Luke Lunkenheimer is living proof that you can rewrite your story.
In this episode of Blue Is The New White, he opens up about battling addiction, facing prison, and finding salvation in sales not just as a career, but as a purpose.
This one hits hard.
Luke doesn’t sugarcoat the pain, the hustle, or the pressure. But he shows how discipline, mindset, and real human connection can turn everything around.
🎯 If you’re in the trades, in leadership, or fighting your own uphill battle, you need this.
🔵 Subscribe for more real conversations from the front lines
#blueisthenewwhite #addictionrecovery #salesleadership #tradesmindset #secondchances #mentalhealth #entrepreneurship
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(01:00:21):
Luke, I've got a question for you.
How can sales change the world?
Already has brother.
Um, sales is the world.
If you ask me now, everybody that you
talk to that's in their respective
disciplines, probably
going to feel the same way,
but I don't know of many other industries
where someone can tell you that they
(01:00:42):
are the precursor for quite literally
everything that transpires in a
transaction. I mean,
what is the first line on a profit and
loss statement, right? It's your revenue.
It's your sales sales drives
that, right? So without sales,
we don't have everything that follows,
but I understand the meat and potatoes of
your question and it's really quite
(01:01:03):
simple.
I believe that there is a void that
exists and there's a,
a large subset of people that could be
experiencing tremendously more income
than they are right now.
People who are in
career type fields that are,
you know, I don't want to use the word
(01:01:23):
ancillary, but like for instance,
somebody who may be working in the
restaurant business,
who is a hard worker and their job
demands a lot of them, uh,
and they're a tremendous waiter or
waitress. They're very conversational.
They can build rapport in a split second.
They know how to work for
the extra tip. They just,
they just have what I
call the it factor. Okay.
That person is going to
make maybe 50, 70, 80 grand,
(01:01:45):
or if they moved to Vegas,
150 by relocating and
finding the right, you know,
the right tree that bears
the appropriate fruit. However,
you can be in a rural environment and
that person could go into automobile
sales, furniture sales,
pharmaceutical sales and make a quarter
of a million dollars plus because it is
such a high earning industry for somebody
(01:02:06):
who's a performer that the,
the earning potential is quite unlimited.
So what I'm saying for your question is
this sales can change the world because
if it's administered correctly,
meaning if somebody or the collective can
make sales an appealing thing for
everybody, meaning make sales an
acceptable thing and not a taboo, uh,
(01:02:26):
fringe job that people do if they don't
have a college degree or they're trying
to make money in between things that
people could respect
sales and sales could
be respected to where somebody could put
a sales job right up there with doctor,
lawyer, dentist, anesthesiologist,
airplane pilot, salesperson,
then a lot of people I believe would open
up their mind and allow themselves
(01:02:48):
access to a career that would be
substantially more
lucrative for them. Um,
so simply put sales could change the
world by giving a much,
much larger subset of people an
opportunity to make a
hell of a lot more money.
That's an incredible answer. So who
should go into sales?
It's a good question.
My knee jerk response would be anybody
(01:03:09):
who feels like their potential is higher
than their current rate of pay, uh, and
enjoys conversation, right?
So I can take an introvert, you know,
and for those people who don't know,
I train salespeople for a living and I
can take an introvert and I can make them
an effective salesperson. Okay. Um,
you can give somebody who's not a natural
conversationalist the appropriate
(01:03:30):
framework and they can make
six figures plus a year. Um,
if you're the kind of person who
absolutely is thrilled by conversation,
debate, um, you know,
loves to win an argument, uh,
gets, gets a dopamine rush from getting
somebody to say yes,
or getting a girl to agree
to go on a date or a guide,
(01:03:51):
I'll let you borrow his
car, whatever the case may be.
If you get a rush off
of winning an argument,
you will be well placed in
sales because you know, they,
they tell you that the most profitable or
the most fruitful that you will be is
if you're doing
something that you love. Um,
and there's a whole rabbit hole that we
can go down there about dopamine and
natural, uh, people with naturally
(01:04:11):
occurring dopamine
deficits and where those
people find a home in sales because of
the dopamine rush that it gets.
And there's a whole
substrata there that we can go into,
but people that like to win arguments,
people that like to not
have a ceiling on their income,
the guy that's working in
the factory that says, man,
I benched 38 more
pieces today than that guy.
But we walked out both
making $18 in our, you know,
(01:04:33):
eight hours that we work
today. That guy should try sales.
The guy that's waiting tables and wants
to make 200 grand a year,
that guy or gal should try sales.
And anybody else who has that burning
desire to make stupid money or F U money,
but doesn't have a college degree, nor do
they want to go into academia,
they should try sales and I could go on
forever, but that's at least a start.
That is way more of an answer than I was
(01:04:54):
expecting. If I'm being honest with you,
that's, that's
incredible, Luke. Okay. So, so that,
that's awesome. We're gonna
talk all about that today.
Tell me if you'd be so
kind, how you got here.
Yeah, man. Like so concise version. Uh, I
grew up, dad was a car sales person.
I was a football player, uh, you know,
(01:05:15):
legacy car dealer family.
I was going to be the
guy that broke the mold.
So worked real hard, played football, got
a scholarship, busted up my shoulder,
lost a scholarship, went into the
workforce, got a
surgery, screwed up to surgery,
uh, got addicted to painkillers, spent 10
years addicted to painkillers.
Eventually robbed a bank, went to prison
after prison, got better,
changed my moral compass, you know, got
(01:05:35):
some, um, some value and some, uh,
some mentorship and then
decided to go back into sales,
but with a completely different outlook
on what sales was and what it could be.
Um, and then that readjustment or
realignment of my
moral compass and a shift
in what my goals were, meaning it was no
longer to talk people out of their
(01:05:55):
money and try to get a quick one hit.
It was to try to establish relationships
network and build a career in sales.
Um, that, that transformation put me into
this because I eventually learned that
sales was not this raised by wolves,
snake oil salesperson,
sell the ketchup popsicle to the lady
with white gloves and a tomato allergy
before the other guy does.
(01:06:15):
Like once I learned that this could
actually be an honorable career, um, that
would, that would help people and make me
a ton of money. Um, you know, that's,
that's what got me here.
So it was quite a backstory.
That's the most
interesting nutshell I've ever heard.
Okay. So let's see,
where do we start? Um,
(01:06:38):
all right. I, uh, I want a
little bit more context on
robbing the bank. Everybody always does.
Yeah, of course. And, and, and, and,
and listen, I told you before the show,
if I, if I overstep at all, just, uh,
just let me know. No, not at all,
brother. No, I appreciate that. So,
so I need to understand
(01:06:58):
where your head was at. Why,
why?
Yeah. So here's the thing, man, when
you're ruthlessly addicted to opiate
medication, um, you're going to do
whatever it takes to get that drug.
And what's funny is you, you give
somebody these pieces, drug addict,
desperation, bank
robber, and they go, ah,
(01:07:19):
desperate guy was high, went into a bank
to steal money. It's like, no,
it was the antithesis of that. Okay.
Very lucid guy who was very aware of what
he was doing and was not high and had
all his mental faculties about him was in
a position where he was stone sober and
in a lot of physical pain because he was
(01:07:41):
a, he was a drug addict.
And if you're addicted to opiates, you
get a very bad
physical reaction, you know,
detox slash withdrawal that you get when
you don't have your drug.
So you're in this bone
chilling, bone aching spine,
tingling state of pain and you're in your
girlfriend's car and you realize she's
leaving you, you have no money. Your
family won't talk to you.
(01:08:01):
Your skin and bones,
everything in your life has come to an
absolute standstill
and there's nothing in
front of you, but a brick wall. Um,
the only way to circumnavigate that brick
wall is to get high because it will
change your mental state and you will no
longer be in so much mental pain.
Furthermore, you're in tremendous
physical pain and then
you drive by a bank and
(01:08:22):
go, man, you know what?
If I go in there and rob
them, they're not armed.
They're not going to shoot me.
I know I'll at least get out the door and
into the car and I can probably get to
the dealer's house before
the cops catch up to me.
So I can at least get something up my
nose and get a buzz before I go to prison
for the next seven years of my life.
(01:08:42):
That's what I was thinking. Um,
subconsciously many years later, I can
tell you, I was also thinking,
dear God,
please let me get caught so they can take
control from me and I'm no longer in
control of my own decisions because I
will never get clean because I can't
mentally and I can't physically.
So it was a
constellation of two things really.
(01:09:02):
So it wouldn't
necessarily be a constellation,
more of a dichotomy.
And I was in a position where part of me
said, take the control from me,
take the steering wheel, because all I'm
going to do is drive it into a wall.
And the other part of me said,
I really don't know what to do with this
overwhelming pile of emotions because
I'm sober and I'm not used to being this
way. I must get high now.
And there was a drug shortage.
So the only way I was getting drugs was
(01:09:23):
with a significant amount of money. Um,
you know, three, four times the normal
prices, what they were going for.
So at that moment it was
like, okay, most feasible thing,
get a lot of money,
potentially get arrested and not have to
worry about this disease anymore and
have somebody take control from me. You
know, all these things at once.
And I can tell you,
man, it was very simple.
It was just, I drove
by, I thought about it.
(01:09:43):
And then something in
me just snapped and said,
this is what I'm doing. And I did it.
Is that what you arrested for?
Yes. Yeah. I've been arrested
many times, but most recently,
and most notably for bank robbery.
Okay. So I I'm not
going to, I'm not going to,
to focus on the personal side. I'm so
curious about the sales side,
but I have one more question. When did it
turn for you? When did, when did,
(01:10:04):
was there a single realization that you
were on the wrong path?
Or is this a slow burn,
a culmination of multiple events where
you looked at yourself in the mirror and
said, I've got to change something. And
when did that happen?
So it was in prison.
It was stone sober. Um,
it was with cockroaches crawling on my
legs and the smell of stale urine and
(01:10:25):
fecal matter three feet away from where I
put my head at night. And just,
I remember it was about four o'clock in
the morning and I was in the upper
gallery of Elmira reception, which looks
like Shawshank prison.
If you've ever seen the movie. Um,
and this is in like the Southwest portion
of New York. It's four in the morning.
I'm exhausted. I've
been chained to a bus.
We've been traveling for five, six hours
that day and no food, male nourish,
(01:10:47):
no hygiene products, sweaty three days
worth of the same outfit and just laying
there in my own filth.
And all you could hear was screaming and
yelling and swearing and
threats and laughing and joy.
It was just, it was just criminals, man.
(01:11:07):
It was just felons, murderers,
rapists, thieves, which I
fell into that category,
just hooting and
hollering and screaming all night.
And there was no escape from it. You put
the pillow over your head.
You still heard it. You put your
headphones in. You still heard it. You,
it didn't matter.
You could not escape the maniacal noise
that occurred and echoed off of all the
(01:11:27):
concrete and metal inside that galley.
And right then and there, man,
I just said, I don't know what the rules
are for swearing on this podcast.
So I said, fuck this.
I said, fuck this man.
This is not me. I am not, I am not a
bad-ass. I'm not a criminal.
I'm not a, I'm a fucking drug addict.
(01:11:48):
That's what I am. And I got to fix it.
And in that moment, um, but well,
probably an hour later,
I had a guy come by one of the porters
and he handed me a Valium and said,
here, this will help you sleep. I know
you're having trouble.
And I pushed it right back at him and
said, no, thank you. I'm all done. And,
you know, that was one of many
realizations that happened,
but that's the most vivid.
And I can tell you as somebody who was
detoxing and experiencing very vivid,
(01:12:11):
real, very sharp sounds and emotions,
it's very difficult to explain to anybody
that's never been through it. Uh,
but if you could consider when you've had
your worst fever and your body is just
in a complete state of shock and the
blanket feels
scratchy on your skin and the
pillow case feels thick and moist with
sweat on the back of your neck.
