I had a lot of nice things. When some of my early ventures panned out well, I bought a lot of expensive stuff: German sports car, a Rolex, bespoke suits, handmade Italian shoes, things like that.

But I didn’t buy any of that stuff for myself.

I bought it to impress others.

I got over that BS real quick though once I moved to the US. There, I didn’t really have the money to impress others with expensive things anymore anyway—nor did I feel the need to do so anymore.

Today, if you’d see my apartment in Germany, you’d find nothing in there that represents me and who I am. It’s a nice place, but I just rented it fully furnished.

Last time around this year, I spent some time on Phuket, Thailand. We were staying in this nice old little house in Thailand, and there was an Adirondack chair. Now, at the time I had no fucking idea what an Adirondack chair was, because I never paid attention to chairs. You sit on it, that’s it. Chairs, end of story.

The reason why I know that it was an Adirondack chair is that there also was a book on the shelf that was about the Adirondack chair, its history, and all that.

And that entire house had a vibe. Not your typical vacation rental.

You could sense someone made it their home, curated the objects in there to create that vibe. You’d walk in there, and you’d feel it. I loved it. And I realized, I never had something like it. I had bigger and nicer homes. I stayed in amazing hotel rooms. But I never had a place that had my vibe, a place that I’d call “home”.

Later that year, I spent some time in Greece, and there I bought myself a new Rolex. Just because I wanted it, just because I loved it. Funny thing: My first impulse when I started wearing it was to hide it. I hoped my friends wouldn’t notice. But eventually, I learned to be at peace with it and cherish wearing and adoring it.

And then a while later again, I started journaling with pen and paper. And I bought myself a nice pen. I know it doesn’t make my writing better. But it feels better when I hold it in my hand. It sings more harmoniously with who I am. So now, I’ve got a nice pen that I really care about.

I also bought a guitar. Nothing ever made me feel that amazing. When I held that guitar for the first time, it was fucking magic. (Talked about this on episode 39 of my Inner Work podcast).

And then recently, I had just a shitty day, was in a bad mood, walked into a coffee shop, and there was a houseplant with a nametag: Juan.

I can’t tell you why, but Juan made my day. Juan instantly put me in a great mood. He opened up a new world to me: plants.

I’m not a “plant person”.

I never in my life cared about plants, thought about them, noticed them, paid any attention to them. But now, I want a plant, because I know how amazing plants can make me feel if I’m open to it.

In fact on that particular day, Juan helped me more than all the wisdom and philosophies from all the books I’ve read, more than all the psychological techniques I’ve learned, all the kinds of meditations I could have practiced. It was just the presence of a simple houseplant that totally turned my day around. And all of that prompted me to just pay more attention to how things that I can surround myself with create an energy that affects me. I pay more attention to the vibe an object has, to its soul. And that’s what the latest episode of my Inner Work podcast is all about: The soul of little things.

If you’ve looked at everything in your life through this very utilitarian lens, where everything is just cold functionality, I’d encourage you to examine if that’s really the best way to live your life.

And if you’re someone who’s always been aware of the energy of little things — I’d love to hear and learn from you.

People love to hate it. Experts love to proclaim the death of cold calling. We all are bothered by bad cold emails pitching us things we don’t need.

But if you do outbound the right way, it could be the become your #1 competitive advantage.

No doubt about it though: Outbound sales is #$%(@ hard.

Which is why I cover everything you need to know to start winning with outbound sales in my latest blog post:

• How to build the right team
• How to create a buyer persona
• How to do prospecting and outreach
• Which tools to use to set your team up for success
• And how to figure out if outbound is the right channel for your company

Too many sales teams still operate like it’s 1999. But things have changed radically, and if you don’t adapt your outbound strategy to what’s working in 2019, you’re doomed to fail.

Check out my latest post on the Close blog to get a full A-Z guide on winning with outbound sales in 2019.

“I’ve heard bad things about your company” is a tough sales objection to overcome. Whether your prospect has read negative reviews or they heard something bad from a friend or colleague, it makes it significantly harder to sell to them.

But it can absolutely be done.

There are four situations you might find yourself in when a prospect thinks your company sucks. I cover them all in our latest article on the Close blog, “How to Overcome a Terrible Reputation and Make Sales”.

The first step is identify the source, and most importantly be sure you really understand what exactly they’re concerned about.

