We talked about something you do that others think is crazy. Is there something that the average seller does that you think is crazy? This is going to get me a lot of heat, but cold calling. I’ve spoken to. I actually went to Baylor University. They have one of the best sports management programs in the country. The asked me to come speak. They actually have a program for kids that are interested in becoming, what I do, ticket sales. You can graduate with a degree in sports management with a concentration in ticket sales. Which, Baylor is one of the few universities that has it, and they’re very well known for it. So they asked me to come speak, and I’m on this panel. The professor says… there’s five people on the panel: When’s the last time you guys made a cold call? Everybody else was like: yesterday, or last week. I said, I was last to go, I haven’t made a cold call in 5 years. It was like a pin dropped in the room. You could hear it. There was dead silence. I didn’t think it was weird, but I think everybody else thought it was weird because they were trained. They had done I think a project with the Houston Astros where they had to call Astros single game buyers to try to upsell them into ticket packages, but they were doing that through the phones. It’s been so long since I’ve made a cold call that you may have to train me on how to do that again because honestly. What’s funny is sometimes our other reps will make fun of me. They’ll be like: Do you even know how to use your phone? I know it’s there. It’s collecting dust and stuff, but do you even know how to use it? Yeah, it’s probably cold calling honestly.
Clip: Allen Schlesinger on Sales Motivation: Being #1 and Getting Better Every Year
What’s motivating you in all of this? I want to stay on top, and obviously in sales as you know, the more you sell the more money you’ll make. I just want to keep getting better every year. I don’t want a year where even if I’m still #1. My revenue was a little bit less than the year before and so I could rest on my laurels and say ‘hey, I was number on this year.’ But instead of $500,000 I sold $450,000. To me that’s just unacceptable. So, just push. My wife is the same way, and so maybe that’s why we’re perfect for each other. We’re wired that way where we both get in early and we both want to be the best at what we do. Just to continue, and I want to see my name #1 on the leaderboard. The league releases the leaderboard rankings once a month. If they’re a day late I send them an email and am like, why haven’t you guys released the leaderboard rankings? They probably hate me for that, but I just need a little reminder every once in a while.
Clip: Push Yourself – Control what you can control: How hard you work
Push yourself. I know it’s kinda cheezy, but. There’s certain factors that you can control and there’s certain that you can’t. But you can control how hard you work. And you can control: I can outwork the person that sits next to me. And so putting yourself in the best chance to succeed is probably by doing that. That’s how I’ve been successful and that’s how I’ve seen others in the industry that I’ve just tried to learn from. My boss in San Antonio is probably the hardest working person I know. He’s been with the Spurs for 17 years. So about almost double as long as I have, and he actually wakes up at 4:30 every morning. So he’s got me beat by an hour because he goes to the gym for an hour every morning. It amazes me because I can literally text him at 6:30 about a question about a deal I’m working on and within 5 minutes he’s responding at 6:30 in the morning.
Clip: Allen Schlesinger’s Social Selling Process: LinkedIn-Email-Coffee
I prefer email and mainly because LinkedIn Sales Navigator only allows you to have 30 inMails a month. So I’m doing everything I can by using some email finding tools to reach out to these people. I’m introducing myself. I’m introducing the team. I specify in every email that this could be for business or personal use, because that doesn’t give them an out either way, and I’m asking for 15 minutes for a coffee. So I’m buying these people a cup of coffee once I get the meeting. The meetings never last 15 minutes. They’re usually like 30 minutes to an hour. It’s just very non-threatening to get your foot in the door with some of these companies.
Clip: Allen’s half million dollar sales result and goal for next year
So I hit a personal best from the 16-17 season which just ended in April. I did a half million in ticket sales, and just to put that in perspective. The second highest person in our league did about three hundred thousand. So it was great for me obviously to continue to push myself and so now for next season or the season we’re currently selling for that starts in November. I’m going for six hundred thousand, would be the next logical step. So it’s going to take a lot of hard work and effort, but I’m hoping I’ll get there.
Clip: Allen Schlesinger’s Social Selling Formula: 100-10-2
So I set a personal goal for myself if I’m in the office and not out on appointments to hit about 100 new people every single day. Most of those people I’m reaching out to through email by using LinkedIn and those tools that I mentioned to find those people. And then I try to focus on landing about 10 face to face meetings a week in the Austin area. And hopefully from one leading to the other there 2, roughly 2 new deals that close every week as a result of those efforts. It takes a lot of time to hit 100 people a day, and so that’s why I’ll come in early just to get going faster.
Clip: Allen Schlesinger is the NBA’s Poster Child for Social Selling
LinkedIn allows me to really narrow down who I’m looking for, and then there’s some tools that help you find people’s contact information that I’ll utilize with LinkedIn. Whether it be a tool called Hunter or a tool called Prospect Works that really help you. They basically find people’s contact information. They scour Google for you. So I’ve really kind of embraced it and the NBA seems like they’ve used me as their poster child pretty much for social selling. Where now I’ve talked to probably a third of the teams in the actual NBA as well as all the teams in the development league. I’ve gone to Charlotte to present at the American Hockey League meetings and then I presented two times now at the NBA D-League meetings. One in Chicago and one in Indianapolis. It’s been fun teaching about this and I think it seems like more teams now are investing their financial resources and time into learning more on how to utilize social selling
Clip: Allen Schlesinger on Social Selling: “I haven’t made a cold call in 5 years.”
They refer to me as the LinkedIn Guy in our office. I don’t make any cold calls at all. I haven’t made a cold call in over 5 years. In our industry that’s been kind of a no-no. It’s still somewhat smile and dial, but I think it’s slowly changing. Social selling has allowed me to get in doors that I would have never got to before. I’ve sold tickets to two of the six billionaires in Austin. Those people would not have taken my phone calls, or their executive assistants would have blocked me from getting into those doors. It opens up an entirely different world that you’ll never get into by phone call.
Clip: Allen Schlesinger – Sales Differentiators: Persistence, Hard Work and Building Relationships
There’s a few things that have really helped me set myself apart. One is persistence. I probably don’t know what the word ‘no’ means. I’ll follow-up on numerous occasions. I utilize texting quite a bit to touch base with people. Then the other thing is working harder than everybody else. I’m in the office every morning at 7:30 with my coffee. Starting my day that way just to get ahead of everybody else and have that hour to myself where I’m just focused. The last thing is really building relationships. I really try to build friendships with all my clients where I’m not just hanging out with them at our games. I’m also hanging out with them socially. Whether it’s my wife and I or them and their wife. Stuff like that.
Clip: Barry Womack – Listen to Yourself and Get Feedback
Clip from Episode 20 featuring Cvent’s Top Enterprise Sales Rep – Barry Womack:
I think one of the biggest things is listen to yourself and take feedback. Even today, 7 years into my sales career I always ask for feedback. I ask for feedback from my customers, my prospects, especially the ones I feel like I have a good relationship with. I’ll always ask for feedback. What did you think? How did we do as a team? Also ask your colleagues. Ask your executives and people that are involved in these conversations that you have. So just ask for that feedback and I think you’ll find that people are very willing to give it and are there to actively help you improve. I’m a big advocate of listening to yourself so I record almost every meeting, demonstration that I do on WebEx. So I’ll fire it up, I’ll always ask for permission from the customer and kind of use it as a… I’ll send this over to you afterwards and you can share it with colleagues or what have you, but it’s really also a great opportunity for me to go back and listen to the conversations that I’m having. See how I sound. See what I can improve on. Help with objections as they come up. If I don’t like how i respond to something. Come up with a way to know how to respond to that better the next time.
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