(01:12:32):
And it's just everything is
hypersensitive. The,
the school bus goes by,
the tractor trailer Jake breaks.
And it's like someone's beating a drum
against your head like 24 seven days
after days after days after
days. And at some point, um,
it just becomes too much. And in that
moment for me, it was,
it was too much and I'd
had enough. And that's,
that's where the change probably pivoted
(01:12:52):
for the first point.
All right. Well, I appreciate your
transparency, Luke. Um,
I am curious what lessons did you take
away from that to help your career?
From that moment or just criminality at
large or from your history,
from, from the whole
thing, from your either point,
(01:13:13):
it's the foundation of my career,
which is I lived my life for 29 years in
a way that the people that mentored me
and raised me taught me that get one over
on somebody as quickly and viciously as
you can, because somebody's going to,
it may as well be you and we're not the
(01:13:35):
type of people or family that has any
particular skills or talents or money.
So you're going to have to get it how you
live and how we live is by talking
people into doing stuff, uh,
at a very high dollar amount for a very low point of entry. You know, I,
I was raised by a dad who loved me very
much and was a good man deep down inside,
(01:13:56):
but he had been taught by his father to
buy a rusty car and bond all the frame
together and double the price and sell
it. And if it breaks when he leaves,
Hey man, I'll tell you, it's a used car.
It is what it is. You know,
this is the type of thing that was
ingrained in me since
I was young, you know,
flip something,
polish the turd and get as much money as
you can for it. And that was just,
that was the precursor to my life. That's just who I became.
No matter what I did, I was a bullshit
(01:14:19):
artist. I was a pathological liar.
Whatever I had to say to get whatever
needed to be done is what I did.
Um, and you know, moving forward, having
gone through that inflection point,
you know, you realize out
the backside of it. First,
what happens for me is
I was like, okay, well,
I'm going to have to go
back down to being a pussy.
Like I'm just going to have to be one of
(01:14:40):
the normal rank and file.
I'm not going to be a shark anymore.
I'm just going to be some schmuck who rakes his head. Spence is for a building and no
disrespect to anybody
that does those things.
But that was my mindset. And I'm going to
be candid with you. You know,
I was taught that the
working man was a sucker, you know,
talk people into giving you their money,
sell them something and make a margin and
make your money. Um,
(01:15:00):
so at that point it was
like, okay, I just, uh,
80 grand a year white picket fence.
I'll find some wife named Sally and have
a Labrador and two kids.
And I guess that's just
what life's going to be.
And I'm not going to be a man who's going to be a man who's going to be a man who life's going to be. You know, I was
so limited in my thinking, man.
I was so frigging limited in my thinking,
but what that good clean moral compass
represented for me was
(01:15:21):
freedom and not having to live sleeping
with one eye closed anymore.
And I was willing to make that trade off.
You know, here on my desk,
you see the statue of Themis. She's the
goddess of justice and good reason. Um,
there's a statue of Themis just about
everywhere that I spend time in my life.
And that's because she represents to me
that you have to live your life in
(01:15:41):
balance. And what I,
the determination that I made at that
point was that there was going to have to
be a trade off in my life. And that trade
off was going to be in one hand,
I wasn't going to be the rock star
million dollar
salesperson that I'd always
wanted to be. But in the other hand, I
was going to have freedom. I was going to
have, you know,
I was going to be free from having to
look over my shoulder and sleep with one
(01:16:02):
eye open and I would be in a position to
actually live a life that I could be
proud of.
Hell yeah. All right. That's great. All
right. First piece of advice.
If you could give
advice to one person or to,
to somebody going
through a hard time right now,
similar to what you would
probably call rock bottom,
what would that advice be?
Somebody going through
(01:16:22):
rock bottom, um, man,
there's a lot of
different things that you can say.
And without further context, it's,
it's difficult to make just an
overarching statement.
But what I can tell you is this,
people say things for a reason, right?
There's a saying I have. And if it's,
if you're, you're in a room and there's
99 people wearing raincoats and you got a
white t-shirt on, eventually someone's
(01:16:43):
going to see your nipples. Okay.
And what that means is,
is if you're in an environment and you
see that the entire collective is
moving or behaving in a
different way that you are, um,
then you're probably wrong. Okay. Um, and
I mean that not like as an innovative
thing. Like if you say you've got a great
idea and a hundred people say it's
bad, I'm just talking
(01:17:04):
about if there's, you know,
something that you're doing against the
grain with and you're being told, uh,
that it's probably not a great idea by
people who have been there,
have experienced it,
so on and so forth. Um,
there's a great chance that you're wrong.
The flip side of that coin is, and what
I'm going to say here is if there is a
collective of people, uh,
or a significant amount of people that
have said something in regards to the
(01:17:26):
pain of being
downtrodden or being in a low spot,
that it's probably right.
So things like, you know,
pain is temporary is very
true. Things like, you know,
it's always darkest
before the dawn is very true.
Things like adversity is simply what
builds strength on the
other side, you know,
or any other variation
(01:17:46):
of that statement is true.
And here's what it boils down to. You can
only fail if you throw in the towel.
Okay. There, there is no failure in
misgiving or mistakes or
shortcomings or trips and falls.
The only way that you can be considered a
failure and that you've truly just
(01:18:06):
fucked it all up is if you throw in the
towel and you quit and to kind of augment
that statement,
I would ask the person going through that
dark period to then reflect on all of
the people that they revere in their
life, the people that
they look at and say,
man, if I can only be like
that person and pick one,
maybe two of those people
(01:18:27):
out and set them up on a,
on a virtual pedestal in
your head and say, okay,
if I were to go
interview those two people,
would they likely tell me that their life
has been relatively easy,
that they were given a lot of success at
the outset and didn't have to work for
much and that the path to, you know,
success or wealth or freedom or whatever
(01:18:49):
it is that you're after,
what wasn't riddled with issues. The
chances of that being the reality are,
it's almost silly to say, right?
Take anybody that's accomplished a great
thing and they either spent time in
prison, spend time addicted to drugs, got
divorced by their wife,
lost their leg. Like, you
know, look at Marcus Latrell.
He's the author of a lone survivor. Mark
(01:19:11):
Wahlberg made a movie about him.
I met Mr. Latrell, um, the
great American that he is at a,
at when I spoke and did a keynote at the
same place that he spoke at.
And that guy at one point
had everything taken from him.
He had his gun taken from him.
He had all six or seven of his platoon
mates killed in front of him,
(01:19:33):
slayed, murdered.
He was taken into a village that was
foreign to him. He was like,
he was in a place where nothing was
familiar to him. He had no clothes,
no food, no money, no weapons, no
defense. He was physically abused.
He was emaciated. He was sick. And yet he
still got up every day.
He still bathed himself. He still
nourished himself. He still had hope.
(01:19:55):
He was told by the United States Navy
that he was an expendable asset.
And if he were ever to be
lost behind enemy lines,
he may as well take his own life because
they weren't coming for him.
Yet he persevered. And now he's got a
movie made after him.
He's a bestselling author.
He goes on speaking tours,
and he always has the scars of those
memories in his mind,
(01:20:15):
but he was on Rogan, you know, not too
far back, talking about his experience.
My point is he went from hell to
superstardom all
because he simply persevered
and pushed through, but
it ain't fucking easy, man.
Like everybody wants
that instant gratification.
Everybody wants to be in that shit
situation and go, well,
just throw me the life preserver.
Like what's the one lever I can pull to
(01:20:37):
just make this go away? It's not,
it's going to require you
to dig with a small shovel.
It's going to require you to stack rocks
so you can get out of the hole.
It's going to require you to get dirt
under your fingernails and you're
probably going to bleed
sweat and cry a little bit.
But on the other side of it, once you've
been through that thing,
you will be far more powerful a human
than you ever
considered that you could be
(01:20:57):
because you never considered you would
get through such a tragedy.
So shut the fuck up, keep pushing,
grab ahold of your balls and get it done
because on the other side of it,
there's something so incredible that you,
you can't fathom getting through the pain
so you can't possibly fathom the
victory that waits on the other side.
That's the advice that I would give
somebody going through that.
It's pretty damn good
advice, Luke. I appreciate it.
(01:21:18):
I'm about to run through a brick wall
right now because this is fantastic.
And I really love what you said.
My dad actually instilled that in me
years ago that you only fail when you
quit. Right. And, and, and so I'm a big
believer in that. I'm, uh, uh,
everything in my life I've, I've applied
that philosophy too. And, uh,
and it's true. I mean, it, it truly is,
(01:21:39):
but, uh, unfortunately,
I believe it's one of those things that
you have to do it to believe it.
You know, it's hard to
tell somebody that, right?
Especially if they're
at rock bottom, you know,
how many people probably told you that
when you were at rock bottom and what the
hell did you say to them?
You know what I mean? And so,
I appreciate that advice and I want to
call that out because if there's anybody
like, eh, you know, I don't know what the
fuck this guy is talking about, you
(01:22:00):
know, maybe,
maybe just reminding them that it's one
of those things they have to experience
is enough to get them to experience it.
So thank you for that, Luke.
I appreciate it. Let's get back on the
track of sales. Um, I, uh,
I think that there's a lot that my
listeners can learn from you. So I'm, um,
I'm curious, you teach this stuff, right?
So, so is there a framework
(01:22:21):
or are there fundamentals?
Is there like some kind of baseline thing
that you say you've got to know this
and be here before you can get here. Tell
me, understand what that looks like.
Yeah. 1000%.
You got to be yourself and
stop trying to be a salesperson.
Everybody thinks there's some particular
voice that you should put on to be a
salesperson, some particular mode that
(01:22:42):
you go into. For instance,
when I train salespeople, I first,
it's kind of a break them
down and build them up process.
The first thing I asked him to do is
pitch me and what I'll do before I asked
him to pitch me, you just have a
conversation with me.
And I always bring up Ricky because
Ricky's a great example.
This one guy long ago ended up being an
employee of mine. I was like,
so Ricky, where are you from? I'm from
Liverpool, New York. And what do you do?
Well, I used to be a security guard at
(01:23:03):
the hospital and what do you have any
kids? Oh, I got my little baby girl.
She's just the apple of my
eye. And what do you do for fun?
I like to like to talk a little pot and
play some video games and dirt.
And I'm like, okay, all right,
man. We'll give me your pitch.
Why are you there? Mr. Luke, welcome to
this car dealership.
How are you? Nice to meet you, man.
That's a lovely little
boy you got with you today.
And I just looked at him and said, who
the fuck is that guy? What?
(01:23:25):
I was just talking to Ricky a few minutes
ago. Who the hell is this guy?
And we discover at length and at scale,
where we talked to many, many, many,
many people that human beings and it's
because of media and movies and the
things that they've learned and the
things that are embedded into them from
childhood, that a salesperson is someone
who talks like this and Oh yeah, man,
(01:23:46):
that's just a great
product. It's the city,
the sea mixer 5,000 and it's got rotating
blades and a low frequency.
It's like, stop. That's,
that's a radio announcer, right?
People tend to put on a character when
they go to sell, right?
Even door to door guys, right? They'll
go, all right, let's get ready.
Let's get ready. And it's like,
(01:24:06):
that is the antithesis of what you should
be doing as a salesperson.
Because if you're a customer, we teach
something in P2P, uh,
it's paid to persuade for the
people that aren't familiar.
We teach something called
perspective over perception.
And this is actually something that I
learned from the CIA and in the CIA,
they teach their analysts or their
negotiated. And again, don't,
(01:24:27):
don't take me
verbatim, take it as a concept.