Then you categorize their concern into one of these:

1. The information was correct, but it’s outdated
2. The information is partially true
3. The information is wrong
4. The information is right

Depending upon which category the prospect’s concern falls into, you proceed with the next step in moving the sales conversation forward (potentially all the way to the close).

Read more about it in my latest post on the Close blog or watch the video where I walk you through these four scenarios and how to handle them.

But let me tell you this:

Having a solid sales process is incredibly important (and will make a major impact on your bottom line). You want a clearly documented sales process in your company, and it should be something that every member of your sales team is intimately familiar with.

But I totally get why so many sales people don’t have a sales process (or don’t care about it). Because there are too many misconceptions about what a sales process is, and what it should be, are floating around. Oftentimes when I do look at some company’s sales process, what I see makes me want to look away and wish I could un-see what I just looked at: overcomplicated, too rigid, too long.

The truth is, the best sales processes are SIMPLE. Simple and effective, because they focus on the few things in the sales process that really matter.

And you can design your first sales process in just one hour. Check out my latest blog post where I share how to create a winning sales process in three simple steps.

If you’re cold calling, you’ll hear this all the time: “Now is not a good time.”

And you do know that it’s a cop out.

We all know what it’s like to be called by a sales rep, interrupting you in the middle of the day.

But I’m assuming that you actually have something of value to offer, a product or service that will provide meaningful benefits to your buyers.

(If not, you should stop selling whatever crap you’re peddling right now and start selling something that DOES create a ton of value. But that’s a topic we can discuss another time.)

And oftentimes it’s precisely these prospects that don’t have time that should take 10 minutes out of their day to figure out how your solution could benefit them.

Because oftentimes, taking those 10 minutes now could save them dozens or even hundreds of hours later on.

We see this all the time with our inside sales CRM. Sales managers tell us they’re too busy running their team to evaluate another CRM.

And then they spend 3 hours a week putting together reports, and their reps spend an hour a day each creating targeted lead lists and figuring out how to reach out to next. They waste time manually logging sales activity.

Switching to Close.io could save them hundreds of hours that they’re now spending on menial busywork, and instead invest that time in higher value activities (like communicating with prospects).

But try telling that to a busy sales manager knee-deep in their day-to-day operations.

Even quoting Abraham Lincoln won’t help.

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.

But I’ve got something that will help you while you’re on that call with a potential customer, trying to get rid of you, telling you that “right now is not a good time”.

A few simple words that magically open up time in a prospect’s busy schedule… Click here to keep reading.

More revenue for your business? Better business opportunities? Bigger commission checks?

Increasing your response rates isn’t rocket science. That’s why I’m going to share a very simple method I call the 1, 2, 3 hack.

Here’s how to use it (and get 3 free email templates).

So many sales people get this wrong. They either push back and alienate the prospect or they comply in an attempt to “build rapport”.

Neither of these approaches work.

Whenever a prospect asks you to send more information, you know that they’re just trying to get rid of you, without saying it outright. And they know that you know. And most people accept it, because that way they don’t have to face rejection and conflict. (Which is probably the #1 reason why most people will never succeed in sales.)

So if you call a prospect, tell him what this is about and what’s in it for them, and they tell you: “Send me more information”, here’s what you really want to do. (Click here to keep reading)

A lot of SaaS companies don’t get sales. And when you don’t get sales, you miss out on a lot of money. Money that you could otherwise put to work to build an even better product.

Fortunately, sales isn’t rocket science. Here are 9 simple tips that can help you get more paying customers fast:

