EPISODE 39

The third day was a half-session that usually broke up at 1 o’clock.  If Day One was meant to break the spirit and Day Two was for manufacturing the breakthrough in thinking about marketing and sales, then Day Three was a call to action.  It was actually very cool to see how the group had progressed.  Not only were they unified in their desire to change the way that they marketed their businesses, they were also very excited about the prospect of getting home and applying some of what they’d learned.  Having done all that we could with our students, Bosco and I went out for a drink.  He took a sip of his scotch and water, put the glass on the table and then launched into a soliloquy. Bosco was relaxed; feeling very full of himself, and that was often when he was at his best.  He would try out different ways of expounding on the themes that he’d tried to teach and in this case, knowing that I was an ardent Red Sox fan, he told me that selling was like playing baseball.

“It’s a simple game and people all over the world play it.  But to do it at the Major League level is quite another thing entirely” he said.  “There are only 750 men that get to play on a big league roster on any given day. Think of all of the best players you knew in high school.  How many of them made it to the varsity team in college?  Not that many, in fact, maybe none!  Now consider how many of the guys who got offered even a minor league contract after college.  There are dozens of single-A, AA and AAAteams operating right now, all of them with players who are better than any of the best you saw play in college.  And how many of them ever get called up to the big leagues each year for even a game or two?  Not a too damn many.  So now consider how few of the guys who went all the way from high school to college to the minors and eventually to the majors who get one of those 750 starting jobs.  The odds against success at that level are staggering!  But every year, thousands of kids play ball and train and work their way as far as they can through the system in hopes of making it all the way.” 

He paused for a second to take another sip of his whiskey before asking, “What makes a good ball player?”

“Talent, I suppose,” I said quietly.  “They have to have the raw stuff.  If they can run faster, swing harder or throw more accurately, they’ll have a shot.”

“Look Michael, if natural aptitude was what it took, then the Majors would be flooded with great players, which isn’t true.  The same is true in our business.  Talent is useless without training.  In fact, most salespeople don’t have any aptitude for what they do.

“In reality” he continued, “there are two basic types of successful salespeople: the Unconscious Competent and the Conscious Competent.  The Unconscious Competent is very rare.  These people have the ability to get the prospect to trust them implicitly, without resorting to any of the tricks that we normally associate with sales.  They don’t ‘pitch’.  You take Sasha Haskins.  She doesn’t think she’s a salesperson, but in fact she’s one of the best you’ll ever see.  Her great secret is that she doesn’t try to sell.  She really wants to help her clients.  She’s also an excellent listener.  She actually cares for them.  In a way, she’s like someone’s mother.  She wants to do right by them and she follows that instinct.  Sasha is the perfect Unconscious Competent.  She sells based on pure trust.  You can’t learn that and you sure can’t fake it either.

“But the rest of us, we have to work at it.  Michael, you’re one of the best salesmen I’ve ever met, but you can be your own worst enemy at times.”

I decided not to rise to the bait and I let Bosco continue.  He was on a roll anyway, so who was I to interrupt him?

“Here’s why.  When you first started working for me, all you wanted was to know how we grew people’s hair back.  Remember?  I wouldn’t tell you.  The reason was that I knew you’d go tell all of your prospects what we were going to do.  With a little bit of information, you were the most dangerous man on the planet!  You’d disclose and disclose and you’d present and present.  You could kill a sale quicker than hell that way.  I watched you burn leads that way until I couldn’t stand it anymore.  Shit!  You didn’t even know what you were selling and you still over-presented! Fuck, I bet there were days you burned through a couple grand worth of my leads.  But one thing was sure, I knew that you could be taught!”

So, the Conscious Competent was a raw talent who could be broken and that’s exactly what Bosco had done with me.  He wouldn’t tell me what I was selling and that forced me to continually direct the conversation away from what we were going to do for the prospect.  My job was to draw out what our potential client wanted.  Initially, it was nerve-wracking work, but I’d learned how to do it.  The secret to success in selling hair was in never selling the hair.  You had to get the prospect to reveal his pain, his fear, and ultimately – his dreams. 

