How Sam Parr Went From Owning Hot Dog Stands to Becoming the CEO of an 8-Figure Company
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Why David Henzel Sold His Business for $10M+ and Started a Podcast Called ‘Managing Happiness’
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with David Henzel, previous owner of MaxCDN, founder of CDN Advisor LLC, and podcast host of Managing Happiness.
Tune in to hear David share about his passion for applying business principles to one’s personal life and relationships, the principles that will help you achieve continual success, how he sold his e-commerce business for $300K just so he could move to the U.S., and how defining the company’s mission statement made growing the business much easier.
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Peep Laja On How CXL Captures 150-200 Emails/Day & Generates 100 Agency Leads/Month
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Peep Laja, founder of CXL, the knowledge leader in the optimization space.
Listen as Peep discusses how CXL began as a blog and turned into an agency, how they increased the readership of their blog to 300K per month, the secret to getting an 80% qualified leads rate, why building your email list should be top priority, and how switching from pre-recorded videos to live courses jacked up participation rates by 600%.
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How the Growth Marketing Conference Brought in $2M in 2 Years in Such a Competitive Space
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Vasil Azarov, CEO of the Growth Marketing Conference, a must-attend for startup founders and marketing execs.
Tune is to hear Vasil discuss how the Growth Marketing Conference gets a 30% attendance rate from their 100K community of entrepreneurs and marketers, why events are essential for generating attraction if you already have a product, why he believes that events are the future of marketing and sales, and the best way to build an audience fast.
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Let’s talk about how you can close more deals.
First and foremost, I think most people think that prospecting, following up, doing sales calls, and closing deals can be pretty daunting, right? Most people don’t like to think of sales. “Oh, I’m just not good at sales” is something I hear all the time.
In fact, I’m still like that, to this day. I tend to avoid wanting to do sales calls, but you kind of have to if you’re running a company, especially in the early days. You have to close the deals. In the agency situation, like with Single Grain, if it’s a big deal, I’m going to come in and close it myself.
But the question is—how do you go about closing deals if you’re just starting out?
If you’re starting out, I think that the one thing you have to realize is that you have to look at your sales activity. How many deals is it going to take for you, or how many calls do you have to make, to eventually close a deal? Then you can work backwards.
Make a list of your sales activities. What you can do is figure out, on average, how many proposals you have to send before you close a deal. For example, let’s say I close at 25%. That means that I need to send out four proposals to close one deal.
Well, how many discovery calls do I need to get on to eventually get to one proposal? Let’s say 1 in 10 calls that I get on actually results in a closed deal. So, to close four deals, I need to speak with 40 people over discovery calls. But how many prospects do I need to reach out to in order to get one discovery call? Let’s say 5% of my total calls will lead to discovery calls. In this case, that means I need to reach out to 800 prospects every month to get four closed deals.
There are about 20 weekdays in one month, right? That means each and every day I need to reach out to 40 brand new people and then we also need to follow up with old clients or prospects, too.
Now, let’s say you’re starting out fresh and you don’t really know how you’re going to end up converting. Let’s say you are actually not that good at closing yet. In fact, let’s say you convert at 10%. You convert 10% of your proposals into a closed deal, 10% of your discovery calls will turn into proposals, and 5% of your prospecting will turn into actual discovery calls.
That means that instead of having to reach 800 per month, you actually have to reach 2,000 per month. That means you effectively have to send 100 messages per day. Which is why prospecting is hard.
One book I would recommend reading is The Ultimate Sales Machine. In this book, there’s a concept called your “dream 100.” In other words, who are your 100 dream clients?
Well, you can prospect for them by setting filters with SaaS sales software (like LinkedIn), or you could have sales development representatives reaching out. More likely, it’s going to be you doing it. Ideally, it’s you and your business partner tag teaming your ideal leads with hand-to-hand combat techniques.
I would also recommend reading From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue by Jason Lemkin and Aaron Ross.
Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr, which is one of the biggest software as a service (SaaS) conferences in San Francisco. I’d recommend reading that book and all of Jason’s articles on software as a service.
Those two books are going to be gold for you, especially if you’re first starting out with sales. Then you just keep doing it over time and you’re going to get used to it.
Learn More: The Sales Process that Grew EchoSign to $100M in Revenues with Jason Lemkin
I would also recommend supplementing your sales efforts with things like inbound marketing where you’re building goodwill with people over time.
You’re doing YouTube videos, you’re doing Facebook Lives, you’re creating a lot of content out there. You’re going out there, you’re speaking at events, you’re doing podcasts, and you’re creating all this content. That’s going to take a lot of time to get that going, but ideally you get that going so that a couple years from now, you’re not going to have to rely completely on sales and ads.
Related Content: How to Create a Content Marketing Strategy if You Are a Beginner
Thankfully, the majority of the leads that we get are from inbound marketing. We get them from podcasts and we get them from doing things like this. Yes, actually doing Facebook Lives like this and rebroadcasting these or re-targeting our audience helps a lot of people who are on the fence make a decision and commit to work with us.
You can definitely do the prospecting thing, but you can see that having to send out 100 brand new emails per day and trying to personalize each and every one of them can get really tiring. So as soon as you can, I would recommend delegating the prospecting to two other people so that you can compare them side by side, and then perhaps you can focus on closing your best prospects.
Eventually, you can hand off the closing to the other people, too. At that point, you just have to focus on growing the business and making the right hires.
There are so many different tools out there. Use tools like SalesforceIQ or some kind of CRM, like HubSpot CRM. I highly recommend using Mixmax to follow up with people automatically. You can see who’s opening emails, when they open it, where they open it from, how many times they open it, etc.
Long story short, everyone I’ve interviewed on Growth Everywhere gets their first 100 and even 1,000 customers by doing hand-to-hand combat.
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
How Jon Carder Compelled 80 Million People To Use His Product, Empyr
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Jon Carder, co-founder and CEO of Empyr, a B2B platform that helps websites and apps generate revenue from online to offline commerce.
Listen as Jon shares inside info on how he got a deal with Yelp, the Holy Grail of enterprise-level customers, how he dealt with the “dark period” where the company struggled to move forward, how he got 50% of Empyr’s deals from “old school” conferences and 15% from cold calls, and the abundance mentality took Jon from zero to 8 figures of revenue within a year.
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How Digital Marketer Created An Effective Facebook Ads + Content Marketing Combo After Spending Over $15M On Testing
Hey guys, today’s interview is with Ryan Deiss, CEO of Digital Marketer. Over the last 36 months, Ryan and his team have invested over $15 million into marketing tests, sent over one billion emails, and run approximately 3,000 split and multi-variant tests.
Ryan and his team are heavy-hitters in the digital marketing space, and you’ve got to make sure you check out their blog… what they do is amazing stuff.
The Digital Marketer Collection of Companies
Basically, what Digital Marketer does is take all the cool stuff they do across their different money-making web properties, and report on what’s working.
Entrepreneurial ADD is built into their business model, and they sell everything from flashlights and worm farms to makeup brushes and eyeliner.
And though it seems like a crazy mix, their model for making a site profitable is the same no matter what niche it’s in.
The Model for Online Money Making
In everything they do, says Ryan, the hardest thing in the world is to gather a crowd or get an audience.
Lots of people build great products, he says, but no one is there to buy them.
At Digital Marketer, they want to make sure that before they go through the effort of product creation that they can gather a crowd willing to buy that product.
And with that crowd gathering, absolutely everything starts with digital media. Since there’s no such thing as mass media anymore and people prefer to aggregate around only the things that they like, Digital Marketer focuses on building interest-based markets.
Once they know they can gather a crowd that all thinks and feels in much the same way as it relates to particular things, then they can start selling stuff to that crowd. (And not just by monetizing through advertising, which a lot of people try to do.)