They teach their guys when they're
sitting with an individual,
they're interrogating or they're,
they're negotiating to always be ever
present of what that person is thinking.
How are they viewing the situation?
How are they receiving my tone of voice?
What is their body language?
(01:24:48):
And anybody listening is going, well, of
course, of course we listen to tonality.
Of course we listen
to bi-language. No, no.
What I'm saying to you is quit worrying
about where you want to take the sale
next and become completely immersed in
what is going through your customer's
mind. Okay. It's a very
difficult thing to teach.
It doesn't happen overnight. And anybody
hearing this isn't just going to snap
(01:25:08):
into it. It's something that's learned
and it's got to be iterated upon. But,
you know, that one framework,
that one thing first piece of advice I
would give anybody looking to be more
effective at sales is if this is how you
talk, this is how you sell.
If you hear me try to sell somebody a car
to me, Hey, how you doing, man?
What's going on guy? You
looking for a pickup truck? Cool.
Let's go take a look at
(01:25:28):
them. Not, Hey guys, Hey,
welcome to Smithtown
Ford. How's it going?
We looking for a four by four or what?
Like just knock that shit off.
Not everybody does it, but
it's like seven out of 10.
The other thing I would tell you is that
you must have a basic framework
to operate off of now
and paid to persuade.
We teach something called the big three
and it's effective across the board,
(01:25:50):
every industry. Now I hear a lot of sales
trainers are sales training works in
every industry. No,
your framework may be
good for any kind of sales,
but it requires iteration and build out
for every different industry.
You're not just going to take my book on
selling and go into HVAC and crush it.
Right. You're going to have
to take the principle things,
(01:26:12):
the fundamental things and weave them
into what is done in HVAC or solar or
real estate. Right. So
the best sales trainings,
and of course I'm a
little biased to mine,
but are the ones that have the most
thorough framework. Okay.
And so our big three is
what brought you here today?
(01:26:32):
What is your buying power and what did
you hope to accomplish? Meaning,
these are not questions. Notice I didn't
say word tracks. I didn't say, you know,
specialized questions. And that's, you
know, big thing out there.
They these special questions. Everybody
wants to trademark the English language.
Right. They want to put a few,
few words together, call it a sentence
and say, Oh, this is the,
the trademark, such and such question.
(01:26:52):
It's like, no, it's a fucking question.
Okay. You can't hijack the English
language. Right. So,
but the big three, what brought you here
today? What is your buying power?
What did you hope to accomplish? Well,
I'll get door to door guys. They,
well, nobody brought them here. They're
not coming to my place.
It's like, I understand dummy, but you
had a, you had a cold pitch, right? Yeah.
Okay. Are they still talking to you?
Yeah. Okay. Why, what do you mean? You,
you said X, Y, and Z, and then ask them
(01:27:14):
if they'd listen and they said, yes.
Right. Okay. Why? Well, I don't know.
Well, you got to discover that, right?
You got to figure out
why they're interested.
You got to ask some questions,
interrogate a little
bit, right? Yeah. Okay.
That's what brought you here today. So it
stems from brick and mortar sales.
This was originally
developed for car dealerships. Okay.
So you go into a car dealership. What
brought you here today? Okay. So let's,
(01:27:35):
let's stick to that. Let's say it's a car
dealership. What brought you here today?
The average sales
person's going to go, well, uh,
they said they're looking for a car,
right? Genius. They weren't looking for
dental work. Okay. It's a car dealership,
but, and I'm not a D I C K when I train
people. I'm just, this is for comedic
effect, right? Sure. Of course.
My point is, okay. What brought like
they're looking for a car. Great.
Are they looking for not, are they
(01:27:56):
looking for a four
wheel drive or a red one?
Like did they total their
car? Did their car break down?
Is someone buying them a car?
Did they just get a pre-approval letter
from their credit union?
Like what is the precursor or the
stimulus for this shopping experience?
Or if you're cold knocking, why did they
let you across the threshold?
What is it about your product? They find
industry interesting. Excuse me.
(01:28:17):
So it's a discovery process. That's what
brought you here today.
The second thing is
what is your buying power?
Every sales person in the world knows
that they've showed a
product or a service
and gotten to the end where they've asked
the person to buy the product or a
service only to hear, well, I don't have
the money for that right now.
Or I don't think I'll qualify for the
financing or now it's not a good time.
Okay. So the whole,
the whole basis of this Josh is what we
(01:28:39):
call compassionate interrogation.
Okay. It is a ruthless discovery process
at the outset of the sale.
So for every sales person out there,
if you can interact with your customer in
a way that at the very beginning of
the conversation,
you can solve for what stimulated them to
be doing what they're doing right now,
as far as shopping, number
two, what is their buying power?
(01:29:01):
Do they have money saved up in the bank?
Are they looking to try to
engage with your financing?
Are they credit worthy? All
these things. And then finally,
what do they hope to accomplish? Like
they're meeting with you,
they're talking with you by the time you
get to the end of this conversation,
what are they hoping to accomplish? And
there's a reason for all this, Josh,
you know, today,
90% of buyers are coming to businesses
with a buying decision made.
(01:29:22):
They don't need to be sold. They've
already made up their mind.
The question is, are they going to do
business with you or that guy?
So when they've already
made up that buying decision,
you can go on a discovery
process and quite frankly,
get every objectionable component
eliminated from that sale before you even
ask for the close.
We teach salespeople only to ask for the
clothes when they already know what the
answer is going to be. Okay. So I went
(01:29:42):
off on a little bit of a spin there,
but the basic answer to your
question is remaining yourself,
staying ruthlessly authentic and
questioning your
customer and going through
a significant discovery process at the
beginning of your conversation,
because it will make you about a hundred
times more likely to sell that customer
because you can sidestep objections
before they even come.
(01:30:05):
That's amazing. So, so I like to try to,
to summarize for my audience what I heard
and let you correct me if I'm wrong.
So in, in the simplest form,
what I heard is that
customers buy when they feel
understood
customers buy when they feel like
(01:30:26):
what is occurring is what they wanted to
happen in the first place.
Got it. Love that.
When they feel understood, like, yes,
that is, that is also applicable.
But if you want to, if
you were going to summarize,
I would say customers buy when they feel
like they're accomplishing what they set
out to accomplish. Perfect.
(01:30:47):
When you're cohesive with what your
customer came in the door thinking,
or you at least create
the idea of cohesion,
that's when someone's going to buy it.
They want to be in control of what
they're doing. Yes. I love that.
How about, how about that? Right. That's
something I commonly hear.
People want to buy, but they don't want
to be sold. Right. Right. Okay, cool.
So, and I love the term you use about
(01:31:08):
compassionate interrogation. That's, uh,
that that's fantastic.
That's the first time I've heard that
specific phrase be used before.
And I really like it.
So I want to kind of get into the
perception of this a
little bit because I've,
I've known this perception
of sales and salespeople to
infiltrate in multiple different areas.
And I'll explain what I mean.
So I've seen business owners hesitant to
(01:31:31):
bring on salespeople for their
organization because of the
perception of salespeople.
I've seen people that are good at being
themselves and actually selling
something shy away from doing that for a
living because of the perception of
sales and, and, and
salespeople. And, and, you know, I,
I like to talk about this and I think
that there is a, uh,
(01:31:52):
a direct parallel here with the
perception of being a
salesman compared to the
perception of being a
HVAC technician, right?
There are elements
that people don't know,
but they use their own facets to assume.
And so I kind of want to understand a
little better about, you know,
that perception of a salesman and why
(01:32:12):
it's such a hindrance to people.
Like what, what are we missing, Luke?
Well, traditionally a salesperson is
thought to be someone that talks you into
spending money that
you didn't want to spend,
talks you into spending more buying more,
extending your loan term,
extending the dollar amount
financed, you know, buying extra,
instead of buying a
(01:32:33):
mattress for your master bedroom,
buying the mattress
for your master bedroom,
but the furniture for the nursery for the
kid that you haven't even had yet that
you're thinking about conceiving,
like historically salespeople have been
the person that tried to take interest
and turn it into a
home run at your expense.
Also talk you into doing
things that you don't want to do,
which is fundamentally flawed.
That's a logical fallacy because human
(01:32:54):
beings will not do something they don't
want to do. No matter how good of a
goddamn salesperson you are,
you cannot convince somebody to do
something that they don't want to do.
That's just plain and simple. You would
have to exude physical force.
And at that point you're not a
salesperson, right? You're, you're a,
you're a criminal. Okay. Um, but people
believe that salespeople are nefarious
(01:33:16):
actors because it's been ingrained to
their thinking, right? Furthermore,
it's also, it's like, you know,
you can tell somebody that a Ford truck
is a piece of crap, right?
They're the most trusted longest lasting
pickup truck on the road,
according to some commercial somewhere.
But if you say found on road dead or fix
or repaired daily, well,
every time there's a broken Ford,
(01:33:36):
they're going to pay attention to it and
it's going to continue to,
to be an addendum to what their thought
process was as far as Ford's being a
bad vehicle. Now you tell people that
salespeople are scummy.
They can go buy a
refrigerator and enjoy the process.
They can go buy a
dishwasher and enjoy the process,
a house and enjoy the process.
And then dental work and be upsold by a
dental technician, enjoy the process.
(01:33:57):
But then a car salesperson talks them
into buying an extended warranty and a
rust and dust package.
It's too expensive and their car payment
goes up by a hundred bucks and they
didn't want it to. Well now you're right.
Salespeople are scumbags, right?
So it's, it's a very slippery slope, man.
And realistically the most effective
salespeople I know are the ones that have
made peace with the fact that they're
(01:34:19):
good. They're good people.
Their customers know
that they're good people.
They do write by people and they just
execute. But for those who are,
I don't want to say weak of mind,
but maybe don't have the history or the
background or the experience to be
super, super self-confident,
they can very easily fall into that trap
that it is a nefarious career.
(01:34:40):
All right. I appreciate that explanation.
That, that really helps to, uh, uh,
that helps me understand kind of where it
comes from. I, I had,
I had an idea, you know, but that was a,
that was a very succinct, um,
explanation. Can I, can I augment that? I
just want to add on. Yeah. Okay.
So because you talked about something I
think is incredibly important,
which is business owners not wanting to
hire salespeople, you know,
(01:35:01):
you get this
entrepreneur, he's an HVAC guy.
He goes out, sells all his
own jobs, does a great job.
And all of a sudden because he's so damn
good at what he does,
his phone's ringing off
the hook, right? Yeah. Patty,
his neighbors referring
him to this one, Mike,
the doctor that he just installed an
overhead system for his referring him to
his buddy who owns a gym and da da da.
Next thing you know, he's like, ah,
and it's like, dude, just
expand scale, bro. Like, okay.
(01:35:23):
So he gets another guy then
that guy's doing good work,
but it's not quite enough incoming
business to sustain him and that guy.
So it's like, well, now
that guy's an expense.
Now he's taking food out of my mouth
because on the days that I don't get the
referral phone calls, he's, I'm having to
keep him busy and he's taking on my job.
So it's like, well, what do we do? We'll
do to hire a sales guy.
Oh, I ain't freaking hiring a sales guy.
(01:35:45):
They're more trouble
than they're worth. Why?
The reason being salespeople at large
are a very diverse array of people. Okay.
Good salespeople,
really good
salespeople are one very small
(01:36:06):
subset of people.
And the people who are very good
salespeople are
generally also people who have
ADD. That is just
reality. Okay. They are verbose.
They are outgoing.
They can handle many things going on at
one time and they're very hyperactive.
That's why they're a great salesperson.