On those days, I sold hope.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on June 2nd.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 38

The second day was devoted to examining business plans.  Sasha really came out of the gate fast that day, challenging Bosco on virtually every point he made.  This was precisely what Bosco wanted.  He knew that if he could win over the most vocal skeptic in the class, the rest would follow.  It was a risky proposition though.  I had seen a couple of guys seated together during the first day who had kept the their arms folded in front of them, occasionally whispering to one another and shaking their heads.  They weren’t buying into it then and on the second morning they looked dubiously at Bosco as he ran down a table of figures associated with the cost of a single sale.

“Bosco, this is bullshit!” Sasha exclaimed angrily.  “You’re saying that our cost per television lead should be $100.  My own tracking shows that it’s more like $300, sometimes $400.  This may be a cheap game to play in Vermont and New Hampshire, but in the rest of this country, advertising costs real money!”

“She’s right!” another member of the class piped up.  “I’m paying about $250 a lead and most of them aren’t worth a damn anyway.”  This guy had been silent throughout the entire first day, but now he was riled.  Bosco looked at him.  His name was Herb Vance and Bosco had known him for a dozen years or so.  Herb was from Charleston, South Carolina.  He was bright, analytical, and completely oblivious as to how he’d set himself up as the straight man for Bosco’s presentation that morning.  He looked down at the notes he had been taking and started to read from them.  He began with a sheet that Bosco had handed out that ranked the top DesignatedMarket Areas in the country.  These DMAs showed the markets where television viewers and radio listeners could get similar broadcast content.  This also applied to newspaper coverage.  Your DMA was your whole world when it came to planning your advertising budget.

“You say that we should budget based on the cost per thousand people.  Well there are 320,000 people in my DMA, which isn’t all that much compared to some of the other people here.  But, it’s still a hell of a lot bigger than the size of your DMA in Vermont, Bosco.  How can these numbers make any sense when we’re all competing in such different markets?  It doesn’t make any sense!”

“Herb, I know you pretty well by now, right?  And you’re no dummy.  What surprises me though is why you and Sasha are so concerned about the cost of a lead.  It might cost $100 in one market, $25 in another, or $1000 in another and none of that makes any difference at all.”

He paused for a few seconds.  Everyone in the room was watching him, half of them convinced that Bosco had finally lost his mind and that they were each out a pile of cash for coming to this clearly useless seminar.  You could almost hear their minds grinding away on how they were going to get back at Bosco for wasting their time and money.  But Bosco knew when to be silent and he also knew when to speak.  He smiled, looked at Sasha and then at Herb.

“What you should really be thinking about is: What is the cost of a sale?”

“It’s the same thing!” Herb objected.

“Oh yes?” Bosco said, rolling his eyes and grinning.  He looked cartoonish when he did this and it cracked up about half the people in the room.

“Now how do you figure that, Herb?  You’re not taking into account all sorts of other items like the cost of the product, the labor, all of your regular overhead!  By comparison, the lousy cost of the lead isn’t that big of a deal.”

Sasha couldn’t take it anymore and she blurted out, “But a $100 lead is cheaper than a $500 lead!”

“Sure!” Bosco exclaimed.  He was really warmed up now.  “But if your $100 leads don’t close, they’re worthless.  Shit, I’d take a half dozen $500 leads that closed over thirty $100 leads that didn’t.  Wouldn’t you?”

The room was silent.  Bosco started to pace around the front of the room, alternately fixing his gaze on different people in the room.  He wasn’t speaking just to Sasha and Herb anymore.  He had made the two of them act as the spokespeople for the group, so as to ferret out the objections that they all held in common.  He knew that they’d all bitched and moaned about him the night before as they had shared dinner and drinks together.  It was all a matter of surfacing what really irked them and getting it out into the open.  Once he was able to beat that back, he would own them.

“The important things to remember are that your goals are to make the sale and then to retain the client.  If you can keep him for 5 years, what does it matter what the lead cost you?  A $500 lead brings you a sale.  But that’s not the total cost of the sale.  You have to pay for the product, the labor, the utilities, your insurance, all of that crap.  Once you add all that up, you might well have wiped out your gross for the year!  So what the hell do you care about the cost per lead?  The deal is retaining that client.

