Speaker 1: Get ready for your daily does of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: And today we're going to talk about seven age old sales hacks that still work today. I'll start with number one. Number one, this is from the late Chet Holmes. This is from his book the Ultimate Sales Machine. Highly recommended. It's about the concept of building a dream 100. This is a target dream 100 list of clients that you want to go after. This is the list that you keep going after no matter what. Even if they keep saying no, you just keep going, you keep going and then eventually even if you get 15, 20% or so you're going to be in a really good position. Start thinking about who your dream 100, or even start smaller, who's your dream 25, go after that and then make sure that you focus.

Neil Patel: Number two. And I used to do this around 10 years ago. It still works today. If you're trying to close a big account with lets say a large Fortune 100 company or even a large company that you're having a hard time getting ahold of, email the CEO and send them something that goes like this, "Hey John," or "Hey Sue," whatever their name is, "Hey Sue, I know you're really busy. But if you can forward this email over to the person who's in charge of your marketing that would be great. I have a way to increase your traffic by X or your conversion rates by Y. You guys are making a lot of mistakes that are making you lose to X, Y, and Z competitor. Cheers, Neil."
And you can adapt that to whatever industry you're in but when you send it to the CEO, yes, they're probably not going to respond to you but a good portion of the time they'll forward it to whoever's in charge of that division and the let them figure it out. And when your CEO sends you an email, it usually is received in a very positive fashion because the person's like, "Oh wow, you must know the CEO." You never said you know the CEO but they're usually going to make that assumption and when the CEO tells them to look into something, they're going to spend the time and attention and give you the energy you need to figure out if they can work with you or not.

Eric Siu: Number three. The fortune is in the follow up. This quote came from John Maxwell and John Maxwell, well he's a really popular motivational speaker so it makes a lot of sense right? When you're reaching out to people, people are busy. If I try to hit Neil, well actually Neil's an exception. That's a bad example because Neil responds to everything, so if you think about hitting any other busy CEO, I mean here's the thing. They probably have their assistant reading their email and they're just to busy right? But if you follow up with the right people a couple of times they're going to eventually get back to you because you don't know what people are doing. Maybe they're not there at 10:00 a.m. when you scheduled that email to go out. Make sure that you're following up because a lot of times that one response comes maybe four, five, six emails down the road so you never really know so that's why the fortune is in the follow up. People give up too easily.

Neil Patel: Number four. Give before you ask. In sales, everyone's like, "I'm going to go make some sales. I'm going to crush it. I'm going to close some deals." Why not just try to help people out first? If you help them, you educate, you try to really solve their problems and make sure they're better off than before when they talked to you they're much more likely to sign up as a customer. Selling doesn't just revolve going out there and pitching people on your product or service. Selling is also about educating. Helping people. Getting them to understand what's wrong. Showing them how to fix it whether they pay you or they don't pay you. Because the companies that have enough money won't care to go around you and do it themselves. They'll just write you a check. So help them out first.

Eric Siu: Number five. Do something that stands out. Here's an example. I know people that will sometimes take a bottle of champagne and walk into an office. That's really bold. I'm not saying you should do that but I also know other people that have ordered tacos ahead of time and had them delivered to that office. When you do something that stands out, when you do something that's actually remarkable, so taking a page from Seth [Coate 00:04:13] and do something that's remarkable, do something that stands out because people are calling all the time, they're sending emails all the time. Sure that works but even if you don't want to send them tacos, you don't want to send them champagne, I mean look, even if you send them a more personalized email, that's going to stand out more because, well you actually took the time to research into that person and you took the time to understand what really drives that person.

Neil Patel: Number six. Go to conferences. Conferences have been around for ages. They work well. And the reason they work is because people are getting ROI from them. We send so many of our sales guys to events. It's one of the highest places that we're going to find leads who are going to close and become customers. Go to as many conferences possible and have your people just walk the floor, not just attend the events but network with people and help them out and give business cards. You'll find that you'll generate a lot of revenue from this over time. It's amazing word of mouth. And if someone can go to a conference and pay a few thousand dollars to get in, they usually will have money to pay you.

Eric Siu: Number seven. Last but not least, make them a star. If you have some kind of in with a, let's say you publish sometimes for an entrepreneur magazine or Huffington Post or something like that or if you have a podcast or if you have a YouTube channel or if you have a good blog that's driving a good amount of traffic or if you have an email list, think about how you can make them a star because that works really well, at least for me to generate conversations with people that I normally wouldn't get to talk to on the Growth Everywhere podcast. And then from there you can try to figure out how you can help these people even more. It all starts with helping people first and while building a relationship that way instead of saying, "Hey, come buy my stuff." Yes, it doesn't scale as well but it works really well. That's it for today but before we go, go to singlegrain.com/giveaway to check out our daily giveaway and we'll see you tomorrow.

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