(01:36:27):
But if you understand that ADD is a
relative lack of dopamine in the brain,
then you understand that you can draw two
things very much together,
which is good salespeople are usually
addicts in some way, shape, or form.
They have a drug addiction.
They have a sex addiction.
They have an alcohol
addiction, a gambling addiction.
(01:36:48):
Everybody right now that's listening to
this is going, holy shit,
I never put those two
together. Or maybe they have,
or maybe they said that most drug good,
good salespeople are addicts,
but they never brought in the dopamine
lack, the ADD piece to it.
But every good salesperson I know, Josh,
everybody that I don't mean good,
like good, I mean like good,
(01:37:08):
like the kick ass guys that everybody
wishes they had on their sales crew also
come with a significant amount of
baggage. So that right there is what,
like you don't hear about the low, the
low level people, right?
Your business always talk, always talking
about their number one guy. Yeah, man,
Zach just fricking sold 13 jobs for me
last week. Yeah. Well,
then we couldn't find them from Friday
through Monday because he was in a
crackdown on the South side,
(01:37:31):
but dude he came back on Tuesday with the
same damn clothes he left on Thursday,
sold me another 27 jobs. And then the
onlooker goes, I don't want that.
I don't want that.
I'm not going to hire a salesperson
because we don't hear
the stories about the
dull roar. We hear the stories about the
spikes on the EKG, right? Yeah.
The people that who
rise above. So, you know,
it's just like you'd never
(01:37:51):
seen a purple Corvette before,
but now that you see one,
you see them everywhere.
Like when you hear a few stories about
salespeople and then you hear that
sentiment continue to resonate amongst
other people who talk about their sales
people,
you eventually create this collective
understanding that if I'm going to hire a
good salesperson, he's
also going to be a nut job.
So I think that has a
lot to do with it as well.
(01:38:12):
Interesting. All right. I
know we're bumping up on the,
on the top of the hour here. I have three
more questions for you real quick.
So the first one is then how would I find
what I would consider or what you
would consider an incredible salesperson
as a business owner?
How would I find that person?
So if you'd asked me that
answer, uh, a month ago,
I probably would have told
(01:38:33):
you just to use your gut.
And if you're sitting with somebody that
looks like they're full of shit and
feels like they're full of shit, they're
probably full of shit. Um, but you know,
I travel a lot and I, and I work and I
consult with a lot of companies.
And one gentleman who owns a very large
company out of the Southern part of the
United States, I spent a week, um, in a
different state with
him and his team. Um,
and we, we taught, we went to dinner and
we ended up spending three hours at
(01:38:53):
dinner because it just, you know, when,
when great minds get together,
they just, I would say great minds when
similar minds get together.
I didn't mean to sound arrogant. Uh, but
when deep thinkers get together,
we think deep, right? And he was
piggybacking off me and
I was pinging ideas off
him. And one of the things that he has
found to be a good solution. And I would,
I would pass this information along as
the gospel because this guy's a very,
(01:39:14):
very strong entrepreneur. Um,
it's taken him a lot of time and money to
find the appropriate assessments,
but he leans heavily on assessments, like
personality assessments.
He's got a hundred page personality
assessment profile
that he puts his people
through and his last seven hires,
he's been able to call to a T whether
they were good, long lasting,
(01:39:35):
honorable, virtuous salespeople. And he's
got an extremely strong sales force.
So if you're asking Luke wonk from paid
to persuade, I would tell you,
if it feels like bullshit,
it's probably bullshit, right?
And if it seems too good to be true, it's
probably too good to be true,
but you're going to have to, if you want
one good salesperson,
you're going to have to hire three or
four and put them all on the street and
crank your marketing budget up a little
(01:39:57):
bit and let them all try to eat.
And you'll eventually see who produces
that seven out of a 10 production level,
but also has 4.8 out of
five stars for you on Google.
That's the guy that
you're going to want to hire.
And when you get that guy or girl, you
just take that person,
invest in training,
coaching, and skill building,
and you will get an 8.5 out
(01:40:17):
of 10 with good CSI ratings.
And I think that's
what everybody's after,
but I can tell you it would be worth
looking into those personality assessment
profiles. I certainly
am. And I can tell you,
it's pretty profound with AI and with the
years of experience that we have from
Sigmund Freud and everybody else that
have dove in deep or dove rather deep
(01:40:38):
inside the human mind.
But you can pretty much figure somebody
out by asking them a series of quite a
few questions.
They're wild disc Colby predictive index,
culture index, all those, uh,
all those things I've taken all of them
and it's amazing how scary accurate
they are. Yeah. So, all right, no, I
appreciate their response. Okay. Second
question. Uh, before we, uh, before we
(01:40:59):
wrap up one more after this has,
what is the most
important question I didn't ask?
Probably why,
why is it important to spend money and
invest in yourself? Um, you know,
I train salespeople for a living.
So naturally I'm
looking at everybody going,
you should be paying me
(01:41:20):
money to train you. Right. Um,
and that's not from a, a, a greedy angle
or it's just that every human being
that we train who is in sales ends up
better. And it's, it's not because,
you know, it's because of our methods.
It's because of, you know,
what we teach and the skills that we
(01:41:41):
teach, but more importantly,
we are the only sales training company in
existence and I've done the research
that doesn't allow you to
just take our sales training.
You can't just come to P2P and be like,
okay, I want the P2P method.
Here's my 2000 bucks. Let's roll.
Like you have to engage in our lifestyle
and mindset training.
Like you have to take our mindset
(01:42:02):
training and
development before you can take
our sales training because otherwise it
would be like me handing you a bunch of
bricks with no
wheelbarrow, no mortar mix, no water,
no trowel, no buckets, no experts. Like
here's your bricks, build your house.
Like, yeah, we need the bricks to build
the house and those are going to be
there, but there's so much more to it
that if you don't
understand all this other
(01:42:22):
minutia, you're never going to be able to
build a strong livable house.
So when it comes to self
investment, most people buy books,
they buy books and they read books.
The problem with that is there's nothing
to carry through those teachings,
right? Like you can't buy how to win
friends and influence people and then hop
on a weekly coaching call with Dale
(01:42:43):
Carnegie to ask him what he really meant
about chapter number
three, right? So, um,
I strongly encourage people to,
and whether it's with my
company or anybody else, okay,
if you have salespeople or you sell for a
living or you persuade,
influence clothes in any way, shape or
form to develop that skill,
because it is the one single solitary
(01:43:04):
skill that can move the needle greater
than anything else, right? You can lower
your product cost. You can,
you know, lower your payroll expenses.
You can do lower your travel budget.
You can buy a plane instead of flying on
what you do all these things,
but if you just bump your top line by a
million bucks a year,
there's really nothing that
(01:43:24):
can compete with that. Okay.
And when people do not have their,
if they're not closing 15 to
20% above industry average,
that disparity exists. Meaning this,
when you just go and open a business,
you're going to, if you get decent people
and you have an okay training,
you're going to meet industry average
type numbers. When you have strong,
(01:43:48):
very, very strong training with strict
follow through and ongoing support,
you can get generally
15 to 20%. It's proven.
And we hit these numbers are well above
sometimes that type of increase above
the bar. So my point is,
unless you're doing that,
you're leaving all
that money on the table.
So one of the biggest things I try to
share with people is, you know,
start small,
(01:44:08):
just you don't have to go in and spend 30
grand on a mastermind and private code.
Just get something,
get something that's ongoing mentorship
and maintenance and a product that
claims to get you X, Y, or Z thing and
try three or four, you know,
don't just try one and say that didn't
work or it only worked this well.
Because the rule of thumb is the same
thing with employees.
(01:44:29):
Just like I said, with the salespeople,
when you get access to
three or four different ones,
you're going to find one that
strikes a significant chord.
And the changes that people undergo when
they get access to that,
just to give you an example, the
gentleman I was just
talking to you about,
okay, owns a service industry business
out of the Southern part of the United
States. He has 16 sales reps. They do
(01:44:49):
business in three different states,
project managers, work vehicles, van, the
whole nine yards, right?
They have a cancellation rate of like 21%
for every 10 of their item that they
sold. They took two cancellations. Okay.
And then their closing ratio when they
started working with us was 28 to 32%.
Okay. After working with us,
they run an average of a
(01:45:11):
52% closing ratio. Okay.
So that is almost double.
Think about what that means for their
bottom line. And not only that,
we lowered their cancellation rate by 21,
26 to, to five. So 21%.
So a net gain of what?
50%. Okay. Or excuse me,
38%, whatever the math
is for who's listening.
My point is that the amount of gratitude
(01:45:34):
that that company showed us for just
doing what we did and
teaching what we taught.
And we get on a call once a week with our
salespeople and they're laughing,
clapping, happy to see it. Cause
everybody's making
more fricking money, man.
And it's all because we gave them access
to fundamental skills and framework
that we know because we've
done this for 25 years and we've,
we've done all the sampling and we've
done all the research. So long drawn out,
(01:45:55):
Donald Trump weave of an answer to your
question, but take a risk, man,
compartmentalize five grand to your
budget and just say,
I'm going to go shoot this out into the
wild blue yonder and access some,
some training resources. I promise you,
one of those is going to be a good fit.
Amazing man. That's, that's fantastic.
One last simple question for you and you
might've already answered it.
(01:46:15):
I don't know, but I'm
gonna ask it anyway.
If you could share one
piece of wisdom or advice, Luke,
that has the potential to transform the
way that a small business or a small
blue collar business owner thinks about
success or growth or freedom.
As you put it, what would it be?
Yeah. Satisfy your customer. Yeah.
(01:46:36):
There's, there is no,
nothing usurps that. Okay.
And if you want some sort of high dollar
guru to anchor it to, okay.
Jeff Bezos, when he's
interviewed, they always ask,
what's the secret to
your success? He was like,
you know, I've answered this question
many times. So for many interviews,
it's just ruthless desire
to satisfy our customer.
(01:46:58):
We just constantly are thinking of better
ways to make our customers experience
better. And that just yields us more
money each year. And it's like, okay,
goofball, like you make it seem so damn
simple, Mr. Billionaire,
Mr. Blue Origin rocket, but
then you step back, right?
And one of the things I've
learned to do as an entrepreneur,
as a human being is just
go up to the 10th story,
(01:47:18):
walk out to the balcony and
look down on the situation.
Stop hanging out at the street level when
you don't understand something or it
doesn't resonate with you, walk up a few
floors and look down on it and say,
what is, what are we really saying here?
And it's so fundamentally simple, man,
when a company just focuses on tying up
all the loose ends in their
business, the CSI stuff,
(01:47:40):
the, the, the follow up stuff,
the making sure we clean the
nails off their yard stuff,
the making sure that if
they refer us a customer,
we do pay them the referral fee,
making sure that if we've ordered their
product and it's not been dropped on
their lawn yet that we call them every
day with an update, Hey,
we're still good for Thursday, Tuesday.
Hey, we're still good for Thursday.
(01:48:00):
Wednesday. Hey, we're
still good for Thursday.
Why like calling them every day when I
told them on Monday,
it was going to be there Thursday because
communication is key and touch points
mean everything to a customer. And if you
as a business owner,
simply wake up in the morning and go,
how can I make my
customer experience better today?
Your business will naturally grow without
you even having to put in the effort.
Amazing. I truly
(01:48:21):
appreciate that answer and the, uh,
and the practicality of it,
Luke. All right, with that,
I know we're a little bit past the hour.
I'm going to let you go before that.
Where can people find you? Where can
people find paid to persuade, uh,
give us the digs, man. Yeah, man. I
appreciate that. So, you know,
if somebody's looking from
a, from a business aspect,
if they'd like me to potentially talk to
their team, train their team,
pick my brain on that. Um,
(01:48:41):
we have a very edgy looking website
because we've put the old website back up
while they're building out the new one,
but it's paid to persuade.com the word
paid P I D the number two, and then the
word persuade, which is you a D E,
because it's commonly misspelled as a U D
E, but paid the number two persuade.com
just click any of the
call to action buttons.