The Sizes of the Crowds They’ve Built
Digital Marketer has some online properties that get millions of visitors per month, and some that get tens of thousands… all depending on the relative size of that particular market.
For example, DIYready.com is one of their sites that gets a few million visits per month. It sounds like a lot, but for a media property, says Ryan, it’s nothing.
If you’ve got a media site that makes money via advertising, he says, you need to hit critical mass and get tens of millions just to be on the low end of things.
But because all of their properties are so niched and specific, they don’t need to focus on monetization via advertising, and can instead focus on making money from audience-specific product offerings.
Traffic-Building Advice for a Startup
For a company with a $500,000 seed round and a product that’s ready to sell, Ryan would advise paid advertising. (Digital Marketer is a huge fan of using paid ads to build their traffic.)
The trick, he says, is to not fall into the trap of buying advertising just to drive that purchased traffic to a landing page, because conversion rates on that are fairly low.
Because if you drive traffic to an offer and someone leaves, then that’s it. They’re gone.
Instead, he says, drive your purchased traffic to content. And not gated content like a downloadable offer… but just a simple blog post that provides loads of value.
What you should be most interested in is the ability to set a retargeting pixel so you can follow up with people who’ve already received free value from you with retargeting ads.
With this approach, after 30-60 days, you cost per lead and cost per conversion will be much lower than if you were driving your purchased traffic directly to a landing page.
Basically, Follow the Protocol of Normal Human Relationships
If a guy sees a girl he likes in a bar, he doesn’t walk up to her and offer to buy her a drink if she promises to make out with him later. (Or at least we hope he doesn’t.)
It’s the same online when you make someone give you their email address on the promise of being able to preview your app. You haven’t given any value upfront, so the person is less likely to trust you.
Everything on the web is quid pro quo, says Ryan. We’re intuitive in our relationships in real life, but we get all pervy online.
Expected Cost Per Pixel
The cost per pixel totally depends from one niche to the other, but Ryan says with Digital Marketer’s properties, it’s anywhere from $0.25 to $0.60.
And figuring out the CPP is easy… it’s the same as your CPC. Because every time someone clicks through, a pixel is set.
What’s more, you can set that pixel to reflect what kind of content someone viewed on your website, so the retargeting ads you show them are far more relevant, and more effective overall.
The Journey from Pixel to Sale
Pixel > Content Upgrade (Lead Magnet) > Low Ticket Offer (buy-in) > Next Step (bigger sale)
An Example of An Effective Content Promotion Funnel
For example, if Digital Marketer is trying to get new audience members to their actual Digital Marketer website, they might target people on Facebook who like Single Grain or this podcast with a specific blog post about how to create a content engine.
After people come to the blog post and read it, they get pixeled for having visited Digital Marketer and being interested in content marketing.
Now they’ll do retargeting ads with an offer to opt in for 212 blog post ideas, which is relevant to the reason they visited Digital Marketer in the first place.
After someone opts in for that, they’ll start showing them ads to buy a $7 course for execution plans related to content marketing.
If they buy into that, then they send them up their funnel into hopefully becoming a Digital Marketer lab member or buying their content marketing certification.
Ad Distribution Across the Funnel
Ryan says how much of your budget you allocate to cold or warm traffic at different stages depends on how many people you have pixeled at a given time.
At this point, for example, Digital Marketer has so many people pixeled that they only allocate 20% of their ad budget to driving ice-cold traffic to content.
However, in the beginning, you might spend anywhere from 80% to 100% of your ad budget on collecting pixels, especially if you don’t have anyone pixeled yet.
If you’re looking for good ROI numbers on a seven-day or a 30-day return, Ryan admits that those numbers might look a little ugly, because this process does require an up-front investment and time to build up.
Driving Traffic to Amazing Content
In the beginning, Ryan asked his editorial director to give him 10 amazing pieces of flagship content… the type of stuff people would normally turn into a special report… and to publish it in the form of an un-gated blog post.