“An average client will spend about $2500 a year with you.  If you can keep him for 5 years, you’ll end up grossing almost 13 grand!  Any time you can make an advertising investment that brings you a rate of return like that; I figure it’s a pretty good bet.  Of course, a $100 lead that pans out does look better on paper, but in reality, it doesn’t put all that much extra into your pocket.

“Now some of you have met Michael.  He works for me making calls to my prospects and he books at an almost two appointment per hour rate.  He burns through a lot of leads too.  He doesn’t give a damn either.  As far as he’s concerned, the leads are worthless until he makes them worth something and he’s right.  If I’ve got $500 leads or $300 leads or $25 leads, it doesn’t matter.  He treats them all the same.

“Of course,” Bosco chuckled, “Michael doesn’t pay the bills for the media buys that make my phone ring, but that’s really the whole point.  A lead is a lead, no matter what it costs.  It isn’t worth shit though unless you know what to do with it.  So stop focusing on that.  Ask yourself what you’re doing with those leads once they come in.”

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on May 27th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 37

Bosco not only owned a chain of hair replacement studios, he was also a well-paid motivational speaker.  His clients were all of the other studio owners in the US and Canada who wanted to learn the secrets that had made him one of the most successful retailers in the industry.  At one time during the mid-80s, Bosco had either held title to or had sold the franchise for 89 locations throughout North America.  He had bought his product directly from a manufacturer in India and had made millions setting up people in business, selling them the raw goods, and then training them to sell as a well organized force, even though all of his franchisees held no secret that they each considered all of the others to be his or her competition. 

It’s a strange dynamic in small businesses.  The owners tend to fall for the old line that “a dollar you make is a dollar that I’ve lost”.  That parochial view of capitalism held a lot of these folks back and so Bosco had tried to get them all to see that they were part of one large corporate entity.  In essence, his message to them was that success for individuals was predicated on the success of the whole organization.  But entrepreneurs are rugged individualists.  They hate being told what to do and even more importantly, they dislike feeling like they are cogs in someone else’s machine.  Most started out their careers working for other people and eventually they either discovered that they had learned everything that their bosses knew and were ready to strike out on their own, or that they had decided that their bosses were simply full of crap.  Regardless of how they came to where they were, these small business owners bristled at being told what to do, even if they coveted the success that someone like Bosco had achieved and repeatedly told themselves that they would do damn near anything to replicate his formula. 

When Bosco sold the last of his franchises, he’d gone into the consulting business.  His code of ethics to his former clients was crystal clear: ‘I will sell you my services, unless you say you don’t want them.  Then I will solicit the people you see as your competition’.  I have to admit that this kind of strong-arming was what I always loved about him the most.  His feeling was that if you truly didn’t feel his advice was worth what he wanted you to pay him, then maybe you were right.  Perhaps he was wrong.  In which case, anything he told the guy down the street would just kill off one of your competitors.  He didn’t care.  It was up to the business owner to decide which way he thought it was going to fall.

Bosco would run 3-day seminars every 6-8 weeks at various locations around the country.  He’d book a conference room someplace like Vegas, Chicago, LA or New York and then he would get on the phone and sell.  To make the whole enterprise worthwhile, he needed 12 people, each paying $1600 to attend.  He figured I might get something out of his class and so one week in late October of that year, the two of us flew down to Orlando where he was set to lay some education on 17 studio owners from the southeast.

He structured the classes around the particular studios that chose to show up, or so it seemed on the surface.  The first rule to successful selling has always been drawing the prospect into the process by discovering what he desires most. 

“If I can get you to tell me what you want,” Bosco would say, “then all I have to do is to get it for you and you will give me anything I want in return.”

This sales axiom was paramount to his success at the studio level and it was also key to how he approached his students.  While he covered essentially the same topics every time he taught these seminars, Bosco would spend most of the first day getting the studio owners to tell him and the rest of the group about their businesses.  Bosco would ask questions that forced them to think carefully about the problems that they faced.  If he got someone in the class to disclose that he or she wasn’t meeting their sales goals, or that they weren’t running at a profit, or better yet – that they were considering closing the whole operation entirely; Bosco would seize on it.  He would ask the poor owner who had confessed his sins to elaborate, often in great detail, in an attempt discover to why the guy figured he was failing.  Then Bosco would ask the other studio owners in attendance if they had experienced the same thing, or whether their own failings were even worse. The results were often devastating.