Those all book a call directly to my
calendar. They can talk to me.
Luke, I've got a question for you.
How can sales change the world?
Already has brother.
Um, sales is the world.
If you ask me now, everybody that you
talk to that's in their respective
disciplines, probably
going to feel the same way,
but I don't know of many other industries
where someone can tell you that they
(01:00:42):
are the precursor for quite literally
everything that transpires in a
transaction. I mean,
what is the first line on a profit and
loss statement, right? It's your revenue.
It's your sales sales drives
that, right? So without sales,
we don't have everything that follows,
but I understand the meat and potatoes of
your question and it's really quite
(01:01:03):
simple.
I believe that there is a void that
exists and there's a,
a large subset of people that could be
experiencing tremendously more income
than they are right now.
People who are in
career type fields that are,
you know, I don't want to use the word
(01:01:23):
ancillary, but like for instance,
somebody who may be working in the
restaurant business,
who is a hard worker and their job
demands a lot of them, uh,
and they're a tremendous waiter or
waitress. They're very conversational.
They can build rapport in a split second.
They know how to work for
the extra tip. They just,
they just have what I
call the it factor. Okay.
That person is going to
make maybe 50, 70, 80 grand,
(01:01:45):
or if they moved to Vegas,
150 by relocating and
finding the right, you know,
the right tree that bears
the appropriate fruit. However,
you can be in a rural environment and
that person could go into automobile
sales, furniture sales,
pharmaceutical sales and make a quarter
of a million dollars plus because it is
such a high earning industry for somebody
(01:02:06):
who's a performer that the,
the earning potential is quite unlimited.
So what I'm saying for your question is
this sales can change the world because
if it's administered correctly,
meaning if somebody or the collective can
make sales an appealing thing for
everybody, meaning make sales an
acceptable thing and not a taboo, uh,
(01:02:26):
fringe job that people do if they don't
have a college degree or they're trying
to make money in between things that
people could respect
sales and sales could
be respected to where somebody could put
a sales job right up there with doctor,
lawyer, dentist, anesthesiologist,
airplane pilot, salesperson,
then a lot of people I believe would open
up their mind and allow themselves
(01:02:48):
access to a career that would be
substantially more
lucrative for them. Um,
so simply put sales could change the
world by giving a much,
much larger subset of people an
opportunity to make a
hell of a lot more money.
That's an incredible answer. So who
should go into sales?
It's a good question.
My knee jerk response would be anybody
(01:03:09):
who feels like their potential is higher
than their current rate of pay, uh, and
enjoys conversation, right?
So I can take an introvert, you know,
and for those people who don't know,
I train salespeople for a living and I
can take an introvert and I can make them
an effective salesperson. Okay. Um,
you can give somebody who's not a natural
conversationalist the appropriate
(01:03:30):
framework and they can make
six figures plus a year. Um,
if you're the kind of person who
absolutely is thrilled by conversation,
debate, um, you know,
loves to win an argument, uh,
gets, gets a dopamine rush from getting
somebody to say yes,
or getting a girl to agree
to go on a date or a guide,
(01:03:51):
I'll let you borrow his
car, whatever the case may be.
If you get a rush off
of winning an argument,
you will be well placed in
sales because you know, they,
they tell you that the most profitable or
the most fruitful that you will be is
if you're doing
something that you love. Um,
and there's a whole rabbit hole that we
can go down there about dopamine and
natural, uh, people with naturally
(01:04:11):
occurring dopamine
deficits and where those
people find a home in sales because of
the dopamine rush that it gets.
And there's a whole
substrata there that we can go into,
but people that like to win arguments,
people that like to not
have a ceiling on their income,
the guy that's working in
the factory that says, man,
I benched 38 more
pieces today than that guy.
But we walked out both
making $18 in our, you know,
(01:04:33):
eight hours that we work
today. That guy should try sales.
The guy that's waiting tables and wants
to make 200 grand a year,
that guy or gal should try sales.
And anybody else who has that burning
desire to make stupid money or F U money,
but doesn't have a college degree, nor do
they want to go into academia,
they should try sales and I could go on
forever, but that's at least a start.
That is way more of an answer than I was
(01:04:54):
expecting. If I'm being honest with you,
that's, that's
incredible, Luke. Okay. So, so that,
that's awesome. We're gonna
talk all about that today.
Tell me if you'd be so
kind, how you got here.
Yeah, man. Like so concise version. Uh, I
grew up, dad was a car sales person.
I was a football player, uh, you know,
(01:05:15):
legacy car dealer family.
I was going to be the
guy that broke the mold.
So worked real hard, played football, got
a scholarship, busted up my shoulder,
lost a scholarship, went into the
workforce, got a
surgery, screwed up to surgery,
uh, got addicted to painkillers, spent 10
years addicted to painkillers.
Eventually robbed a bank, went to prison
after prison, got better,
changed my moral compass, you know, got
(01:05:35):
some, um, some value and some, uh,
some mentorship and then
decided to go back into sales,
but with a completely different outlook
on what sales was and what it could be.
Um, and then that readjustment or
realignment of my
moral compass and a shift
in what my goals were, meaning it was no
longer to talk people out of their
(01:05:55):
money and try to get a quick one hit.
It was to try to establish relationships
network and build a career in sales.
Um, that, that transformation put me into
this because I eventually learned that
sales was not this raised by wolves,
snake oil salesperson,
sell the ketchup popsicle to the lady
with white gloves and a tomato allergy
before the other guy does.
(01:06:15):
Like once I learned that this could
actually be an honorable career, um, that
would, that would help people and make me
a ton of money. Um, you know, that's,
that's what got me here.
So it was quite a backstory.
That's the most
interesting nutshell I've ever heard.
Okay. So let's see,
where do we start? Um,
(01:06:38):
all right. I, uh, I want a
little bit more context on
robbing the bank. Everybody always does.
Yeah, of course. And, and, and, and,
and listen, I told you before the show,
if I, if I overstep at all, just, uh,
just let me know. No, not at all,
brother. No, I appreciate that. So,
so I need to understand
(01:06:58):
where your head was at. Why,
why?
Yeah. So here's the thing, man, when
you're ruthlessly addicted to opiate
medication, um, you're going to do
whatever it takes to get that drug.
And what's funny is you, you give
somebody these pieces, drug addict,
desperation, bank
robber, and they go, ah,
(01:07:19):
desperate guy was high, went into a bank
to steal money. It's like, no,
it was the antithesis of that. Okay.
Very lucid guy who was very aware of what
he was doing and was not high and had
all his mental faculties about him was in
a position where he was stone sober and
in a lot of physical pain because he was
(01:07:41):
a, he was a drug addict.
And if you're addicted to opiates, you
get a very bad
physical reaction, you know,
detox slash withdrawal that you get when
you don't have your drug.
So you're in this bone
chilling, bone aching spine,
tingling state of pain and you're in your
girlfriend's car and you realize she's
leaving you, you have no money. Your
family won't talk to you.
(01:08:01):
Your skin and bones,
everything in your life has come to an
absolute standstill
and there's nothing in
front of you, but a brick wall. Um,
the only way to circumnavigate that brick
wall is to get high because it will
change your mental state and you will no
longer be in so much mental pain.
Furthermore, you're in tremendous
physical pain and then
you drive by a bank and
(01:08:22):
go, man, you know what?
If I go in there and rob
them, they're not armed.
They're not going to shoot me.
I know I'll at least get out the door and
into the car and I can probably get to
the dealer's house before
the cops catch up to me.
So I can at least get something up my
nose and get a buzz before I go to prison
for the next seven years of my life.
(01:08:42):
That's what I was thinking. Um,
subconsciously many years later, I can
tell you, I was also thinking,
dear God,
please let me get caught so they can take
control from me and I'm no longer in
control of my own decisions because I
will never get clean because I can't
mentally and I can't physically.
So it was a
constellation of two things really.
(01:09:02):
So it wouldn't
necessarily be a constellation,
more of a dichotomy.
And I was in a position where part of me
said, take the control from me,
take the steering wheel, because all I'm
going to do is drive it into a wall.
And the other part of me said,
I really don't know what to do with this
overwhelming pile of emotions because
I'm sober and I'm not used to being this
way. I must get high now.
And there was a drug shortage.
So the only way I was getting drugs was
(01:09:23):
with a significant amount of money. Um,
you know, three, four times the normal
prices, what they were going for.
So at that moment it was
like, okay, most feasible thing,
get a lot of money,
potentially get arrested and not have to
worry about this disease anymore and
have somebody take control from me. You
know, all these things at once.
And I can tell you,
man, it was very simple.
It was just, I drove
by, I thought about it.
(01:09:43):
And then something in
me just snapped and said,
this is what I'm doing. And I did it.
Is that what you arrested for?
Yes. Yeah. I've been arrested
many times, but most recently,
and most notably for bank robbery.
Okay. So I I'm not
going to, I'm not going to,
to focus on the personal side. I'm so
curious about the sales side,
but I have one more question. When did it
turn for you? When did, when did,
(01:10:04):
was there a single realization that you
were on the wrong path?
Or is this a slow burn,
a culmination of multiple events where
you looked at yourself in the mirror and
said, I've got to change something. And
when did that happen?
So it was in prison.
It was stone sober. Um,
it was with cockroaches crawling on my
legs and the smell of stale urine and
(01:10:25):
fecal matter three feet away from where I
put my head at night. And just,
I remember it was about four o'clock in
the morning and I was in the upper
gallery of Elmira reception, which looks
like Shawshank prison.
If you've ever seen the movie. Um,
and this is in like the Southwest portion
of New York. It's four in the morning.
I'm exhausted. I've
been chained to a bus.
We've been traveling for five, six hours
that day and no food, male nourish,
(01:10:47):
no hygiene products, sweaty three days
worth of the same outfit and just laying
there in my own filth.
And all you could hear was screaming and
yelling and swearing and
threats and laughing and joy.
It was just, it was just criminals, man.
(01:11:07):
It was just felons, murderers,
rapists, thieves, which I
fell into that category,
just hooting and
hollering and screaming all night.
And there was no escape from it. You put
the pillow over your head.
You still heard it. You put your
headphones in. You still heard it. You,
it didn't matter.
You could not escape the maniacal noise
that occurred and echoed off of all the
(01:11:27):
concrete and metal inside that galley.
And right then and there, man,
I just said, I don't know what the rules
are for swearing on this podcast.
So I said, fuck this.
I said, fuck this man.
This is not me. I am not, I am not a
bad-ass. I'm not a criminal.
I'm not a, I'm a fucking drug addict.
(01:11:48):
That's what I am. And I got to fix it.
And in that moment, um, but well,
probably an hour later,
I had a guy come by one of the porters
and he handed me a Valium and said,
here, this will help you sleep. I know
you're having trouble.
And I pushed it right back at him and
said, no, thank you. I'm all done. And,
you know, that was one of many
realizations that happened,
but that's the most vivid.
And I can tell you as somebody who was
detoxing and experiencing very vivid,
(01:12:11):
real, very sharp sounds and emotions,
it's very difficult to explain to anybody
that's never been through it. Uh,
but if you could consider when you've had
your worst fever and your body is just
in a complete state of shock and the
blanket feels
scratchy on your skin and the
pillow case feels thick and moist with
sweat on the back of your neck.
(01:12:32):
And it's just everything is
hypersensitive. The,
the school bus goes by,
the tractor trailer Jake breaks.