For the strategy Digital Marketer uses, you’ve got to have world-class content. Sub-par stuff won’t cut it.
If your content is crap or you decide to put your best stuff behind a firewall, says Ryan, the more traffic you buy, the more money you spend to convince people that you suck.
Native Commerce
Native commerce, says Ryan, is the whole idea that media and commerce have merged… even though they were completely separate in the past.
For example, in a traditional newspaper or magazine, you have the editorial department separate from the advertising department, and they’re not allowed to influence each other.
But with native commerce (not native advertising, like the advertorial), you create the theme park where people come to ride your roller coasters (read your content), and then they exit through your gift shop.
And the difference is, you sell your own products, rather than advertising for someone else’s.
For example, if one of their beauty sites shows a makeup tutorial on how to do a smokey eye, they can turn around and sell the makeup brush (which is produced by them) used in the video.
If you’re in the physical product space, says Ryan, this is how you can de-commoditize a commodity.
The Traffic & Conversion Summit
This is an annual event that Digital Marketer has put on for the last seven years.
When they started, Ryan and his team knew they wanted to put on an event, but instead of inviting a bunch of speakers to create a corporate pitch-fest, all they did was teach in every session.
The first year, 180 people showed up. Each year following, it continued to grow, and now it’s well over 3,000 people.
The Struggle of Defining Their Audience
Over the years, Ryan says their biggest struggle has been getting clarity on who their market really is.
It’s changed, because with Digital Marketer, he just talks about what he’s doing.
So when he was the guy in the trenches getting started without any money and just trying to pay the bills with an online business, he talked about that.
When he wasn’t that guy anymore and was a small business person, he talked about that.
In fact, he says, there were many years when their summit was the only good thing they did, because they didn’t know what the heck they were doing or who they were catering to online.
In they end, they decided to serve small business owners. While startup folks can get a lot out of what they talk about, they’re not the guys for startup-specific advice.
In fact, once they set their mission and vision to double the size of 10,000 small businesses in five years or less, they got great clarity and could easily figure out the type of work they needed to put out and the value they needed to provide.
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The 3 Ways Gainsight Uses Customer Success Followup to Reduce Churn & Improve Net Retention
Hi everyone, today we’re talking to Gainsight’s CEO Nick Mehta. Gainsight is a customer success company that helps businesses grow faster by reducing churn, increasing net retention, and driving customer advocacy. Nick’s last company, LiveOffice, sold to Symantec for $115 million.
Nick’s got some good insights on what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur even through the tough times, and how the old business model in favor of product and sales is being replaced by one that’s in favor of customer success.
Software Business Smarts from Childhood
Nick’s been around technology his entire life. His father ran some software companies in the 80s and 90s in Pittsburgh, and always told is son, “If you go into business, make sure you work in either sales or product. Because after the sales, everything else is overhead.”
Other fathers taught their sons how to play baseball and pick up girls. Nick’s father taught him how to run a software business.
He was destined to be a tech entrepreneur.
When the time came for him to get into business for himself, he did his own internet startup after college, but then got into enterprise software and worked for Symantec for a long time.
Even then, the model of business his father taught him was still true.
But once he went to run LiveOffice as a subscription-based SaaS company, he learned on the job that the old playbook of only focusing on product and sales was broken. Suddenly, customers weren’t committing for a lifetime, but only for a month or a year at a time.
He had taken for granted that their customers would stay, but saw their churn rate going up. So within LiveOffice, he got really deep into customer success and built a great team and custom internal systems to help customers and predict renewals… not realizing there would already be a company solving these problems.
He sold LiveOffice, took some time off to figure out what to do next, and met the founder of Gainsight who was passionate about the mission of customer success.
What is Customer Success? And How Can You Tell if It’s Working?
A customer success team is a group of people who are proactively thinking about your customers and helping them get the most out of your solution… not just sitting behind a help screen responding to customer support inquiries.