“How many of you here think that you’re good salespeople?” he bellowed.  A few hands went up, but the majority of the group remained motionless.  In fact, some of them even began to look a little pissed off.

“Okay,” Bosco would continue.  “How many of you even consider yourselves to be salespeople?”

“I’m not a salesman, Bosco!  I’m a goddamn artist!  People drive from as far away as Georgia to have me do their hair.  I don’t have to ‘sell’ myself to anyone.  I’m good.  No, I’m fucking great!  I don’t need gimmicks to make my business work.”

There was no way to ignore this outburst, particularly when it came from a very striking looking woman in her late thirties.  She was maybe five feet tall and she sported a beautifully cut mane of dirty blonde hair that brushed her shoulders.  She was dressed casually in a black t-shirt and black jeans, but she made that simple outfit look glamorous nonetheless.  She was stood in front of her chair, glowering at Bosco.  Her name was Sasha Haskins and she owned a studio in Sarasota, Florida.  And I can promise you that it was all I could do to keep from gaping like a little kid.  She was as angry and as lovely a woman as I could imagine.  I also had the definite feeling that she could beat the hell out of anyone who got in her way.  I was always attracted to women like that.  I guess I was just some kind of an S&M mama’s boy at heart.

“That true, Sasha?” Bosco asked with a smile.

“Damn right!”

“Anyone else feel like Sasha?”

Several hands went up at once.  From the look of it, Sasha was rapidly mounting an insurrection against the instructor.  Several of the attendees who had initially admitted to being salespeople now piled on, protesting that they too were creative geniuses.  In a matter of seconds, almost everyone in the room was against Bosco and this was when he turned a disorganized room of individuals into a focused group.  He grinned at his students, who by then were a mix of confused, agitated, and downright pissed off.  They slowly grew quiet and he finished the first day of his sales seminar with a challenge.

“Then what in the hell are you doing here?  I mean it.  I don’t know why you’d waste your time unless you were a salesperson.  In fact, you’re just wasting everyone else’s time here too.  So after we break up today, I want you to think very carefully about one thing.  If you’re not the main salesperson at your studio, then exactly who is?”

This process did a lot to get the owners to examine their strengths and weaknesses.  It also made them feel lousy and that was the whole point of that first day.  After Bosco had broken the class by beating them down, he would begin to build them back up on the morning of the second day.  Usually one or two people had decided that they had had enough and so they had withdrawn from the class.  Bosco had a very clever guarantee that stipulated that anyone could leave and then they were allowed to take the class again at another time, for no additional charge.  Similarly, he also said that if someone felt that the class had not produced the results that he or she had hoped for, then that person could also take the class again, free.  The number of clients who came back, particularly after the abuse that had been heaped on them that first day always fascinated me.  But the point was that all of the attendees wanted to learn how Bosco had made so much damned money selling hair!

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on May 19th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.

EPISODE 36

I found that tracking prospects during the daytime was infinitely easier than doing so on the night shift.  If I caught them at home, they weren’t in a rush to go anywhere.  Second and third shift workers were delighted to talk and I found that my booking rate rose markedly just because of that. I also discovered that even if I couldn’t catch my prospect at home, it wasn’t all that difficult to find out where he worked.  You would be appalled by the number of wives, girlfriends, or children who were only too glad to give out the work numbers of the guys I was tracking.

“This is Michael.  Ted asked me to give him a call.”

“Jeez, he’s at work now and don’t expect him home until 3 or 4.”

“Shoot.  I don’t even know what he called me about.  I found a message on my desk saying he called me.”

“Well, I guess it’d be okay to give you his office number…”

And I was in!