And it's like someone's beating a drum
against your head like 24 seven days
after days after days after
days. And at some point, um,
it just becomes too much. And in that
moment for me, it was,
it was too much and I'd
had enough. And that's,
that's where the change probably pivoted
(01:12:52):
for the first point.
All right. Well, I appreciate your
transparency, Luke. Um,
I am curious what lessons did you take
away from that to help your career?
From that moment or just criminality at
large or from your history,
from, from the whole
thing, from your either point,
(01:13:13):
it's the foundation of my career,
which is I lived my life for 29 years in
a way that the people that mentored me
and raised me taught me that get one over
on somebody as quickly and viciously as
you can, because somebody's going to,
it may as well be you and we're not the
(01:13:35):
type of people or family that has any
particular skills or talents or money.
So you're going to have to get it how you
live and how we live is by talking
people into doing stuff, uh,
at a very high dollar amount for a very low point of entry. You know, I,
I was raised by a dad who loved me very
much and was a good man deep down inside,
(01:13:56):
but he had been taught by his father to
buy a rusty car and bond all the frame
together and double the price and sell
it. And if it breaks when he leaves,
Hey man, I'll tell you, it's a used car.
It is what it is. You know,
this is the type of thing that was
ingrained in me since
I was young, you know,
flip something,
polish the turd and get as much money as
you can for it. And that was just,
that was the precursor to my life. That's just who I became.
No matter what I did, I was a bullshit
(01:14:19):
artist. I was a pathological liar.
Whatever I had to say to get whatever
needed to be done is what I did.
Um, and you know, moving forward, having
gone through that inflection point,
you know, you realize out
the backside of it. First,
what happens for me is
I was like, okay, well,
I'm going to have to go
back down to being a pussy.
Like I'm just going to have to be one of
(01:14:40):
the normal rank and file.
I'm not going to be a shark anymore.
I'm just going to be some schmuck who rakes his head. Spence is for a building and no
disrespect to anybody
that does those things.
But that was my mindset. And I'm going to
be candid with you. You know,
I was taught that the
working man was a sucker, you know,
talk people into giving you their money,
sell them something and make a margin and
make your money. Um,
(01:15:00):
so at that point it was
like, okay, I just, uh,
80 grand a year white picket fence.
I'll find some wife named Sally and have
a Labrador and two kids.
And I guess that's just
what life's going to be.
And I'm not going to be a man who's going to be a man who's going to be a man who life's going to be. You know, I was
so limited in my thinking, man.
I was so frigging limited in my thinking,
but what that good clean moral compass
represented for me was
(01:15:21):
freedom and not having to live sleeping
with one eye closed anymore.
And I was willing to make that trade off.
You know, here on my desk,
you see the statue of Themis. She's the
goddess of justice and good reason. Um,
there's a statue of Themis just about
everywhere that I spend time in my life.
And that's because she represents to me
that you have to live your life in
(01:15:41):
balance. And what I,
the determination that I made at that
point was that there was going to have to
be a trade off in my life. And that trade
off was going to be in one hand,
I wasn't going to be the rock star
million dollar
salesperson that I'd always
wanted to be. But in the other hand, I
was going to have freedom. I was going to
have, you know,
I was going to be free from having to
look over my shoulder and sleep with one
(01:16:02):
eye open and I would be in a position to
actually live a life that I could be
proud of.
Hell yeah. All right. That's great. All
right. First piece of advice.
If you could give
advice to one person or to,
to somebody going
through a hard time right now,
similar to what you would
probably call rock bottom,
what would that advice be?
Somebody going through
(01:16:22):
rock bottom, um, man,
there's a lot of
different things that you can say.
And without further context, it's,
it's difficult to make just an
overarching statement.
But what I can tell you is this,
people say things for a reason, right?
There's a saying I have. And if it's,
if you're, you're in a room and there's
99 people wearing raincoats and you got a
white t-shirt on, eventually someone's
(01:16:43):
going to see your nipples. Okay.
And what that means is,
is if you're in an environment and you
see that the entire collective is
moving or behaving in a
different way that you are, um,
then you're probably wrong. Okay. Um, and
I mean that not like as an innovative
thing. Like if you say you've got a great
idea and a hundred people say it's
bad, I'm just talking
(01:17:04):
about if there's, you know,
something that you're doing against the
grain with and you're being told, uh,
that it's probably not a great idea by
people who have been there,
have experienced it,
so on and so forth. Um,
there's a great chance that you're wrong.
The flip side of that coin is, and what
I'm going to say here is if there is a
collective of people, uh,
or a significant amount of people that
have said something in regards to the
(01:17:26):
pain of being
downtrodden or being in a low spot,
that it's probably right.
So things like, you know,
pain is temporary is very
true. Things like, you know,
it's always darkest
before the dawn is very true.
Things like adversity is simply what
builds strength on the
other side, you know,
or any other variation
(01:17:46):
of that statement is true.
And here's what it boils down to. You can
only fail if you throw in the towel.
Okay. There, there is no failure in
misgiving or mistakes or
shortcomings or trips and falls.
The only way that you can be considered a
failure and that you've truly just
(01:18:06):
fucked it all up is if you throw in the
towel and you quit and to kind of augment
that statement,
I would ask the person going through that
dark period to then reflect on all of
the people that they revere in their
life, the people that
they look at and say,
man, if I can only be like
that person and pick one,
maybe two of those people
(01:18:27):
out and set them up on a,
on a virtual pedestal in
your head and say, okay,
if I were to go
interview those two people,
would they likely tell me that their life
has been relatively easy,
that they were given a lot of success at
the outset and didn't have to work for
much and that the path to, you know,
success or wealth or freedom or whatever
(01:18:49):
it is that you're after,
what wasn't riddled with issues. The
chances of that being the reality are,
it's almost silly to say, right?
Take anybody that's accomplished a great
thing and they either spent time in
prison, spend time addicted to drugs, got
divorced by their wife,
lost their leg. Like, you
know, look at Marcus Latrell.
He's the author of a lone survivor. Mark
(01:19:11):
Wahlberg made a movie about him.
I met Mr. Latrell, um, the
great American that he is at a,
at when I spoke and did a keynote at the
same place that he spoke at.
And that guy at one point
had everything taken from him.
He had his gun taken from him.
He had all six or seven of his platoon
mates killed in front of him,
(01:19:33):
slayed, murdered.
He was taken into a village that was
foreign to him. He was like,
he was in a place where nothing was
familiar to him. He had no clothes,
no food, no money, no weapons, no
defense. He was physically abused.
He was emaciated. He was sick. And yet he
still got up every day.
He still bathed himself. He still
nourished himself. He still had hope.
(01:19:55):
He was told by the United States Navy
that he was an expendable asset.
And if he were ever to be
lost behind enemy lines,
he may as well take his own life because
they weren't coming for him.
Yet he persevered. And now he's got a
movie made after him.
He's a bestselling author.
He goes on speaking tours,
and he always has the scars of those
memories in his mind,
(01:20:15):
but he was on Rogan, you know, not too
far back, talking about his experience.
My point is he went from hell to
superstardom all
because he simply persevered
and pushed through, but
it ain't fucking easy, man.
Like everybody wants
that instant gratification.
Everybody wants to be in that shit
situation and go, well,
just throw me the life preserver.
Like what's the one lever I can pull to
(01:20:37):
just make this go away? It's not,
it's going to require you
to dig with a small shovel.
It's going to require you to stack rocks
so you can get out of the hole.
It's going to require you to get dirt
under your fingernails and you're
probably going to bleed
sweat and cry a little bit.
But on the other side of it, once you've
been through that thing,
you will be far more powerful a human
than you ever
considered that you could be
(01:20:57):
because you never considered you would
get through such a tragedy.
So shut the fuck up, keep pushing,
grab ahold of your balls and get it done
because on the other side of it,
there's something so incredible that you,
you can't fathom getting through the pain
so you can't possibly fathom the
victory that waits on the other side.
That's the advice that I would give
somebody going through that.
It's pretty damn good
advice, Luke. I appreciate it.
(01:21:18):
I'm about to run through a brick wall
right now because this is fantastic.
And I really love what you said.
My dad actually instilled that in me
years ago that you only fail when you
quit. Right. And, and, and so I'm a big
believer in that. I'm, uh, uh,
everything in my life I've, I've applied
that philosophy too. And, uh,
and it's true. I mean, it, it truly is,
(01:21:39):
but, uh, unfortunately,
I believe it's one of those things that
you have to do it to believe it.
You know, it's hard to
tell somebody that, right?
Especially if they're
at rock bottom, you know,
how many people probably told you that
when you were at rock bottom and what the
hell did you say to them?
You know what I mean? And so,
I appreciate that advice and I want to
call that out because if there's anybody
like, eh, you know, I don't know what the
fuck this guy is talking about, you
(01:22:00):
know, maybe,
maybe just reminding them that it's one
of those things they have to experience
is enough to get them to experience it.
So thank you for that, Luke.
I appreciate it. Let's get back on the
track of sales. Um, I, uh,
I think that there's a lot that my
listeners can learn from you. So I'm, um,
I'm curious, you teach this stuff, right?
So, so is there a framework
(01:22:21):
or are there fundamentals?
Is there like some kind of baseline thing
that you say you've got to know this
and be here before you can get here. Tell
me, understand what that looks like.
Yeah. 1000%.
You got to be yourself and
stop trying to be a salesperson.
Everybody thinks there's some particular
voice that you should put on to be a
salesperson, some particular mode that
(01:22:42):
you go into. For instance,
when I train salespeople, I first,
it's kind of a break them
down and build them up process.
The first thing I asked him to do is
pitch me and what I'll do before I asked
him to pitch me, you just have a
conversation with me.
And I always bring up Ricky because
Ricky's a great example.
This one guy long ago ended up being an
employee of mine. I was like,
so Ricky, where are you from? I'm from
Liverpool, New York. And what do you do?
Well, I used to be a security guard at
(01:23:03):
the hospital and what do you have any
kids? Oh, I got my little baby girl.
She's just the apple of my
eye. And what do you do for fun?
I like to like to talk a little pot and
play some video games and dirt.
And I'm like, okay, all right,
man. We'll give me your pitch.
Why are you there? Mr. Luke, welcome to
this car dealership.
How are you? Nice to meet you, man.
That's a lovely little
boy you got with you today.
And I just looked at him and said, who
the fuck is that guy? What?
(01:23:25):
I was just talking to Ricky a few minutes
ago. Who the hell is this guy?
And we discover at length and at scale,
where we talked to many, many, many,
many people that human beings and it's
because of media and movies and the
things that they've learned and the
things that are embedded into them from
childhood, that a salesperson is someone
who talks like this and Oh yeah, man,
(01:23:46):
that's just a great
product. It's the city,
the sea mixer 5,000 and it's got rotating
blades and a low frequency.
It's like, stop. That's,
that's a radio announcer, right?
People tend to put on a character when
they go to sell, right?
Even door to door guys, right? They'll
go, all right, let's get ready.
Let's get ready. And it's like,
(01:24:06):
that is the antithesis of what you should
be doing as a salesperson.
Because if you're a customer, we teach
something in P2P, uh,
it's paid to persuade for the
people that aren't familiar.
We teach something called
perspective over perception.
And this is actually something that I
learned from the CIA and in the CIA,
they teach their analysts or their
negotiated. And again, don't,
(01:24:27):
don't take me
verbatim, take it as a concept.
They teach their guys when they're
sitting with an individual,
they're interrogating or they're,
they're negotiating to always be ever
present of what that person is thinking.
How are they viewing the situation?
How are they receiving my tone of voice?
What is their body language?
(01:24:48):
And anybody listening is going, well, of
course, of course we listen to tonality.