Customer success is essential to any business with repeat or recurring revenue, and you can measure it by three things:
Net retention is the key one. It’s the idea of churn (losing customers) vs. existing customers staying on and spending more.
By proactively understanding and defining what your customers want and mean by success, and working towards helping them achieve that, you’ll improve your net retention…. less people will drop off and more people will stay on and advance their use of your product.
What Gainsight Does for Customers
Beyond providing software to help their paying customers win at customer success, Gainsight does a handful of things to help their online and offline community (paying customers or not) advance their ability to improve their net retention via customer success:
For their paying customers, these are the services the Gainsight software provides:
Gainsight’s Success
Gainsight has positioned themselves as a higher-end company that may not be affordable for startups who haven’t been able to start scaling their business yet.
However, they’ve just crossed 200 customer companies and have been fortunate to work with some of the best-in-class SaaS companies and some of the best traditional tech companies moving to the cloud.
How to Do Customer Success if You Can’t Afford Gainsight
If you’re just starting out, Nick recommends having an online community and engaging there.
Whether someone uses your product your not, you’ll still be helping them out… which is a great way to kickstart your customer success.
He also says that content marketing… in the sense that you create educational content that genuinely helps people and isn’t brand-focused… is a great strategy as well.
Once you scale, you can start looking into a software to help you do customer success.
Gainsight’s User Acquisition Stages
According to Nick, Gainsight went through a handful of user acquisition stages similar to those of most startups.
Pitching a Conference Internally – Convincing Everyone That the Investment is Worth It
The interesting argument about technology, says Nick, is that with it, there almost doesn’t seem to be much of a need to meet people in person.
But even though Nick says it’s the best thing they’ve ever done, he says that you can do whatever math you want, but you’re still going to be putting on a conference in faith. There’s absolutely no guarantee it will provide a good ROI.
But, he cites two main reasons why they keep hosting their Pulse conferences:
As you go along, says Nick, you can start to measure the secondary (monetary) impact of your conferences beyond the ability to meet people and share knowledge.
For example, you can track the number of new opportunities and new customers you get from people who attended the conference, and you can also look at the data of customers who come to your conference vs. those who don’t. Do the customers who come end up spending more over their customer lifetime?
Starting a Conference, Even When You’re Small
When you’re small, but you still want to reap the benefits of hosting a conference, Nick suggests starting as small as possible… even with just a dinner.
After a dinner, you can turn it into a late afternoon & drinks event. After that, a half-day. Then a full day. Then a day and a half.
As you build up, you’ll be earning credibility and building your fan base.
One thing he does suggest though, is to mix up the format… and for goodness sake, don’t do only panels.
If you do a panel, you need to make sure you’ve got a great moderator who asks good questions (not the same one to every person), and makes it funny. After a panel then, you could have a speaker, then an interactive session.
Two Big Struggles of Growing Gainsight
On the Brink of Failure With LiveOffice
Fortunately, Gainsight hasn’t faced the brink of failure yet.
But, LiveOffice once ran out of money due to a billing issue. They were generating revenue, but not collecting it… which turned into a huge problem.
They had as low as $10,000 in the bank with 150 employees. (That’s less than $70 per person.)
It was the scariest thing he’d been through professionally, but fortunately, a Navy Seal stepped in to help them out. He put things in perspective, and was very diligent and organized about his approach to solving the problem.
Nick says when you face tough situations like that, you just gut through it and it gives you the realization that even if things get bad in the future, it will eventually be okay.
Gainsight’s Three Core Values
Even though the human reaction is to fight fire with fire (to be rude to those who are rude to you), Nick says that within Gainsight they try to realize that rude people are usually stressed about another issue that has nothing to do with the person they’re talking to.
To have great customer success themselves, they put themselves in the shoes of that person, and treat them the way they’d want to be treated if they were going through a similarly stressful situation.
Advice to His 25-Year-Old Self
“If Google calls, take the job offer.”