Keep your trials short

1. Keep your trials short: Too many startups offer free trials for way too long. That’s bad for a several reasons. If a user knows that they have a very long time to check out the product, there’s no sense of urgency and they might decide to check your software out “sometime later this week”. Then life happens, they forget about it and “sometime later this week” turns into never. But the worst thing about long trials is that they really screw up your sales process. (Click here to find out more about this.)
2. Set up drip campaigns that do the selling for you: If you’re not yet sending out drip campaigns, it’s time to start doing this. (But don’t worry… even Basecamp didn’t send out drip email campaigns until very recently, and they’ve been around for a really long time. But when you do set up drip campaigns, BE INTENTIONAL AND RESULTS-ORIENTED. I see too many lame SaaS signup drip campaigns that would never convert a free trial into a paying customer. There is a right way to use drip emails to sell.
3. Call your trial signups within five minutes of signing up: Now this is the part that nobody loves to do. Nobody loves calling their free trials, and oftentimes the free trials don’t like being called. But there’s tremendous value in doing it, and you absolutely can and should be doing it this way.
4. Give short, value-focused demos: When it comes to giving demos, there’s three golden rules. Qualify first. Keep it short (15 minutes to demo, 15 minutes for Q&A). Focus on benefits, not features. Click here to learn more about giving great SaaS demos.
5. Follow up like a pro: It’s not enough to send an email or two. You want to follow up with your trial signups until you get a response from them, a clear decision. I share a simple framework for building an effective follow up email sequence here.
6. Give a lot of value and charge a lot of money: Too many founders price their product too cheap. You wanna be in a price range where most users feel like you’re a little bit on the expensive side, but still worth it. Here’s a simple framework for figuring out your SaaS pricing.
7. Sell annual prepaid plans: That’s pretty obvious, right? :)
8. Don’t discount: People will ask you for a discount all the time. Don’t devalue your product. Giving discounts is bad for your brand and makes creating a predictable revenue model impossible. Instead, get really good at handling discount requests.
9. Never close a bad deal: Never sell your product to a customer that won’t get value out of it, even if you easily could and need the money. It’s just not worth it. It creates a lot more trouble than you anticipate at first. Here’s what you should do to get it right.

Want to learn more about how to sell SaaS? Check out my free 1 hour crash course on SaaS sales for startup founders. Click here for more.

Oftentimes, the bigger the deal the longer it takes to close it. When you’re selling to large organizations, you’ll find that they’re also very slow moving organizations. Selling to them can bring in a lot of revenue — but it can also cost a lot of time and eat up a lot of resources that you could otherwise deploy elsewhere.

This matters even more if you’re working on a startup where resources are always scarce, and long sales cycles could kill your entire business. You need to move fast and create a lot of learnings in a short amount of time.

Back in the days when I was running an outsourced sales organization where we did a lot of enterprise sales, we had to come up with a way to create results for our clients quickly. We were doing sales for more than 200 venture backed startups in Silicon Valley, and these people were paying us very well — but they also expected results. When you’re running an outsourced sales team, it’s very clear and transparent how much value you’re creating for the organization.

So we had to come up with creative ways of shortening the sales cycle. What you’ll find in a typical enterprise deal for example is that it has to pass through departments, and each department will take time to vet a contract, request some changes, which then have to be reviewed and approved by another department that already had passed it on, and so on. There’s a sheer endless amount of back and forth between you and the different stakeholders on the side of the buyer, and it often takes months.

Now what you want to do is to learn about this process before you begin the process. You want to know who needs to sign off on a deal, whose stamp of approval it needs, who will share input on this deal, and what the whole process typically looks like in the buying organization.

The trick then is to parallelize these processes. Instead of having a contract go through procurement and legal and marketing and IT in sequence… kick the process of with as many departments at a time as possible.

“But won’t this create a lot of confusion and potential for conflict?”

Only if you don’t do it right :) We’ve developed a simple framework for parallelizing the different components of the buying process, and I’m sharing it with you here. Click to read more.

You’re young and you want to crush it. You’ve got big dreams and ambitions. YOU’VE GOT PLACES TO GO!

I get it.

But don’t allow your hustle & grind mode to grind you down.

It’s easy to get so caught up in that chase of making shit happen that you loose sight of the bigger picture.

I see it happen all the time.

I’ve been lost in the land of busywork myself for way too long.

At the end of the week, ask yourself:

How busy have I been / how much have I worked…

… and …

How much have I accomplished?

Look at this.

If you’re week has been super busy, but you haven’t accomplished much, then it would look like this:

That red X… not good.

What you want to aspire to is this:

You want to work

• fully engaged
• at maximum productivity
• in a sustainable way.

You still have time to have a fucking life and take care of your physical, mental and emotional needs.

You want to tap into all that hunger and ambition and drive you’ve got boiling inside you. But you don’t wanna look back at the end of your life and regret that you’ve worked too much and lived too little.

(It’s never the other way around.)

Now if you’re a red X candidate… how do you change things?

It’s fucking difficult to make a big change from one day to the next.

So what you want to do instead is to take that huge task, and break it down into tiny steps.

Here’s the first step… Click to keep reading.