was not only did I start to dramatically improve
the number of hours I was able to spend talking to prospects, by the way still a very low
number.
You’d really be shocked.
Honestly, you would be shocked.
In a month, if you can spend in a whole month 10 or 15 hours talking to qualified prospects,
that’s really good.
You’d be shocked if you actually tracked your time.
Not only did I increase that, but my hourly rate actually went up as I got better and
better at selling merchant services.
The last month that I tracked it, I made $1,000 an hour, a little over a thousand dollars
an hour, if I added up all the minutes that I spent talking to qualified prospects.
Here is my challenge to you today.
#1.
Track how many minutes you spend every day, every week, every month, talking to qualified
prospects.
How many minutes are you spending on that?
Then look at your total income and recognize that if you divide your total income by those
total hours, that’s your hourly rate.
What you have to do is figure out a way, and by the way, that’s why I hired an assistant.
That’s why I had somebody that went and did my terminal installations for me.
That’s why I hired somebody to call and schedule more appointments for me.
Why?
Because I realized that every minute that I spent doing anything other than talking
to a qualified prospect, those minutes were not making me really any money.
There are things I have to do for sure, but the one thing that I knew that I could do
that I could do better than almost anybody else is I could go sell merchants.
Many of you are the same way that I was.
You are amazing at sales.
You know how to sell.
You are a super sales person.
Okay, why aren’t you making any money?
The reason is pretty simple.
You are not talking to anybody.
Your sales skill is only valuable when you are talking to qualified prospects.
My name is James Shepherd.
Thanks for watching!