Of course we listen
to bi-language. No, no.
What I'm saying to you is quit worrying
about where you want to take the sale
next and become completely immersed in
what is going through your customer's
mind. Okay. It's a very
difficult thing to teach.
It doesn't happen overnight. And anybody
hearing this isn't just going to snap
(01:25:08):
into it. It's something that's learned
and it's got to be iterated upon. But,
you know, that one framework,
that one thing first piece of advice I
would give anybody looking to be more
effective at sales is if this is how you
talk, this is how you sell.
If you hear me try to sell somebody a car
to me, Hey, how you doing, man?
What's going on guy? You
looking for a pickup truck? Cool.
Let's go take a look at
(01:25:28):
them. Not, Hey guys, Hey,
welcome to Smithtown
Ford. How's it going?
We looking for a four by four or what?
Like just knock that shit off.
Not everybody does it, but
it's like seven out of 10.
The other thing I would tell you is that
you must have a basic framework
to operate off of now
and paid to persuade.
We teach something called the big three
and it's effective across the board,
(01:25:50):
every industry. Now I hear a lot of sales
trainers are sales training works in
every industry. No,
your framework may be
good for any kind of sales,
but it requires iteration and build out
for every different industry.
You're not just going to take my book on
selling and go into HVAC and crush it.
Right. You're going to have
to take the principle things,
(01:26:12):
the fundamental things and weave them
into what is done in HVAC or solar or
real estate. Right. So
the best sales trainings,
and of course I'm a
little biased to mine,
but are the ones that have the most
thorough framework. Okay.
And so our big three is
what brought you here today?
(01:26:32):
What is your buying power and what did
you hope to accomplish? Meaning,
these are not questions. Notice I didn't
say word tracks. I didn't say, you know,
specialized questions. And that's, you
know, big thing out there.
They these special questions. Everybody
wants to trademark the English language.
Right. They want to put a few,
few words together, call it a sentence
and say, Oh, this is the,
the trademark, such and such question.
(01:26:52):
It's like, no, it's a fucking question.
Okay. You can't hijack the English
language. Right. So,
but the big three, what brought you here
today? What is your buying power?
What did you hope to accomplish? Well,
I'll get door to door guys. They,
well, nobody brought them here. They're
not coming to my place.
It's like, I understand dummy, but you
had a, you had a cold pitch, right? Yeah.
Okay. Are they still talking to you?
Yeah. Okay. Why, what do you mean? You,
you said X, Y, and Z, and then ask them
(01:27:14):
if they'd listen and they said, yes.
Right. Okay. Why? Well, I don't know.
Well, you got to discover that, right?
You got to figure out
why they're interested.
You got to ask some questions,
interrogate a little
bit, right? Yeah. Okay.
That's what brought you here today. So it
stems from brick and mortar sales.
This was originally
developed for car dealerships. Okay.
So you go into a car dealership. What
brought you here today? Okay. So let's,
(01:27:35):
let's stick to that. Let's say it's a car
dealership. What brought you here today?
The average sales
person's going to go, well, uh,
they said they're looking for a car,
right? Genius. They weren't looking for
dental work. Okay. It's a car dealership,
but, and I'm not a D I C K when I train
people. I'm just, this is for comedic
effect, right? Sure. Of course.
My point is, okay. What brought like
they're looking for a car. Great.
Are they looking for not, are they
(01:27:56):
looking for a four
wheel drive or a red one?
Like did they total their
car? Did their car break down?
Is someone buying them a car?
Did they just get a pre-approval letter
from their credit union?
Like what is the precursor or the
stimulus for this shopping experience?
Or if you're cold knocking, why did they
let you across the threshold?
What is it about your product? They find
industry interesting. Excuse me.
(01:28:17):
So it's a discovery process. That's what
brought you here today.
The second thing is
what is your buying power?
Every sales person in the world knows
that they've showed a
product or a service
and gotten to the end where they've asked
the person to buy the product or a
service only to hear, well, I don't have
the money for that right now.
Or I don't think I'll qualify for the
financing or now it's not a good time.
Okay. So the whole,
the whole basis of this Josh is what we
(01:28:39):
call compassionate interrogation.
Okay. It is a ruthless discovery process
at the outset of the sale.
So for every sales person out there,
if you can interact with your customer in
a way that at the very beginning of
the conversation,
you can solve for what stimulated them to
be doing what they're doing right now,
as far as shopping, number
two, what is their buying power?
(01:29:01):
Do they have money saved up in the bank?
Are they looking to try to
engage with your financing?
Are they credit worthy? All
these things. And then finally,
what do they hope to accomplish? Like
they're meeting with you,
they're talking with you by the time you
get to the end of this conversation,
what are they hoping to accomplish? And
there's a reason for all this, Josh,
you know, today,
90% of buyers are coming to businesses
with a buying decision made.
(01:29:22):
They don't need to be sold. They've
already made up their mind.
The question is, are they going to do
business with you or that guy?
So when they've already
made up that buying decision,
you can go on a discovery
process and quite frankly,
get every objectionable component
eliminated from that sale before you even
ask for the close.
We teach salespeople only to ask for the
clothes when they already know what the
answer is going to be. Okay. So I went
(01:29:42):
off on a little bit of a spin there,
but the basic answer to your
question is remaining yourself,
staying ruthlessly authentic and
questioning your
customer and going through
a significant discovery process at the
beginning of your conversation,
because it will make you about a hundred
times more likely to sell that customer
because you can sidestep objections
before they even come.
(01:30:05):
That's amazing. So, so I like to try to,
to summarize for my audience what I heard
and let you correct me if I'm wrong.
So in, in the simplest form,
what I heard is that
customers buy when they feel
understood
customers buy when they feel like
(01:30:26):
what is occurring is what they wanted to
happen in the first place.
Got it. Love that.
When they feel understood, like, yes,
that is, that is also applicable.
But if you want to, if
you were going to summarize,
I would say customers buy when they feel
like they're accomplishing what they set
out to accomplish. Perfect.
(01:30:47):
When you're cohesive with what your
customer came in the door thinking,
or you at least create
the idea of cohesion,
that's when someone's going to buy it.
They want to be in control of what
they're doing. Yes. I love that.
How about, how about that? Right. That's
something I commonly hear.
People want to buy, but they don't want
to be sold. Right. Right. Okay, cool.
So, and I love the term you use about
(01:31:08):
compassionate interrogation. That's, uh,
that that's fantastic.
That's the first time I've heard that
specific phrase be used before.
And I really like it.
So I want to kind of get into the
perception of this a
little bit because I've,
I've known this perception
of sales and salespeople to
infiltrate in multiple different areas.
And I'll explain what I mean.
So I've seen business owners hesitant to
(01:31:31):
bring on salespeople for their
organization because of the
perception of salespeople.
I've seen people that are good at being
themselves and actually selling
something shy away from doing that for a
living because of the perception of
sales and, and, and
salespeople. And, and, you know, I,
I like to talk about this and I think
that there is a, uh,
(01:31:52):
a direct parallel here with the
perception of being a
salesman compared to the
perception of being a
HVAC technician, right?
There are elements
that people don't know,
but they use their own facets to assume.
And so I kind of want to understand a
little better about, you know,
that perception of a salesman and why
(01:32:12):
it's such a hindrance to people.
Like what, what are we missing, Luke?
Well, traditionally a salesperson is
thought to be someone that talks you into
spending money that
you didn't want to spend,
talks you into spending more buying more,
extending your loan term,
extending the dollar amount
financed, you know, buying extra,
instead of buying a
(01:32:33):
mattress for your master bedroom,
buying the mattress
for your master bedroom,
but the furniture for the nursery for the
kid that you haven't even had yet that
you're thinking about conceiving,
like historically salespeople have been
the person that tried to take interest
and turn it into a
home run at your expense.
Also talk you into doing
things that you don't want to do,
which is fundamentally flawed.
That's a logical fallacy because human
(01:32:54):
beings will not do something they don't
want to do. No matter how good of a
goddamn salesperson you are,
you cannot convince somebody to do
something that they don't want to do.
That's just plain and simple. You would
have to exude physical force.
And at that point you're not a
salesperson, right? You're, you're a,
you're a criminal. Okay. Um, but people
believe that salespeople are nefarious
(01:33:16):
actors because it's been ingrained to
their thinking, right? Furthermore,
it's also, it's like, you know,
you can tell somebody that a Ford truck
is a piece of crap, right?
They're the most trusted longest lasting
pickup truck on the road,
according to some commercial somewhere.
But if you say found on road dead or fix
or repaired daily, well,
every time there's a broken Ford,
(01:33:36):
they're going to pay attention to it and
it's going to continue to,
to be an addendum to what their thought
process was as far as Ford's being a
bad vehicle. Now you tell people that
salespeople are scummy.
They can go buy a
refrigerator and enjoy the process.
They can go buy a
dishwasher and enjoy the process,
a house and enjoy the process.
And then dental work and be upsold by a
dental technician, enjoy the process.
(01:33:57):
But then a car salesperson talks them
into buying an extended warranty and a
rust and dust package.
It's too expensive and their car payment
goes up by a hundred bucks and they
didn't want it to. Well now you're right.
Salespeople are scumbags, right?
So it's, it's a very slippery slope, man.
And realistically the most effective
salespeople I know are the ones that have
made peace with the fact that they're
(01:34:19):
good. They're good people.
Their customers know
that they're good people.
They do write by people and they just
execute. But for those who are,
I don't want to say weak of mind,
but maybe don't have the history or the
background or the experience to be
super, super self-confident,
they can very easily fall into that trap
that it is a nefarious career.
(01:34:40):
All right. I appreciate that explanation.
That, that really helps to, uh, uh,
that helps me understand kind of where it
comes from. I, I had,
I had an idea, you know, but that was a,
that was a very succinct, um,
explanation. Can I, can I augment that? I
just want to add on. Yeah. Okay.
So because you talked about something I
think is incredibly important,
which is business owners not wanting to
hire salespeople, you know,
(01:35:01):
you get this
entrepreneur, he's an HVAC guy.
He goes out, sells all his
own jobs, does a great job.
And all of a sudden because he's so damn
good at what he does,
his phone's ringing off
the hook, right? Yeah. Patty,
his neighbors referring
him to this one, Mike,
the doctor that he just installed an
overhead system for his referring him to
his buddy who owns a gym and da da da.
Next thing you know, he's like, ah,
and it's like, dude, just
expand scale, bro. Like, okay.
(01:35:23):
So he gets another guy then
that guy's doing good work,
but it's not quite enough incoming
business to sustain him and that guy.
So it's like, well, now
that guy's an expense.
Now he's taking food out of my mouth
because on the days that I don't get the
referral phone calls, he's, I'm having to
keep him busy and he's taking on my job.
So it's like, well, what do we do? We'll
do to hire a sales guy.
Oh, I ain't freaking hiring a sales guy.
(01:35:45):
They're more trouble
than they're worth. Why?
The reason being salespeople at large
are a very diverse array of people. Okay.
Good salespeople,
really good
salespeople are one very small
(01:36:06):
subset of people.
And the people who are very good
salespeople are
generally also people who have
ADD. That is just
reality. Okay. They are verbose.
They are outgoing.
They can handle many things going on at
one time and they're very hyperactive.
That's why they're a great salesperson.
(01:36:27):
But if you understand that ADD is a
relative lack of dopamine in the brain,
then you understand that you can draw two
things very much together,
which is good salespeople are usually
addicts in some way, shape, or form.
They have a drug addiction.
They have a sex addiction.
They have an alcohol
addiction, a gambling addiction.