Just kidding.
“Don’t underestimate how much value your training and experience can bring to somebody else’s extensive experience.”
Nick says he’s not as young as he used to be, and has a lot of experience to show for it. But he encounters some 21-year-old entrepreneurs whose ideas are just as good as his because they’re not stuck in funnels.
“You might thank that person has it all figured out,” he says, “but you have just as much value to add. Don’t ever feel like you should defer to them or assume they’re right.”
Structuring His Day
Nick says he’s a creature of the calendar & loves to practice stacking.
For example, he puts all of his meetings on Monday. It can be mind-numbing by the end of the day, but it leaves Tuesday through Friday open for customers, product focus, and business advancement.
Three Must-Read Books
For fiction: The Martian
For a classic: Slaughterhouse Five
For a business book: The Hard Thing About Hard Things
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How Authenticity Grew Sales Hacker from a 4-Person Meet Up to a 30-City International Community
Today I’m talking to Max Altschuler, CEO of Sales Hacker and author of the new book Hacking Sales. Max’s sales career began at the early days of Udemy, where he had to figure out how to grow the company by 20% each month without spending much money or using a lot of resources. Since then, he’s become a master of using technology to hack sales, and he tells us how he’s used this knowledge to build a successful business based on helping sales professionals do their jobs.
A background in startup sales meant hacking wherever possible to boost growth
As the sole person responsible for growing the instructor side of Udemy’s online education marketplace and the classic startup problem of having no money to do it, Max had to find a way to generate revenue using fewer resources than the vast majority of sales teams did.
He figured the only way to do it was to hack his way through it, so with technology, he built up an amazing virtual outsourced SDR (sales development rep) team to help get Udemy through their A-round and B-round of funding.
After his success there, he left for a company called Attorney Fee (now LegalZoom Local) where he was responsible for growth in a similar way.
Then, he started Sales Hacker Inc.
At first, it was nothing more than a meet up, and when he left Attorney Fee, it developed into a conference.
After the huge success of the conference and the realization that despite sales being everywhere, there weren’t any college courses, education or real content on sales, Max realized what he wanted to do.
Within the last 2-3 years, says Max, companies have really started to develop technology for sales people. With Sales Hacker, Max plans to ride that wave and be one of the key players pulling the trend forward, and playing a big part of the conversation while showcasing new tools and educating companies and startups on how to embrace technology in the sales process.
Sales Hacker conference vs. SaaStr conference
When Jason Lemkin asked for Max’s help with The SaaStr Annual conference, Max recognized that working with sales technology as a part of Sales Hacker and SaaS companies were very closely tied, that it only made sense to get involved.
But since Jason’s conference was four to five times bigger that the Sales Hacker conference, the scale and the fact that they only had a five-person team to turn fantasy ideas into something practical and doable was interesting and a bit tougher.
But even though the conference was so huge and involved a lot of hard work, Max says it had the highest-quality attendee list he’d ever seen at an event. There were CEOs and executives from some of the fastest-growing companies, great VC-backed entrepreneurs, and everyone was incredibly open to quality conversation.
Exactly why conferences are worth the headache
Putting on a conference is a task with a very hard deadline, all kinds of potential problems, and lots of personalities, vendors, and live technical difficulties to deal with.
But even though it can be incredibly stressful, Max says it’s worth it – especially for the business model he’s trying to set up with Sales Hacker.
At it’s core, Sales Hacker is a full-service media company that does publications, hot conferences, and meet ups in 30 cities all over the world. The idea is to build a community from the events and get high-level people involved.
With the community behind it, Sales Hacker can be a company that is about conversation and helping its community members in different ways. Already, lots of doors have opened, and they’ve had to pick and choose which opportunities to pursue to grow their business.
Why Sales Hacker is so focused on building it’s own community-based brand
With their own brand, they’ll be able to do whatever they want with it.