A third trick I learned was that even the most diligent office manager or receptionist could be coopted.  The gatekeeper had one job to perform: to make sure that shmucks like me never got through to my prospect while he was supposed to busy at work.  But I figured that my boy had called us first and therefore, if I could just get him on the phone, I could probably make my pitch.  The problem was how to do so in such a way that he thought I was actually doing him a favor by interrupting whatever he was doing to talk about his insecurity over his hair loss, which had been of paramount importance to him at 1 in the morning a day, or week prior.  It occurred to me that by feigning to preserve his privacy might be the best way of affecting that.  So I would approach the gatekeeper thusly.

“Hi, this is Michael Drabek from BI Management.  Ted left me a message yesterday and asked me to give him a call.”

“Ted is in.  Can I tell him what this is about?”

“Sure.  He wanted some information and I’ve got it for him.”

Now, a good gatekeeper might have smelled a rat and would ask “Ted” if he knew what in the hell I was talking about before buzzing me through.  In many cases, that would be the end of the conversation and I would have effectively burned the lead.  But there were plenty of times that that door wasn’t closed in my face.  The gatekeeper would get flustered and put me straight through, figuring that I had serious business with whomever it was I had asked for.  After identifying who I was and why I was really calling, it was simply a matter of apologizing to “Ted” for using a bit of subterfuge to speak with him. 

“Sorry to use that line with your assistant, ‘Ted’, but I didn’t want to get too specific about this with anyone else but you.”

In almost every case, the Teds of the world thanked me for my discretion and I was just that much closer to booking them.  What was even more remarkable to my mind was that never once did “Ted” ever ask how I got his office number.  It was like some unspoken secret between us and oddly enough, it seemed to bond the client more closely to me.  On one extraordinary afternoon, I got a guy at his office, after calling his home first.  His teenage daughter had been home from school and she gave up the old man’s number without any kind of a fight.  I dialed the number I’d been given and was pleasantly surprised to find that my prospect answered the phone himself.

“’Afternoon, Lew!” I said.  “I’m Michael Drabek from BI Management.  You called us up the night before last, looking for help with a hair loss problem.”

Lew didn’t speak immediately.  However, after a second of two, he cleared his throat and responded.

“Yeah.  I did.  I mean, yeah.  That was me.”

I plunged blindly on.

“So Lew, How long have you been losing your hair?”

Again, there was a pause.  I was on a roll that day, having booked an average of two appointments an hour so far, so I just kept asking those damned questions.  But Lew was clearly of a different mind.  He paused a good long time before speaking and when he did, I realized that this wasn’t just another sales call.

“I dunno, Michael,” he said haltingly.  “Maybe this was a mistake.  Maybe I shouldn’t have called in.”

I knew enough to understand that I didn’t have a quick comeback for this one.  I had to hold back to keep from asking another question.  Something felt wrong here and I figured that the best thing I could do was to keep my mouth shut, in spite of my propensity to do the opposite.

“You still there?” Lew asked.

“Sure.”

“I’m sorry.  I really am.  It’s just been so hard.  I don’t want to burden you.”

And that’s when I understood my role in this conversation.  Lew had gone through a bit of hell in the recent past.  His motivation for calling our toll free line had something to do with more than embarrassment, or a need for sex, or any of the more base motivators that I was used to exploiting.  Lew fucking hurt.

“No,” I replied.  “It’s okay.”

“Well, 5 months ago, my wife passed away.  She had breast cancer.  They did the surgery and the chemo and we all hoped that it was going to work out.  But it didn’t and she just got sicker and sicker.  After a while, she couldn’t do much of anything except lie there.  They doped her up to keep the pain at bay, but I knew she still felt it.  She’d wake up and look at us and we just knew how much she hurt.  She was so weak.  Christ, I don’t think she weighed 90 pounds towards the last week or two.  When she finally died, I thought I’d feel relieved, but I didn’t.  I was even worse.  My two daughters were strong though.  They’ve basically been what’s kept me together.  I keep feeling like I have to be there for them, but they’ve been keeping me from losing it.

“They keep looking at me, waiting for me to do something.  At first, I thought they were checking to see if I was going to take care of them.  Shit, their mother was dead.  Can you imagine anything worse?  I mean, shit…”

His voice trailed off.  We sat together on the phone, not saying anything.  I listened and I could hear him breathing.  He wasn’t sobbing, but he was clearly having a rough time.  I could hear him hitch just a bit as he inhaled and then he continued.