(01:36:48):
Everybody right now that's listening to
this is going, holy shit,
I never put those two
together. Or maybe they have,
or maybe they said that most drug good,
good salespeople are addicts,
but they never brought in the dopamine
lack, the ADD piece to it.
But every good salesperson I know, Josh,
everybody that I don't mean good,
like good, I mean like good,
(01:37:08):
like the kick ass guys that everybody
wishes they had on their sales crew also
come with a significant amount of
baggage. So that right there is what,
like you don't hear about the low, the
low level people, right?
Your business always talk, always talking
about their number one guy. Yeah, man,
Zach just fricking sold 13 jobs for me
last week. Yeah. Well,
then we couldn't find them from Friday
through Monday because he was in a
crackdown on the South side,
(01:37:31):
but dude he came back on Tuesday with the
same damn clothes he left on Thursday,
sold me another 27 jobs. And then the
onlooker goes, I don't want that.
I don't want that.
I'm not going to hire a salesperson
because we don't hear
the stories about the
dull roar. We hear the stories about the
spikes on the EKG, right? Yeah.
The people that who
rise above. So, you know,
it's just like you'd never
(01:37:51):
seen a purple Corvette before,
but now that you see one,
you see them everywhere.
Like when you hear a few stories about
salespeople and then you hear that
sentiment continue to resonate amongst
other people who talk about their sales
people,
you eventually create this collective
understanding that if I'm going to hire a
good salesperson, he's
also going to be a nut job.
So I think that has a
lot to do with it as well.
(01:38:12):
Interesting. All right. I
know we're bumping up on the,
on the top of the hour here. I have three
more questions for you real quick.
So the first one is then how would I find
what I would consider or what you
would consider an incredible salesperson
as a business owner?
How would I find that person?
So if you'd asked me that
answer, uh, a month ago,
I probably would have told
(01:38:33):
you just to use your gut.
And if you're sitting with somebody that
looks like they're full of shit and
feels like they're full of shit, they're
probably full of shit. Um, but you know,
I travel a lot and I, and I work and I
consult with a lot of companies.
And one gentleman who owns a very large
company out of the Southern part of the
United States, I spent a week, um, in a
different state with
him and his team. Um,
and we, we taught, we went to dinner and
we ended up spending three hours at
(01:38:53):
dinner because it just, you know, when,
when great minds get together,
they just, I would say great minds when
similar minds get together.
I didn't mean to sound arrogant. Uh, but
when deep thinkers get together,
we think deep, right? And he was
piggybacking off me and
I was pinging ideas off
him. And one of the things that he has
found to be a good solution. And I would,
I would pass this information along as
the gospel because this guy's a very,
(01:39:14):
very strong entrepreneur. Um,
it's taken him a lot of time and money to
find the appropriate assessments,
but he leans heavily on assessments, like
personality assessments.
He's got a hundred page personality
assessment profile
that he puts his people
through and his last seven hires,
he's been able to call to a T whether
they were good, long lasting,
(01:39:35):
honorable, virtuous salespeople. And he's
got an extremely strong sales force.
So if you're asking Luke wonk from paid
to persuade, I would tell you,
if it feels like bullshit,
it's probably bullshit, right?
And if it seems too good to be true, it's
probably too good to be true,
but you're going to have to, if you want
one good salesperson,
you're going to have to hire three or
four and put them all on the street and
crank your marketing budget up a little
(01:39:57):
bit and let them all try to eat.
And you'll eventually see who produces
that seven out of a 10 production level,
but also has 4.8 out of
five stars for you on Google.
That's the guy that
you're going to want to hire.
And when you get that guy or girl, you
just take that person,
invest in training,
coaching, and skill building,
and you will get an 8.5 out
(01:40:17):
of 10 with good CSI ratings.
And I think that's
what everybody's after,
but I can tell you it would be worth
looking into those personality assessment
profiles. I certainly
am. And I can tell you,
it's pretty profound with AI and with the
years of experience that we have from
Sigmund Freud and everybody else that
have dove in deep or dove rather deep
(01:40:38):
inside the human mind.
But you can pretty much figure somebody
out by asking them a series of quite a
few questions.
They're wild disc Colby predictive index,
culture index, all those, uh,
all those things I've taken all of them
and it's amazing how scary accurate
they are. Yeah. So, all right, no, I
appreciate their response. Okay. Second
question. Uh, before we, uh, before we
(01:40:59):
wrap up one more after this has,
what is the most
important question I didn't ask?
Probably why,
why is it important to spend money and
invest in yourself? Um, you know,
I train salespeople for a living.
So naturally I'm
looking at everybody going,
you should be paying me
(01:41:20):
money to train you. Right. Um,
and that's not from a, a, a greedy angle
or it's just that every human being
that we train who is in sales ends up
better. And it's, it's not because,
you know, it's because of our methods.
It's because of, you know,
what we teach and the skills that we
(01:41:41):
teach, but more importantly,
we are the only sales training company in
existence and I've done the research
that doesn't allow you to
just take our sales training.
You can't just come to P2P and be like,
okay, I want the P2P method.
Here's my 2000 bucks. Let's roll.
Like you have to engage in our lifestyle
and mindset training.
Like you have to take our mindset
(01:42:02):
training and
development before you can take
our sales training because otherwise it
would be like me handing you a bunch of
bricks with no
wheelbarrow, no mortar mix, no water,
no trowel, no buckets, no experts. Like
here's your bricks, build your house.
Like, yeah, we need the bricks to build
the house and those are going to be
there, but there's so much more to it
that if you don't
understand all this other
(01:42:22):
minutia, you're never going to be able to
build a strong livable house.
So when it comes to self
investment, most people buy books,
they buy books and they read books.
The problem with that is there's nothing
to carry through those teachings,
right? Like you can't buy how to win
friends and influence people and then hop
on a weekly coaching call with Dale
(01:42:43):
Carnegie to ask him what he really meant
about chapter number
three, right? So, um,
I strongly encourage people to,
and whether it's with my
company or anybody else, okay,
if you have salespeople or you sell for a
living or you persuade,
influence clothes in any way, shape or
form to develop that skill,
because it is the one single solitary
(01:43:04):
skill that can move the needle greater
than anything else, right? You can lower
your product cost. You can,
you know, lower your payroll expenses.
You can do lower your travel budget.
You can buy a plane instead of flying on
what you do all these things,
but if you just bump your top line by a
million bucks a year,
there's really nothing that
(01:43:24):
can compete with that. Okay.
And when people do not have their,
if they're not closing 15 to
20% above industry average,
that disparity exists. Meaning this,
when you just go and open a business,
you're going to, if you get decent people
and you have an okay training,
you're going to meet industry average
type numbers. When you have strong,
(01:43:48):
very, very strong training with strict
follow through and ongoing support,
you can get generally
15 to 20%. It's proven.
And we hit these numbers are well above
sometimes that type of increase above
the bar. So my point is,
unless you're doing that,
you're leaving all
that money on the table.
So one of the biggest things I try to
share with people is, you know,
start small,
(01:44:08):
just you don't have to go in and spend 30
grand on a mastermind and private code.
Just get something,
get something that's ongoing mentorship
and maintenance and a product that
claims to get you X, Y, or Z thing and
try three or four, you know,
don't just try one and say that didn't
work or it only worked this well.
Because the rule of thumb is the same
thing with employees.
(01:44:29):
Just like I said, with the salespeople,
when you get access to
three or four different ones,
you're going to find one that
strikes a significant chord.
And the changes that people undergo when
they get access to that,
just to give you an example, the
gentleman I was just
talking to you about,
okay, owns a service industry business
out of the Southern part of the United
States. He has 16 sales reps. They do
(01:44:49):
business in three different states,
project managers, work vehicles, van, the
whole nine yards, right?
They have a cancellation rate of like 21%
for every 10 of their item that they
sold. They took two cancellations. Okay.
And then their closing ratio when they
started working with us was 28 to 32%.
Okay. After working with us,
they run an average of a
(01:45:11):
52% closing ratio. Okay.
So that is almost double.
Think about what that means for their
bottom line. And not only that,
we lowered their cancellation rate by 21,
26 to, to five. So 21%.
So a net gain of what?
50%. Okay. Or excuse me,
38%, whatever the math
is for who's listening.
My point is that the amount of gratitude
(01:45:34):
that that company showed us for just
doing what we did and
teaching what we taught.
And we get on a call once a week with our
salespeople and they're laughing,
clapping, happy to see it. Cause
everybody's making
more fricking money, man.
And it's all because we gave them access
to fundamental skills and framework
that we know because we've
done this for 25 years and we've,
we've done all the sampling and we've
done all the research. So long drawn out,
(01:45:55):
Donald Trump weave of an answer to your
question, but take a risk, man,
compartmentalize five grand to your
budget and just say,
I'm going to go shoot this out into the
wild blue yonder and access some,
some training resources. I promise you,
one of those is going to be a good fit.
Amazing man. That's, that's fantastic.
One last simple question for you and you
might've already answered it.
(01:46:15):
I don't know, but I'm
gonna ask it anyway.
If you could share one
piece of wisdom or advice, Luke,
that has the potential to transform the
way that a small business or a small
blue collar business owner thinks about
success or growth or freedom.
As you put it, what would it be?
Yeah. Satisfy your customer. Yeah.
(01:46:36):
There's, there is no,
nothing usurps that. Okay.
And if you want some sort of high dollar
guru to anchor it to, okay.
Jeff Bezos, when he's
interviewed, they always ask,
what's the secret to
your success? He was like,
you know, I've answered this question
many times. So for many interviews,
it's just ruthless desire
to satisfy our customer.
(01:46:58):
We just constantly are thinking of better
ways to make our customers experience
better. And that just yields us more
money each year. And it's like, okay,
goofball, like you make it seem so damn
simple, Mr. Billionaire,
Mr. Blue Origin rocket, but
then you step back, right?
And one of the things I've
learned to do as an entrepreneur,
as a human being is just
go up to the 10th story,
(01:47:18):
walk out to the balcony and
look down on the situation.
Stop hanging out at the street level when
you don't understand something or it
doesn't resonate with you, walk up a few
floors and look down on it and say,
what is, what are we really saying here?
And it's so fundamentally simple, man,
when a company just focuses on tying up
all the loose ends in their
business, the CSI stuff,
(01:47:40):
the, the, the follow up stuff,
the making sure we clean the
nails off their yard stuff,
the making sure that if
they refer us a customer,
we do pay them the referral fee,
making sure that if we've ordered their
product and it's not been dropped on
their lawn yet that we call them every
day with an update, Hey,
we're still good for Thursday, Tuesday.
Hey, we're still good for Thursday.
(01:48:00):
Wednesday. Hey, we're
still good for Thursday.
Why like calling them every day when I
told them on Monday,
it was going to be there Thursday because
communication is key and touch points
mean everything to a customer. And if you
as a business owner,
simply wake up in the morning and go,
how can I make my
customer experience better today?
Your business will naturally grow without
you even having to put in the effort.
Amazing. I truly
(01:48:21):
appreciate that answer and the, uh,
and the practicality of it,
Luke. All right, with that,
I know we're a little bit past the hour.
I'm going to let you go before that.
Where can people find you? Where can
people find paid to persuade, uh,
give us the digs, man. Yeah, man. I
appreciate that. So, you know,
if somebody's looking from
a, from a business aspect,
if they'd like me to potentially talk to
their team, train their team,
pick my brain on that. Um,
(01:48:41):
we have a very edgy looking website
because we've put the old website back up
while they're building out the new one,
but it's paid to persuade.com the word
paid P I D the number two, and then the
word persuade, which is you a D E,
because it's commonly misspelled as a U D
E, but paid the number two persuade.com
just click any of the
call to action buttons.
Those all book a call directly to my
calendar. They can talk to me.
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