As an example, Max cites Jason Lemkin who built the SaaStr brand. While other VCs are running around chasing deals, because of the SaaStr brand he built, Jason can sit back, relax, and get access to invest in some of the best companies who often give him better deals and terms just because of his brand.
At their conferences, they don’t sell out their attendee lists or let sponsors pay for speaking spots. Instead, they do things that speak to the core of building an authentic community people can trust.
A few of the things they’ve been able to do because of their branding so far include:
Backing things up a bit: authenticity from the beginning
In the beginning, Sales Hacker meetings were an invite-only ordeal – sort of like a private mastermind group. It started with four guys meeting together each moth to hack things out and figuring out how to make the sales process better.
They were figuring out things around building lists and managing virtual assistants, and over time, they invited more and more people in their networks who were doing interesting things in sales. By their last meet up, they had 20 people, and Max says the reason it was able to grow that much via an invite-only process was because it was authentic and genuine.
Keeping the events genuine and useful
Because panels tend to be a handful of people rambling and saying the same things, Max isn’t a fan of them because he feels they’re inauthentic and devoid of actionable information for an audience. So he doesn’t use panels in the events he hosts.
Instead, he prefers to give one speaker a set amount of stage time to really go deep into one topic.
For example, at the Sales Hacker series events, they usually have three 20-minute spots with one over-arching topic. And for their conferences, they’ll line up 10 different 30-minute sessions with some Q&A to follow.
He says having just one person zoom in on a topic helps people a lot more and provides for a great Q&A afterwards.
The biggest struggle in growing Sales Hacker as a business
According to Max, everything in a startup is a circle of, “We want to do that thing and do it really well, but we need to hire someone to do it. We can’t do it until we hire them, but we can’t hire them until we do it.”
Essentially: growing pains.
As an entrepreneur and a sales guy, he says he’s impatient and wants to move extremely fast. In reality, he’s happy with the speed they’re going, but is always striving for more.
Hacking Sales – the book
Max says that Hacking Sales is all about building up the sales process from the early-stage startup perspective, and is written for sales reps and entrepreneurs. It’s a how-to playbook on the entire sales process, and each step has tips and hacks behind it that you can use to optimize your sales. It also showcases 200 different sales tools you can use to automate your sales process.
The idea of the book is to help sales professionals and entrepreneurs do what Max did in his days at Udemy and Attorney Fee: get high-velocity sales as quickly as possible, because especially in a startup, time is money. It helps readers generate more revenue while using less resources and time.
Advice to his 21-year-old self
“Put your head down and work hard.”
Max says a lot of people get into SaaS and sales wanting to network and read TechCrunch all day. According to him, that’s all a waste of time if you’re not actually getting any work done.
He also suggests being transparent and writing about everything you do. He says it’s really not possible that anyone could copy you – no one will be able to out-execute you at your own process.
His idol
Max says that he really looks up to his father because, “He’s a happy guy, he’s done so much, and if I can be that successful when I’m his age, I’d be pretty happy with it.”
Max’s dad was the kid reading stock quotes at age 13 and who became a stock broker turned financial advisor. Max says he’s also always been really good at sales because he’s genuine, authentic, has a high level of empathy, and people trust him.
One productivity hack
To boost your productivity, Max suggests spending the time to find and hire a good virtual assistant, and train them to do all of your menial tasks.
Beyond doing things like scheduling, he says a lot of virtual assistants are so professional and smart that they can work directly in tools like SalesLoft, ToutApp and Yesware to take care of even some of your higher-level work.
One must-read book
Max recommends the 48 Laws of Power because it’s full of great stores and teaches you a lot about strategy.
He says he finds most business books boring, but this one is a fun read and is actionable.
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How to Get the Most Value Out of Conferences
When I first started doing conferences and networking events, I was always the guy standing in the corner playing with his phone pretending to be busy. But to get the most value out of conferences, I’ve found that it’s always better to listen and focus on helping people. That way you’re more memorable and the conference is more beneficial for everyone.
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