“Anyway, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.  I hate what’s happened.  I hate feeling like this.  I just don’t want to be this way anymore.  I want to change and I thought that maybe I could, you know, grow back my hair.  I’ve been bald since I was in college, even before I met my wife.  She never cared.  She was so beautiful.  I couldn’t believe she fell in love with me.  So I never cared about it either.  But now I have to get on with my life.  I have to change.  But I keep looking at those two girls.  They’re 13 and 16 years old and I see them watching me.  I know that they see what I’m going through.  They’re just waiting for me to lose it.  They’re terrified of it.  I can’t do that to them.  I mean, if I go out one morning and come back home that night with a full head of hair, they’re going to know I’ve lost it.  I can’t do that to them.  I just don’t know what to do though.”

I waited a bit longer after he finished, to see if he had more to say, but he didn’t.  I could imagine him in his office, baring himself to a complete stranger, a damned telemarketer!  As far as I was concerned, if this guy hadn’t hit bottom, then there was no such thing.  As I went through what he’d said, I realized that I felt like a complete asshole.  I was trying to sell him something that would in no way help him.  It was painful.  Yet, I couldn’t just hang up on the guy.  That would be too cruel.  But what the hell was I supposed to do?  After another few seconds, I went with the only thing I had. 

“Don’t do anything, Lew.”

“Really?”

“I’m serious.  You’re not ready for this, or much of anything.  You may want out of this, but you’re right about your girls.  You’ve got to be there for them.  If they’re getting you through this horror, then you need to make sure that they’re safe.  If you think you’ll freak them out by doing this with us, just don’t do it.  It’s not that important.  I take it that your daughters aren’t at school today?”

“Yeah.  I decided that they needed to take the day off.  They both just felt lousy and…”

“I hear you,” I interrupted.  I didn’t want to him to get back on how crappy he felt.  Of course he was miserable.  Who the hell wouldn’t be?  I was beginning to feel his hurt.  It literally seemed to ooze right through the telephone.  I could see his daughters tiptoeing around him, looking at him with sideways glances and then looking at each other.  Is this when Dad breaks down?  They’d obviously seen him crying and while that’s a natural reaction for anyone who has lost a beloved spouse, to those two girls, they were watching the last remaining adult in the house come unhinged.  What were they going to do when there was no one there for them?  They had to be in a very bad place with that hanging over them, in addition to their own pain after watching their mother suffer through such an awful death.  For them, the nightmare of her passing was followed by the profound uncertainty of what lay ahead.  “Bleak” didn’t do the situation justice.

“That’s good, Lew!” I heard myself exclaim.

“It is?  What is?”

“Taking the time off.  You haven’t healed.  You still hurt.  You need to take care of yourself so that you can take care of your girls.”

“I know, but it’s been months.  I don’t know how much more I can do this.  My job.  I mean, how much more are they going to take?”

“Forget that, Lew.  You’re still mourning.  You have rights.  Take a leave of absence.  Spend some quality time with your daughters.  Be home when they get home for a while.  Just do what feels right.  God knows you deserve it, man.”

Lew was crying now.  He wasn’t loud, but he was very quietly weeping.  I could hear him sniffle a bit and then he cleared his throat.

“Thanks, Michael.  I appreciate that.  I really do.  It’s been so hard and I guess I was making it even worse for myself.  I know what I have to do for my girls.  I know it.  I need something for me too.  I have to change my situation, for all three of us.”

And to my utter astonishment, Lew booked an appointment to come into one of our studios and he bought a hair replacement plan right then and there.  I can honestly say that I still have no clear idea on how I feel about this, even today.  What Lew needed more than anything else was to be validated and I needed to be a mensch.  We both got what we needed, but I’ve always wondered if somehow, in the back of my mind, without ever really consciously intending it – that I’d been selling him all the same.

The next episode of SlipNot will be published on May 12th.

If you'd like to read SlipNot in its entirety, GO HERE.